“Why can’t you tell me?” I said.
“Because.” Edmundo shrugged.
The three of us stood there, me looking between them, neither of them looking at me. Philip’s skin was truly horrible, covered, especially on his chin, by both scabs and white-capped pustules. If my skin were like that, I thought, I would be afraid to leave the dorm. I felt myself soften toward him, even though he didn’t like me, and toward Edmundo, for being something good in Philip’s life of hideous acne.
“Fine,” I said. “Never mind.”
I had already opened the door to Broussard’s when Edmundo called back to me, blurring his words so that I couldn’t understand them until the whole sentence was finished. What he said was, “You worry too much.”
Conchita and I met for a bike lesson on Sunday evening, after she got back from Boston. When the lesson was over, I walked with her toward her dorm, wheeling Sin-Jun’s bike beside me. Martha had said she thought it was okay to wait awhile, at least until Conchita brought up the subject herself, to reveal our decision, but hiding the news made me anxious. We were passing the library when I said, “I want to tell you something. It’s not that big a deal, but Martha and I are rooming together next year.”
Conchita stopped walking, and I saw that she had burst into tears. I touched her shoulder. “Don’t cry.”
She raised both her elbows to the level of her face, as if to create a barrier between us. A few guys were approaching from the opposite direction. “Let’s go over there.” I pointed to a circular marble bench just beyond the library-the bench had been given by the class of 1956, contained a statue of a cherub in its center, and was never, to my knowledge, used by anyone.
“Come here.” I patted the marble next to me. “I’m sorry, Conchita,” I said. “I really am. But you need to calm down.”
“What about us rooming together?” Her face was a slimy red raisin.
“Us meaning you and Martha or you and me?”
“You and me.”
“I consider you a really good friend. I just think it’s hard to share a small space.”
“You and Martha will share a small space.”
“Yeah, but-you have so much stuff.”
“That’s because of my mom’s decorator. I don’t even like most of it.”
“Also, Martha and I have a lot in common. We get along.”
“You had never even talked to Martha before I introduced you.”
“We talked sometimes. In Latin.” I should have ceded the point, but I felt filled with the righteousness of what was, technically, the truth.
“When did you guys decide this?”
“Yesterday. Plus, Conchita, you have insomnia.”
“You decided it on the ride back to school? Did you ask her or did she ask you?”
“It was mutual. We came to a decision.”
Conchita had been sounding firmer. But when she spoke again, her voice trembled-I think it trembled with hope. “It could be all three of us,” she said. “We could get a triple.”
I could have said yes. Martha, I knew, preferred a double, but I was pretty sure I could talk her into a triple. “That wouldn’t work,” I said. “Groups of three always fight.”
“We didn’t fight in Boston.”
“That was just one day. But, Conchita, this doesn’t change anything. I still want us to hang out. We became friends this year without living in the same dorm.”
“We’re not friends.” With a lavender tissue she’d pulled from a pocket, she wiped her nose but did not blow it. Snot remained behind, smeared around her nostrils.
“Of course we’re friends.” I had never imagined we’d arrive at this moment, with me trying to convince her. “You’re overreacting. By tomorrow, you won’t even care about this. Let me walk you back to your dorm.” I stood and looked down at her scrawny heaving shoulders; in the fading evening light, I noticed for the first time that the laces of her running shoes were yellow-and-orange striped. “Conchita, I don’t know what you want me to do.”
“Leave me alone.”
The chapel bells rang once; it was eight-thirty. People who say leave me alone never mean it, and this was something that I knew. “Fine,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”
When I’d killed McGrath, he’d told me his target was Alexander Héverd, a sophomore. Alexander was from Paris, he was (I’d heard) a druggie, and he was handsome in a graceful but not feminine way. He was medium height and quite thin, with narrow hips, and when he wore jeans-on the nights when we didn’t have formal dinner-instead of wearing running shoes, as most Ault boys did, he wore tan leather shoes that you might have thought were dorky, or even orthopedic (they had a thick rubber sole), except that the fact that Alexander Héverd was wearing them meant they had to be, in some way, whether or not it was visible to you, deeply cool. I had never spoken to him, but I’d once been behind him going through the food line in the kitchen, and his voice, which was only faintly accented, had seemed utterly assured and possibly condescending. But maybe I’d only thought that because he was French.
The problem was that even though McGrath had told me I was inheriting Alexander as a target, McGrath hadn’t given me the piece of paper verifying this, nor had he given me the stickers. I still had stickers-in fact, I had several sheets of them-but it felt important to have the paper with Alexander’s name on it. Though no one, including Devin, had made me prove I had them, I wanted proof for myself. Because what if McGrath had gotten mixed up and really I was supposed to kill Alex Ellison, who was a senior?
By Monday, McGrath still hadn’t dropped off the piece of paper. True, I’d been away from campus most of Saturday, but all day Sunday, at chapel and then at lunch afterward-Sunday lunch was supposed to be the nicest and was therefore usually the worst, often including bloody lamb-and then in the dorm, he could have found me. Finally, on Monday evening at formal dinner, I approached him again, at the site of our last terrible interaction, and he smacked his head and told me he’d leave it off later that night, definitely, he wouldn’t forget. Which, actually, he didn’t. I killed Alexander the next day by following him out of roll call. His target was Riley Haddix, also a sophomore. Standing there while Alexander tried to find his stickers (within a matter of seconds, it seemed too late to tell him I didn’t need them, it seemed like he might think I’d already wasted his time) made me feel chunky and American and overheated.
But I had to keep playing, because how else would I get to Cross? And it was, with every passing day, less clear to me how many people were left, how close I was, and how much time remained for either of us. As far as I could tell, no one had made an attempt on my life since Edmundo had told me he’d been killed. But even if the person who had killed him wasn’t trying to kill me, that assassin’s assassin would, or that assassin’s assassin’s assassin. Especially because the remaining pool of players-maybe there were fifteen of us left, or maybe fifty-had to be mostly self-selecting. So I looked over my shoulder when I was walking, I tried never to be out in the open by myself. But what I felt more strongly than the possibility of my own death was the possibility of Cross’s. Maybe he’d decide the game was no longer cool. He’d get tired of it. Normally, when I saw him around campus, I liked to watch him but keep my distance. But now I edged closer, sitting at the table next to his at breakfast and again at lunch, waiting to overhear a scrap of conversation about the game. I even left lunch just behind him (if he were paying attention, he might well have thought he was my target already), and finally I got what I’d been waiting for. He was fifteen feet in front of me, talking to John Brindley and Devin Billinger, and he said something that I missed the beginning of but caught at the end: “-unless it’s someone who tries to get me in the shower.” All three boys laughed. “If he comes for me in the shower,” Cross said, “then it’s like, okay, man, if it’s worth that much to you.”