Sleight (10 page)

I sighed. Yeah, on my own. Without Henry.

I guess everything had trade-offs.

:13:

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

—Honore de Balzac

It felt good to have a new secret. Usualy the confidential nature of my less-important secrets was short-lived and they became common knowledge by dinner. It was like that with al of us.

Seriously—you should have heard the Cinzio grapevine when I started my period. You’d think these grown-ups would have better things to talk about. But everyone knew pretty much everything, that my mother had been crazy in life and that she did herself in, and that my father was nothing more than a one-night sperm donor.

They knew that without Marlene and Ted looking after me, I’d be in foster care, or worse. The sole exception was the thing with the shades. The Cinzios and I protected that like the code to unlock The Bomb.

Because there were so few of us the same age in this extended circus family, it was only natural that as puberty reared its ugly head, it brought with it the sudden need to write poetry and that cutesy boy-girl stuff. I’d developed a one-sided crush on Ash, and he toyed with my emotions as only Ash knew how to do. Al the adults knew it, and they thought it was cute.

Our relationships with “outsider” children had been transient at best, and although Junie established and maintained a network of pen pals across the country, I never found the need to befriend anyone whom I’d leave behind in a week’s time. But then came Henry. And he was different. I was going to be around for a few months, not weeks. Maybe getting to know him would be…good.

Healthy. Maybe even normal.

The trick was keeping Henry to myself for as long as I could.

For the first time, I was experiencing a freestanding friendship—I didn’t have to share this friend with anyone. So far, Junie had expressed zero interest in Henry beyond babbling about his good looks. And Ash, needless to say, wasn’t looking for friends unless they were, wel, babes.

During that first week, Henry and I got acquainted through emails and al-nighter online chats. And these sessions were precious to me not only because they were secret and all mine but because talking with Henry taught me the rules of engagement for communicating with outsiders of the male teenage variety.

Irwin and Marlene knew I was typing late into the night, every night, and had it not been for the occasional verbal slip-up, they likely would’ve kept on believing I was doing homework. But few people giggle or say “awwww” about social contract theorists or neo-conservative philosophers. Nonetheless, my bunkmates were discrete and respectful. I think they were rooting for me, for my new friendship, given that my connections with other people outside my circus family had been so unreliable. As long as I stayed on top of my homework and violin, and carried my weight with chores, I figured I’d attract little scrutiny.

At least that’s what I figured.

At breakfast on the second Tuesday after we’d started school, Ted caled a team meeting (Marlene, Irwin, and me) for after dinner so we could discuss plans for the upcoming weekend show. As Marlene and I excused ourselves from the table, Ted stopped me.

“Gemma, I need to speak with you when you get home this afternoon. Come find me, okay?” he said. The sternness of his request made me uncomfortable. I scanned through the list of possible things I could’ve done wrong, but was blank on anything I might have screwed up. And Ted had been so moody lately.

Maybe he was going to nag me about overfeeding Gertrude and Jiminy or spending too much time holed up in front of my computer.

At school, I went through the regular paces that had already become routine. The novelty of our presence had worn off a bit, though the chiled reception on the part of my classmates had not yet thawed. I’d managed to steer clear of Becca Bristol and her cosmetics case, and I didn’t even have to finish her voodoo dol.

Summer Day more or less ignored me, unless she was plying me for details about Ash. Junie and I didn’t have any classes together, and she had been absorbed by a group of girls who were nice enough but not realy my type. Too much giggling.

Henry and I had eaten lunch together every day since my first at EHS, and while my questions surrounding his apparent lack of friends persisted, I’d opted to take the ignorant route and accept what he was offering. I’d even gotten used to his shade, that painfuly beautiful woman, appearing whenever she felt like it.

Ash’s behavior toward me, however, had soured to a new low.

He didn’t acknowledge me in the hals, especialy if he passed Henry and me walking together. Although we were in the same chemistry class, he’d arrive late and sit as far from my desk as possible. A tiny slice of my ego was flattered by what I perceived (and kinda hoped) to be jealousy, but the realist in me knew he was pissed because I wasn’t whining and moping about school anymore.

