White Cat (Curse Workers 1)

I give them a nod and wonder if Sam’s at least taking bets on the rumors about me. He’d better.

In the kitchen a bunch of seniors are gathered around Harvey Silverman, who’s downing a pyramid of shots. Outside, by the pool, I see most of the rest of the partygoers. It’s too cold to swim, but a couple of fully clothed people are anyway, their lips blue in the patio lights.

“Cassel Sharpe,” Audrey says, looping her arm through mine. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Audrey’s eyes are glassy, her smile vague. She still looks lovely. She glances toward Greg Harmsford leaning against a bookshelf, talking with two girls from the field hockey team. I wonder if they came to the party together.

“Just like always,” she says, looking back at me. “Watching from the shadows. Observing everybody. Judging us.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” I say. I don’t know how to explain how afraid I am of being judged.

“I liked when you were my boyfriend,” she says, and leans her head against my shoulder, maybe out of habit, maybe because she’s drunk. It’s enough like tenderness for me to pretend. “I liked you watching me.”

I resist the urge to promise her that if she tells me all the things I did right, I’ll do them again.

“Didn’t you like it when I was your girlfriend?” she asks, her voice gone so soft that it’s mostly breath.

“You’re the one who broke it off,” I tell her, but my voice has dropped low, and the words come out like a caress. I don’t care about what I’m saying. I only care about keeping her here, talking with me. She makes me feel like it’s possible to slip out of my old life and into hers, where everything is easy and honest.

“I’m not over you,” she says. “I don’t think.”

“Oh,” I say, and then I lean in and kiss her. I don’t think. Don’t think. I just mash my mouth against hers. She tastes like tequila. It’s an awful kiss, too full of grief and frustration and the knowledge that I am screwing everything up and don’t know how to do anything but screw things up worse.

She reaches up her hands and touches my shoulders gently. She doesn’t push me away. Her fingers curl against the nape of my neck, which tickles a little and makes me smile against her lips. I slow down. Better. She sighs into my mouth.

I let my fingers trace her collarbone, dip into the hollow of her neck. I want to kiss her there. I want to let my mouth and tongue follow the road map of freckles across her milky skin.

“Hey,” Greg says. “Get off her.”

Audrey stumbles back, nearly into Greg. I feel like I’ve come up out of such deep water that I have the bends. I forgot that we’re at a party.

“You’re drunk,” Greg tells her, and grabs hold of her upper arm. Audrey sways a little unsteadily.

My fingers curl into fists. I want to shove him against the wall. I want to break open my knuckles on his face. I look at Audrey for a signal. I tell myself that if she looks scared or even angry, I am going to hurt him.

She’s looking down, though, her face turned away from me. All that rage curdles into self-loathing.

“What are you even doing here?” Greg says. “I thought the dean finally figured out that you’re a criminal and kicked you out.”

“I didn’t think this was an official school-sponsored event,” I say.

“Nobody wants you around, working their girlfriends.” His smile is smug. “You and I both know that’s the only way you can get a date.”

I think of Maura, and my sight narrows. It’s like I’m looking at Greg through a tunnel of blackness. My fists clench so tightly that I can feel my nails through the leather of my gloves. I hit him, hard, sending him sprawling on the wooden floor. My foot is digging into his ribs before Rahul Pathak grabs me around the waist and pulls me away from him.

“Chill out, Sharpe,” Rahul says, but I struggle against his hold. All I want to do is kick Greg again. Someone I can’t see grabs my wrist and twists it behind me.

Audrey’s gone.

Greg stands up, wiping his mouth. “I saw your mother’s trial in the paper, Sharpe. I know you’re just like her.”

“If I was, I would make you beg to blow me,” I sneer.

“Get him outside,” someone says, and Rahul steers me toward the door. The swimmers look up when we march through. Several people sitting on chaises rise, like they’re hoping for a fight.

I try to pull my way out of the guys’ grip, and when they let me go, I don’t expect it. I drop onto the grass.

