by Tracy Korn
"He doesn't have to be smart. He just has to find some people who don't like you, and that's not going to be too hard."
"Gee, thanks, best friend."
"Halsey, come on. You know these paint sniffers are half a braincell from being confused about how to eat their own lunch," Max said as we stopped by my locker and grabbed my planner for the internship selections. I laughed. "I'm serious," he added. "They think you walk around like you're better than they are."
"Why? Because I applied to The Citadel?" I asked, hearing the edge in my own voice now.
"Uh, yeah," Max looked at me dumbfounded. "That's exactly why, Halls."
"They could apply too if they'd stop wasting their time sitting around huffing primer from the body shop, or whatever else they do when they're not making every second of being at this school a hell on earth."
"Yeah, well that's not going to happen," Max added as the first bell rang. "Just watch out today—don't go anywhere alone. I'll catch up with you in the gym for the internship selections."
I nodded to him and closed my locker, then headed to my homeroom where we'd all soon be sent down to pick out the career paths we qualified for based on our grades. If only they'd have the results of The Citadel applications too, I could finally get out of the limbo I'd been in for months now.
***
I walked into Mr. Warren's class and immediately felt a stab of embarrassment as I remembered Brian's stupid comment earlier about a quickie before school.
Sure, Mr. Warren was attractive in that new, young professor kind of way with the tweed jacket and open collar Oxford, but it honestly hadn't occurred to me to be attracted to him. He just kind of blended in with everyone else, even though he'd gone to The Citadel. Everyone in The Grind was just getting through each day doing the same thing over and over. Seeing the same people and having the same conversations. I felt like there was something more to the world though…at least, that there could be. The only way I was going to find out was by getting into The Citadel and training for a career that could take me somewhere else.
"Halsey?" Mr. Warren said, startling me out of my thoughts.
"Uh, sorry, yes?"
"The rest of the class is leaving for the Internship fair," he said, though it sounded more like a question—an, are you going to join them or what, question.
"Oh, sorry."
"Anything happen this morning you want to discuss?" Mr. Warren asked, taking a seat on the corner of his desk and putting his clipboard under his arm.
"No, everything is fine," I answered, trying to inch my way toward the door.
"Nothing involving Brian Dunwin?" he pressed, giving me a knowing look. I froze for a second wondering how the news had reached him already, but then again, this was a high school.
"Oh, that was nothing. I handled it," I said, giving him a quick grin and rushing through the door. "See you later, Mr. Warren!"
I darted down the hall and caught up to the others in my homeroom before he could reply. The last thing I wanted to discuss with him was what Brian could have said that provoked me to aim for the bleachers with my walking stick.
We shuffled into the gym, which was already about ten degrees warmer than it had been in the hallways thanks to the sheer number of people, not to mention the sanitation stations pushing out negative ion mist every five feet. As the droves of humanity made their way to the tables and kiosks set up around the perimeter, I must have counted at least ten different machines puffing out a little virus assassin heat mirage before it dissipated in the air. Representatives from all the businesses in The Grind were there, everything from Mr. Burke's supermarket—his kiosk manned by his son—to the health clinic and local veterinarians.
Depending on our grades, we could get apprenticeships at the clinic or in a vet office, but that's as far as we could ever go without going through The Citadel for an Authorized license to actually practice as a doctor at either place. In my lifetime, I'd never known anyone actually from The Grind who ever got into The Citadel. Everyone in a position that required an Authorization had been born and raised behind that wall already.
I pushed the thought to the back of my head as I made my way through the crowd. There was a first time for everything, right? I could become a psychologist and help people solve their problems. I could help them hold on and fight through them. Problems were just puzzles, that was all, and I could still get into The Citadel.
But if I didn't...
I had no idea what I wanted to do if I didn't, and I had approximately one hour to not only figure it out, but to make a good enough impression on the business owners to get them to consider picking me over someone else. Someone who probably had brought them a résumé and cover letter, and who had worn their best outfit today instead of a ratty pair of jeans and a faded T-shirt. This was a disaster.
