Sign Here(80)

“Has she been missing it?”

I opened my fist and shook out a silver ball chain, slick to the touch and cool from its time inside Felix after so many years against a human heart.

In the middle hung a cluster of soda tabs.

I was right.

Jason and the rest of them were not resentful ex-footballers; they were soldiers. The General’s soldiers. And not only did they think they needed his key—his mark—so that they could go to Heaven, not only did they still believe him, trust him, even after the raid at the barracks, even after some were returned, thin and thirsty, to their red-eyed parents . . . But if this knockoff dog tag, this heartbreaking relic of imagination and violence, was truly Cal’s, then it, combined with her willingness to cut me out of the deal in favor of Trey, pointed to one answer.

She still believed him too.

I could tell from her file how she felt about that key. The key that he took from the group home when he was a child. The key that was just as much of a lie as everything he had ever done or said. Why didn’t he just stick with this “Holy Father’s” story the whole way through, and brand the boys alive? I wondered as I gripped the chain. But as soon as I thought about it, I knew the answer.

He thought Father Michael, with his underground fighting ring for profit at Saint Anthony’s, and the Farm’s Holy Father, with his hand to Elsie’s battered cheek, were cruel.

He believed himself to be better.

This was a common opinion among those who found themselves here.

I tucked the necklace in my pocket and patted it flat. It would come in handy at some point; it had to. But right now, there were only two things I knew for certain.

One: Cal didn’t know the General’s mark was fake.

Two: She wanted it, which meant I had to get it first.

“Thanks for this,” I said. “But are you sure there isn’t anything else you can do? I just want my own results that were already granted to me. Please, buddy. Help me out.”

Felix rolled back and forth for a second, like a person debating their next step. But Felix didn’t seem like the kind of creature who debated.

“There is one thing I can do, and only one thing.”

“What?” I asked.

A tiny raccoon hand touched my skin, followed by a hiss and a loud pop, and then nothing.





MICKEY





“TRUTH,” JOSH SAID, ONE hand around his plastic cup, the other pitched on the arm of the couch. When he got down to the basement, he took the spot next to Mickey, and she barely heard anything anyone had said since. Every time he gestured, his knee came so very close to hers.

Ruth rolled her eyes from her place on the floor.

“Boring,” she said.

“That’s me,” Josh answered, shrugging. Mickey grinned. She loved how he didn’t perform for Ruth the way Cody—or even she—did. He was immune, and she wanted what he had. She wanted the cure of him.

“Josh, are you a virgin?” Ruth asked. Sean laughed in a coughing way, and Cody joined.

“Define ‘virgin,’?” Josh said. Mickey could see a poster of some football team’s cheerleaders hanging over his head, missing one thumbtack.

“That’s a yes,” Cody said.

“No, come on, I’m trying to play the game right,” Josh said. “I picked truth, so I want to make sure I’m telling the truth.”

“Have you had sex?” Ruth said. Mickey heard the word on the inside as much as she did on the outside.

“No,” Josh answered. He shifted on the couch, jostling Mickey just enough to spill a little of her drink on her thigh. She wiped it off with her forearm.

“Have you?” Cody asked Ruth.

She smiled. “It’s not my turn, perv.”

“I’m not the perv! It was your question!”

Mickey noticed how when Ruth laughed, she leaned back so her shoulders rested on Sean’s leg. She could tell Cody saw it too. She made a note to ask her about it later.

“Your turn,” Ruth said to Josh. He nodded.

“Mickey, truth or dare?”

Mickey froze and burned at the same time. She hurt from his attention, but when he turned his head away, she found she also hurt from the lack of it.

She swallowed.

“Dare.”





PEYOTE





I OPENED MY EYES and thought for a second I was at the Harrisons’.

The air smelled like the Harrisons’; there were pine trees everywhere. But these were nothing like the well-fed, ruddy-faced trees of New Hampshire. These trees were thinner and wind-whipped to the point of trembling together as one, their branches intertwined like a thousand cold hands in prayer.

I reached for my tablet to check my location: southern Georgia. But before I could make any connections, I heard him.

“You’re so sexy when you’re focused.”

No one had a voice so disruptively man-made as Trey’s. He was the living equivalent of a paved hiking trail. The crows on the wire gave a collective wince.

Cal stepped under the streetlight, her tablet in hand.

I watched from my pocket of the woods, which came up against a field of grain, and was careful not to move. Everything was like this, either tree or field, except for the sunbaked asphalt of a parking lot across the street, which wound its way up a small hill and around a bend.