“You left me,” I said, as I let him in. I didn’t have to make it easy.
The professor’s gaze fell to his feet. “I saw what would happen to her if I’d been there. It was for your, and her, protection.”
“That’s so convenient, isn’t it? You can excuse anything that way, can’t you? By saying it couldn’t be otherwise, that you had no choice. So why are you here now? What do you want from me? I want you gone before Indi finds you here.”
“There’s a girl. I need you to befriend her. She’s passionate, hyperintelligent, but skeptical.” His words were rushed—I’d never seen him so excited. “She won’t listen to me. You’re the only one who will be able to persuade her to do what’s necessary to have the child.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because your daughter is pregnant.”
I blinked, stunned. “What?”
“She didn’t want to tell you until after she’d graduated. She’s going to marry her boyfriend. She thought you’d disapprove.”
I sat down, rested my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands.
“It’s recessive, Mara—Her child might be a—”
My head snapped up. “Have you seen anything?”
“The child’s fate is too tightly wound with mine, so I can’t distinguish the threads. But I know that we need the boy Naomi will have. We need a Hero. Just in case Indira’s turns out to be a—”
Shadow. Like me. He didn’t need to say it.
“Your ability will fade as Indira’s child begins to manifest. But if the boy is born of the girl, Naomi, there might be a way—if you die by his hand, you might be able to reverse it. End the cycle completely.”
“Might.”
“There are no guarantees,” he said. “You know that.”
“And the girl? What will happen to her?”
“She makes the choice. She consents. She dies.”
It was a risk. But I would take it for my daughter’s sake. I flew to London with the professor the next day.
44
HE’S HERE!” DANIEL SHOUTED. “HE’S in New York!”
I lifted my head up from the kitchen table, wincing at the stiffness in my neck. Had I fallen asleep?
“What time is it?” I asked hoarsely.
“Wake-up time,” my brother said cheerily. He was neatly dressed in jeans and a henley shirt, standing next to Stella. She was also annoyingly alert, and freshly clothed.
“I thought about waking you to go to bed,” Stella said, then sipped from a glass of orange juice. “But Daniel said not to.”
“You looked pretty pitiful,” my brother added.
I couldn’t muster up an equally irritating response, but I didn’t have to because Jamie appeared in the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Who’s in New York?” he asked.
“Lukumi! Whoever! He’s giving a lecture at Columbia.” Daniel flipped around his laptop to show me an online announcement for the Columbia Department of Comparative Literature, and he read it aloud as I read it silently: The Final Girl: Jungian Archetypes in Pop Culture, a lecture presented by Dr. A. Lukumi, MD, PhD. Contact the Columbia Student Affairs office for tickets.
Jamie stood in front of the fridge. “Are you finished speaking?”
Daniel narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”
“Can someone tell me why there’s no cream cheese in the house?”
Daniel ignored him. “It’s today,” Daniel said. “I’m leaving at four.”
I looked at the clock. That was in two hours. I felt a jolt of energy and stood up. I had time to change, maybe even shower. I wasn’t going to miss this.
“What are you doing?” my brother asked.
“I am going to get less gross,” I said, “And then I am going to go with you, obviously.”
Daniel shook his head. “That’s what he’ll be expecting. He knows who you are, Mara—he was in your hospital room, on the train platform. He’s been following you, right?”
“Right . . .”
“Then he’ll know if you show up.”
“He’ll know who you are too,” I said to my brother. “Haven’t you been paying attention? He’s calling us out. He knows everything, about all of us, about our whole family. He definitely knows what you look like.”
“Maybe, but I don’t plan on being seen. And if I am seen, so what? I’m visiting colleges, after all. It’s only natural that I’d be—”
“Auditing a lecture?” Jamie snorted. “I wouldn’t describe that as natural.”
“Natural for Daniel,” I said as I took a bagel from a bag on the counter. “Is there any peanut butter?” I asked Jamie.
