“My family loves poker,” I said.
“Interesting,” she said. We’d hooked up twice, sophomore year, once she’d given up on being my friend.
Twice had always been my number: more than an accident, less than a pattern. Threading the needle between messiness and tenderness.
I wondered what kind of pattern Hiromi and I would have fallen into, if I hadn’t been born a Morton. If I was someone without strategies. But in that world, who would’ve introduced us? How would I have known to pursue her? How did it all work, between ordinaries?
Maybe that was what I was at this table to find out.
It took two hours for Frankie to ask about my new nose.
“Did it hurt?”
“Not as bad as the broken ribs.” Or the hallucinations.
“Can I touch it?” Nura asked, already reaching. “It looks awesome.”
I didn’t back away. Her fingertips were cool against my scars.
“Does it make me look rakish?”
Nura pulled away, eyes dropping. “You were that already.”
Aaliyah laughed. “She used to be scared of you.”
“We all were,” Frankie said.
All this time I’d felt invisible at Helshire, blending in like a goodMorton. But in my own way, I’d been as renowned as Sebastian. Disconnected was not the same as unseen.
“I’mstillafraid of you,” Nura said. “You keep winning!”
“Because she’s sober and we’re not,” Aaliyah said, reaching for her fourth hard lemonade.
I hadn’t touched alcohol since Mary’s big day. My stomach could no longer be trusted—nor my tears. I didn’t even know how to play this shitty hand. After wearing a poker face my whole life, I couldn’t muster one for an actual game.
Then I remembered what Sebastian had whispered in my ear the night before—When the world needs breaking, chaos is a virtue—and pushed my tallest stack of quarters into the pot.
Frankie looked up from her cards. “You’re bluffing.”
The table went silent, her eyes locking with mine.
As I stared back at her, something familiar began to play on my skin. That connection I’d felt with Bellamy—the strings that made me feel her pain when she struggled across a room.
Frankie was trying to will something like that into being, to read my mind, to know me. Was this what life was like for ordinaries? Strings everywhere?
I tried to give Frankie my mother’s stare, but I couldn’t empty myself anymore. Instead, I felt her see me—my missing pieces, my nightmares. Everything I’d done in that small room in the Catskills.
She shivered a little, and folded.
Open or shut, we Mortons always take the money.
“Pair of fours,” I said.
“Now you’re showing off,” Aaliyah grumbled.
“Do you ever cheat?” Nura asked. “It seems like you do.”
I thought of Poker Genome Project: thirteen million playing cards splayed across the walls. Odds and patterns. Gods and mathematicians.
