скачать книгу бесплатно
“Lulu, honey,” says Camila with something like pity. “Wouldn’t you rather have a boy who’s passionate about you?”
I shrug and she shakes her head.
“You’re hopeless, you know that?” She hoists herself up on the porch rail.
I don’t give her an answer, but the fact is, I do know it. My feelings for Jek are just as hopeless as Camila says. I’ve done everything I can think of to get him to notice me, and Jek’s not an idiot. He’s got to know how I feel, and if he hasn’t shown any interest yet, he isn’t going to. The only rational response is to move on.
But I’m not quite ready to be rational yet. Maybe he needs a little more time. Maybe he just needs some encouragement. Maybe if I’m patient, he’ll wake up one day and realize I’m the one he’s wanted all along.
I squeeze my eyes shut, disgusted with my own thoughts. If I said any of that out loud, Camila would be the first to tell me how I’ve had my mind addled by too many rom-coms and fairy tales. I don’t need the lecture, so I keep my thoughts to myself.
Lucky for me, Camila has stopped watching my face and moved on to more exciting spectator activities, like narrating all the town gossip while a dozen little soap operas play out through the window, as if it’s our own personal flat-screen TV.
“Hmm, looks like Val and Erik are still together. Guess she never told him what she did to his car. And Brandon is way too drunk again. Third time this week, from what I heard.”
“Quit it, Camila,” I grumble.
“Come on... Don’t you want to know what’s going on in this sad little town?”
“I don’t like gossip. People are entitled to their secrets.”
“Oooh,” she says, ignoring me. “Natalie Martinez, returning to the scene of the crime.”
“Camila, I said—”
“Shh, I know, but this is different. It’s not about what she did, it’s what got done to her. If some sleazebag attacked her, don’t you think it’s my duty to let everyone know? For the safety of future potential victims, I mean.”
I cast her a doubtful look. Camila’s been known to exaggerate. “Did some sleazebag attack her?”
She shrugs. “Hard to say, really. It was last Saturday night, at Matt Klein’s kegger. I got there late because I was...” She trails off. “Well, never mind what I was doing. The point is, when I got there, she was slipping into one of the bedrooms with this half-Asian guy. Floyd or something. Lloyd? Hyde. I’d never seen him before.”
“That’s your story? People do that all the time, Camila. You do that all the time.”
“I’m not judging, and I’m not done! As far as anyone can tell, she went in perfectly happy and willing, but she came out twenty minutes later looking like she’d seen the devil himself. She started yelling at this guy in front of everyone, calling him a freak, saying she’d never agreed to that.”
“To what?”
“Oh, so now you want to know,” Camila teases.
I turn away from her, annoyed that she caught me in her trap. “So don’t tell me,” I huff. “You’re the one who brought it up.”
“Yeah, well...whatever it was, it was apparently too kinky for Natalie to say out loud. She did say she was going to call the cops on him, though.”
“Shit,” I say, interested again in spite of myself. “What happened?”
“Somehow it all died out. Natalie left the kegger in tears with a friend, and I expected to hear sirens within minutes, but no one ever came. As far as the gossip mill is concerned, she never told anyone what happened. No one official, at least. But then again, Natalie’s gotten around a lot since her dad got sick last year. Maybe she’s afraid no one would believe her story.”
“What about the guy? Hyde?”
“Beats me. At that point, no one wanted to admit to knowing him, let alone inviting him. I don’t blame them... There’s something funny about that guy. Something off.”
“What do you mean?” I say, no longer bothering to hide my interest. Camila’s too deep into her story to give me a hard time about it.
“I don’t know...” she says, staring off at nothing as if she’s replaying the scene in her mind. “He’s sort of weird-looking.” She shivers. “Something about his face.”
“What, like a scar?”
Camila squinches up her forehead, like she’s trying to remember, but after a second she shakes her head. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She shivers again and slides off the porch rail. “Come on, it’s freezing out here. Come back inside with me and at least try to have fun?”
I heave a long-suffering sigh, but a few minutes later we are giggling uncontrollably at the sight of Dracula, Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes trading keg stands, and I have to admit I am having a pretty good time—at least until Camila decides to join them, and ends our evening early by getting spectacularly drunk and puking all over Kilpatrick’s kitchen table. After that, I don’t have much choice but to get her as cleaned up as I can, then tug and shove her toward the front door, through a crowd that seems to have only gotten bigger and rowdier in the past couple of hours.
Once I’ve gotten a weakly protesting Camila through the door, I turn and give one last glance around the party on the off chance that my eyes will land on Jek. Camila’s right—it’s pretty unlikely that Jek would show up to a kegger, but he did say he might. But before I get a good look, I’m knocked off balance by some guy shoving his way into the house. I tip backward into Camila, and she goes stumbling down the front steps, where she wobbles a moment before pitching heavily to the ground.
