The Rivals (6 page)

I wonder if our dean gave him orders to get into Juilliard too.

“The dancer!” I say quickly, like I’m on a quiz show, banging the red light.
I know the answer! I know the answer!
“He’s amazing,” I add.

“Not anymore,” Parker says. “Didn’t you hear? He had an ACL tear over the summer. Landed wrong or something.”

“He did?”

“Yeah, he came to Hopkins to have surgery. My mom’s head of orthopedics,” he adds.

“Did she do the surgery?”

“No, one of her colleagues. I hear he’s not dancing anymore.”

“That’s so sad,” I say, and I suddenly feel an intense pang for Theo. If I were sidelined from the piano, I’d be lost, like a wanderer roaming the desert for years, thirsting for water but never finding it. I might as well be dead if I couldn’t play. Then my mind shifts back to Ms. Merritt and what she said to me earlier. I wonder if she knows about Theo’s injury, if she’s aware that the other Juilliard aspirant is out of commission, and if that’s why she’s putting her chips on me. If that’s why she sounded just a little bit desperate.

“Regardless of how sad his injury is, I don’t think we should be assuming he’s in any way related to this cheating ring, guys,” Martin says, the voice of reason, of measure, like he was before. “I mean, she might have just heard about it in general. And naturally, given her history, she wouldn’t want to take a chance. We need to talk to her again. Find out more about what’s going on.”

Then Parker offers another idea. “Do you think it’s possible Delaney’s actually involved in the cheating? And by tipping us off she’s hoping to not be implicated?”

“You mean maybe she wasn’t so innocent after all at Matthew Winters?”

Parker shrugs. “I’m just saying…”

It’s a nefarious suggestion, but I wonder if he’s onto something. Yes, we have an unbreakable rule about helping those who need it, and we’re clearly going to do our due diligence. But I’d be foolish if I didn’t keep in mind that there’s also a ruthlessness to this school—to any prep school—and it’s not out of the question that even with her history Delaney could be playing us, maybe establishing her own early alibi by tipping us off to the cheating ring. This is Themis—we are all driven here, we are all relentlessly pursuing excellence, and we can all be calculating enough if we have to be.

And because I’m like that too—maybe not calculating, definitely not underhanded, but
driven
, driven to excellence—I do the natural thing a Themis student and the Mockingbirds’ leader would do.

I volunteer for extra credit.

“I’ll talk to her again tomorrow,” I say.

“I sort of feel like I’m dating the boss,” Martin says after Parker leaves the laundry room. We’re alone together on the beat-up couch.

“Is that bad?” I ask.

“Nah. I’m a postmodern man. I’m like the guy who doesn’t mind that his girlfriend makes more money than him.”

“I believe that’s called a trophy husband. Or a kept man,” I tease.

“I could be good in either role, don’t you think?”

I laugh, then ask, “Do you think it’s weird, though, that we’re working together and not always agreeing?”

“Why would we always agree?”

I shrug by way of an answer, then shift to another question. “So, how do you think I did with my first meeting?” My voice rises. I realize I’m nervous. I want to do a good job for so many reasons, but I also want Martin to think I’m doing a good job. He’s been doing this so much longer than I have. “I mean, it’s my first official meeting.”

“You were great.”

I laugh, a disbelieving laugh. “Seriously.”

“Yeah. Seriously,” he says, his brown eyes fixed on mine.

“I don’t know. This is hard,” I admit, and when I do I feel lighter—just voicing some of my worries out loud makes them weigh on me less. So I unburden more. “It’s very trial by fire. I feel like I’m just making it up as I go along. Besides, how can you say I did great when you were all,
Why are we having a meeting?
Why are you bringing this tip to us?
” I ask, imitating him.

He laughs. “Is that what I sound like?”

“Yeah. Totally,” I say, punching him on the arm.

“Ouch.”

“So. Answer the question, Martin.”

“Because one does not preclude the other. I thought you did great, and I also didn’t agree with you. But then you convinced me.”

“I think Parker was the one doing the convincing,” I say.

