Rated

by Melissa Grey

  His father, who wasn’t his father. Except for all the ways in which he was.

  The darkroom felt more personal to Noah than his own bedroom. The walls of Noah’s room were decorated with posters of bands he’d long ago stopped following. His bed was still covered in dinosaur sheets, because Cece liked them and he was loath to remove anything that gave her even the smallest amount of joy.

  The darkroom was his, in a way nothing else in the world was. No one was allowed to enter, not since the time his mother had thrown on the lights and ruined the photos he’d been developing of Cece’s birthday. Her face had been smeared with rainbow frosting from the Funfetti cake Noah had baked for her. They’d eaten it by the handful because doing so was disgusting and made Cece laugh so hard she snorted. But those pictures had been destroyed, inspiring the strict entry policy for Noah’s darkroom. The Rainier family respected this, and when he was in there, no one bothered him.

  Today Noah didn’t want to be bothered. He wanted—needed—to be alone.

  Solitude made processing information easier, and he had a lot of processing to do.

  The red light of the darkroom soothed the ragged edges of Noah’s thoughts. Hours passed as he sat on the floor, backpack tossed to one side carelessly, his camera placed on the ground beside him with much more care.

  He hadn’t realized how long he’d been sitting there until a knock sounded at the door.

  “You in there, Noah?”

  It was his father. The man who raised him and whose blood he didn’t share.

  “Yeah.” The word came out of Noah in a croak, his voice shaky and disused.

  “Well, dinner’s ready. Your mom made lasagna.”

  His mother had reheated lasagna. She made a big batch on Sundays, and they lived on it until the large glass dish was empty.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  His father was silent on the other side of the door for the span of a few breaths, which Noah dutifully counted. Then, eventually, “Suit yourself.”

  Noah listened to his father’s footsteps as he climbed the stairs. The hard, indigestible lump in his gut grew with every retreating footfall.

  Standing at her locker between periods, Tamsin grimaced as the device on her wrist buzzed. Again. It was the fifth time that day, and while she often took pleasure in flouting the rules of Maplethorpe (and society as a whole), she was certain that she hadn’t earned five separate rating reductions. Yet.

  Maybe she’d pissed someone off on the bus ride to school? Or her chem teacher was feeling less generous than usual about her slight tardiness. She actually enjoyed her science classes, so she went to most of those. Ms. Stevens was normally more lenient than the rest of the faculty, especially with her sentimental favorites. Maybe Maplethorpe teachers had been instructed to bring down the hammer in light of the vandalism.

  “Ms. Moore, may I have a word with you?”

  The voice came from the other side of Tamsin’s open locker door. She couldn’t see the face of the speaker, but she didn’t need to. That voice belonged to the man who delivered the news at morning assembly every day in authoritative tones. And even though Tamsin’s attendance at such assemblies was sporadic at best, she still knew the stern disapproval of that voice like she knew the back of her own hand. She didn’t think she’d ever heard anything but stern disapproval from it, come to think of it.

  With the slow, deliberate speed of a death row inmate walking to her execution, Tamsin closed the locker door and turned to face Headmaster Wood.

  He was tall, far taller than a school administrator had any right to be, and Tamsin had to look up to meet his gaze. She hated looking up at people. She was far more comfortable looking down on them.

  “Sure, Dr. Wood. I don’t have anything important on the old agenda.”

  Wood pursed his lips in a distinctly unamused fashion. “As a matter of fact, you have chemistry this period.”

  Tamsin offered him her best artful shrug. “Wasn’t like I was planning on going anyway.”

  “Ah, there’s that blatant disregard for authority I’ve come to know and love,” Wood said. “Come with me.”

  He turned and used his unreasonably long legs to stride down the hallway, not even looking back to see if she was following.

