The List

by Hurwitz, Gregg

  “I’m white-knighting you because you’re sixteen years old.”

  “Oh, yeah? What were you doing when you were sixteen?”

  That was her standby argument when he was being X, the best and most undeniable proof that he was, like, a total hypocrite.

  “Josephine—”

  “I hate it when you call me that!”

  Which she did, like ninety percent. But ten percent of her that she couldn’t quite extinguish secretly liked it.

  “—that was different,” he finished.

  “Why was that different?” she said. “’Cuz you had a Y chromosome?”

  He finally stopped and looked at her. “I had Jack,” he said. “And you have me.”

  “Aargh. You’re so … aargh!”

  She stomped off, heading for home.

  She was angry because he was right.

  A few blocks away, she realized she had stormed off in the wrong direction. On the street corner, she stood with her hands at the small of her back, staring up at the stars, trying to dissipate her irritation into the night sky. A few students trickled past, giving her a wide berth.

  Finally she exhaled, letting her shoulders drop, relaxing her neck. She returned to the trail, paused, then walked back up to where she’d thrown down her bracelet. There it was in the dirt, one of the stainless-steel skulls popped off. She picked it up, using a chewed fingernail to pry out the GPS chip.

  She pressed the skull back onto the end of the bracelet and popped it onto her wrist again.

  It held her eye for a moment there against her brown skin.

  It really was her taste.

  Which meant X really did see her, like all the way down. Not just the hers she put on for cover or for protection, the fake hers she found easier to play than being herself, like when she’d played Hot Girl, all confident and sexy. X saw the real her, messy and nerdy and screwed up and maybe kinda beautiful in a broken sort of way.

  It gave her the faintest sense not of belonging exactly but maybe feeling a tiny bit less alone. A warm sort of feeling, a little candle that she held close to protect it from guttering out.

  Maybe he wasn’t quite as awful as she’d decided.

  Not that she’d tell him that.

  * * *

  X texted her the next day: Want me to come over?

  no

  Want to come here?

  no

  Want me to give you another piece of jewelry with a hidden GPS microchip?

  no

  Want an inspirational unicorn sweatshirt?

  no

  Okay. I’ll wear it myself.

  ur the worst

  * * *

  The next week she bumped into Ian and Miles outside Royce Hall. They had on their cross-country sweatshirts and had their phones glued to their thumbs and almost walked right into her.

  She said, “Do you wear your sports clothes all the time in case you forget what team you’re on?”

  Miles laughed. “I thought we cleared this up already. This is us signaling our place in the social hierarchy.”

  “If you wanted a good place on the social hierarchy,” she said, “then you wouldn’t be on the cross-country team.”

  “Right,” Ian said. “We’d be, like, computer-science majors. ’Cuz they’re so cool.”

  “You looked me up?”

  He blushed.

  “No,” Miles said, covering for him. “You mentioned it when we—”

  “I did not,” she said. “I hold my secrets close to the vest.”

  “Well played, Miles,” Ian said.

  Students pushed and jostled around them, but they held a small space in the middle of the wide lawn of Dickson Court.

  “You probably heard what happened,” Ian said. “Everyone getting expelled.”

  “Well,” Joey said. “Not everyone.”

  “Right. Only the members who contributed to The List.”

  “Funny coincidence that,” Miles said.

  “Well, someone should be around to rebuild the new ‘brotherhood.’”

  “You’re pretty aggressive with those air quotes,” Ian said.

  Joey said, “You should see me with eskrima fighting sticks.”

  They laughed.

  She deadpanned.

  Their smiles faded a bit.

  “Be dudes,” she said. “Date girly girls. Have fun. But don’t cross the line into total dickheaditude, or I’ll get you. In a free-fucking-marketplace-of-ideas way.”

  “Fair enough,” Ian said. “We’re having a heaven-and-hell party next week.” He twisted the toe of one sneaker into the grass. “Any chance you want to come?”

