Premeditated (13 page)

“You think this Dex person is jealous? He could be pretending to hate the girlfriend when he’d really rather hook up with her.… Maybe you could help him get what he wants.”

“I saw them all day—it wasn’t an act. He picks at her and she loathes him for it.”

“Either way, they’re your weak links,” Brucey said. “The point of contention is the easiest broken. Pick one and wear them down.”

Chandi already hated me, so that left me with Dex.

Dex, who I was truly beginning to think had me LoJacked, because he had just entered the food court. His Lowry blazer and slacks had been replaced by an untucked T-shirt, flannel, and worn-out jeans. Rather than the regulation combed-back horror the school required guys to maintain as a “respectable and nondistracting” hairstyle, he looked like he’d walked here
straight from the shower and let his hair dry on the way. I was forced to retract my initial opinion of “not handsome.”

Lowry Dex wasn’t handsome. Real Dex could have set fire to a glacier.

“Who’s that and why are we watching him?” Brucey whispered.

He and Tabs moved their chairs around so that I was in the middle and their viewpoint was the same as mine.

“Yum,” Tabs said.

“That’s Brooks’ best friend.”

“I want one.”

“That’s the grinning idiot?” Brucey asked. He checked my phone again. “Nah—can’t be.”

“Leave,” I told them quickly.

“I think she’s ashamed of us, Tabby Cat.” Brucey sniffled. “She doesn’t want us meeting her new friends.”

“I’m serious. Get out of here. I can’t operate as Lowry Dinah with the two of you here to make me fall back into my real self.” I wasn’t trying to hide who I used to be—it was no secret, as Dex pretty much knew where I’d come from—but I couldn’t keep my personalities straight with Tabs and Brucey nearby. (Once upon a time, I’d only had one personality to worry about.…) “Stop looking at him!”

“How about gawking? Can I gawk at him?” Tabs tried to weave around my hand as I turned her head away. “Is ogling allowed? Eyeballing? Gaping with intense interest? Give me something to work with, here.”

“Stop it,” I snapped. “Dex has some kind of weird sixth-sense thing. He’ll know you’re staring.”

“And now I’m waving,” she said through a phony grin. “He’s looking right at us.”

“Dinah?”

Dex left the line where he’d been chatting up a girl wearing a track jacket. He cocked his head to the side, trying to fit my non-Lowry self to my face. Ratty shorts and an old sweatshirt didn’t scream “private school” any more than his scuffed Converse did.

“Hi,” I said, then started praying for a freak meteor shower to shatter the mall’s glass dome and knock me through the floor.

Dex grabbed the free chair at our table, spun it around, and sat with his legs straddling the back. I cringed, anticipating Brucey’s usual tirade against people who sit backward. (He claims it’s a sign of social deviance, but considering his habit of taking things that don’t belong to him, I tend to ignore his assessments of other people and their quirks.)

“She said hi.” Brucey scowled. “She didn’t say you could steal our seat without even introducing yourself.”

“Maybe I’m shy,” Dex said. “You should introduce yourself first.”

“Bruce Wayne Bateman.”

Crap
. That’s Brucey litmus test number two—the one he uses whenever someone makes a bad first impression on him. Depending on their response to his full name, he can sprout wings and a halo or horns and a tail.

“Marcus Norwood,” Dex said, and stuck his hand out.

“Guys, this is Jackson Dexter,” I corrected. “Dex goes to Lowry, too. Dex, this is Tabs and Brucey.”

“You were serious about the name?” Dex asked. “My bad. I thought maybe I needed a secret identity to sit here.”

Brucey relaxed. The last time he’d told someone his full name, the kid had come back with “Holy evil parents, Batman.” And since Brucey had actually watched enough old reruns to get the joke, he hadn’t been amused.

“You know they kick you off the tables here if you don’t eat,” Dex said.

“Urban myth,” Tabs said.

“If you say so.” Dex cut his eyes from side to side in a comical rendition of suspicion. “But I used to work here, and I’d rather not do the escorted walk of shame to the escalators for being a ‘nuisance’ to the police academy dropouts.”

“Then maybe you should leave before they decide you’re guilty by association,” Tabs said sourly.

