“Sounds like Eric.”
“He was on your crew, right? One of the ones who left you.”
“Yeah. He went with Dylan.”
She nodded in that way she had of not saying anything while trying to make me feel like a bug. I was really starting to hate the bitch. She went on asking questions, going over what had happened, which was a total waste of time. Thanks to her Syndicate connections inside the police department, she was just asking me to repeat stuff she already knew. So did she want to find out if I was going to lie about it? Like I’m that kind of an idiot. Or maybe she just wanted to make me say it all because she knew I’d be pissed off about losing the lair.
She was a hottie, but a real bitch on wheels.
“So what are you boys going to do now?”
I hated the way Vivian called us “boys.” It wasn’t like she was that much older than us. She just did it to put us in our place, to remind us that she was hooked up with the Syndicate and we were still knocking on the door, trying to come up with a pay-off big enough to get in. I needed to get in with them. I needed to get the hell out of this hick town and run with some people who really knew about power and what to do with it.
Tony and I had been trying to find an angle for months, just doing little shit. Our family had connections, my mom, his dad, but both of them had moved to Fairview to try get away from the life. And once you’re out, it’s hard to get back in. We’d tried, and they’d told us we had to prove ourselves. Tony and I had been in a competition to see who could do that first.
And I was doing really well. I was gonna show them that I had leadership quality. I had a crew. We were tight, organized, and they did what I told them to. Little shit yeah, but I had a plan. I was building to something. The bank job was going to be a big payday for me, and that was going to get me noticed.
Until Dylan turned on me and fucked it all up. Tore up my crew and made the bank job impossible. And all because of that little bitch girlfriend of his.
“Marco, you fuck, are you even listening to me?” I really wanted to punch Vivian in that pretty face of hers but I stopped myself. The Syndicate had noticed what we were doing, and now I had to work with her, impress her, if I was ever going to get in with the big guys in Banner.
“I’ll find another place. Something better.” I shrugged like it didn’t matter. “It was time to move on from there anyway.”
“Whatever. Look, you need to get it together and stop fucking up. So far I am not impressed.”
“Last night wasn’t part of the plan. We just happened to run into Joss and we wanted to mess with her. Then when Tony and I weren’t there, things got out of hand. It won’t happen again.”
“Yeah, well, see that it doesn’t.” She signaled to her goons with a jerk of her head. We were well away from the school now, on a side street without any traffic. Richie swung to the curb suddenly. Poe reached across me, popped the door handle, and shoved me out of the car.
I stood there in the middle of the street as it sped away, clenching and unclenching my fists. I wasn’t the one fucking up. It wasn’t my fault Vivian had dragged Tony and me out of there—for no good reason but just to see us run when she called. I’d left those guys with one girl, tied up and blindfolded, and they still couldn’t manage her. It was Joss screwing with my shit all over again. Joss and Dylan. And I wasn’t about to let them get away with it.
* * *
Joss
After school I looked for Dylan. At his locker, as I moved through the halls, and I looked around when I got outside. I was half afraid that I would find him.
“Nope. Never.”
Well what did that mean? That was a joke, right? Right?
I was trying to be understanding about the whole avoidance thing, because, as much as I wanted to see him right now, I was kind of feeling it too. But…grrr.
“There you are!” Kat bumped into me, and she and Heather caught me in a flanking maneuver.
“Wasn’t hiding,” I muttered.
“Imagine that.”
“Wish I’d thought of it.”
“Someone’s in a mood today,” Heather said.
“You know exactly what kind of mood I’m in, and I’ll thank you to keep it to yourself.” Heather always kept stuff to herself, so that was unnecessary. It wasn’t her fault she could hear all my thoughts, and she had really strict rules about how she used her Talent. But I knew she knew that I’d been replaying Dylan’s kiss in my head all afternoon, which made me blush, which made me peevish. Which she also knew, so she could just deal with my mood.
“Dealing!” she said, throwing up her hands in mock surrender.
“Am I missing something?” Kat asked.
“Is that actually possible?” I replied.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “I don’t know what took you so long. Come on. We’re going to the Pit. The guys went on ahead of us, but Matt’s waiting to drive us over.”
“Thanks, but I don’t want pizza. Actually, if we could go someplace else, I’d really like to talk to you guys.”
“She wants to talk? She wants to talk! I am totally missing something. And you know what it is.” Kat reached around behind me to cuff Heather on the back of her head.
“Joss’s mind is a complicated place. I’m not really sure what she wants.”
Oh, nice, Heather. That’s so helpful.
“No problem.”
“Well, as much as I would like to engage in the historic event of you talking voluntarily, we’re going to have to do it at the Pit. My man is waiting for me, and he does not like to be kept waiting.”
I muttered something rude that doesn’t need to be repeated.
“Kiss your boyfriend with that mouth?”
I made a big-eyed shut the hell up face at Heather, but Kat didn’t even seem to notice. She was heading for the twins’ SUV. Well, it would belong to both of them if Maddy could ever pass her road test.
