Page 63 of The Bargain

Girls who used to sneer at me now hang from my arm when I go from class to class, eager to catch the attention of the one guy whose touch was hot enough to melt the ice queen herself.

And since the plan is working, I leave Desdemona alone.

Maybe she notices all the time I’m spending with the Brotherhood. She refuses invitations to several parties we’re invited to, claiming to be too busy with her studies, and I’m sure that’s true. But I also wonder if she notices how many more girls are paying me attention. If she cares.

But that’s not the reason I stay away from her.

The truth is that it’s all about self-preservation.

Because when I close my eyes and I think of that night—Halloween, red lights, pulsing music, the fog of alcohol and cinnamon and body heat, boys chasing girls, writhing couples on blood-red couches—I think, inevitably, of Desdemona.

Desdemona standing in a courtyard of stone with her back utterly straight, tears running down her porcelain face. When I found her, she’d been so still that I hadn’t even realised she was crying. The sight of her tear-streaked cheeks, of her wet, glitter-smeared eyelashes, of her flushed skin, sent such a powerful wave of emotion through me it shocked me.

It had moved me in a way so profoundly familiar I felt myself hurled back, physically sucked into a wormhole of memories that made my stomach sink and my throat tighten.

In care homes, on the first night, everyone cries. Especially the younger kids. They can’t help it. Even the kids that come in bruised and broken and damaged inside and all over, even those kids cry.

But the kids that are the most petrified, the most hopeless, the most broken—they cry in silence. They cry so quiet and still you’d never know it.

They cry just like Desdemona did, alone in that courtyard.

The thought makes me irrationally angry: what does she have to cry about? This perfect, pristine angel, who’s never known hunger, who’s never known a single blow from the hand of someone who was supposed to love her, who’s known nothing, her entire life, but comfort and luxury. How dare she cry like that? How dare she make me think of that dark place I left behind?

But her pain was real. It poured off her, the wreathing, anguished lashing of a solar flare. It felt so real that in that moment, I could think of nothing to do but gather her to me, press her as close to my heart as possible, keep her there until all her fears were banished, her pain soothed away.

I’d wanted to press my mouth to the top of that proud neck, to the fine hairs growing there like spider silk. I’d wanted to kiss her in the most tender of places: on her moist, shimmering eyelids and on the corner of her trembling mouth and in the crook of her clean, untainted palms.

Fuck. But that’s the thing about faking it.

To do it well, you have to make it feel real.

And if it gets too real… well, then it’s not fake anymore, is it?

And that’s when you know you’re in deep shit.

But you know what? The nice thing about life is that, if you should ever be so unfortunate as to make a small mistake, life is always there to make sure that mistake goes from insignificant to disastrous as fast as fucking possible.

I’m in my physics class, bent over my notebook writing down everything Mazzati has to say about standard candles and the inverse-square law of light when the door opens. Everyone looks up, startled, but my instinct makes me glance out of the window. No policemen waiting outside, no distant flash of blue and red.

I breathe a sigh of relief and turn to the door. Mrs Jacobs, assistant to the headmaster, meets my eyes immediately and smiles.

“Apologies, Mr Mazzati. May I borrow Mr Lennox for a moment?”

Mazzati throws me a look that’s something half between betrayal and warning, a look that seems to say You haven’t gotten yourself in trouble, have you? and You better not have gotten yourself in trouble at the same time. I answer the look with a shrug and shove my things into my backpack. Behind me, Gabriel North raises his eyes in an expression of polite curiosity. I grin at him and shove off.

“Don’t worry,” Mrs Jacobs reassures me as soon as we’re out of the classroom. “You’re not in trouble.”

I think of Desdemona standing in my bedroom with an enormous wad of cash, and of Birnam’s bloodied, battered body in a hospital somewhere, a ticking time-bomb of mangled limbs, and of the Harvard scholarship and Desdemona spread open and needy on her head girl’s desk, and of her tear-streaked cheeks in a dark courtyard.

Oh, I am, Mrs Jacobs. You have no idea.

But actually, I’m the one who has no idea.

Mr North is waiting for me outside his office. He’s wearing a navy blue suit, a silver tie and an indulgent smile. Like his kid, his hair is a silvery shade of blond; his skin is pale and his features almost delicate. There’s a sharp, intimidating quality to his eyes. Every time he looks at you, you feel like he inherently knows all your dirty secrets and hidden flaws.

I like North, actually—way more than I did when I first met him. I thought he was one of them: the aureate, rotten elite that populates the hallowed halls of this academy, but that’s not what he is at all. Mr North is a whole other thing altogether.

“I’m so sorry for dragging you out of physics, Elias,” he says. His voice is a mellow, pleasant tenor. I imagine he has the ability to sing beautifully but not the inclination. “I know how important that class is to you.”