by Trisha Leigh
A glance at Jude knocks me out of my selfish internal monologue. Sadness wrinkles around his eyes and downturned lips, and coupled with the slump of his shoulders, paints a picture of hopeless defeat.
My heart twists. “And you’ll think about talking to him, too? At least try? I know you don’t want to get him in trouble, or for things to change at home, but it’s worth a shot. He might understand.”
The silence feels hostile at first but soon eases to something that might be gratitude as Jude reaches out and covers my hand with his. I let it rest there for the barest of moments, long enough to soak up the sizzling jolt of contact, before pulling away under the guise of gathering up our trash.
“You know my dad thinks they were doing some kind of science experiments on you guys, at Darley,” he says conversationally.
I’m glad my back is to him, because every muscle seizes at once. There doesn’t seem to be anything more than mild interest in his voice, but my ears ring a little, anyway. It could be that he’s still trying to lure me into admitting something, or just trying to prepare me for meeting his dad.
By the time I toss the cans into the recycle bin and turn around, I’ve managed to fix what I hope is a bemused smile onto my lips. “Is that right?”
“Yeah, like the government’s creating superheroes or something.”
“What’s a superhero?”
His eyes pop wide open. “Are you kidding me? Avengers? X-Men? Superman? Batman?”
Some of those sound familiar from my post–Star Wars research, but it seems best to stick with my original story. “Nope, sorry. You’re talking gibberish.”
“I can promise you that I’m not, and someday very soon I’m going to show up at your door for an X-Men marathon.”
“Sounds like fun. And afterward, I can give you a Molly Ringwald education.”
He pauses, lips twisted. “Is she that chick from the Breakfast Club with the curly red hair?”
“Yep.”
“I’m going to have to rethink this bargain.”
I laugh, and Jude laughs, and pleasure coats me all over until my cheeks burn. The exquisite, sweet pain drifts into my chest, squeezes my heart, and then it’s identifiable: This moment is a glimpse of what might have been, not what still might be, and the melancholy and sense of loss brings tears to my eyes.
It’s not until after my father chases Jude out a little after nine and I’m snuggled beneath my white and purple comforter that I admit what that moment truly meant.
I’ve given up on that normal life.
I can’t wish for something like that, not while Flicker’s in trouble and the rest of the Cavies are in danger, their powers changing. Not while we’re all blowing in the breeze, waiting to be snatched up by the shadows lurking around the edges of our world.
My body feels heavy, too full of fear and doubt, but the bed is soft and warm, inviting me to the sweet release of sleep in its arms. I have a brief thought of checking in with the Clubhouse, updating Geoff on the day’s events so he can be on the lookout for Flicker, but I don’t make it.
There’s a text from Jude on my phone when I wake up. It says that his dad would love to meet me but that the best time to catch him in a lucid mood is first thing in the morning. He doesn’t live downtown so I’ll just leave an hour early and grab a taxi to his house, then catch a ride to school with him.
My father doesn’t seem pleased with the idea and wants to drive me, but I’ve gone from letting the Philosopher and his staff do everything for me—tell me what to think and how to behave—to the same sort of situation here. It’s not that I think my father has any kind of ill intentions, but I’m seventeen years old, and it’s time to start figuring out how to at least get around town on my own.
I let him call the cab, though, and pay the driver. If things weren’t so crazy I might think about getting a job. My father hasn’t mentioned it, and I’m starting to realize that, as finances go, he doesn’t seem to be lacking.
The ride isn’t long, just ten minutes or so in the direction of the bridge that leads south, toward the islands and Darley and, eventually, Beaufort. The cabbie lets me out in front of a modest one-story home, leaving me on the sidewalk with a thank-you and a wave.
There’s no landscaping here like there is on Water Street, no wrought-iron fences with decorative crests, no blooming camellias, no neatly trimmed hedges. There’s a tiny yard covered with a spread of brittle brown grass and a cracked concrete path connecting Jude’s house to the sidewalk.
I’ve only been to one other CA student’s home—Maya’s. If our fathers represent an average income, then Jude’s already to managing to pretend pretty well. I wonder if anyone comes here, if his father’s eccentricities are common knowledge or if his mother’s good community standing was able to shield her son from the brunt of being considered lesser-than all these years.
He didn’t say anything about moving after she left them, but they must have.
The curtains flutter at the corner of the rectangular front window, and a moment later the front door flies open to reveal Jude, dressed in his uniform but with damp hair again, as though he considers toweling off after a shower an option. The fresh smell of him falls around me like snowflakes—soft and cool as it melts against my skin.
“Good morning, pretty girl.”
I roll my eyes, hiding my pleasure at his continued efforts to woo me, because I should wish he wouldn’t. “Hey.”
“Have you had coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
His eyes bulge. “Holy geez, my dad’s right. You are some kind of mutant. How do you fuel your teenage angst without coffee?”
“Um, I don’t know.”
He motions me over the threshold and I step into a dim tiled entryway that’s nothing more than a square cut out of the living room. Dust shimmies in the pale beams of early morning sunshine, settles on the tables on either side of the short, sagging, faded gold couch. Piles of papers and books tower everywhere, stacked in an attempt to make it appear less cluttered. Despite the fact that it’s small and has a hand-me-down feel, the house exudes a worn, relaxed comfort that reminds me of Jude.
