She gave him a bit of a nod, so he shrugged and headed for the locker room, perhaps a bit too eagerly, but Miss Aoki didn’t pay him any attention.
If Alex had stayed a bit longer, he might have seen Mitsuru staring at the inside of her arm intensely for several moments, as if lost in thought, and then, slowly, raise her hand and drag the jagged edge of one fingernail sideways, across the soft skin below the elbow, until she pierced it. He would have needed to be very close to see the blood seep out, first one small drop, then a moment later, another.
He probably wouldn’t have noticed that while the first drop hit the grass, the second did not. Instead, it formed a perfect sphere midway to the ground, and then it reversed itself, floating back up until Mitsuru caught it in her hand, something indefinable, between happiness and fear on her face, as she examined the bloody smear across her palm.
“It was right there the whole time, from the first night I met him. Rebecca,” Mitsuru asked sadly, looking over at Alex as he slowly limped up the steps from the track, “what did you make me forget?”
18
Emily wasn’t used waking up this early and heading to the gym, but ever since she’d agreed to go to Anastasia’s island for spring break, she’d started to worry about how she would look in the bathing suit that she hadn’t worn since last summer. It was too late to do much of anything about her tan, but at the very least, she wanted to make sure that she finished shedding the last few extra pounds she’d been trying to lose since Christmas. She was too busy to make it to the gym after class, so she’d decided to start working out a couple mornings a week.
The locker room was quiet when she came in, with just a handful of girls changing into workout clothes or swimsuits. Since the central gym was the only one with an indoor pool, and the mornings were still a bit chilly, it was seeing more traffic than usual. Emily picked a row of lockers at random, squeezing politely by a couple of younger girls who were toweling off from a very early swimming session, and took the first available open locker. She didn’t even notice the girl a few lockers over, right above the floor, until she had already unpacked her stuff. She was already half-changed into her gym clothes when she realized that she had blue hair.
Emily quickly considered her options. The idea of trotting to the next row, partially dressed and holding her gym clothes and shoes didn’t seem appealing or dignified, so she resigned herself to changing rapidly and hoping that Eerie either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t talk to her, or wouldn’t talk to her if she did. Emily took her shirt off; glad that she had put her sports bra on in her dorm room, and grabbed her gym shirt and pulled that over her head. When she finished putting it on, she found herself standing almost toe-to-toe with an obviously surprised Eerie, wearing a black one-piece swimsuit and frozen stock still, in the act of tucking her blue hair into a swim cap.
“Oh,” Emily said faintly, trying to summon a smile, “hello.”
“Hi,” Eerie squeaked. “Yes. Um. Hi.”
“Well, Eerie,” Emily asked, hurriedly turning back to shoving her clothes into her locker, as if the activity required her full attention, “how have you been?”
“Not great. In trouble,” Eerie said sadly, shaking her head. “What about you, Emily?”
“Things are fine,” Emily said, her voice oddly shrill, since she was talking to the main reason that things were not, in fact, fine. Her hands were trembling so slightly that no one else would notice it, but Eerie looked no more than slightly nervous. Emily was surprised and emboldened by the rush of self-righteous anger she felt.
“Good,” Eerie said, sounding doubtful. “You are here very early”.
“So are you,” Emily said defensively. The last thing she was about to admit to was her current weight loss regime. Even admitting the necessity would be, she felt certain, some sort of moral victory for the blue-haired freak.
“I always swim in the morning,” Eerie explained in her odd, melodic voice. “But you do the three o’clock yoga class with Anastasia. Everyone is talking about it.”
“Is that so?” Emily asked as she pulled on her running socks, hoping to draw Eerie out. She was secretly pleased with the idea that people were talking about her, even if it was about her and Anastasia.
“Yes,” Eerie said, apparently uninterested in explaining any further. After a moment’s delay, she just turned back to her locker, pulling out a pair of flip-flops and then closing the door behind her. Emily reached for her trainers, and then she got a nasty idea.
She tried unsuccessfully to put it aside while she laced up her left shoe, but it wasn’t going anywhere, even if it was mean, even if it was beneath her. Emily reminded herself that this was not just any girl, but her rival, who would doom her entire future, unchecked. This was the person, she thought angrily, who had almost managed that once before, with her infamous jaunt to San Francisco. And probably, probably just because she liked Alex right now, another airheaded crush, one that Eerie would lose interest in, sooner or later. Did it even matter to her, Emily wondered, that she was screwing up her entire life? Did it bother her at all?
“I’ve been so busy lately, it’s been a struggle to make it to the gym,” Emily said lightly, loudly enough that Eerie stopped walking away to listen. “First there was the dinner party, and now, with spring break coming up, there are of course a million details to take care of before I go away to Anastasia’s. You know, what to wear, what to pack, that sort of thing. Then, of course, Alex needs help with all the same things. The boy hardly knows anything at all about that sort of thing, don’t you agree? Do you think he even has a swim suit?”
Emily looked up at Eerie and smiled sweetly. The girl’s face remained as flat and expressionless as always, but Emily could see her hand twisting one of the corners of the white towel she clutched to her chest, and she knew that she had gotten through.
“I don’t know,” Eerie said quietly. “I have never seen him swim.”
She wasn’t sure what to make of that. Her expected elation mixed with more than a hint of doubt. Was Eerie really so dense? On the other hand, was she simply unconcerned? She hadn’t made any secret of her interest before, and even if she actually was Alex’s girlfriend, how could she possibly be so confident when he was going away with Emily for nearly three weeks?
She couldn’t be. Emily decided to twist the knife.
“What are you doing over break, Eerie?”
Was there a flicker, a glimmer of light above her head? Perhaps the barest hint of a halo?
“Coding down at Processing in Central,” Eerie said slowly. “Field study. It’s not so bad.”
She thought she could see it again, above Eerie’s head. Never long enough to read it, never vivid enough to identify the hue, but she knew that she was rattled, if it was visible to her at all. She had gotten to the changeling, she thought triumphantly.
“You poor thing,” Emily said sympathetically. She did feel some sympathy for Eerie — after all, she fully intended on taking Alex from her while she was stuck in Central, working in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, staring at a monitor. But that, she was starting to realize, might still not be enough. Emily was not about to lose to her, and she didn’t like the idea of Eerie being there for Alex to come back to. “That sounds awful.”
“It’s not so bad,” Eerie repeated, not sounding too convinced. She turned and took a step away, then stopped and looked back. “Have a fun break, Emily.”
“I will,” she promised the girl’s back, surprised and emboldened by her bad intentions. “And you, too, Eerie.”
Somewhere in London, in a fashionable loft with a view of the Thames, Margot killed four members of the former Taos Cartel, fast, but not so fast that she didn’t notice that the first one, the black guy, had still been at the Academy when she was a kid. She remembered watching him play basketball, out the window of the little house she shared with Eerie, while she fractured his skull against the white-painted concrete wall. His wife and the other two weren’t people she knew, so they were easier. She found herself staring at the way the blood pooled and collected on the flat’s antique Persian rugs after, marring the delicacy of the designs.