White Cat (4 page)

“Yeah, because you just want to keep taking our money,” says Rahul, but he smiles when he says it.

I shrug my shoulders. There’s no good answer.

“I bet it chews off one of its feet and gets away,” Jeremy says. “That thing is a survivor.”

“So
bet
, Jeremy,” Rahul says. “Put up.”

“I don’t have it on me,” says Jeremy, turning the front pockets of his pants inside out with an exaggerated gesture.

Rahul laughs. “I’ll cover you.”

The mocha burns my throat. I’m hating everything about this conversation. “If you need to collect, Sam’s going to be taking care of things for me.”

They stop their negotiation and look across the room at Sam. He’s sitting at the table in front of a pile of graph paper, painting a lead figurine. Next to him Jill Pearson-White rolls strange-sided dice and pumps her fist into the air.

“You trust him with our money?” Rahul asks.

“I trust him,” I say. “And you trust me.”

“You sure we can still trust you? That was some serious
One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s
Nest
–type behavior last night.” Jeremy’s new girlfriend is in drama club, and it shows in his movie references. “And now you’re going away for a while?”

Even with the coffee running in my veins and the long nap this afternoon, I’m tired. And I’m sick of explaining about the sleepwalking. No one believes me anyway. “That’s personal,” I say, and then tap the part of the envelope sticking out of my pocket. “This is professional.”

That night, lying in the dark and looking up at the ceiling, I’m not sure the sugar and caffeine I’ve gulped will be enough. There is no way they’ll ever let me back into Wallingford if I sleepwalk again, so I don’t want to risk dozing off. I can hear the dog outside the door, its toenails clicking across the wood planks of the hallway before it settles into a new spot with a soft thud.

I keep thinking about Philip. I keep thinking about how, unlike Barron, he hasn’t looked me in the eyes since I was fourteen. He never even lets me play with his son. Now I am going to have to stay in a house with him until I can figure my way back to school.

“Hey,” Sam says from the other bed. “You’re creeping me out, staring at the ceiling like that. You look dead. Unblinking.”

“I’m blinking.” I keep my voice low. “I don’t want to fall asleep.”

He rustles his covers, turning onto his side. “How come? You afraid you’re going to—”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Oh.” I’m glad I can’t see his expression in the darkness.

“What if you did something so terrible that you didn’t want to face anyone who knew about it?” My voice is so soft that I’m not even sure he can hear me. I don’t know what made me say it. I never talk about stuff like that, and certainly not with Sam.

“You
did
try to kill yourself?”

I guess I should have seen that coming, but I didn’t. “No,” I say. “Honest.”

I imagine him weighing possible responses, and I wish I could take back the question. “Okay. This terrible thing. Why did I do it?” he asks finally.

“You don’t know,” I say.

“That doesn’t make sense. How can I not know?” The way we’re talking reminds me of one of Sam’s games.
You reach a crossroads and there’s a small twisty path going toward the mountains. The wide path seems to run in the direction of town. Which way do you go?
Like I’m a character he’s trying to play and he doesn’t like the rules.

“You just don’t. That’s the worst part. It’s not something you want to believe you’d ever do. But you did.” I don’t like the rules either.

Sam leans back against the pillows. “I guess I’d start with that. There must be a reason. If you don’t figure out why, you’ll probably do it again.”

I stare up into the darkness and wish that I wasn’t so tired. “It’s hard to be a good person,” I say. “Because I already know I’m not.”

“Sometimes,” Sam says, “I can’t tell when you’re lying.”

“I never lie,” I lie.

*   *   *

After not sleeping all night, I’m pretty dazed in the morning. When Valerio bangs on the door, I answer, fresh from a cold shower that jolted me awake enough to put on some clothes. He looks relieved to find me alive and in my room. Next to Valerio stands my brother Philip. His expensive mirrored sunglasses are pushed up onto his slicked-back hair, and a gold watch flashes on his wrist. Philip’s tanned skin makes
his teeth look whiter when he smiles.

“Mr. Sharpe, the board of trustees talked to the school’s legal team, and they want me to communicate to you that if you want to come back to school, you need to be evaluated by a physician, and that physician must be able to assure the school that nothing like the incident that took place the night before last will happen again. Do you understand me?”