  For a few seconds, Tamsin considered not following him, just to spite the unwavering confidence Wood had in his own authority. But she didn’t. For starters, she had a feeling that was exactly what he was expecting of her, and she so hated to be predictable. And there was the minor fact of her rating. The system was a sham, a disgrace, an arbitrary algorithm designed to maintain the status quo of privilege and prestige, but the thought of flouting it to the point where she was expelled gave her pause. Not that she cared about the consequences for her own life, but her mother ran a tiny apothecary in a gentrified part of town, catering to far-wealthier people. They barely scraped by as it was. Despite her bravado, Tamsin didn’t truly want to hurt the one person in her life whose opinion actually mattered.

  Her mother wanted her to graduate. Maybe she should try.

  Tamsin trudged after Wood, the heels of her heavy block boots dragging on the polished wooden floors. The halls had quieted, with most students sitting dutifully in class, where Tamsin was supposed to be. A not insignificant part of Tamsin was curious about Wood requesting her presence during a class period. He could have intercepted her after school—provided she didn’t cut, which would have honestly been a bit of a gamble—or during her designated lunch period. He’d waited until most of the student body and staff were preoccupied.

  Interesting.

  And so, she followed him all the way to his office. The room was set in one of the towers overlooking the main quad on campus. It reminded Tamsin of the diagrams of old prisons she’d seen in a textbook in the library’s recycling pile. (The school sent outdated or otherwise undesirable books to be turned into mulch and made into new books, but Tamsin enjoyed a spot of literary dumpster diving the way she suspected other girls like shopping for prom dresses.)

  From the bank of large windows set into the curving walls of the room, Wood had a view of practically the entire campus. It wasn’t her first time in the office. That was how she knew the abandoned music building was just out of his line of sight. It made her business dealings safe from his prying eyes.

  “Take a seat, Tamsin.” Wood gestured to one of the leather chairs before his desk. They were far less grand than the one he lowered himself into.

  An obvious power move, Tamsin thought. Reminding one’s opponent of their place. Making them feel smaller.

  The joke was on him. Tamsin was so accustomed to the disdain directed at her from her fellow Maplethorpe students that she hardly felt Wood’s intimidation tactic.

  “I won’t beat around the bush.” Wood set his elbows on his desk, resting his chin against his loosely clasped hands. She wondered if he’d seen the pose in a manual designed to teach school officials how to look relaxed and casual while still projecting an air of foreboding. “We need to talk about your rating.”

  Tamsin held up her wrist, beaming with something a lot like pride. “Yeah, it’s abysmal, right?”

  Wood managed to look even less amused. “It is. You’re on the cusp of expulsion.”

  Tamsin nodded. None of this was news. She was only surprised it had taken Wood this long to say what they both knew out loud.

  “I don’t want to expel you, Tamsin.”

  She rolled her eyes, exaggerating the move to make sure he knew she really meant it. “Right. Let me guess. You think I could be a valuable asset to the Maplethorpe community. You see a great potential in me to be a productive member of society. Yada yada. I’ve heard the spiel before.”

  Wood cocked his head to the side, as if studying a dog that had just learned how to ride a bike. “Hardly.”

  Tamsin blinked at him. “Pardon?”

  “I don’t think you’ll ever be a valuable asset to the Maplethorpe community, Tamsin. Nor do I think you have mu
ch interest in productivity to society as a whole.”

  This wasn’t how she’d been expecting the conversation to go. “So, why did you call me into your office if you’re not going to try to convince me to get my act together?” She motioned between them, hoping her loose hand gestures succinctly conveyed the disparity of their positions, life philosophies, and regard for the rule of law and order. “What’s the point of this?”

  “Here’s the thing. I don’t want you to get your act together to please me or your teachers or anyone else.”

  “Um, is that not how society operates?”

  He ignored her, plowing toward his point. “I want you to get your act together for yourself. You’re smart. Smart enough to skirt the rules without falling so far afoul of them that you lose your place here. Smart enough to get decent-enough grades to pass while putting in the absolute minimum effort. Smart enough to spearhead your own flourishing underground business.”

  So he knew about her tarot card hustle. Interesting, Tamsin thought, that he didn’t put a stop to it.

