Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(70)

“Isn’t that against house rules?”

“I’m not going to smoke in the house, and I don’t keep ’em in the house. If Caryl wants to make a thing out of it, she can change the wording in the contract.”

“Hey, Teo, before you go . . .”

“Yeah?”

“It’s probably against the rules to ask, but . . .”

“Spit it out.”

“Why does Tjuan hate me so much?”

Teo stared at me for a second, then laughed. “You’re kidding, right? The dude’s got massive trust issues. When I first moved here, it took him three months to even answer when I said hi.” He shook his head, walking away. “Not everything’s about you, mija. Really gotta get that into your head.”

After Teo left, I allowed myself a few moments to enjoy the peace and quiet and have a few crackers from the kitchen. The place was a little spooky when not populated, even in the daytime. The cracks in the bathroom tiles, the water stains on the dining room ceiling, the sun discoloration on the carpet by the sliding glass door: all symptoms of a house that wasn’t cared for by its owner. I felt a little sorry for it.

I had just stuffed a handful of crackers in my mouth when I turned and saw Gloria in the kitchen doorway, staring at me with a look of naked contempt.

I coughed, spraying crumbs. “Uh, hi there,” I said.

She smiled, sweet as antifreeze. “Does Caryl know you have plans to become a celebrity?” she said.

“Beg pardon?” I yanked a paper towel off the roll and attended to the mess I’d made.

“You’re all over the paparazzi sites,” she said. “Cuddling with David Berenbaum in his convertible. What’s that all about, hon?”

I froze, feeling my hands go cold. As always, my first reaction to anyone talking to me in that tone was shame, as though I, and not the paparazzi, were guilty of something. I took a moment to talk myself down so I didn’t go into a full-on panic attack. All I was guilty of, as far as I could see, was being interesting enough to be photographed. So just exactly what was Gloria’s problem?

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “He and I hit it off. It’s perfectly innocent.”

If anything her smile got frostier. “Shall we expect you to be starring in your own reality show soon?” she drawled. “Or do you think you’ve maybe attracted enough attention to the Arcadia Project for now?”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I didn’t really think it through.”

“And just what good is ‘sorry’ going to do if the paparazzi start camping on our doorstep? Is there anything else you -haven’t thought through that we should maybe know about before it shows up all over the Internet?”

My pulse accelerated. By the grace of Dr. Davis I managed to keep it together, though I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking or think of anything clever to say. In my directing days I could have won a shouting match with a howler monkey, and now I was trembling at a few sugarcoated rhetorical questions.

“What exactly is it you’d like me to do?” I said as calmly as I could.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “I e-mailed some of the worst links to Caryl. I normally keep out of this kind of stuff, but ever since I heard about what you did to Teo, I’ve been keeping my eye on you. I don’t take kindly to people who mistreat that boy, so you’d better step real carefully from here on out, hon.”

“I—what?” Mistreating Teo? She must have meant the time I hit him, but who had told her? And she was full of shit anyway; she’d been trying to cut me down to size from minute one. But before I could retort in any coherent manner, she’d already made her exit.

I used my good knee to deliver a weak kick to the kitchen cabinet, leaning both hands on the counter. Venting anger is a hard thing to do when you have no one to yell at and very little kicking power. I fumbled through Dr. Davis’s exercises in my mind, but it was hard because I was dealing with anger and panic at the same time. Through my Borderline filter, everyone in the house had turned against me and was plotting to bring me down. All it takes is a fragment or two of evidence, and my mind leaps to join dots that aren’t there, constructing a picture of conspiracy that is almost impossible to unsee.

My attempts at calming myself with DBT skills were not working, at least not fast enough to satisfy me. So I answered that frantic little voice saying do something, fix it, fix it, and called Berenbaum. Another bad move straight out of the What-Not-to-Do Handbook. Never, ever call someone important when you’re having a spell of “intense episodic dysphoria,” as the DSM-V calls it.

Araceli put me through to Berenbaum without a lot of fuss, but he didn’t sound as warm as I wanted—no, needed—him to sound. It was probably because of work, my Reason Mind should have prompted, but my paranoid Emotion Mind was making everything about me.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“I don’t want to work for the Arcadia Project anymore,” I said. It was by far the least crazy thing I could have said under the circumstances. Perhaps Dr. Davis’s lessons in self-control were buried somewhere in my subconscious after all.

“You’ll want to set up a meeting with Vivian,” he said.

Not what I wanted to hear. Very much not.