Mind Games

by Kiersten White

  I laugh. “Wasn’t he worried I’d kill you in your sleep or something?”

  “I don’t think he’d actually care.”

  “Oh, poor James.” I scoot across the dark velvet of the love seat, scoot right onto James’s lap, wrap my arms around his neck. “Why do you care if he cares? Your dad is evil.” Is it the money? Can he not live without bottomless funds? Or does he actually believe in this shadowy network of power his dad is building? I need to know. I let myself ignore it for so long, but the why is killing me. The why of James working for his father. The why of how I can feel like this for him even though he is part of what did this to me.

  He looks at my lips, leans in closer. I don’t need to know the why anymore. I don’t care. I’ll care again tomorrow, but now? I close my eyes, waiting, waiting, wanting his lips on mine.

  He pecks my nose instead, then laughs. I open my eyes and glare.

  “My dad is evil. But I’m a Keane. It’s my duty to care. I owe it to my mother.”

  “So, are you finally living up to Daddy Dearest’s dearest wishes? Are you going to seduce me, James Keane?”

  He pulls me in closer. “I’ve only stayed away from you this long because he wanted me to do the opposite. I can’t let him win, can I?”

  “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  “But what about the Readers?”

  “Oh, them? I think ‘I’m boinking the boss’s son!’ at them every chance I get. But only the ones who are in love with you.”

  “You are evil.” But he looks at me like I’m not.

  I know it’s wrong.

  He’s a Keane.

  He isn’t his father, but he will be.

  He’s almost as good a liar as I am, and I am too drunk to sift through what he’s said.

  It’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

  But his hands are on my neck and in my hair and tracing my collarbone and it is wrong but it feels right, it feels like falling and I know the impact at the bottom will probably kill me, but I don’t care anymore.

  “I’ve wanted to kiss you since that first night in the school. I’ve wanted to kiss you every single day since then.” He shifts me even closer. We are touching, touching everywhere and it’s wrong it’s wrong it’s wrong but right right now and I close my eyes and his lips are even better at the dulling than the drinks or the music. His lips light me on fire and dull everything else and I lose myself in them, and I am so happy and relieved to be lost I could cry.

  We stumble out onto the street, wrapped around each other, and I am light-headed and my feet can’t trace a straight line, and I can’t feel anything.

  Right or wrong or even my hands.

  It’s glorious.

  I laugh.

  James nuzzles his face into the top of my head, breathing in my hair. “You’re amazing, you know that? I think I love you.”

  I push him into the wall, grab his shirt in my fists, kiss him hard. Pull away. He is such a liar. “You don’t love me, you idiot. No one does. No one should.”

  “That’s not true. I do love you. I’m just trying so hard not to. It would ruin everything. But you don’t make it easy, you know?”

  I laugh and walk a few steps ahead. This late/early there is no one out but a car on the corner. Delivery van.

  Idling.

  It’s wrong, it shouldn’t be there, I know it shouldn’t. No one would deliver something right now on these streets. I turn to James. “Something’s wrong.” I know it in my stomach sloshing with drinks.

  “Nothing’s wrong.” He reaches out to pull me into his arms and I jump forward and put my foot behind his, trip him as I shove him down.

  Someone swings a fist where his head was.

  I lift my foot and kick backward as hard as I can with my sharp heel (the sharp heels—I needed the sharp heels), and it slams into something and then there’s a wet give as it breaks through skin and someone shouts but it’s muffled. I yank my foot back and the shoe doesn’t come with it. I kick the other one off because now it will only slow me down.

  Am I screaming? I should be screaming. James is shouting, trying to get up. The man who swung at James’s head pulls something out of his jacket and points it at James and I can’t lose James, I won’t, not now that I found his lips. I throw myself onto the man, wrap my arms and legs around him. He’s off balance and stumbling, and I sink my teeth into his shoulder as hard as I can.

  I shouldn’t have had anything to drink. Annie was right. This is not a fight I should lose.