He pours himself a cup of coffee when we get to the kitchen, then pulls a second mug from a cabinet and fills it as well. He dumps in a healthy serving of liquid creamer, stirring it in before handing it to me with a shrug. “I feel better if you just hold it. It masks your weirdness.”
“If I had known that’s all it takes, I would have started drinking coffee years ago.”
That makes him laugh, and it rolls over his shoulders and washes past my cheeks as he leads me down a dark hallway. The walls are bare, no family photos or random paintings like houses in the movies have. My father’s house doesn’t have anything personal hanging, either, but he told me a decorator did the whole thing.
We pass a couple of closed doors and one that opens into a bathroom before he pauses, hovering in the last doorway on the right. All of the shades are pulled halfway down, and the walls are nothing but full bookcases, making the room feel like a cave. It sort of reminds me of the library at Darley, except much smaller and nowhere near as immaculate. Books and papers are scattered across the floor, not stacked and organized like in the living room. More slouch over the desk, sliding off the edges onto the worn hardwood.
A man who must be the infamous Mr. Greene looks up from his spot in the center of the chaos when we step into his space. He’s wearing thin-rimmed glasses and his hair is a shade of sandy brown that matches his son’s. The coffee steams in my grasp, smells good, even, but I don’t take a drink. The last thing I need is to add another unknown to the witch’s brew that’s swirling in my blood after that stupid injection.
“Dad, this is Norah, the girl I told you about.”
The clouds in his father’s eyes take a few uncomfortable seconds to clear, but then they focus on me with a lightning flash of excitement. He gets to his knees and then his feet, stretching his back along the way. “Yes. Sorry
. I’m Brandon Greene.”
“Norah Crespo.” If it’s his quirkiness that keeps him from trying to take my hand, I’m thankful for it. The last thing I need to know is whether or not my presence is going to kill both of them inside a year.
“Yes, you’re one of the children they rescued from Darley.” He works hard at smoothing his hair. “I have a lot of questions for you.”
“She came because she has questions for you, Dad, remember? Let’s start with that.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
The way he’s looking at me ties my stomach into knotted bows, pushes adrenaline into my legs until it takes all my willpower to stay in the room. It’s like I’m a bug on the sidewalk—one that’s rare and interesting, maybe, but that he’d just as soon squish and study afterward, when it can’t talk.
They’re both waiting to hear my all-important questions, and I remind myself that the whole reason I’m here is to help my friends. It doesn’t matter how uncomfortable it makes me or if Jude learns something about me that makes him scream and run away.
“Okay. Well, I know you were the one who found Darley, and Jude says there are some things you saw there that make you wonder if there’s more to our story. My friends and I are kind of wondering where we came from, how we got to Darley, things like that, so if you’ve learned anything that could help us, we’d really appreciate knowing it.”
He pauses, wiping his glasses and peering at me in his disconcerting way. “You all came to the plantation from a government-funded home for, shall we say, wayward teens—Saint Catherine’s House. None of the records I’ve stolen from the property’s basement since the raid contain any information on why you were chosen to be a part of whatever experimentation went on at Darley Hall, but I haven’t been through all of it. Not even close.”
“I’m sorry, you stole records? I didn’t even know Darley had a basement.”
“It used to be the kitchen, in the original house. Surely you noticed the functional kitchen was in the flanker.” The way he says it makes me feel like an idiot for not realizing it was weird that the main house had no kitchen.
This whole scene starts to feel as though it’s happening to someone else. Then Jude steps closer, until we’re almost touching but not quite, and brings me back. “What have you found?”
“I’ve started looking for similarities between your families. The ten of you, of course, but also the previous generations that have disappeared from Darley over the years—”
My heart stops. Stops working, stops helping me breathe and stand up.
“Are you okay?” Jude’s hand presses into the small of my back.
I can’t answer him. My eyes are glued to his father’s face, which looks more annoyed at being interrupted than anything, and I struggle to wrap my mind around his words. To get enough moisture into my mouth to swallow, to not pass out. “What previous generations?”
Mr. Greene’s gaze turns confused, clouds over again. “Surely you knew you weren’t the first group of children raised on the premises? Saint Catherine’s has been funneling unwanted babies to Darley since the early 1950s, with new batches every ten years at the beginning, every twenty years more recently.”
The information swirls through me like acid, etching into my arteries and my brain and my guts until it’s part of me. Flicker said there were others, and that Greene knows.
What he knows is that there are others—more of us. More kids raised at Darley. They might be special, like us, and they could have answers.
Answers that enhance our abilities. That fill a syringe.
The possibility that the people who injected us are from Darley flushes me with equal parts hope and nausea. Who is the Philosopher? What did he really want with our gifts?
It takes a few seconds but my synapses recover, making connections that end in more questions. “You said that some secret government organization runs Saint Catherine’s, but what about Darley Hall? Who owns that?”
“It’s privately owned, according to official documents.” He flicks a glance at his son, one full of reproach, and gives me the feeling that they’ve had a talk about how he’s supposed to behave this morning. “I’ll not speculate further, but I don’t believe that’s the case.”
