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Hot yoga was a bitch, but Joey had learned that if you could push through the first fifteen minutes and your muscles loosened in the 110 degrees and your chakras—or whatever the hell they were—opened up, you could drop into a sort of trance.
Movement linked to breath, the world wrangled down to the four corners of her dripping-wet mat. The overheated, dimly lit room seemed to exist out of time and space. She needed it, needed to work at being present.
For the first time in her life, she was normal, or at least an approximation of normal. She’d come up hard in the foster system, pulled out at a young age and trained in the deep-black Orphan Program to be an assassin. But she’d failed the Program, or it had failed her, and she’d found herself further outside the current of the real world, a sixteen-year-old hacker with an oversize brain and fairly stupendous hand-to-hand-combat skills and not much more.
That is, until Orphan X had found her and pulled her to shore.
He’d set her up in an apartment near him and made her enroll at UCLA, where she took computer-science classes that she could’ve taught herself after checking forty IQ points at the door. But it made him happy. He said it socialized her, like she was some great cat captured in the wild who needed to learn not to show her claws. Like she was in need of housebreaking. Like he should talk, Evan Smoak, the baddest Orphan of them all, who rattled cages and crushed windpipes like some masquerading do-gooder sociopath who marked his territory with blood.
Mostly she hung out in her apartment with her dog named Dog and pwned shit to her heart’s content. But now and then, all the stuff from her past would get loud, her brain coming between herself and her body, and then flashes from the foster “homes” would hit her nervous system, memories of the boyfriends of her “caregivers,” assholes with rough stubble, beer breath, and no boundaries. Men who thought the world was there for the taking and weren’t afraid to lay their hands on whatever they could grab, especially if it had ovaries. It’s not like her time in the Orphan Program before she washed out was any better. Bruises and fractures, a near-punctured eardrum, and a level of mindfuckery usually reserved for reality dating shows. They’d treated her like an object, too, just as benumbed, just as disposable, until she’d found her way out and Evan had found his way to her.
And even though he was impossible and stubborn and totally infuriating, he was also the first person she’d ever met who was pure of heart—if you looked hard enough to see it. And she loved him, though she’d rather die of a urinary-tract infection than ever let him know that.
So here she was, socializing herself in a sweaty room filled with students and faculty spouses, moving through the asanas, lassoing her hypomanic brain and trying to get it reconnected with her body and all the peace and trauma locked inside it.
Plank, Upward-Facing Dog, Chaturanga, Downward-Facing Dog, her muscles screaming, sweat dripping from the ends of her thick brown-black hair and tapping the mat audibly. Everyone panting and grunting, Lion’s Breath and Ujjayi breathing, lights low, air thick and wet, eucalyptus and sweat. The instructor, named—honest to God—Forrest, guided them with a soothing, sensuous voice. He was lean and fit and diminutively super-hot, like a chiseled elf , and she trusted him enough to follow where he led.
They rolled from Downward-Facing Dog into Pigeon, shins laid parallel to the tops of the mats, everyone bringing torso down over leg to open the right side of the hip.
She got light-headed, riding the knife edge of what her body would tolerate. Separating fiber, tendon, and sinew. Relaxing into vulnerability, loosening muscle that felt forever braced against an injury that never quite materialized.
Next came the left side, her worse side, getting into the outside hip flexor. She sipped in air and gave out shaky exhalations, and then all of a sudden it came in a rush, no memory, just emotion pure and raw and coded into the fascia itself. Her hip released, and she gave a faint, shuddering cry, and her chest lowered six more inches right down onto the mat. The bar of her shin against her breasts, her stomach lying pressed across the thigh, forehead grinding the mat. She was gasping, trying not to whimper, everything breaking over her like a flood, and she was just her heartbeat and her breath and her body, totally present, her skin glowing from the heat.
She held the pose against all reason, pain and pleasure fused in a fires-of-hell union, and then Forrest instructed them to exit the pose. She tried not to grimace against the creaks and aches, pushing herself back into Downward Dog, directing her gaze back through the stems of her straightened legs.
That’s when she noticed.
Two guys in the row behind her, snickering and checking out her ass.
She almost couldn’t believe how deeply it struck her, a wave of heat roiling through her already overheated body. She was stretched wide, loose in the joints and muscle, carved open like a halved piece of fruit, and laid bare, and there they were, two dickhead dude-bros staring in at all that rawness and taking it—her pose, her noises, her long-suffering body—as something sexual.
As a source of amusement.
Like some thing they wanted to hump.
She gave another quick glance. The guy on the left was annoyingly good-looking. The other, huge and bulky, she recognized as the starting center for the football team. They were both shirtless, bodies oiled with sweat. They eye-fucked her and nudged each other and grinned predatory grins.
She dropped into Child’s Pose yet even then felt their gaze from behind and thought she could hear them murmuring to each other, but she didn’t look back.
