“No, ma’am. They just wanted to give me a little demonstration of how safe I would be working with them, although I can see how someone observing it might have come to a different conclusion. You can call the agents yourself,” I say, reaching into my pocket. I pull out the card Agent Jones gave me and set it down on Northcutt’s desk.

  “I will do that,” she says. “You may go. For now.”

  The agents will back me up. They have to. They’re not done with me yet. And Agent Hunt doesn’t really want to explain why he was slamming around a seventeen-year-old with no criminal record. So I get the satisfaction of their having to agree to a silly story. And I get Northcutt’s annoyance at having to accept a story she’s pretty sure isn’t true.

  Everyone wants to get out of a situation with dignity.

  * * *

  The HEX meeting has already started by the time I get there. The desks in Ms. Ramirez’s music room have been rearranged into an impromptu circle, and I see Lila and Daneca are sitting together. I pull up a seat next to Lila.

  She smiles and reaches over to squeeze my hand. I wonder if this is her first meeting. I haven’t attended enough to know.

  On the blackboard, there’s the address for the worker rights protest Sam promised we’d attend way back when school started. Turns out it’s tomorrow. I guess that’s what they were talking about before I got here. Rules are written below the protest information: stick together, no talking to strangers, stay in the park.

  “I’m sure that many of you didn’t see yesterday’s speech, since it ran during study hall,” Ramirez says. “I thought we could watch it together and discuss.”

  “I really hate Governor Patton,” says one of the sophomore girls. “Do we have to see his face spewing more crap?”

  “Like it or not,” says Ms. Ramirez, “this is what America sees. And this is what New Jersey will be thinking about in November when we vote on Proposition 2. This or a speech very like it.”

  “He’s ahead in the polls,” Daneca says, biting the end of one of her braids. “People actually approve of his performance.”

  The sophomore gives Daneca a horrible look, like Daneca was suggesting people should approve of Patton.

  “It’s a stunt,” says one of the boys. “He just acts like he cares about this because it’s a popular issue. Back in 2001 he voted with worker rights. He goes where his bread is buttered.”

  They talk some back and forth, but I lose the thread of it. I’m just happy to be here, not getting yelled at or handcuffed. Lila’s watching the discussion, gaze flashing to each of the speaker’s faces, but her hand rests in mine and she seems more relaxed than I’ve seen her in a long time.

  Everything seems possible.

  If I just think hard enough, plan carefully enough, maybe I can solve my problems—even the ones I was considering unsolvable. First off, I need to actually figure out who killed Philip. Once I know that, I can engineer the steps to get the Feds off my back. Then maybe I can figure out what to do about Lila.

  Ms. Ramirez pushes a television in front of a chair on one side of the circle. “Enough! Let’s leave some discussing until after watching, okay?”

  She presses a button, and the screen flickers to life. She points the controller at it, and Governor Patton’s pasty face fills the screen. He’s at a lectern, with a blue stage curtain hanging behind him. The few white hairs he still has are slicked back, and his whole vibe screams benevolent tyrant.

  The camera pulls back so that we can see the press pit in front of him. Lots of people in suits raising their hands like it’s high school all over again, just waiting for the teacher to call on them. And at one side there’s an aide standing on the narrow steps to the stage, like he’s guarding them. Beside the aide is a woman in a severe black dress, her hair pulled into a chignon. There is something about her that makes me look again.

  “You’re hurting my hand,” Lila whispers.

  I let go of her, ashamed. My glove was pulled tight over my knuckles, like I was trying to make a fist.

  “What?” she asks me.

  “It’s just hard to listen to,” I say, which seems to be true, since I wasn’t actually listening at all.

  She nods her head, but there is a pin scratch line between her brows. I wait interminable minutes until I think I can safely turn to her and say, “Be right back.

  “Bathroom,” I say to her frown of inquiry.