“Do you have names? A list of kids who grew up at Darley Hall before we did?”
He glances around the hopeless tornado of paperwork. “There is one somewhere that I’ve been compiling, yes. I haven’t been able to figure out the common link between you.”
“I’d really love to know who they are.” My mouth has dried out again, and I glance at the coffee, sorely tempted. I find an empty corner of a shelf and put it down, trying to stop the acceleration of my heartbeat. “Are there addresses? Details?”
“A good number of them are deceased.” He purses his lips after another glance toward Jude. “I’ll put together a list for you, but I want you to tell me about yourself. About your friends and what kind of experiments they were running out there.”
“It’ll have to wait, Dad. We’re about to be late for school and Norah here still has a perfect attendance record. You get that list for her, and I’ll make sure to bring her back, yeah?”
The man’s shoulders relax, a true smile touching his mouth. It wavers between pride and exasperation, but in that moment there’s no doubt in my mind that he loves his son. “Sure. Have her over for dinner one night. I’ll make my famous shrimp and grits.”
“Thank you, Mr. Greene. I really appreciate you sharing what you’ve found. All of us… we’re feeling a little bit lost, is all.”
“You’re welcome.”
Chapter Eighteen
Jude senses my disinterest in or inability to talk, and the drive to CA passes in companionable silence. If he had said anything, I doubt it would have been audible over the roar of my brain processing everything I just learned, anyway.
It gives me the chance to zone out, to visit the Clubhouse, but no one’s there—not even Geoff, which is a first. I leave a note suggesting we all talk right after school lets out, hoping my feeling of urgency bleeds into the written words.
Jude parks the car and walks beside me to Latin. There’s only one more week of school before holiday break. They don’t call it Christmas break because of the two Jewish kids at our school, but it makes no difference to me. Religion isn’t encouraged at Darley, not for kids who spent their lives pinning their hopes on science. Science is what can make us normal, or at least be able to live well with our mutations. Faith does nothing. Not for us.
It’s hard to muster even the barest interest in class or schoolwork when my entire world has been tossed around in a blender. There are more Cavies. Darley has been operating for decades, churning out generations of kids like us. For what purpose?
I doodle my way through the morning, which helps me not run away screaming, and focus only long enough to grade Savannah’s Latin paper, which is a steady improvement from the previous. She’s been more genuine since word got around that I turned Jude down for a date, but she’s also asked me a few too many times whether or not Shiloh might be coming around more often.
“So, Jude drove you to school this morning, huh?”
Oops.
“Yeah. I needed to talk to his dad about something.”
“About how all of you kids from Darley are mutant science experiments?” She gives me a faint smile that’s anything but nice. “He’s been going on about that place for years, literally.”
Her bringing it up feels threatening, somehow. Like she wants to find a way to keep me as the freaky new girl a little longer. There’s nothing that I can say to shut her up, short of admitting that he’s right. My lips twist into a grimace that probably matches the distaste in my mouth. “I doubt Jude would want that to get around.”
She shrugs as we step into the cafeteria for lunch, twenty minutes that have become a ritual already. “Jude wouldn’t, or you prefer your secrets, Norah? Because one of those things matters more to me than the other.�
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Savannah leaves me standing with my mouth open. I go through the line, trying to shake off her attack, and find Maya already at the table. She’s got her nose buried in her French textbook, eyes closed as her lips form silent, foreign sentences.
“Hey.” I interrupt with the quietest, least startling word possible, but she still jerks, the book clattering to the floor. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t know why I’m so jumpy.”
I nod toward the fallen text and scattered pages of notes. “French final today?”
“Next period. I’m going to bomb.”
Maya lives in perpetual fear of failing at school. Maybe she’s not as smart as some of the kids at CA, but none of them are idiots. Her grades are decent; she just loves drama.
“You’re going to do fine.” I sit across from her and open my carton of milk. “I guess I should be enjoying these fake three weeks of school before next semester, but honestly, I’m bored.”
“I can see that,” Maya huffs.
Savannah sits next to Maya, who abandons her last-minute cram session for lunch. We’re joined by the sometimes-addition of Jude’s friend Peter next. He chugs milk, the carton tiny in his giant hand, then slams it down on the table.
It leaves a mustache, which makes Maya roll her eyes. “Why are guys such animals? How am I supposed to find a boyfriend when I go to school with you bunch of infants?”
“Are we animals or infants?” he asks around a series of belches. “Make up your mind.”
“Infant animals,” she replies, looking to Savannah for help.
“Peter’s a lost cause, and not my problem, thank heavens.” Savannah takes a delicate bite of taco salad, not making eye contact with anyone.
Jude appears a second later, dropping his tray and bottle of water next to mine. He always sits next to me, our thighs touching under the table, and every day it gets a little bit harder to swallow my food once he arrives. Or to move away.
Today feels different. His leg still rests against mine, but he’s quiet. Off. I wonder if this morning, if the glimpse into even the tiniest bit of the truth of my life, has made him see me differently. Maya casts worried glances his direction, too, and even Peter notices.
