You in Five Acts(76)

“Relax, cuz, I’m just playing,” he said, giving me a hard, unfriendly stare. “I just want to talk to you.”

“So talk,” I said, crossing my arms. “Don’t touch me.”

“Liv thinks you narc’d on her,” Dante said. “But I told her my little cousin would never do that. I just need to hear it from you.”

“It wasn’t me.”

Dante looked genuinely relieved. “Well, OK then. Good. Any idea who it was?”

“No.” I focused on keeping my face still so he wouldn’t know I was lying.

Everything that had happened in the Boroughed Trouble cue-to-cue had trickled down from Faiqa Bashara, and there was no doubt it had been Ethan who’d turned Liv in. But I couldn’t sic Dante on him. I couldn’t even blame him, really. In his own twisted, dramatic way, he’d basically done the right thing. I should have done it myself. I realized that much once I saw how devastated you were when you found out. If it had been you, puking on your knees in some stranger’s bathroom, and someone else had known . . . I didn’t even want to think about it. Liv didn’t mean as much to me, but that didn’t excuse how I’d covered for her. I mean, everyone is somebody else’s “you,” right?

“Well, listen,” Dante said, “if you’d do a little reconnaissance, that would really help me out.”

“Why should I help you?”

“Come on.” The snake smile again. “Because we’re family.”

“I’ll do it if you stop selling to her.” I tightened my arms around my chest, jutted out my jaw, did anything I could to look bigger, or more frightening. Men don’t have to be tough. That’s what my mom had told me, that day when I came home with the slur on my bag. They can be soft and vulnerable, too. I remember how she kissed my head, stroked her thin fingers under my chin. All the good ones are.

Dante gave me a funny look and then burst out laughing. “Sell to her? Man, she sells for me now. Girl’s got that whole school on lock.” He shook his head. “She’s a natural, too, unloads a six-hundred-dollar bottle in a day.”

I lunged at him. It wasn’t planned, just animal instinct, fear and rage and shame. I’d worked hard to get where I was, to carve out a space in the world that was just mine, far away from the big-talking, wannabe-hustler letdowns who haunted me, past and present, in our apartment complex. Dante could have his little corner of the world, but I’d die before I let him take over mine. I hooked him by the neck and swung him back against the stairwell wall, this time holding him with my elbow.

“Shit, I thought you knew!” Dante cried, his eyes wide with shock and a touch of amusement. He tried to push my arm down and I let him; I didn’t really want a fight. “Look, I get it,” he said, “but some people don’t have some fancy scholarship, you know? Some of us just gotta survive.”

“I don’t care what you do. Just leave her out of it.”

“It’s not that easy,” Dante said, stepping back. “She’s a valuable asset.”

I swallowed bitter, coppery saliva. “But we’re family,” I said.

He shrugged. “Family is family, money is money.”

“And which one’s worth more?”

“It’s not like that,” he said. “Liv’s a big girl, she can make her own decisions. I’m not some gangster keeping her in line. Every weekend when the new stuff comes in she just shows up. I don’t know if she doesn’t have anywhere else to be or if she just gets off on being a tourist in the projects, or what. But no one’s got her on a leash. She can leave if she wants to.” His face softened, and for a second, under the carefully manicured facial hair and studied Clint Eastwood squint, I saw the boy I used to look up to. “I could have let her OD or let her fall off the roof at that party, but what did I do? I called you, right? Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Not much,” I said.

“Whatever, man,” he said, sneering and starting down the stairs two at a time with his hands shoved in the pockets of his hoodie. “Relax. It’s not life or death.”





Chapter Twenty-Nine


    May 13

14 hours left


“ARE YOU READY?”

I woke up with a start, sweating and panting, reaching for you. In the dream, we’d been onstage, doing the pas de deux, in front of hundreds of people—a packed house (everyone had been dressed in suits, even my mom, which was strange, but otherwise everything was normal). Right before the press lift, you’d whispered, “Are you ready?” and I’d nodded, but when I lifted you into the final position, the muscles in my arm gave out—just crumbled to dust—and I dropped you from seven feet up. The look in your eyes as you fell was so real. I heard your neck snap. I could still hear it.

I flopped back on my bed and hugged a pillow to my chest. Above me, through the crack in the curtains, I could see a triangle of dark gray sky slowly giving way to sunrise. It was the morning of Showcase, the morning that was supposed to be the first day of the rest of my life, or something cheesy like that. And I was dreading it.

It’s not life or death. That’s what Dante had said, and probably why I had the dream in the first place. But I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling it left me with. It seemed like a bad omen, some kind of message I couldn’t decode.