And Then Everything Unraveled

by Jennifer Sturman

He arrived right at 1:45, and just watching him walking down the street had me doing the uncontrollable smiling thing all over again.

  “What’s the surprise?” I asked, trying my best to act like someone who could control her facial expressions.

  “Come on,” he said, casually grabbing my hand, like holding hands on the street wasn’t a big deal. “This address was a decoy. I didn’t want the surprise to be ruined if you got here before me.”

  “Oh. That’s very complicated,” I said.

  “I’m a complicated guy.” He led me around the corner and down the next block. Then he stopped and pointed to a theater marquee across the street.

  “Surprise,” he said.

  I was speechless.

  “Well?” he asked. “What do you think?”

  I looked up at him, and my words came back. “It’s perfect,” I said. “Absolutely perfect.”

  “I hope so. The tickets are nonrefundable.”

  He was taking me to see Romeo and Juliet.

  It was a small theater, with maybe fifty seats, and the stage itself was tiny, so we were practically sitting on top of it. But the best part was that the production was by an experimental theater group, and they’d cast the play the same way it would’ve been cast in Shakespeare’s day, with only four people playing all the roles, though one of the actors was a woman, which wouldn’t have been allowed back then.

  That meant that Romeo also played Juliet’s mother, and Juliet also played Mercutio, and they both played multiple other roles, as did the two other actors. Each acted his or her individual parts so well that unless you really thought about it, you didn’t even notice that you’d seen any of them in a different part just seconds earlier.

  “This is amazing,” I said to Quinn at intermission.

  “It is sort of cool, isn’t it?” he said. “And it’s good to see you not stressing for once.”

  “I’m not always stressing,” I protested as we made our way to the lobby.

  He didn’t say anything—all he did was raise one eyebrow.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You did the one-eyebrow thing.”

  “What one-eyebrow thing?” he asked, raising his other eyebrow.

  “You’ve only seen me under unusual circumstances,” I said. “Usually I’m totally carefree. It’s just hard not to stress with everything I’ve got going on right now.”

  “Isn’t that what the detective’s for? To handle of all that?”

  “In a way. But there are still things I can be doing while Rafe is doing his thing.”

  “What things?” asked Quinn. So I told him about researching the directors of EAROFO and trying to figure out how I could talk to one of them.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he said. “I mean, don’t you suspect these people of going after your mom?”

  “That’s why I need to try to find out more.”

  “But what’s to keep them from going after you?”

  He was the second person that day to warn me, but he didn’t have Carolina’s special skills. “As far as anyone knows, I’m a harmless high school student—that’s why I used my dad’s name,” I said. “And what could they do to me anyway? As long as I’m careful not to be alone with anyone dangerous. I mean, you can’t exactly make a person disappear when she’s surrounded by other people.”

  “If we were in a movie, right now they’d cut to somebody making you disappear,” said Quinn.

  “It’s not a movie. But if I’m not back from the ladies’ room in five minutes, you can call the police, okay?”

  There was only one other person in the bathroom, a woman about Charley’s age with shoulder-length brown hair, and she didn’t exactly radiate danger. I had to wait for her to finish washing her hands before I could wash mine, and it was such a small space that it seemed awkward not to say anything. So I asked her if she was enjoying the play.

  “What?” she said, like I’d startled her. And I probably had—I was always forgetting that people in New York weren’t automatically friendly the way they were in California. She moved aside and I stepped up to the sink.

  “The play. Are you enjoying it?”

  “Oh, uh, yeah,” she said, ducking her head to find something in her purse.

  “I hope the second half is as good as the first,” I said.

  She mumbled something and left, and I dried my hands and followed her out.

  The second half was just as good as the first, and maybe even better, though I embarrassed myself by tearing up during the death scene. Quinn probably thought I had some sort of compulsive crying disorder on top of my split personality, inability to stop stressing, and various other psychological problems.

  But if he did, he didn’t seem to mind.

  Because he held my hand all the way through the rest of the play, right up to the curtain calls.

  Twenty-five

  If I’d thought things were awkward in the ladies’ room, that was nothing compared to the awkwardness after the play. Not immediately, but when we were saying good-bye.

  “Can I put you in a cab?” Quinn asked outside the theater.

  “Oh, no. I’ll take the subway. I like the subway.” I was getting proud of my subway mastery. Besides, Charley said cabs were for tourists.

  “Really?” said Quinn. “I didn’t think Prescott girls were allowed to take public transportation.”

  “I’ve had all my shots,” I told him.

  “Then I’ll walk you to the station.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “I want to. This isn’t the safest neighborhood. My mother once got mugged not far from here.”

  It was still light out, and while it might not have been the Upper East Side, it looked pretty safe to me, but I wasn’t about to turn him down. And this was the first time I’d ever heard him talk about his mother. “Was she hurt?” I asked as we walked down the block.

  “No, more just shaken up. It was a long time ago, before my parents split up, but I remember it because she was so freaked out. She was sort of”—he chose his words carefully—“emotionally delicate to start with, so it didn’t take much to upset her.”