  Joey laughed. “Uh, no. But I’m sure there’ll be plenty of the types of girls who go to those things.”

  “How are we supposed to build ‘a new culture’”—and here Ian gave her air quotes back—“if we only invite the same types of girls?”

  “And besides,” Miles said, “there aren’t types of girls any more than there are types of guys. We’re all just … us.”

  “Look at you two,” Joey said. “All insightful and shit.” She flicked her hair out of her eyes and gave a smile, the wide one that showed off the hair-thin gap in her front teeth and made the boys swoon.

  They swooned.

  She turned to walk off, tilted her head back over one shoulder.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  * * *

  The stupid bioinformatics prof kicked her out of the evening class after she pointed out that he’d made a mistake in the expression data gathering in his analysis of metabolic pathways.

  He was all like, “What’s your name, Miss…?”

  And she was all like, “I’m only auditing this class.”

  And he was all like, “This is for graduate students only.”

  And she was like, “Right. ’Cuz they’re the only ones meek enough not to point out where you’re screwing up your algorithms. Which you’ve done like three times tonight.”

  Then he was like, “Young lady, given that you’re not enrolled in this class, I would invite you to leave. Or I’d be happy to have security escort you out.”

  And then she was like, “I’d like to see them try,” which was not up to her usual standard of repartee, but she was all flustered and embarrassed and fuck him ’cuz he was the one who didn’t know how to run basic expression data gathering.

  So now she was in the elevator riding down, chewing her gum aggressively, feeling her TMJ threaten in the hinge of her jaw.

  The lobby had one of those glass cases with photos of faculty, so she stuck her blob of gum over his stupid man face and walked out.

  She paused outside the doors.

  There were a cluster of students around the spot where Rebecca Morgan had landed. They were cupping votive candles, the light flickering through glass colored red or blue or yellow, and it was like some sort of beautiful ancient ritual, which she supposed it kinda was.

  She drew close and saw that some of the students had their arms around one another and a few were crying and someone was telling a story about Becca and laughing through tears. There were two middle-aged folks, Very normal-looking parents who didn’t look like an Overbearing Mom and Asshole Dad; they looked absolutely shattered. They were being consoled by a few girls with matching Tri Delta sweatshirts, but it didn’t seem to be doing any good.

  There was a little circle of scattered rose petals, the evening air still, as if the weather had paused to be respectful. The concrete inside the ring was bleached a lighter shade than the surrounding area.

  She remembered holding Becca across her lap for that last moment before the life shuddered out of her, how she’d tried to brace her neck to stabilize the vertebrae, how by the time she’d checked the pulse there was no pulse to check.

  The mom was sobbing now. “I just can’t believe she was alone when she died. I mean, her last seconds … all by herself.”

  Pressure came up in Joey’s chest, shoving at her ribs. It w
as uncomfortable, and she didn’t recognize it until she realized she’d forgotten to breathe.

  She stood there for a moment trying not to shake, then mustered whatever nerve she could and stepped across the circle to the parents.

  “She wasn’t alone,” Joey said. “I was with her. I held her when she took her last breath, and I told her I was there with her.”

  The mom stopped sobbing. She was an elegant lady, not much makeup but what was there was done just right. Her head was held slightly aloft, a dignified bearing.

  She reached out a quivering hand and took Joey’s gently, clasping it across the tops of her knuckles. She gave Joey’s hand an emphatic little squeeze, and Joey realized that she would have said something but was too overcome to talk.

  The father said, “Thank you,” but based on the depth in his clear blue eyes it conveyed a lot more than just the words.

  Joey lowered her head and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” which was lame and basic, but she didn’t know what else to say and she was getting very uncomfortable with all this Meaningful Eye Contact, and so she squeezed the mom’s hand back and pulled away and vanished from the candles into the darkness.

  When she got home, Dog the dog came over and nibbled at her hand, which was his way of saying hi, and then she got into bed but didn’t lie down. She just sat and pulled her knees into her chest.

