Mortal Danger (The Immortal Game) (11 page)

I handed him the credit card after he gave the damage. Pausing, he said, “Mildred Kramer? Huh.”

“It’s my mom’s card.” Though I was pretty sure that wasn’t why he was wearing the I’m-thinking-hard-and-it-hurts look.

“I figured. You don’t look like a Mildred.”

“She knows I have it, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Go on and make the connection, genius.

“No, it’s not that. We had a girl named Kramer here last year.”

“Oh?” Noncommittal reply. “It’s a common name.”

“I guess. Are you a junior?”

I shook my head. If I wasn’t so determined to make him pay, I could almost feel sorry for Cameron, because he didn’t have enough cerebral wattage to light up a single Christmas bulb. “Senior this year. I’m surprised you don’t remember. You used to pay an awful lot of attention to me.”

“Eat-it?” he blurted. “I mean …
Edith
?”

“My friends call me Edie,” I said breezily.

Not that he would ever number among them.

“Holy shit. What the hell did you
do
this summer?”

I just smiled. “Do you think you could run that card instead of tapping it on the counter? I still need to get school supplies.”

Mostly I wanted to get away from him before I started shaking or burst into tears. Remembering what he’d done to me—and how utterly fine with it he seemed—I could hardly breathe for the tightness in my chest. The shame washed high, higher, until it collared my throat, the spiked-leather dog version. Pure inner steel kept me upright and my lips curved into a smile that swore I wasn’t on the verge of total collapse.

“Yeah. Sorry.” Now he was awkward and fumbling.

Somehow I kept it together until he gave me the ticket to sign. I was an authorized user on my mom’s card, so I scrawled on the slip and passed it back. In return he handed me my bag of uniforms.
Still have to figure out how to rock this without looking like I’m trying too hard.

“See you around,” I said.

Smooth strides carried me out of the store and then I practically ran into the restroom, where I leaned my head against the wall, trembling. Slowly the urge to barf passed, but before I straightened up, a girl came in. I recognized her as Jennifer Bishop, a peripheral member of the Teflon crew. She wasn’t as popular as Brittany or Allison, but since she was one of them, I couldn’t trust her. Jennifer had dark hair and eyes; she looked as if she had Thai heritage, though her last name didn’t reflect it.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, I just didn’t eat breakfast. I’m a little light-headed.” Bending down, I splashed some cold water on my face, then belatedly realized that most girls wouldn’t do that because it would destroy their makeup.

Looking in the mirror, I saw that I had, in fact, screwed up my eyeliner. With a faint sigh, I got a paper towel and did what I could to amend the damage. Now I got why girls in the Teflon crew carried around a cosmetics studio. Apparently I still had some things to learn.

“You can use mine if you want.” She was touching up her face, but the idea of risking pink eye was enough to make me shake my head.

“Thanks, but I’m headed home now anyway.”

“It’s Edith, right?”

I was honestly surprised. “Edie. Have we met?”

“No, but I know who you are.”

After what Cameron did, that was probably true of everyone at school, to say nothing of the five thousand viewers on YouTube. “What can I say, I’m memorable.”

“I hesitate to say this, but … you had me worried toward the end of last year. You look amazing now, though. I guess summer break put things in perspective?”

“Yeah.”
More than you can ever know.

“I just want you to know, I had nothing to do with what happened. And I’m really sorry.” That was the most I’d ever heard Jennifer say.

“I survived. For what it’s worth, I know it wasn’t your idea. Talk to you later.”

She wore a pained look as I pushed past her, but I wasn’t interested in her crisis of conscience. For the sake of my sanity, I needed to get away from Blackbriar and marshal my strength for school next week. Bag in hand, I jogged out of the main building and toward the gate. Guys yelled after me; there were whistles and catcalls, but it didn’t make me feel pretty or special. It just made me feel worse, knowing that it didn’t matter what kind of person I was, only how I looked.

