White Cat (30 page)

She’s smiling at me the way she used to. “Where are you guys going?”

I take a deep breath. “HEX meeting. Learning about worker rights.”

“For real?” She looks toward Daneca.

“What can I say?” I shrug. “I’m trying new things.”

“Can I come?” She doesn’t stand up, like she’s expecting me to say no.

“Of course you can,” Daneca says, before I can get past the
idea that she
wants
to come. “HEX meetings are for us all to better understand one another.”

“They have free coffee,” Sam says.

Audrey chucks her apple toward the shrubs by the entrance. “Count me in.”

The meeting is being held in Ms. Ramirez’s music room; she’s the adviser. A piano sits in one corner, and a few drum toms rest near the back wall, against a bookshelf filled with thin folders of sheet music. A cymbal balances on the low shelf near a wall of windows, near a gurgling coffeemaker.

Ms. Ramirez is sitting the opposite way on the piano bench in a circle of students. I come in and pull up four more chairs. Everyone scoots politely aside, but the girl who’s standing doesn’t stop talking.

“The thing is that it’s really hard to stop discrimination when something’s illegal,” the girl says. “I mean, everybody thinks of workers as being criminals. Like, people use the word ‘worker’ to mean criminals. And, well, if we work a work, even once, we are criminals. So most of us are, because we had to figure it out somehow and that was usually by making something happen.”

I don’t know her name, just that she’s a freshman. She doesn’t look at anyone when she speaks, and her voice is affectless. I am a little awed by her bravery.

“And there are lots of workers who never do anything bad. They go to weddings and hospitals and give people good luck. Or there’s people who work at shelters and they give people hope and make them feel confident and positive. And that word—‘cursing.’ Like all we can do is bad magic. I mean,
why would you even want to do the bad stuff? The blowback’s awful. Like, if all a luck worker ever does is make people have good luck, then all he has is good luck too. It doesn’t have to be bad.”

She pauses and raises her gaze to look at us. At me.

“Magic,” the girl says. “It’s just all magic.”

When I get home that night, Grandad is making a cup of tea in the kitchen. We’ve cleaned up a lot. The counters are mostly clear and the stove is no longer crusted with old food. There’s a bottle of bourbon on the table, but the cap’s still on it.

“Your mother called,” he says. “She’s out.”

“Out?” I repeat dumbly. “Out of prison? Is she here?”

“No. But you do have a guest,” he says, turning back to wipe the faucet. “That Zacharov girl is in your room.”

I look up, like I can see through the ceiling, surprised and happy. I wonder what she thinks of the house, and then I remember she’s been here before, lots of times. She’s even been in my room before—just as a cat. Then the rest of what Grandad said hits me. “Why are you calling Lila ‘that Zacharov girl’? And where’s Mom? She can’t have gotten far. Jail has to slow you down a little.”

“Shandra rented a hotel room. She says she doesn’t want us to see her the way she is. Last I heard, she was ordering champagne and french fries drenched in ranch dressing up to her bubble bath.”

“Really?”

He laughs, but it sounds hollow. “You know your mother.”

I walk past him and the remaining boxes of unsorted stuff
in the dining room, up the stairs, taking them two at a time. I don’t understand his mood, but my need to see Lila overwhelms other concerns.

“Cassel,” he calls, and I turn, leaning over the banister. “Go up there and bring her down. Lila. There’s something I need to tell you both.”

“Okay,” I say automatically, but I don’t really want to hear whatever it is. Two quick steps down the hall and I open the door to my bedroom.

Lila is sitting on the bed, reading one of the old collections of ghost stories I never returned to the library. She turns to give me a sly smile. “I really missed you,” she says, reaching out a hand.

“Yeah?” I can’t stop looking at her, at the way the sunlight from the dirty window catches on her lashes, making them gleam like gold, the way her mouth parts slightly. She looks like the girl I remember climbing trees with, the one who pierced my ear and licked my blood, but she looks unlike that girl too. Time has hollowed her cheeks and made her eyes feverishly bright.

I’ve thought of her so many times in this room that it seems like those thoughts conjured her, a fantasy Lila, spread out on my bed. The unreality makes it easier to walk over to her, although my heart is beating like a hammer in my chest.

“Did you miss me?” she asks, stretching her body like a cat might. She drops the book without marking her place.

“For years,” I say, helplessly honest for once. I want to press bare fingers against the line of her cheek and trace the
dusting of freckles on her pale skin, but she still doesn’t seem real enough to touch.

She leans in close, and everything about her is dizzyingly warm and soft.

“I missed you, too,” she says, voice low and breathless.

I laugh, which helps me clear my head a little. “You wanted to kill me.”

She shakes her head. “I always liked you. I always wanted you. Always.”

“Oh,” I say stupidly. And then I kiss her.

Her mouth opens under mine and she lies back, drawing me down onto the bed with her. Her arms twine around my neck and she sighs against my mouth. My skin feels pricklingly hot. My muscles tense, like I’m ready for a fight, everything clenched so hard that I’m shaking.

I take a single shuddering breath.

I am full of happiness. So much happiness that I can barely contain it.

Now that I’ve started touching her, I can’t seem to stop. Like somehow the language of my hands will tell her all the things I don’t know how to say out loud. My gloved fingers slide under the waistband of her jeans, over her skin. She shimmies a little, to shove her pants down, and reaches for mine. I am breathing her breath, my thoughts spiraling into incoherence.

Someone bangs on the door to the room.

For a moment I don’t care. I don’t stop.

“Cassel,” Grandad calls from the other side of the door.

I roll off the bed and onto my feet. Lila is flushed, breathing hard. Her lips are red and wet, her eyes dark. I am still reeling.

“What?” I yell.

