She pushed. The right pedal went down, and the left pedal came up, and then nothing else happened.
“You keep doing it,” I said. “That’s what makes the bike go forward.”
She began pumping again. Her motions were still jerky, but they were continuous, and she was moving. I jogged along.
“I feel like I’m tilting to one side,” she said.
“You sort of are. The faster you go, the smoother the ride will be.”
“This is Sin-Jun’s bike, right?” she said. “You must get along with her better than Dede because you didn’t want to borrow Dede’s stereo.”
“Sin-Jun is more laid-back,” I said. “Dede’s okay, but she’s not laid-back.”
“Dede’s problem is that she wants to be Aspeth Montgomery.”
This observation was accurate. But it was also odd-Conchita’s tone made her seem familiar with Dede, when I suspected they’d never had a conversation.
“Do you think Dede and Aspeth will room together next year?” Conchita asked. Though request forms weren’t due until late May, rooming had, since spring break, become a common topic of conversation.
“I doubt it.” Dede would like nothing better, I knew, but in the final hour, I didn’t believe that Aspeth would agree to it.
“Imagine wanting to room with Aspeth,” Conchita said. “She’s so mean.”
“Do you know her?”
“Oh, I’ve known her forever.”
This didn’t seem possible. Aspeth lived in my dorm, not Conchita’s, and even if the two of them had been on sports teams or in classes together, Aspeth was always surrounded, literally buffered from the rest of Ault, by a group of girls like Dede. I thought of Aspeth’s long pale hair, the clothes she wore-now that it was spring, pastel button-down shirts and khaki skirts and white or navy espadrilles-and her tan, shapely legs and the light sprinkling of freckles across her nose, which always made her look as if she had spent the afternoon playing tennis in the sun. Then I glanced at Conchita on the bike beside me, her glowing pink rain slicker and hat, her dark puffy hair. “I didn’t realize you guys were friends,” I said.
“I’ve known Aspeth my whole life. Our dads used to work together. I’ve been in her class since kindergarten.”
“I thought Aspeth was from Connecticut.”
“Her family only moved there a few years ago. Before that, they lived in Texas.”
“So do you guys hang out much?”
Conchita turned to look at me, an expression of faint amusement on her face. “Yeah, constantly. Haven’t you seen us?” Then she said, “Lee, when will you quit playing dumb with me? Aspeth and I were friends when we were little, but she stopped talking to me in fifth grade because she became too cool.” Conchita sounded matter-of-fact, not resentful. I think that she accepted her status as an outsider, that perhaps she had done so even before she came to Ault, while I remained perpetually hopeful that circumstances would conspire to make me beloved.
“So what about Sin-Jun?” Conchita said. “Do you think you two will room together?”
“Maybe.” I was pretty sure Sin-Jun was planning to room with plump, yappy Clara O’Hallahan. I imagined they’d let me get a triple with them, which would be better than a single, but not by much. Just as rooming with Aspeth would secure Dede’s status as a bona fide popular person, rooming with Sin-Jun and Clara would signify, if only to me, that I really was one of the mild, boring, peripheral girls.
We were well past the infirmary. “Let’s turn around,” I said. “We can just keep going up and back.”
On Wednesday, after killing Devin, I’d killed Sage Christensen (she was a sophomore on the lacrosse team), and at dinner I’d killed Allie Wray, a senior. Both exclaimed in surprise when I tagged them, but neither seemed to care particularly. “I’m so bad at these games,” Allie said agreeably as she passed over her stickers and her target.
Yet I, apparently, had an aptitude for Assassin, and I found myself wondering-it was impossible not to wonder-if I had any shot at winning the whole game. What if I surprised everyone? What if all the boys (boys, definitely, were more into it) got so preoccupied killing each other that they forgot about me and I just stuck around, beneath the radar? Because, undeniably, the qualities that I usually lamented in myself-my invisibility, my watchfulness of others-now served me well. Maybe at the end there would come the unlikely inevitability of victory, like when I played hearts with my family and, every so often, shot the moon.
And even if I didn’t win Assassin, I still liked the extra pulse it created in the dining hall and the schoolhouse. Some people would tell you who they had, and some people were secretive-it was like grades-and supposedly a bunch of sophomores had drawn up an enormous chart, like a family tree that circled in on itself, connecting all the players. But of course, such a chart wouldn’t remain current for long, because people’s status changed hourly. I also heard that Mrs. Velle, the registrar, had given out other students’ class schedules to Mundy Keffler and Albert Shuman, who were seniors, but that after more people came by her office asking for schedules, she refused. Waiting in line for breakfast, I was told by Richie Secrest, another freshman, that at least half the student body had been killed in the first twenty-four hours. I wasn’t surprised-both Dede and Sin-Jun had been dead by the previous evening. I was toasting my bagel when I heard Aspeth say to Cross Sugarman, “If I hear another word about that goddamn game, I’ll scream.”
“Yeah, because you’re out already,” Cross said. “Don’t be a bad sport.” (In such proximity to Cross, I stared at the floor, feeling clammy and unattractive from having been outside with Conchita.)
“No,” Aspeth said. “Try because it’s lame. And because there are enough basket cases at this school as it is.”
“Sure,” Cross said. “I completely believe you.”
They were standing about three feet from me, and then their bagels fell down the slide to the front of the toaster, and they were gone. So Cross was still in, I thought, and that was when I had the idea: If I stayed alive, eventually the game would lead me to him. Or it would lead him to me, which would be even better. For Cross to be in possession of a piece of paper with my name on it, for him to travel around campus in search of me, to reach out and place a sticker on my body-the possibility made me almost sad, almost terrified, with hope. For the first time since we’d ridden in the taxi together more than a month before, we’d be forced to talk; he’d have to acknowledge me.
Life is clearest when guided by ulterior motives; walking to chapel, I felt a sense of true purpose. I was on my way to kill McGrath Mills, a junior from Dallas whom I’d inherited from Allie Wray. I’d heard McGrath was good at lacrosse, and I thought that an athlete would probably be harder to kill-there was more of a chance he’d be into the game.
I’d decided the night before that my best bet was in the rush after morning chapel. Therefore, I’d left breakfast early, without Conchita, and I found a seat in chapel near the back. Usually I sat near the front, but I knew the back was the province of drowsy junior and senior boys and of students using chapel time to finish their homework. As the seats around me filled, I kept an eye out for McGrath. At seven fifty-eight, he took a seat two rows in front of me. While Mr. Coker, a chemistry teacher, gave a talk about how he’d developed patience by observing his grandfather during boyhood fishing trips to Wisconsin, I intently watched the back of McGrath’s head.
Though you were free to leave chapel after the hymn, I usually waited until the recessional was over. On this morning, however, before the last notes of “Jerusalem” rang out, I followed McGrath toward the exit. A bottleneck had formed at the doors-this was why normally I waited-and people were pushing each other and joking around. Parker Farrell, a senior, said, “Hey, Dooley, watch your back!” and then another guy shouted, “Quit grabbing my assassin!”
Two people stood between McGrath and me, and I wormed past one, then the other. With my right hand in my pocket, I’d transferred an orange sticker from the sheet to my finger. On the threshold of the chapel, McGrath was only a few inches from me; seeing the weave of his red polo shirt up close was like seeing the pores on another person’s face.