Martin rolls his eyes. “Parker was fine. But you,” he says, and places his index finger on my chest, where my heart is. He pushes lightly. “You have what it takes in here.”

I feel warm all over, but it’s not only physical. It’s deeper, and it comes from knowing he’s not just into me on the outside; he’s into all of me, and he sees all of me. I grab his hand, and with my hand on top I press his closer, imagining that he can feel how his words have turned the temperature up through every square inch of my body.

“Maybe I should disagree with you more,” he says, moving his body closer to mine.

“Let’s fight and make up.”

“Over and over. Terrible fights, horrible fights,” he says, and buries his face in my hair. “The worst.”

“Because it bothers you so very much to be beneath me in the chain of command.”

“I’m so bothered by it, Alex. It makes me want to fight even more,” he says, then runs his hands through my hair the way I like. Everything he does is the way I like.

“Mmmm…”

He shifts me so I’m sitting on his lap. “Now I’m literally beneath you. So fitting.”

I pretend to swat him, but he pulls up for another kiss.

“I like you beneath me,” I whisper to him.

“I like it too,” he says, and right now, in this moment, it’s just the two of us here. No one else is in my head.

Then as soon as I think that, an image flickers by. Quick, fast, like a burglar outside a window. But I’ve spotted the thief and, try as I might, he keeps looking through the glass. So I shut my eyes and rest my head against Martin’s chest. He wraps his arms around me tight and holds me close. And now we are not Mockingbirds. We are just us. Just a boy and a girl trying to move beyond what happened.

When I was younger, I was a baseball fan. My father was a fanatic, a diehard, so he felt it was necessary and vital to take my sister and me to ball games. He taught us how to keep score, and by age seven I was tracking the number of errors and base hits and the batting averages for every professional baseball team. I know—it was an unusual habit for a piano girl. But I liked the numbers, the history, the strategy.

Then I stopped.

I went cold turkey when I learned about the sport’s modern history and how steroids had radiated across nearly all of professional baseball, touching virtually every player. The sport was tainted; they were tainted. Their records didn’t matter; their scores didn’t matter. I could sit there and tally up RBIs till the wee hours of the morning, but there would be asterisks next to their names.

Because they doped up to get ahead.

“You just don’t do that,” I told my dad. “So I’m not going to follow baseball anymore. And I don’t think you should either.”

It broke his heart, but he agreed and joined in my boycott.

I was just a fan, though. So while I understand the broader philosophical stance—success of any kind needs to come on its own terms, by its own merits—I also
want
to understand the personal one. I want to understand why Delaney’s so worried about a possible déjà vu that she’d seek me out the second school started.

When classes end the next day, I head straight to her dorm.

I knock and knock and knock.

There’s no answer.

The music is blasting from her room, so I bang louder. They’re probably rocking out to her tunes in nearby Connecticut too.

“Delaney!” I shout as loud as I can possibly go.

The music stops, and she yanks the door open.

“What? Oh. It’s you,” she says.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m here to see you,” I say. “You came to find me yesterday. I came to find you today.”

She narrows her eyes at me, looks me up and down, then scans the halls. She nods and lets me in, quickly shutting the door behind her.

Her bed is piled with clothes, T-shirts upon jeans upon jackets with ironed-on patches all over them. Her floor is littered with suitcases and duffel bags. The one thing that’s neat is the row of nail polish bottles on her desk, easily twenty or thirty of them. I notice she’s holding the brush of one of them—a sparkly sea green. I glance down at her nails. Every other one has been painted sea green; they alternate with cherry red.

“I like your nails,” I say.

“Want me to do yours?”

“Sure,” I say, and I sit down on her desk chair. She grabs another chair and pulls it up next to mine.

“What color do you want?” she asks.

“You pick,” I say.

“Blue,” she declares, and reaches for a color the shade of a cloudless summer sky. “You are definitely a blue.”

“You must be the Color Oracle. Yesterday you said I should do a blue streak.”

“Yes, but that was because you told me you’d thought about dyeing your hair blue,” she says, correcting my memory.

“True,” I say as she brushes on a daub of nail polish, spreading the color perfectly in one, two, three strokes. She continues across my right hand with the same precision and I say, “You’re like a pro. Wow.”