“Watch it, asshole,” I call over my shoulder as I hurry to her side. In return, the guy spits back a slur so vile that I spin around to face him, shock and fury pulsing through me. “What did you call me?”
The dark-eyed boy tosses a bored glance over one shoulder and opens his mouth as if to follow up on his comment. But something about my face must change his mind, because his eyes widen in what looks like panic, and before I know it he has slithered back into the crowd.
“What was that all about?” Camila asks hazily as I help her to her feet.
“I hate costume parties,” I mutter. “Hard to give someone a piece of your mind when they’re dressed as...”
“As what?”
I grasp at a word or an idea for a second, but it slips away from me. “I didn’t get a good look at him,” I tell her with a shrug. “Some kind of angel? Or a demon.”
Camila giggles as I maneuver her into the car.
“Well, which was it?”
“I mean, like a fallen angel,” I explain, but I can’t put my finger on why I think so. I try to conjure up a mental image of him, but I don’t remember him wearing anything special or carrying any props, and his face is now a muddled memory. I can’t quite get a fix on whether his nose was big or small, his cheeks sharp or soft, his skin dark or light—all that stands out in my mind are those intense black eyes, and the strange fear I read in them.
CHAPTER 2 (#u8dc10260-3b01-5885-be9a-4a674dfbd769)
I can’t stop thinking about that guy who ran into me at the kegger. It’s weird to see anyone you don’t know in a town like this, where almost everyone is connected in some way to the Research Park. London’s funny that way.
No, not that London—London, Illinois. Up until the 1970s, it was an unincorporated farming community called Plachett, an hour and a half out of Chicago on winding country roads. It didn’t even have a post office. Then Lonsanto Agrichemical Corporation bought out a bunch of the local farmers and built a major research facility right in the middle of nowhere, and people started moving in and building houses. In 1978, Lonsanto merged with Donnelly Pharmaceuticals to create London Chemical—Big Farm meets Big Pharm, people said. That’s when they built the Research Park, and more housing developments, and in 1984, the town of Plachett incorporated and changed its name to London—for LONsanto and DONelly.
That history makes London feel different from most small, Midwestern farm towns. Most places grow up naturally around a river or a railroad, and they wind up a mishmash of old buildings and new, straight roads and roads that wind off into nothing, fancy brick houses and old wooden shacks. In London, the whole town was planned by the company from the beginning to attract the best scientists in the country, so it’s like living in the pages of a tourism pamphlet. There’s a picturesque Main Street with coffee shops, antiques stores and a microbrewery. The buildings all have solar panels, the flower beds are filled with noninvasive wildflowers, there are bike paths crisscrossing the whole town... When you go to a friend’s house, you always know exactly where the bathrooms are, because every house was based on one of three different plans.
I have to admit, it’s beautiful in the spring and summer, especially on the London Chem grounds, which are basically a big park right on the edge of town, with paths through the trees for bikers and joggers, free and open for anyone to use. Of course, that means us locals have to share space with protesters yelling, “GMO, just say no!” and “No more frankenfoods!” but you get used to them. It’s all worth it for the botanic garden, the butterfly pavilion and the mirrored glass lab buildings in strange, fanciful shapes, all designed by famous architects. The biggest are the twin headquarters of Lonsanto and Donnelly, curved around each other to reflect the symbiosis of the companies. They tell you all this when you visit—when I was a kid, we had field trips to London Chem every semester or so.
That’s another thing London Chem won’t let you forget: how invested they are in education. They paid for both schools in town—the K-8 and the high school where I go now, with its state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, better even than most colleges. That means science is a huge deal at London High, and the top students are super competitive—especially when it comes to the various science fairs and competitions sponsored each year by London Chem. Monday morning after the kegger, the latest award is all anyone can talk about.
“Jayesh Kapoor won the Gene-ius Award again?” Steve Polaczek says, reading the morning announcements off his phone. “I can’t believe it. Who the hell is this guy?”
We’re in the middle of setting up another mass spectrometry lab in biochem. It’s our third this semester, after Donnelly donated a hand-me-down QTOF. Now we have to use it every other week just to show how grateful we are. Really, London Chem should be thanking us. Sure, we get fancy lab equipment, but they get a massive tax write-off every time they toss something our way.
My lab partner, Danny Carew, claimed he can’t find his goggles and is wandering the room asking people if they’ve seen them, which is a transparent excuse to curry votes for the upcoming student council election. He’s left me to do all the grunt work of setting up, which I’m not really doing because I’m distracted by Steve’s question. I’m itching to answer him, but he and his partner, Mark Cheong, are across the lab bench from me, very clearly not including me in their conversation.
“What do you mean, who is he?” replies Mark lazily. “He’s the guy who wins all these awards.”