The door opens and my grandfather is there, holding the phone. “I need you to come and talk to your mother,” he says.

I look over at Lila apologetically. Her cheeks are stained pink and she’s fumbling with her jeans, trying to get them buttoned.

“I’ll call her back.” I’m glaring at him, but he barely seems to notice.

“No,” he says. “You take this phone and you listen to what she has to say.”

“Grandad,”
I say.

“Talk to your mother, Cassel.” His voice is harder than I’ve ever heard it.

“Fine!” I grab the phone and walk into the hall, ushering Grandad out with me.

“Congrats on getting out of jail, Mom,” I say.

“Cassel!” She sounds ecstatic to talk to me, like I’m the prince of some foreign country. “I’m sorry about not coming right home. I want to see my babies, but you don’t know what it’s like to live with a bunch of women for all these years and never have a moment alone. And none of my clothes fit. I lost so much weight from that awful food. I need a lot of new things.”

“Great,” I say. “So you’re at a hotel?”

“In New York. I know we have a lot to talk about, baby. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about being a worker sooner, but I
knew people would try to take advantage of you. And look at what they did. Of course, if the judge had just listened to me and realized that a mother needs to be with her children, none of this would have happened. You boys needed me.”

“It happened before you went to jail,” I say.

“What?”

“Lila. They tried to get me to kill her before you went to jail. They locked her in a cage before you went to jail. It had nothing to do with you.”

She falters a little. “Oh, honey, I’m sure that’s not true. You’re just not remembering right.”

“Don’t—talk—to me—about—memories.” I practically spit out the words. Each one falls from my tongue like a drop of poison.

She goes silent, which is so unusual that I can’t remember it ever happening before. “Baby—,” she says finally.

“What’s this call about? What’s so important that Grandad made me talk to you right this second?”

“Oh, it’s nothing really. Your grandfather is just upset. You see, I got you a present. Something you always wanted. Oh, honey, you don’t understand how happy I am that you managed to get your brothers out of a bad situation. Your
older
brothers too—and you, the baby, taking care of them. You deserve something just for you.”

Cold dread uncoils in my stomach. “What?”

“Just a little—”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I went to see Zacharov yesterday. Did I ever tell you that we know each other? We do. Anyway, I ran into that
adorable daughter of his on the way out. You always liked her, didn’t you?”

“No,” I say. I’m shaking my head.

“You didn’t like her? I thought—”

“No. No. Mom, please tell me that you didn’t touch her. Say you didn’t work her.”

She sounds uncertain, but also unrepentant, like she’s trying to cajole me into liking a sweater she bought on sale. “I thought you’d be happy. And she grew up very pretty, don’t you think? Not as handsome as you, of course, but prettier than that redhead you were spending all your time with.”

I step back against the wall, slamming my shoulders against it like I no longer remember how to move my legs. “Mom,” I moan.

“Baby, what’s wrong?”

“Just tell me what you did. Just say it.” It is a terrible desperate thing to plead with someone to crush your hope.

“This really isn’t the kind of thing you just say over the phone,” she says reprovingly.

“Say it!” I shout.

“Okay, okay. I worked her so that she loves you,” Mom says. “She’ll do absolutely anything for you. Anything you want. Isn’t that nice?”

“Fix it,” I say. “You have to undo it. Put her back the way she was. I’ll take her to you and you can work her again so she’s back to normal.”

“Cassel,” she says, “you know I can’t do that. I can make her hate you. I can even make her feel nothing at all for you, but I can’t take away what I’ve already done. If it bothers you so
much, just wait it out. The way she feels will fade eventually. I mean, she won’t be exactly the same as she was before—”

I hang up the phone. It rings over and over again. I watch it light up, watch the hotel’s name scroll across the caller ID.

Lila finds me sitting in the hall, in the dark, holding a still-ringing phone when she comes out to see what’s taking so long. “Cassel?” she whispers.

I can barely look at her.

The most important thing for any con artist is never to think like a mark. Marks figure they’re going to get a deal on a stolen handbag, then they get upset when the lining falls out. They think they’re going to get front row tickets for next to nothing off a guy standing out in the rain, then they’re surprised when the tickets are just pieces of wet paper.

Marks think they can get something for nothing.

Marks think they can get what they don’t deserve and could never deserve.

Marks are stupid and pathetic and sad.

Marks think they’re going to go home one night and have the girl they’ve loved since they were a kid suddenly love them back.

Marks forget that whenever something’s too good to be true, that’s because it’s a con.

CHAPTER ONE

I don’t know whether it’s day or night when the girl gets up to leave. Her minnow silver dress swishes against the tops of her thighs like Christmas tinsel as she opens the hotel door.

I struggle to remember her name.

“So you’ll tell your father at the consulate about me?” Her lipstick is smeared across her cheek. I should tell her to fix it, but my self-loathing is so great that I hate her along with myself.

“Sure,” I say.

My father never worked at any consulate. He’s not paying girls a hundred grand a pop to go on a goodwill tour of Europe. I’m not a talent scout for
America’s Next Top Model
. My uncle doesn’t manage U2. I haven’t inherited a chain of hotels. There are no diamond mines on my family land in Tanzania. I
have never been to Tanzania. These are just a few of the stories my mother has spent the summer spinning for a string of blond girls in the hope that they’ll make me forget Lila.

They don’t.

I look up at the ceiling. I keep on staring at it until I hear my mother start to move in the adjoining room.

Mom got out of jail a couple months back. After school let out she relocated us both to Atlantic City, where we’ve been grifting rooms and charging up whatever food and drink we want to them. If the staff gets too demanding about payment, we simply move down the strip. Being an emotion worker means that Mom never leaves a credit card at the desk.

As I think that, she opens the door between our rooms.