I open my mouth to say that I do, but my brother’s gloved hand on my arm stops me.

“You ready?” Philip asks lightly, still smiling.

I shake my head, gesturing around me at the lack of any bags, the scattered schoolbooks, the unmade bed. Yeah, sure, Philip has finally shown up, but it would be nice if he’d asked me if I’m all right. I almost fell off a roof. Clearly something is wrong with me.

“Need some help?” Philip offers, and I wonder if Valerio notices the edge in his voice. In the Sharpe family the worst thing you can do is be vulnerable in front of a mark. And everyone who isn’t us is a mark.

“I’m good,” I say, grabbing a canvas bag out of the closet.

Philip turns to Valerio. “I really appreciate you looking after my brother.”

This so surprises the hall master that, for a moment, he doesn’t seem to know what to say. I guess that few people consider calling the local volunteer firemen to drag a kid off a roof as great care. “We were all shocked when—”

“The important thing,” Philip interrupts smoothly, “is that he’s okay.”

I roll my eyes as I shove stuff into the bag—dirty clothes,
iPod, books, homework stuff, my little glass cat, a flash drive I keep all my reports on—and try to ignore their conversation. I’m just going to be gone a couple of days. I don’t need much.

On the way out to the car, Philip turns to me. “How could you be so stupid?

I shrug, stung in spite of myself. “I thought I grew out of it.”

Philip pulls out his key fob and presses the remote to unlock his Mercedes. I slide into the passenger side, brushing coffee cups off the seat and onto the floor mat, where crumpled printouts from MapQuest soak up any spilled liquid.

“I hope you mean sleepwalking,” Philip says, “since you obviously didn’t grow out of stupid.”

CHAPTER THREE

I PUSH BRUSSELS SPROUTS around my plate and listen to my nephew scream from his high chair until Maura, Philip’s wife, gives him some frozen plastic thing to bite. The skin around Maura’s eyes is dark as a bruise. At twenty-one, she looks old.

“I put some blankets on the pullout couch in the office,” she says. Behind her are grease-spattered cabinets and paper-strewn laminate countertops. I want to tell her that she doesn’t need to worry about me on top of everything else.

“Thanks,” I say instead, because the blankets are already in the office and I don’t want to rock the boat of Philip’s hos
pitality by seeming ungrateful. I don’t, for instance, want to point out that the kitchen is too warm, almost suffocating. It reminds me of the holidays, when the oven has been on all day. And that makes me think about our father sitting at the dinner table, smoking long, thin cigarillos that yellowed his fingertips, while the turkey cooked. Sometimes, on bad days, when I really miss him, I’ll buy cigarillos and burn them in an ashtray.

Right now, though, all I miss is Wallingford and the person I could pretend to be when I was there.

“Grandad is coming tomorrow,” Philip says. “He wants you to go over to the old house and help him clean it out. He says he wants it all fixed up for Mom, when she gets out.”

“I don’t think that’s what
she
wants,” I say. “She doesn’t like people messing with her stuff.”

He sighs. “Tell that to him.”

“I don’t want to go,” I say. Philip means the house we grew up in—a big old place stuffed with the many things our parents accumulated. No garage sale was left unplundered as they grifted their way across the country each summer, while we kids stayed down in the Pine Barrens with Grandad. By the time dad died, the junk was so piled up that there were tunnels instead of rooms.

“Then don’t,” Philip says, and for a moment I actually think he’s going to look me in the eye, but he addresses my collar instead. “Mom can take care of herself. She always has. I doubt she’s even going back to that dump when she finishes her sentence.”

Mom and Philip have been on the outs since the trial, when he reluctantly bullied witnesses to help her defense team. Phil
ip’s a physical worker—a body worker—who can break a leg with the brush of his pinkie. I don’t think he forgave Mom for being convicted despite him.

Plus the blowback made him pretty sick.

I sigh. Unsaid is where I’m supposed to go if not with Grandad. I very much doubt Philip is planning on letting me stay. “You can tell Grandad I’m only his manservant till I get back in school. And that’ll take me a week, at most.”

“Tell him yourself,” Philip says.

