The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) (13 page)

BOOK: The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two)
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The words stung, even though Nicky was complimentary in her tone. He hadn’t had time to properly investigate the wine bottles he’d found on his nightstand this morning, and had spent the day in fear that he would learn the news that Nicky was now telling him. The wine was good. Really good. And that could only mean that he had raided his father’s wine stash. What on earth possessed him to do that? What a rookie mistake. If he was going to have a party with Nicky, the first thing he should have done was score some liquor in a manner that his father wouldn’t notice. His father definitely would notice if some of his best wine was missing.

“I don’t even remember when I started drinking last night,” Art said.

“Do you remember waking up yesterday with a headache?” Nicky said. “When I got there and found you drinking I was surprised, but you said you needed some hair of the dog that bit you.”

Now Art was getting disgusted with himself.
Hair of the dog that bit you
was an expression his brother used, and his brother, at only twenty-four, was already a raging alcoholic. Art needed to be careful. This incident with all this memory loss was an early warning. Sometimes his brother lost track of entire weekends drinking. Now Art was doing the same thing.

What was frightening was how out of control he already felt. If he couldn’t even remember getting the wine, how was he supposed to stop himself next time? There was no moment of decision, no weighing of the pros and cons of opening a new bottle of booze less than 24 hours removed from getting hammered.

This must be how it goes
, he thought, suddenly feeling closer to his brother than he ever had before.
This is why people get addicted. They don’t control it because they can’t. They can’t even try.

“Yes, I remember waking up with a headache,” Art said.

“Maybe we should start with your last memory,” Nicky said. “Try going through yesterday and see where the memories stop.”

 
“The last thing I remember is coming home from the hotel some time in the afternoon,” Art said.

“Okay,” said Nicky. “Well, you probably took a nap after you got home, especially since you were still sick from all the drinking. Maybe you woke up feeling gross and weren’t even fully awake yet when you started drinking again. Maybe that’s why the memories just kind of stop there.”

Art looked at the clock. Lunch-hour was half done. He turned left on Maguire Road and started heading back towards school.

“I bet you’re right,” Art said. “It makes sense. God…I wish I hadn’t…straight to my dad’s wine stash? That was a really stupid thing to do.”

“You weren’t yourself, Art. We put our bodies through a lot at the Masquerade and the after-party. We partied really, really hard.”

“Yeah, I remember that. Kind of. So when you came over, was I already drunk?”

“Pretty much,” Nicky said. “Not so far gone yet that you were out of it, but definitely feeling frisky.”

“Frisky?”

Nicky smiled, then she took a drink of her milkshake.

“Was I…did I do anything?”

“Nothing I didn’t want you to,” Nicky said. “And yes, we kissed a little. I had some wine after I got there. We were having fun.”

“We just kissed?”

“You were a perfect, drunken gentleman,” Nicky said.

Art was relieved that Nicky seemed okay about last night, but very disappointed to hear that they had only kissed.

“And then you left,” Art said.

Nicky turned sideways in her chair. She took another drink from her shake then she put it down in the cupholder. “Yes. Things got out of control after you got your father’s pills.”

Art sighed. What a dunce he was. He had a girl at the house who liked him enough to kiss him, a smoking hot girl at that, and what does he do? He goes off and gets into his father’s narcotics and drives her away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what got into me.”

“I would have tried to stop you, but you were too fast for me. Before I even understood what was going on, you had put three of the pills in your mouth. That’s when I knew you were headed for a long night. I thought for a while there we might need to call an ambulance.”

“Then what happened?”

“It didn’t take long for you to pass out,” Nicky said. “That was at nine-thirty. I stayed until three. Your bad time was from ten to midnight.”

“What do you mean my bad time?”

“Your breathing got a little forced, you were all agitated as you slept. I just sat there with you, holding onto the phone.”

“Geez Nicky. What a putz I am. I’m so--”

“Don’t worry about it. Everything turned out fine. By one in the morning I could tell you were going to be fine. When I left at three you were in really good shape. Sleeping like a baby, your breathing was strong, your heart was strong…it sucks that you can’t remember anything, but really, it could have been a lot worse.”

“Yeah it could,” Art said. “And I promise you, Nicky. No more. I’m done with all of that. Definitely no more of my dad’s pills, and no more wine either. Man, the way I feel today--”

“Let me guess—you’re never going to have a drink again,” Nicky said, her voice full of sarcasm.

Art feigned a laugh. “I guess that’s what they all say, isn’t it?”

“So I’ve heard. Listen, none of this matters to me. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“Me too,” said Art.

A quiet moment passed between them, Nicky sipping at her milkshake, Art trying to keep his head together. He was so angry at himself. He felt like such a fool.

It was all so exhausting. The emotional highs and lows of the past forty-eight hours—to call it a swinging pendulum was to ghastly understate what Art’s life had been like since Saturday. When were things going to calm down? Was this what it was like to be an adult?

He turned onto Forester Lane to find heavy traffic. There was an accident up ahead. Three cars were pulled off the road. One of them was totaled.

“Alright, this isn’t going fast enough,” Art said, looking at the sea of cars in front of him. “We’re going to be late if we don’t get out of here.”

He pushed his way into the breakdown lane and floored it, zooming past ten cars and turning the wrong way down Copper Boulevard.

“Art, this is a one-way,” Nicky said.

“I know,” said Art. “We’re taking a quick detour.”

There was clear space in front of him for the rest of the block, so Art punched it, bringing the car up to 55 in only a few seconds. He was less than a hundred feet from Mercy Avenue when a green station wagon with two teenagers turned onto the street right in front of him.

