“Seeing things. Clarice thought I should focus on you, and it helps. A little. But lately I haven’t been seeing things exactly how they will happen. I’ve been seeing…I don’t know. Bits and pieces that feel like they mean something more. Like maybe they’re still shifting and not set. It feels…big. Not like what I used to see, where it was something that really was going to happen exactly like that, and I only had to figure out how to understand the images. These visions are more like puzzles. Lots of little pieces. Like a recent vision, there was a guy with light hair and one with dark hair, opposite each other like they were two sides of a mirror. And a flash of you, and one of Clarice, and the color red, and a room all filled with tables and chairs but really fancy looking, official…I don’t know. It’s kind of scary, and I don’t understand it yet. But some are good. I’ve even started dreaming them. Sometimes they’re happy.” She gets a sort of dreamy smile on her face.
I sit up (it hurts, it hurts, my body hurts) and grab her hand in mine. She startles; I haven’t been touching her at all lately. I don’t like my hands anymore. I used to think they were pretty. Now they look like they belong on someone else’s body. Someone who kills people. “Listen to me. Do not tell them. Don’t tell them you’re seeing more. Don’t tell Clarice. Don’t even think about what you’re seeing.”
“Why? Fia, you’re scaring me. Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“Promise me you won’t tell them!”
“I won’t! I promise! What’s going on?”
I drop her hand. “Nothing. And stop trying to see me. You won’t like it.” I walk out of her dorm room.
Down the hall.
Down the stairs.
Doesn’t matter where I go.
Outside the entrance hall I nearly bump into a boy. He’s wearing a coat and he is tall and he belongs black-and-white and shirtless on the wall of a clothing store and his warm brown eyes are completely glazed over. I simultaneously want to kiss him and to get as far away from him as possible. He feels wrong, he feels dangerous; my heart speeds up the same way for him that it did for the stun guns.
Everything here feels wrong all the time. But he feels exciting wrong.
“Hey,” he says, grinning, his eyes tracing over me without apology.
“Hey.” There are no boys here. Not teenagers, anyway. Only men. With weapons. (It hurts, it hurts, my body hurts.)
“James. Keane. James Keane.” He sticks out his hand for me to shake it.
I keep my murderer hands to myself. “Keane as in the Keane Foundation?”
“The very same!”
“I should bash your brains in right now,” I say, but I am too tired to do it.
“You’re the third person to say that to me today!” He winks, then takes my arm and links it through his own. “Why don’t you take me on the grand tour of the secret school.”
“Why don’t you take a walking tour through rush-hour traffic?”
He laughs. “I like you. What did you say your name is?”
“Sofia.”
“Sofia. Soooofia. Sofia, I have done something very bad.”
It is wrong to go with him as he pulls me down the hall toward the empty classrooms. I go anyway. “I’ll bet I’ve done something worse.” Tap tap goes my finger.
“I would love to hear it if you have. But I get to go first. I have”—he looks both ways down the hall in exaggerated caution, then leans in and whispers right in my ear (wrong, wrong, but it doesn’t stop the shivers from going up and down my spine; he is gorgeous, I have never been this close to a gorgeous boy)—“broken into a boarding school for special teenage girls.”
I shove him back, glare. “That’s it? That’s pathetic.”
“It’s not! It’s very, very bad. You see, I brought whiskey with me. Stolen whiskey.”
I yawn, patting my hand over my mouth.
“Stolen from the dean of my college.”
I check the watch I am not wearing for the time.
“After he expelled me.”
I look him straight in the eyes. “I delivered a package bomb that killed two people.”
His face freezes. I shouldn’t have told. I shouldn’t have. I don’t care. I stare defiantly at him.
His frozen face melts into a smile. “Well, my dear girl, you win. I think this calls for a drink.” He tries to open the nearest door, but it’s locked. He takes a step back, lifts his leg, and kicks it open with a resounding crack. “That’ll hurt in the morning. Ladies first.” He holds out a hand to the now-open room.
He doesn’t care that I killed two people.
What is wrong with him?
I walk in. (In this room I have picked which gun was unloaded out of ten options. And then they pulled the trigger on me. I have picked stocks that went on to skyrocket. I have picked which pencil I would shove into Ms. Robertson’s ear until she kicked me out for thinking about it.)
James staggers/swaggers past me and sits on the floor against the wall out of view of the damaged door. He pats the floor next to him.
I sit. He passes me a bottle he pulls out of his coat and I know—I know, I know—I should not ever taste alcohol.
I take a swig.
I choke and cough and he laughs. I take another and manage to swallow it.
“That’s a girl. Now, do you want to know a secret?”
“I know too many secrets.”
“Well, you don’t know any of mine. My mother was psychic. Genuine, see-the-future, real-deal psychic.” He waits. “You aren’t impressed?”
“Should I be?”
“Probably not. Made it awfully hard to really get into trouble, though. She could always see it coming. Do you want to know the trick to getting in trouble under the watchful eye of a psychic?”
I think of the nailed-shut windows. I think of Clarice. I think of the two, the two, the two who are now zero. Tap tap. “Yes.”