White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

“That spends well,” I said.

Worker stuff. I still don’t know where they went or what she did, but when she got back, her hair was messed up and her lipstick was gone. We didn’t talk about that, but we did watch a lot of black-and-white caper movies in the basement, and she let me smoke some of the unfiltered Gitanes she’d picked up in Paris.

Poisonous jealousy thrummed through my veins. I wanted to kill Barron.

I guess I settled for Lila.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I GET BACK TO THE OLD house in time for dinner, which turns out to be goulash of some kind, thick with noodles and dotted with slivers of carrot and pearl onions. I eat three plates and wash it all down with black coffee as the cat winds around my ankles. I hand her down all the beef I can nonchalantly pick out.

“How’d the doctor’s visit go?” Grandad is drinking coffee too, and his hand shakes a little as he brings the cup to his lips. I wonder what else is in the cup.

“Fine,” I say slowly. I don’t want to tell him about the test or about Maura and her missing memories, but that leaves me with very little to say. “They hooked me up to a machine and wanted me to try and sleep.”

“Right there in the office?”

That did sound pretty unlikely, but there’s no backing down now. “I managed to doze a little. They were just trying to get some basic results. A baseline, he said.”

“Hu-uh,” Grandad says, and gets up to clear the dishes. “That must be why you were so late.”

I pick up my plate and walk to the sink, saying nothing.

Later that night, when I’m covered with dust but most of the upstairs is clean, we watch Band of the Banned. On it, curse workers who belong to a secret FBI team use their powers to stop other workers, mostly drug dealers and serial killers.

“You want to know how to tell if someone’s a worker?” Grandad asks with a grunt. He’s saved the chair I hate and is sitting in it, his face lit with blue from the screen. The hero of the show, MacEldern, has just kicked down a door while an emotion worker makes the bad guys weep with remorse and begin a rambling confession. It’s pretty lame, but Grandad won’t let me change the station.

I look at the blackened stumps of my grandfather’s fingers. “How?”

“He’s the only one gonna deny he’s got powers. Everyone else thinks they got something. They got some story about the one time they wished for a bad thing to happen to someone and it did, or wished for some moron to love them and got loved. Like every goddamn coincidence in the world is a working.”

“Maybe they do have a little power,” I say. “Maybe everyone does.”

Grandad snorts. “Don’t go believing that crap. You might not be a worker, but you come from a proud worker family. You’re too smart to sound like—wasshisname—who said that if kids took enough LSD, they’d unlock their powers.”

One in a thousand people is a worker, and of all of them, 60 percent are luck workers. People just want to game the odds. Grandad should understand that.

“Timothy Leary,” I say.

“Yeah, well, see how that turned out. All those kids trying to give each other the touch, winding up half out of their heads, imagining they’d worked and been worked, imagining they were dying from blowback, clawing each other apart. The sixties and seventies were stupid decades, full of misinformation and crazy rock stars trying to be prophets, pretending to be workers. You know how many workers were hired just to do the work Fabulous Freddie said he did alone?”

There’s no point in trying to distract Grandad from his rants once he’s gotten started. He loves them way too much to bother realizing I’ve heard them about a million times before. The best I can hope for is to push him toward some new rant. “You ever get hired by one of them? You would have been, what, twenty-, thirtysomething back then?”

“I did what old man Zacharov said, didn’t I? No freelancing. Know some people who did, though.” He laughs. “Like a guy who toured with Black Hole Band. Physical worker. Really good. Someone pissed off the band, that someone’d be in traction.”

“I would have thought emotion work would be more popular.” Despite myself I’m drawn in. Usually when he delivers this speech, I feel like he’s giving it to the rest of the family and I’m just overhearing it. This time we’re alone. And I think of all the stuff I’ve seen photos of on the Internet or on VH1 specials from back then. Performers with goat heads, mermaids who danced in tanks until they drowned because the transformer hadn’t known what she was doing when she’d cursed them, people remade like cartoons with big heads and huge eyes. All turning out to be the work of a single transformation worker who died of an overdose in her hotel room, surrounded by worked animals that stood on two legs and spoke gibberish.

There aren’t any transformation workers for bands to hire to do any of that today, even if it was legal. There might be one in China, but no one’s heard about him for a long time.

“Well, no one can work a crowd. Too many people. There was this one kid who tried. He figured what the heck; he’d ride out the blowback. He’d let a whole crowd of people touch him, one after another, and make them feel euphoric. Like he was a drug.”

“So the blowback would be euphoric too, right? Where’s the harm in that?”

The white cat jumps onto the couch next to me and starts shredding the cushions with her claws.

