IN THE DARK
When I returned upstairs, Jimmy was in the bathroom taking a shower. The door to my bedroom was open. Cardboard boxes sat neatly against one of the walls. One was open, with neatly folded boy clothes stacked inside. They were similar to what Jimmy had worn earlier: sport shorts and tank shirts, with a few T-shirts and pairs of jeans mixed in. I thought of digging for more information, but I didn’t want to snoop too far.
He didn’t seem dangerous and he wasn’t really my problem. The last thing I needed was for him to catch me or notice I had gone through his things and spur some mistrust.
I listened for signs of Marie. No footsteps. No sounds at all. Was she sleeping?
It was almost eight thirty. I wondered if Carol would actually be up here to inspect the room at any moment. I went to the attic and found it partially lit by a lamp in the corner opposite the door. The view deeper into the room was still blocked by the wardrobe.
I closed the door behind me and crawled around. My things were neatly arranged, as best they could be. The air had the light scent of baking soda, I supposed to make it smell cleaner. I couldn’t picture how to tidy the space further.
North was on the cot, on his back. He wore black jeans and a black sweatshirt and was barefoot. His jet-black hair was smoothed back, with a single lock crossing in front of his forehead, making his hard face look devilish. His lips were pressed together. I was surprised he was here and not Gabriel, or at least someone like Luke, who was usually quieter about getting up here.
Then I remembered he didn’t seem to have a problem climbing a roof. He’d done it on this house before.
His eyes were glued to a tablet that was displaying video feed of the laundry room. “I couldn’t hear some of what she said,” he whispered, although his deeper voice carried.
I sat on the floor near the cot, relaying everything I could remember. He kept watching the tablet, even after I finished. He was silent for so long that I inched closer, trying to see what he was seeing: keeping an eye on Carol. “So I guess I can go to Jessica’s… Kota’s… um, but not keep the job.”
“You’ve got two weeks, at least,” he said.
“She wants Jimmy and Marie to be included in some things. She wants me to agree to help her. She’s…doing so much. She’s changing things. Is this bad? Should I back off?”
He sighed and put the tablet down on his stomach to look at me. His lips parted quickly, but then he focused on my face and paused. After a moment, he held his hand out, palm up, in offering. “Come here.”
I crawled on my knees toward him, until his arm wrapped around my waist and I realized he wanted me on the cot with him. I eased myself in beside him. He encouraged my head to nestle on his chest, picking up his knees so he could position the tablet to keep an eye on it.
He wrapped one arm around my body as best as he could in the small space. He pressed his lips to the top of my head, through my hair, breathing in. “Baby, I don’t know what’s going to happen at this point. She’s acting nicer than I’ve heard she was.”
“How?”
“Reports from her old job said she was very strict. People hated her. I wish I could say trust her, but we can’t. She told you flat out to quit a job without asking how you felt about it. She just did it in a nice voice.”
That was true. It hadn’t registered with me since I didn’t consider it a real job. I was hoping somehow, despite my having to be back, she was being nice and trying to help. “Shouldn’t I stay on her good side?”
“Yeah, just don’t go so far as to tell her anything. She may seem nice, but she’d use whatever information she can get to her advantage. See how fast she moved here? Promise of a bigger house, more money from selling her old house, didn’t hesitate to consider if your dad even really wanted this. I doubt he’d say yes willingly.”
I couldn’t imagine why he’d ever agreed. He was so quiet at dinner.
But he wasn’t arguing…because things were going how he wanted them to? Had he agreed to it because he thought having Carol around would fix things?
I sighed against his chest, breathing in musk and soap. He must have showered before coming over, because we’d gotten here straight from camp and he didn’t smell anything like the outdoors. I snuggled into him. “He’s not saying anything. I can’t tell if he is okay with this. I can’t imagine why…”
He nuzzled his nose against my scalp. His lips puckered slowly against my head in a light kiss, and then he pressed his cheek against the spot. “We’ll try to find out if there’s a risk if Carol finds out the truth about you. Maybe we can use it to our advantage to get you out of here, but goddamn, this is going to cost a lot of favors.”
“Will it really? I asked the Academy council not to let it cost you any more favors when it came to me.”
“It isn’t about you anymore. Or at least not just you. Your sister. Jimmy. Carol. Your father. Your stepmother. I can’t imagine how it will work with this new situation. We can’t ask the Academy to foot the bill for everything. There’s a lot more parts involved here. More people.”
“What is the plan?”