  I head down the hallway the opposite way from the bathroom, lean against the wall, and take out my phone. As it rings, I think over and over about Millionaires at Home or whatever that stupid magazine was.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” my mother says. “Let me call you back on a landline.”

  I clear my throat. “First, would you explain what you were doing on television?”

  She laughs girlishly. “You saw that? How did I look?”

  “Like you were wearing a costume,” I say. “What were you doing with Governor Patton? He hates workers, and you’re a worker ex-convict.”

  “He’s a nice man once you get to know him,” she says sweetly. “And he doesn’t hate workers. He wants mandatory testing to save worker lives. Didn’t you listen to the speech? Besides, I’m not an ex-convict. My case was overturned on appeal. That’s different.”

  At that moment I hear shouting back where the HEX meeting is being held.

  “I got you freaks,” someone yells.

  “I’ll call you back,” I say, folding the phone closed against my chest as I head back down the hall. Greg is watching as Jeremy holds a video camera in front of the doorway, swinging it back and forth, like he’s trying to get everyone. Jeremy’s moving so fast that I wonder if he’s recording.

  Ms. Ramirez steps into the hall, and the boys stumble back, but they keep filming. Now they’re just filming her.

  “I am giving you both two demerits,” she says. Her voice sounds odd, shaky. “And for every second that you don’t turn off the camera, I am giving you another one.”

  Jeremy swings it down, right away, fumbling with the controls.

  “You are both going to have detention with me for the rest of this week, and you are going to erase the recording, do you understand me? That was an invasion of privacy.”

  “Yes, Ms. Ramirez,” Jeremy says.

  “Good. Now you can go.” She watches them lope off. I watch her watching them, a cold dread settling into my bones.

  * * *

  The website goes up that night. On Thursday morning I hear the rumor that Ramirez goes ballistic, but Northcutt doesn’t know who to blame. Jeremy claims he was intending to delete the footage, that someone snuck into his room and stole his camera. He says he didn’t upload the stills; Greg says that he never touched any of it.

  The bets start flooding in. Are they or aren’t they? It seems like everyone in the school wants to put down money on which of the people at that meeting were workers. A room that I would have been in too, if it wasn’t for the barest coincidence.

  “Do we take the money?” Sam asks me in the hallway between classes. He looks miserable. He’s a clever guy and he’s thought through this far enough to know that there are no easy answers.

  “Yeah,” I say. “We have to. If we don’t, we won’t be able to have any control.”

  We take their money.

  On Thursday afternoon the website goes down without a trace.

  9

  BACK AT THE DORMS SAM is stripping off his uniform and putting on a T-shirt with I’M THE HONOR STUDENT YOU READ ABOUT across the front. He sprays some cologne at his neck while I dump my books onto the bed.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “The protest.” He rolls his eyes. “Don’t try to weasel out of it. Daneca will kill you. She will skin you.”

  “Oh, right,” I say, combing my fingers through my hair. It’s getting shaggy again. “I guess I thought, with all the craziness…”

  He lets me trail off vaguely but doesn’t say anything helpful. He is probably used to me being an idiot. I sigh and kick off my dress shoes and black dress pants, pulling on jeans. After unknotting my tie and tossing it onto my rickety desk, I’m pretty much ready to go. I’m not even bothering to change out of my white button-down.

  We cross the quad together and find Daneca with Ramirez outside of Rawlings Fine Arts Center, home to Ramirez’s music room, and the location of most HEX meetings. The day is warm for September. Daneca’s dressed up in a long batik skirt with bells dangling from the hem. She’s even dyed the tips of her braids a muddy purple.

  “It’s canceled,” Daneca says, turning to us. She’s practically shouting. “Can you believe it? All Northcutt cares about is placating alumni donors! This isn’t fair! She already said okay.”

  “It’s not just the administration,” Ms. Ramirez says. “Students dropped out of the trip too. No one wants to be seen getting on the bus.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Daneca mutters, then louder she says, “We could have done something. Met somewhere other than here.”