I scanned the gym for Max but didn't see him in the sea of faces. I did see Brian Dunwin and his flea infested entourage, however, so I quickly maneuvered into the current of people streaming around the perimeter on the opposite side of the gym. Brian stopped at Mr. Burke's supermarket kiosk, and I chuckled to myself. Let Draco and Fate get one whiff of him, and we'd see just how long that internship would last.
"We currently service the entire Eastern Seaboard, as well as selected overseas markets," a familiar voice said, and I looked around for the source. It was coming from the direction of a large, red kiosk tent with Chinese characters on either side of a golden dragon. In the middle, the words Wu Fong Pharmaceuticals were printed in block letters. Who were Wu Fong Pharmaceuticals?
The voice I heard belonged to a young man with slicked back, dark hair. He was familiar, but I didn't know why as I studied his expensive looking suit.
"So it's just, like, selling drugs, but legally?" Lauren Stover, one of the brainwashed girls in Brian's group of friends giggled at her own question. It was the kind of condescending giggle that only mean, usually stupid girls employed when they wanted to make it seem like they were just passing judgement on an answer they already knew, rather than reveal they actually just had the IQ of a gum wrapper. I rolled my eyes.
"Well, sales is a position within Wu Fong Pharma, if that's something you'd be interested in. Do you like to travel?" the man asked, then casually met my eyes. For the briefest second, his seemed to widen in recognition of me, and the ghost of a grin passed over his lips.
A gasp caught in my throat when it dawned on me that he was the guy from the woods, somehow cleaned up…and here.
Chapter 3
I looked away abruptly and lost myself in the crowd again, ducking behind a wall of shuffling students. My heart started pounding in my ears, and I was sucking in gulps of air. Fight or flight... I thought, and this was definitely flight. What was a guy from Wu Fong Pharmaceuticals doing in the woods trying to sell me those little, colored vials?
Out of nowhere, the thought was knocked out of my head when I crashed full force into someone and nearly fell backward. The person grabbed my arms and pulled me in.
"Whoa! Halls…" Max chuckled, his arms tight around me. He glanced down at my hands, which were pressed flat against his chest, then cleared his throat and let me go.
"Uh, sorry about that. I was...um, can we go?" I said, feeling like my mind was already several steps ahead of me.
"Go where? Did you already turn in all your internship requests?" he asked.
"Shit. No. OK, then let's go this way," I said, pulling his forearm in the opposite direction of the Wu Fong forest guy.
"Halls, what's wrong with you?" Max looked back toward where we'd come from. "Was it Lauren? Did Brian send her after you?"
"No," I said. "She didn't see me. Just come this way."
"Stop! Halsey, the body shop is over there and—hey, will you wait?"
"Just come on!" I shouted back to him, letting go of his arm eventually to weave through the people coming into the gym. It felt like trying to swim upstream as I bumped into one person after another until I finally got through the doo
rs and into the open foyer. Flight accomplished. Now, it was time for fear.
My whole body started shaking and my knees felt weak. In fact, my muscles felt rubbery and my head was spinning.
"Halsey!" My name sounded muffled as the room turned upside-down, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on a bench with my face pressed against the side of the water fountain. "Here, drink this," Max said, handing me a cold soda. He held it to my mouth, and I took a sip, which actually helped a lot. He held the frigid can to my cheek, and that brought me the rest of the way back. I took the can from him and moved it over my face.
"What just happened?" I asked, then took another long drink, not even minding the burn it caused going down my throat.
Max looked at me skeptically. "You almost face-planted. Did Brian try something?"
"No, it wasn't him."
"What then? You look like you saw a ghost."
"I kind of did."
Max narrowed his eyes at me, then sighed impatiently. "I'm going to shake it out of you in a second if you don't spill it already," he said, but then his hardline expression softened as he rose to drop some coins in the vending machine a few feet away. "Here, eat these—the salt will help," he said, returning with the bag of pretzels that he'd just opened. "How did you bonk just running out of the gym?" He grinned.