“Art, look out!” Nicky screamed.

Squealing tires, honking horns—Art lost track of himself for a bit when it happened. It was as if he wasn’t really there, as if a stranger was pulling the wheel hard left and hard right and Art was watching from afar.

The car jerked itself back to the center as Art snaked around the back side of the station wagon.

They were safe. Art pulled into a parking lot to get off the road, tires squealing as brought the car around. The car skidded to a stop and Art came back to the moment. His heart racing, his body pumped full of adrenalin, he felt fully awake for the first time today, maybe for the first time in many days, and without even knowing what he was saying or why, the words, “That was awesome,” came out of his mouth.

He sensed an immediate shift in Nicky. He could feel her looking at him with displeasure.

“Sorry about that, but you’ve gotta admit, that was some pretty swank driving on my part,” he said. “And this car…I told my brother nothing beats an Audi for driving in the city. He’s all hung up on Italian cars these days, but his car never would have handled the turn like this one did.”

Nicky said nothing.

“And what was with those kids in that car?” Art said. “I swear they were following us. I saw them at the drive through when we got your milkshake.”

Nicky said nothing.

“Are you okay?” Art asked.

With a ferocity he didn’t know she had, Nicky reached out and punched him in the shoulder.

“Ow,” he said. “What was--”

“You scared me, Art! Have you forgotten I was in a wreck on Saturday?”

“No…I…ummm…”

“Oh forget it,” Nicky said. “Just take me back to school.”

“Nicky, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright. Let’s just go.”

But he could hear in her voice that it wasn’t alright. He had screwed up and she was mad at him. They didn’t speak for the rest of the ride. It wasn’t that Art wanted silence—he was actually trying hard to come up with something to say, but he never did. Nothing seemed appropriate. His little bit of hot rodding was totally uncalled for, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Nicky had just spent her entire lunch hour explaining to him how rotten his behavior had been the night before. He messed up then and he messed up now. Whatever chance he might have had with Nicky Bloom was slipping away.

They pulled into the senior lot right as the second bell was ringing. Art killed the engine and looked to Nicky, hoping for some cue that they could at least say goodbye.

Without ever looking him in the eye, Nicky leaned in and threw her arms around Art’s neck, giving him a quick, confusing hug.

“See you around, okay?” she said.

“Yeah, sure. See you,” he said.

Then Nicky got out of his car, leaving Art to wonder what just happened. He thought about chasing after her. He imagined a scene where he caught up to her and asked if they were okay and, if not, what he could do to make it up to her.

But he didn’t get out. He sat in his car, letting Nicky get some distance on him. He knew exactly what he needed to do to make it up to her. Nicky was a girl wearing black. She had taken an interest in Art for his money. She had never promised him a romance. That was something he’d added to the equation. He wanted Nicky to fall for him and choose him as her bond after she won Coronation.

So far he was doing a lousy job.
 
All Nicky knew of Art at the moment was that he was a drunken, brazen, bad driving, pill-popping loser.

That would change at the Date Auction. Art was about to inherit a quarter share in one of the most profitable companies in Washington. Whatever Nicky thought of him now, she’d forget about it when he placed the winning bid.

 

Chapter 13

 

When Jill was a child, her bedroom was a mix of elegance and girlish charm that was appropriate for a daughter from an elite family. A four-poster bed, an antique dresser, pink walls, and framed posters of fairies and unicorns were the décor Jill grew up with.

After Ryan broke up with her, Jill spent a dark and miserable week in that bedroom. When she came out she decided it all had to go. There’s only so much pretty pink princess crap a girl can take. By winter break of freshman year, Jill had transformed her room from pre-teen girl cave to hardcore work space.

She turned the pink walls white. She built two workstations that ran the longest sides of the room, one for software, the other for hardware. She got rid of all her posters, and in their place she hung big glass panels on which she could write out her thoughts in dry-erase marker.

Her king-sized four poster in the center of the room gave way to a metal-frame double mattress pushed off in a corner. Her Victorian-era dresser and vanity went up for auction at Sotheby’s and she replaced them with sleek, Swiss-made furniture that fit in her closet.

The summer before senior year, when Gia asked her to break into Thorndike’s admissions database and score the open spot for Nicky Bloom, Jill dumped all her old computers and started from scratch, creating her own distributed network in her bedroom with enough processing power to go toe-to-toe with the servers the Network wanted her hacking into. This multi-workstation construction took up half the room and doubled the electric bill at the Wentworth home. It also caught the eye of Jill’s mother, who was so impressed with it that she duplicated the setup in her own office on the third floor.

There was no doubt in Jill’s mind that the transformation of her bedroom from living space to working space was part of the reason she had gone from mischievous computer snoop to world-class hacker. Her bedroom invited her to do something important every time she stepped inside. It provided her comfort and motivation to carry on when she ran into a particularly thorny problem.

Like the one she faced now.

Thirty-six hours had passed since Jill broke into the TPM database and sent all the data to the Network’s servers in Colorado. At the time she sent that data, she was logged into the live stream on her phone, and could see the glorious secret files stored inside.

She hadn’t seen them ever since. Even though everything looked good when she and Nicky left Art’s house, even though Alvin had told her the data transfer was a success, when she got home and logged in to have a look, all she saw was gobbledygook.

She called Alvin immediately to ask what was going on.

“I don’t understand what happened,” Alvin told her. “The data was clean just five minutes ago.”

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