“Did you really want to come here, or were you pressured into it?”
“You mean you don’t know all about me from watching me so closely?”
“I think you’re like classified.”
“Classified?”
“For national security. I overheard two dissectors discussing you outside room twenty-two the other day. One said, ‘Getting Kaylee to talk about herself is like pulling teeth.’ I wanted to turn around and ask her if she had ever pulled teeth. Sometimes it’s not so hard to do. Apparently, not only don’t you gossip about others, but you don’t gossip about yourself. How do you expect to survive your teenage years?”
“Very funny. Naturally, I miss Ridgeway. I’ve lived there all my life,” I said, in the tone of a captured soldier giving name, rank, and serial number. He wasn’t too far off the mark. I was behaving as though most of my life were classified. Here at Littlefield, that wasn’t far from the truth.
“One of the few places in the state I’ve never been to, so I can’t comment. I like taking long rides. That’s my car ahead, third from the end.”
“I heard about it. A brand-new red Jaguar convertible.”
“Birthday present when I turned seventeen in August. It was a bribe.”
“A bribe? To get you to do what?”
“Turn eighteen,” he said. He didn’t smile or laugh.
He unlocked the passenger door and opened it for me. The interior was so new and pristine it was like no one had ridden in it yet. The leather still had that new-car scent. He closed the door and went around to get in. I waited until he was settled behind the steering wheel to ask about what he had just said.
“You’re not serious about that bribe, right?”
“I said that’s why they gave it to me, but I didn’t say it was justified. My parents think I’m too . . .” He started the engine. “Dark,” he said. “Seat belts,” he added, clicking his own on and waiting for me to click mine. He backed out of the parking space.
“I can’t imagine why your parents would think such a thing.”
He gave me one of his rare direct and intense looks. “I hate being so right on my first impressions of someone all the time, but I sure was right about you.”
“I know that’s a compliment, but I’m not sure if you’re complimenting me or yourself.”
This time, he laughed. “I guess you’re just going to have to wait and decide.”
We drove out of the parking lot and down the drive to the school entrance. It would be my first time off the campus since I had arrived. It felt as if I had swum out too far in the sea. I hoped he couldn’t see how nervous it made me. I had this recurring nightmare in which I went off campus with Marcy and the girls, and someone stopped us on the street in Carbondale and asked, “Aren’t you that girl from Ridgeway who was abducted?”
If that really happened, I’d probably transfer out the following morning.
“So where are you from?” I asked Troy as he turned right. Getting people to talk about themselves usually kept them from asking probing questions of me.
“Here. Carbondale,” he said. “I’ll drive past our house. It’s kind of historic, once the home of a prominent coal mine owner who at one time employed most of the people living here. My mother wanted the house as a trophy, but she has this preoccupation with dust, as if the original owner came home covered in coal dust every day and it’s embedded in the walls or something. She has air filters everywhere and has our two maids do a top-to-bottom cleaning practically every other day. Drives my father nuts. He claims their bedroom could be an OR.”
“OR?”
“Operating room. It’s that immaculate. Most of the year, my sister and I aren’t there to make any sort of mess, not that we would. We’ve been brought up dabbing our mouths with a napkin after every bite.”
“Where is your sister?”
“Jo, short for Jocasta, a name she hates, attends Merrywood, a private junior high school in Philadelphia. She’s twelve.”
“Interesting name, Jocasta.”
“My mother was into Greek mythology. She was determined we’d be different. Jocasta is the mother of Oedipus.”
“What about you? Troy? How is that mythological?”
“Helen of Troy, the city of Troy. Achilles and his heel . . . all of it.”