A pulse of shame thrummed all the way down to the marrow, and she tried to redirect like she normally did—to anger, outrage, a planned counterattack—but she was too spent at the end of the hour in this heat, with her joints unhinged and her breath all through her body.
So she lay there in the give-up pose even as Forrest talked everyone else through the lower-back twists. Breathing hard, sweat pouring down her shoulders, trying not to cry. And she was mad at herself for letting them get to her, two douchebags who came in to check out girls’ asses, who were only here so they could brag about doing yoga to fuck sorority girls. And then she was ashamed about being mad, letting them get the better of her, and then ashamed for being ashamed, and it was all a big loop of self-loathing and humiliation that fed itself and spiraled down and down and down.
* * *
Joey raked the shower curtain shut behind her and let the cold water blast over her, cooling off her body. She was mad—mad at the assholes, mad at herself, mad because why should she give a fuck?
She was still sweating under the stream, and she leaned into the pressure, letting it hit her crown, trickle down her face.
That way she could pretend she wasn’t crying.
* * *
Forrest caught her on her way out. “You okay, Joey?”
“I’m fine.” She mopped at her forehead with the collar of her shirt. After a hard class, it sometimes took a half hour to get he
r body temperature back under control.
“You working through an injury?”
“Why?”
“Just—you took Child’s Pose for the back half of class.”
“I’m not injured.”
He was short enough that they were eye to eye. He had a firm chin line and kind, soft eyes and was trying to get in. But she didn’t know how to let anyone in.
He said, “You don’t normally do that, so I was wondering…”
“Like I said. I’m fine.” She started out.
“Joey?”
She stopped. Grimaced. Turned back around.
“This is your space. Here. If something—or someone—bothers you, let me know. It’s our job to make sure you feel safe enough to do your practice however you want.”
“I always feel safe. Why would you think someone bothered me?”
“I guess I wouldn’t. Unless you told me. And if you did, I would be happy to intervene.”
“I don’t need anyone to intervene on my behalf, Forrest. I can take care of myself.”
“Of that,” he said, “I am sure.”
He gave her a smile. He was old, like almost thirty, and his energy was kind, avuncular. He never sneak-looked at her tits when they were talking and always asked if she was okay being touched before adjusting her on the mat.
She felt bad because she knew she was being a bitch, and the more understanding he was, the more of a bitch she felt like. She took a deep breath, deep enough that her chest cracked in three places. The practice had given her that.
She looked at him for real now and tried to soften her eyes the way his were. But she couldn’t quite get there. It didn’t feel safe to let him see inside.
Only once she’d turned away was she able to say, “Thanks, Forrest.”
* * *
She was meeting X for lunch in Westwood Village. He liked this sushi-roll place on Gayley, and she liked it, too, mostly because they sat at a counter so they didn’t have to do the eye-contact thing, which neither of them was good at. Actually, he was good at it if it was right before he was going to dislocate someone’s arm or if there was some Serious Emotional Matter, but for casual catch-up and small talk, they did better with more distractions.
She swiped a yellowtail roll through her soy sauce until the end was sopping and ate half of it in one bite, chewing contentedly.
He was looking at her. “How can you even taste it with all that soy sauce?”
Around a crammed mouth, she said, “Because I have, like, amazeballs senses. So stop soy-sauce-shaming me.”
She went back to her roll, chewing with her mouth open because he hated that. Then she started to fidget with her chopsticks, which she noticed him noticing. He always paid attention to nonverbal tells and could read her mood and it was so aggravating because no one else could and it was like he had this superpower but at least he used it for good. When it came to her at least.
Finally she slammed down her chopsticks and said, “Why do you all suck?”
His expression didn’t change. She never knew how he could do that. You could throw anything at him and it was like he’d seen it coming before you even knew you had anything to throw.
“All who?” he asked. “All devastatingly handsome former deep-black government assassins?”
“All men. No—not men. Most of you don’t deserve to be called that. Guys. Why do all guys suck?”
“Suck how?”
She felt the flush returning to her cheeks as it had in the yoga studio. “It’s really not that hard to not be an asshole,” she said. “Just, like, don’t be all snickery and woman-hatery to cover up that you’re not-so-secretly insecure and scared of girls. It can’t be that difficult to just be strong and sensitive but not too sensitive ’cuz that’s annoying, too, and only strong when we need it and give us space and respect but also know when we need … dunno … support”—she was pointing at him now—“and that doesn’t mean just coming in and fixing everything or having all these answers, but just, like, getting it. Is that so hard?”
He was doing that almost-smile thing she hated. “I can’t imagine why that would be hard.”
“And don’t look at our asses when we’re doing yoga.”
X said, “Okay.”
They ate the rest of lunch in silence.