Eventually, I collected myself enough to head for the T station. In the city, I bought school supplies, and when I got home, my parents were both out. That was par for the course. Since I turned thirteen, I’d spent a fair amount of time alone. I wished my parents had evaluated the social atmosphere at Blackbriar in addition to the academics, but stuff like that didn’t occur to them. They saw high school as a hurdle to overcome on the way to an awesome adult life, and I should ignore people who made fun of me. I tried to talk to my mom about it once, and she told me a long story about how things were worse for her growing up and I should be grateful for my advantages. That was the end of me trying to make her understand just how
bad
things had gotten.

Too late now.

Over the next week, I wrote back and forth with Vi, less often to Ryu. I had the impression that he was pretty popular in Japan. It would’ve made me sad if I thought he was seriously hung up on me, but his quick notes were just about back-to-school stuff. In the mornings, I took to running, mostly because it was exercise I could do with the clothes and shoes I already owned. If my parents thought it was weird that I was up at seven every day and racing through the city streets, neither my mom nor my dad said a word. My new interest in fitness came partly from a desire to keep the body I’d sold my soul for—I hoped not literally—and the rest had to do with burning nervous energy.

The night before school started, I talked to Vi on Skype. “So how’s Boston?” she asked, faking a bad townie accent.

“It didn’t change since I left it, so that’s good. How are things with you and Seth?”

Vi went for fifteen minutes about how awesome he was, and the fact that they were planning to hook up next weekend. I probably shouldn’t have asked, if I didn’t want the long, detailed answer. Partway through, I tuned out.

When I checked back in, she was saying, “Anyway, his mom says he can’t drive to meet me every weekend, and they had a big fight, but eventually they compromised, so we’re going every other, and he’s paying for part of the car insurance.”

“Sounds like a fair deal.”

She nodded. “Plus it gives us the chance to make sure we don’t fall behind in school. When I’m not seeing him, I’ll catch up on projects and extra credit.”

Only people from the nerd phylum would say “extra credit” without a sneer or a mocking laugh, but I’d always liked learning what teachers came up with to challenge us. Sometimes it was silly, not hard at all, but it showed you were willing to try. Since I’d had no social life, I was always about a hundred bonus points into A
+
territory.

“So,” Vi concluded, “I just wanted to tell you to have a great first day.”

“You too.”

She paused. “Were you listening at all? We don’t start until next week.”

Oops
. It looked like I wasn’t a great listener, and I’d missed some stuff that wasn’t Seth-relevant, but I’d get better with practice. Except for the SSP, I had more experience hiding from people than talking to them.

“Lucky.”

“I’m kind of bored,” she confessed.

“Me too.”

The waiting was getting to me as well. I kept checking my phone to see if Kian had texted, but nothing so far. It would be a relief to get this mission underway.

Soon after, Vi disconnected and I got ready for bed. One benefit of working out, however, was that I suffered from insomnia less. Despite myriad fears about tomorrow, I fell straight into a dreamless sleep. My alarm blared too early, but I rolled out of bed and went through the regimen I had practiced the week before.

In the end, I decided to go with classic schoolgirl. I wouldn’t be wearing thigh-high stockings or tying up my shirt the minute the teachers looked the other way. Instead I wore my uniform nearly as intended: blue knee socks, innocent Mary Janes, two buttons open on the blouse, and skirt rolled up once at the waistband to make it a bit shorter than strictly permissible. I’d seen girls daring much more, however. I did my hair up in a twist, a sexy, tousled one with curls escaping. This look that seemed effortless took me almost half an hour, more with makeup time. But in the end, it was worth it.

At last, I looked like one of the beautiful people, somebody you’d see cruising the halls with the Teflon crew. I had fruit and yogurt for breakfast, brushed my teeth, and waved at my parents, who were barely stirring. They were both kind of night owls, not in the party sense but that they’d stay up late watching documentaries or reading articles in scientific journals while sipping endless cups of hot tea.

“You want oatmeal?” Mom asked.

“No, I’m fine. I ate already. Bye!”

It was time to shift from planning and preparation to payback and penance. By the time I was done at Blackbriar, there would be blood in the water.

THE SHARKS ARE CIRCLING, CIRCLING

When I entered DeWitt Hall, where all language arts and literature classes were held, people stared as I walked by. In the old days, that would’ve meant the Teflon crew had stuck something on my back or circulated a new rumor. This time it signified a different kind of attention, but it was no easier to bear—for different reasons. Kian probably knew how this felt, and maybe he’d wanted to caution me about this.