“I am a pro,” she says. “I do this for a living back home. And on weekends at a salon down on Kentfield Street.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Why? Does that bother you?” The raspiness in her voice is its own question mark.

“No. Why would it bother me?” I ask, but I know why she’s asking. Because she has some sort of chip on her shoulder, some sort of defensiveness, like she did when I asked her about her hometown. She thinks it should bother me because it must bother other people, other students.

“Because I have a job, unlike the rest of the students here,” she adds.

“Then you should let me pay you,” I say.

She shakes her head. “No. I offered to do your nails.” She reaches for my left hand. “Blow on your right,” she instructs, and I do as I’m told. With her practiced hand she applies the color to my left hand, and I realize Delaney and I are similar. We both work with our hands. We both have chips on our shoulders. She thinks people will judge her for her past. I think people will disrespect me for not having earned the Mockingbirds job. And maybe that’s the reason the Mockingbirds pay it forward, because when you’ve been through something yourself, it’s much easier to connect to someone else. Maybe that’s why I don’t need a leadership pedigree or a lengthy résumé of captainships. I’m here because I had my training by fire.

“Delaney, is Theo involved in the cheating ring?” I ask as she finishes my pinkie.

She keeps her head bent over my hand, not meeting my eyes. “Why are you asking about Theo?”

“You’re dating him, right?”

She shrugs. She’s uncharacteristically quiet.

“Should I take that as a yes?”

A nod.

“So, is he the reason you reached out to me?”

She looks up now, her blue-gray eyes behind her glasses meeting mine hard. “You think I’d rat him out, don’t you?”

I stay calm. “I didn’t say that. I just asked if he’s involved.”

“I’m not a rat,” she says, her voice low but still full of smoke.

“Hey,” I say softly, and I have this impulse to reach out and touch her knee to reassure her. But I don’t do it. “I know you’re not a rat. I would never think you’re a rat. I think cheating sucks too, Delaney. And if someone I cared about was doing it, you damn well better believe I’d try to stop him.”

She looks up quickly, her eyes blazing at me through her silver-framed glasses. She points at herself. “You think I didn’t try to stop him? I tried, but he just totally denied it. Completely, one hundred percent denied it. And besides, I hardly know anything,” she fires off.

“Can you tell me what you do know, though?” I ask gently, thinking of what Martin said last night, of how when I lead from the heart, I know what I’m doing. This is what I zone in on—just talking to her, just connecting.

She breathes out hard, pushes her hands through her purple hair.

“Yesterday I saw some of his e-mails. But I didn’t read them,” she says defensively. She takes a beat, then continues, “Okay, I mean I looked at them. But not like looked
through
them. They were just up on his screen, and I saw bits and pieces about”—she stops to sketch air quotes—“
the plan
.”

“The plan to…?”

“What I told you yesterday. I don’t have any more details. He was e-mailing other students; they were setting things in motion about competing again. That’s all I know. He said
competing again
.”

“Like dance competitions? I don’t think Anderin helps you
dance
again,” I add.

“No. It doesn’t. That’s why something else is going on and I don’t know what, because once I saw those e-mails I asked what was going on.”

“What did he say?”

She steels herself for the next thing. “To stop snooping.”

“What’d you say?”

“I told him not to leave e-mails up on his screen,” she says proudly.

“So is he the one supplying?”

“I don’t know. As you can imagine, he was kind of pissed.”

“So why’d you come to us?” I ask, wanting to finish the conversation that was truncated yesterday, wanting to hear from her what we only surmised in the Knothole.

“Because I told him to stop. I said whatever he’s doing needs to stop, but he just said he wasn’t going to talk about it. Wasn’t going to discuss it with me. And I can’t take a chance of this thing blowing up again. I’d never get into college then. Sure, it’s all fine and good that Matthew Winters apologized, but could you imagine what would happen if I’m even remotely connected, even through my boyfriend, to another accusation of cheating? I’d never get into college. Never. That’s why you can’t say it came from me. You can’t let on, okay?”