There was a small shrug of his shoulders and another kiss at my scalp. “We don’t know yet,” he said. “Right now, we’re intervening with the lawyer she keeps trying to get in touch with. Luckily, the two she called were out of the office on vacation. An Academy lawyer will get in touch with her as an alternative. Hopefully she’ll go with him. That’ll prevent some trouble.”
I hadn’t thought they could use a special Academy lawyer. I imagined it would cost something to utilize one in this unique situation. Would it cost favors?
And did it apply to the boys, or to me?
North used his elbow to prop himself up and nudged me to move. “Jimmy’s wrapped up his shower,” he said quietly.
I didn’t know how he’d noticed, because he was still monitoring Carol. I assumed he could hear the shower somehow. He had excellent hearing. But wasn’t this space soundproofed?
He moved around until he was at the platform, near the beanbag chair. He turned around at the foot of the cot, sitting cross-legged.
He kept the tablet, looking at it again. His brow furrowed, he frowned and then pulled a pair of earbuds from his pocket. He plugged them into the tablet, putting one in his ear. “Listen for Jimmy. He’s still in the bathroom, but he’s tinkering around. If I don’t hear him because of the earbuds, just shove me. I’ll move.”
“What’s going on?”
“She’s talking to your father, but she’s really just telling him what meals she’s planning for the week. I’ll tell you if it’s anything interesting.”
I sat on the cot, watching him, listening for sounds like Jimmy coming into the bedroom, and held my breath as long as I could. Every moment needed to be captured in order to collect any information. No more surprises. No more being caught off guard.
He motioned to the book bag. “You’ve got an empty journal or notebook?”
“I think so.”
“Get two if you have them. She wanted a schedule. Let’s make one.”
The book bag was perfectly organized by class, with folders and notebooks. Gabriel or North had been busy up here, not just watching out for me. I held up a spiral-bound book.
North shook his head and pointed to the duffle. “Isn’t there a better one?”
Better? I checked the duffle. It had an overnight kit like I’d had at camp, and things like the DS games and the compass and a pink tool kit. This one was moderately organized, but it still seemed a mishmash. I didn’t have anywhere to store them other than under the cot.
There were a couple of different smaller notebooks. One had thick spirals with a pink cover, the other was stitch-bound and black. He motioned for me to bring both over. I grabbed a few pens, too.
He pulled the earbud out, listened, and then put it back in. He positioned himself to sit cross-legged on the floor, using the cot and sleeping bag on top as a makeshift desk. He handed me the pink book, and he used the black one for himself. We had similar plain ballpoint pens.
“Do what I do,” he said. “It’ll be better if you do this in your own handwriting.”
I sat nearer to him. He wrote in the notebook, putting his name on the front page, marking it for the year. I put my name on mine, and most everything else, I copied exactly how he did it.
He skipped a couple of pages. He made a calendar on the next page, creating the month of January, and wrote out the dates on the left-side page. He marked off holidays and when school started, even noted a couple of birthdays for girls, but I knew the dates were really for Kota and Victor, not Katy and Victoria.
“It’d look weird if you only ever wrote in boy birthdays,” he whispered.
On the right page, he wrote out a to-do list, marked off sections for remembering to drink water, take a vitamin pill and exercise. He added bogus tests and threw in dates for study group, the last two weeks of work at the diner, the dinner with Dr. Green, Sunday with Jessica. He went back a page, marking down my old class schedule.
Quietly, I worked alongside him. He paused occasionally, watching how Carol organized and reorganized the laundry room. I kept an ear out for Jimmy.
He showed me how to create this planner. Other girls at school sometimes had one, but I’d never used one. In my old life, I hadn’t had dates to schedule, or birthdays to remember, or a job to work around. Looking at the calendar now, it made it look like all I would do was come home and sleep.
“How did you know to do this?” I whispered when he slowed down to think of what else to add. “I mean to make your own planner?”
“I prefer the paper ones,” he said, his dark eyes focusing on the page. He flexed his hand, rolling the pen in his fingers as he was thinking. “Probably better to make your own, so you can put in it what you need. I needed a new one for the new year anyway. I’ll keep this one for myself. I’ll add my own things later. Do me a favor if you make changes, and take a picture and send it to me. I’ll want to keep a copy for the rest of us anyway.”
It made sense. If I was going to get a schedule, they’d need to know it. I wondered if Carol would be impressed with this level of organization.
He picked up his head, refocusing on the tablet and bringing it around to show me. Jimmy walked out into the hallway from the bathroom, hair combed, and wearing clean pajama bottoms and a tank shirt. He thundered down the stairs. North followed him with the cameras.
When Jimmy found his mother, she was in the master bedroom with a pile of clothing she had brought in. She went to the closet, pulling out hangers.
