White Cat (3 page)

I go back to my dorm and sleep through the period when I should be getting help from teachers in classes where I’m struggling, through track practice, and through the debate team meeting. Waking up halfway through dinner, I feel the rhythm of my normal life receding, and I have no idea how to get it back.

Wallingford Preparatory is a lot like how I pictured it when my brother Barron brought home the brochure. The lawns are less green and the buildings are smaller, but the library is impressive enough and everyone wears jackets to dinner. Kids come to Wallingford for two very different reasons. Either private school is their ticket to a fancy university, or they got kicked out of public school and are using their parents’ money to
avoid the school for juvenile delinquents that’s their only other option.

Wallingford isn’t exactly Choate or Deerfield Academy, but it was willing to take me, even with my ties to the Zacharovs. Barron thought the school would give me structure. No messy house. No chaos. I’ve done well too. Here, my inability to do curse work is actually an advantage—the first time that it’s been good for anything. And yet I see in myself a disturbing tendency to seek out all the trouble this new life should be missing. Like running the betting pool when I need money. I can’t seem to stop working the angles.

The dining hall is wood-paneled with a high, arched ceiling that makes our noise echo. The walls are hung with paintings of important heads-of-school and, of course, Wallingford himself. Colonel Wallingford, the founder of Wallingford Preparatory, killed by curse work a year before the ban went into effect, sneers down at me from his gold frame.

My shoes clack on the worn marble tiles, and I frown as the voices around me merge into a single buzzing that rings in my ears. Walking through to the kitchen, my hands feel damp, sweat soaking the cotton of my gloves as I push open the door.

I look around automatically to see if Audrey’s here. She’s not, but I shouldn’t have looked. I’ve got to ignore her just enough that she doesn’t think I care, but not too much. Too much will give me away as well.

Especially today, when I’m so disoriented.

“You’re late,” one of the food service ladies says without looking up from wiping the counter. She looks past retire
ment age—at least as old as my grandfather—and a few of her permed curls have tumbled out the side of her plastic cap. “Dinner’s over.”

“Yeah.” And then I mumble, “Sorry.”

“The food’s put away.” She looks up at me. She holds up her plastic-covered hands. “It’s going to be cold.”

“I like cold food.” I give her my best sheepish half smile.

She shakes her head. “I like boys with a good appetite. All of you look so skinny, and in the magazines they talk about you starving yourselves like girls.”

“Not me,” I say, and my stomach growls, which makes her laugh.

“Go outside and I’ll bring you a plate. Take a few cookies off the tray here too.” Now that she’s decided I’m a poor child in need of feeding, she seems happy to fuss.

Unlike in most school cafeterias, the food at Wallingford is good. The cookies are dark with molasses and spicy with ginger. The spaghetti, when she brings it, is lukewarm, but I can taste chorizo in the red sauce. As I sop up some of it with bread, Daneca Wasserman comes over to the table.

“Can I sit down?” she asks.

I glance up at the clock. “Study hall’s going to start soon.” Her tangle of brown curls looks unbrushed, pulled back with a sandalwood headband. I drop my gaze to the hemp bag at her hip, studded with buttons that read
POWERED BY TOFU
,
DOWN ON PROP 2
, and
WORKER RIGHTS
.

“You weren’t at debate club,” she says.

“Yeah.” I feel bad about avoiding Daneca or giving her rude half answers, but I’ve been doing it since I started at Wall
ingford. Even though she’s one of Sam’s friends and living with him makes avoiding Daneca more difficult.

“My mother wants to talk with you. She says that what you did was a cry for help.”

“It was,” I say. “That’s why I was yelling ‘Heeeelp!’ I don’t really go in for subtlety.”

She makes an impatient noise. Daneca’s family are cofounders of HEX, the advocacy group that wants to make working legal again—basically so laws against more serious works can be better enforced. I’ve seen her mother on television, filmed sitting in the office of her brick house in Princeton, a blooming garden visible through the window behind her. Mrs. Wasserman talked about how, despite the laws, no one wanted to be without a luck worker at a wedding or a baptism, and that those kinds of works were beneficial. She talked about how it benefited crime families to prevent workers from finding ways to use their talents legally. She admitted to being a worker herself. It was an impressive speech. A dangerous speech.