Jamie made a face. “Peanut butter on a bagel?”
“Yes?”
“Who are you, Mara Dyer?”
I ignored him. “And what exactly is your big plan, then?” I said to my brother before taking a too-big bite of my peanut buttered bagel. “Are you going to bum-rush him at the podium?”
“I’m going to go to the lecture and then follow him. I want to know where he’s staying, where he lives, everything about him.”
“And then, after your Scooby-Doo mission is complete?”
“Then I’ll force him to tell me how to fix you,” Daniel said.
His words brought me up short. I’d wanted that, once upon a time. To be fixed. To be saved. I’d begged Noah to do it. He couldn’t, he’d said, because I wasn’t broken.
I turned to Stella, who had been noticeably quiet during this entire conversation. “Stella? What say you?”
“I want to see him,” she said firmly. “I want him to fix me, too.”
Hmm. Back to Daniel. “How do you think you’re going to be able to force Lukumi to do anything? He holds all the cards.”
“If he’s really behind all of this, then he has gone to great lengths to keep his identity a secret. We’ll threaten to splash his face, his name—”
“His fake name,” I corrected him.
“Everywhere,” Daniel continued. “We’ll publish all of this.” He swept his arm around the kitchen island, where stacks of files and notebooks were piled high. “What happened to you, what was done to you, what he was responsible for—and then he won’t be able to hide anymore. I’ll need to snap a picture of him at the podium and match it up to something else. I haven’t been able to find any of him online anywhere.”
“There’s that photo from McCarthy’s office,” Jamie said, whipping out his phone.
Daniel looked confused. “Let me see?”
Jamie handed him the phone.
“Wait, that’s him?” Daniel asked. “He looks familiar.”
Goose bumps rose on my arms.
“I can’t place him, but I feel like I’ve seen him before.”
Maybe you have, I almost said.
Daniel shook his head as if to clear it. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is that we have to follow him, find out as much as we can about him so we can find out who he really is—his real name, his real identity, so we can connect him to all of this, so you can have a normal life,” Daniel said to me.
In fact, almost everything he had said was to me. For me. I was the one who needed Lukumi more than anyone else in that room. I was the only one of us who wasn’t innocent.
“What do you think he’s hiding from?” Jamie asked quietly, but no one answered. None of us could guess.
“We’re going to have to talk to a lawyer,” my brother said, head cocked to the side. “You know that, right?”
I hadn’t thought about it, but he was right.
“The things you’ve—” He stopped himself before continuing. “The things that have happened to you, and what happened at Horizons—we need to get them out in the open, deal with them, make sure we can establish that you were tortured, that it was self-defense—”
Not always. But I bit my tongue.
“And then, once he tells us how to fix you guys, we’ll go public anyway.”
“Stop saying that,” Jamie said
.
The three of us turned to him.
“Stop saying that we have to be fixed. I like who I am. I don’t think I need to fix anything. I’m not broken.” Jamie left the room.
Daniel leaned his elbows on the table and rubbed his face. “You knew what I meant, right, Mara?”
I did. But Jamie had voiced what I hadn’t been able to put into words until then, what the slight sting of shame kept me from saying out loud.
I didn’t think I needed to be fixed either. I liked who I was becoming too.
45
TO DIFFUSE THE TENSION, DANIEL suggested we take a break before the lecture. We were tired and cranky and confused, and we’d been trapped in the house for too long. Daniel wanted to keep reading, though, so he stayed home, leaving Stella, Jamie, and me to our own devices. Which to Jamie meant buying food.
Without a car, and with our agreement not to order out, we ended up having to take the train to a Whole Foods (Jamie insisted), which meant lugging bags of groceries with us on the way back. The platform was weirdly empty, except for a couple of preppily dressed guys urinating on a heap of what looked like rags. Stella and I were debating the artistic merits of graffiti (my opinion, art; hers, vandalism), but I digressed for a moment to loudly inform the guys of their disgustingness. They didn’t say anything back. Not even when Jamie called out to them. It was only then that I noticed that the heap was actually a person.
