Keystone (12 page)

“But I don’t have that kind of money!”

“Sounds like she could end up owning…your ball.” Sean grins, tapping his spoon on the lip of his mug. Addo giggles, but Zane shivers like a wet dog.

“Yes,” Ms. Fisk smirks. “May that thought give you nightmares, Mr. Middleditch.”

Feet on the stairs and a one-sided conversation that never takes a breath interrupt us. Zane slinks away from the end of the table and Garrett and I follow him.

“You know, I gotta say it, I’m not responsible for this place. It wasn’t up to me and I gotta say, I’m a little disappointed that we’re putting up our best Contego in basements, instead of the palaces I’ve got out there. We’re talking major digs. Saunas, pools, luxury suites. And they’re secluded, really secluded. Isn’t that what we’re shooting for? To keep the Addo out of sight? I gotta say, that’s what I thought we were going for. Not a hole in the ground, right smack in the middle of the next blasted world war.”

The man, who is doing all the talking, steps into the living room first, still complaining over his shoulder to the tiny woman who comes in behind him. He turns and notices all of us, standing around the long table, and stops short.

“Gang’s here,” he says, sticking his hands in his pockets. He jingles his loose change as he leans back at the waist, first scoping out the corridor with the swinging doors, and then he leans forward, craning his neck as if it can stretch all the way into the second hallway leading off from the opposite end of the room. “It’s even smaller in here than I thought. Who picked this dump, anyway?”

“Nice to see you could make it, Larson,” Addo appears beside me, sipping his tea. “And even a hundred times nicer to see you, Ruka.”

“You mean,
Madam Neho
,” Ms. Fisk cups Addo’s elbow lightly as she steps up to his side. The Addo just rolls his eyes as an oriental woman steps out from behind Larson and throws her arms around the Addo.

“Good to see you, crazy man, “ she says. “And what relief! I worry we here first and I stuck listen to Larsy blah-blah about real estate more times.”

Larson shakes off the insult with a shrug. “Hey, gotta tell you, there’s opportunities out there. I just want you to know what you’re missing.”

“And you need to get you head out of real estates and back where it belong,” Mrs. Neho says.

“Don’t know what you’re crabbing about, Ruka. Real estate’s been a gold mine for the community. Can’t argue with that.” Larson grunts and swings around to look at the Addo. “You never said whose place this is, Addo.”

“No, I’m sure I didn’t.” Addo grins into his cup and his eyes travel past our shoulders to the staircase. “Oh look. Good to see you, girls.”

I turn to see three girls who have materialized in the living room. I didn’t hear them come down the stairs and now they’re standing only a foot away from me. Garrett says hello. Zane just groans.

“Great. It’s the tampon brigade,” Zane says. He leans over to whisper in my ear, “Beware, the evil twin.”

“Evil twin?” I’m sure I heard him wrong. Garrett grabs my hand and pulls me to his side.

“Nalena, this is Deeta, Robin, and hey, Zaneen, who let you in?” Garrett clonks the last girl lightly on the shoulder with a sideways fist.

The first girl, Deeta, I recognize from my history class at Simon Valley High. She’s a girl who always looks shocked, from her eyes to the tips of her hair. It explodes out from the bottom of her disheveled bob like static-zapped, scarecrow fingers.

What I remember of Deeta Houle is that she always sat on the opposite side of the room in History, in the front left corner, and spent most of our class time leaning off her desk with her hand up, desperate for the teacher to call on her. And Deeta, pretty much without fail, always had the wrong answer. But even with the whole class groaning every time the teacher called on her, Deeta never seemed discouraged. She smiles at me now, like we’re best friends, and I smile back.

The second girl is kind of familiar too, even though she was always as hard to recognize as my own shadow in a crowd. Robin Middleditch traveled in the black-clothed Goth group at Simon Valley and wasn’t in any of my classes, so all I knew of her was what Head Cheerleader Jen thought of her.