  “Some of them are actually workers, you know,” I say. “It’s not just a cause for them. It’s their actual lives. So maybe they’re worried about the actual consequences of people guessing their secret.”

  Daneca gives me a look of loathing. “How do they think anything’s going to get better with that attitude?” She clearly thinks they means me.

  “Maybe they don’t,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” Ramirez says with a heavy sigh. “I know you had your heart set on this.”

  “What’s going on?” a soft voice asks from behind us. I turn to see Lila, backpack over one shoulder. She’s wearing a yellow sundress and big, clunky boots. I feel that same odd shock that I always feel when I see her, like an electric current passing through my body.

  “Trip’s canceled due to administrative cowardice,” Sam says.

  “Oh.” Lila looks down at her boots and kicks a clump of dirt. Then she looks up. “Well, can the four of us still go?”

  Daneca stares at her for a long moment, then turns to Ramirez. “Yes! She’s right. We already turned in our permission slips, so our parents have already agreed to letting us out.”

  “On a school-supervised trip,” Ramirez protests.

  “We’re seniors,” Daneca says. “We’ve got our parents’ permission. Northcutt can’t stop us.”

  “I don’t recall Mr. Sharpe turning in a permission slip.”

  “Oops,” I say. “Left it in my room. Let me just run back and get it.”

  Ramirez sighs. “Fine. Give me that form, Cassel, and the four of you can sign out and go to the protest. But I want your word that you will be back in time for study hall.”

  “We will,” Lila promises.

  After a little bit of forgery on my part, we’re heading to Sam’s 1978 vintage Cadillac Superior side-loading hearse. Lila stops to read the bumper sticker.

  “This thing really runs on vegetable oil?” she asks.

  The afternoon sun bakes the asphalt of the parking lot, making heat radiate off it. I wipe my brow and try not to consider the sweat beading at Lila’s collarbone.

  Sam grins proudly and slaps the hood. “It wasn’t easy to find a diesel hearse to convert, but I did.”

  “Smells like french fries,” says Daneca, climbing in. “But you get used to it.”

  “French fries are delicious,” says Sam.

  Lila scrambles into the backseat, which is custom—scavenged from a regular Cadillac and installed by Sam—and I slide in after her.

  “Thank you guys for coming,” Daneca says. She looks in my direction. “I know you don’t really want to go, so let me just say—I appreciate it.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to,” I say, and take a deep breath. I think of my mother at that other rally with Patton. “I’m just not that into politics.”

  Daneca turns around in her seat to look at me incredulously. “Oh?” She doesn’t seem mad, more amused.

  “Deathwërk’s playing later,” Sam says, steering the hearse out of the parking lot as he steers the conversation away from me. “We’ll probably get there in time for Bare Knuckles.”

  “Bands? Really? I was imagining less fun, more marching with placards,” I say.

  Daneca grins. “Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of placards. The march goes past city hall to Lincoln Park—that’s where the bands are supposed to perform. There are going to be speeches, too.”

  “Well, good,” I say. “I would hate to think we’re giving up valuable studying time for anything less than a—”

  Lila laughs, leaning back against her headrest.

  “What?” I say.

  “I don’t know,” Lila says. “You have nice friends.” She touches my shoulder lightly with the tips of her gloved fingers.

  A shiver starts low on my spine. For a moment I remember the feel of her bare hands on my skin.

  It’s just the four of us in the car, and even though the plan is to go to the movies tomorrow, I have to try really hard to convince myself this isn’t anything like a double date.

  “That’s right,” says Sam. “You knew our man Cassel back when. Got the dirt for us?”

  She looks at me slyly. “When he was a kid, he was a total shrimp. Then around thirteen, he shot up like a beanpole.”

  I grin. “And you stayed a shrimp.”

  “He loved cheap horror novels, and when he started one, he’d read it straight through until the end, no matter what. Sometimes his grandfather would come into his bedroom and switch off the lamp when it got really late, so Cassel would climb out the window and read by the streetlight. I’d come over in the morning and find him asleep on the lawn.”