The last thing I wanted to do was hang out at the Pizza Pit with a whole crowd of people. More specifically, I didn’t want to go hang out with Dylan in front of a bunch of people, trying to act like nothing was going on, since I still didn’t know if there was anything going on.
I mean, obviously there was something going on.
“It’ll be fine,” Heather said, as we climbed down from the truck.
“Care to expound?” I asked.
“Can’t.”
“Of course not.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Kat growled. “It drives me nuts when you do that.”
She flounced off into the Pit, which was getting crowded, and plopped herself down in Eric’s lap for a sloppy kiss before sliding off onto the chair he was saving beside him. Dylan was lounging in his long-legged sprawl pose next to Eric, Maddy had the seat next to him. She looked at me when we came in, pointed to her chair and raised her eyebrows like, Want this seat? I shook my head slightly.
I didn’t make eye contact with Dylan. I wasn’t there yet. Heather sat next to Kat, and I took the last chair between her and Elizabeth. And then realized that this put me directly across from Dylan. Damn.
A can of diet slid across the table and bumped my hands. I picked it up and finally looked at him. He was looking at me kind of weird. Part his concerned look, part his don’t be mad look…it was some kind of question, but I didn’t know what it was. And Heather could tell me, because she was sitting right next to me, but she wouldn’t.
“Thanks.” I popped the top and took a swig, because my mouth was really dry, plus it gave me something to do.
“Okay,” Kat announced as she rose, in a very let’s get started voice that immediately made me edgy. That was all it took for me to know that this was not about pizza. “Let’s get started.”
“On what?” I asked.
“The first meeting of the Fairview Talent Society.”
“Will you shut the hell up and sit down?!” I hissed.
“What’s your problem?”
“Kat,” Dylan s
aid, “you might want to re-think that name.”
“Did you know about this?”
He looked across the table at me, guilty. “Sort of.”
“Okay, forget the name,” Kat said. She had retaken her seat and was now leaning on the table. “We can vote on a name later. The important thing is that we start to organize ourselves. We Talents—”
“If you use that word in this place one more time, I swear I’m going fix it so you can’t talk again for weeks.”
“Joss!” Maddy sat up to start in on me.
“Don’t even. I cannot believe you guys. What, you don’t like Fairview High? Think it’s gonna be better…there?” My voice was pitched low, as private as I could be in a place like the Pit, but unmistakably full of wrath. “Keep it up, and you’ll find out.”
“But Joss,” Elizabeth said, quietly, “that’s the whole point. We need to stick together if we’re going to protect ourselves. And each other. Like at Kat’s party.”
Oh, Jesus. Like at Kat’s party, when NIAC agents stormed in with Tasers and you animated a small army of porcelain dolls to throw plates at them? Yes, let’s get together and do that again soon. And now that Kat’s kitchen repairs are finally finished, maybe I can rip out all the cabinets to barricade the doors again. Ugh!
I pressed my hands against my head, not wanting any more replay of that disaster. Yeah, we’d saved Phil “Laser-Vision” Meeks from State School, but— “Maybe you guys haven’t noticed, but what happened at that party brought us enough attention to last a while. Disappearances are up—”
“That’s the point!” Eric cut me off. “Disappearances are way up. Ever since that party, kids are being plucked out of Fairview left and right.”
“And you want to give them a bigger target? Make it easier for them to catch all of us at once. Hey, maybe they could get a deal on a bus charter.”
“Joss,” Heather said soothingly, reaching out to touch my hand which I yanked away from her. “I know you have a personal style, a way of dealing that you’re used to. You have a comfort zone. But the fact is that you’re the one who’s most qualified—”
“Yeah,” Matt cut in with way too much enthusiasm, “you’re the most kick-ass Talent we’ve got!”
“Hey! Pipe down, Matt,” Dylan growled.
“What are you even doing here?” Matt was asking him.
But I was already way more than done. I leaned into the table and kept my voice steady. “I suggest that you all shut up and go home. Don’t sit here anymore, in a big group where everyone can see you and knows who you are. Don’t continue to talk about your private business where you don’t know who’s listening. Don’t talk about it outside on the street, on the way to your vehicles. Just stop talking and go think about why this was a bad idea. I’m going to work. Don’t follow me. Don’t come by the store later. Don’t try to call me.”
I pushed back from the table and walked away.
* * *
Joss
I held myself back from slamming through the door of Gene’s Army/Navy.
“Hey, Dad!” He was rearranging the peg-board wall, which was sometimes a bad sign. For someone who liked everything to be in meticulous order all the time, I’d think taking everything off the wall and starting over would be the last thing he’d want to do when he was agitated. Mom said it had something to do with exerting control.
From the looks of things, he’d started exerting control practically as soon as he’d walked in the door this morning. The wall display was completely different, a fresh, new challenge I was just going to love on order day. Not. There were two shopping baskets filled with product on hooks and a bunch of empty baskets stacked on the floor next to him. He turned around to give me one penetrating look before going back to his work.
Oh, I’m so happy to be here. It’s going to be a great day!