  “Oh,” I said, not sure what else to say.

  And that’s when the awkwardness started.

  “Yeah, well, here we are,” Quinn said abruptly. We’d reached the subway entrance, and a train must have just arrived, because people started streaming out and we were suddenly in the middle of a crowd.

  “Thank you,” I said, as a group of tourists in matching I NY sweatshirts threatened to sweep us along toward Times Square. “This was really perfect.”

  “I’m glad you liked it,” said Quinn. “And I think we’re ready.”

  “What? Oh. I hope so.” With all the hand-holding and then the thing about his mother and now wondering how we were going to part ways—would there be kissing?—I’d almost forgotten that we were doing our scene in class the next day.

  “So, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

  “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Okay,” I echoed. “Bye.”

  “Bye,” he said.

  And that was it. I waited one more awkward moment, but nothing happened, and definitely not kissing. I just went down the stairs to the subway and caught an express train to Canal Street.

  Charley beat me out of the loft on Monday morning. Gertrude had found a graphic designer that she insisted was the only possible choice for the film credits, but Charley didn’t trust her judgment. “Let’s just say that Helga’s aesthetic sense leaves a lot to be desired,” she said. Which meant that Charley had set up a full day of meetings with other designers, and she rushed off before I was even dressed.

  Meanwhile, I hadn’t heard anything from Rafe, and nobody had e-mailed me back from Navitaco, but Quinn grabbed me on my way into my first-period class.

  “Hey,” he said, so casually that
I wondered if he felt any of the awkwardness I’d felt the previous day. Maybe someone like Quinn was immune to that sort of thing. “I had an idea after I got home last night. Why don’t you talk to my dad? His fund invests in different types of energy businesses—he probably knows all about the companies you’re interested in and what they’re up to. And that way you don’t have to worry about the entire spider-and-fly situation.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know. ‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.’ And then the spider eats the fly.”

  “Am I the spider or the fly in this scenario?” I asked.

  “You’re the fly, obviously. And these oil company execs are the spiders. So, I’d rather you talk to Hunter than get caught in their web.”

  “That almost makes sense,” I said.

  “Then I’ll set it up,” he said.

  “Wait, Quinn,” I said. “Don’t tell your dad the whole thing, okay? Could you do what I did when I sent out the e-mail to the guy at Navitaco and just tell him I’m working on a project? And could you use my middle name, and not my last name?”

  He smiled. “What, are you worried about Hunter?”

  “No, of course not. But if he knows all these companies and everything, it just seems like it would be best.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. I’m on it. See you later, Juliet.” And then he was gone.

  Natalie had been out on Friday, on a three-day weekend of college visits with her parents, but she was eager to catch up during lunch. And after I heard more than I’d ever wanted to know about the undergraduate science programs at MIT, Harvard, and Cornell, I brought her up-to-date on everything that had been going on with me.

  Of course, being Natalie, she was only mildly curious about Quinn. She was much more interested in what Rafe had to say and his trip to Chile.

  “Does this mean that you trust Rafe now?” I asked. “Was it the giraffes that changed your mind?”

  “No, I’m still not sure if I trust him and even if I did, it wouldn’t be because of the giraffes,” she said, like I’d insulted her by suggesting it. “That would be like trusting him based on his favorite flavor of Pop-Tart or whether he can ice-skate his astrological sign or something ridiculous like that.”

  “Do you think signs are ridiculous?”

  She looked at me like I should have known the answer to that without asking.

  So then I told her about Carolina and the Sagittarius warning. “I mean, Carolina’s been so right about everything that it’s hard to ignore her advice, but I don’t know what to make of this one. But if you don’t believe in Carolina and you don’t believe in astrology, then you probably don’t think it’s important.”

  “I’m a Sagittarius. Maybe you should be watching out for me,” she said dryly. “And centaurs, too. There aren’t a lot of them at Prescott, but you never know when one might decide to canter into precalc.”

  “Why centaurs?”

  “That’s the symbol of Sagittarius—half man, half horse, with a bow and arrow. And their element is fire and their birthstone is topaz, so you should probably also watch out for any fire-breathing, topaz-wearing archery enthusiasts. Could I borrow your notes from physics on Friday, by the way? Or did you not take any?”

  It didn’t even hit me until I was on my way to drama, and then it wasn’t the fire or the topaz. I realized that I hadn’t seen centaurs recently but I had seen horses—at least, I’d seen the dancing ponies on Rafe’s tie.

  Did that mean I should actually be suspicious of Rafe, just like Natalie was? And did ponies even count as full-fledged horses? Rafe had been wearing that tie days before Carolina’s Sagittarius warning—but maybe it was grandfathered in somehow?

  Either way, that’s what I was thinking when I got to drama, which was probably a good thing, because otherwise I’d have been completely freaking out about getting up on stage and doing the scene with Quinn, instead of just partially freaking out. And when Quinn sat down next to me and said, “Game on,” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Which game?”

  “My dad will see you right after school. At his office.”

  “Seriously? Just like that?”