North handed me an earbud. He listened through the other one. The audio was a second delayed from the video.
Jimmy waited until his mother turned around. “Yes?” she asked him.
“She organized her space,” he said. “Clothes are put away in that little closet. She’s about as crazy as you with sorting. Looked like she had them designated by day.”
It was unsettling to hear him saying this. He’d been in the closet and looked through my things. I supposed she wasn’t going to come up here if Jimmy would report everything to her. Gabriel must have hidden pretty well at least.
Carol held a wire hanger in her hands, straightening a small bend. “She hung up dirty clothes from camp?”
North tightened his lips, and his shoulders dropped. We shared the concern between us. Dirty clothing was something we’d overlooked.
Jimmy shrugged, sitting on a corner of the bed. His eyes wandered around the room, looking at the small TV on a side table and the brown wallpaper. “Maybe they had laundry machines at the camp? She wasn’t dirty at all when she came in.”
He’d invaded my privacy, but at least he seemed supportive of me. It still hurt that I felt I couldn’t trust him.
But who was I to think little of him for doing so? Here I was listening to his conversation with his mother. Despite our reasons, we were eavesdropping.
“Hmm,” Carol said. “Her father said she was a troublemaker. Her sister says she’s got a bunch of boyfriends, has been away from home the last couple of months living with one.”
North put an arm around my shoulders, tugging me into him. I pressed my cheek to his bicep, watching and holding my breath. She knew more about me than I’d wanted her to know. A tiny hard pit formed in my stomach. It had been positioned there since camp and had only gotten tighter and heavier since.
“Can you blame her?” Jimmy asked. “He was gone. You saw this house when we showed up. It’s…empty. Her room had the worst clothes, boy clothes. Just a couple of books and an old stereo.” He flopped onto his back on the bed, looking at the ceiling. His voice became a little harder to hear. “She’s got a group of pictures in a small alcove inside that attic space. Those must be her boyfriends.”
“It’s her sister you’ll have to be careful around. Marie’s so jealous of her. She was willing to sell her sister out. I’m not so sure I believe half of what she says. She’d do anything to get us out of here. Scaring us. Threatening.”
North’s arm around my shoulder became firm. This didn’t tell us if she knew the truth. Did she know about the time my stepmother had put me in the closet? Or the times I was punished? Did she know about my real mother and that secret?
“I don’t really like Marie,” Jimmy said.
“We’re in this together now,” Carol sighed and then picked up laundry to put on hangers. She began walking back and forth to the closets to hang each item as she picked it up. “I don’t know how their father planned to put them in a private school. Sang’s the only one with good grades. It would be such a waste of money for Marie. It’d be her last year.”
Private school? I pressed a palm against North’s leg, needing something to hold on to. I could almost laugh at the ludicrous idea.
If I’d never met the guys, I would have wanted it. I would have loved it. Normalcy. Getting away. Carol would have been a godsend.
North tilted his head and whispered in my ear. “Never going to happen, Sang Baby.”
I didn’t want it, either. Not now. Not when I had them. Not when I had the Academy.
“What about Sang?” Jimmy asked. “She seems nice. If she’s got the grades, it’d keep her away from boys until she graduated.”
“I’m considering it, but private schools cost a lot. What a waste when I can just monitor her.”
“Yes,” North said, hugging me close and kissing my forehead. “Baby. Sounds like she’d let you go if it were free. We can do this. We’ve done it before.”
“Do it?” I asked. “I don’t want to go to private school.”
“It won’t be real. You’ll just be with us. We just make it up. Worked for a lot of us.”
My heart did a flip in my chest. The Academy. Silas, Victor…even Kota…Their parents thought they went to private school. A normal one.
It gave me hope. If I could behave and get on Carol’s good side, the Academy could help us. They’d get me out of here, hopefully without too many problems.
I thought of the costs, though. I couldn’t help it. I wanted it so much, but there was so much to do. Carol wanted a divorce. My father wanted to keep my past a secret.
My stepmother…she’d have to be monitored to prevent her from speaking out. What happened when she left the hospital?
I’d always have to worry about Marie and what she might say about me.
Jimmy might know more than he was letting on. Or he might learn more from Marie.
Who knew who they all talked to as well? What about in the future?
I could use Academy money and favors, perhaps, but would the cost be too much? Would it mean it wouldn’t be worth it to the Academy to keep me on?
North seemed excited. Worry and concern snaked their way into my heart.
This might never be over. All my life I’d have to watch, wait, and wonder when the truth about me would be revealed.
I wanted to go over more of what this would mean, when I felt short vibrations at my chest. The phone was indicating I had messages.