Our gazes meet for a brief second before he looks past me.
“Hey, Soph,” he says conversationally, light-green eyes glittering with menace. “What was it you were saying about Vin’s hairy dick. I want to make sure I get it right when I tell him about it later.”
Sophia makes a choking noise, her mouth moving like a fish that just got pulled out of the water. “I was just talking about Zaya’s hair.”
“I heard what you said.” He taps his knuckles against the fullness of his lower lip. Leather creaks as he pushes off from the wall and stands to his full height. Elliot’s style is full-on Rebel Without a Cause meets Rodeo Drive: black motorcycle jacket made of Italian leather, fitted jeans that have been tailored, and a white designer t-shirt that costs as much as some people’s car payments. “Maybe you should take a page from Zaya’s book. Hasn’t anybody ever told you that silence is golden? It keeps our mouths from writing checks that our lily white asses can’t cash.”
Sophia isn’t quite smart enough to keep the defiance out of her voice. “Why are you defending her, anyway? I thought all you Vice Lords had a hard-on for messing with her.”
“I don’t make the rules,” Elliot replies with a careless shrug. “But Zaya is Founding, you should remember that.”
He stalks away without sparing any of us another glance.
Elliot isn’t exactly a white knight. The lesson is as much for me as it is for Sophia. Just because Vin has decided I have to suffer doesn’t mean he is always willing to share the privilege. But if I’d spoken a word in my own defense, whatever the Vice Lords did to me would make Sophia Taylor look like a preschool teacher.
Like always, I’m on my own.
Seven
Jake Tully finally works up the nerve to talk to me again while I’m hiding out in the library during lunch.
I want to be impressed with his persistence, then I remember he just moved here and doesn’t understand the forces that are set up against him. It isn’t the same thing as bravery when you’re just too stupid to realize how afraid you should be.
Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
I notice him as soon as I walk in, because usually the librarian and I are the only ones who ever come here. Deception High isn’t exactly at the forefront of technological innovations, so the computers are so ancient they might as well be bricks, and most of the books are moth-eaten or missing pages. Most students don’t even bother trying to use the limited resources and opt for a drive out to the county library.
But Jake is here. He sits at a table in the very center of the rectangular room, an iPad with an attached keyboard set up in front of him. That cements for me he has to be living on the better side of town. No one from the Gulch would dare flash a piece of tech that expensive, assuming they could get their hands on it in the first place.
The sharp division between the haves and the have-nots makes Deception what it is. Anybody who wants to study the long-term of income inequality and economic stagnation should pay us a visit. Million-dollar mansions on the Bluffs are balanced by families living exclusively on food stamps in dilapidated trailers around the Gulch. The town’s history made some of this inevitable — the children of the migrants brought in to work the mines or clean houses never climb out of the poverty trap. Social mobility is little more than a fantasy here — anybody who betters themselves does it by getting the hell out.
It’s hard to imagine what this place must look like to an outsider.
I finally choose a spot as far from Jake as I can get, close to the reference section and a large bay window letting in dreary light from the overcast sky. Setting my bag on the table, I make a point of slowly removing each item I need from my bag one by one: textbook, binder, pencil, pen, calculator.
Too bad they don’t allow pepper spray on campus.
When I finally look up, I’m not exactly surprised to see Jake hovering over the chair across from me, obviously trying to decide if he should sit down or not. I don’t help him make the decision, simply staring up at him silently as he awkwardly stands there.
No one in this world has ever made things easy for me. I don’t have a problem with paying that forward just a little bit.
“Hey,” Jake murmurs, finally taking a seat.
A sharp rapping from the main desk silences whatever he might say next. The librarian, Mrs. Markel, glares at us over a pair of bifocals. Her wrinkled lips are pursed in extreme displeasure as she brings a withered finger to her lips.
Despite the general shabbiness, this is what I love most about the school library. Silence isn’t only acceptable, but encouraged practically on pain of death. Mrs. Markel has a reputation for eating disobedient students alive and then lecturing the remains about decorum. Even the Vice Lords know better than to tempt fate by getting on her bad side.
But Jake isn’t that easily deterred. He reaches across the table and snags a page from my open binder, the ripping sound of paper echoing off the low ceiling as Mrs. Markel continues to glare.
If she ever figures out how to force choke like Darth Vader, we’re all dead.
When he catches me watching, a slight smile curls his lips as he scrawls something with his pen before shoving the paper towards me so it skids across the table.
I glance down at it, because I can’t help myself.
Will you go with me to the Founder’s Ball?
Once a year, the Cortlands open up their magnificent home to the riffraff in celebration of our town’s founding. It’s a little bit debutante ball and a whole lot of showing