“Robbie-Might-As-Well-Be-Bobby,” Jen had pointed Robin out to me in the hallway. It was during the couple of weeks when I was still the new girl and Jen and I were actually friends. “She’s the twin’s cousin, but she doesn’t look anything like them. She looks like a guy if you ask me. And she lives with them, so she’s got to be one of the Middleditch’s shotgun babies, if you know what I mean. I say she’s 100% freak monkey.”

After, when I became one of Jen’s freak monkeys too, I tried to smile at Robin whenever I passed her in the halls. She never smiled back. Now, her one visible eye blinks at me through the ring of her smoky make up and she pans down the length of my dress to my bare feet.

“Where’s your shoes?” she asks and then she looks away before I answer.

“My fault,” Garrett chuckles. “I hid her glass slippers.”

The third girl is Zaneen. I recognize her the same way you recognize a face you’ve seen at a mall or in a yearbook, but not from my classes. The girl is a total duplicate of Zane, but with longer hair, tighter jeans, and awesome, rock star hair that is white blond on top and neon pink at the bottom.

“Nice to meet you,” I say to her. “You’re Zane’s twin, right?”

“Belladonna,” she tips her chin as she says it. Zane snorts behind us.

“Oh my god…” he groans. “Just shut up already, Neener. You’re not some cryptic little flower. The Addo only gave you the day-pass into the Ianua so you could watch Iris while we get things straightened out. Don’t get nuts with it.”

She’s not Contego, but she might as well be. She’s Zane’s sister. Zaneen hits him with a laser beam glare.

“Shut up, jock strap,” she says, but she still blushes. But, on Zaneen, blushing makes her look like she’s just been kissed, instead of totally embarrassed. There’s something about her that is delicate and something that wants to be dangerous, like the busted neck of a champagne bottle, and I get uneasy watching how her eyes rest on Garrett’s face when he smiles at me. She seems to be calculating how close Garrett’s hand swings to mine.

Her blush drains when she looks back at me and then she leans in close and whispers, “I grew up with the Reese’s. They’re like my brothers…except that I like
them
.” She sneers at Zane and he just snorts back at her, but then her eyes run back over me like a wire brush. “I’m
very
protective of my brothers.”

I’m not sure what to say to her then. Part of me feels like I’ve got to give Zaneen proof of how much I care about Garrett- how my whole body turns to lightening when he’s around and how his voice puts something back together in me. Like she should know how wide open I am with him and how I would do anything to make him happy. And there’s a part of me that wants her to know that she doesn’t have to worry about protecting Garrett. I can be protective enough for both of us.

“You know, Nali’s a Contego, right?” Zane drawls. “Which means that she could relocate your little Belladonna butt faster than a weed whacker.”

Zaneen rolls her eyes at her brother, but watches Garrett’s every move as he reaches for me. He pulls me close, against his ribs and I guess he’s decided to take advantage of the whole window in the training schedule after all. I’m glad he does. The arc of electricity that fires through me erases all of Zaneen’s sour glares. I melt against Garrett’s side instead.

“I’m irresistible,” Garrett says with a laugh.

“Of course you are,” Zaneen says, but it’s pretty obvious, even before she looks up at Garrett and her smile opens wide, that Zaneen and I will never be friends. And I get a wide-screen idea of what kind of enemies we’ll be the moment she reaches up and touches a lock of Garrett’s hair as she giggles and whispers to him, “It’s not like it’s ever been a secret.”

“That’s hysterical,” Zane pops up between his sister and Garrett. “Because I would bet Nali’s thinkin’ the same dang thing.”

That’s when it hits me exactly what Zaneen is. She’s another Jen. But she’s a grazillion times worse. I’ll probably never even see Jen now that she and Garrett’s senior year is over, but with Zaneen and I, we’re both tied to the Ianua and that’s never going to change.

A heavy thing sinks in my stomach and drags down my heart.

I didn’t mean to believe that being Contego would be some magical thing that would make everything easier…but I did. I hoped that being one of the Ianua would mean that I belonged, that I’d have friends and a feeling of family. But now, with Zaneen glaring at me, I realize it’s not what I hoped at all. We are going to be enemies, fighting for all the same things.

I glance at Garrett and his brow jumps once, making a joke of it all, just for me.