“What got into you?” Rahul says. He’s breathing hard.

I look up at the stars. “Sorry,” I say.

The other person holding me turned out to be Kevin Ford. He’s short but built. A wrestler. He’s watching me like he hopes I try something.

“Be chill,” Rahul says. “This isn’t like you, man.”

“I guess I forgot myself,” I say. I forgot that I didn’t belong, that I would never belong. That I had charmed my way into being their bookie but that I was never their friend. I forgot the delicate foundation my excuse for a social life was built on.

Kevin and Rahul walk back to the house. Kevin says something, too low for me to hear, and Rahul snickers.

I look up at the stars again. No one ever taught me the constellations, so to me they are all just bright dots. Chaos. No pattern at all. When I was a kid, I made up a constellation, but I couldn’t find it a second time.

Someone shuffles through the grass to loom over me, blotting out the chaotic stars. For a moment I think it might be Audrey. It’s Sam. “There you are,” he says.

I get up slowly as Sam turns, stumbles, and pukes in the hydrangea bush near the kitchen window. Some girls on lounge chairs start to laugh.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Sam says when he’s done, “but I think you better drive me home.”

* * *

I get him coffee at a drive-through fast-food place and mix in a lot of sugar. I figure it will help him sober up, but he vomits most of it onto the asphalt of the parking lot. He washes his mouth out with the rest.

I turn on the radio and we sit there listening to it as his stomach gurgles. Another song about being worked by love. Like it’s romantic to be brainwashed.

“I used to pretend I was a worker when I was a kid,” he says.

“Everyone does,” I tell him.

“Even you?”

“Especially me.” I offer him the other cup of coffee. It’s mine and I’ve left it black, but there might be more packets of sugar somewhere. He shakes his head.

“How does anyone find out they’re a worker? When did you know you weren’t?”

“I’m sure it was the same with you. Our parents told us not to mess around with working. My mom went so far as to tell us that kids who did work before they were grown-up could die from the blowback.”

“That’s not true?”

I shrug. “Only way it kills you outright is if you’re a very unlucky-with-blowback death worker, and even then it doesn’t matter how old you are. But my brothers knew when they were pretty young. Barron won stuff by other people losing, you know? And Philip was always doing too well in a fight.” I remember Mom getting called into the junior high when Philip had broken the legs of three guys much bigger than he was. The blowback made him sick for a month, but no one ever messed with him again. I don’t know how she managed it, but no one reported him to the law, either. I try to think of an example with Barron in it, but nothing comes to mind. “Once you find out you’re a worker, you learn secret stuff from other workers. I can’t tell you that part because I don’t know it.”

“Are you supposed to tell me any of that?”

“Nope,” I say, turning on the car. “But you’re so drunk that I’m pretty sure you won’t remember anyway.”

Somewhere between apologizing to Mrs. Yu for bringing Sam home so late, dumping him onto his bed, and backing out of the driveway of his huge brick colonial, I realize something.

If Lila is a cat, then there’s a transformation worker here in the United States. I knew that before, but I hadn’t really thought about what it meant. The government would fall all over itself to hire him. The crime families would be desperate to recruit her. That’s what they’re conspiring about. If Philip knows who that person is, the memory work makes sense.

They’ve got a real transformation worker.

That’s something worth making me forget.

CHAPTER TEN

SAM AND DANECA MEET me outside the coffeehouse. They’re sitting on the hood of his 1978 vintage Cadillac Superior side-loading hearse in the parking lot, and Sam looks awful, taking tons of tiny sips from his cup like he’s got the shakes. The car is perfectly polished; its waxed metallic black paint is marred only by the sticker reading POWERED BY 100% VEGETABLE OIL pasted just above the chrome bumper. Sam’s wearing a suit jacket over a white shirt with a tie, but the jacket is too short in the arms, as if maybe it’s been in the back of his closet for a long time.

Daneca looks strange out of uniform. Her jeans are worn along the bottom, above her thin flip-flops, but her white shirt is perfectly ironed.

