We leave the apartment before Philip or his mother comes home, and when we get to the lobby, there’s a new security guard on duty. This one doesn’t give me a second glance, and this small sign confirms my belief that my decision has the power to remake the world. Even Patrice seems changed. When she pulls up to the curb and we climb into the back seat of her reliable Volvo, her face looks worried, genuinely worried, more like a real parent instead of a reluctant guardian.
“Tristan, your face.” She sighs. “It’s worse than I thought. And Marcus did this to you.”
“How’d you know?”
“Chantal, of all people,” Patrice says as she puts the car in gear and merges into the chain of headlights making its slow way downtown. “That girl is such a chatterbox, and only eight years old, too. I almost scolded her for lying when I remembered that I never saw you on Sunday, not since dinner on Saturday. And then I can’t reach you or Marcus on the phone all day, and I’m going crazy with worry, and then you don’t come home after school. Do you have any idea how scared I was?”
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“I could kill you if I wasn’t so worried about Marcus doing the job for me.” I know that this is the way Patrice talks, that she doesn’t mean it literally, but that statement produces a chilly space in the conversation when it lands. Izzy flicks her eyes in my direction but stays quiet, waiting for me to take the lead. When I rush into an explanation of my plan to get a scholarship to Westcroft, it’s half to chase the silence out of the car, half because I know if I don’t say the words now, I’ll chicken out. I try to describe to Patrice how good Westcroft is for chess, how this is a great opportunity, infusing the words with more enthusiasm than I feel.
Patrice, predictably, is less than thrilled.
“Something like this, it’s not up to you alone,” she says. “This was never the plan when you came to live with me. Not to mention that Marcus is family. You have to confront problems when they confront you.”
“It’s not only about Marcus.” It’s about solving my own problems without waiting for Patrice to bully Marcus into submission for me, but I don’t say this out loud.
“We’ll see what your father has to say about all this,” Patrice says. But I already know, and maybe she does, too, that I can talk my father into going along with my wishes. For better or worse, he’s always treated me more like an adult than a child.
“And what about Izzy?” Patrice says. “Is she planning to go to the fancy boarding school as well?” Patrice is squeezing the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles look pale and bloodless under the streetlights. We are sailing over the Manhattan Bridge, racing toward the neighborhood faster than I’d like. I wish she wouldn’t talk about Izzy in the third person.
“I’m staying at Sagan,” Izzy says quickly.
“You could go back to Hope Springs,” I say.
“No.”
“You’re not afraid of Marcus, then,” Patrice says. It’s not a question, the way she phrases it, but Izzy ponders it as though it is.
“Sometimes,” she says.
Even in the dim light, I can see that there is grim resolve in Patrice’s face, and maybe some respect for Izzy, too. “Believe me, Marcus won’t give you any trouble. I will see to that.”
Izzy doesn’t respond to this, simply stares out the window at the dark glitter of the East River. I reach for her hand, wanting to close the space between us, and I find it already reaching for mine.
THE ROOK
AS I ANTICIPATED WHEN I SHOWED UP AT HER HOUSE, Izzy is missing from school after the fight. No one can tell me where she is, which isn’t a huge surprise since she hasn’t bothered making many friends here other than me and T. I go to school on Monday, since Mai has ceased to be fooled by the many illnesses I’ve been claiming lately, and since I can’t exactly pull out my tarot deck and do a full reading in the middle of class, I start seeing signs everywhere I look. The lunch line features apple crisp, Izzy’s favorite, even though it isn’t a Friday; does it mean something? Ms. Rathscott slips and calls me by Izzy’s name in Government class; is she channeling something out of alignment? I test the universe, making up my own signs. If the library door stays shut until I’ve walked past, she is safe (it does). If my notoriously crappy locker opens on the first try, she isn’t mad at me (it doesn’t). It’s a day of endless small agonies, death by a thousand superstitions.