I pushed a few pretzels into my mouth and chewed. Max was right, the salt did help everything inside me feel a little less like it was floating around in zero gravity. After another drink of the soda, I took a deep breath and finally felt back to normal again.
"OK, so this morning on my way to school, there was this strange guy in the woods," I started.
"What? Where?" Max's expression hardened again.
"In the eye—by the stream there, you know? Anyway, he was trying to give me some kind of drug."
"And you're just now telling me this?"
"I didn't have a chance, anyway, I just—"
Max pushed his hands over his face. "No wonder you were so bitchy about me scaring you..."
"What? I wasn't bitchy." He dropped his hands and gave me a deadpan look. I shook my head. "OK, that was legitimate self-defense mode, and it was your own fault."
"Whatever," he grinned again. "So what happened to weird you out in the gym then?"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you. That guy is in there. The one from the woods. He's working the Wu Fong Pharmaceuticals kiosk, and he recognized me!"
Max sobered and sat up a little straighter. "The drug pusher was pushing drugs on you in the woods? That's what you're telling me? And he recognized you?"
"Yes!"
"Did he say anything? How do you know he recognized you?"
"Because he gave me the same grin he did in the woods when I shoved him off with my walking stick."
"You shoved him with your walking stick?" Max gaped at me. "Halsey, shit! Anything else life threatening you forget to mention today?"
"I think that covers it..."
Max got to his feet and peered back through the gym doors. "We need to tell someone. That guy can't be here," he said, then took a few steps toward the crowd.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"You said the kiosk was called Wu-what?"
"Wu Fong Pharmaceuticals. It's red with the dragon right under the name."
"OK, but I don't see him."
I got up and looked into the gym, but of course I couldn't see through the crowd, and I wasn't tall enough to see over it. I grabbed the bench and dragged it over, then climbed on top of it. To my complete amazement, the man from the woods was gone.
But…Brian Dunwin and the brain-donors were not. They spotted me almost immediately, and started pushing through the crowd.
"We gotta go!" I jumped down from the bench and grabbed Max's wrist, pulling him along toward the double doors that led back to Mr. Warren's room.
We had enough of a head start to make it back before Brian and his cronies ever so much as made it out of the gym, but we still stumbled over the threshold of Mr. Warren's class like they were right on our heels. We closed the door behind us and leaned against it.
"Halsey? Max, what's going on?" Mr. Warren asked, pushing his glasses to the top of his head.
"Brian Dunwin," Max answered before I had the chance. "And there's a drug dealer in the gym. Or, I mean, there was."
"What?" Mr. Warren's dark brows crashed together.
"It's true," I said. "A guy stopped me this morning trying to give me a vial of something, and he was just at the Wu Fong Pharmaceuticals kiosk."
"Wu Fong…" Mr. Warren picked up a clipboard and flipped through a few pages. "Ah, here they are. Yes, they've sent Emily Runyon as their representative for the internship fair."
I felt the blood drain from my face as a chill ran down my spine.
"No, there was a man," I said. "Ask Lauren Stover. She was talking to him! She asked if they just sold drugs, only legally."
Mr. Warren wrote something down on the clipboard, then tapped his temple. A 3-D hologram of the office secretary appeared in his field of vision.
"Hi, Mae. Could you please page Lauren Stover to my room, and could you send one of the Sweeper droid units too?"
"Is everything all right?" Mrs. Poole, the secretary asked.
"I think so; just a precaution. I'll keep you posted," Mr. Warren smiled.
A few seconds later, Lauren's name came over the announcement speaker with instructions to report to Mr. Warren's room. A few seconds after that, a Sweeper droid let itself in the room, its cylindrical, brushed chrome body, for lack of something better to call it, hovering in the air.
"That was fast," Max whispered to me.
"How may I help you?" The droid voice was a warm, male voice that actually helped dissipate some of the tension building in my chest.
