Suddenly there is a great shuffling behind me. And when I turn, every guy is down on one knee and every girl is doing a very low curtsey. All heads are bowed.
“Lars, come on, man. Knock it off.”
Lars leans in to me and whispers, “Fuck you, Cooper. You wanna be the goddamned King? Then be the fucking King.”
Valentina and Selina both bow low as well. They say, “My Queens,” simultaneously, like this is all some prearranged pageantry.
I look at Cadee. She shrugs.
I look at Isabella. She beams. She loves this.
“OK, everyone up. Carry on.”
They all get to their feet and resume whatever they were doing before we arrived.
“I’m hungry.” I look at Isabella and Cadee. “You guys are hungry, right? Let’s go to the cafeteria. I need to get out of this fucking building.”
“Cafeteria?” Lars scoffs. “My king. The royal breakfast is waiting for you in your private dining room.”
“What private dining room?” Cadee asks. “We only have one dining room here.”
“That’s right.” We all turn to find Mona walking towards us. And do I detect discontent in her voice? Her rebel style is long gone now. All the other Fang and Feather initiates are in jeans, t-shirts, a few girls are wearing miniskirts—but all in all, they are casual. Not Mona. She is dressed like… I don’t know. Some classy, put-together person from the middle of the last century. “Just the one dining room,” she confirms. “And now it’s only for you three. Congrats, my royal bitches. Now the rest of us have to eat across campus.”
She gives us a slow clap.
Then I spot Dante on the other side of the room. Hands in pockets. Leaning against a wall. Sunglasses on so I can’t see his eyes.
But I can imagine what’s going through his head right now.
This was supposed to be him, after all.
I look back at Mona. “Guess it sucks to be you, doesn’t it?” Then I offer my right arm to Cadee, my left arm to Isabella, and I escort them down the hall to our new private dining room.
Fuck it.
If I have to play the role of King, I might as well make the most of it.
That’s what Dante would do if he were me.
Later that week I’m walking out of my groundwater modeling class when Jack sidles up to me. I don’t stop, or even slow, but he keeps pace and says nothing for several seconds.
“Can I help you, Jack?”
He takes a breath. Like a deep one. Like maybe he’s about to lie to me. I’ve never thought Jack was much of a liar, but I’ve been known to be wrong, well… pretty much all the time, so it’s highly likely that I am. “Your equipment arrived.”
“Equipment?”
“For your geological study underneath the tomb?”
Oh. Right. That. “OK. Um… thanks?”
“You’re getting started on it today. It’s already there at the tomb. I’ve assigned Victor English to help you out.”
Now I stop walking and turn to him. “Since when are you involved in my research project?”
“Since now, I guess.”
“That’s not an answer, Jack.”
He shrugs. “Our father is a busy man, Cooper. You know this. He can’t babysit your project, so he told me to do it.”
I get what’s going on here. Jack is baiting me. He basically just said, Cooper, you are an imbecile fuck-up who can barely manage to wipe his ass and tie his shoes. But never fear, big brother is here.
Big Brother is right.
I smile at him. “Well, thanks, Jack. I have no idea what I’m doing. And I had a question.”
“Shoot, Coop.”
“So… you know… I was like… calculating the density of the soil and I got to thinking. Do you think we’re gonna have a problem with the fine-grain sediments?”
“What?”
“High electrical conductivity?”
“Cooper, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh. OK. Well, I phrased it as a question to like… be inclusive. But actually, what I’m really saying is that ground-penetrating radar is probably not gonna work.”
I do my best not to smile. I think I mostly succeed.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s got a lot of limitations. I’ll do it. Especially if the equipment is already here. Plus, the more bullshit I can put in that Capstone paper, the more legit it will look. But what I’m really saying is that I think we need a bigger gun.”
“Explain.”
God, I love that look on his face. He seriously has no idea what I’m talking about. And let’s just be honest here, I barely know what I’m talking about and this time next year I’ll have an actual degree in this shit. But it’s still funny. “Have you ever heard of seismic scanning?”
“Cooper, you know I haven’t. Just get to the point.”
“OK. Calm down, big brother. It’s um… you know, seismic scanning. It pretty much speaks for itself.”
“What does it do?”
“It finds voids underground. And maps them up in pretty colors.”
“Isn’t that what the ground-penetrating radar does?”
“Yes. Minus the pretty colors.”
He lets out a long breath. “So? Are the colors important? What’s the difference?”
“Oh. Well, seismic scanning…” I put my arm around his shoulder and make him walk with me as I explain using as many fancy words as possible. And by the time we reach the dock where my boat is, he has agreed to increase my budget by fifty thousand dollars because he lost track of what I was saying pretty much the moment I started talking. Fifty grand is way more than I need, but that was the point.
“Good idea, Cooper. I’ll have a check for you by the end of the week. Do I need to find you a team?”
“No, I have one in mind.”
“Excellent. We don’t want outsiders involved if we can help it. But we need this done by Christmas.”
“Oh.” I wince.
“What?”
“Well, that’s a problem.”
“Why?”
“We need permits for that. I’m gonna be setting off a couple hundred tiny explosions, right? The government typically frowns on that shit unless you get permission.”
He’s shaking his head the whole time I’m talking. “No permits.”
“I don’t need them for the radar, but yeah, dude. We have to have them for the seismic shit.”
He sighs. Clearly my project is above his pay grade. Which was the point, actually. I don’t need Jack babysitting me the entire year. “I’ll talk to Father. But just get us something. Quick. If you do the radar stuff today, can you tell us something tomorrow?”
I laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“No.” I laugh again. “Jack. This is science. It doesn’t move very fast. And since Victor English and I are the only ones on the job, we’re probably gonna fuck it up… oh, at least a dozen times before we get it right. And then we have to interpret the data using complicated software and… yeah. That’s the hard part. So… two months?”