“I see your car is out of the shop,” I say to Sam.

He looks confused. “My car’s—”

Daneca talks over him. “I thought I’d come along anyway, since I already said I would.”

I take a deep breath and wipe my damp palms against my pants. I’m too nervous to care that they lied. “I really appreciate you guys giving up your Saturday to help me,” I say, turning over a new leaf of gentlemanly behavior.

“So, what’s the deal with this cat?” Daneca asks.

“It’s a family friend,” I say, hoping they’ll laugh.

Sam looks up from his cup. I can see the shimmer of sweat on his face. He looks massively hungover. “I thought you said the cat was yours.”

“Well, it is. It was. It was mine.” I am confusing myself. I am forgetting the basics of lying. Keep it simple. The truth is complicated, which is why no one ever believes it over a halfway decent lie. “Here’s what I need you to do—I guess you didn’t get my text?”

“Am I not dressed rich enough?” Sam asks, leaning back so that we can appreciate the full glory of his suit. “Don’t be drinking the Haterade.”

“You look crazy,” I say, shaking my head. “Like a crazy valet. Or a waiter.”

He looks over at Daneca, and she bursts out laughing. “Is that why you’re dressed like that?”

Sam flops back on the car. “This is so not good for my ego.”

“Daneca can do it,” I say. “Daneca looks the part.”

“Humiliation on top of humiliation,” Sam groans. “Daneca looks rich because she is rich.”

“So are you,” she tells him, which makes him put his sunglasses over his eyes and groan again. Sam’s parents own a string of car dealerships, which makes it ironic that he both drives a hearse and opposes big oil.

“It won’t be hard,” I tell her, trying to push out of my head all the times I blew her off. “You’re going to be a nice well-to-do girl who was supposed to be taking care of her grandmother’s long-haired white cat. Its name is Coconut, but it has a longer show name that you don’t know. The cat also had a Swarovski crystal collar worth thousands.”

Sam sits up. “Your cat is a Persian? I love their little pushed-in faces. They always look so angry.”

“No,” I say as calmly as I can, even though I want to knock Sam in the head. “Not my cat. Her cat. Just let me finish.”

“But she doesn’t have a cat.” He holds up his hands at my look. “Fine.”

“First you go in looking for Coconut, but then you ask if they have any fluffy white cats. You’re desperate. Your grandmother is going to be home on Monday and she’s going to kill you. You’ll pay the person behind the desk five hundred bucks for any all-white fluffy cat—no questions asked.” They’re staring at me strangely. “There aren’t any monitors on the desk, I checked.”

“So then they give me the cat and I give them the money?” Daneca asks.

I shake my head. “No. They don’t have a fluffy white cat. Our cat is a shorthair.”

“Dude, I think your plan has a flaw,” Sam says slowly.

“Trust me,” I tell them, and smile my biggest, charmingest smile.

Daneca goes over to the Rumelt Animal Shelter and comes back, looking a little shaken.

“How did it go?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says, and for a moment I’m furious that I couldn’t have played her part too. I am furious that her parents haven’t taught her how to lie and cheat properly, so that now I am betrayed by her inexperience.

“Was there a woman there?” I ask, biting the inside of my mouth.

“No, it was a skinny guy. In his twenties, I’d guess.”

“What did he say when you talked about the money? Or the collar?”

“Nothing,” she said. “He didn’t have any fluffy white cats. I don’t know if I did it right. I was just so freaked out.”

“It’s okay.” I take her hand. “Freaked out is good. You just lost Granny’s Coconut. Anyone would be freaked out. Just tell me you gave him your number.”

“That was the only time he seemed interested in what I was saying.” She laughs. “Now what?”

I shrug my shoulders. “Now we wait. Next part can’t happen for an hour—at least.” I look over at Daneca, and she gives me the same look she gave me when I refused to sign up for any of her causes. The look that said I’d betrayed who she thought I should be. But she doesn’t take her gloved hand out of mine.

