The Fixer (6 page)

When I was thirteen, I would have given anything for this Ivy. For after-school snacks and a bedroom in this house. For the phone to ring more than three times a year. I would have poured my heart out to her. I would have asked her everything I wanted to know.

“You can’t make this better,” I said, my throat tightening around the words. “You can’t
do
anything.”

“Tessie—”

“I’m not broken.” My voice was low. “And whatever
this
is, you can’t fix it. Not anymore.”

CHAPTER 11

The next morning, Bodie was the one who dropped me off before school. I made my way sluggishly to the Hut, wondering at the cruelty of a student coffee shop
that did not sell coffee
.

“I have a job for you.” Apparently, that was the Emilia Rhodes version of hello. She’d appeared out of nowhere and waylaid me on my way to a bagel. When I didn’t reply immediately, she arched an eyebrow. Clearly, she was expecting that eyebrow arch to engender some kind of response.

“Hello to you, too,” I muttered. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and it was too early in the day for this. I edged past her and toward the counter. She sidestepped directly into my path.

No bagel for me.

“You can pretend you’re not interested,” she told me, “but if you’re smart, you’ll bypass playing hard to get and jump straight to negotiations.” For all the sense that Emilia was making, she might as well have been speaking Latin.

“I have literally no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

Emilia pressed her lips together into an expression that was, at best, a distant cousin of a smile. “I have a problem.”

“Yeah,” I replied under my breath. “You have several.”

“It’s my brother,” Emilia continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “His best friend isn’t at school this week, and that means he’s bored.”

Again, my response—or lack thereof—must have left something to be desired, because Emilia fixed me with a look.

“When Asher gets bored, things get broken. Laws, standards of decency, occasionally bones.” She wrinkled her nose slightly. “There was an incident in his chemistry class yesterday—suffice it to say, he’s skating on thin ice with the Hardwicke administration.”

I wondered if the incident in chemistry class had involved an explosion, but figured that asking would only encourage her to block my bagel consumption for that much longer.

“I’m applying to Yale next year,” Emilia continued, “and I am
going
to get in.” Her tone strongly implied that she’d burn anyone and anything that stood in her way. “Unfortunately, Yale has an unofficial admissions policy on twins. Most of the time, either both twins get in, or neither of them do, and
my
twin seems intent on getting himself expelled.” Emilia let out a huff of air, summoning her zen. “I just need someone to do damage control until Henry gets back. Three days, maybe four.”

If I stood there long enough, she’d tell me what any of this had to do with me.

“You’re going to make me say it again, aren’t you?” She forced a smile. “Asher is a problem.”

I waited. “And?”

“And,” she said, as if she were talking to someone either very young or very slow, “you fix problems.”

“I . . .
what
?” My voice rose up on that last word. All around us, people were beginning to stare.

Emilia hooked her arm through mine, like we were the best of friends. “You solve problems,” she said again. “I have a problem. Ergo . . .”

“You have a job for me.” This conversation was starting to make so much more sense. And it was becoming that much more an after-coffee kind of endeavor. “You’re barking up the wrong tree here, Emilia.”

“So you’re
not
the Tess Kendrick that Anna Hayden is swearing is a miracle worker?” Another eyebrow arch. “Anna’s not exactly sharing what the
miracle
was, but she’s a big fan, and she has a big mouth.”

“Hayden,” I said out loud. “The girl I . . .
helped
 . . . yesterday—”

“Hayden comma Anna.” Emilia dropped my arm. “Freshman wallflower, beloved youngest daughter, and the only person at this school with a Secret Service escort?”

I flashed back to the day before. I remembered thinking that the crying girl had looked young and scared and vulnerable and
pissed
. The one thing I hadn’t thought was that she looked
familiar
. She’d never told me her name.

Emilia snorted. “You honestly expect me to believe that you came riding to the rescue of the vice president’s daughter with
no
idea of who she was?”

No wonder Anna had been freaking out—and thank God that jerk whose phone I’d confiscated hadn’t e-mailed the pictures of her to anyone. I didn’t even want to think about the kind of media storm it might have kicked up if he had.