  He slams me into the brick wall and the air leaves my lungs in a sad, drunken whoosh. I drop off and hit the ground on crouched legs. I need to protect James. I need to get them away from James.

  I run (I can still run, I know how to run, I can do this) toward the opposite side of the street, away from the van. Glance back, they’ve left James, he’s up now and stumbling toward us, but he had even more to drink than I did and they are not drunk, they are definitely not drunk.

  I can get away. I know I can. One of them has stopped, turned to face James. Does he have a gun? He might have a gun. I don’t know, I can’t tell.

  If I run now, I’ll only be followed by one and I can take him down and get away.

  I turn and spin past the man following me, dive for the knees of the man facing James. He falls; I am tangled up in him.

  “RUN!” I scream at James. “I’m behind you!”

  He waits until I’m up and then he runs and I am behind him.

  And someone is behind me, arms circling my waist, lifting me off the ground. Cloth-covered hand over my mouth, pulling me backward. I am swimming and it smells stinging sweet and someone else has my legs. I can’t remember how to kick, it’s getting too dark. A light, a slamming door. James, where is James? I can’t breathe I can’t keep my eyes open.

  The last thing I see is the girl with brown eyes and brown hair whose car I stole.

  FIA

  Two Years Ago

  WHY DOES HATING THE MOST VIOLENT THING I’VE ever done make me want to be violent?

  They took away my computer when they realized I was researching jail time for various crimes. But they didn’t have to. I have nowhere to go. Annie is here.

  Annie told me to get out of her life.

  If I really thought she’d be safe here, if I really thought she’d be okay on her own?

  I don’t know.

  My closet is dark and warm. I like sitting in it. Sometimes I sleep here. Sleep, sleep. I’ll sleep now.

  “Fia?”

  I startle, smack my head against the wall. Ouch.

  “Annie?” I push open the closet door. She’s standing in the middle of my room. She has one hand out, palm up, the way she always comes into a room where she knows I am. She’s waiting for my hand.

  I hide my horrible hands behind my back. “What?”

  She looks scared. Nervous. I stand and rush out of the closet. “What’s wrong? What did you see?”

  “I—I didn’t see anything. I heard. Fia, what have they been doing to you? What have they made you do? Tell me. Please tell me.” Her voice cracks and if she cries, I will cry and I won’t, I won’t let myself cry.

  “Bad things,” I whisper. “I’ll never tell you.”

  She holds out both her hands and I trip forward, let her wrap her arms around me. “Okay. Okay. You don’t have to tell me. It doesn’t matter. We’re leaving. Today.”

  “Really? You want to leave?” My heart expands, bursts—hope, there is hope, I have hope for the first time in years. We’re going to leave! Annie wants to leave, so it won’t be betraying her, won’t be taking her away from hope for her eyes.

  “Pack your things,” she says. “I’ve got all my stuff ready. We can probably sell my laptop and braille equipment for a few thousand dollars. Enough to get back to Aunt Ellen’s. Once we’re there, we’ll figure out how to get ahold of her. I’ll leave a note for Eden so she knows why we left and can find us if she wants to leave, too.”

  My heart sinks. “You pac
ked? When did you decide we should run?”

  “Last night. I’ve been up all night, reading train and bus schedules. Do you have any cash at all? There’s a Greyhound station. It’s a long walk, but we can do it. And you can figure out how to sell my laptop, right?”

  She sounds so hopeful, so determined. I back away and slump on my unmade bed. “We can’t. They already know.”

  Annie frowns, shakes her head. “No, we need to leave. We need to get you out of here.”

  “We should have run last night, the moment you thought of it. It’s too late now. They already know what we’ll do. Clarice will be watching. So we can’t do it.”

  “But—”

  “No. Not today.”

  Annie’s shoulders collapse. She tries to walk over to my bed but trips on a pile of shoes. I haven’t been keeping the floor clean. It’s dangerous for her. Bad, bad Fia.