>

I give them a nod and wonder if Sam’s at least taking bets on the rumors about me. He’d better.

In the kitchen a bunch of seniors are gathered around Harvey Silverman, who’s downing a pyramid of shots. Outside, by the pool, I see most of the rest of the partygoers. It’s too cold to swim, but a couple of fully clothed people are anyway, their lips blue in the patio lights.

“Cassel Sharpe,” Audrey says, looping her arm through mine. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Audrey’s eyes are glassy, her smile vague. She still looks lovely. She glances toward Greg Harmsford leaning against a bookshelf, talking with two girls from the field hockey team. I wonder if they came to the party together.

“Just like always,” she says, looking back at me. “Watching from the shadows. Observing everybody. Judging us.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” I say. I don’t know how to explain how afraid I am of being judged.

“I liked when you were my boyfriend,” she says, and leans her head against my shoulder, maybe out of habit, maybe because she’s drunk. It’s enough like tenderness for me to pretend. “I liked you watching me.”

I resist the urge to promise her that if she tells me all the things I did right, I’ll do them again.

“Didn’t you like it when I was your girlfriend?” she asks, her voice gone so soft that it’s mostly breath.

“You’re the one who broke it off,” I tell her, but my voice has dropped low, and the words come out like a caress. I don’t care about what I’m saying. I only care about keeping her here, talking with me. She makes me feel like it’s possible to slip out of my old life and into hers, where everything is easy and honest.

“I’m not over you,” she says. “I don’t think.”

“Oh,” I say, and then I lean in and kiss her. I don’t think. Don’t think. I just mash my mouth against hers. She tastes like tequila. It’s an awful kiss, too full of grief and frustration and the knowledge that I am screwing everything up and don’t know how to do anything but screw things up worse.

She reaches up her hands and touches my shoulders gently. She doesn’t push me away. Her fingers curl against the nape of my neck, which tickles a little and makes me smile against her lips. I slow down. Better. She sighs into my mouth.

I let my fingers trace her collarbone, dip into the hollow of her neck. I want to kiss her there. I want to let my mouth and tongue follow the road map of freckles across her milky skin.

“Hey,” Greg says. “Get off her.”

Audrey stumbles back, nearly into Greg. I feel like I’ve come up out of such deep water that I have the bends. I forgot that we’re at a party.

“You’re drunk,” Greg tells her, and grabs hold of her upper arm. Audrey sways a little unsteadily.

My fingers curl into fists. I want to shove him against the wall. I want to break open my knuckles on his face. I look at Audrey for a signal. I tell myself that if she looks scared or even angry, I am going to hurt him.

She’s looking down, though, her face turned away from me. All that rage curdles into self-loathing.

“What are you even doing here?” Greg says. “I thought the dean finally figured out that you’re a criminal and kicked you out.”

“I didn’t think this was an official school-sponsored event,” I say.

“Nobody wants you around, working their girlfriends.” His smile is smug. “You and I both know that’s the only way you can get a date.”

I think of Maura, and my sight narrows. It’s like I’m looking at Greg through a tunnel of blackness. My fists clench so tightly that I can feel my nails through the leather of my gloves. I hit him, hard, sending him sprawling on the wooden floor. My foot is digging into his ribs before Rahul Pathak grabs me around the waist and pulls me away from him.

“Chill out, Sharpe,” Rahul says, but I struggle against his hold. All I want to do is kick Greg again. Someone I can’t see grabs my wrist and twists it behind me.

Audrey’s gone.

Greg stands up, wiping his mouth. “I saw your mother’s trial in the paper, Sharpe. I know you’re just like her.”

“If I was, I would make you beg to blow me,” I sneer.

“Get him outside,” someone says, and Rahul steers me toward the door. The swimmers look up when we march through. Several people sitting on chaises rise, like they’re hoping for a fight.

I try to pull my way out of the guys’ grip, and when they let me go, I don’t expect it. I drop onto the grass.

