Ace of Spades Sneak Peek(96)

There’s a knock on his door and I look up.

“Jack, everything good in there?” his uncle says. I quickly stand, shakily moving away from his body. Jack looks up at me, then turns away.

“Yeah,” he croaks. “Everything’s good.”

Without saying anything else to him, I turn around and, for the last time, slide his door open and stumble into the night.



* * *



Thursday


I’m woken up the next day by my phone ringing. It’s bright outside, and my bed is empty, no sign of my brothers anywhere. My hand is sore, knuckles bruised. I’m a little surprised I slept at all.

It’s like all I needed to get a good night’s sleep was to finally confront Jack.

I reach out for my phone. Three missed calls from Chiamaka.

Why the hell is she calling me? What time is it? I glance at the time and I bolt up.

It’s already past two.

How long was I asleep for? Ma usually wakes me up if I look like I’m about to oversleep, especially on a school day. Why didn’t she?

My phone rings again. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and accept the call from Chiamaka.

“Where are you? I’ve been texting you all morning!” she says, her voice only slightly raised.

“I overslept, sorry.”

I expect her to shout at me or dish out an insult, but instead she says, “That’s okay, when will you get here? I’ve started getting ready; the event isn’t for a few hours but it’s best if you get here quickly so I can see if my dad’s suits fit. If they don’t, I’ll have to call in an emergency tailor,” she says.

Someone outside the Niveus bubble might have thought she was being sarcastic, but from dating Scotty, I know things like emergency tailors actually exist. And they are on speed dial after 911.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” I say, trying to hold back a yawn. How am I still tired?

“Okay, see you soon, then,” she says.

“See you,” I say before the line goes dead.

I scroll for any messages from my ma, explaining why for the first time in years she’s let me stay home instead of going to school, but there are none. I decide to send her a message anyway.

I love you, Ma. I know she won’t see it until she’s on her break, which should be any time now, but I need to tell her before this suicide mission.

I throw my phone down, shower, and grab my backpack before leaving.

As I leave, I plug my headphones in and classical music fills my ears, one of Chopin’s pieces, and I refresh mine and Ma’s chat. Still nothing. I try not to feel guilty about keeping so much from her. I exit the chat and look for another app to get lost in while I walk to Chiamaka’s. I click on Twitter, scrolling down the timeline slowly. I mostly follow college admissions pages and the odd celebrity, so there’s not much to see until I see my tweet from yesterday.

I don’t know what I was thinking posting it.

I scroll down, but stop short when I see the numbers underneath my tweet. I slow down my pace and click onto the tweet, just to double-check that the figures are right.

24,000 likes.

Holy shit.

There are people in the comments talking about how messed up it is, tagging other people, telling me I’m not alone.

I don’t check my socials often, don’t have my notifications on for them. They usually sit in my phone, taking up storage space, with no other purpose but to occasionally like a tweet from an admissions page.

I have messages from so many people. This is weird. I click on one of the messages.

@neenaK77: This is so fucked up, I hope you report them to someone

@ty_blm: You have my support, it’s not right that this is happening at a time like this. Thought this type of shit only happened in the 1950s

There’s more like these, packing my previously empty inbox.

If people saw this and believed me, maybe tonight they’ll see what we have to say and believe us too.

@DLikesTunes: Thank you, we have, we’re going back there tonight to stop them. I tweet at @neenaK77

Maybe Chiamaka was right.

Maybe we can defeat Niveus after all.

My phone buzzes and a message from my ma pops up.

Love you too, hope you had a good sleep.—Ma

Why didn’t you wake me up? I text back.

I know you haven’t been going to school. We’ll talk later, okay? Love you, Von.

Ma knows I haven’t been going in. Does she know about Niveus, or does she just have her special bullshit-detector turned up to full?

Either way, it means I’m going to have to come clean. If today goes well, it will be a lot easier to explain.

I hope it goes well.





38


CHIAMAKA

Thursday


Devon arrives in a timely manner at three thirty and I drag him inside and up the steps.

“Okay, so, we have five options that I think would fit you from Dad’s closet. Pick the one you like most and I’ll leave you in here to change,” I tell him, when we get into my room.

I have the five suits laid out on my bed in front of him, all different in some way. One is made from velvet, another, laced in gold. I’ve laid out a range of styles for him to choose from, seeing as I don’t know Devon all that well, so I don’t know what kind of suit he’d be into. Especially since his day-to-day fashion sense doesn’t exactly make his tastes extremely obvious to me. He dresses like he’s purposely trying to make some kind of statement about ugly garments. It’s hard to gauge what someone who wears the same dreadful hoodie, pants, and sneakers every day would wear when it comes to formal outfits.