I blew through the swinging door to the back room and went to throw my bag in the office. My frustration over my friends’ stupidity gave way to guilt over how I had upset my dad. I had to be more careful. And then, every time I thought through what happened last night, I wanted to do most of it the same way. I mean, yeah, I wanted to be smarter and faster, not get myself caught, put the total smackdown on those guys—somehow. But in none of my re-imaginings did I convince myself it would have been okay to just keep walking, look the other way, mind my own business.
It was like I couldn’t convince myself to be that person anymore.
Things in the office were not as they should have been. The ledger was out, and the daily cash report was sitting there, half finished. That was really weird. The cash report, ledger, and bank deposit were things Dad did after he closed the store. And Dad was totally a creature of habit. I knew how to do it, though. I knew how to do pretty much everything in the shop. And all the better to avoid Dad’s mood and keep mine to myself.
Fifteen minutes later, I was only feeling more uneasy about Dad. I went back out to the shop floor where, fortunately, there weren’t any customers.
“Dad, I finished up the ledger and stuff.”
He turned around, gave me a hard look, and went back to his task. “That’s not your job, Joss.”
You’re welcome. “Yeah, I know. Um, there’s some money missing from the deposit.”
“Yeah, I had some expenses I had to pay out of petty cash.”
“Do you have the receipts? I can enter them and balance out the books.”
“Not with me, no. I’ll get to it later. That’s not for you to worry about. What I need you to work on today is footwear inventory.”
“But I did that a week ago.” Normally I liked jobs that kept me in the stockroom and I had no problem counting boots. But today I really wanted to keep an eye on things out here. Plus, he really had made me do it last week and it was a monthly job at most.
“And I’m telling you to do it again. The last inventory showed more accidental overstock than we can afford. We’re going to have to keep a closer eye on that.”
I didn’t remember a whole lot of overstock, but I tried to remind myself about the whole “exerting control” thing. “Yeah, sure,” I told him and turned to go. I was going to leave it at that, too, I really was. Just go on about my business. But then I didn’t. “Um, Dad, I got the deposit ready for the bank, even though it was short. I thought you might want to take it later. The yellow copies weren’t where you usually keep them, but I found them…”
“Jocelyn, I just gave you a job.”
“Yes, sir.” He knew what I was going to say, that today’s deposit wasn’t the only one that was missing money. I had no idea what could be going on, but I had to decide if I had to talk to Mom about this. It didn’t seem right to go behind Dad’s back or to put that on her, but…. I’d have to think about it.
I got out the ladder, put an inventory sheet on a clipboard, and got to work. It was pretty mindless and gave me even more time to think, which I didn’t really want. I couldn’t seem to focus on this latest problem. My mind kept wandering backward over all the things that had changed.
After the whole thing with Marco, when my parents had found out that I had been making friends at school, there was a big family meeting. Mom said I had done a great job keeping my secret so far, I had done everything they asked of me, and had proven myself not only trustworthy, but able to take care of myself. With my face all bruised up and my ribcage wrapped, I don’t know how she managed to pull that off, but she did.
It all came down to Mom saying, “Clearly, our current strategy of encouraging Joss to keep to herself is gaining her attention in a different way. Now that her peers are showing an interest in her, insisting that she put them off is going to make her a target at school that will put her under a microscope. Jocelyn is practically an adult now, and I think we’re going to have to allow her to choose how she interacts with others.”
Which then translated into me getting an hour or so to myself between school and work, and receiving the occasional phone call from Kat on the land-line.
I was pretty sure that this newly won freedom did not extend to me keeping a cell phone, so I was keeping the one Eric gave me a secret. Kind of like how I didn’t know for sure—but very much suspected—that having a boyfriend wasn’t one of my new privileges. So if anything came of the thing with Dylan, I’d be keeping that…
Yeah, that was where I lost most of my ability for articulate thought and just drifted off into replay mode. I was still moving boxes, writing things down—I have no idea how I was able to do that, because it seemed like my whole brain had checked out and gone back to lunch. There must have been some part left in the store, though, because I also heard the phone ring right before the buzzer on the door signaled that a customer had just walked in.
I thought that I had better go out on the floor to see if Dad needed any help. He didn’t need the stress of trying to answer two people at once today. Besides, maybe by the time I got back, I could get my head back on my job before the light-headed girly thing made me fall off the ladder.
I was brought up short by the scene I walked in on. My father was standing at the checkout with a customer on the other side of the counter. They both snapped looks at me when I walked passed the motion sensor on the stockroom door and it blared its annoying beep. In an instant I processed Dad’s agitation and alarm, the open envelope with the cash inside, and the smirk on the face of a guy I didn’t recognize.
He was pretty young, like maybe college age. Really tall, taller than my dad or Dylan, messy brown curls, a nose that was too wide for his face. He turned back to my dad. “Looks like it’s all here. I’ll be back next week.”
Dad didn’t say anything. The guy rapped the envelope on the edge of the counter before slipping it into his jacket as he turned to leave.
“See you around, Joss.”
I tried not to look startled. How did he know my name? What the hell was going on? “Dad, what was that about? Who was that guy?”