by Vivian Wood
When I wake up the moon peeks between the plastic slats at my window, the quiet creak of the trailer the only sound. But I know something’s different. The air feels different.
Someone is here.
My chest feels full with relief and a stupid kind of happiness, before I realize it can’t be Daddy. He would never be so quiet, especially coming from a two-week bender. He would crash into the counters, bang his head on the doorframe, and swear in loud whispers before finally falling asleep with snores that rattle the walls.
A burglar? We don’t have much of anything to steal, but people get dumb when they’re desperate. Maybe Mr. Romero told someone I had a hundred dollars.
Or maybe it’s Mr. Romero himself, come to my trailer since I won’t come to his. My heart beats wild and loud, banging against my ribs like it’s trying to break out.
“Trigonometry,” says a voice in the darkness.
For a half second I think it’s the man from school. The one who’s tall and dark, his voice too smooth and his smile too cold to be trusted. Jonathan Scott. The terror that rises up in me is bigger and sharper than when I thought it was a burglar, or even Mr. Romero in my trailer. The very worst threat. The same as drowning, my very own nightmare.
And then my sleepy mind registers something about the voice. It’s not deep.
“What’s a little kid doing with a trigonometry book?”
I sit up in bed. My gaze moves over the shadows in the room until I find him against the wall, his shadow thumbing through my textbook. “Don’t touch that.”
He flips the book open to a page, pale white from the moonlight through the blinds. “To prove an identity, you have to use logical steps to show that one side of the equation can be transformed into the other side of the equation. You know what that means, Penny?”
I’m supposed to feel bad for stealing his money, and I do, but right now I’m mad. Mad that he wasn’t there and mad that he suddenly appeared. Mad that he scared me.
“Yeah, I know what it means. Probably more than you.”
His laugh sounds so much like the man from school that I narrow my eyes, looking at the way he holds his head, the way his shoulders are set, the way he carries himself. Same, same, same. “You some kind of baby genius?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“And I’m the dumbass who left you with my money.”
My cheeks turn hot. “I’m sorry I did that. I have it here, under my pillow. The rest of it, anyway. After I paid for the soup. But you can have that too, if you want.”
He laughs, the sound clanging like bells. “I don’t want it back.”
“You have to take it,” I say, scared that he sounds so much like that stranger. “The soup is enough for me, if you leave it. And you need the money more than I do.”
His shadow goes still. “What do you know about that?”
“I know you have a dad who’s mean, mean enough to run away from.”
“Doesn’t take a baby genius to figure that out. I pretty much told you.”
“Then there’s the man from the school.”
“What school?”
“From some fancy private school, I guess. He came to visit me at recess.” Something cold touches my bones, making me shiver. There’s a reason his laugh sounds the same. A reason he’s run away from home. The answer comes to me the way numbers do, before I’m even sure I want to know.
Black eyes narrow. “What did he look like?”
“Like you.”
This strange feeling comes over me, like it did when I first cheated. I knew I had something important I needed to do. But I didn’t have a deck of cards in front of me. No trigonometry proof to solve. Numbers were easy, but people are hard. They always have been.
A boy without any place to go.
A man who promises me safety, a real future.
The proof doesn’t write itself inside my mind. There are gaps between each logical jump. Unsolved variables. Unknowns. I can figure out the answer anyway. It makes too much sense.
“He talk to your class?” The boy’s voice is casual, but I can hear the tension underneath.
“Not really. He came at recess. I think Mrs. Keller told him what I can do.”
“And what’s that?”
I shrug in the dark. “Does it matter?”
“Yeah, it matters. It matters if you told him what he wanted to hear.”
That dark wave passes over me again, dragging me under. A warning. “He gave me a bad feeling. Not the same as Mr. Romero, but worse. So I told him a wrong answer.”
“Good. When he comes back you tell him as many wrong answers as you need to until he goes away.”
“How do you know he’ll come back?”
“Because he doesn’t give up.” A short laugh. “I thought that meant he would keep looking for me. Instead he went looking for a replacement.”
“Did you go to his school?”
The sound he makes is hard and mean. “His school? Yeah, I guess you could say that. Learned a lot. You wouldn’t like it there, trust me.”
“They don’t have the free lunch program?”
A longer pause this time. “It’s important that you don’t go along with him, understand? No matter what he says. No matter what he promises you. It’s not worth it, okay? You need to believe me.”
“I don’t even know you.”
He tosses the book aside. “I’m serious. You need to stay away from him.”
“Tell me your name. And don’t say it’s Quarter.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Because you want me to trust you. At least I should know what to call you.”
“Damon Scott.”
My stomach sinks. “So that means your dad is…”
“Jonathan Scott, yes. You’ve heard of him, then. That’s good. You know what he’s capable of.”
Everyone in the trailer park knows about him, after Lisa Blake. The people my father plays cards with are dangerous, the ones he borrows money from even more so. But even he would never dare go near Jonathan Scott, the man who rules the west side of Tanglewood.