  “I do see potential in you and I do believe that you’re capable of great things, but one thing I don’t want to see you nurture is your own stupidity.”

  Tamsin had been accused of a lot of things by her various teachers throughout the years. Stupidity had never been one of them. “Excuse me?”

  “Whatever you want to do in this life, you won’t be able to if you shoot yourself in the foot before you even get it in the door.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to get my foot in the door. Maybe I want to stay outside and light the whole house on fire.”

  She wished she had the lighter she used for her candles in the music building. Flicking it right then would have been the height of self-indulgent drama.

  With a swift twitch of his fingers, Wood tapped something on the face of his own smartwatch. Half a second later, her own buzzed against her skin. She glanced down at the screen, not surprised to see it flash an even more abysmal 31 back at her.

  “Here at Maplethorpe, we have a zero tolerance policy for arson. You’ll remember that in the future.”

  “But I wasn’t …” Tamsin swallowed her protest. It was a power move, like the disparate seating arrangements and the Orwellian view of the campus behind him. George Orwell, the author of another book she’d found in the library’s mulch pile. 1984. She’d tried to find any of his other works in circulation, but her search of the library system’s catalog hadn’t returned a single title.

  “Your position here is a precarious one. I want to make sure you understand it.”

  Tamsin bit down on the tender flesh on the inside of her cheek before giving her answer through clenched teeth. “Trust me, I do.”

  Wood straightened up, relinquishing the pretense of being relaxed and approachable. “Good. See that you remember it. When I read the names of this year’s seniors at graduation in the spring, I expect to see your name on it. Not for my sake. But for yours.”

  He reached for a stack of papers in a chrome tray on his desk, before flicking his gaze to her. “That’ll be all, Ms. Moore. I’ve already told Ms. Stevens you’ll be late for class, so you needn’t worry about a rating deduction for being tardy. I hope that you take the time to think about what I’ve said.”

  Tamsin grumbled out an extremely insincere thank-you and goodbye and trudged out of his office with double the speed she’d entered. The halls were empty as she made her way back to her locker. The thick soles of her boots thudded dully against the wooden floor with no other sound to cushion their fall.

  She could go to class. She probably wouldn’t. Maybe she would. Maybe sitting through the drudgery of a lecture would be worth not subjecting herself to another one of Wood’s.

  He wasn’t wrong about her. Not really. She was smart. She was probably the smartest person she knew. Not only had she managed to disable a number of fire exits in the school to enable her numerous escapes, but she’d figured out how to confuse the motion sensors installed in the derelict music building. Simply turning them off triggered an alarm in the facilities office, but redirecting them to a patch of grass near the back … now, that took skill.

  But Tamsin didn’t know what she wanted to do with all that genius. She knew what she didn’t want to do. That was easy. She didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a hedge fund manager—or whatever career Maplethorpe’s best and brightest were funneled into after graduating from college. And while she admired her mother’s work ethic and her ability to keep a small business afloat in a place like Jackson Hills, she wasn’t sure the life of a humble shopkeeper was for her either. So far, the only vocations in life that gave her pleasure were hoodwinking the rich and gullible and inspiring a vague sense of unease in everyone around her.

  Tamsin’s boots skidded to a stop when she reached her locker.

  There was a card taped to it.

  She approached cautiously. It wasn’t the first time someone had messed with her locker. There had been an unfortunate incident her freshman year when a group of girls—she’d always suspected Summer Rawlins had been involved—scribbled a slew of unkind messages on it. The nicest of them was a simple freak.

  But this wasn’t the vengeful scrawl of mean-spirited fourteen-year-olds.

  This was a single tarot card. The nondescript blue-and-white pattern on the back was marred by a sticker of a smiling jester.

  Tamsin plucked it off the door and turned it over, expecting something uninspired like Death or any of the more violent-looking sword cards. Maybe an angry client was seeking revenge for a negative reading. But the face of the card presented none of those. She blinked at it, puzzled.

  The Hanged Man.