“See, that’s the problem with kids—that’s how you all think. Like you’re immortal. Like all the stupid things you’re doing, no one ever thought of before. He went crazy. Sure, drooling, grinning, happy crazy, but crazy all the same. He’s the son of one of the bigwigs in the Brennan family, so at least they can afford to take care of him.”

Grandad goes off again on his rant about the dumbness of kids in general and worker kids in specific. I reach over to pet the cat and it quiets under my hand, not purring, just going still as stone.

Before I go to bed that night, I root through the medicine cabinet. I take two sleeping pills and fall asleep with the cat at my elbow.

I don’t dream.

Someone’s shaking me. “Hey, sleepyhead, get up.”

Grandad hands me a cup of too strong coffee, but this morning I’m grateful for it. My head feels like it’s packed with sand.

I reach for my pants and pull them on. My hands automatically tuck in the pockets, but halfway through the gesture I realize something’s missing. The amulet. Mom’s amulet. The one I tried to give Maura.

Remember.

I go down on my knees and crawl under the bed. Dust, paperback novels I haven’t seen in years, and twenty-three cents.

“What are you looking for?” Grandad asks me.

“Nothing,” I say.

* * *

When we were little, Mom would stand Philip and Barron and me next to each other and tell us that family was everything, that we were the only people we could really rely on. Then she would touch our shoulders with her bare hands, each in turn, and we would be suffused with love for one another, suffocated by love.

“Promise your brothers that you will love one another forever and ever and that you will do whatever you have to to protect one another. You will never hurt one another. You will never steal from one another. Family is the most important thing. There is no one who will love you like your family.”

We would hug and cry and promise.

Emotion work fades over months and months, until a year later you feel silly about the stuff you did and said when you were worked, but you don’t forget what it was like to be glutted with those emotions.

Those were the only times I’ve ever felt safe.

Still holding the coffee, I walk outside to clear my head. One foot in front of the other. The air is cold and clean, and I suck in lungfuls like a drowning man.

Things fall out of pockets, I tell myself, and figure that before I melt down completely, I should check the car. If it’s there, wedged down in the seat or glittering on one of the floor mats, I am going to feel pretty stupid. I hope I get to feel stupid.

Impulsively I flip open my cell. There are a couple of missed calls from my mother—she must hate not being able to call me on a landline—but I ignore them and call Barron. I need someone to answer questions, someone I can trust not to protect me. The call goes right to voice mail. I stand there, hitting redial again and again, listening to the ringing. I don’t know who else to phone. Finally it occurs to me that there might be a way to call his dorm room directly.

I phone the main number for Princeton. They can’t seem to find his room, but I remember his roommate’s name.

A girl picks up, her voice throaty and soft, like the phone woke her.

“Oh, hey,” I say. “I’m looking for my brother Barron?”

“Barron doesn’t go to school here anymore,” she says.

“What?”

“He dropped out a couple of months into the year.” She sounds impatient, no longer sleepy. “You’re his brother? He left a bunch of his stuff, you know.”

“He’s forgetful.” Barron has always been forgetful, but right now forgetting seems ominous. “I can pick up whatever he left.”

“I already mailed it.” She stops speaking abruptly, and I wonder what went on between the two of them. I can’t imagine Barron dropping out of school because of a girl, but I can’t imagine Barron dropping out of Princeton for any reason. “I got tired of him promising to come get it and never showing up. He never even gave me money for the postage.”

My mind races. “The address you mailed all that stuff too—do you still have it?”

“Yeah. You sure you’re his brother?”

“It’s my fault I don’t know where he is,” I lie quickly. “After dad died I was a real brat. We had a fight at the funeral and I wouldn’t take any of his calls.” I’m amazed when my voice hitches in the right place automatically.

“Oh,” she says.

“Look, I just want to tell him how sorry I am,” I say, further embroidering my tale. I don’t know if I sound sorry. What I feel is a cold sort of dread.

I hear the rustling of papers along the line. “Do you have a pen?”

I write the address on my hand, thank her, and hang up as I walk back to the house. There I find my grandfather stacking up dozens of holiday cards he’s pulling out from behind a dresser. Glitter dusts his gloves. It’s odd how empty the rooms look stripped of junk. My footsteps echo.

“Hey,” I say. “I need the car again.”

“We still got the bedroom upstairs to do,” he says. “Besides the porch and the parlor. And even the rooms that are done we got to box up.”

I lift the phone and wave it slightly, like it’s to blame. “The doctor needs me to go back for some more tests.” Lie until even you believe it—that’s the real secret of lying. The only way to have absolutely no tells.