“Yes, I know,” says Steve sarcastically. “This time for research into—” he reads from the screen “—metabolic pathways for the artificial synthesis of (S)-reticuline.”
Mark raises his eyebrows. “Impressive.”
Steve dismisses this assessment with a wave of his hand. “Sure, whatever. But who is he? If he’s good enough to win the Gene-ius Award, how come he’s not in any of my classes? I’ve asked around before, and no one seems to know him. Does he even go here?”
Steve’s got a big mouth and loves to act like he’s a real player in the school’s science competitions, but it’s mostly hot air. He placed once as a sophomore, but that’s it. Truth is, he isn’t half as smart as he thinks, and he spends more time obsessing over what everyone else is working on than studying and developing his own ideas. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen him in class with his head bent over in deep concentration, only to realize that instead of taking notes, he’s recalculating his GPA in the margins of his notebook.
Mark shrugs. “It’s probably some awkward loser you never even notice. Keeps to himself, you know? A silent, nerdy ghost, haunting the halls of London High,” he finishes in a fake-spooky tone.
I can’t ignore them anymore.
“He’s not a ghost,” I say, my eyes fixed on my notebook.
I can feel their stunned stares immediately. It clearly hasn’t occurred to them that I might know anything about this situation. This happens all the time. I’ve been in classes with these kids for years now, but they still act surprised when they realize I’m in the science track with them. As far as they’re concerned, the science track is for the London Chem brats—the ones whose parents work at the Research Park—not kids like me, the children of farm laborers. I’ve heard all the smooth comments about how great it is that London “supports diversity,” as if there’s no way I could have earned my spot in this class. Sure, biochem isn’t my best subject, but I’m at the top of my electrical engineering and information technology classes, if any of them cared to notice.
I clear my throat. “And you do know him. It’s Jek.”
Before I’ve even registered their reaction to this information, my body tenses up with guilt. I know very well what Jek would say if he heard me: that he doesn’t need or want me sticking up for him. Jek’s dealt with idiots like this his whole life and he’s figured out a way to handle them that works for him, which basically means letting these guys believe whatever the hell they want. It drives me nuts, but I’m beginning to understand that the alternative can be worse. But I just can’t stand the self-satisfied way these boys are so sure they know everything and deserve everything, and are blind to everyone who isn’t them.
After a moment’s silence, Steve lets out a sour laugh. “What are you even talking about?”
I look up from my lab notebook. “You know, Jek?” I nod toward Steve’s phone. “That’s his real name. Jayesh Emerson Kapoor. His initials are J.E.K.”
“The black kid?” says Mark, his tone incredulous.
I grip my pencil to steady my nerves, but I can feel my heart rate rising. Such an innocuous comment, but there’s so much behind it. I don’t know whether I’m angrier at the assumption that these two can read everyone’s race and ethnicity perfectly just from looking, or at their surprise that a black person could kick their ass at a science competition, but I can’t point out either one, since they didn’t actually say any of that.
“His mother’s Indian.” I keep my voice calm and steady. “His father is black.”
“Oh,” they say in tandem, as if that explains it all. “Indian.”
Let it go, Lulu. It’s not your fight. Jek can handle his own battles. Not that he does. He’s happy to fly below the radar and avoid drawing attention to himself. That kind of attention, anyway. It’s been this way since middle school, when he first abandoned his real name and told people—even teachers—to start calling him Jek. I asked him about it once, and he admitted that he was sick of people assuming he was nerdy and uncool because he was Indian. Presenting himself as the only black kid in our grade made him seem a lot more exciting—even if it came with other baggage, like people assuming he’s no good at science, or automatically blaming him whenever there’s any trouble.
Now, only his close friends know that he’s biracial, and that he’s secretly still obsessed with science. For everyone else, he just plays into their expectations: doesn’t advertise his grades, doesn’t talk much in class and when he gets called on, acts like he’s as surprised as anyone when he gets the right answers. And so he gets to be everyone’s cool friend instead of a threat. I wish he could find a way to embrace both sides of his identity and challenge people’s dumb stereotypes, but Jek’s made it clear he’s not interested in being a crusader.
“Does his mom work at London Chem?” Steve asks.
I nod.
He smacks his hand on the lab bench. “I should have known. The guy’s a ringer. His mom probably did the whole project for him.”
It’s the most absurd thing he could possibly say. If that’s his objection, it could be true for almost everyone in the science track at this school. If anything, Jek is the least guilty of this crime, given that his mom sometimes comes to him to consult on metabolic processes or different drug absorption mechanisms. I am this close, this close, to blowing up in this asshole’s face and telling him all about how Donnelly Pharmaceuticals has patents on three processes that Jek initially conceived in previous Gene-ius Award entries, but I’m saved by the return of Danny, who knows me well enough to read the dangerous expression on my face.