Ash thrived on conflict, fed on it like a fly sucking spiled snow-cone syrup off the aluminum bleachers. My lack of discomfort and grousing must have, in his mind, been justification for his cold-shoulder treatment. And I resented him for not being happy for me.

I deserved to have a friend, to have something positive in my life.

Finaly.

As I walked into math, I was surprised to see Henry bent over his book, head down, sunglasses on. I slid into the seat next to him.

“Morning, Henry,” I said.

“Hey, Gemma.” He didn’t look up when he answered.

I didn’t say anything else, didn’t ask if he’d opened the email I’d sent the night before that contained the images of my elephants for my photo project, didn’t ask if he was okay despite al signals pointing to the contrary.

Mr. Poole bumbled his way into the class, swinging the door closed with his leg, a fresh stack of quizzes in one hand and a stained porcelain mug in the other. Judging by the wet brown blotches on his shirt, he’d had a harried trek down the hal with an overfiled cup.

“Mr. Dmitri, this isn’t a rock concert. Please remove your sunglasses in my classroom,” Poole said.

Henry maintained his head-down stance but obliged Poole’s request. It became immediately obvious why Henry had been so quiet, hiding behind the dark frames.

I gasped when I saw him without the glasses, a stupid move on my part that made everyone turn around and look. Henry’s face, his beautiful, untouched face, was black and blue around his right eye.

The eyelid was swolen to a mere slit, the partialy visible white of his eyebal bright red with the fresh blood of a blown vessel.

“Rough night, Mr. Dmitri?” Poole said. Heartless bastard. “Take out a pencil and clear your desks, ladies and gentleman. Pop quiz!” Amidst the whines and shuffling of books and backpacks, Henry gathered his things and bolted from the room. I regretted that I’d drawn attention to him, but more than that, I was worried. I needed to folow him and apologize, and of course, find out what the hel happened in the nineteen hours since we’d parted company.

I knew better, knew that I should stay put, but I grabbed my stuff and rushed for the door.

“Miss Flannery, if you choose to folow Mr. Dmitri, you’l be given a zero on this quiz,” Mr. Poole said, counting papers in stacks of six at the head of each row. He didn’t look at me as he spoke.

I turned the knob and made my quiet exit without acknowledging his ultimatum. A few of the students murmured “Oooooooh” as I walked out.

Henry was already at the end of the hal, about to turn the corner and disappear.

“Henry!” I yeled. “Wait!” He stopped, though his back was stil to me as I jogged down the corridor to catch up.

“Oh my God, what happened? Does it hurt?” I reached up toward his sunglasses but he grabbed my wrist in midmotion.

Instead of the usual flush of warmth, I felt a surge of cold, hard anger. It raced through me like a torrent; I tasted blood in my mouth and upon his release of my arm a split second later, I realized the jolt from his clutch made me bite my lip.

“It’s nothing,” he said, pissed.

“It’s not nothing. Clearly something happened.” I rubbed my wrist. It buzzed from Henry’s grip. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you in there. I’m so sorry—”

“Gemma, there’s a lot you don’t know about me, stuff you don’t want to know.” He looked right through me. “I gotta go. I’l email you later.” He turned and sprinted toward the exit.

I was unsteady on my feet, as if I’d caught a medicine bal a second too late and had the wind knocked out of me. For a brief moment, I contemplated chasing after Henry, though judging by the edge to his voice and the coldness toward me, I knew that imposing myself upon whatever he was going through would not have been fair.

And he was right. I didn’t know very much about him, save the few details he’d shared during our brief acquaintance. This realization brought with it a sense of guilt. The more comfortable I’d become around him, the more time I’d spent yammering on about nothing and everything. I’d not given Henry equal time to talk. As much as I wanted to know what happened, how his glorious face had come to look like he’d tangled with a prize fighter and lost, I had to leave it alone. Leave him alone.

Too embarrassed to go back into math, I started for the library.

Henry’s shade, the woman, was waiting at the end of the halway, looking right at me. I felt naked, like she was staring into my soul. I froze.

She shook her head and turned away, walking right through the solid wal and out of sight.

True to the nature of the beast that was the Eaglefern student body, word of Henry’s dramatic departure traveled like wildfire.