“What got into you?” Rahul says. He’s breathing hard.

I look up at the stars. “Sorry,” I say.

The other person holding me turned out to be Kevin Ford. He’s short but built. A wrestler. He’s watching me like he hopes I try something.

“Be chill,” Rahul says. “This isn’t like you, man.”

“I guess I forgot myself,” I say. I forgot that I didn’t belong, that I would never belong. That I had charmed my way into being their bookie but that I was never their friend. I forgot the delicate foundation my excuse for a social life was built on.

Kevin and Rahul walk back to the house. Kevin says something, too low for me to hear, and Rahul snickers.

I look up at the stars again. No one ever taught me the constellations, so to me they are all just bright dots. Chaos. No pattern at all. When I was a kid, I made up a constellation, but I couldn’t find it a second time.

Someone shuffles through the grass to loom over me, blotting out the chaotic stars. For a moment I think it might be Audrey. It’s Sam. “There you are,” he says.

I get up slowly as Sam turns, stumbles, and pukes in the hydrangea bush near the kitchen window. Some girls on lounge chairs start to laugh.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Sam says when he’s done, “but I think you better drive me home.”

* * *

I get him coffee at a drive-through fast-food place and mix in a lot of sugar. I figure it will help him sober up, but he vomits most of it onto the asphalt of the parking lot. He washes his mouth out with the rest.

I turn on the radio and we sit there listening to it as his stomach gurgles. Another song about being worked by love. Like it’s romantic to be brainwashed.

“I used to pretend I was a worker when I was a kid,” he says.

“Everyone does,” I tell him.

“Even you?”

“Especially me.” I offer him the other cup of coffee. It’s mine and I’ve left it black, but there might be more packets of sugar somewhere. He shakes his head.

“How does anyone find out they’re a worker? When did you know you weren’t?”

“I’m sure it was the same with you. Our parents told us not to mess around with working. My mom went so far as to tell us that kids who did work before they were grown-up could die from the blowback.”

“That’s not true?”

I shrug. “Only way it kills you outright is if you’re a very unlucky-with-blowback death worker, and even then it doesn’t matter how old you are. But my brothers knew when they were pretty young. Barron won stuff by other people losing, you know? And Philip was always doing too well in a fight.” I remember Mom getting called into the junior high when Philip had broken the legs of three guys much bigger than he was. The blowback made him sick for a month, but no one ever messed with him again. I don’t know how she managed it, but no one reported him to the law, either. I try to think of an example with Barron in it, but nothing comes to mind. “Once you find out you’re a worker, you learn secret stuff from other workers. I can’t tell you that part because I don’t know it.”

“Are you supposed to tell me any of that?”

“Nope,” I say, turning on the car. “But you’re so drunk that I’m pretty sure you won’t remember anyway.”

Somewhere between apologizing to Mrs. Yu for bringing Sam home so late, dumping him onto his bed, and backing out of the driveway of his huge brick colonial, I realize something.

If Lila is a cat, then there’s a transformation worker here in the United States. I knew that before, but I hadn’t really thought about what it meant. The government would fall all over itself to hire him. The crime families would be desperate to recruit her. That’s what they’re conspiring about. If Philip knows who that person is, the memory work makes sense.

They’ve got a real transformation worker.

That’s something worth making me forget.

CHAPTER TEN

SAM AND DANECA MEET me outside the coffeehouse. They’re sitting on the hood of his 1978 vintage Cadillac Superior side-loading hearse in the parking lot, and Sam looks awful, taking tons of tiny sips from his cup like he’s got the shakes. The car is perfectly polished; its waxed metallic black paint is marred only by the sticker reading POWERED BY 100% VEGETABLE OIL pasted just above the chrome bumper. Sam’s wearing a suit jacket over a white shirt with a tie, but the jacket is too short in the arms, as if maybe it’s been in the back of his closet for a long time.

Daneca looks strange out of uniform. Her jeans are worn along the bottom, above her thin flip-flops, but her white shirt is perfectly ironed.