And then, she comes back the very next day, as if nothing has happened. She sits right next to me in Trigonometry, and I try to ask her about T, about how badly he’s hurt, but I keep getting the evil eye from Mr. Mashariki, and Izzy only nods in the direction of the teacher and shrugs and goes back to doing the assigned problems. The whole day I get all kinds of negative energy swirling around her. She isn’t giving me the cold shoulder, not exactly, but it’s like she is occupying a different mental plane than me.
At lunch, I figure I’ll get the whole story, and I do, sort of. She says that T is gone for good, that he’s transferring to another school, effective immediately, and though they are still together, they’ll see each other much less.
“You know, I’m sorry I got you messed up in this,” I say, needing to apologize for something, even if I can’t bear the thought of telling her about Frodo. “Really. I wish I’d been smart enough to keep all of this from happening.”
“There’s nothing you could have done. All those astrology books and tarot cards—don’t you believe in fate, Brianna?”
I used to think that no one understood fate more than I did. Fate was a map of a place called the future, a land that already existed, and all you had to do was learn to read that map and connect the dots. Now I’m not so sure. I think that fate might be more like a very intricately choreographed dance; it’s set up in advance, but it’s up to you to hit the right moves, and I’ve been missing so many of the steps lately.
THE QUEEN
BECAUSE I KNEW TRISTAN WOULD NEVER LEAVE IF I didn’t, I put on a brave show about Marcus. Patrice would follow through, I told Tristan; she would insist that Marcus needed to stay away from me. Besides, if he was going to lash out in anger again, Tristan would be the likely target. Brianna agreed with this prediction, though she said that maybe I should keep my distance until Venus moved out of Scorpio. I was perfectly happy following her advice, because in actual fact, I was scared of everything I didn’t know about Marcus and some of what I did.
But for a few days, it seemed like this détente might actually hold. Tristan had already enrolled at Westcroft. Marcus had been conspicuously missing from school. I had run into several of his friends, but they did little more than shoot me dirty looks. One of them, probably Frodo, started a rumor on Snapchat that I was pregnant with Tristan’s baby and that was why he was sent away, but bookish little me was of limited interest to the high school gossip mill and the story burned out almost immediately.
Then, one evening, I rounded a corner on my way to the public library, and there was Marcus, leaning against the fence, talking to a kid I’d never seen before. He made eye contact with me, murmured something to his companion, and the kid disappeared in an instant. I tried to turn down the volume on my thoughts when they shrieked that Marcus was clearing the scene of possible witnesses. I’m pretty sure that my knees actually knocked together in fear, something I thought was only a saying until that moment.
“Izzy,” he said.
“Marcus.” At least, I think I said that. I was having a hard time making my voice work properly. We eyed each other, waiting to see who would speak next. He wasn’t wearing a winter coat, only a sweatshirt, and I considered asking him if he was cold, even though that was the least of our concerns.
“You want to walk somewhere?” he asked.
I wasn’t going to go wandering through the night with Marcus when no one knew where I was. “I’m heading to the library,” I told him, nodding at the building. “You could come in with me.”
“You mean you haven’t already read every book in there?” He
gave me that trademark smile. No wonder everyone was charmed by him. When I didn’t smile back, he swept his arm toward the door and said, “After you.”
The mind will play all sorts of tricks on you if you let it, and for a nauseating second, I was certain he was going to actually stab me in the back. But then I gained control of myself and walked into the library and Marcus followed me, no knife thrusts involved.
I picked up the books I’d reserved from the hold shelf and pointed to a line of small tables at the back of the nonfiction section. My brain was churning, trying to figure out what I should say, but Marcus beat me to it, speaking up almost before we fully slid onto the scarred wooden chairs.
“You know, Izzy, some people might call me soft after what happened. Some people might think that if a guy’s cousin is sneaking with his girl, he should do a lot more than what I did to T.”