Jamie spoke first. “What in the ever-loving fuck do you think you’re doing?” He was already marching toward them.
I was close at his heels, and Stella brought up the rear. We could see the person, the woman, huddled against the wall, her small, pathetic collection of things strewn around her like trash. She was older and her face was dirty, and she was awake. Part of me hoped she’d be unconscious so she wouldn’t ever have to know what was being done to her, but one look at her face told me she did know. And she was ashamed.
I vibrated with rage, just as one of the assholes flashed a shit-eating grin at Jamie and said, “When you gotta go, you gotta—”
He never finished his sentence, because I punched him in his freckled face. The other one, Blondie, raised his arm to swing back at me, but Jamie yelled “Stop!” in that voice of his. Both of them froze, completely, but they could still hear. They could definitely hear.
My hands were balled into fists so tight that my nails dug into my skin. “She’s a person,” I said. “How could you do this to a person?”
“Answer her,” Jamie said flatly. “And tell the fucking truth.”
“The homeless are a plague,” Freckles said, then swallowed hard, as if by doing so he could take the words back. Blondie just smirked. He wasn’t ashamed at all.
Stella had knelt down near the woman, and I heard her ask if she was hungry. I took a step toward the assholes, who were farther from the woman, and closer to the platform.
“She’s more of a person than you are,” I said. I could hear the woman sobbing softly. “Stella, help her?”
I didn’t look to see if she nodded, but I assumed she did, because I heard plastic crunch as the woman stood.
“Give her something to eat?” Jamie said to her.
Stella glanced at our groceries and nodded. She offered the woman her arm. “What’s your name?”
“Maria,” the woman said.
Stella helped her up and said, “Guys, let’s go?”
“No,” I said slowly, looking back at the boys. “I’m going to stay, I think.”
“Mara.” Stella said my name through gritted teeth. “Come on.”
Jamie edged closer to me. “I’m going to stay too, actually.”
Freckles burst out laughing. “You’re not seriously suggesting that you’re going to punish us?”
Little did they know. I flicked a glance at Stella. “Do you need something?”
“No,” she dragged out the word.
I looked at Freckles and Blondie as I said to her, “Then go. Now.”
But she didn’t. Instead, she unlooped her arm from Maria’s.
“What are you going to do to them?”
“I kind of want to see Mara Crucio their asses,” Jamie said.
The boys snickered.
“Avada kedavra, more like,” I said.
Stella looked back and forth between the two of us. “You’re not serious.”
“They deserve it,” I said quietly.
Blondie chuckled. “Two girls and a child?” He looked Jamie up and down. “How old are you?
“Old enough to kick your ass.”
Freckles doubled over.
“I would cut out your eye just to see what it looks like in my hand,” I said to him to absolutely no effect.
Which was fine. He didn’t have to believe me yet.
“You’re not really . . . You’re not going to . . . ,” Stella said, but from the tone of her voice, I knew she wasn’t sure.
I shrugged. “It would be fair.”
Stella turned to Jamie. “Jamie.”
He didn’t answer her.
“Make them sit still and then piss on them,” Stella said. “That would be fair.”
Jamie shook his head. “Look, if you peed on me—”
“I would never piss on you, Jamie.” Stella had relaxed a bit. She thought Jamie was playing with her. Maybe he was.
“I appreciate that, but let’s say you did. Then according to Kant, I could pee on you. That’s retributive justice right there.”
Jamie turned back to the boys, who were frozen in place, presumably because Jamie had told them to stop. They watched us warily. “Peeing on a homeless person, that’s different. It’s worse. There are levels of awful, and that’s near the top.”