People had grown accustomed to seeing Henry and me together, so the morning’s events instigated a new batch of attention through the curious stares of inquisitive eyes. Only Summer Day was brave enough to ask me straight up about what had gone down.

“I heard his face was al smashed in and his nose looked broken.

My friend has a locker next to his and she said he might’ve even had a missing front tooth!” Her enthusiasm for Henry’s misfortune bordered on hysteria. The anger I’d felt earlier when Henry grabbed my wrist resurged and I unleashed it on Summer.

“Your friend is a liar,” I hissed.

“Geeze, circus, relax! I was just relaying what I heard.”

“You heard wrong. It was a black eye, that’s it.”

“It would be awful if his rich daddy had to pay for a plastic surgeon to fix that boy’s perfect face,” she said. Her twisted sarcasm was making me nauseous.

“Summer, you’re a real bitch, you know that?”

“And you’re brain dead if you think Henry is interested in you,” she said, spitting the words mere inches from my face. “Dmitri Senior owns the souls of everyone in this shithole, including that of his precious son. That is why Henry Dmitri doesn’t—no, let me correct myself—can’t—have friends.”

I looked her square in the eye, my tongue playing with the minor sweling in my lip where I’d bitten down earlier. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what I said, Gemma. Lucian Dmitri is a raging asshole.

Everyone in town knows it, but those Dmitri dolars are ever flowing. No one has the stones to tel that tool to shove off,” she said, digging at her cuticles with the lid from her Bic pen. “If Dmitri closed his vault to the community, this place would fold up like a friggin’ tent.”

I doubted Summer had any clue as to the metaphorical significance concealed in her words. “Fold up like a tent”…like a circus tent. At present, Lucian was in control of our future, my future. He didn’t just own the souls of the residents of Eaglefern, he owned the souls of everyone with whom I worked and lived, in particular one Theodore Vincent Cinzio.

And then it dawned on me: Uncle Ted’s requested chat after school was going to be about Henry. He was going to try and convince me that my developing camaraderie with Henry was il-advised, that it probably wasn’t smart to get too cozy with the financier’s son, just in case. He’d already made one comment last week—“You be careful with this one”—but now that he could see I was putting some serious energy into developing a friendship with Henry, he thought it best to step in and play the heavy.

With Henry MIA, I ate lunch alone, thankful Junie hadn’t sought me out to get her own serving of the gossip everyone else was feasting on. When Ash circled through the cafeteria for his daily apple and Coke, he made eye contact only long enough to laugh under his breath, shake his head at me, and grant a parting sneer as he disappeared out the side door. I knew he and Summer would have loads to talk about.

I spent the balance of the school day in a distracted state, scratching worthless notes through my classes, absent-mindedly erasing my camera’s memory card, nearly catching the stovetop on fire during cooking. My brain was on overdrive as I prepared myself for the meeting with Ted. I tried to imagine his argument, what he’d have to say, how I’d react to his sudden concern over the details of my life. He’d adopt some misguided father-figure manner, try to convince me he knew what was best for me but more importantly, what was best for the show. Maybe he’d go so far as to tel me that puling me back to study with the tutors would be a good idea, a prospect that would’ve suited me ten days ago but now terrified me. If I were forced to do independent study again, I’d never get to see Henry, except on those rare occasions when he and his father came out for dinner or performances.

And not seeing Henry every day would depress me in a big way.

In a super-short span of time, Henry had become important. He had replaced my mother as the last person I thought of before going to sleep, and the first person I thought of upon waking the folowing morning. I wasn’t naïve enough to expect that Henry was experiencing this new connection on the same level as I was. But I wasn’t going to simply walk away from him, from whatever was going on with us, without putting up a fight, circus or no circus.

After the final bel, I found Marlene waiting out front as she always did now, primping in the mirror of the rented four-door import. I answered the obligatory questions—how was your day, did you have any tests, did you turn in your homework, did you make any new friends—with as few words as possible. I faked a headache so I could zone out and secretly hoped that the thing with Ted wouldn’t take too long. As I wasn’t in the mood for idle chat, I clicked on the radio to fil the space in the car. Marlene didn’t press me further.