I could feel heat flickering in my cheeks, and it took me a moment to realize that it was anger rushing in to mix with my fear. It warmed up my vocal cords, loosened my tongue. “Some people? Like the people who follow you around telling you what you want to hear?”
“A lot of people, I’d bet.”
“Interesting. Of course, it doesn’t really apply here. I was never your girl.”
Marcus looked startled by this. Maybe he was accustomed to hearing a softened version of the truth from all the people who were afraid of him.
“Damn. That’s cold, Izzy.”
“At what point did I do anything to indicate that I was your girlfriend, Marcus?” As the words slipped past my lips, I remembered the party, the Final Frontier, Brianna’s face in the bathroom. I remembered how eager I’d been in the alley to say anything that would keep Tristan safe. I swallowed, wishing my mouth wasn’t so dry and sticky.
“It’s like that, then?” Marcus shook his head. “It still doesn’t explain why T had to lie to my face about it.”
Why had we lied about it for so long? It was hard to remember. It all seemed so silly when I was looking across the table at Marcus, trying to justify everything that had happened for the past few weeks. Love is madness, they say, and I had to admit we’d been acting madly. But we weren’t the only ones. I thought of my conversation with Tristan over Skype earlier that day, thought of how his lip hadn’t fully healed, how the bruises around his eye had turned a sick green.
“You’re not an easy person to talk to,” I said, “and you like it that way. If you act like people should be afraid to tell you something, they’re not going to tell you.”
“Hold on. You’re going to act like this is my fault?”
“It’s your fault that you’re a bully. It’s your fault that people are afraid to cross you.”
“No.” Marcus shoved his chair back from the table, crossed his arms. “If people are afraid, that’s on them, not me. I can’t be responsible for the way every crazy person feels.”
“The thing is, Marcus, people aren’t crazy to be afraid of you. You beat him up! You beat up your own cousin.”
“You think I’ve never taken a punch? And I didn’t run away to some rich-kid school.”
I could see two of the librarians shooting perturbed glances our way on account of our raised voices. I leaned across the table, prepared to quietly lay down the winning card. “Tristan and I saw you that night in the playground. Buying… something.”
Marcus leaned in close again. I was having a hard time reading his expression. “What are you talking about?” he whispered.
“A gun. Let’s just say it. You were buying a gun.”
“What?” He made a strange noise, a sort of choking snort. With a start, I recognized the emotion playing over his face. He was scared. “You gotta be kidding me. Keep your voice down when you’re spreading lies like that.”
“So what was it, then?”
“What was what? You’re not even talking sense.”
I felt thrown off-balance, as though my foot had missed the bottom stair, and I flailed to regain my certainty. “You were in the playground. It was you. You were with two older guys, and Tristan saw them, too.” I saw some connection snap together behind Marcus’s eyes and felt a moment of relief. “Who were they?”
“It’s your business?”
“After everything that’s happened, yeah, maybe it’s my business.”
“It’s like this: Somebody asked if I could find them the new iPhone on the cheap. And those were the only guys who could get it for me.” Marcus gripped the sides of the table as if he were on a ride that was making him dizzy. I couldn’t tell anymore if he was scared because I’d gotten too close to the truth or had landed so very far from it. “Shit, Izzy.”
I closed my eyes, trying to remember. The metallic glint I’d seen. It couldn’t have been from a phone. Or maybe it could have? “You mean it was stolen.”
“I think even you know there’s a difference between a hot cell phone and an unlicensed weapon. Who do you think I am?”
It was a good question, actually. I’d gotten used to thinking of Marcus as some hybrid between criminal mastermind and supernatural bogeyman. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“You know what, don’t answer that,” he said. “I think I know the answer.”
He slipped away from the table and out of the library so quickly that I had to question whether he’d ever been there in the first place.
