Brutal Precious Read online

  Through the anger I can see her shoulders trembling. I didn’t think it was her, at first. She was so quiet, her purple streaks all by faded. But I recognized Will Cavanaugh. How could I not? I studied his face in the dossier for nights on end, memorizing every line and curve, planning out where and how I would hurt him most. The docile girl talking with Will couldn’t have been Isis. But then came the kick to his spleen, wild and furious and all reaction, no forethought, and I knew instantly it was her. Here, of all places. My heart stuttered, the color and warmth flushing in where months of training and guilt had drained it out to grays and blacks.

  “What about you?” She spits when I don’t say anything. “Harvard get too snooty for you? Who am I kidding, the Queen of England is less snooty than you.”

  “I’ve transferred here. I never went to Harvard.”

  “Then where. The fuck. DID. You go?”

  Her words are slow venom, her eyes narrowed. I can’t tell her. She wouldn’t understand. No – she would. She would understand best of all, and that’s why I can’t tell her. It would draw me closer to her. I was thrilled to take this job at first, if only for my planned retribution on Will, but now that she’s here I regret it. This school brings us close. So close. Close enough for me to hurt her all over again, hurt her to the point of no healing, like I did to Sophia.

  I savor the cuts her fury makes, the pain letting me know that yes – I’m still alive. Even after trying to kill the old me, the hurtful bastard me, to leave him behind buried in guilt beside Sophia and Tallie, a single flame from Isis’ lips and I’m reminded of our war, our words, our bond. I want to kiss her. I want to kiss her as she turns me to ash. I want her to kill me like I haven’t had the guts to.

  But she is trembling. So I settle for words.

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” I say. She scoffs. Her armor is out in full force, tougher and spikier than ever, thanks to me. Thanks to Will. Thanks to bastards like the two of us.

  “Did you get that line from one of Sophia’s trashy romance novels –” She covers her mouth instantly, but it’s too late. Sophia’s name rings in the open, tearing apart the stitching on both our wounds. But where pain stops most mouths, it fuels Isis’.

  “I hate you, Jack Hunter.”

  I want to hold her until she can’t stand me anymore, until she runs away to somewhere safer. Somewhere without me.

  I nod instead.

  “I know.”

  “No. You don’t know. You think that immature war was hate. But this – this is –” She squeezes her eyes shut. “You left me. You left me like everyone else, and I can’t forgive you for that.”

  “You don’t have to,” I offer. “You don’t owe me anything.”

  She laughs, the harsh front breaking for just a moment, her old self spilling through the cracks.

  “And you don’t owe me anything, obviously. Not even a call. Not even a single goddamn text saying, oh, I don’t know, ‘I’m not actually decomposing in a river somewhere after throwing myself off a bridge, still breathing, don’t wait up for me’.”

  And that’s when I see it. It’s not anger because I’ve hurt her. Sophia’s anger was always because I’d hurt her. This purer, brighter anger is because I made Isis worry. Because she thought I was dead, or rather, because she didn’t know whether or not I was alive. She is too kind, too motherly for this fury to be anything but a protective instinct denied its full course. I held that sort of anger once, too. I took it out on Isis after I’d caught her in my room looking through my letters – in my mind, trying to get to Sophia.

  I’ve known Isis long enough (not nearly a year, but it feels like centuries) to know that when she shakes, she is far gone. When she trembles, her past is rearing its head, throwing shadows on her mind. I’d always considerately refrained from touching her, from making it worse, and though I scream at myself to remain that way, I can’t.

  I can’t.

  I step into her, wrapping my arms around her weakly and resting my head in her neck.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” I breathe. “I tried, and tried, god I tried to be the strong one. To do the right thing for everyone.”

  Isis goes stiff, and for a split second I realize what I’m doing, and frantically try to pull back. Something desperate and dark is eating away at my core, held back by Gregory’s brutal training and my own dam of denial. And, like the bomb she is, just seeing Isis again blew cracks in that dam, and she’s going to see me through the cracks, the real me, she’s going to see me like no one else has, like I’m pretending not to be, broken and dead inside and I have to leave, have to compose myself, but she doesn’t let me pull away, wrapping her arms tight around my waist and keeping me pressed against her, against her warmth and smell and her understanding silence.