“Why would he want me?”
“Because he likes to fuck—sorry. He likes to mess with people. That’s what he does. Moves people around on his big ugly chessboard. You know how to play chess?”
I shake my head even though he can’t see me. Some of the books I’ve read have descriptions of chess. I know how the pieces move but I’ve never played. Never even seen a chess set in person. “Not really.”
“Well, pawns are the front line. They’re easy to find, but they can only move one way, one square at a time. A kid who’s what? Six years old?”
“Seven,” I say, indignant.
A soft laugh. “A seven-year-old doing trigonometry. Imagine what he could turn you into.”
“What?” I asked, a little awed by the idea that I could become something. Something other than one of the tired mothers with three kids from different men or one of the women on the street corners. A girl from the west side didn’t have other options.
“He’d turn you into a weapon,” Damon says, his voice flat. “A bullet. He would spend years making you, and when you were done, he’d pull the trigger.”
“Is that what he did to you?”
“Why?” he asks, his voice rough. “Do I seem dangerous?”
I remember the way he had looked that first night, all puffed up and strong. Like he could shoot me with the gun he claimed to have. Or slash me with his knife. Instead he had offered me food.
And he didn’t hurt me now, even though I’d stolen from him.
“You’re not dangerous.”
After a beat he says, “Not to you, baby genius. Not to you.”
Chapter Four
For the next four days Damon lives in the trailer with me.
Mostly he disappears during the day. He isn’t there when I get off the bus. But he always comes back at night. He works through the trigonometry book with me, teasing me when I get the
answer right, encouraging me when I don’t.
“Won’t your dad lose his shit if he sees me in his bed?” he asks.
“I lock the deadbolt,” I say. “Even Daddy would have to knock to get in. And I’d wake you up before I opened the door. How did you get in, anyway?”
“The kitchen window.”
There’s barely a foot and a half in that space. Only enough for the feral cats in the neighborhood to sneak in and have a drink from the leaky faucet and dash out again.
He doesn’t act like Daddy. There are no rules and no drinking. But he does take care of me. Like a big brother, I decide. That’s what it’s like. A big brother who brings food and does math with me. I can almost forget that Daddy’s still missing.
I can almost forget that he might not come back.
It’s on the fifth day that everything goes wrong.
Mrs. Keller calls me to her desk. “Why did you tell Mr. Scott the wrong answer?”
I shrug. Maybe I didn’t know the right answer. She’d know that I’m lying. I can do a lot more than multiply numbers together.
Her eyebrows press together. “He has resources that we can only dream of at the school. Advanced teachers and materials.” She pauses, taking a deep breath. “There would be boarding. You would have to live somewhere else. Do you understand?”
This is my way out. An escape from West Tanglewood Elementary. A chance to be someone other than the teenage mother or the girl on the street corner.
“What about you?” I ask.
Her brown eyes widen. “What about me?”
“I could do what you did. I could be a teacher.”
Her nose scrunches like it does when someone gets a wrong answer. “Penny, I don’t think you realize how special you are. It’s not just that you’re the smartest girl at this school. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met, anywhere. And I wish—”
My head tilts. “You wish what?”
“I wish that you would give Mr. Scott the right answer. I convinced him to give you another chance. He’s coming back tomorrow.”
Curiosity sparks inside me, but it’s not because of his special school. What did he do to Damon to make him run away? If he has so much money, why does Damon sleep outside?
The questions follow me home on the bus. They nip at my heels like the wild dogs that sometimes follow me around the trailer park. They keep my eyes open when I’m in bed, waiting for the soft shift of the walls that means he’s come back.
I find him in the kitchen, pouring a can of soup into a bowl.
“What are you doing up?” he says without turning around.
“Couldn’t sleep. Where did you go today?”
He gives me a warning look. “Around.”
I sit down at the kitchen table, swinging my legs. “Fine, don’t tell me. I have a secret, too.”
“Do you?” The way he asks I know he thinks it’s something dumb, like maybe I’m going to tell him what Jenny Carson said during gym class again. That was only one time.
“It’s about you,” I tell him, triumphant.
He drops the spoon into the bowl, his eyes narrowing. “What?”
My heart squeezes a little, because when he stares at me like that he reminds me too much of Jonathan Scott. “You tell me your secret first.”
“This is not a fucking game. Did someone come around asking about me?”
I’m not going to budge, even though he used the f-word. “You go first.”
“Jesus,” he says, running his hand through his hair. He pulls some money from his pocket, tosses it on the kitchen table. “I was getting this. You don’t want to know how, because it wasn’t exactly legal. And I don’t like going into the city because it means there’s a chance I’ll be seen, but this way you won’t have to go wandering if your daddy doesn’t come back. You’ll have enough to eat, at least.”
I frown, looking at the money. There’s more than two hundred dollars. How could he make that much in one day? “Was it dangerous?”