“Mom deals with worker families all the time,” Daneca says. “The issues worker kids face.”

“I know that, Daneca. Look, I didn’t want to join your junior HEX club last year, and I don’t want to mess with that kind of stuff now. I’m not a worker, and I don’t care if you are. Find someone else to recruit or save or whatever it is you are trying to do. And I don’t want to meet your mother.”

She hesitates. “I’m not a worker. I’m not. Just because I want to—”

“Whatever. I said I don’t care.”

“You don’t care that workers are being rounded up and shot in South Korea? And here in the U.S. they’re being forced into what’s basically indentured servitude for crime families? You don’t care about any of it?”

“No, I don’t care.”

Across the hall Valerio is headed toward me. That’s enough to make Daneca decide she doesn’t want to risk a demerit for not being where she’s supposed to be. Hand on her bag, she walks off with a single glance back at me. The combination of disappointment and contempt in that last look hurts.

I put a big chunk of sauce-soaked bread in my mouth and stand.

“Congratulations. You’re going to be sleeping in your room tonight, Mr. Sharpe.”

I nod, chewing. Maybe if I make it through tonight, they’ll consider letting me stay.

“But I want you to know that I have Dean Wharton’s dog and she’s going to be sleeping in the hallway. That dog is going to bark like hell if you go on one of your midnight strolls. I better not see you out of your room, not even to go to the bathroom. Do you understand?”

I swallow. “Yes, sir.”

“Better get back and start on your homework.”

“Right,” I say. “Absolutely. Thank you, sir.”

I seldom walk back from the dining hall alone. Above the trees, their leaves the pale green of new buds, bats weave through the still-bright sky. The air is heavy with the smell of crushed grass, threaded through with smoke. Somewhere someone’s burning the wet, half-decomposed foliage of win
ter.

Sam sits at his desk, earbuds in, huge back to the door and head down as he doodles in the pages of his physics textbook. He barely looks up when I flop down on the bed. We have about three hours of homework a night, and our evening study period is only two hours, so if you want to spend the break at half-past-nine not freaking out, you have to cram. I’m not sure that the picture of the wide-eyed zombie girl biting out the brains of senior douchebag James Page is part of Sam’s homework, but if it is, his physics teacher is awesome.

I pull out books from my backpack and start on trig problems, but as my pencil scrapes across the page of my notebook, I realize I don’t really remember class well enough to solve anything. Pushing those books toward my pillow, I decide to read the chapter we were assigned in mythology. It’s some more messed-up Olympian family stuff, starring Zeus. His pregnant girlfriend, Semele, gets tricked by his wife, Hera, into demanding to see Zeus in all his godly glory. Despite knowing this is going to kill Semele, he shows her the goods. A few minutes later he’s cutting baby Dionysus out of burned-up Semele’s womb and
sewing him into his own leg
. No wonder Dionysus drank all the time. I just get to the part where Dionysus is being raised as a girl (to keep him hidden from Hera, of course), when Kyle bangs against the door frame.

“What?” Sam says, pulling off one of his buds and turning in his chair.

“Phone for you,” Kyle says, looking in my direction.

I guess before everyone had a cell phone, the only way students could call home was to save up their quarters and feed them into the ancient pay phone at the end of every dorm hall. Despite the occasional midnight crank call, Wallingford has left those old phones where they were. People occasionally still use them; mostly parents calling someone whose cell battery died or who wasn’t returning messages. Or my mother, calling from jail.

I pick up the familiar heavy black receiver. “Hello?”

“I am very disappointed in you,” Mom says. “That school is making you soft in the head. What were you doing up on a roof?” Theoretically Mom shouldn’t be able to call another pay phone from the pay phone in prison, but she found a way around that. First she gets my sister-in-law to accept the charges, then Maura can three-way call me, or anyone else Mom needs. Lawyers. Philip. Barron.

Of course, Mom could three-way call my cell phone, but she’s sure that all cell phone conversations are being listened to by some shady peeping-Tom branch of the government, so she tries to avoid using them.

“I’m okay,” I say. “Thanks for checking in on me.” Her voice reminds me that Philip’s coming to pick me up in the morning. I have a brief fantasy of him never bothering to show up and the whole thing blowing over.