  “Well, not quite. I had to agree to an extra session of SAT prep with Marcus, so I won’t be able to go with you. Is that okay? Will you be all right on your own?”

  I doubted that Charley would be terribly happy about my going off to meet Hunter Riley unaccompanied, but I wasn’t going to tell Quinn that, and I also didn’t see what harm it could do. “I’ll be fine,” I said as Mr. Dudley called us to order.

  He made us all sit in a circle and do the usual set of breathing exercises, which gave me an opportunity to do the full-on freaking out that I hadn’t done earlier. By the time the exercises were over and everyone but Quinn and me had been shooed off the stage and into the first few rows of seats, I was more nervous and self-conscious than I’d realized was possible. And the modest high school auditorium seemed enormous, like I couldn’t possibly make my voice fill the vast space.

  “Whenever you’re ready, people,” said Mr. Dudley from the front row.

  “Ready?” Quinn asked me.

  I didn’t feel like I’d ever be ready, but I nodded and turned to face him.

  And that’s when it happened.

  I put my palm against his, and he began to speak his first line, and suddenly it was like I wasn’t there.

  I was Juliet and Quinn was Romeo, and the lines weren’t dead black-and-white words on a page but somehow alive, as natural and real as the argument we’d had about the spider and the fly. The rows of empty seats were gone, and we were in a candlelit ballroom, wrapped in our own cocoon of words. But the playful banter of our words couldn’t mask what we both knew—that after this, nothing would be the same.

  And then we got to the kissing part, which we’d only read through together and had never really rehearsed. But it didn’t matter, because I was still Juliet and Quinn was still Romeo, his gray-green eyes fixed on mine. And when he bent to kiss me, it was Romeo’s lips on Juliet’s.

  Even so, Juliet was just as stunned as I would’ve been. When I said my last line, I was speaking for both of us. You kiss by the book.

  Twenty-six

  I was so caught up in the whole thing that it took me a second to realize we’d finished. The auditorium was completely silent.

  Then, after an interminable moment, a girl in the second row began to clap, and then another, and then everyone was clapping—even Mr. Dudley.

  And the clapping was almost as good as the kissing.

  Actually, that wasn’t even close to true. The kissing was much, much better.

  I took the bus down Fifth Avenue from school to Quinn’s father’s office in Midtown. I should have spent the ride thinking about what I wanted to ask him, but mostly I was still stuck on the kissing. I mean, did it count as kissing if it occurred in the context of a play? If so, then I’d just had my first real kiss. But I wasn’t sure it counted.

  Hunter Riley’s office was in a shiny glass tower on the edge of Bryant Park, opposite the New York Public Library. There was a reception desk in the lobby, and the man there found my name on a list of expected visitors after I showed him my school ID. “Take the express elevator up to forty,” he said, handing me a pass and pointing out which elevator bank to use.

  A woman was waiting when the elevator doors slid open on the fortieth floor. She wore a pale blue suit and clunky gold jewelry, with the same carefully styled hair and perfect lipstick that newscasters have on TV. “You must be Delia!” she said, with far more enthusiasm than really seemed necessary. “I’m Kimberly, Mr. Riley’s assistant. He’s looking forward to seeing you.”

  She led me through a maze of cubicles filled with serious-looking men and women, all peering intently at their computer screens. Hunter Riley was at the far end of the floor, in a large glassed-in office with a view over the city skyline.

  He was pacing and talking into a headset, but he w
aved me in with a big smile, indicating a chair across from his desk and gesturing that he’d be off the phone soon. “That’s it,” he was saying. “Five thousand October puts at the three-fifty strike price…set up a synthetic hedge to offset the position…got it?”

  I’d just noticed the silver-framed photos of Quinn and Bea and Oliver on a credenza when he ended his call. “Delia, welcome,” he said with another big smile. “Now, what can I do for you? Quinn said you had a project you wanted my advice about?”

  “It’s an independent study,” I said, which was sort of true. “About variables affecting global oil supply and demand.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place. That’s what I do—essentially, I make bets on what’s going to happen to the prices of different commodities, and oil’s my specialty.”

  What followed was a half-hour lesson about the different stocks and bonds and other types of securities you can use to buy and sell oil. I pretended to understand, and I even took notes, but he might as well have been speaking Mandarin. He was also so genuinely thrilled that somebody was taking an interest in his job that it seemed wrong to interrupt him.

  When he eventually paused, I tried to steer him back toward the questions I actually wanted answered. “What would happen if somebody suddenly found a big new oil supply? Prices would go down, right?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “When supply goes up, prices go down, and vice versa. The tricky part is that prices already reflect what people know about future oil supply—it’s well-documented where the oil is and who’s pumping it. So if you want to make money, you need to have better information, so you can have a different opinion than everyone else and be right about it.”

  “How do you get better information?”

  “Oh,” he said vaguely. “Research. You know, talking to people in the business.”

  “Like the oil companies?” I asked.

  “Sure. There are rules about what they can tell you, but you can learn a lot if you drill—I mean, dig.”

  “What if they’re doing something they’re not supposed to?”