For a moment she looks disoriented. Then she smiles back, a big grin. “Thank you! Come back again.”
Mom and Barron get up and start toward the door, leaving me there staring after Jin-Sook, trying to figure out how to tell her that her memories just got rearranged.
“What’s done is done,” Mom says from the front of the restaurant. The look she gives me is a warning.
Family looks after family.
The girl’s memories are gone. I could get Barron in trouble, but I can’t undo what’s already done.
I push back my chair and follow my mother and brother out. Once we’re on the street, though, I shove Barron’s shoulder. “Are you crazy?”
“Come on!” he says, grinning like it’s all a great joke. “Paying is for suckers.”
“I get that you don’t care about other people. But you’re messing up your own head,” I say. “You’ll use up all your memories. There won’t be anything of you left.”
“Don’t worry,” Barron says. “If I forget anything important, you can just remind me.”
Mom looks over at me, eyes glittering.
Yeah. Right. What’s done is done.
They drop me off back at Wallingford, in front of my own car. I start to get out.
“Wait,” Mom says and takes out a pen from her handbag. “I got a cute little phone! I want to give you the number.”
Barron rolls his eyes.
“You hate cell phones,” I say.
She ignores me as she scribbles. “Here, baby,” she says. “You call me whenever. I’ll call you back from the nearest pay phone or landline.”
I take the slip of paper with a smile. After her three years in jail, I don’t think she realizes just how rare pay phones are these days. “Thanks, Mom.”
She leans in and kisses my cheek. I can smell her perfume, sweet and heavy, long after they pull away.
My car makes a horrible noise when I try to start it up. For a moment I think I am going to have to chase down Mom and Barron for a ride. Finally I put it in second gear and get it rolling. Somehow the engine turns over and the motor roars to life. I have no idea how long my car is going to stay running or whether I’m going to be able to get it started again when I want to return to Wallingford.
I drive to the big old house I grew up in. From the outside the unpainted shingles and off-kilter shutters give it the look of a building long abandoned. Grandad and I cleaned out most of the garbage, but inside I can smell the faint odor of mold under the Lysol. The place still looks tidy, but I can tell Mom’s been here. There are a couple of shopping bags on the dining room table and there’s a mug of tea rotting in the kitchen sink.
Good thing Grandad’s down in Carney; he’d be annoyed.
I walk straight to the chair. It’s covered in a kind of a mustardy cloth and is perfectly normal-looking for a club chair, except for the feet, which, now that I really look at them, are awful. I thought they were claw feet holding on to painted balls, and at a glance that’s what they look like. But now that I am inspecting the chair closely, those claws are actually human hands, the knuckles bent under.
A shudder runs through me.
I sit down on the floor beside it, despite wanting nothing more than to get as far away from it as I can. I reach out a hand and concentrate. The power still feels strange, and my whole body is braced for what comes after, for the pain and helplessness of the blowback.
As my palm comes down on the chair, everything goes fluid. I can feel the curse here, feel the threads of it, and even feel the man underneath. I rip the magic with a push that’s almost physical.
After a moment I open my eyes, not even realizing I had closed them.
A man stands before me, his skin pink with life, his eyes open. He’s wearing a white sleeveless undershirt and underwear. I feel a wild hope.
“Henry Janssen,” I say, my voice trembling. He looks just like the picture paper-clipped to his file.
Then he falls, his skin turning ashen. I remember how we tried to fake Zacharov’s death. Seeing Janssen fall, I realize how wrong we had it. You can see the moment it happens, like a light burning out in a lamp.
“No,” I yell, crawling over to him.
And the blowback hits me. My body cramps all over, limbs elongating like a spider, reaching toward the ceiling. Then it’s like I’m made of glass and each twist of my body creates cracks that turn to fissures until I am lying in pieces. I try to scream, but my mouth has turned to crumbling earth. My body is turning itself inside out. As agony grips me, I turn my head and stare into the glassy eyes of a dead man.
I wake up, drenched in sweat, next to Henry Janssen.
Every muscle in my body is sore, and when I look at the corpse, I feel nothing except a growing sense that I have to get rid of it. I no longer understand the urgency that sent me here. I no longer understand why I thought there could be any other outcome but this. What did I think was going to happen? I know nothing about transformation or its limits. I don’t even know if it’s possible to turn an inanimate object back into something alive.
I don’t care, either. I’m tired of caring.
It’s like the part of me that feels all that guilt has finally overloaded. I feel nothing.
Even though the most practical solution is to curse him back into being a chair, I can’t face another round of blow-back. I think of burying him, but I’m pretty sure the hole has to be deeper than I have time to dig.
I could dump him in deep water, but since I’m not even sure my car is going to start, that seems problematic too. Finally I remember the freezer in the basement.
It’s harder to carry a dead person than someone who’s alive. It’s not that they’re heavier; it’s that they don’t help you. They don’t bend their body into your arms or hold on to your neck. They just lie there. On the plus side, you no longer have to worry about hurting them.
I drag Janssen down the stairs by his shoulders. His body makes a sickening thud with each step.
There’s nothing in the freezer except half a pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream, rimed with frost. I take it out and set it on my father’s old workbench. Then I put one hand under the dead man’s clammy neck and hook the other around his knee. I lift and half-roll, half-toss him into the freezer. He sort of fits, but I have to bend his limbs so that I will be able to close the lid. It’s pretty bad.
I’ll come back, I tell myself. In a day or two I’ll come back and change him.
Looking down at a freezer full of Henry Janssen, I think about Philip’s corpse laid out in the funeral home. Someone—a woman—was caught on video walking into Philip’s condo. And since I know I killed the rest of the people in the files, the FBI are on the entirely wrong track. They’re looking to connect the killers. But whoever murdered Philip had nothing to do with all this, probably didn’t know anything about it.