He laughs, the sound sharp and short. “Tell me your secret.”
Now that it’s time, I don’t want to tell Damon. I’m afraid of what he’ll say, what he’ll think, but I can’t back out now. If there’s one thing I learned from going with Daddy to those poker games, it’s the importance of following through on your promises.
The importance of paying your debts.
“Your daddy’s coming back to the school tomorrow.”
He’s silent a moment, but it’s not a quiet silence. It’s louder and louder in the still night air, so much that when he finally speaks it sounds soft. “Say that again.”
“My teacher, Mrs. Keller. She said he’ll give me another chance. That I should tell him the right answers because he can help me.”
“He can’t help you.”
“But she said—”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what she told you.”
“Why would she lie?”
“Because she’s working for him? Because he’s blackmailing her? Or maybe she thinks that no matter how bad he is it will still be better for you, but I’m telling you she’s wrong.”
I shrug, uncomfortable with his intensity. “I guess.”
“Don’t talk to him, Penny.”
“He’s going to talk to me at recess. What am I supposed to do?”
“Ignore him. Scream. Kick him in the balls.”
“Why is he so bad?” I demand. “Why did you leave?”
“You’re too little to talk about that.”
“I’m not too little!”
“You are, baby genius.”
“I’m not a baby,” I say, making my voice as loud and strong as I can. “And anyway, you don’t have to tell me. I’ll just ask Mr. Scott when I see him tomorrow.”
His eyes darken. “You wouldn’t.”
I probably wouldn’t, because it would put Damon in danger—wouldn’t it? Then Mr. Scott would know where to look for him. It’s such a coincidence that I would even meet them so close together. The father and the son. In two totally different places. The odds had to be huge. I’ve calculated hundreds of odds with just fifty-two cards, but the number of people in Tanglewood is a lot more than that. Even if you narrow that down to the west side, you’re still in the tens of thousands.
And with a horrible click the calculation fell into place.
I scramble up from the chair, backing away. “Why are you here?” I whisper.
“What?” Damon looks confused, but I already know he’s a good liar.
“Is it some kind of trick? You tell me not to go so that I will?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Or maybe you’re here in case I say no. Like if I don’t go with Mr. Scott at school tomorrow you’ll be here waiting for me when I get back.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know! Whatever people like you do. All I know is that it’s not a coincidence that I meet you and your father in the same week. It can’t be.”
Guilt flashes across his face. “Look, Penny.”
“Don’t say my name.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“You lied to me.”
“I left some stuff out.”
“That’s lying!”
“Okay, I lied. But not because I’m working with my dad. I swear to you.” He stands and paces in the small kitchen, his expression severe. “And I’m serious about what I said. Stay away from him.”
My lower lip trembles, and I bite down hard. It’s an old trick from when one of Daddy’s poker friends starts saying things I don’t like. I refused to cry in front of them.
Damon’s dark eyes flash. “I knew who you were because my dad keeps tabs on everyone. On people who owe him money. On people who might be useful to him. People like you.”
It’s warm outside and downright hot in the trailer. The poor air conditioning unit struggles against the coming summer, certain to lose that battle. But right now, standing in my bare feet on
the kitchen linoleum, I feel freezing cold. I wrap my arms around myself.
My voice is small. “That’s why Daddy’s been gone so long, isn’t it?”
“He owed a lot of money.”
“You saw him?” A knot swells in my throat. “Is he alive?”
Damon shoves his hands across his chest, looking somehow older and younger at the same time. “He was desperate, okay? You have to understand that.”
I blink. “Okay.”
“People like that, they see their life flashing in front of their eyes. It breaks something inside them. And my father—he loves that moment. He lives for it.”
“What did he do?” I whisper.
“He starts talking about his daughter, how smart she is, all the things she can do. How you help him count cards. At first my father doesn’t care. He says, not that well since you ended up here. But your dad explains how you aren’t allowed at the high stakes games. That’s where he lost all his money.”
My insides feel wobbly, like I’m going to cry no matter how hard my nails press into my palm. “I don’t understand. If you were there, if you saw that, why did you come here?”
He shrugs, shaking his head like he doesn’t know the answer. “I meant to leave the city for good. That’s what I was doing. Running. Escaping. And I almost did it. I got on a grey bus heading west and pulled my cap low. Then I found myself getting off at the first stop. Hitching a ride back. And camping behind the trailer park.”
“Damon,” I say, pressing my hands together. This is how you pray. “What did Mr. Scott do to you?”
“What’s important is that he’s never gonna do it to you, understand? I’m going to stop him.”
I shake my head no, because I don’t understand. I know Damon is strong and smart, but how is he going to stop his father? And if he had any power over him, why did he leave in the first place?
“Yes,” Damon says, “but you need to keep your head down. No more reading about trigonometry. No more counting cards. That’s the deal we’re gonna make.”
“I don’t want any deal.” I don’t want you to leave.
“That’s the only way you see your daddy again. If I go back.”
