Perfect Lies

Babysitting.

I’m babysitting a freaking Reader.

She pops her gum, bored. “You aren’t cleared to go back to the offices.”

Hey, I think. On a scale of one to ten, how fond are you of an intact spinal cord?

Her eyes widen and I laugh. “Just kidding. Probably you should stay out of my head. It’s not a friendly place.”

“Clearly.” She has short hair, bleached white, with choppy bangs hanging over her kohl-rimmed eyes. From the looks of her she’s maybe sixteen, pixie features and tiny frame; her feet hang a few inches above the floor. She’s wearing metal almost everywhere metal can go—ears, nose, fingers, wrists, even studs on her black heels. It doesn’t compensate for how small she is. Fragile. Fingers like twigs, equally snappable.

“Aren’t you a little young to be Keane’s personal assistant?” I ask, leaning against the rosewood desk she’s slouching at.

She doesn’t break eye contact. “Aren’t you a little psychotic to be Keane’s employee?”

I like her. The pixie is going to be my friend. I know it like I know I’m not going to see Mr. Keane today. I will be her friend, while plotting to either betray her if she’s untrustworthy for the company, or be betrayed by her if I slip up and she sees thoughts she shouldn’t.

Best friends.

“When is James getting out of his meeting?”

“Quit thinking of me as a pixie. It pisses me off.”

Magic magic pixie dust! Tinker Bell! Tiny pixies with sharp teeth, stealing children and horses! I start humming the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” under my breath.

“You really are as obnoxious as everyone thinks you are.” She sighs heavily, slides off her chair, and walks around the desk. Even in four-inch heels she barely comes up to my chin. “Let’s go get dinner.”

I let my eyes travel down the hall behind her. Mr. Keane is there somewhere. Mr. Keane who—nope not gonna think about it, not gonna think about anything at all. I can be patient. Pixies. Pixie haircuts. Pixie sticks. Drumsticks. Music. Dancing. I want to go dancing! Ache for it.

“You know what?” she says. “I changed my mind. Go ahead and snap my neck. It’s gotta be better than listening to you free-associate to try and scramble me.”

I laugh and wrap my arm through hers, steering her past the security guard and toward the gleaming elevators. “Your mistake is in assuming my brain doesn’t work like this all the time.”

We ride down the elevator in relative silence, except when Pixie asks me to please think the lyrics to a song she wouldn’t mind having stuck in her head. I settle on Queen in my head and pizza for dinner.

“So,” I say around a thin and drooping slice. “Turns out I do miss something about Chicago. What the crap is this crust?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m a vegan.”

I reach out and tug the collar of her leather jacket. “And this cow died of natural causes?”

She shrugs defensively. “My grandma gave it to me for my thirteenth birthday. It was hers. The cows would have been dead of old age by now, anyway. Besides, eggs are disgusting, and have you ever actually thought about what dairy is? You are eating the product of liquid squirted from the nipples of a cow.”

“Mmmm …” I stick my tongue out to catch a stray strand of goopy cheese. Pixie rolls her eyes, and I free-associate cow nipples in my thoughts to entertain her and keep my brain safe as I sit back and look out the window at the busy sidewalk. It’s dark and bitterly cold, but that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone out there. New York is more claustrophobic than Chicago, the buildings tall and looming so that you can’t see anything beyond your street. This afternoon as I prowled the city, waiting for James to text me that it was time to go in, I passed the Empire State Building without even noticing until I almost knocked down a tourist.

How come Pixie is here? Why isn’t she in the school?

“My name isn’t Pixie. And it’s because I’m too good for the school, you idiot. When they interviewed me for a scholarship, I started asking them about the Keane Foundation and what on earth Feelers were and assured them that I was more than qualified for whatever they had in mind. Then they put me up against their best Readers—”

“Did you get Doris?”

“Yes! Kill me now, her thoughts were like being trapped in an airless room with nothing but smooth jazz.”

I cackle. “So, what, they gave you independent study?”

“Pretty much. Said I could cut my teeth at the front desk of Keane’s main office, since I was too young to place somewhere big.”

“And your family …”

Her eyes get tight and she snaps her head to look outside. Not in a tragic, I’ve-been-ripped-away-from-them way. I tap tap tap tap a finger on the counter. She wants to be here, I can tell. Hmm. I will tread carefully. Super careful.

Ha ha ha ha, as if.

She clears her throat. “I lived with my grandma until she died when I was thirteen. Then I got saddled with my dad who’d sooner raise hunting dogs than a teenage daughter. So.” She claps her hands together, smile too wide and eyes too bright. “I get to come to the great big city and do great big things, and he gets to take the sheets off the couch that doubled as my bed. Win-win!”

Am I supposed to hug her? Console her? (Annie would know what to do. Would have. Would have.) “Well, screw that. Let’s go dancing.”

She frowns as though trying to hear something better, then shakes her head and jumps off the stool. “That, I can do.”

My phone buzzes and I pull it out. Text from James. Stuck in meetings.

Late dinner? I can eat twice if it means we can talk.

Eating with my father. Sorry. Will make it up to you tomorrow.

I narrow my eyes at the screen, tap tap tap tap on it. I need us to move, to do, to start this wheel spinning until it flies off its axis and destroys everything around us. I hold James’s face in my thoughts, imagine his arms around me. Imagine his voice whispering “patience” in my ear before I elbow him in the stomach because I hate it when he tells me that.

I take a phone off the counter, where someone set it down to go get a refill.

“Did you just steal that guy’s phone?” Pixie asks as we hunch our shoulders against the chill. She has her own phone out, looking for a nearby club.

One can never have enough phones, I think at her. She gives me a secret smile in return.

ANNIE (#ulink_ca611a06-08c5-5a60-a121-31603bab842a)

Three Months Before (#ulink_ca611a06-08c5-5a60-a121-31603bab842a)

I’VE BEEN VENTURING OUT MORE NOW THAT RAFAEL got me a white cane. Coming and going as I please is a luxury I intend to take advantage of. It’s strange—for so long I hated seeing the future because it didn’t belong to me. It belonged to Keane. Now I have my own future, and no idea what to do with it. Fia was always supposed to be with me. She’s not.

I feel lost.

As I trail my fingers along the hall wall I hear voices. I pause—both are hushed but clearly angry. Taking a few steps forward, I lean near a doorframe and listen.

“—you know I’m right!” Cole.

“I don’t! And you don’t know, either. I’m tired of arguing with you.” Sarah sounds exhausted.

“What about Annie? There’s no reason for her to stay here. She can’t accomplish anything. She sees even less than you do, and she’s a huge target. She needs to be placed somewhere else.”