“What if you invent a cure for fuckin’ Dragonscale? What if you didn’t laugh like a thirteen-year-old girl with the hiccups?”
Marty laughed like a thirteen-year-old girl with the hiccups.
“Who breaks?” Jakob said.
There was a loud crack as one ball struck a dozen.
“Is this single elimination?” Marty asked. “Or best of three?”
“Whatever,” said the Marlboro Man. “I don’t have anyplace to be.”
6
A powdery snow granulated the night. She drifted through a frozen darkness, her nostrils stinging from the cold. The light had been failing when she entered her house. Now, six games of pool later, it was who knew when—nine? ten?—and her legs were cramped from the hours she had spent balled up in the cupboard space behind the tinted glass door.
Jakob had been better at pool but the Marlboro Man was superior at holding his drink. The fat man—from his voice alone, Harper felt sure he was at least three hundred pounds—had left with a pair of her undies in his coat pocket, whistling “Centerfold.” She waited at least thirty minutes to crawl out of her hiding place, half believing Jakob and his new friends would still be there, silently waiting for her. They had left the empty bottle of Balvenie upside down in one of the side pockets.
She should’ve been wretched, choking on sobs, or quaking helplessly in shock. Instead, Harper felt buzzed, as if she had just skied a slope at the very edge of her ability, taking turns faster than she had ever taken them before. She had heard of adrenaline highs, but wasn’t sure if she had ever had one before. She was hardly aware of her legs carrying her forward.
Harper didn’t know where she was going until she got there. She wandered right past the entrance to Camp Wyndham—past the chain hung between the stone monoliths, past the burned-out wreckage of the bus—and followed Little Harbor Lane until it switched to gravel. In another hundred feet it turned into a boat ramp, angling down into the lapping foam of the Atlantic.
And there was the Fireman’s island. A quick clamber over a stone breakwater, a two-minute walk along the shingle, and she came in sight of Camp Wyndham’s dock.
She had promised Allie she would be back in two hours. It had been maybe twice that. Harper dreaded facing Allie, who was likely in trouble by now, and who almost certainly had spent the evening sick with worry. Harper decided solemnly to do whatever was necessary to make amends.
But Allie would have to worry a little longer. Harper had left John Rookwood on his island all alone for three days, with smashed ribs, a sprained elbow, and a wrist that had been seriously dislocated. He was her whole reason for slipping out of the infirmary. It would be a poor joke to head back without seeing him.
Besides. For all Allie’s talk about how they were going to start making examples out of people who broke the rules, Harper couldn’t take any of it too seriously. To Harper, it was elementary school all over again. There were rules, of course, and consequences for breaking them . . . but rules and consequences alike were applied by the grown-ups to the kids, and Harper was a grown-up. A student might get a demerit slip for running in the hall, but if someone on staff broke into a jog, presumably there was a good reason. Ben might be annoyed with her, but she would talk to him and smooth everything over. She was no more threatened by his authority (or Carol’s) than she would’ve felt threatened by a teacher. It was not, after all, like anyone was going to make her write I will not leave camp without a permission slip a hundred times on the chalkboard.
She rowed across a heaving liquid darkness. She felt a kind of slow tidal rocking inside her as well, as if she herself contained a smaller sea.
Harper knocked on the doorframe of the Fireman’s shed.
“Who’s that, then?”
“Harper.”
“Ah! Finally. I warn you, I’m not dressed.”
“I’ll give you a minute.”
She took a deep breath of damp, salted, frozen air, let it out in a trickle of white fog. She had never looked around his island, not really, and tramped up the great central dune to see the view from the highest point.
It wasn’t much of a rock. A couple acres long, shaped like an eye. One central ridge ran along the island lengthwise, with the Fireman’s little shed built into one side of it. At the southern tip was the ruin of a guesthouse, a collapsed rectangle of carbonized beams poking out of a layer of snow no deeper than a bedsheet. She was momentarily surprised by the sight of the boat: it stood just above the pebbly shingle on the eastern face of the island, a thirty-five-foot-long sailboat resting in a stainless steel carriage, the deck covered by a taut white tarp. But then Father Storey had mentioned a boat out here, had talked about taking it on a search for Martha Quinn. If the snow kept falling, soon it would just look like a part of the landscape, one vast white dune to tower over the others.
The cold was making her cheeks numb. She tracked back down the sand and let herself into the Fireman’s shed without knocking. She came in stamping her boots and rubbing her hands, shaking off snow.
“Willowes! I’ve never been so glad to see another human face! It feels like a car is parked on my chest. I haven’t been in so much pain since Guns N’ Roses broke up.”
“Sorry,” she said. She dropped the cloth shopping bag she had brought with her. “Busy day.”
She opened her mouth to tell him about Jakob and the Marlboro Man and almost being discovered, then caught herself.
He was sitting on his cot, and he still wasn’t wearing a stitch, except for the sling she had made out of a canvas quiver. His only gesture to modesty was the bedsheet bunched up in his lap and pooled around his hips. His skin was scrawled all over with the devil’s handwriting in black and gold. The bruises beneath the ’scale had darkened to shades of blackberry and pomegranate. It hurt her in her own chest just to look at them.
“You still aren’t dressed,” she said.
“Well,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I should bother. Aren’t you going to examine me? Seemed a lot of effort to go to, just to take it all off again. And where have you been? I’ve been stranded on this muddy blob of sand for days, with no one to talk to but myself.”
“At least you were having conversations with someone who thinks you’re clever.”
He fixed the cloth shopping bag with a rapacious glare. “There better be morphine in there. And cigarettes. And fresh-ground coffee.”
“I wish I had morphine. In fact, we’ll have to talk about that.”
“Cigarettes?”
“I don’t have any cigarettes for you right this instant, Mr. Rookwood,” she said, choosing her words with care. This was not a lie—but it was also not strictly honest. Harper was becoming practiced at such evasions. “Look at it as an opportunity to quit before the smokes kill you.”
“You think smoking is going to kill me? When I smoke, Nurse Willowes, it’s other people who need to worry about their health. There better be fresh coffee, then.”
“I brought you some wonderful loose teas—”
“Tea! You think I want tea?”
“Why not? You’re English.”
“And so you think I drink tea? What, do you imagine I used to wander around in the London fog in a deerstalker cap, talking to my mates in iambic pentameter? We have Starbucks, woman.”
“Oh, good. Because I also have a few packets of Starbucks instant.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Because you’re such an amusing man to disappoint. How about I put on the kettle and you at least put on some pants? I don’t recall any below-the-waist injuries that require a medical opinion.”
He swept a foggy gaze around the floor, reached with one bony foot for his fireman pants.