Deeta touches my arm and says, “Zane said you’re Garrett’s Vieo. Congratulations.”

“You are?” Zaneen’s smile droops as she looks from me, to Garrett, to Zane, and back again.

“Um,” I still have no real idea what a Vieo is, even though Deeta says it the same way Zane did, as if it’s something really good. I think it means I’m Garrett’s girlfriend, but I don’t know for sure. “I don’t know what that means…”

Zane lassos Robin’s neck with one arm, pushing his nose through her hair and into her ear. “Remember when we were Vieos?”

“Ugh.” Robin shoves him away. “Get off me.”

Zane pulls his head away with a laugh. “That’s why,” he says to me, “this one’s my wife.”

I’m sure my eyes bug out a little. He doesn’t seem to be joking, but he’s got to be. They just graduated. They couldn’t have been married while they were still in school. I think it’s against school rules. I don’t even think it’s even legal. I’m pretty sure I heard him wrong, especially when Robin lands a fist in Zane’s gut and he doubles over with an
oomph.
He lets go of Robin, but he’s still laughing as he snaps his jaws at her.

“This one’s vicious,” he says. Robin slaps him and Zaneen turns her back on me and walks away. She goes all the way around the table to the other side and drags out a chair. Zane leans over the table and opens his mouth to say something to her, but Robin pulls him back.

“Lay off Neenie,” she says. “You know she’s broken hearted.”

“Like it was
ever
going to happen,” Zane counters, but he lets it go. We all look anywhere else we can, besides at each other for a moment. And then Robin says she’s grabbing a seat, but she grabs Deeta’s arm instead and drags her around the end of the table to the chairs beside Zaneen. The hope I had leaks away as I look at the three girls, lined up across from me. I could’ve used some friends.

I lean over to ask Garrett if he and Zaneen ever dated, if Zane and Robin are really married, and what a Vieo is exactly, but when Garrett ducks his head down to listen to me, the feeling of his hair on my cheek and the water-wood-citrus scent of him makes all of my questions, all of my worry, all of the other people in the room, disappear. He waits for me to say something and when I don’t, he finally pulls away and gives me a little grin, like he gets it.

And while we’re standing there, the room gets even fuller. One small crowd after another come down the stairs, until we’re all shoulder-to-shoulder. But no matter how full the room gets, the conversations are all just murmurs. There won’t be enough chairs.

Principal VanWeider, my Principal from Simon Valley High, is one of the last ones in and the only person I recognize right away. When he appears, he walks right up to Garrett and gives him one of those quick kind of tapping hugs.

When he steps away, he says, “I am so sorry that we lost him, Garrett. I wish things would’ve happened differently. There were just too many of them.”

“We were outnumbered,” Garrett says with a short nod. “I know you did everything you could. I wouldn’t have made it out without you.”

Principal VanWeider doesn’t seem relieved. I think of all the times that he called me into his office to apologize for my nickname being carved in desks and tattooed across posters and announced on the PA system. Principal VanWeider was always nice to me, although he could never catch whoever else was antagonizing me, so he spent a lot of time apologizing over and over again for the behavior of the other students. I usually ended up feeling worse about him apologizing than for what actually happened.

His gaze shifts to me and he takes my hand, giving it a squeeze as he frowns his sympathy. “And hello, Ms. Maxwell. I’m so sorry to hear of your loss. Your mother was an asset. That’s why I suspected I’d find you here.”

“You did?”

“Certainly,” he says. “Once I viewed Ms. Puguli’s tape of the confrontation in the second floor lavatory, I had a good idea that you were one of us.”

I wince, remembering how Cora hid in a bathroom stall and stood on the toilet seat, just so she could record Jen and Regina on her cell phone, as they tried to beat me into oblivion. And I remember most, how they couldn’t touch me. It was my first fight, using the abilities I didn’t even know I had, and I’d won, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

“Well, it’s very good to see you.” Principal VanWeider gives me a polite grin before he turns back to Garrett. “I was quite surprised to see your older brother and younger sister here, Garrett. Oh yes, and Zane’s twin sister is here too. Have they all been Impressioned?”