Rubric turned and walked away. “Don’t think I won’t get even.”
“Yeah,” Tish said. “Even more of what you just got.”
The hall remained silent. We all looked at Mrs. Bagley.
“Students.” Mrs. Bagley shook her pad of slips at us. “The bell rang, and you are late. You are aware, I am sure, of the rules against tardiness.”
Wonderful. I didn’t have time for detention.
Mrs. Bagley wrote quickly and tore off a slip, handing it to me, the slightest hint of a smile cracking across her face. “You’ll all need late passes to get into class.”
…
I took a little detour before meeting Bobby in study hall. With everything that had happened since the Spring Fling, I needed to regroup. Normally, I would have talked with Kathryn. Thanks to Tammy Angel, I didn’t have that option. So Plan B. I snuck into the girl’s bathroom, opened a stall, and plopped down on the closed lid.
See, here’s the thing. The kids at school were pulling together, which was good, and Angel had been arrested, which was also good. But her father had connections. Which stunk. Tammy was acting all proper, but that’s just what it was, an act. I knew she was a Knight, but without her Amplifier, I couldn’t prove it. I had to get into her head without letting her know that I was the Morgan girl she was hunting. A life without secrets would have been so much easier.
Then there was Egon. He’d been such a sweetheart through this whole thing, but apparently felt like I was neglecting him. I really needed to spend time with Egon if our relationship was to go anywhere. Maybe it was time to rethink my priorities.
Speaking of time, I peeked at my watch and panicked. My late pass couldn’t buy me enough to sort this out, so I rushed out of the bathroom and into an empty hall. Or so I thought.
“Hey.”
Mason’s voice sent such a fright through me that I let out a tiny shriek. He sat on the floor, cross-armed against the wall, like he had been waiting for me. I shot a quick glance over my shoulder to see if we were alone. Terrifyingly, we were.
“Got a sec?”
No. I didn’t. Not even part of one. Between planning the downfall of the forces of evil and wallowing in self-pity, I was booked. But I was actually glad to see him. Maybe I could learn something about Miliron. “Always.”
Mason smiled. “I just wanted say I’m sorry for…you know, for that day in the park. I didn’t know what I was doing. And the hundred years before that. Everything is different now. I want you to know.” Then he gazed up at me with sad eyes and patted the floor. Before all this happened, my Bad Guy Meter would have seriously pegged, but the batteries must have been dead. I sat down beside him.
Mason stared blankly and shook his head, like he was totally lost. “I can’t stop thinking about the things I’ve done. About my mother. She had problems. But I loved her.” He leaned a little closer, and gazed right into my eyes. His breath warmed my cheek. “I just wanted her to love me back, but all she ever did was tell me what was wrong with me. When I came home from a friend’s, she never said hi, or asked me if I had fun. She’d show me the toy I didn’t put away, or tell me my socks didn’t match. Or ask me why I didn’t wear a different shirt. I was never good enough for her. She always compared me to my brother.” Mason’s eyes filled with tears. “Rinnie, I never had a brother. My mother was sick.”
I wanted to tell him I knew, that I saw it.
“Everybody thinks my mom is being treated at the asylum. She’s not. What I told you and Kathryn that day in the lab is true. She was murdered. I watched it happen.”
“That’s awful.” I had only vague memories of my parents’ murder, and they scared the pants off me. From what the Memory Lash had showed me, Mason’s recollection was completely clear. “That had to be a horrible thing to see.”
“It was. But it’s not what I saw that bothers me. It’s what I felt.”
“Shock? Grief? Mason, that’s normal.”
“No.” He shook his head and took my hand in both of his. “Liberation. It was like this big iron chain I had been carrying around my neck all my life just fell off. I watched a man beat her to death with a shovel, and all it made me feel was relief. My mother was right. There’s something wrong with me.”
What I had felt in Mason’s memory was sheer terror, not relief. I noticed he didn’t mention that the murderer had a rotting skull for a head.
“Dad thought I’d killed her, and I couldn’t convince him it was somebody else. So he covered it up. That’s when I knew I could get away with anything. My poor father. What I put him through. But that day in the park… I see things differently now. What did you do to me?”
Uh oh. This was why he wanted to talk. “I, uh…maybe you hit your head. You were high, weren’t you?”