  “Sorry. Here.” I take her hand, lead her to the bed. She sits next to me, every line of her body turned down.

  “I’ve ruined everything. I’m so sorry.”

  “Hey.” I put my arm around her shoulders. It’s my job to take care of her. And I will. “It’s okay. Now that I know you don’t want to be here, I can fix this.” I smile; she can’t see how wicked my smile is. “I’ll get us out of here. You need to be ready to go at a second’s notice. It won’t be easy. I don’t think we can go back home.” She has to understand. I know—I can feel—they’ll never just let me go. We’ll have to hide.

  Forever.

  But if we hide together, then it’s not hiding. It’s escaping.

  She nods, sits up straighter. “Anytime. I’m ready. And, Fia?”

  I am trying not to think of escaping. I am not planning anything. I am letting the future be a complete blank. If I have no plans, they cannot see my plans. I live now and only now. “What?”

  “I know we have a future. And whatever you’ve done, whatever you think you’re guilty of? You’re not. It’s not your fault. You know that, right? You’re a good person.”

  My eyes sting and my throat aches and my heart hurts and she is wrong but I want her to be right. I want it so badly, it has to become true. When we leave here, we will leave all this, and things won’t be wrong all the time, buzzing constantly at the back of my mind and in my hands and in my stomach with the wrongness of everything. I will feel right. I will be good.

  As I finish randomly picking stocks, Clarice smiles at me like she knows something I don’t. I know what she thinks she knows that I don’t. I know she saw us leave, that she’s expecting it at any time.

  I smile back at her. I hope that she’s personally taking the extra patrol duties or whatever security measures they’ve put in place. Because it’s a waste of time. I can be patient. Annie is on my side now. I can wait and wait and not plan a thing. I am not planning a thing.

  “You seem cheerful this morning,” she says, taking another sip of her coffee.

  “If you were a Reader, you’d know it was because I put something in your drink.”

  She glances in horror at her half-empty cup before her face smooths itself out and she smiles again. “I like your sense of humor.”

  “Are we done? Because my nap isn’t going to take itself.” I stretch in my chair, put my legs up on her desk, my skirt riding up my thighs but I don’t care, because I am finally back in control.

  “You keep thinking that word,” Ms. Robertson says from behind me and I freeze. I hadn’t heard the door open. Clarice must not have closed it all the way. “Control. What an interesting word for you to be dwelling on.”

  “I have some other words.” I scream the F-word in my head, over and over and over again.

  “We have an assignment for you,” Clarice says, but I am too busy screaming thoughts to pay much attention. “There’s a girl. We need her.”

  I start at the beginning, mentally screaming every obscenity I can in alphabetical order. Then I start setting them to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

  “Are you listening, Sofia?”

  I nod.

  “This girl we need, her family has declined our generous scholarship. So we’ve been forced to go to extreme measures to help her. You’re going to kidnap her.”

  I laugh, abruptly cutting off the chorus of my song. “I am, am I?”

  “Yes. We’ve got all the information here. Pictures, important details about Sadie and her family. I’ll leave it to your discretion how to go about it all, but I will note that it might be easier for everyone involved if there were some sort of accident that meant she had no more family to ask questions or look for her.”

  Some sort of accident.

  Some sort of accident.

  Some sort of accident.

  My brain sticks on that phrase, like a skipping CD, repeating it over and over.

  “We didn’t know about you and your sister then,” Ms. Robertson says from behind me. “In your case it was your parents’ accident and the news story about the blind girl who saw it that caught our attention.”

  I laugh. It’s high and fast and strange. “Well, then, that’s all right. I’ll set a gas fire, maybe? Blow them all up! Then it would be efficient and pretty. And the girl—Sadie?—we can roast marshmallows before skipping back here and introducing her to her new home!”

  “Sofia,” Clarice says, and her voice is low with warning.

  “Clarice,” I answer, and my voice is not low with warning—my voice is high with giddy hysteria, but my eyes are knives. “I’m not doing it.”