* * *
Her Logic Design of Digital Systems class was beyond basic, so she cut out early and snuck over to Boyer Hall to audit a Ph.D. class on bioinformatics like she sometimes did. She was new to the field and all, but it looked like the prof had fucked up the algorithm for calculating mobile mRNA detection, though she didn’t want to say anything because she wasn’t really supposed to be here sitting in the back of a graduate class.
She was sitting by the door, which she always did—’cuz escape plan—and she heard a sharp cry from the hallway and the sound of something striking the floor and breaking.
She was on her feet and into the hall in less than a second, swinging her rucksack over a shoulder. At the end of the empty hall, a Very Pretty Girl was standing with her shoulders hunched and her hand over her mouth, eyes huge and frozen. Her iPhone was on the cheap tile by her white Converse All-Stars, but she wasn’t looking at it. She was looking at nothing and not moving a muscle except for the slight tremble of her fingers over her lips.
“Hey,” Joey said. “Are you okay?”
The girl didn’t register Joey until she was close, and then Joey said again, “Hi. Hi. You there? Do you need help?”
The girl had sloughed off her light gray Herschel backpack. It sagged against her heels, a name Magic Marker–ed across the top flap: BECCA MORGAN.
She turned and ran for the stairwell.
Joey crouched to snatch up the phone—the screen shattered into white spiderwebbing—and went after her. “Your phone!”
The girl charged up the stairs, the door to the seventh floor banging open and shut, and Joey reached the hall in time to see her vanish into a seminar room.
By the time Joey got to the doorway, the girl had bolted past the empty chairs and tables and flung open the door to the balcony.
“Hang on!” Joey yelled. “Wait—just wait!”
She was on the girl’s heels now, out into the open air. Seven stories up, the campus stretched wide beneath them. The girl backed to the far side of the balcony, one manicured hand skimming along the low iron rail.
She turned to face Joey, mascara streaking her cheeks, her eyes wild and panicked. Wind caught her honey-blond hair, sent it fluttering like streamers across her face. “I can’t do it. There’s no way. I just can’t do it.”
Her breaths were jerky like hiccups. Joey’s mind was whirling, and she grabbed for one solid mooring in the whirl of motion: What would X do?
She moved toward the girl calmly, one hand outstretched. “Becca? Whatever it is you’re dealing with—”
The girl vaulted over the railing and was gone.
Here. Then not.
Joey had a single instant of comprehensive denial.
She gave herself that. One instant.
Then she sprinted out.
By the time she’d lunged down the stairs and slammed out the doors into the plaza, a thin ring of onlookers had gathered, keeping twenty yards back from where the girl had landed. Joey shouldered through them and saw why.
One femur bone shoved up into sight, torso bent over itself wrong, left arm twisted in a way that no human limb should ever twist.
Joey stood for a second, blood thundering in her ears.
The girl’s head bobbed a little. And she drew in a screeching lungful of oxygen.
Joey ran to her, sliding on her knees, tearing her jeans, scuffing the flesh of her knees. Cradling the girl’s head to stabilize the neck vertebrae, but there was no point, and the girl’s eyes rolled up at her like a horse’s, and she looked terrified and Joey heard herself saying, “—it’s okay I got you it’s okay I’m right here I’m here with you—” as she pulled off her belt to tourniquet�
�what? the left leg? the right? the arm?—and the girl’s eyes stopped rolling, and Joey pressed two fingers to her neck feeling for a pulse that she knew wouldn’t be there.
She sat like that with the dead girl’s head in her lap, everyone staring at them in shock from a safe distance, murmuring to each other, and she felt like an animal in a cage at a zoo. But then first responders broke through the line of students, running for them with a stretcher and hands clamped Joey’s shoulders and moved her firmly back, away, and they were working on chest compressions and shining penlights into the girl’s glassy blue eyes.
Joey stood there a moment with the girl’s blood on her shirt and her own blood dripping down the torn knees of her jeans, the concrete monolith of Boyer Hall rising at her back, beholding the whole awful scene impassively.
And then she walked away. The lookie-loos parted, eyeing her with respect, even awe, and she moved through them and headed for her apartment.
It wasn’t until she got home that she realized she still had the girl’s phone.
* * *
Joey couldn’t read anything through the cracked screen, but it wasn’t too hard to get into the girl’s phone, because Joey was Joey and that was what she did. Within minutes she was in her circular workstation in her gamer’s chair, monitors stacked two high and arrayed 270 degrees around her, the phone’s contents displayed before her.
She was staring in disbelief at a Google Docs–shared spreadsheet that had been texted to the phone forty-five minutes earlier with a message—WTF have u seen this?—by a contact labeled BFF Frida.
The spreadsheet was labeled The List.
Girls’ names.
Then categories. Tits. Ass. Legs. Face.
Each ranked on a scale of one to ten.
Then a different set of categories. Missionary. Doggie. Cowboy. Reverse Cowboy.
Then more rankings.
Then a comments section.
The List Page 1
