Burn(16)

But though he may have been stupid—and, it can’t be overemphasized, he was—he was very, very cunning. He knew exactly how much he could get away with and exactly how those limits changed with the person who was its unfortunate recipient. He knew which neighborhoods he could drive through in Frome to harass residents who would never call his boss to report him. He knew which ones he could stop for a busted taillight—that was, of course, working perfectly until Deputy Kelby put his baton through it—and who’d never officially complain, even when he did it again a month after they’d had it fixed.

He was the thing the world had suffered from most in her four billion years of existence: a stupid man with power. When the lights of the universe went out one day, standing over the plug, having pulled it despite all warnings, would be a man like Deputy Kelby, defiant in refusing to believe the advice of anything but his own sheer dumbness.

Like many stupid but cunning men with power, he also never forgot a slight.

That dragon. That blue dragon. That Russian dragon had slighted him. He would find a way to make it pay. But that wasn’t today. Today was for one Jason Inagawa. Hadn’t we just fought a war and won? And here was someone like Jason—there he was now, look at him, busing crates of return bottles out of the back of the diner—at a job that should rightfully have gone to a proper American teenager.

Deputy Kelby pulled a drag on his cigarette so hard and long he burnt his lip. Cursing, he flung it out the window he’d cracked on this stakeout. Because yes, he was staking out Jason Inagawa, who wouldn’t forget the rest of this night in a hurry. Nosiree, when the last lights went out and Jason Inagawa started the long walk home, something was going to happen that would make sure he never forgot the name Emmett John Kel— He sat up straight in his seat. Were his eyes deceiving him or was that Sarah Dewhurst sidling out of the shadows and knocking on the back door of Al’s, not seeing Kelby’s cruiser in the dark? And here was Jason Inagawa opening the door for her, greeting her only with a nod as she followed him inside.

Deputy Kelby smiled. It was a stupid smile. It was a cunning smile.

This was going to be even more fun than he thought.

“Stop,” Jason said.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, pulling away from the kiss.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m being a real sad sack tonight.”

She moved over next to him. “A little bit. But so what?” She looked around Al’s cold and dingy office. “This is a sad sack kind of place.”

“I just . . .” he said. “I’m angry.”

“At me?”

“No, just angry. But I realized today that I feel it all the time.” He turned to her. “All the time.”

She didn’t answer him, but of course she knew what he meant. Every day in a town with people who didn’t look like you, in a life that didn’t look like you, it eventually just wore you out. Like even today, she got strange looks in all her classes, and Velma Doone accused her straight out of having a dad who was spying for the Russians. What would he spy on in Frome? On a farm? That Velma Doone was a stupid person who would never transcend her name was beside the point. She knew what Jason meant. But what could they possibly do about it?

“Is it Kelby?” she asked anyway.

“I guess. I mean, he’s just the top of a long list.”

“My mom always said that dragons weren’t just out there in the world. That if you cut some people open, they’d have dragon right below the surface. An angry one, trying to get out.”

Jason leaned all the way forward, almost until his forehead touched his knees. “My father wants to send me away.”

Sarah sat up. “He what?”

“He’s found some prep school in Minnesota run by a Japanese guy. Says it’s the best way to get me into the right college.”

“When would this be?”

“Summer and then all of senior year.”

They sat in silence. There wasn’t a chance Sarah was going to be able to afford college. Her grades were good enough to get in somewhere, but probably not good enough to get the scholarships she’d need to even come close to paying for it. But Hisao Inagawa wanted his son to not just succeed but thrive and, Sarah and Jason guessed, conquer the exact types of people who forced his mother to die in an internment camp. Even working at this diner while still having all the chores of any teenager living on a farm was practice to get Jason working harder than everyone else.

Sarah knew—had always known—that she didn’t fit into his future. But then, she had sort of given up on the future when her mother died. You just got days, it seemed to her, where stuff happened or it didn’t, where planning just showed you what a fool you were to think you had any say over what your life would be. If Jason left in the summer, well, it was going to happen whatever her ache about it might be.

She could already feel that ache beginning.

“Don’t you ever want to go on a real date?” Jason said now, clearly feeling it, too.

“Of course,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

He looked at her, surprised. “I thought you wanted to keep this secret.”

“I thought you wanted to keep this secret.”

He was shocked for a moment, then laughed. “How stupid are we?”