“I told you—people like us don’t have friends.” Linus cocks a hip against my wall and I raise an eyebrow. “So stop feeling sorry for yourself and get your fucking game face back on.”
“Don’t touch my wall.” I pocket my cell and consider the millions of ways I could push Linus into traffic.
He slow blinks once. “It’s not your wall.”
“It is. My wall. My name’s on it. Right here.” Because it is my wall, I don’t have to point to prove I’m right and Linus’s eyes automatically shift to where my father wrote my name on it when I was five. This half-wall was a present to me the first time he brought me to this place. I was to sit on this wall and wait for him because it was my wall to protect and nobody else’s.
Dragons, he told me, would storm the party if I left this wall. Princesses in Dad’s fairy tales never needed saving—a princess was strong enough to save herself.
“You’re not a kid anymore. Will you stop acting like one?”
I hop off my wall and lean into him, not caring he’s taller than me and bigger than me and doesn’t have a problem with shooting other people like me. “It’s my fucking wall and if I told you not to touch it, you don’t touch it.”
We’re in a staring contest—he and I, and I plan on winning.
He blinks first, but he kills my win-joy with. “He’s not coming back for you.”
Pain straight through my heart, but I take pride that I was able to mask that ache. “You’re just jealous you don’t have a wall. Daddy gave you a gun. He gave me wall. I gotta say, I totally won.”
A flash of something in Linus’s eyes and I feel the condescending smirk forming on my face. “You don’t like it when I call him Daddy, do you?”
He presses his lips together as if he’s willing himself to not verbally or physically tear into me.
“Which one don’t you like? That it makes him real because he felt for me or that it makes me real and not make-believe? Because let’s be honest, you don’t like feeling.”
“Ricky and I often debate whether you’re brilliant or a sociopath.”
I weigh my options. “Why can’t I be both?”
Linus shakes his head because he never gets me. “Ricky wants to see you.”
Mock jazz hands in the air. Linus ignores my reaction and tips his chin toward the parking lot. Ricky, like me, prefers to do business in cars. His car is nicer than my clients’ and he has a driver, but I’m still not giddy on this meet.
We stroll through the crowd, and I wonder what it would be like to be Evie. To have a decent home, great opportunities, yet still willingly choose to get sucked into the pit of numb.
“Can I ask you something?” I breach, when we reach that lonely place between leaving a crowd and halfway to where you’re heading.
“If it’s fucking crazy or makes no sense, then no.”
“You’re such a buzzkill.”
“Got a sane question or not?”
“What if I decline whatever it is that Ricky has to offer me?”
That causes Linus to stop so quickly that his upper body moves forward as his feet become lead. “Why would you do that?”
“Harvard wanted me today.”
His eyes laugh but not his mouth. “I’m sure Harvard wanted you. Lots of guys want you.”
I smirk, he raises his eyebrows, and I up the stakes by showing him the card. “We had interviews at school today. If I became a normal girl with normal extracurricular activities, I could possibly have a shot because he liked me. Liked. As in how I like bunnies and how you like raining on people’s parades or kicking puppies.”
Linus only reads the card, doesn’t touch it, and I find that interesting.
“You want to go to college?” Linus asks.
I shrug then nod.
“Tell Ricky. Chances are he’ll pay for it.”
“Is the five-hundred-word essay for the Gangster of the Year Scholarship due now or later? And do you think my topic of how to creatively dump a body during rush hour traffic will work or is he searching for something a little more mainstream like how to use technology to smuggle in heroin?”
Once again, no reaction. “Ricky likes smart.”
Bet he does. “That money doesn’t launder itself.”
“You said it.”
I pocket the card and a strange twinge of desperation rattles my bones. Last spring, when Isaiah was having problems with Eric, I told him that once he started down the path of