When I walked out of the doors after him, I was so distracted that I forgot to check out the books that had been on hold and set off the alarm at the door, further annoying the librarians. I clawed through my bag to find them and mumbled an apology, but my mind was still with Marcus. He was arrogant, hotheaded, threatening. He acted like the neighborhood belonged to him. He had hurt Tristan, physically and emotionally, and had maybe considered hurting him worse. All of that was still true.
But what about me? Marcus and Tristan had been getting along pretty well until I barged into their lives. At the most basic level, I was the reason they were no longer speaking. I had also lied to my parents, jeopardized my friendship with Brianna, grown estranged from my twin brother, and discounted the fact that Marcus might have had real human emotions. Even the best thing in my life, the love between Tristan and me, I had finagled into existence with an act of spectacular deception and, some might say, destruction.
The thing is, we get used to spinning a narrative in which we’re the heroes. If we do something good, it’s because we’re good; if we do something bad, it’s an excusable offense, and we expect allowances to be made. But that doesn’t change the fact that sometimes we do good and sometimes we do bad. That none of us is blameless.
That’s what I thought about on the walk home, shouldering the guilt along with my library books. But it wasn’t until later, when I was lying in bed alone, that dread began to press down on me. If you’d asked me at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to describe clearly what was causing that suffocating feeling. With the gift of hindsight, though, I can guess: It was the first small recognition that fate was far more complicated than my love for Tristan and bigger than our troubles with Marcus. That the seeds of pain are sown into our fate before we realize, and none of us, in the end, survives it.
THE ROOK
I GET DRESSED IN MY OLD-FASHIONED FORTUNE-TELLER’S costume: a full skirt that belongs to my mother, a frilled long-sleeved shirt, big hoop earrings, and a scarf pulled over my hair and knotted at the nape of my neck. A crystal ball, even though it’s not a real one. It’s Halloween, All Hallows’ Eve, the night when the spirits are up and walking. An important day, even if I’ve been too busy to give it much thought this year.
“If it isn’t Miss Cleo herself,” Hector says to me when I walk downstairs. He’s setting up the tables in the café, even though it’s early still and we don’t open until lunch. Playing the good son, I guess, trying to get Mai and Pai off his back.
“Who’s Miss Cleo?” I ask, and Hector shakes his head, says something about kids these days and offers to give me a ride to school. Playing the good brothe
r, too, though I don’t know why. I am running late, though, so I accept, and we listen to “Thriller” twice in a row on the way there, and I remember when Hector and I found the video online when we were younger and played it over and over again and learned the whole dance from start to finish, and my mood actually starts to lift a little.
It plummets again when we pull up in front of the school and I see Marcus standing there, clearly waiting for us. It was Marcus, probably, that inspired this ride, not brotherly love, and (at the risk of sounding like my parents) I don’t like the idea of Hector and Marcus doing business so close to the school, where charges would be much worse if they ever got caught. Hector rolls up and Marcus leans his elbows on the door, face framed in the open window.
“You’re probably not going to like this,” Hector says. “That’s why I came down here to tell you in person.” Marcus makes a sour face, and my mind spins, wondering what Hector is up to here. “I’m getting out of the game, man. I’ve been doing this shit too long.”
This is news to me, and it must be news to Marcus, too, because he stands up straight for a moment, and all I can see through the window is his arms held slack at his sides. Then his face reappears inside the car, but it’s not angry; in fact, he looks sort of downcast, like Hector told him he didn’t want to be his friend anymore.
“What do you have going instead?” he asks.
“I’ve had this idea cooking for a while. My own store. I’ve got some saved up and my pops is helping me get a business loan. I can tell you more when I’ve got the details locked down.”
“You sure about this?”
“Yeah, man. Something I gotta do.”
Marcus nods, exhales slowly through puffed-out cheeks. “A’ight. Anything changes, you know where to find me.”
“No doubt,” Hector says, then turns to me. “Brianna, you gonna get out of the damn car already or what?”
Izzy + Tristan Page 19