“Lulu,” he says gently. “Would you mind checking the storeroom for extra pipettes? If we wait till we reach that step, everyone else will have grabbed them all.”
I’m seething silently as I tug open the door to the supply room. I find the pipettes and grab a handful of them, still preoccupied enough to nearly mow down Maia Diaz on her way into the supply room. Somehow I manage not to drop glass everywhere, and I mumble an apology on my way out when she stops me with a light hand on my arm.
“Lulu,” she says softly when I turn around. “You’re friends with Jek, right?”
I raise my eyebrows, wondering why everyone is so interested in my best friend this morning. “Yeah.”
“Right,” she says, nodding to herself a little. “Can I ask you something?”
I shrug and gesture for her to go ahead. She glances around the room nervously, then grips my arm and tugs me back into the supply room. I’m so caught off guard that I don’t even try to resist. I know I should really get back to Danny, but I have to admit I’m curious about what Maia has to say.
She flicks on the light and pulls the door shut. In the shadowy depths of the supply closet, I see the wall of boxes behind her, all different sizes, and all identically marked with a leafy vine creeping through a double helix—the company logo of London Chem, and our sports team, the Helices. They look like the bewitched brambles of fairy tales, and for a strange moment they almost seem to be closing in on us. I nod for Maia to get on with it before claustrophobia gets to me.
“Matt Klein’s kegger,” she says. “A couple of weeks back. Did you hear what happened to Natalie?”
I hesitate. I hate to admit I had anything to do with that kind of mindless gossip, but playing dumb won’t help. “I heard something about it, yeah,” I say with a nod.
“Look, this is kind of a big secret and I know Natalie wouldn’t want me talking to anyone about it, but there’s something weird going on and I think...I think someone should know.” She pauses. “I think Jek should know. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
“I don’t understand. Jek wasn’t even at that party. What’s it got to do with him?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” she says. “The thing is, I never knew Jek’s real name before, but when Steve said it just now it sounded familiar. And I realized, I remembered it from Klein’s party. Natalie was really upset that night, so I took her outside to talk. I wanted her to tell me what happened, and if we needed to call the cops or go to the hospital and get a rape kit. But that guy, Hyde, he followed us out.” She shudders at the memory. “I didn’t even know what had happened between them, but he gave me a bad vibe. Creepy-looking, you know? I don’t know why she’d want to mess around with someone like that. Anyway, he called after Natalie, telling her to be reasonable, to let it drop. I told him to fuck off, but he ignored me. He just looked at Natalie and said, ‘Name your price.’”
“What?” I say, genuinely shocked. I still have no idea what this has to do with Jek, but I’m starting to have very bad feelings toward this guy Hyde. “He just...just like that? He offered to buy her off?”
“I couldn’t believe it, either. I started to tell him exactly where he could put his dirty money, but Natalie stopped me.” Maia looks down at her shoes, then glances up again. “It sounds bad,” she says. “I know. I didn’t want to believe Natalie would accept cash over something like this, but she has a point. Who’s going to believe a brown girl over a white boy when it comes to rape? You know how it goes—everyone’ll say, oh, that poor boy made one mistake and now she’s ruining his life.”
“A white boy?” I think back to Camila’s description of Hyde. “I heard he was Asian or something.”
Maia shrugs. “Looked white to me. Anyway, Natalie’s father’s been sick a lot, and her uncle, too, from the pesticides they work with. So they haven’t been able to work lately and they have all kinds of medical bills...”
“It’s okay,” I assure her, thinking of similar situations in my own family. “I understand.” Health insurance for the laborers at London Chem is a joke, and of course the company always denies that the chemicals are harmful. But it’s not like anyone has the cash for a lawyer.
Maia nods. “So, Natalie, she...she told him her price. And it wasn’t low. I thought for sure he’d drop his offer or try to bargain, but he didn’t even blink. He just took out his phone. He said all he needed was her app info, and he’d transfer it right away.”
“And she accepted the cash?”
“It was a lot of money.”
“I guess that explains why the story died,” I say, half to myself. “But I still don’t see what any of this has to do with Jek.”
“Because,” says Maia, “the name on the account that sent the money wasn’t Hyde. It was Jayesh Emerson Kapoor.”
I stare at her in the dim light of the supply closet, trying to parse what she’s telling me. “Are you sure?” I say. “That’s not possible.”
“That was the name,” she says firmly.
“Jek,” I say softly to myself. “What the hell? How’d he get access to Jek’s account?”
“That’s what I’m wondering. And I don’t want to stir up drama for Natalie if I can avoid it, but I’m worried for her. Worried that if Hyde hacked into Jek’s account or something, the money’s going to disappear and she’ll wind up with nothing. I wouldn’t put it past him.” She shakes her head in disgust. “Has Jek mentioned anything about any identity theft?”
“Not to me, but...we haven’t exactly been close lately.”