  “Awwww,” Daneca says.

  I make a rude sound, accompanied by an equally rude gesture.

  “One time, at a fair in Ocean City, he ate so much cotton candy that he threw up.”

  “Who hasn’t?” I say.

  “He had a black-and-white film marathon, after which he wore a fedora.” She raises her brows, daring me to contradict her. “For a month. In the middle of summer.”

  I laugh.

  “A fedora?” Sam says.

  I remember sitting in the basement for hours, watching movie after movie of rough-voiced women and men in dapper suits with drinks in their gloved hands. When Lila’s parents got divorced, she went to Paris with her father and came back smoking Gitanes and outlining her eyes in smudgy black kohl. It was like she’d stepped out of the movie I wanted to be in.

  I see her now, the stiffness of her body as she leans deliberately away from me, pressing her cheek against the window. She looks tired.

  In Carney, back then, I didn’t care about blending in. I wasn’t constantly trying to bluff my way into seeming like a better guy. I had no secrets I was desperate to keep. And Lila was brave and sure and totally unstoppable.

  I wonder what the kid I was then would think of the people we are now.

  * * *

  Cops are standing by blockades far from where the march is supposed to be. Traffic cones are set up, flares sparking with sizzling orange flames. There are people, too, more than I expected, and a distant roar that promises even more than that.

  “There’s no place to park,” Sam complains, slowly circling the same block for the third time.

  Daneca pokes at her phone as we inch along behind a line of cars. “Turn left when you can,” she says after a few minutes. “I have an app that says there’s a garage a couple blocks from here.”

  The first two we pass are full, but then we find cars just parking on top of the median and along the sidewalks. Sam pulls the hearse onto a patch of green grass and kills the engine.

  “Rebel,” I say.

  Daneca grins hugely and opens the door. “Look at all these people!”

  Lila and I get out, and the four of us head in the direction most are going.

  “It makes you feel like everything could change, you know?” Daneca says.

  “Everything is going to change,” says Sam, surprising me.

  Daneca turns and gives him a look. I can tell he surprised her, too.

  “Well, it is,” he says. “One way or another.”

  I guess he’s right. Either Proposition 2 will get voted down and workers will see that organizing works and do a whole lot more of it, or Proposition 2 will pass and other states will fall all over themselves to try the same trick.

  “Changing is what people do when they have no options left,” Lila says cryptically.

  I try to catch her eye, but she’s too busy watching the crowd.

  We walk like that for a few more blocks and start to see signs.

  WE ARE NOT A CURSE, one reads.

  I wonder what kind of slogans they had at the press conference Mom attended.

  A group of kids are sitting on the steps of a Fidelity bank. One throws a beer in the direction of the protesters. It shatters, glass and foam making everyone near its impact start shouting.

  A man whose huge beard is long enough to overlap his T-shirt jumps up onto the hood of a car and yells louder than the others, “Down with Proposition 2! Flatten Patton!”

  A policeman standing in front of a bodega picks up his radio and starts speaking rapidly into it. He looks flustered.

  “I think the park is this way,” Daneca says, pointing from the screen of her phone to a side street. I’m not sure she noticed anything else.

  A couple more blocks and the crowd becomes so thick that it’s more like a tide we have been swept up in. We’re a vein rushing blood toward the heart, a furnace of sun-warmed body heat, a herd barreling toward a cliff.

  I see more and more signs.

  HANDS OFF OUR RIGHTS.

  TESTING EVERYONE/TRUSTING NO ONE.

  THIS ISN’T WORKING.

  “How many people are they estimating will come out for this?” Lila shouts.

  “Twenty, maybe fifty thousand maximum,” Daneca shouts back.

  Lila looks toward where our street intersects with Broad, where the main protest is. We can’t see too far, but the wall of noise—of slogans being screamed through bullhorns, of drums, of sirens—is almost deafening. “I think that number was off—way off.”