“Believe what you want,” I told Emilia. “I’m not a miracle worker. I’m not a problem solver. Whatever’s going on with your brother—”

“Asher,” she supplied.

“I can’t help you,” I said firmly.

“I’ll pay you.” Emilia clearly wasn’t acquainted with the word
no
—but the two of them were about to get downright cozy.

“I don’t want your money.” I pushed past her—successfully this time—and she amended her offer.

“I’ll
owe
you.”

I wondered who or what I had offended in a previous life to end up in this position: sister of famed fixer Ivy Kendrick, endorsed as a miracle worker by the vice president’s daughter.

“Sorry, Emilia,” I said, almost meaning it. “You’ve got the wrong girl.”

CHAPTER 12

About five minutes into my first class of the day, it became clear that Emilia Rhodes was not the only person who was operating under the impression that I was a chip off the sisterly block. Anna Hayden might not have told the entire school that I was
the
person to go to if you had a problem, but she’d whispered it in the right ears.

In a school the size of Hardwicke, word got around.

In English, one of my classmates attempted to retain my services to handle “rumor management” in a nasty breakup. In physics, I got a request that—as far as I could tell—had something to do with a show-choir rivalry.

I dearly hoped to never so much as
think
the words
show choir
again.

By lunchtime, I was nearing the end of my patience.

“Hypothetically speaking, should I be concerned that you look like you might throw that meatball sub at someone?” Vivvie popped up beside me.

I glanced over at her. “If I was going to throw something, it would be the bread pudding. Hypothetically.”

“Don’t throw the bread pudding,” Vivvie objected vehemently. “It’s got a butter rum sauce!”

She sounded so horrified at the idea that I managed half a grin.

“Here at Hardwicke, we take our baked goods very seriously,” Vivvie informed me pertly. She hesitated just for a second. “Are you looking for someone to sit with?”

Across the room, Emilia met my eyes, then slid her gaze to an empty seat at her table, across from Maya and next to Di. Clearly that was an invitation.

I turned back to Vivvie. “I assumed I was sitting with you.”

Vivvie broke into a smile the way other people broke into song and dance. It lit up her entire face.

“Where do you normally sit?” I asked her. The day before, when she’d been playing official guide, we’d grabbed a seat in the corner, but a girl like Vivvie had to have friends, as alien as that concept felt to me.

Vivvie’s eyes went Bambi wide, the smile freezing on her face. “Well,” she hedged, “sometimes I eat in the art room? And sometimes I just find a place outside?” She said every sentence like it was a question—and like she fully expected me to reconsider sitting with her.

“Outside works for me,” I said. There were too many people in the cafeteria, and I truly did not want to know which of the onlookers would turn out to be my next wannabe “client.”

Vivvie practically bounced with relief and began to lead the way. “I know you’re probably wondering, about the whole ‘sometimes I eat in the art room’ thing.”

“You’re an artist?” I guessed.

Vivvie nibbled on her bottom lip and shook her head. “Not so much. I mostly draw stick figures.” She paused. “They’re not very good ones,” she confessed.

Open book, thy name is Vivvie
. “I get eating lunch alone,” I told her. “You don’t have to explain.”

“It’s no big deal,” Vivvie assured me, in a way that told me that for her, it was. “It’s just . . . Hardwicke is a small school. At least half of us have been here since preschool. I know everyone, but my best friend moved away a couple of months ago. We were kind of a pair. There are people I could sit with. I just . . . I don’t want to bother anyone.” She offered me another tentative smile. “I’m kind of an acquired taste.”

Something in the way she said those words made me think they weren’t hers. “Says who?” I asked darkly.

Vivvie came to a halt in the courtyard, her eyes going round.

“What?” I said. She didn’t reply, so I turned to follow her gaze to the Hardwicke chapel. Or, more specifically, to the chapel’s roof. There was a single octagonal window at the base of the steeple. Standing just in front of that window—thirty feet off the ground—was a boy. His toes were even with the very edge of the roof.

There was no one else outside. Just me and Vivvie and the boy on the roof. I stepped past Vivvie, wondering what he was doing up there. Wondering if he was going to jump.

