“Performance anxiety?” she said blandly. “Come on.”
She was looking at him through the sweep of blond, waiting, and he couldn’t exactly say that he played only for sinners. He swallowed, struggled to find a lie that skirted truth.
“Go on,” she insisted. “I promise not to—”
“Freddie!” shouted a voice, and August turned to see Colin waving him toward the cafeteria. He rose gratefully to his feet.
“I better go,” he said, taking up the case as casually as possible.
“I’ll get you to play for me,” she called as he descended the metal steps. “One way or another.”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t dare look back as he jogged over to Colin, who was staring baldly. When August reached the sidewalk, the boy patted him down. “He lives!” he announced with feigned shock.
August waved him off, and Colin fell into step beside him. “But seriously, Freddie,” he said, shooting a glance back at the bleachers. At Kate. “Do you have a death wish? Because I’m pretty sure there are faster, less painful ways to go. . . .”
Kate got through the rest of the day without hurting anyone, so that was something. She didn’t know if it was luck, odds, or Freddie. Even though she’d teased him, there had been a moment on the bleachers where the answer to Where are you? had really been Here. She wasn’t sure why, only that for the first time in ages, sitting in that strange but comfortable silence, she felt like herself. Not the Kate who grinned at the rumors, or the one who held a knife to a girl’s throat, or drove a crowbar through a monster’s heart.
The Kate she’d been before. The version of her that made jokes instead of threats. The one that smiled when she actually meant it.
But this wasn’t the right world for that Kate.
She tossed her bag onto the bed, and the vial from Dr. Landry tumbled out.
Maybe it was the pills, smoothing her edges. Maybe . . . but there was still something about Freddie. Something . . . disarming, infectious, familiar. In an auditorium full of stares, his was the gaze she felt. In a classroom full of students learning lies, he scribbled the truth in the margins. In a school that clung to the illusion of safety, he didn’t shy from talk of violence. He didn’t belong there, the way she didn’t belong there, and that shared strangeness made her feel like she knew him.
But she didn’t.
Not yet.
She sat at her desk, tapped her computer awake, and logged into the Colton Academy website.
“Who are you, Mr. Gallagher?” she wondered aloud, pulling up the student directory and scrolling through profiles until she found the one she was looking for. She clicked on Frederick Gallagher’s page. His information was listed on the left-hand side—height, age, address, etc.—but the photo on the right was odd. She’d had half a dozen pictures taken, one for every school, and they always insisted on front and center, eyes forward, big smile. But the boy on-screen wasn’t even looking at her.
His face was in profile, eyes cast down, edges blurred, and lips parted as if he’d been caught midbreath as well as midmotion. If it wasn’t for the barest edge of a black tally mark where his cuff was riding up, she wouldn’t have been sure it was him.
Why hadn’t the office retaken the photo?
There was something teasing about the blurred shot, and Kate found herself craving a better picture, wanting the luxury of being able to stare at someone without being stared at. She booted a new browser on the city’s updrive, went onto a social networking site the students all seemed to use, and typed in his name.
Two matches came up in the V-City area, but neither one was the Freddie she’d met. Which was odd, but Freddie said he was homeschooled. Maybe he’d never joined the site. She opened a third browser and typed his name into the search engine. It landed half a dozen hits—a mechanic, a banker, a suicide victim, a pharmacist, but no match for her Freddie.
Kate sat back in her chair, and tapped a metal nail against her teeth.
These days, everyone left a digital mark. All day, every day at Colton, people were snapping photos, recording every mundane moment as if it deserved to be preserved, remembered. So where was he?
Something twinged in her mind. Maybe she was being paranoid, searching for a complicated answer when the simple one—that he was that rare teen who preferred staying off-grid—was probably true.
Probably. But it was like an itch, and now she’d started scratching . . .