Too bad I’m not quite there yet.

“I thought it might be something like that,” he says with a deep sigh. I wait for him to call me out, to say that he’s already talked to the doctor or that it’s been clear to him from the start that I’m full of it. He doesn’t say any of those things; he reaches into the pocket of his jacket and tosses me the keys.

My amulet isn’t on the floor of Grandad’s Buick or stuck in the crease of the driver’s seat, although I do find a crumpled-up take-out bag. I stop for gas and buy more coffee and three chocolate bars. While I wait for the guy to come back with my change, I program Barron’s new address into the GPS on my phone. The place is in Trenton, on a street I’ve never been.

I don’t have much more to go on than a hunch that all the weird things—my sleepwalking, Maura’s contradictory memories, Barron’s dropping out of school without telling anyone, even the missing amulet—are related.

But as my foot presses on the gas and the car speeds faster, I feel like for the first time in a long while I’m heading in the right direction.

Lila had her fourteenth birthday party at some big hotel of her father’s in the city. It was the kind of thing where lots of workers got together, passed around envelopes that only theoretically had to do with the party, and talked about things that were better not overheard by the likes of me. Lila pulled me into her hotel room an hour before it was supposed to start. She had on a ton of glittery black makeup and an oversize shirt with a cartoon cat face on it. Her hair wasn’t pink anymore; it was white blond and spiky.

“I hate this,” she said, sitting down on the bed. Her hands were bare. “I hate parties.”

“Maybe you could drown yourself in a bucket of champagne,” I said amiably.

She ignored me. “Let’s pierce each other’s ears. I want to pierce your ears.”

Her ears were already hung with tiny pearls. I bet if I scratched them against my teeth, they’d turn out to be real. She touched an earring self-consciously, like she could hear my thoughts. “I got these done with an ear gun when I was seven,” she said. “My mom told me that she would give me ice cream if I didn’t cry, but I cried anyway.”

“And you want more holes because you think pain will distract you from all the annoying celebrating? Or because stabbing me will make you feel better?”

“Something like that.” She smiled enigmatically, went into the bathroom, and came out with a wad of cotton balls and a safety pin. After setting them down on top of the minibar, she pulled out one of the tiny bottles of vodka. “Go get ice from the machine.”

“Don’t you have friends—I mean, not that we’re not friends, but—”

>

“That spends well,” I said.

Worker stuff. I still don’t know where they went or what she did, but when she got back, her hair was messed up and her lipstick was gone. We didn’t talk about that, but we did watch a lot of black-and-white caper movies in the basement, and she let me smoke some of the unfiltered Gitanes she’d picked up in Paris.

Poisonous jealousy thrummed through my veins. I wanted to kill Barron.

I guess I settled for Lila.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I GET BACK TO THE OLD house in time for dinner, which turns out to be goulash of some kind, thick with noodles and dotted with slivers of carrot and pearl onions. I eat three plates and wash it all down with black coffee as the cat winds around my ankles. I hand her down all the beef I can nonchalantly pick out.

“How’d the doctor’s visit go?” Grandad is drinking coffee too, and his hand shakes a little as he brings the cup to his lips. I wonder what else is in the cup.

“Fine,” I say slowly. I don’t want to tell him about the test or about Maura and her missing memories, but that leaves me with very little to say. “They hooked me up to a machine and wanted me to try and sleep.”

“Right there in the office?”

That did sound pretty unlikely, but there’s no backing down now. “I managed to doze a little. They were just trying to get some basic results. A baseline, he said.”

“Hu-uh,” Grandad says, and gets up to clear the dishes. “That must be why you were so late.”

I pick up my plate and walk to the sink, saying nothing.

Later that night, when I’m covered with dust but most of the upstairs is clean, we watch Band of the Banned. On it, curse workers who belong to a secret FBI team use their powers to stop other workers, mostly drug dealers and serial killers.

“You want to know how to tell if someone’s a worker?” Grandad asks with a grunt. He’s saved the chair I hate and is sitting in it, his face lit with blue from the screen. The hero of the show, MacEldern, has just kicked down a door while an emotion worker makes the bad guys weep with remorse and begin a rambling confession. It’s pretty lame, but Grandad won’t let me change the station.

I look at the blackened stumps of my grandfather’s fingers. “How?”

“He’s the only one gonna deny he’s got powers. Everyone else thinks they got something. They got some story about the one time they wished for a bad thing to happen to someone and it did, or wished for some moron to love them and got loved. Like every goddamn coincidence in the world is a working.”

“Maybe they do have a little power,” I say. “Maybe everyone does.”