  She thought about the mom and dad at the hospital when Becca was born. How they’d probably held her in the nursery or whatever. And figured out how to feed her, and change a diaper, and do that swaddle thing parents do. And how they’d been there when she’d taken her first step. Maybe her mom sat in the station wagon after she’d dropped her off at preschool for the first time and cried. Maybe her dad had taught her to throw a baseball the right way. They’d been there for her high-school graduation and probably helped her pick her major. And they probably had hopes and dreams for her. A first job in marketing or whatever. A wedding one day, with a father-daughter dance where they’d both cry. And a baby.

  She’d had all that.

  What was it like to have all that?

  Joey would never know.

  What was it like to give all that?

  To give all that and wind up standing in front of Boyer Hall nineteen years in with a bunch of votive candles and your heart in pieces all around you.

  Joey’s breathing got weird, sort of jerky, and then her lips started to tremble and she tipped her forehead to her kneecaps. There were tears running down her nose, and she couldn’t even pretend she wasn’t crying because she wasn’t in the shower.

  It took her a while, but she found her yoga breath, evening herself out until she loosened the clog in her windpipe, until she could inhale again, until she felt like she might not die of sadness.

  Then she picked up her phone and speed-dialed pretty much the only number she ever called.

  He picked up on a half ring.

  “X,” she said, and her voice was all wrong and her lips were quivering and she couldn’t stop them, not this time. “You can come over now. If you want.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m right outside.”

  Read on for a sneak peek of

  Prodigal Son

  Coming from Minotaur Books in 2021

  Copyright © Gregg Hurwitz

  Chapter 1

  A New Brand of Danger

  A stir moves through the Pride House Group Home, and seconds later adolescent faces pig against the muggy front window. Evan, at twelve, still has not hit his growth spurt. He jockeys for position and loses, Charles Van Sciver’s elbow knocking him to the rear of the pack. A tiny gap opens between Tyrell and Jamal, and Evan catches a fleeting glimpse of a slender man disappearing around the fence of the cracked basketball courts across the street. The conversation wafts back at him.

  “Well? Was that the guy?”

  “I dunno, Charles. Looks like him.”

  “Real helpful, shitbird.”

  The herd is unsupervised, which is never good. Papa Z, the sturdy Polish-American house father, has retired to the bathroom with the Baltimore Sun. The fact that it’s a Sunday edition, paired with his chronic and oft-referenced constipation, means he could be missing for hours.

  Van Sciver leads the way, naturally, as they spill out of their gone-to-hell row house in the shadow of the high-rise Lafayette Courts projects. They reach the asphalt park and spread out, only seven kids today because Danny got yanked into juvie and Andre’s been missing since Friday, no doubt on another fantasy quest looking for the parents he never knew. Nothing to see but brick and concrete, sweaty in the August humidity, and the usual junkies and corner boys. Cookie-cutter row houses stare back from all sides like crooked teeth.

  “I swear it was him again,” Tyrell says.

  The boys are adrenalized by the Mystery Man’s reappearance. He materializes at intervals, eyeing the boys as they strut and roughhouse in the park, the sun glinting off his gold watch. Masked by black Ray-Bans, he smokes through his pack with conveyor-belt efficiency, and when he finally moves, he walks at a leisurely pace, his fingers skating along the chain-link. The theories are endless—he’s a weenie-wagger; he’s a real-estate tycoon from Streeterville looking to adopt; he’s a cannibal who subsists on young flesh.

  Van Sciver circles them up. “Get over here. Everyone over here!”

  The blue bandanna is cinched around his forehead as always, his reddish blond bangs falling over the band of fabric. He’s a head taller than everyone except Ramón, but Ramón’s built like a skeleton so the height doesn’t get him much respect. Van Sciver wears a sleeveless Washington Redskins shirt to show off his biceps, which bulge enough to have grooves in them already. His upper lip sports a few scraggly hairs and a dried smear of the protein muscle drink he downs religiously every morning, mixed powder from the canister he painstakingly saves up for each month, the canister the other kids dare not touch.