"Go ahead and tell it the name of the business you saw, and about what you saw this morning." Mr. Warren nodded to me.
I told the Sweeper droid about the man at the Wu Fong kiosk being the same one from the woods this morning, having just enough time to finish when Lauren Stover came into the room.
"I heard my name?" she said in her normal, pinched tone. She gave me a weak side glare. "I didn't do anything to her," she said to Mr Warren, who seemed momentarily confused.
"No, Lauren, you're not in any trouble." Mr. Warren shook his head. "I just needed to know, did you happen to talk with someone from Wu Fong Pharmaceuticals in the gym just now?"
"A man," I emphasized.
"Wu-what?" Lauren laughed nervously.
"The guy in the black suit with the slicked hair." I shoved the words at her. "I saw you talking to him under the big dragon banner. You told him, so it's just like selling drugs." It took everything in me not to reenact her prissy, demeaning tone.
"Are you stupid?" Lauren looked at me like, in fact, I was, as she pushed her stringy blonde hair behind her ear. "Why would I talk to anyone about drugs here on school grounds?" She huffed a laugh in my direction and rolled her eyes. "I don't know what she's talking about, Mr. Warren."
"Liar!" I took a few steps toward her with every intent to throttle her, but Max stopped me.
"Whatever," Lauren rolled her eyes again and returned her attention to Mr. Warren. "Can I go back now? I still have three more internships to apply for."
Shit! I thought again, remembering I hadn't even done one yet.
"Yes, that's fine, Lauren. Thank you for your time."
She left, glaring at me until the last few seconds before she walked out the door, and I was a hundred percent positive she'd have half the gym after me by lunch. Great. Like I didn't have enough problems today.
"Mr. Warren, I swear there was a man here at the Wu Fong kiosk, and that he was the same guy from the woods," I insisted.
"She went running out of the gym pretty spooked," Max spoke up.
"All right, I'll head down there myself and have a look around," Warren said. "Have you both finished your internship applications?" Max and I exchanged g
lances. "That's what I thought," Mr. Warren smiled. "Get back at it then before you run out of time. Lunch is in an hour, and the businesses will be gone this afternoon."
We followed Mr. Warren out of his room and back to the gym, passing Brian Dunwin and his paint sniffer parade in the hallway. His eyes locked on mine, and I forgot all about Lauren.
Chapter 4
I couldn't believe I'd messed up the most important day of my high school career by not preparing for any internship submissions. Fortunately, I was able to transmit about half-a-dozen copies of the academic résumé Ms. Pike had made us do in business class a few weeks ago. They were general rather than tailored for the actual places I was interested in, but they were better than not having anything to give the prospective employers at all.
I'd tucked in my T-shirt and pushed my hands through the long bangs of my otherwise short hair and managed to have six halfway respectable meet-and-greets with the City Engineer's Department, the Department of Natural Resources, Raphael's Tea Shop—which wasn't on my radar, but it sounded kind of exotic—and a few landscaping companies. If I couldn't get into The Citadel to study psychology, at least maybe I'd get to see something new each day.
"You're decided on eventually taking over Mr. Burke's store?" I asked Max as we made our way to the cafeteria, our mission accomplished for the day.
"His son already said I'd be the ideal manager," Max answered as he passed me a tray. "He's happy just doing the accounting and all that from home."
"I guess it sounds perfect then. People will always need groceries." I smiled at Max, but inside I was struggling to be happy for him. He was easily one of the smartest, most well-rounded kids in the school, and he didn't even take a chance on The Citadel. It made me feel like maybe I was a little delusional for applying.
I barely had a chance to wallow in the existential dread I was creating before someone shoved me hard into the pillar to my right, which smashed the tray of pasta I was carrying all over me and two other people sitting at a nearby table. I lost my footing with the impact and crashed to the ground, along with my tray. Lauren Stover walked by with Brian Dunwin and about four of his Cro-Magnon brethren, all of them laughing.
