Raphael smiles and looks at me with what I think is admiration. “You want to accuse Crevan of being Flawed?”
I chew on my lip nervously. “I know it’s not conventional.…”
“I’m not a conventional kind of man. But I’d have to see the footage first.”
Ah. “There’s one problem.” I swallow. “One big problem. I don’t have it.”
Silence.
“Mr. Berry’s husband says that I have it. He told me over the phone. Crevan overheard the conversation; our phone lines must have been tapped. But I don’t have it. I have no idea where it is.”
He looks quite close to wanting to wrap his fingers around my neck and squeeze tightly, but thankfully he doesn’t. He breathes in and out a few times.
“Did Mr. Berry visit you at your house after the trial?” he asks.
“No.” Those early days were difficult, my coming in and out of painkiller-induced sleep, but I know that he didn’t visit me. I could count on one hand the number of people who did. The doctor. Angelina Tinder.
“Tina visited,” I remember suddenly. “She was one of the guards. A nice guard.”
“Then she must have given you the footage.”
My mind races. I think back to four weeks ago. It feels like a lifetime. “No. She brought cupcakes. Her daughter had made them. I remember thinking it was selfish because I couldn’t eat them. Only one luxury a week, and one cupcake alone was over the permitted calorie intake.”
“There was something in the cupcake,” he says.
“No. I gave them to my little brother to eat.” I stand up and pace. “I think we’d have noticed if he swallowed a … a … I don’t know, Mr. Angelo, what are we even looking for? A file? A disk? A chip?”
“I’d imagine it’s a USB,” he guesses. “Or the memory card from Mr. Berry’s phone.”
Fifteen minutes until I have to leave.
“She must have given you something else,” he says.
“I didn’t even see her.” I rack my brain. “I wasn’t well. My mom wouldn’t let her in to see me. She didn’t think it was appropriate.”
“It wasn’t really, was it?” he says, thinking about it. “No, it was a completely inappropriate visit, and a risky one for her. There must have been a purpose. She must have given the footage to your mother.”
“There was a snow globe,” I remember suddenly. “A Highland Castle snow globe. When you shook it, red glitter fell down, like blood. I thought it was the most horrific, disgusting gift anybody could give me after what happened to me in there. I wondered why she would give it to me.”
“It’s in there,” he says, standing. “It must be in the globe. Where is it?”
I view him suspiciously now, wondering if I can trust him. I have told him everything, but have I told him too much? If I lose the footage, I lose all the power.
I feign disappointment. I lay my head on the table, and it’s not difficult to make the tears come; they were already close to the surface anyway.
“I threw it away,” I lie. “I threw it against the wall. It smashed. Mom put it in the trash. That was weeks ago. It’s gone.”
Raphael seems angry, but I think he believes me. All the time, my mind is racing over how I can get the snow globe back. If I call my house, I’m sure they’ll be monitoring the calls. That’s how Crevan learned about the footage in the first place, through my conversation with Mr. Berry’s husband. How foolish I was then!
Ten minutes left until I must leave.
Raphael seems anxious. He slowly sits down. “Unconventionality is my way of thinking, of being. That is my strength, Celestine. You don’t get to my age looking as I do without having had to toughen up and fight. When you’re a teenager, what makes you different can be the worst thing in the world. The older you get, the more you realize that it’s your weapon, your armor, your strength. Your gift. For me it is thinking in a nonlinear way, which means doing the very thing you think you must not do.”
“And what’s that?”
“What have you been doing for the past two weeks?”
I frown, mulling his question over. Running, hiding, crying, feeling sorry for myself. Losing my virginity, but I’m sure he doesn’t mean that. I look at him suddenly, fearing what he is going to say. “Avoiding Crevan.”
“Exactly. Now you and Crevan must meet.”
THIRTY-NINE
PLAN MADE, RAPHAEL goes back into the house to get me the car keys. He’s left his phone on the table. I grab it. After calling Judge Sanchez and Whistleblower Kate on my secret mobile, I don’t want to call Juniper on it, too. It might not be safe any longer. Through Granddad I learned that Juniper was working in a café in the city. It’s weird how other people’s lives move on, how they have to move on, while mine stands still.
When someone is accused of being Flawed, that person must hire a lawyer to help represent them. If they’re found not guilty, the Guild pays the court fees; if they are found guilty, the Flawed must pay the fees. Mr. Berry was the best and most expensive lawyer in the Guild, and I know that paying for his services depleted all of Mom and Dad’s savings.
As well as that, since Mom is a top fashion model, she lost some contracts, and left some of her own accord, no longer happy having to live up to the perfect standards that the products advertised. I doubt she has any money coming in. Dad works as an editor at TV network News 24, but I’m sure he is completely under the thumb of the new management, Candy Crevan, Bosco’s sister. She won’t want Dad deciding the direction of the news, particularly when his daughter is much of the story.
So Juniper is working. It is summertime, we both would have had to get summer jobs anyway, before college started, but I know things must be tight at home. Despite Juniper’s being older than I am, we are less than a year apart, and people always think we are twins. During the weeks when the media was swarming our house, we often used Juniper as a decoy, sending her outside to be trampled on by photographers while I made a swift exit out the other side. We may look alike, but we’re poles apart in personality.
I loved school, excelled at it; Juniper hated it and always had to work harder because of her dyslexia. But while I got better grades, Juniper was always smarter than me. She is more savvy and has a greater understanding of people and situations, as though sitting back and observing was teaching her a whole lot more than me, who was always involved.