  Though he’s just two years older than Evan, they might as well be different species. They’ve tangled only twice, Van Sciver bloodying Evan’s nose when Evan stood up to him for cheating at blackjack and splitting his lip for backing Tyrell, whose sister is a whore but who probably doesn’t need to be reminded of it as often as Van Sciver thinks he does. Van Sciver came into the home when his dad got nailed for a bank heist, which makes him royalty in this zip code. A few coveted photographs and a yellowed newspaper clipping confirm his provenance.

  Evan on the other hand is without the benefit of a rousing lineage. He simply appeared like something mythical—Moses in a basket of pitch-darkened bulrushes, Athena springing fully formed from the brow of Zeus. From various social workers, he’d gleaned only the barest facts about his origin. That his birth mother had traveled from out of state to turn him over for adoption in Maryland when he was six days old. That his first adoptive mother had been debilitated by a series of strokes she’d kept secret, right up until she and her overwhelmed husband had dropped Evan back into the system. Since Evan’s birth mother had retained the right to select the adoptive family, his fate was frozen while social services tried to locate her. But young women who travel out of state to relinquish newborns don’t want to be identified, let alone found. By the time the bureaucracy had unsnarled itself sufficiently to declare him “abandoned,” he’d knocked around a series of homes. Even by the time he was four years old, his face had grown guarded, no longer a blank slate upon which a couple could project their dreams. He had a whiff of inferiority about him, another kid fit for the damaged-goods bin.

  Papa Z’s group home is the latest stop on the merry-go-round. Five to fifteen kids on perennial rotation, graduating to trade school or jail or jobs involving wrenches and name-patch coveralls. The choices are few, the outcomes predetermined, the tracks laid pointing to a dismal future. That is what is so intriguing about the Mystery Man and his gold watch, no matter how awful his intentions may be. He does not belong to this world, to these city blocks. He represents not just a new brand of danger but
a new road to a new place, and any route out of East Baltimore is a good one.

  Van Sciver says, “I talked to Eddie in Paco’s garage who talked to his cousin who said the Mystery Man takes kids and turns them into something.”

  Turns them into something. But what? The only point of reference Evan has for this comes from the army recruiting office across from the arcade in the mall. In between rounds checking the video-game change slots for forgotten quarters, he and Tyrell watch the slouchy teenagers go through that glass door bearing the decal of the American flag. They always come out a little straighter.

  They come out men.

  Ramón’s voice cuts through Evan’s reverie. “Turns them into sex-slave dicksuckers,” he says, and a few kids risk snickers.

  But Van Sciver continues, undeterred. “Eddie’s cousin? He said he knew a guy came up in a Westside home—New Beginnings?—and that guy said the Mystery Man picked another kid, the best kid, out of the group. The tallest. The fastest. The strongest. And that kid? One day he just vanished.” He draws out the pause, the boys huddling closer, still breathing audibly from their dash across the street. Now it’s no longer a story but an urban legend, a campfire ghost story, and somehow that makes it more real. Evan senses some dark truth in the spaces between the lies. Van Sciver has let the cliffhanger linger long enough. Conspiratorially, he looks left, right, then back at the group. “Four years later he came back. For a day.”

  A block or two over, a car is blaring Run-DMC with the bass cranked up high. The sound fades. Tyrell’s sneaker scrapes the asphalt as he leans in even closer. “And?”

  “He was built,” Van Sciver says. “Muscles like this. And badass. Had a scar across his cheek. And a Porsche.”

  The details are delicious, tantalizing. Evan’s stomach pitches with excitement, as if he’s in roller-coaster free fall.

  A wino shuffles by tangentially, and Van Sciver shoots him a hostile glare. “Get the fuck outta here, Horace.” Back to his captive crowd. “This guy, he said he went to a house—best house ever. A real home. Hot meals three times a day and Nintendo and a pool. You get your own room. Said they trained him.”