“I don’t have to. It’s math for me.”
“It’s math for everyone,” Aaliyah said.
“Plus anxiety, bravado, superstition. For me, it’s just the math.” It used to be, anyway. Now I worried about sick kids and cried about music.
Now I knew the world was alight, and my family did the accounting for the pyre. Letting these girls win wouldn’t make amends.
Nura began to gather the cards. “What else did your family teach you?”
“Ballroom dancing, climbing, archery. Lock picking, bomb defusing.”
Aaliyah snort-laughed at this, to assure the others that I was joking. Or maybe it was simply funny. My family’s truth was comical. I’d made Hiromi laugh so many times, always at my most honest with her.
“Your face just did a thing,” Nura said to me. “What are you thinking about?”
“My cousin Tom,” I lied. “He’s a freshman this year.”
“Tough time to start,” Aaliyah said. “No parties. Everyone in masks. He must be lonely.”
I shrugged. Tom was like me when I’d first arrived at Helshire—never lonely, already complete. Now, my bed felt too big to sleep in alone.
“Speaking of cousins,” Frankie said, “we haven’t seen Sebastian yet. Is the smoke keeping him away, or does he have a girlfriend these days?”
I smiled at her. “He doesn’t really do girlfriends.”
“Runs in the family,” Aaliyah muttered.
Frankie sighed. “He’s just waiting for the right girl.”
“No,” I said. He’d been waiting for me—a partner in carelessness, the only person in the world who could ever understand him.
But not the right girl.
“He’s being cruel,” Nura said, poking at Frankie’s arm. “Denying you his charms.”
“Sebastian’s not cruel,” I said. “Not on purpose.”
Frankie stared at me, waiting to hear about some saving grace, some hidden virtue of his that would absolve her fantasies.
But I was too busy absolving myself. “He’s just confused. He doesn’t fit in with the rest of our family.”
Aaliyah began to shuffle the cards. “Cross-racial adoption is hella problematic.”
“Yes.” Especially into a centuries-old crime family.
“Still, I’d bang him,” Frankie said. “A broken heart seems like a small price to pay.”
Nura touched my hand apologetically, as if to say,She’s got it bad.
But who was I to judge? A moment later, when my new burner phone vibrated in my pocket, I pushed all my quarters into the pot.
“This is my last hand, ladies,” I said. “If you want to get even, place your bets.”
52
Sebastian’s text said he was waiting for me on the second floor of Main Hall.
Main had been the first building of the new campus. It contained everything a college needed—classrooms, offices, commons, dorm rooms—a world unto itself. The residents flaunted the convenience of living there, lounging in the Lesser Tea Room or the Hellion Café in pajamas and bathrobes, especially on winter days.