Grandad snorts. “Don’t go believing that crap. You might not be a worker, but you come from a proud worker family. You’re too smart to sound like—wasshisname—who said that if kids took enough LSD, they’d unlock their powers.”

One in a thousand people is a worker, and of all of them, 60 percent are luck workers. People just want to game the odds. Grandad should understand that.

“Timothy Leary,” I say.

“Yeah, well, see how that turned out. All those kids trying to give each other the touch, winding up half out of their heads, imagining they’d worked and been worked, imagining they were dying from blowback, clawing each other apart. The sixties and seventies were stupid decades, full of misinformation and crazy rock stars trying to be prophets, pretending to be workers. You know how many workers were hired just to do the work Fabulous Freddie said he did alone?”

There’s no point in trying to distract Grandad from his rants once he’s gotten started. He loves them way too much to bother realizing I’ve heard them about a million times before. The best I can hope for is to push him toward some new rant. “You ever get hired by one of them? You would have been, what, twenty-, thirtysomething back then?”

“I did what old man Zacharov said, didn’t I? No freelancing. Know some people who did, though.” He laughs. “Like a guy who toured with Black Hole Band. Physical worker. Really good. Someone pissed off the band, that someone’d be in traction.”

“I would have thought emotion work would be more popular.” Despite myself I’m drawn in. Usually when he delivers this speech, I feel like he’s giving it to the rest of the family and I’m just overhearing it. This time we’re alone. And I think of all the stuff I’ve seen photos of on the Internet or on VH1 specials from back then. Performers with goat heads, mermaids who danced in tanks until they drowned because the transformer hadn’t known what she was doing when she’d cursed them, people remade like cartoons with big heads and huge eyes. All turning out to be the work of a single transformation worker who died of an overdose in her hotel room, surrounded by worked animals that stood on two legs and spoke gibberish.

There aren’t any transformation workers for bands to hire to do any of that today, even if it was legal. There might be one in China, but no one’s heard about him for a long time.

“Well, no one can work a crowd. Too many people. There was this one kid who tried. He figured what the heck; he’d ride out the blowback. He’d let a whole crowd of people touch him, one after another, and make them feel euphoric. Like he was a drug.”

“So the blowback would be euphoric too, right? Where’s the harm in that?”

The white cat jumps onto the couch next to me and starts shredding the cushions with her claws.

“See, that’s the problem with kids—that’s how you all think. Like you’re immortal. Like all the stupid things you’re doing, no one ever thought of before. He went crazy. Sure, drooling, grinning, happy crazy, but crazy all the same. He’s the son of one of the bigwigs in the Brennan family, so at least they can afford to take care of him.”

Grandad goes off again on his rant about the dumbness of kids in general and worker kids in specific. I reach over to pet the cat and it quiets under my hand, not purring, just going still as stone.

Before I go to bed that night, I root through the medicine cabinet. I take two sleeping pills and fall asleep with the cat at my elbow.

I don’t dream.

Someone’s shaking me. “Hey, sleepyhead, get up.”

Grandad hands me a cup of too strong coffee, but this morning I’m grateful for it. My head feels like it’s packed with sand.

I reach for my pants and pull them on. My hands automatically tuck in the pockets, but halfway through the gesture I realize something’s missing. The amulet. Mom’s amulet. The one I tried to give Maura.

Remember.

I go down on my knees and crawl under the bed. Dust, paperback novels I haven’t seen in years, and twenty-three cents.

“What are you looking for?” Grandad asks me.

“Nothing,” I say.

* * *

When we were little, Mom would stand Philip and Barron and me next to each other and tell us that family was everything, that we were the only people we could really rely on. Then she would touch our shoulders with her bare hands, each in turn, and we would be suffused with love for one another, suffocated by love.

“Promise your brothers that you will love one another forever and ever and that you will do whatever you have to to protect one another. You will never hurt one another. You will never steal from one another. Family is the most important thing. There is no one who will love you like your family.”

We would hug and cry and promise.

Emotion work fades over months and months, until a year later you feel silly about the stuff you did and said when you were worked, but you don’t forget what it was like to be glutted with those emotions.

Those were the only times I’ve ever felt safe.

Still holding the coffee, I walk outside to clear my head. One foot in front of the other. The air is cold and clean, and I suck in lungfuls like a drowning man.

Things fall out of pockets, I tell myself, and figure that before I melt down completely, I should check the car. If it’s there, wedged down in the seat or glittering on one of the floor mats, I am going to feel pretty stupid. I hope I get to feel stupid.