“Go get someone,” I told Vivvie.

The boy held his hands out to either side.

“What are you going to do?” Vivvie asked me.

I took a step toward the chapel. “I don’t know.”

The door to the chapel roof was propped open and marked with a sign that read
DO NOT ENTER
. I stepped through it. One more ladder, and I was on the roof.

The boy was still standing at the edge. I could only see the back of his head. He had auburn hair—a deep, rich red that girls would have killed for, but that looked strange, somehow, on a boy. Now that I was up here, standing just a few feet away from him, I wasn’t sure what to do.

“Top of the morning to you,” the boy said without turning around. I took a step forward. He lifted one foot off the roof and held it out—nothing but air and the ground below.

“It’s not morning,” I replied, inching my way out toward him. The roof was steeper the farther out I went.

The boy glanced back. “I’m not Irish,” he said, a hint of a smile dancing around the corners of his lips. “In case you were wondering.”

I was wondering what this guy was doing on the roof of the chapel—because suddenly, I was certain that he wasn’t here to jump.

“It’s the red hair that makes people think I might be,” the boy continued. “And my habit of saying things like
top of the morning.
And the fact that I took up Irish folk dancing for two weeks when I was fourteen.” He sighed. “It was a beautiful two weeks. Kathleen and I were very happy.”

“Kathleen?” I asked.

“Girlfriend number seventeen,” the boy replied. “Before Sophie and after Sarah.”

“You’d had seventeen girlfriends by the time you were fourteen?” I asked.

“The ladies,” he replied with a shrug. “They love me. It’s because I’m so charming.”

“You’re balancing on one leg on the roof of a chapel. You’re not charming. You’re an idiot.”

“Tell me what you really think,” he said, grinning.

“I think you should come away from the edge of the roof before a teacher sees you,” I told him.

The boy peeked over the edge of the roof. “Too late, fair lady. That ship has sailed and sailed again.”

I rolled my eyes and started back toward the door. I’d thought he needed help—but clearly, what he really needed was a swift kick. Given that we’d met all of two minutes ago, I didn’t feel particularly obligated to be the one who delivered it. He could do the hokey pokey up here for all I cared.

As I hit the top of the stairs, he fell in beside me, that stupid grin still on his face.

“You’re new,” he said.

I didn’t reply. I’d made it to the door of the chapel when he spoke again, more quietly this time. “I was just enjoying the view.”

I turned back toward him, ready to smack the smile off his face, only to discover that he wasn’t smiling anymore. Seriousness didn’t fit with his features.

“The view?” I asked, still annoyed with myself that I’d misread the situation so badly.

“The view,” he replied. “The higher up you go, the smaller they get.”

“Who?” I asked.

He held his hands out to each side, the same way he had on the edge of the roof. “Everyone.”

The second I stepped outside, I realized that the boy hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said the “get down before a teacher sees you” ship had sailed and sailed again. I wasn’t sure if Vivvie had actually gone for help, or if someone else had caught sight of the boy, but there were
two
teachers in the courtyard now, along with a handful of students—including Emilia Rhodes, who had a distinctly pained expression on her face.

“Did you haul him down?” Vivvie asked me in a whisper. “You forcibly hauled him down, didn’t you?”

“Ms. Kendrick!” A teacher broke through the crowd to reach me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Care to explain what you were doing in there?” The teacher narrowed his eyes at me. Behind him, Vivvie began to gesture emphatically. She was freakishly skilled at charades. Following the gist, I glanced up at the roof. From where we were standing, you could see the edge of the roof, but you couldn’t see farther back, where I’d been standing.

“It’s a chapel,” I said, turning back to the teacher. “What do you think I was doing in there?”

The teacher was flummoxed.

I shrugged. “When you have to pray, you have to pray.” The teacher opened his mouth to reply, and I cut him off. “The Hardwicke chapel
is
open to students of all religious beliefs and affiliations,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“Errr . . . yes,” the teacher replied. “Of course.” The man adjusted his tie, then zeroed in on a different target. “Mr. Rhodes!” he boomed.