Maybe I should get back to thinking about suspects other than myself.
My car starts without a problem; the first good thing that’s happened to me in a while. I drive back to Walling-ford eating the Cherry Garcia ice cream and thinking about red gloves, gunshots, and guilt.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO avoid the cafeteria forever.
When I walk in to dinner, I see Daneca and Sam sitting with Jill Pearson-White and a bunch of Sam’s chess club friends. I start over to them, until I see Lila, her head bent toward Daneca’s. I can only imagine the speech Lila is being given about worker rights and HEX meetings.
I veer abruptly toward another table and spot the flame of Audrey’s red hair.
“Hi,” I say as I sit down.
Greg Harmsford is there, along with Rahul Pathak and Jeremy Fletcher-Fiske. They all look surprised to see me. Greg’s hand clenches around his fork in a way that suggests I better say something clever, fast. He might be dating Audrey now, but I dated her once, and clearly Greg worries there might still be something there. Probably because once, at a party, she arrived with him but made out with me.
Here’s the thing about influencing a group to do what you want. It’s a lot easier if what you want and what they want line up. Getting marks interested in easy money only works on the greedy. I hope I can interest Greg in the promise of easy revenge while I distract the rest of the table. I’m counting on his being threatened enough that he’ll want to make me look like a fool. I just hope that he’s not so threatened that he decides to punch me in the face.
“Get out of here,” Greg says.
“I wanted to talk with you all about the senior prank,” I improvise wildly.
Rahul frowns. “The school year just started.”
I nod. “Look, last year the class left it until the end and they got the kind of lame prank that you’d expect. I want ours to make our graduating class infamous.”
“You’re totally taking bets on it,” says Jeremy. “You just want an inside line.”
“I want to get a horse into Northcutt’s bedroom,” I say. “Wearing an enormous thong. Now, please tell me how admitting that to you is going to make me any money.”
Rahul and Jeremy laugh, Jeremy spitting a piece of salad out onto his plate. Now Greg can’t just boot me from the table. He won’t let me leave with Rahul and Jeremy well-disposed toward me.
“Can you picture her face?” Rahul says gleefully.
“Whatever,” says Greg. “We can come up with something better than that.”
“Like what?” asks Audrey. She doesn’t sound like she’s challenging him. She sounds like she’s sure he’s going to come up with an absolutely brilliant suggestion in just a moment and she’s patiently waiting. She sounds kind. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if her new boyfriend made her old boyfriend look like a fool either.
By this point I’m sure I have somewhere to sit for dinner. I get my food and eat it, listening to them trade prank ideas back and forth. The more we talk about it, the more I warm to the idea of deciding the scheme early so we can focus for the rest of the year on the perfect execution. I let Greg get in a few digs.
And if I sometimes flash to the image of the body in the freezer, to the waxen face of my brother, or to the wide-eyed way Lila looked when I pulled away from her last night, well, then, I have had a lifetime of experience keeping what I’m thinking off my face.
“Hey, look at the new kid. Isn’t she supposed to be some crime boss’s daughter?” Jeremy says.
I swivel my head to see Lila standing. A junior girl I don’t know is talking to her, gesturing grandly with blue-gloved hands. I can’t hear what they’re saying over the general dining hall noise, but the junior’s expression is alight with malicious glee.
“Girl fight,” Rahul says, grinning.
But when Lila takes a step toward the sophomore, it’s not to punch or pull hair. She starts removing a single black glove.
I see a flash of bare fingers and hear Greg’s indrawn breath beside me. The junior girl stumbles back.
“She’s crazy,” says Jeremy. “That’s nuts. She’s going to—”
People are getting up, conversations are pausing. In that lull of sound I hear Lila’s voice distinctly.
“You sure you want to cross me?” she says. In that moment she’s her father’s daughter.
The junior runs off toward the teacher’s table, and Lila sits down, pulling her glove back on. I see Daneca gaping at her. After a few moments Dean Wharton comes over and escorts Lila out of the building.
I push around the Salisbury steak in front of me. After a while of doing that, I get up.
“Greg,” Audrey says, rising with me. “Can you give me a minute with Cassel?”
“Whatever.” He shrugs, but the look he shoots me is anything but casual. It’s hard to picture a guy like Greg Harmsford loving anyone, but the way he watches Audrey is at least possessive.
“What’s going on with you?” Audrey asks as we walk toward the dorms. The sun is just going down and the sky is dim. The leaves are turned over on their backs, waiting for rain. “You don’t care about the senior prank. I know that because you never, ever say what you actually mean.”
Six months ago we almost got back together. I’d thought that being with her would, through some power of alchemy, transmute me into being a normal guy with normal problems. When she looks at me, I see the reflection of a different self in her eyes. Someone I long to be.
I lean toward her. She puts a hand on my chest and pushes me back, hard.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“I don’t know. I thought—” I thought I was supposed to kiss her.
“Cassel,” she says, exasperated. “You’re always like this. Hot or cold. Do you even know what you want?”
I look at the concrete path beneath me, at the desiccated bodies of earthworms who crawled out of the ground in the rain, only to get scorched by the sun.
“You’re the one who wanted to talk,” I say defensively.
“Do you even remember last year? I cried my eyes out after you came back to school and acted like nothing we’d said to each other while you were kicked out mattered.”
I nod, not looking at her, because she’s right. After my mother worked Lila, the only reason I didn’t flunk out was because Sam did half of my homework for me. Everything felt hollow and unreal. I blew off Audrey without even making up excuses.
“Why? And why talk to me now like that never happened?” Her voice has a funny quality to it. I know that if I look up at her, her neck will be all blotchy, like it always gets when she’s upset.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re right. I’m not really good at relationships.”