Peter hadn’t looked away from Evan; Evan hadn’t looked back. Silently, he absorbed all the S2—Subtext possible. Condescension was a means for establishing social control.
“What’re you looking at over there? Not much view from this bench, buddy. And I gotta say,” Peter said, inching closer, “I feel like I’m seeing you everywhere. Weird, right? Why do you think that is? Evan? Why d’you think that is?”
He felt his hair rise. Take the S4—Emotion out of it, and S5—Rationale. There was no reason for Peter Novak to know his name, unless Peter was paying attention to him.
“It’s a small—”
“Gotta talk louder than that.”
“It’s a small school.”
Peter tilted his angular nose down, like he was trying to pry a silent answer from beneath Evan’s skin. Aiden and Emma were gone, swept into the chapel with the wave of students around them. “I’m gonna go,” he mumbled, but as he tried to stand, Peter’s left arm slammed him back into the bench.
“I know what you’re doing, you little plebe,” Peter said. “She knows what you’re doing.”
“I—I’m not . . .” Evan tried to squirm around him but failed. His body went limp.
“I don’t know who you think you’re helping here, or why you’re following her, but knock it the fuck off, okay?” Peter let go of him and stood up. “My suggestion? Get a new hobby. Find your own thing.”
And he was gone, leaving Evan alone and out of breath on the bench. A few students nearby rolled their eyes in pity and continued into the chapel. One plebe girl tried to offer him a hand to stand but he ignored it. He didn’t need the help.
He didn’t care, either. It didn’t matter what Peter thought of him. Peter’s life wouldn’t matter anyway. Peter was a plebe. He’d graduate from Redemption and find a lifeless job. He’d make a few women miserable. He’d mow his lawn a million times and get back problems. He’d die. Peter would come and go from Earth without anyone ever acknowledging that he was actually there. Peter would never exist for a larger purpose, and he would never know true salvation.
But not Evan. He had a purpose. After stepping inside to confirm Emma was secured in the third row, Evan disappeared out the back door of the chapel.
Neesha.
TEN MINUTES BEFORE evening mass, at the stone well two hundred yards north of the wooden cross, wearing a dark-purple-and-yellow Adidas windbreaker. Those were the instructions.
Neesha waited with her hands balled into fists, leaning against the inner break of a tree. On the top of the Wah Wah Mountains, and every mountain in the southern Rockies, water condenses faster, so when the sun disappears and the wet heat of the day is left to night, it becomes a thick white fog, clinging to the top of the mountain. Redemption was built on the edge of the fog line, which meant most nights, it came rolling in slowly and suffocated the school until dawn. She liked being outside to watch as it was settling, slowly obscuring everything in the distance until you could only see twenty feet in any direction. It was like watching the world shrink in minutes. Souffle de dieu, the instructors called it. The breath of God.
Twelve minutes to mass. Her feet were soaking wet. She’d been in such a hurry to get out, she forgot her all-terrain shoes, and now her Skechers were sinking into the mud. She could feel the cold sneaking up the arms of her jacket and in the holes of her jeans, squeezing her skin and setting off ripples of vibrations. She stood stiff, soaking the drawstring of the jacket with saliva as she chewed it.
Nine minutes to mass. Something started to feel off; she could always tell when something was wrong. Her mother told the story of a night in Chandigarh, when she was eight. They’d been walking home from temple, and as soon as the sun had fully set, she stopped and started crying. Her father tried to carry her forward, but she collapsed to the ground, refusing to cross the Ghaggar River. She insisted they walk around it, an extra kilometer to get home. The next day, her mother ran to tapri to get a newspaper, expecting to see reports of a drowning, or a car driving into the Ghaggar, but there were no tragedies in Chandigarh. Or if there were, she didn’t get far enough past the front-page headline to find it: JAHAR DEVASTATED BY FLOODING. Rains in the nearby Patna region had destroyed entire villages. It was like an attack; the rainfall was so sudden and violent that survivors felt certain it had been sent as a punishment, starting with the first drop right at sunset.
It wasn’t scientific, but it was proof: she had a good sense for these things, even if she wasn’t always exact on the details.
Seven, six, five minutes to mass. Something was definitely off. Maybe she’d been given the wrong instructions, or maybe whoever she was supposed to meet had seen that it wasn’t Emma waiting and turned around. Either way, she wasn’t going to wait and miss mass to find out. She shoved both of her arms against the sides of the tree, pulling hard against the mud to lift herself up, but the branch wasn’t strong enough. It split with a loud crack.
“Neesha?”
Her hands shot in opposite directions and her balance swung forward. She hit the mud hard, her whole body sinking into it, and rolled onto her back, cracking open like an egg.
Above her, a dark-purple-and-yellow Adidas windbreaker was floating in the breath of God, glaring down.
“I fucking knew it!”
She could see a dark brown face below the hood. “I knew it,” he said again, high and tentative. “Oh, this is so messed up!”
He pulled his hood back. Ahmad Galbia—Zaza, as he had been called since he was seven years old—had a thin layer of black hair that stopped too high on his forehead, and a wide face, but maybe that was because his narrow glasses threw off the proportions. For as many times as she’d seen him, and it was many times—in the lab almost every day, weekends included, for three years—he’d never been this animated.
“As soon as I heard about this, I was like, ‘That’s Neesha’s project,’ I just had to see it for myself and I was fucking right! Do you have any idea how much shit you’re in right now?”
She groaned as she pulled herself up from the ground, bringing her face-to-face with him. He was short, only a few inches taller than her.
“They’ll end you. They’ll confiscate your work, they’ll take away the project, and they’ll ban you from winning the trophy—”
“Money, please.”
He shut up.
Neesha smiled, watching his hand hover over his pocket. “What?” she asked. “Are you going to not buy it?”
He sighed and dropped a clean white envelope on the stump between them.
“What are you even doing here?” she asked as she began to count. “It was supposed to be someone from the basketball team.”
“I am on the basketball team—I do the stats.”
“And the dirty work.”
“I guess.”
He didn’t say anything else. It said an embarrassing amount about his self-esteem that he was willing to run an errand like this for guys who cared so little about him that they asked him to run an errand like this.
“Where’s Emma?”
“Not here.”
“Why?”