One guy whispered, “Who
is
that?”

“The new and improved Edie Kramer.”

“Holy shit.”

“I know, right? How do you go from barks like a dog to that in a summer?”

A girl whose name I didn’t know pushed into the conversation with a scornful “I heard she had plastic surgery. Lipo, nose job, nips, tucks, lifts, and—”

“You have no idea how much I don’t care,” the guy said. “Like
you
were born with that nose, Tara.”

I felt his eyes on me as I turned the corner and stepped into my first class. My knees felt shaky, but soon the talk would die down. Then I could make inroads toward my goal. Jennifer Bishop might offer an opening since she’d professed what seemed like genuine regret over what the Teflon crew did to me.

I chose a seat in the middle of the room. The front marked you as a dork and the back said you planned to sleep or text. Since I was trying to reinvent myself, I avoided both classifications.
These people know nothing about you. You’re a mystery.
At least, I was hoping there would be a certain mystique surrounding me, and I didn’t intend to give anything away. The class filled up and the instructor came in just before the bell. I didn’t recognize him, so that meant he was new. I wondered who had retired or taken another job, freeing up this slot.

The girls were suddenly very attentive because this teacher couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and he was hot in a professorial sort of way. By which I meant, he had on a corduroy blazer with suede patches on the sleeves, and he was pulling it off, mostly because he’d paired it with boots, faded jeans, and a striped dress shirt. He had a chiseled jaw, great cheekbones, and black hair that looked like he’d rumpled it in a fit of literary inspiration. I privately suspected it had taken substantial time, plus expensive hair product for him to achieve that level of “I don’t care about my hair.” All around me, girls gave a soft, collective sigh, and his hazel eyes crinkled in amusement.

He wrote on the chalkboard, “Mr. Love.”

And a guy said, “Seriously? That’s your actual name?”

“The irony doesn’t escape me, and the moniker’s offered its share of challenges over the years.”

English accent.
The female population at Blackbriar had no hope of escaping a giant crush this semester. Coupled with his looks and his slightly bashful air, he was girl Kryptonite. While I registered his definite appeal, he wasn’t turning me dreamy-eyed alongside everyone else. That probably meant I was broken.

He drew a line through the name on the board and added, “You can call me Colin. As you might’ve surmised, I’m from London, and I’m looking forward to sharing my fondness for great literature with you. Now I’d like you to go around the room and state your name, plus one interesting fact about you. We’ll start on the right.”

I tuned out the introductions, though I did roll my eyes when one girl said her name was Nicole and that she could tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue. The guy next to her said, “Call me,” but Mr. Love moved the conversation along.

Pretty soon it was my turn. “My name is Edie Kramer, and…”
I’m afraid I made a deal with the devil
. “I can recite pi to a hundred places.”

“Impressive. And what about you, sir?” I appreciated that he shifted focus to the boy in front of me. Though I would have to get used to it if I truly meant to infiltrate the Teflon crew, I hated being watched.

Eventually I knew all kinds of trivia about the rest of my class and then Colin started the lesson in earnest. He was a good teacher, explaining his expectations up front, how he would evaluate our performance, how much reading and writing we’d be doing, and then his test policies. By far it wasn’t the worst first session I’d had.

The rest, until lunch, were a mixed bag. I had a few of the same teachers from last year, but they were all polite enough to pretend I hadn’t changed into a new person. By the time break rolled around, my shoulders hurt from the tension. It took all my courage to go into the cafeteria instead of hiding in the bathroom. The place smelled delicious, mostly because we had chefs instead of lunch ladies. There was a wide variety of choices too, but my stomach roiled too much for me to grab anything but salad and yogurt. If I kept up this I’m-freaking-out diet, I’d end up even skinnier,
not
one of my goals.

When I stepped out of the line, I almost bumped into Jennifer. Today, she wore her hair long and straight, glowing with a blue-black sheen. Between that and her flawless skin, she was much prettier than either Brittany or Allison. If popularity was driven by looks alone, Jennifer would rule the school. Since she seemed to have a heart, that would be a good thing.