“Checking up on you? I’m your mother! I should be there! It is so unfair that I have to be cooped up like this while you’re gallivanting around on rooftops, getting into the kind of trouble you never would have if you had a stable family—a mother at home. That’s what I told the judge. I told
him that if he put me away, this would happen. Well, not this specifically, but no one can say I didn’t warn him.”

Mom likes to talk. She likes to talk so much that you can mmm-hmm along with her and have a whole conversation in which you don’t say a word. Especially now, when she’s far enough away that even if she’s pissed off she can’t put her hand to your bare skin and make you sob with remorse.

Emotion work is powerful stuff.

“Listen,” she says. “You are going home with Philip. You’ll be among our kind of people, at least. Safe.”

Our kind of people. Workers. Only I’m not one. The only nonworker in my whole family. I cup my hand over the receiver. “Am I in some kind of danger?”

“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. You know I got the nicest letter from that count. He wants to take me on a cruise with him when I get out of here. What do you think of that? You should come along. I’ll tell him you’re my assistant.”

I smile. Sure she can be scary and manipulative, but she loves me. “Okay, Mom.”

“Really? Oh, that’ll be great, honey. You know this whole thing is so unfair. I can’t believe they would take me away from my babies when you need me the most. I’ve spoken to my lawyers, and they are going to get this whole thing straightened out. I told them you need me. But if you could write a letter, that would help.”

I know I won’t. “I have to go, Mom. It’s study period. I’m not supposed to be on the phone.”

“Oh, let me talk to that hall master of yours. What’s his name. Valerie?”

“Valerio.”

“You just get him for me. I’ll explain everything. I’m sure he’s a nice man.”

“I’ve really got to go. I’ve got homework.”

I hear her laugh, and then a sound that I know is her lighting a cigarette. I hear the deep inhalation, the slight crackle of burning paper. “Why? You’re done with that place.”

“If I don’t do my homework, I will be.”

“Sweetheart, you know what your problem is? You take everything too seriously. It’s because you’re the baby of the family—” I can imagine her getting into that line of theorizing, stabbing the air for emphasis, standing against the painted cinder block wall of the jail.

“Bye, Mom.”

“You stay with your brothers,” she says softly. “Stay safe.”

“Bye, Mom,” I say again, and hang up. My chest feels tight.

I stand in the hallway a few moments longer, until the break starts and everyone files down to the common lounge on the first floor.

Rahul Pathak and Jeremy Fletcher-Fiske, the other two junior-year soccer players in the house, wave me over to the striped couch they’ve settled on. I wave back, take a hot chocolate packet, and mix it into a large cup of coffee. I think technically the coffee is supposed to be for staff, but we all drink it and no one says anything.

When I sit down, Jeremy makes a face. “You got the heebeegeebies?”

“Yeah, from your mother,” I say, without any real heat.
HBG is the abbreviation for some long medical term that means “worker,” hence “the heebeegeebies.”

“Oh, come on,” he says. “Seriously, I have a proposition for you. I need you to hook me up with somebody who can work my girlfriend and make her really hot for me. At prom. We can pay.”

“I don’t know anyone like that.”

“Sure you do,” Jeremy says, looking at me steadily, like I’m so far beneath him he can’t figure out why he has to even try to persuade me. I should be delighted to help. That’s what I’m for. “She’s going to take off her charms and everything. She wants to do it.”

I wonder how much he’d pay for it. Not enough to keep me out of trouble. “Sorry. I can’t help you.”

Rahul takes an envelope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and pushes it in my direction.

“Look, I said I can’t do it,” I say again. “I can’t, okay?”

“No, no,” he says. “I saw the mouse. I am completely sure it was heading toward one of those glue traps. Dead before tomorrow.” He mimes his hand slashing across his throat with a grin. “Fifty dollars on glue.”

Jeremy frowns, like he’s not sure he’s ready to give up trying me, but he’s not sure how to get the conversation back to where he wants it either.

I shove the envelope into my pocket, forcing myself to relax. “Hope not,” I say quickly, reminding myself that after I get back to the room, I’m going to make Sam note down the amount and for what. It’ll be good practice. “That mouse is good for business.”