  “I t-tried,” I whisper. “I tried to protect her, and you, and everyone. But all I did was kill her. I failed. I failed and I killed her, and hurt you.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, hot moisture collecting in them.

  “I don’t deserve to live -”

  Her arms tighten, squeezing the air from me.

  “Stop,” Isis says.

  “It’s the truth –”

  “Newsflash; not everything that drops from your gorgeous dumb mouth is the truth.” There’s a pause. “Ah, shit. I just called you gorgeous. Now I have to commit seppuku.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I mumble into her neck.

  “See? That’s how it feels. That’s how it feels when you say you don’t deserve to live. New rule: Nobody gets to talk suicide ever.”

  A tear escapes, and I bury it in her shirt collar. She puts a hand on my head, petting it.

  “If you really think you’re so bad,” she says. “Then live. Live, and suffer. Live with the memories of all the bad things you’ve done. Don’t take the easy way out.”

  There’s a poignant pause. Then she adds;

  “- numbnuts.”

  The name is a tiny injection of reality, of light. The cracks in me relieve the pressure of the last year, of the year before the last, the water flowing through them slowly as my breath deflates in my lungs. I look up, and cup either side of her face.

  “I’ll only say this one time, so listen carefully.”

  Her eyes are wide, her lips parted and her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes too, I notice, are more than a little tear-stained.

  “You’re right,” I finish. “You’re right for once, Isis Blake.”

  And then she smiles, and for the briefest half-second before her friends come barreling out of the hall and shout for her, everything in the world is right, and bright, and better. We part, my arms already missing her warmth, and she looks back at them.

  “One sec!” She whips her head around to me. “So you’re here now? You’re living on campus like the rest of us peons?”

  I nod. “The Jefferson dorm. 314. For a while.”

  Her stare is flinty. “You have a lot of explaining to do. Due. A lot of explaining is extremely overdue. And you should call your mom. She’s been really worried about you.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You still have my number, right? You didn’t chuck your phone in a lake when you went to join the Empire or the seven samurai or the monastery of lame grossness or whatever?”

  “I have it.”

  She chews her lip. “I still haven’t forgiven you. But I’ve found, through eighteen years of vigorous experimentation, that I’m much more willing to forgive people if they interact with me on this physical plane. Talk to me. Text me. With cute cat pictures or winky faces –”

  “I don’t do winky faces.”

  “Aha, but you do cat pictures!”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” She argues.

  “No.”

  “Ugh, look at us. Why can’t we just talk like normal people? About, like, concerts and cake and our deep personal beliefs and the color orange and stuff?”

  I stare at her blankly. She nudges me.

  “Orange. C
’mon, try it. A conversation about orange.”

  “It’s….orange.”

  “Ding ding ding. Give the man a cigar. Orange is orange. Wow. This has been an excellent conversation. Your powers of observation are downright fearsome. Maybe we could work our way up, you know, to purple next time. Except then you might disappear for years again –”

  “It wasn’t years.”

  “ – and I would be lost and heartbroken, and then you would come back having spent fifty years thinking about purple, thinking; ‘oh yes, now is my chance to impress Isis with my deep and thorough knowledge of the color purple’, and you’d find me in a nursing home in a coma dreaming about Johnny Depp all vegetable-like, and you’d have to hurry to tell me about purple because one of my potential spawn might pull the plug on me. Maybe you’ll pull the plug on me. Note to self: ugh, don’t get old.”

  “Too late,” I smirk. She puffs out her cheeks and stands.

  “Anyway, I like you but you’re ruining my life. Bye.”

  -7-

  3 Years

  47 Weeks

  2 Days

  Everything happens all the time forever, and this would be a terrifying concept if I wasn’t so enlightened and in-tune with the natural forces of the universe, which include but aren’t limited to; A. taco salad, B. taco salad, and C. my own glorious ass (glorioass). Which increases in size directly proportionately to how much taco salad is in the area. Science has come so far.