Impulsively I flip open my cell. There are a couple of missed calls from my mother—she must hate not being able to call me on a landline—but I ignore them and call Barron. I need someone to answer questions, someone I can trust not to protect me. The call goes right to voice mail. I stand there, hitting redial again and again, listening to the ringing. I don’t know who else to phone. Finally it occurs to me that there might be a way to call his dorm room directly.

I phone the main number for Princeton. They can’t seem to find his room, but I remember his roommate’s name.

A girl picks up, her voice throaty and soft, like the phone woke her.

“Oh, hey,” I say. “I’m looking for my brother Barron?”

“Barron doesn’t go to school here anymore,” she says.

“What?”

“He dropped out a couple of months into the year.” She sounds impatient, no longer sleepy. “You’re his brother? He left a bunch of his stuff, you know.”

“He’s forgetful.” Barron has always been forgetful, but right now forgetting seems ominous. “I can pick up whatever he left.”

“I already mailed it.” She stops speaking abruptly, and I wonder what went on between the two of them. I can’t imagine Barron dropping out of school because of a girl, but I can’t imagine Barron dropping out of Princeton for any reason. “I got tired of him promising to come get it and never showing up. He never even gave me money for the postage.”

My mind races. “The address you mailed all that stuff too—do you still have it?”

“Yeah. You sure you’re his brother?”

“It’s my fault I don’t know where he is,” I lie quickly. “After dad died I was a real brat. We had a fight at the funeral and I wouldn’t take any of his calls.” I’m amazed when my voice hitches in the right place automatically.

“Oh,” she says.

“Look, I just want to tell him how sorry I am,” I say, further embroidering my tale. I don’t know if I sound sorry. What I feel is a cold sort of dread.

I hear the rustling of papers along the line. “Do you have a pen?”

I write the address on my hand, thank her, and hang up as I walk back to the house. There I find my grandfather stacking up dozens of holiday cards he’s pulling out from behind a dresser. Glitter dusts his gloves. It’s odd how empty the rooms look stripped of junk. My footsteps echo.

“Hey,” I say. “I need the car again.”

“We still got the bedroom upstairs to do,” he says. “Besides the porch and the parlor. And even the rooms that are done we got to box up.”

I lift the phone and wave it slightly, like it’s to blame. “The doctor needs me to go back for some more tests.” Lie until even you believe it—that’s the real secret of lying. The only way to have absolutely no tells.

Too bad I’m not quite there yet.

“I thought it might be something like that,” he says with a deep sigh. I wait for him to call me out, to say that he’s already talked to the doctor or that it’s been clear to him from the start that I’m full of it. He doesn’t say any of those things; he reaches into the pocket of his jacket and tosses me the keys.

My amulet isn’t on the floor of Grandad’s Buick or stuck in the crease of the driver’s seat, although I do find a crumpled-up take-out bag. I stop for gas and buy more coffee and three chocolate bars. While I wait for the guy to come back with my change, I program Barron’s new address into the GPS on my phone. The place is in Trenton, on a street I’ve never been.

I don’t have much more to go on than a hunch that all the weird things—my sleepwalking, Maura’s contradictory memories, Barron’s dropping out of school without telling anyone, even the missing amulet—are related.

But as my foot presses on the gas and the car speeds faster, I feel like for the first time in a long while I’m heading in the right direction.

Lila had her fourteenth birthday party at some big hotel of her father’s in the city. It was the kind of thing where lots of workers got together, passed around envelopes that only theoretically had to do with the party, and talked about things that were better not overheard by the likes of me. Lila pulled me into her hotel room an hour before it was supposed to start. She had on a ton of glittery black makeup and an oversize shirt with a cartoon cat face on it. Her hair wasn’t pink anymore; it was white blond and spiky.

“I hate this,” she said, sitting down on the bed. Her hands were bare. “I hate parties.”

“Maybe you could drown yourself in a bucket of champagne,” I said amiably.

She ignored me. “Let’s pierce each other’s ears. I want to pierce your ears.”

Her ears were already hung with tiny pearls. I bet if I scratched them against my teeth, they’d turn out to be real. She touched an earring self-consciously, like she could hear my thoughts. “I got these done with an ear gun when I was seven,” she said. “My mom told me that she would give me ice cream if I didn’t cry, but I cried anyway.”

“And you want more holes because you think pain will distract you from all the annoying celebrating? Or because stabbing me will make you feel better?”

“Something like that.” She smiled enigmatically, went into the bathroom, and came out with a wad of cotton balls and a safety pin. After setting them down on top of the minibar, she pulled out one of the tiny bottles of vodka. “Go get ice from the machine.”

“Don’t you have friends—I mean, not that we’re not friends, but—”