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I frown. “What for?”
“Rent. Bills.” She sighs and although her small face is in shadow, I imagine I see the shine of her eyes, the pale line of her throat. “The usual crap.”
“Your parents lost their job?”
She’s still, so still she becomes part of the steps, part of the night. “You could say that,” she says at last, and sounds strangely wistful.
“I want to find a tutoring job,” I say.
Still don’t know why I’m talking to her. Jesus.
She tilts her head to the side, and I take a few steps closer, needing to see her face. “Tutoring, huh? What subjects?”
“Russian. Physics. History.”
Her exhale is sharp like a gasp. “Wow. Are you any good?”
I glare, offended. “Of course I am.”
In response, she smiles, a flash of white in the dark. “Okay, then. I could find you a student or two.”
I blink at her. “You could?”
“Sure. I go to school, remember? I’m just about to turn seventeen. Still a kid, unlike you.”
Yeah. I’d forgotten, truth be told. Forgotten I’m supposed to be an adult now.
“That’d be great, thanks.”
She nods, and I make myself mount the steps and enter the building, leaving her outside. Only, her voice follows me.
“Hey… have you figured out what you wanna do with your life?”
Fuck no, the words come unbidden to my mind.
Fuck this life.
Fuck all my plans and dreams. All the angsting and worrying about the future proved fucking pointless.
“Who the hell asks this kind of thing anyway?” I grumble, determined not to be drawn into another useless, dangerous conversation, stopping in the darkness of the foyer. “Have you figured it out?”
“No,” she says quietly, “but I always ask, in case someone has the answer.”
Chapter Five
Sydney
I’m worried about West.
Of course, there’s nothing new about this. I’ve worried about him ever since I met him. He’s nothing like Nate—or Kash, now that I’ve met him. West is different. He’s so withdrawn, reserved, private in his interactions, so rigid in his rules that you can tell that if he ever cracks, he’ll shatter into a million pieces.
And he will eventually crack. There’s that incredible intensity underneath his every look, his every action, that ferocity and heat vibrating beneath his every word and gesture. You can tell he feels things. He feels too much, so he tries to shield himself from the world.
He’s kinda failing right now.
We are in the biology lab, and I watch as he struggles with the experiment we’re conducting. We’re studying the mold we have grown in a Petri dish under the microscope, and it is disgusting for me, so I can’t imagine how bad it is for West. I bet he will go home and scrub his whole apartment with chlorine until all the mold dies a horrific and final death.
But we’ve done experiments like this one before. Studied water and enumerated the microorganisms living in it, took apart the soil from the garden and looked at all the life it contains. Studied earthworms and frogs and other animals.