  Regardless of how big my ass is, it won’t be big enough to crush Nameless’ huge fat head. Also, I would not touch him with any body part that is not spiked and or doused in black mamba venom. Now that he’s going to my school, I have to devise ways in which to rid myself of him sans homicide. Maybe, like, a fortuitous black hole.

  But first, I have to throw a tantrum. It’s an area in which I have great experience.

  “Do I even wanna know what you’re doing?” Yvette looks down as I attach myself to her leg the second she walks in the room. I whimper attractively.

  “I’m taking the time to revisit your ‘drop out of college in the first year’ plan.”

  “Oh, stop,” Yvette throws her laptop bag on her bed. She drags her feet to her desk. “While you’re down there, untie my shoes for me.”

  “Like I was saying,” I untie with gusto. “I recently discovered someone I really don’t like goes here.”

  “That dude you were talking with the other night? Model McFartington?”

  “Have I called him that? That sounds like something I would say.”

  “You say it a lot. In your sleep.”

  “Yvette!” I wail. “It’s not Model McFartington. There is another person on my shitlist. Model McFartington is on the shitlist, also, but he is not number one, and also he’s got a bunch of red squiggly lines through his name, because sometimes I take him off the list and sometimes I add him back on.”

  Yvette raises one studded eyebrow.

  “It’s complicated,” I summarize. “Let’s drop out.”

  “No,” she says simply.

  “WhhHHHYY?” I inquire delicately.

  “We gotta experience the whole nine yards of college agony before we drop out. We have to black out drink a bunch and swear off men forever and fail a bunch of classes and try cocaine. That’s at least seven months worth of work right there.”

  “Says who.”

  “Says every poignant coming of age movie ever.”

  “Ugh!” I let go of her foot and roll under my bed. I see a moldy dick carved into the wood mattress slats and immediately roll back out. “Ugh.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about this dude, okay? Or…two dudes, or whatever you have going on. Point them out to me and I’ll sock them so hard they’ll vomit up what’s left of their souls. But right now, I gotta finish this Chem essay or I’m screwed. Metaphorically. I haven’t actually gotten screwed in a while.”

  These are her famous last words, because when I go to get dinner and come back full of burrito and knock for her to let me in there is groaning emanating from the door and I hear Yvette demand for something ‘harder’. I trip over a dust particle with alarming grace as I make my way to calmer waters. Jack opens his door with sleep-mussed hair and no shirt and it’s then I realize these waters are about as calm as people who win free cars on Oprah.

  “My roommate’s being gross so I live here now,” I say as I push past him.

  “You can’t,” he points out.

  “They said that to Columbus too, and look what happened there.” I flop on his bed. I know it’s his because it’s perfectly made, covers just a little wrinkly from sleep. His roommate’s bed is a mercifully empty nest of messy blankets. Jack pulls a shirt on and yawns, sitting beside me.

  “You’ve got sleep boogers,” I point at his eyes. He rubs them vigorously.

  “You can stay here if you want,” He says, still rubbing one eye. It is a drastically human, vulnerable motion I’ve never seen him do before. “But I’m leaving in fifteen minutes.”

  “You look like a little kid,” I laugh. “With eye problems.”

  “Shut up,” He growls, and rubs harder. His cheeks are sleep-flushed and his hair sticks up every which way.

  “Still got a duck’s butt for a hairstyle, huh?”

  “Still got the most infantile insults for a defense mechanism, huh?”

  “At least it is not an animal’s backside.”

  “The sounds are similar.”

  I flip him off with both hands and he retorts by leaning against the wall and closing his eyes. The dusk-rose sky looms outside the window, sunset slanting in and painting the white walls peach-striped.

  “What do you want to know first?” Jack asks finally.

  A thousand questions erupt, but I pick the least confrontational one. “Where are you going in fifteen minutes?”

  “A friend invited my roommate to a barbeque. He’s dragging me along.”

  “Who’s your roommate?”

  “Charlie. An idiot, but a passionate idiot. I’ve heard that counts for something.”

