“Take your pictures, Blue Girl,” says Pierce, setting up his pieces. “Today you’re like to set fire to the board, you stare at it too long.”
I watch the games for a while, my camera still in its case in my bag, letting them get back to normal. It’s not at all uncommon for someone to not be able to focus on a game, to prowl around the tables and sort of keep an eye on all the matches in progress, or if someone has a doctor’s appointment or something and we have an odd number. It doesn’t take them long to settle in.
When I pull out the camera and look through the viewer, the world seems to sharpen. Focus. Not that terrible things aren’t still out there, or even in here, but there’s a glass barrier between all of that and me.
It’s like I’ve forgotten how to breathe, and someone just poked me in the ribs to make me suck in air.
I take shots in both black and white and color, making especially sure to catch some good, clear angles on Landon. The only last name I know is Gunny’s, and there’s really not a way to ask around without being very weird.
Things seem more obvious behind the camera. Like the way Corgi keeps one eye on the game and the other on Happy. The way Yelp’s hands are shaking and his eyes are shadowed, and the way Jorge watches him without seeming to. Jorge usually moves lightning fast, slamming his pieces against the board and pulling his hand back like he’s about to get shot, but today he moves slowly, sliding the pieces so the felt bottoms stay in contact with the polished wood. Nothing sudden, nothing sharp. When Phillip reaches out to capture Steven’s bishop, his sleeve rides up, showing the monorail track of stitches over a long-ago wound, just a thick, pale line with dots running to either side.
Gunny looks even older, if such a thing is possible. The soft folds of skin look deeper, the scar tissue around his temple more stretched. I get a few shots of Hannah, too, both when she’s up to check on her grandfather and when she’s back in the car with her knitting. She’s got a stack of knit baby blankets on the backseat; when I ask her about it, she says she gives them to the local hospital, for the neonatal ward. So every baby goes home with a good blanket. It’s the first time I’ve ever asked her what she spends so much time knitting, because it’s always seemed like a strange question to ask, but I love the thought of it, someone brand new and innocent going home in something made with love.
Eventually I head inside to get a drink. For the first time, I actually take it to a table and sit down. They have a new kind of cookie that smells amazing, and I haven’t eaten since the bananas, but I’m not going to, not until Mum is there and I know she’ll tell me to stop if I go too far. I’m still a little too fragile from last night (this morning?) to trust myself.
I’m barely seated, the notebooks in a stack at my elbow, when I see Landon walk in and look around. Fuck. He’s obnoxious enough when I can just walk past him, but if I’m an easy target?
“Do you mind if I join you?”
I glance up to find Joshua standing almost behind me, his eyes on Landon. He was already at a table when I came in, nose buried in a new hardcover and apparently oblivious to the world. We’ve chatted, occasionally, when we’ve crossed paths. He’s nice enough, never pushy or inappropriate. I don’t really want the company today, but . . . I really don’t want Landon’s company. “Sure.”
He sits down across from me at the four-seater, giving me space, and drops his coat into the chair next to him. I shift mine from the table to the last chair. Oh look, no more room. I eye him warily, not sure if I’m up for casual conversation, but he just opens to his bookmark, wraps his hand around his drink, and goes back to reading.
All right then.
Landon sits down a few tables away, with a battered, coverless paperback that’s either the same one he was reading a month ago or one that’s been similarly mistreated. I’m constitutionally incapable of trusting people who treat their books that badly. But he opens the pages, and aside from looking over at me a bit too much, he seems to be stationary, so I lay my keys in easy reach on the table, the trigger for the pepper spray nice and accessible, and open the first notebook.
The thing about the journals is that there is nothing consistent about them. I write almost every day, but not every day, and the entries could be anything from all is well, nothing to report to pages of infodump. The first time Dad grounded Chavi (for holding hands with a boy in the couples’ skate during her eighth-grade field trip to the roller rink) she went off on an epic rant that took her fourteen hours and a little over half the notebook to get down. We both used it for whatever was on our minds, whatever that might be, so there are drawings and photos and maps, phone numbers or addresses or even shopping lists, to-do lists, test review, all mixed in with the actual commentary of what we were doing or how we were feeling on any given day. It’s possible to skim the entries, but with how quickly thought can jump without any kind of break or segue or warning, it’s not possible to do so quickly.
As I dive into the entries I remember how, against all odds, and entirely in spite of myself, I was actually kind of happy in San Diego. I had friends there.
Well.
I had a friend there, and others I was friendly with.
The flowers started in March, just like now, with a bundle of jonquils, but I had no context for them. No reason to think it wasn’t the boy I was tutoring, who blushed every time I looked at him and could never talk above a whisper. They were just flowers; it was just a boy who might have been sweet if he’d given me the flowers directly instead of putting them at my door.
After the jonquils came calla lilies, then a crown of baby’s breath, a wreath of honeysuckle, sprays of freesia. The last one was a bouquet of carnations, the white ones with the red tips that look like they’re bleeding. There are pictures tucked in there, the pages fluffed around them.
The carnations arrived two days before the movers did, and the next week we were in Washington, D.C.
A week after that, I no longer had a friend in San Diego. The Quantico Three asked me new rounds of questions, looked at me with new shadows in their eyes, and I decided I could research the other deaths myself, rather than ask anything of my agents that would make those shadows deeper. Eddison asked me if I wanted context for their questions, and I said no.
He looked so relieved.
Reading how happy I was in San Diego hurts, because it was an anomaly. It hurts, and it pisses me off, and I’ve been so angry since Chavi died, and I just . . .
I want . . .
I am so fucking tired.
I close the last notebook, scrub at my face as if I can peel away the layers of rage and grief. Joshua is long gone, but so is Landon, thankfully. There’s a little folded note where Joshua was sitting, though, with the same phone number that was on the card he gave me a few weeks ago. His friend’s shuttle service.
I toss the note, because I still have the card in my wallet. It’s a nice gesture for him to make, and he isn’t being pushy about it. I just don’t want to use the service.
The walk home is freezing, and gets even colder as the last bits of sunset give way to full dark. Mum will probably arrive not long after I do. To keep my mind on something other than the cold, I go over my to-do list for the night: scan the photos from the journals, upload the ones from chess, and pass them along to the agents.
There’s nothing on the front step. I want that to be a good thing.
I’m not sure I know how to recognize a good thing anymore.
He’s never really thought about it, Ramirez’s teasing being a part of the team dynamic nearly since she joined, but he actually misses it when she’s being sensitive.