“I see your car is out of the shop,” I say to Sam.

He looks confused. “My car’s—”

Daneca talks over him. “I thought I’d come along anyway, since I already said I would.”

I take a deep breath and wipe my damp palms against my pants. I’m too nervous to care that they lied. “I really appreciate you guys giving up your Saturday to help me,” I say, turning over a new leaf of gentlemanly behavior.

“So, what’s the deal with this cat?” Daneca asks.

“It’s a family friend,” I say, hoping they’ll laugh.

Sam looks up from his cup. I can see the shimmer of sweat on his face. He looks massively hungover. “I thought you said the cat was yours.”

“Well, it is. It was. It was mine.” I am confusing myself. I am forgetting the basics of lying. Keep it simple. The truth is complicated, which is why no one ever believes it over a halfway decent lie. “Here’s what I need you to do—I guess you didn’t get my text?”

“Am I not dressed rich enough?” Sam asks, leaning back so that we can appreciate the full glory of his suit. “Don’t be drinking the Haterade.”

“You look crazy,” I say, shaking my head. “Like a crazy valet. Or a waiter.”

He looks over at Daneca, and she bursts out laughing. “Is that why you’re dressed like that?”

Sam flops back on the car. “This is so not good for my ego.”

“Daneca can do it,” I say. “Daneca looks the part.”

“Humiliation on top of humiliation,” Sam groans. “Daneca looks rich because she is rich.”

“So are you,” she tells him, which makes him put his sunglasses over his eyes and groan again. Sam’s parents own a string of car dealerships, which makes it ironic that he both drives a hearse and opposes big oil.

“It won’t be hard,” I tell her, trying to push out of my head all the times I blew her off. “You’re going to be a nice well-to-do girl who was supposed to be taking care of her grandmother’s long-haired white cat. Its name is Coconut, but it has a longer show name that you don’t know. The cat also had a Swarovski crystal collar worth thousands.”

Sam sits up. “Your cat is a Persian? I love their little pushed-in faces. They always look so angry.”

“No,” I say as calmly as I can, even though I want to knock Sam in the head. “Not my cat. Her cat. Just let me finish.”

“But she doesn’t have a cat.” He holds up his hands at my look. “Fine.”

“First you go in looking for Coconut, but then you ask if they have any fluffy white cats. You’re desperate. Your grandmother is going to be home on Monday and she’s going to kill you. You’ll pay the person behind the desk five hundred bucks for any all-white fluffy cat—no questions asked.” They’re staring at me strangely. “There aren’t any monitors on the desk, I checked.”

“So then they give me the cat and I give them the money?” Daneca asks.

I shake my head. “No. They don’t have a fluffy white cat. Our cat is a shorthair.”

“Dude, I think your plan has a flaw,” Sam says slowly.

“Trust me,” I tell them, and smile my biggest, charmingest smile.

Daneca goes over to the Rumelt Animal Shelter and comes back, looking a little shaken.

“How did it go?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says, and for a moment I’m furious that I couldn’t have played her part too. I am furious that her parents haven’t taught her how to lie and cheat properly, so that now I am betrayed by her inexperience.

“Was there a woman there?” I ask, biting the inside of my mouth.

“No, it was a skinny guy. In his twenties, I’d guess.”

“What did he say when you talked about the money? Or the collar?”

“Nothing,” she said. “He didn’t have any fluffy white cats. I don’t know if I did it right. I was just so freaked out.”

“It’s okay.” I take her hand. “Freaked out is good. You just lost Granny’s Coconut. Anyone would be freaked out. Just tell me you gave him your number.”

“That was the only time he seemed interested in what I was saying.” She laughs. “Now what?”

I shrug my shoulders. “Now we wait. Next part can’t happen for an hour—at least.” I look over at Daneca, and she gives me the same look she gave me when I refused to sign up for any of her causes. The look that said I’d betrayed who she thought I should be. But she doesn’t take her gloved hand out of mine.