  “Uh, you are looking at living proof of that right here,” I point at my chest. Jack smirks and cracks his eyes open to look at me, the ice-blue of them melted to faint purple by the red sun.

  “You’re not an idiot, Isis.”

  “I know. Duh.”

  “You’re a moron,” He corrects, and closes his eyes again, falling to lie on his side. I debate the merits of pulling his fingers off one by one and decide they are much too pretty to be removed. For now.

  I hug my knees and try to remember how to breathe right, like normal people do. People who aren’t chased by ghosts. Or in this case, chased by sadistic ex-boyfriends. And just as I start to spiral down into the darkness, where the monster lives and breathes and gnaws, Jack reaches up and pulls me down, and I squeak, and we’re lying on his soft bed, him behind me, me as the little spoon. His heat and weight presses against the contours of my spine, the smell of mint and honey surrounding me like a blanket. It’s the smell I longed for in the darkest nights alone, thinking about the war, and his hands, and what it would be like to kiss him, hard and for real and maybe more because maybe, just maybe, he’s the one person in the world who might kiss my stretch marks instead of calling them ugly -

  “Stop,” He mumbles into my hair.

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop looking so sad all the time.”

  I scrunch my face up, and he nuzzles into my neck further. My heart suddenly decides it’s an astronaut and attempts to do forty backflips in what feels like zero-G.

  “W-Why go here for school?” I ask. Jack exhales.

  “Work.”

  The zero-G cuts out, replaced with molasses and lead and spikes.

  “Obviously. Of course, it’s so obvious, frat boys just don’t cut it, college girls need a suave and experienced undertaker of the vajayjay to relieve stress, because everyone in the world is obsessed with sex, apparently –”

  “I’m not an escort,” He says
patiently. “I work for someone else now. Doing other things.”

  “Wow. That’s so specific. I feel like I’ve gleaned a lot of valuable and specific information from this conversation.”

  “Remember the guys who were in that forest? The guy in a tweed suit? The ones who chased you?”

  “Yeah, but –”

  The door opens just then. Jack and I sit up hastily. In walks Tinyballs Mcsuitypants, he of the running-after-me-in-a-dark-Ohio-forest-because-his-boss-told-him-to. His black hair’s in spikes, skin amber. He freezes, dark eyes catching on me.

  “You!” He squawks, and points.

  “YOU!” I shout. “How are you still alive? I FIFA’d your balls!”

  “What the hell is she doing here?” He snarls at Jack. Jack sighs.

  “Isis Blake, meet Charlie Moriyama.”

  “Already have,” Charlie and I say at the same time. I glare. He narrows his narrow eyes even further.

  “Look, we don’t have time for this shit,” Charlie looks to Jack. “We were supposed to be there five minutes ago. Let’s not fucking blow this, okay?”

  Jack sighs and hefts off the bed, looking at me. “I’ll be back later. We’ll talk more then.”

  “Sure, yeah, just work with the bad guys. See if I care.”

  “Isis –”

  “We’re GOING,” Charlie shouts, grabbing a towel off the end of his bed and slamming the door behind him. Jack frowns, and follows reluctantly.

  And I do the same. From at least five meters and two cars away. Charlie drives a white Nissan with a broken taillight. My mind runs circles around itself as they lead me down the highway and away from school. Why has Jack shacked up with Tweed-jerk and Small Balls? Tweed talked about wanting to hire him, but I still don’t know for what. I guess he succeeded. Let’s be real though - Jack let him succeed. Everything that happens to Jack is exactly because Jack lets it happen. Except me. But that’s a different story, full of illegality and joy.

  Jack said he’s working, which means, what? He’s at school, but on a job for Tweed? What job, stealing good grades for the poor-grade people? What could Tweed’s company possibly do for money, other than stand there and look dumb? It doesn’t make any sense and it makes less sense when Charlie pulls into a huge, white-stone plaza surrounded by a posh apartment building. A security booth lets cars in and out of the massive parking garage. Charlie’s Nissan disappears, and I pull up next. The security guard is a tan guy with a neat beard.