“Seems like, for the first time since we met, there’s nothing standing in our way,” Jericho said. Very gently, Jericho took her hand and brought it to his shirt, above his heart. It had been months since their kiss on the roof of the Bennington, but she knew that the feeling hadn’t gone away. She’d only pushed it aside again and again. Evie spread her fingers against Jericho’s broad chest, and he moaned softly. It made her dizzy; it made her feel powerful.
“Evie, I don’t want to waste any more time.” Jericho leaned in to kiss her.
There was a loud knock. Theta popped her head around the door. She looked from Evie to Jericho, her eyebrows rising. Quickly, Evie yanked her hand away from Jericho’s chest and shoved both hands under her armpits.
“Hi, Theta! We were just talking!” she said.
“Yeah. I didn’t ask. Sister Walker’s looking for you, Evil. She wants you to come read some objects. So when you’re finished talking, we’re in the library.” Before Theta shut the door, she shot Evie a We will talk about this later oh yes we will look, to which Evie responded with her own: Okay. Fine. Yes. Go!
“I’d better report for duty,” Evie said with a mock-salute. Her cheeks were warm. She let her hand rest on a poppet doll, and its secrets licked at her palm before she snapped her fingers away again.
“Say, Evie?”
“Mm-hmm?” Evie said, chasing the object’s thoughts from her mind.
“Maybe you’d like to go to the pictures sometime? Or for a walk. Or anything, really.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Sure.”
“Sure?” Jericho smiled.
Evie bit her lip and nodded. “Sure,” she said.
“Say, I was just looking for you. Are you okay?” Mabel asked as Evie breezed back into the library and took a seat.
“Of course! Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. You’re all flushed. And your voice is really high. Are you sick?”
“I… I think it’s just been too much excitement,” Evie managed.
Mabel laughed. “You? Too much excitement? I never thought I’d hear those words come out of your mouth!”
The pocket doors slid open again, and Jericho let himself in silently. He looked over at Evie, smiling shyly, guiltily. Evie did her best not to return the glance but failed.
Mabel saw it all.
RABBLE-ROUSERS
Why?
That was the question on Mabel’s mind as she crossed Sixth Avenue, her bones rattling as the elevated train rumbled far above her head.
Why did Jericho like Evie and not her? (It was painfully obvious and had been for some time. Mabel just couldn’t seem to let go.)
Why did some people have special powers but not her?
Why did she let it bother her so?
Oh, Mabel knew that she and Jericho weren’t a good match. Not really. But it stung that he hadn’t wanted her. Just once in her life, Mabel had wanted to come first. She’d wanted to be the chosen one instead of the chosen one’s reliable, unexciting best friend. A kid tried to sell her a newspaper. “No, thank you!” Mabel barked. Then she felt guilty for it and tossed him a nickel at the last minute, taking the newspaper she hadn’t even wanted in the first place.
Why had she done that? Why did she feel like she had to be so good all the time?
As Mabel turned the corner onto Bleecker Street, she noticed the man in the brown fedora at the bottom of the train steps. He was just standing there, watching her. Her stomach fluttered. Quickly, she tucked her purse and the newspaper under her arm, walking up Bleecker Street. She glanced behind her. The man followed. She couldn’t lead him to Arthur’s place. Mabel took a sharp left onto Macdougal Street and stopped in front of a bakery window, pretending to admire a pastry display. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man stop a few windows down, pretending to check his watch. That was all the confirmation Mabel needed. Heart beating fast, she walked briskly toward Washington Square Park, trying to lose herself among the throngs of people. She let the newspaper fly. Its pages scattered on the wind, a distraction Mabel used to duck into a drugstore and sneak out the back door into an alley, practically running to the Bohemian Reader and up the back stairs to Arthur’s garret. The others were already there, gathered around the small, scuffed wooden table, smoking cigarettes and knocking back coffee.
Mabel fought to get her breathing under control. She didn’t want to come off half-cocked.
“Ah. Mabel. How is your little Italian friend? Any more visions?” Aron joked, and everything about Mabel’s rotten day came crashing down inside her.
“Maybe you should ask the man who’s been following me,” Mabel blurted.
“What do you mean? What did this man look like?” Arthur asked, coming toward her.
“Like a Pinkerton trying not to be seen. I have spent my whole life on the lookout for just that sort of thing, you know, and I can spot it.”
“Did he follow you here?” Luis asked.
Mabel shook her head. “I did my best to lose him. It’s why I was late.” Mabel told them everything that had happened. “And then I managed to lose him,” she said, sinking into a chair, all the earlier adrenaline washing away, leaving her feeling loose and sleepy.
Gloria rushed to the window, yanking up the blinds.
“Hey!” Arthur said. He lowered the blinds again. “We’ve gotta be careful now. If any of you think you’re being followed, take another route, like Mabel did, or buy a book from Mr. Jenkins downstairs for our ‘book club.’ You all remember the Palmer Raids. If we’re caught with radical publications, we could all be arrested. Aron could be deported to the Soviet Union, and Luis to Mexico.”
Arthur peeked out through two of the slats. “No one there now.”
He squatted at Mabel’s side, looking up at her. “You sure you’re all right?”
“Fine,” Mabel said, but she liked that Arthur had asked. Most people didn’t.
Satisfied, Arthur took a seat on the edge of the battered steamer trunk. “On to business, then. No one’s paying attention to the striking workers. The press has lost interest. They only want to talk about Marlowe’s Future of America Exhibition.”
Luis untied a handkerchief full of roasted nuts, offering them to all. “I hear management has hired local thugs as militiamen. They beat one of the miners last night and sent him to the hospital. Word is those militiamen are driving around the camp in trucks with Gatling guns mounted in the back to intimidate them.”
“And the radium and uranium they’re mining is making the men sick. They can scarcely breathe,” Gloria said.
“Why do you suppose Marlowe needs so much uranium?” Mabel asked, echoing Ling’s earlier question.
“He probably sells it,” Gloria said. “It’s just pure, old-fashioned greed.”
“Well, if everybody could see what’s happening in the camp, surely they’d be horrified; they’d have to do something to stop it,” Mabel said.
“People choose not to see,” Arthur said in his gentle way.
Mabel thought for a moment. “What if we made a newsreel? Marlowe makes them all the time to tout how great he is. But we could show people how sick his miners are and how bad the conditions are in the tent camp. If people could see it for themselves, they couldn’t ignore what’s really happening.”