“All right,” he said. “One point to me. We’re tied. Your turn to ask a question.”
I was relieved that he wasn’t making a big deal out of my revelation. It made me relax a little. I pushed hair out of my eyes while a brisk wind blew through the park. A purple tinge was bleeding into the night sky. Dawn was coming. Still no sign of our stakeout target, so I continued. “Back in the diner, you said your mom was trying to talk you into going to fake school. What does that mean?”
“Pfft,” he said. “That’s barely a question.”
“You have to answer, right?”
He sighed heavily. “Okay, fine. Here goes. My mom wants me to go to clown school.”
I blinked several times. “Clown school?”
“Red noses. Painted faces. Big shoes.”
“There’s a school for that?”
“She says I act like a clown, so maybe I should turn that into a professional career.”
“Um... no. Not true. Lie.”
He laughed. “Fine. But she did tell me that once, so it wasn’t completely a lie.”
“A point for me, and now you’ve got to tell me the truth.”
“Fine,” he said, pretending to be upset. “Here goes. After the Houdini fuckup, I sort of had a hard time. I went through some stuff, and yadda, yadda, yadda, I missed a bunch of school, my grades bit the dirt, and I graduated by the skin of my teeth. I didn’t apply for college because...”
“Because?”
“It was a bad time in my life.”
I waited for him to explain.
He considered his words carefully, starting and stopping a couple of times before settling on, “I did a stupid thing.”
“Okay...?”
“I was mad at the world for losing my hearing,” he explained. “Which was ridiculous, because first of all, it was my fault. And second of all, once I started...” He paused to think, head turned toward the city lights. “Once I started getting my shit together, started working full-time at the hotel last summer after graduation, made some... adjustments. I guess you could say things slowly got better. But over the last year, I’ve been thinking, hey—do I really want to end up working at the Cascadia for the rest of my life? No. I do not. So, I’m trying to figure out what to do. I mean, yes, I’d like to do magic for a living, but I don’t want to end up being the sad magician that does kids’ birthday parties or gets paid in free appetizers to entertain people in chain restaurants, and I hate Las Vegas, so where does that leave me? Pickpocketing?”
“Might be lucrative. But then there’s the jail time.”
“Exactly. Anyway, my mom wants me to go to wood tech school.”
“Huh?”
He gestured loosely. “There’s a vocational school that teaches you how to build things. Carpentry. Boats. Furniture. There’s a woman who lives in our community—”
“That Nest place you told me about.”
“Yep, that’s the one. And Katy is one of the residents there. She built all our picnic tables, cabinets... even remodeled two of the houses. She’s a genius. Anyway, she’s been teaching me stuff, and I’m pretty good at it. And that’s why my mom says I should learn a trade instead of going to college. I don’t know. It’s weird to think about not going to a regular university, or whatever.”
It sounded as if he was fishing for an opinion, so I said, “Just because you take a few classes doesn’t mean you have to commit to it forever, right?”
“I suppose, but I’m sort of a commitment type of guy.” He gestured loosely with his hands. “Anyway, I’m still not sure.”
“I get that. I’m not sure what I should be doing either.”
“Are you going to college?”
“I want to,” I said. “But I don’t have a diploma.”