  “That’s not an option.”

  I stand up, kick my chair over. It skitters across the floor and crashes into the wall. She jumps, stands, and backs away. I like that she’s scared of me.

  “I’m going back to my room now. I’ll keep playing your stupid stocks games or your sick little physical challenges because I don’t have anywhere else to go. But if you think for one second I am ever hurting someone for you again, you’re wrong. I won’t do it. And you can’t make me.”

  I turn and walk past Ms. Robertson, thinking CONTROL as loudly as I can at her.

  “We’ll see,” Clarice says, her soft voice carrying through to the hall. “Remember. It’s your choice that did this. You did this.”

  She’s crazy. Crazy crazy. And I don’t care. I skip down the wide, empty hallway, singing at the top of my lungs. I know I’m not free yet, but I feel like I am. This feeling, this huge horrible wrong nagging feeling I’ve had since I was twelve will go away and I’ll be able to breathe, I’ll be able to think, I’ll be able to use whatever it is they think I have for myself. I’ll use it to make my own path. I’ll never do it for anyone else, not ever again.

  But the wrong feeling is getting wronger. I feel like the ground has been pulled out from underneath me. My heart races. I can’t breathe. Something is wrong.

  It’s wrong wrong wrong WRONG WRONG WRONG! I need to find Annie.

  I race up the stairs, through the hall, burst through her door. She’s there. Annie’s there, in her room, she’s okay, what’s wrong?

  She’s sitting on her bed. Her face is blank.

  “Are you okay? Annie?”

  “I saw myself.” Her voice is as blank as her face.

  “You—what?”

  “I saw myself. In a vision. At first I thought it was you, but the hair was too short.” She lifts a hand to her hair that hits at her shoulders. “And the eyes were different. But it looked so much like you. Then I realized. It was me. I finally saw what I look like.”

  I sit down, still dizzy with panic. “Told you you’re beautiful.” What is wrong? Nothing is wrong here. Why isn’t my body calming down?

  She doesn’t react. “I was dead.”

  I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. “What?”

  “I was dead. There was a hole in my head. A perfect red hole. And my hair, it’s darker than I thought it was, it was all tangled up in the blood on the floor. There wasn’t as much blood as you’d think there would be. I was d
ead. They killed me.” She closes her eyes. “I’m going to die.”

  “How would that happen? How would that even—”

  I said no.

  I told them no.

  I thought I was in control.

  They are always in control.

  “What else? Any other details? Any other details at all? Do you know when it happens? Where? Anything!” She doesn’t react, so I grab her shoulders, shake her. “TELL ME ANYTHING. GIVE ME SOMETHING.”

  “How can I tell you where it happens? I’ve never seen the room before. I’ve never seen any rooms before.” She laughs drily. “The only other detail was Clarice. She was standing next to my body, talking to someone on the phone.”

  “Did she shoot you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  My heart picks up. Races. Don’t plan. Don’t plan. “But she was there? In the room?”

  “Yes.”

  I run out. Back down the stairs. I don’t think. I don’t plan. I just run. Back to the classroom. Clarice is still there. She looks up at me, a single eyebrow raised. “Have you changed your mind then?”

  I pick up the chair on the ground, still against the wall where I kicked it. I lift it and spin and smash it into Clarice’s head.

  She doesn’t even have time to look surprised.

  I smash it on her again and again and again.

  And then I stop and drop the chair and sink to the floor. Clarice’s lifeless eyes stare at me from her bloodied and ruined head.

  If Clarice is dead, she can’t be there when Annie gets shot. That can’t happen now.

  It won’t happen now.

  Annie is safe.

  Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe. Annie is safe.

  ANNIE

  Monday Evening

  I KNOW ALL MY INTERNET ACTIVITY IS MONITORED and that I can’t search anything on Adam without raising suspicion. I wish Fia and I had been able to talk. She could have told me more about him, maybe told me why he was connected to all those women who didn’t want to be found. She said he was nice.

  He looked nice.