It was. I hadn’t felt this angry in so long, and there was so much pleasure in it. My nerves were electrified. New synapses were firing. I felt different, and wondered if I looked it. I craned my neck to see my reflection in a mirrored tile and waited for it to say something, to tell me what to do the way she used to. But she was silent. Hmm.
Meanwhile, Jamie continued to explain to Stella why the assholes deserved more than what she thought they did. “There’s a power differential,” he said. “They’re taking advantage of someone weak, and it’s horrible and disgusting and amoral, and anyone who does something like that needs to be taught a lesson. Peeing on them back isn’t enough.”
No. It wasn’t. A hot breeze made its way through the tunnel, giving me an idea. “There’s a train coming,” I said to Jamie.
He met my eyes. He understood. “Listen carefully,” he said to the boys, and they did, because they had no choice. “Climb down off the subway platform. Don’t step on the third rail, but stand on the tracks.”
Stella’s eyes widened. “No,” she said, staring at Jamie. “No.”
But he ignored her, and the boys walked over to the yellow line, which warned them in huge block letters to stay away. They jumped down off the platform and onto the tracks, avoiding the third rail like Jamie said. Two rats scurried over a discarded chip bag and a stray purple ribbon before disappearing into the tunnel.
“Follow them,” Jamie said to the boys, as he pointed at the rats. “Walk into the tunnel.”
“You can’t do this,” Stella said. “Jamie. Jamie.”
I answered for him. “What they did was wrong.”
“But they don’t deserve this.”
“How do you know?” I said. “What are they thinking?”
Stella went very still. I watched her focus, watched her face change, darken as she listened to the words in their minds.
“It doesn’t matter what they’re thinking,” Stella said quietly and from the tone of her voice, I knew she hadn’t liked what she’d heard. “Thoughts are just thoughts.”
But now that I had asked, I very much wanted to know. “Jamie, can you make them say what they’re thinking out loud?”
“I can try,” he said, and walked to the edge of the platform. “Let’s hear it, assholes. Tell me eve
ry thought running through your tiny minds.”
Another hot breeze ruffled their hair, and Freckles glanced over his shoulder before shouting at Jamie, “Fuck you!” Blondie added an unspeakable word.
I watched Jamie’s expression harden. “Oh, don’t stop,” he said, softly. “Tell me how you really feel.”
“You people are parasites,” Blondie went on. “Lazy and useless and worthless. You should be my slaves.”
Stella’s face was wiped blank. Her voice shook when she spoke again. “They’re just ignorant, Jamie. Ignorant and stupid.” Jamie was quiet. “Killing them is going to hurt you more than it hurts them,” Stella continued. “And what about their families?”
I felt the telltale subway rumble beneath my feet. Stella said something to Jamie, but I didn’t pay attention. I was looking at the woman, Maria.
“Stop,” she said quietly, so quietly I wasn’t sure I’d heard it. Then she said it again. “Let them up,” Maria told Jamie.
That was when Jamie’s facade cracked. He was still angry, but it was a different kind of anger. Cold. Resigned. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “Get out of here. Climb up.” He looked sick when he said it. “She’s a better person than either of you.”
She was, and so was Jamie. But I wasn’t.
Jamie was never going to let them die, I knew. He just wanted to scare them. I wanted to kill them. Their brand of cruelty wasn’t illegal but it was poisonous. They would do worse, someday, and hurt other people, people who didn’t deserve it. I wanted to stop them before they had the chance. I wondered if I was really capable of it.
And as I wondered, Freckles offered his hand to Blondie to help him up. The train was approaching—I could see the light in the distance. But Blondie would be off the tracks by the time it got there. I wasn’t sure what to wish for, what to think, and that made me even more angry. They couldn’t just walk out of here. I wouldn’t let them.
I heard Freckles swear. He was looking at Blondie, whose face was contorted in pain. His nose was bleeding.
“What the fuck!” Freckles shouted, as blood streamed over his lips. He looked up with wild, unfocused eyes as he pinched his nostrils to cut off the flow.