“Waiting. I need time to—”
“Waiting,” growled Veedy. “You think you’re the tortoise. Truth is, you’re the motherfucking hare, asleep in the tall grass.”
Zee didn’t say anything. You couldn’t talk to Veedy when he got like this. You just had to wait for the moment to pass.
“Look, I’m sorry,” said Veedy a few seconds later. “This place, it makes me—I haven’t had a decent meal or conversation in a long fucking time, you know?”
“I know.”
“I know you’re not asleep, Zee. Just like I know how important the operation is to you. Maybe even more important than it is to me. Which is how I know, when the moment comes, you will do what is necessary to save the operation—and save my ass in the process.”
Zee thought about pressing his point one more time—But it won’t involve killing the witness. Tell me you understand that—but he kept his mouth shut. At the time he thought it was because he didn’t want to take this argument for another lap around the track, but later, after hanging up the phone, he wondered if he’d stayed silent because he didn’t want to take that final option off the table, either.
Don’t tell yourself no, wrote Kleinfelter. Zeeshan had absorbed that lesson, at least.
Chapter 5
SHORT ANSWERS
Ana was looking at a brochure for Tufts when a single sheet of paper slipped out of the middle. At first, when she saw the question blazing at the top of the page—Are we alone?—she thought it was someone’s idea of a joke, or maybe a plea for help (she imagined a soul-sick grad student tasked with stuffing ten thousand packets slipping this paper into the brochure like a message in a bottle) but then she realized it was an essay prompt. Part of the application. And the blank space under the question wasn’t a visual echo of the wide, cold universe, but rather a space for her answer.
Ana found the question disturbing.
It had been a week since her father’s “accident,” as everyone was calling it. The swelling in his brain was going down, but he was still in the hospital with no clear prognosis or release date. In the farmhouse, the phone rang night and day. Ana did not pick up. It might be her mother, and Ana didn’t want to tell her what happened, much less put up with all her I-told-you-sos.
“Why don’t you unplug the phone?” said Logan when she complained about the incessant ringing at school. Logan knew her mother no longer lived with them, but that was the extent of his knowledge about their situation. “I should totally do that,” said Ana. She wanted to get away from her parents, away from the craziness they’d whipped up, and yet she knew she wouldn’t actually unplug the phone, wouldn’t blow a kiss to her father while backing out of the hospital room, Sayonara, Pop, good luck with the trial, I’m outta here. She totally should, and she totally wouldn’t.
Are we alone?
No. Unfortunately.
* * *
School, lunch. While other kids slouched toward the cafeteria, Ana went against the stream, carrying the sack lunch Karen had slipped into her hands on her way out of the diner. Opening the door to the library, she was greeted by the smell of old glue and bookmust. The ancient librarian looked up from a copy of MAD magazine. Her red hair was so thin Ana could see her entire scalp. The old lady nodded, tortoise-like. “Good afternoon, Miss Easterday.”
Ana nodded back, hoping she hadn’t hesitated too long. She still wasn’t used to her new last name. Really, she only heard it from her gym teacher (“Easterday! Get your head in the game!”) and her priggish English teacher (“Can you favor us with your attention, Miss Easterday?”). Hearing her first name was almost worse, though, because it was tied to her old life. Every time someone said Ana, it plucked that string, making her feel how much she had left behind.
She passed the rolling cart of books and the copier with its hot ink breath, and wound her way back to the supply closet, where she found Logan turning down the roaring white noise on the TV/VCR cart.
“Well, well,” he said in his flattest tone. “Look who decided to show up.”
Logan had been experimenting with sarcasm. He probably hoped it would become his defining characteristic, dislodging his reputation as the gay porn kid who worked at his family’s video store.
Ana told him to shut his stupid mouth, which might have been the kindest thing anyone had said to him all day. “You got here like five seconds ago,” she said. “The movie’s not even loaded yet.”
“I’ve been waiting here for ten minutes, twat.” He leaned in to explain in sotto voce. “Waiting is another of those social niceties you know nothing about. Like ‘promptness,’ or ‘consideration for others.’”
On her way to the library, Ana had stopped by the main foyer to call her father on the pay phone. He still couldn’t talk, but it reassured her to hear his breath, the TV playing in the background. Sometimes her father tapped the receiver a couple of times with a fingernail. No way her call had taken ten minutes, but that wasn’t really Logan’s point: pretending to be annoyed was his way of expressing his gratitude that Ana hung around him. It was his nerdy shtick.
“I was giving you time to finish playing with yourself,” she said. “See, I am considerate.”
“I finished early.”
“Oh?”
“I thought of you and my boner died.”
She slugged him in his squishy bicep. That was her shtick.
“Ow, you crazy bitch,” said Logan, unable to contain his grin.
This was the AV Club. When Ana joined, she doubled the membership from the previous year, when Logan had abandoned the combat zone of the cafeteria for the bunker-ish safety of this repurposed supply closet.
She had not asked to join his club. She came into Morocco with the mentality of a short-timer: no friends, no joining, no roots. Do the time, get her father through the trial, leave for college, forget about this ugly chapter of her life. That was the plan, anyway, before Logan barnacled onto her.
The first week of school, he’d asked Ana to join his club. She said no, but the next day he asked again. She said yes, then stood him up. The next day he asked again. What gave him hope? Maybe the fact that Ana couldn’t bring herself to call him names. Or maybe he recognized a fellow castaway.
Ana finally caved when a group of girls waved her over to their lunch table, threatening to befriend her. A friendship with Logan, she reasoned, was naturally exclusive. Dude was a pariah nonpareil. Logan: other friends::garlic: vampires.
Plus he was funny, in his nerdy way. And totally sluggable. And the fact that he had access to pretty much every movie on VHS was a bonus.
The movie for this session of AV Club was Terminator. Logan slotted in the tape and settled into his bean bag. His bag was old and covered with Xs of duct tape, a visual history of blowouts. Ana’s bag—which Logan claimed the school had bought with money from a grant to “promote film literacy,” though Ana suspected he’d purchased it himself—was still new enough to be slippery. When she squinched into it, she could feel each styrofoam pea through the vinyl.
They laid out their lunches by the light of the Interpol warning, which was Ana’s daily cue to tell him he had to start eating better, or his heart would go supernova before he was twenty.
“What are you talking about?” He rustled through the stuff he’d looted from the snack