“Not me.” He pointed to his T-shirt, which was likely the only thing he was wearing that was new. “Sixth Street Shelter” was stenciled across the front in giant block letters. “We’re having a toy drive for the trauma center. I’m one of the good guys today.”

“Only today?” Tabs asked.

“It’s no fun being the good guy all the time.” He flashed that same smile that had nearly melted the soles of my shoes to the floor of not-trig the day before.

His head popped up higher, like he’d locked eyes with someone across the crowd, and he raised his hand to beckon them over.

Double crap
. All that time waiting for the devil to show and he found me as soon as I stopped looking. Brooks approached our table, wearing a flaming orange shirt identical to Dex’s.

“ ’Scuse us,” I said, hauling Brucey away. When Tabs didn’t move, I hooked her arm and dragged her behind me.

“Stop staring at them,” I said.

“I can’t help it. Your friend Dex looks familiar, and it’s driving me crazy.”

“The two of you are driving
me
crazy, and he’s not my friend.” I was also starting to hate Mr. Tripp for imprinting Alice on my frontal lobe. Everywhere I went, my world slanted through the looking glass, and now I was hearing the Mad Hatter cackle about how we were all going mad. “I can’t handle both of them with you trying to psychoanalyze their nacho-eating skills. If this is going to work, then I have to at least act like the person they think I am. Which means you two need to stick to the background unless I need a bailout.”

“Aye, aye, mon admiral—run silent, run deep.” Brucey stood up straight and saluted.

“What does that even mean?” Tabs asked.

“Go!” I ordered, shoving my keys into her hand. “Take the Mustang. You’ve just ditched me, so I have to beg a ride home.”

“Have fun—so long as there aren’t any witnesses.” Tabs grabbed a fistful of the front of Brucey’s shirt and pulled him away.

“Later,” Brucey said.

As he and Tabs left, Brucey angled just close enough to Brooks to make me certain he’d lifted something while Brooks was busy talking to Dex. Then Brucey and Tabs ran off toward the escalators, leaving me to wonder how much trouble he’d managed to pick out of Brooks’ pocket.

“Did I scare your friends off?” Brooks asked when I sat back down.

“Not really,” I said. “They’re headed for the cineplex.”

“Without you?”

“I told them to go. Dex was telling me about your toy drive and I thought I’d see if you needed a hand.”

For the first and only time in my life, I found value in my failed-pageant past. Drilled-in lessons about how to stand and smile in order to create the best possible image flooded back, as some sort of latent secret power I never knew I possessed. Like Dex said, there was no better cover than pretending to be one of the good guys. If the snake could pull it off without shedding his skin, then so could I.

It took exactly twenty-six minutes to figure out what Brucey had stolen, because twenty-six minutes after I chased my friends off our table, Brooks finished eating and tried to use the phone that was no longer in his pocket. And it took exactly one minute longer for Brooks to begin retracing his steps from the moment he entered the mall to see if he could figure out where he’d dropped it.

Dex had neglected to mention that both he and Brooks were on the morning shift for the shelter’s charity drive, and it was now over, which meant that if I wanted to stick close, I had to go with them and look for a phone that wouldn’t be found unless Brucey decided to give it up.

“I need someone to dial it,” Brooks said. “Maybe it’s close enough to hear the ring—or someone could find it.”

“Can’t call without a phone,” Dex said. He turned a bit red, crossing his arms and looking at his feet as he ground his toes into the floor.

“I’ve got mine,” I said, quick-scrolling through my very short contact list to find the number Brooks had put into it after Cavanaugh’s class. I pressed the button and prayed my mad genius of a best friend was either out of range or had thought to turn the ringer off.

I was also praying neither Brooks nor Dex could tell I was
holding my breath until I was sure there wouldn’t be a ringtone.

“Where’d you get that?” Dex asked while I pretended to be searching the food court for a hint of sound.

“Uncle Paul,” I said with a shrug, then hung up. “He wanted to make sure any news got through, so he gave me a new phone.”

“Who are you related to? Seriously?”

“Just Uncle Paul,” I said, turning to Brooks to add: “No answer, sorry.”