  It wasn’t a bad card, despite the connotations of the name. It could be interpreted to mean letting go of negative patterns of behavior or shedding bad habits holding you back. It could also symbolize surrender. Sacrifice. Martyrdom. There were a number of ways to read the card, just as there were a number of ways to read almost any card, especially those in the Major Arcana. But there was something about the card that felt sinister to Tamsin.

  She looked at it more closely. What had initially looked like a design on the white border of the card was actually text. Each letter had been surgically cut out from what Tamsin could only assume was a book with a vintage typesetting and precisely glued to the card.

  On the day of the prophet false

  One mustn’t dance a forbidden waltz

  A copper found and a fortune told

  All beside a box of gold

  She looked to her right. Then her left. The corridors were as empty as they’d been when she’d left Wood’s office. Whoever had left the card had likely done so in the sliver of time between the bell ringing and her arrival. She didn’t imagine someone would have done it with an audience of dozens of students milling about the halls.

  Tamsin slipped the card into her pocket and made for the stairwell nearest her locker. She made sure the door didn’t slam behind her. The hinges were temperamental on that one. The old music building waited for her, and hopefully, there she would be able to solve the riddle of the hanged man and the jester.

  Her feet had barely touched the grass outside the fire exit when a voice broke her stride.

  “Going somewhere, Ms. Moore?”

  Tamsin bit back a groan. She pivoted in place. Leaning against the wall was the physical education teacher, Ms. Lynch. Her cropped red hair fluttered in the gentle, early autumn breeze. She flicked the ash off her cigarette as she regarded Tamsin with an ambiguous expression.

  “As a matter of fact, I thought I could use some fresh air,” Tamsin said. “It gets real stuffy in there.”

  Lynch barked out a laugh. If she hadn’t been a phys ed teacher, Tamsin probably would have liked her. She’d always seemed different from other faculty members at Maplethorpe. Not more relaxed—her personality skewed a little too close to drill sergeant for Tamsin’s liking—but less conservative perhaps.

  “You’re tel
ling me.” Lynch took a slow drag of her cigarette. It was rare to see a teacher smoking at Maplethorpe. Tamsin wondered if Headmaster Wood would dock Lynch’s rating for it if he caught her. “You supposed to be in class?”

  Tamsin considered lying. But it would take naught but a few taps on her watch for Lynch to pull up Tamsin’s schedule and catch her in the lie. It wasn’t worth risking an even greater deduction for dishonesty.

  “Would you believe me if I said no?”

  “Nope.”

  Tamsin sighed. “Fine. What’s it gonna be?”

  Lynch regarded Tamsin thoughtfully for a moment before speaking. “Nothing, so long as you don’t tell anyone you saw me out here.”

  “Deal.”

  Lynch nodded. Tamsin remained there for a second or two longer than necessary. She couldn’t go to the music building now. Not with Lynch watching.

  “You waiting for an engraved invitation?”

  Tamsin shrugged. “Bum a smoke?”

  It seemed like a reason to justify her presence outside. It fit with the whole persona she’d spent years crafting. Even though cigarettes were disgusting cancer sticks and she wouldn’t smoke one if paid.

  Lynch tossed back her head and laughed. With the hand holding the cigarette, she tapped at her own smartwatch with her ring finger. A second later, Tamsin’s device buzzed against her skin in a sensation so familiar she often felt it in her sleep.

  She didn’t need to look down to see what had been done. Her rating. One point lower. One inch deeper into her own grave.

  “You could’ve gotten away clean, Moore, but you just can’t help yourself, can you?”

  Tamsin bit back all the responses that would result in the same thing—even more points shaved off her rating. “Guess not, Ms. Lynch. But thankfully, I’ve got you to keep me on the straight and narrow.”

  She didn’t wait for Lynch to respond. The door was still unlocked, and so she went through it, back into the belly of a beast that was liable to chew her up and spit her out before the year was through. Maplethorpe would have its pound of flesh from Tamsin, one way or another. And it felt like there was nothing—absolutely nothing—she could do about it.