Maura folds her arms across her chest. It’s so strange to see her bare hands that I’m embarrassed. Mom hated gloves at home; she said that families were supposed to trust one another. I guess Philip believes that too. Or something.

It’s different when the hands belong to someone I’m not related to, even if she is my sister-in-law. I try and force my gaze to her collarbone.

“Don’t let him bully you into staying at that creepy place,” Maura tells me.

“We used to live there!” Philip gets up and takes a beer from the fridge. “Anyway, I’m not the one telling him to go.” He pops the top, takes a long swig, and unbuttons the neck of his white dress shirt. I see the necklace of keloids, where his maker cut across his throat to symbolize the death of Philip’s previous life, and then packed the wound with ash until it scarred in a long, swollen line. It looks like a flesh-colored worm coiled above his collarbone. All laborers, minor crime bosses, have them. Just like a rose over the heart showed you were one of the Russian
bratva
, or like a
yakuza
inserts pearls under the skin of his penis for every year in jail. Philip got his
scars three years back; now all he has to do to see people flinch is loosen his collar.

I don’t flinch.

The big six worker families came into power all down the East Coast in the thirties and have remained that way ever since. Nonomura. Goldbloom. Volpe. Rice. Brennan. Zacharov. They control everything, from the cheap and probably fake charms dangling near lighters on convenience store counters, to tarot card readers at malls who offer little curses for twenty extra dollars, to assault and murder done for those who can afford it and know who to pay. And my brother’s one of the people you pay, just like my Grandad was.

Maura looks away from him, gazing dreamily out the windows at the mostly dead stretch of grass outside the apartment. “Do you hear the music? Outside.”

“Cassel wants to stay at the old house,” says Philip with a quick, quelling look in my direction. “And there’s no music, Maura. No music, okay?”

Maura hums a little as she starts collecting the plates.

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

“She’s fine,” says Philip. “She’s tired. She gets tired.”

“I’m going to go do my homework,” I say, and when neither of them stops me, I go upstairs to Philip’s office in the loft. The couch is made up with new sheets, and the blankets she promised are piled on one end, so freshly washed that I smell the laundry detergent. Sitting in the leather chair in front of the desk, I spin around and switch on the computer.

The screen flickers to life, revealing a background screen littered with folders. I open a browser window and check my
email. Audrey sent me a message.

I click so fast that it opens twice.

“Worried about u,” it reads. That’s it. She didn’t even sign her name.

I met Audrey the beginning of freshman year. She usually sat on the cement wall of the parking lot at lunch, drinking coffee and reading old Tanith Lee paperbacks. One time it was
Don’t Bite the Sun
. I’d read it too; Lila had loaned it to me. I told her I liked
Sabella
better.

“That’s because you’re a romantic,” she said. “Guys are romantic—no, really. Girls are pragmatic.”

“That’s not true,” I told her, but sometimes, after we started dating, I wondered if she was right.

It takes me twenty minutes to write back to her: “Home for wk. Looking forward to lotsa daytime tv.” I hope that it conveys the right amount of nonchalance; it certainly took long enough to fake.

Finally, I hit send and groan, feeling stupid all over again.

Most of the rest of my email that isn’t spam are links to the video of me clinging to the Smythe roof that someone already uploaded to YouTube, and a few messages from teachers, giving me the week’s assignments. I take the latter as a sign that all is not lost in terms of getting back into Wallingford, despite the former. I still have last night’s homework to finish too, but before I start, I want to figure out how I’m going to convince the school to forget all about the incident on the roof. After a little bit of Googling, I find two sleep specialists within an hour’s drive. I print out both addresses and save both logos as jpgs on my flash drive. It’s a start. I take it for granted that no
doctor is going to put his reputation on the line to guarantee I won’t sleepwalk again, but I can find a way around that.

I am feeling pretty cocky, so I decide to tackle weaseling out of Grandad’s cleaning plan. I call Barron’s cell. He answers on the second ring, sounding out of breath.

“You busy?” I ask.

“Not too busy for my brother who almost took a nosedive. So, what happened?”

“I had a weird dream and started sleepwalking again. It was nothing, but now I’m stuck at Philip’s mercy until the school realizes that I’m not going to kill myself.” I sigh. Barron and I were on the outs when we were kids, but now he’s practically the only person in my family I can really talk to.