Dex was practically salivating. My phone wasn’t the prepaid from-the-drugstore piece of trash I was used to. It was a gift from one of the companies with a buy-in on Uncle Paul’s game—a beta version of a model that wouldn’t hit stores for another three months. They were hoping he’d give them special consideration on an app or something to increase their audience base. (I’m sure the company suits would have passed out if they knew Uncle Paul had handed their Next Big Thing to his teenage niece, who then dragged it around the city on her quest to skirt the line between misdemeanor and felony.)

I slipped the phone back into my pocket, and for once I was fairly sure hormones had nothing to do with why Dex was staring at my backside. He looked like a starving man forced to sit at a banquet with his hands tied. At Lowry, he had a well-polished suit of social armor in place—no different from making sure his tie sat straight—but in the open, when he didn’t have to conform to a set way of acting, the desire for things he couldn’t have showed. It made the moment uncomfortable enough that I was happy to join in on a physical, if pointless, search where we had to split up to cover more ground.

We came up predictably empty in the food court. We scoured the shelter’s area and all of the bags and boxes of toys, but of course there was nothing there, either. Brooks’ final, desperate idea was to backtrack the route he’d taken from his car to the charity tables, which led us through a large department store with one of the main parking entrances.

“I’ll go right,” I said, turning toward the nearest cashier.

Dex and Brooks divvied up the left side and center of the store, and we split for the time it took to ask if anyone had turned in a phone.

“Sorry, honey, haven’t seen it,” said a woman in a lavender suit. “I can give you one of our gift bags if it would make you feel better.”

I shook my head. All I needed to feel better was to breathe. When we entered the store from the mall, that familiar air compressor scent that used to ground me had only made me think of the unit in Claire’s hospital room, so it was a relief to pass the cosmetics counter, where competing trails of perfume beat it back.

“I got nothin’,” Dex announced when we met on the other side of the store.

“Me either,” said Brooks, and when he looked to me for better news, I just shrugged, twirling my gold bird necklace on the end of its chain the way I always did when I got nervous. “Maybe I left it in the car,” he said.

Brooks headed for the door but ended up bouncing off a six-and-a-half-foot twig with shaggy black hair before he made it out—
Brucey
.

Brucey mumbled sorry as he jostled past us and shoved his hands in his pockets. It was a very specific physical tic that no
one aside from one of his friends would recognize. Just like only Tabs or I would know the version of Brucey standing there in that store compared to the one Brooks and Dex had seen earlier. He’d ditched his jacket, and with his hair drawn forward, there wasn’t a face to be seen, much less remembered.

“You didn’t,” I mouthed as he pushed his hair out of his eyes.

He danced his eyebrows up and down, grinning back.

I was about to warn Brooks what was coming when—

Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!

The store’s alarm started screaming as soon as he put one foot out the door and his pocket passed the sensor.

Brooks froze, confused by the sound, having no idea what had triggered it or the flashing lights on top of the door panels. People stopped to stare at him while a pair of mall cops with store badges popped out of a door camouflaged into the wall. I took a step back and did my best to look like I didn’t know what was going on.

“What’d I do?” Brooks asked one of the mall cops.

“Empty your pockets, son,” he said.

“Sure, but I didn’t—” Brooks shrugged and reached into his pockets. I knew the exact moment he realized he was sunk, because his face bleached whiter than Brucey’s. When he pulled his hands back out, there was a necklace dangling from his fingers.

“You’re going to need to come with us to the security office,” the mall cop said before turning to me and Dex. “Are you three together?”

“Yeah, but—” I started.

“We just bumped into each other.” Dex cut me off. “We go to school together.”

“Turn out your pockets,” the guard ordered.

We did as he said, pulling everything out for security to see, but there was nothing of interest to them.

“Names?”

“D—”

“Daley.” Dex cut me off again. He took my sleeve and pulled me toward the mall exit. “We’ll get out of your way, sir. Let’s go,
Daley
.”

“And what about you?” the mall cop asked.

“Courtney D’Avignon, and that’s all you get to ask—remember your right to remain silent,” Dex said to Brooks.

The guard watched us until we had cleared the security scanners. When they didn’t go off again, he lost interest and set his focus back on Brooks.

“I didn’t take anything,” Brooks said.

“You can tell us about it in the back; we’ll need a statement to give the police. Are you seventeen?”

“Yeah, but—”