“Look, I’m sorry, but what do you want?” I said. “You signed me up for this, so this is what I have to do. I have to go to Halloween parties and spend time with people! It’s my job!”
“It’s two thirty in the morning!” my mom cried. “In Manhattan! Do you know all the things that could have happened to you?”
I looked at my parents like they were speaking Korean. (And to be fair, my dad can speak Korean, so it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.) “Wait, so let me get this straight,” I said to them. “We moved here so I could make friends and get information from Jesse Oliver, right? So why are you so mad when I’ve spent my entire evening doing exactly that?”
“Because it’s two thirty in the morning!” my dad shrieked. In English.
“We need to set up some ground rules,” my mom added. She was starting to pace, and Pacing Mom was the equivalent of Stress-Eating Dad. “This cannot happen again. We were worried out of our minds.”
“Did it occur to you,” my dad chimed in, “to call us?”
Of course it hadn’t. I had been hauling a very drunk Roux around Upper Manhattan and kissing Jesse. I didn’t even think about my phone. “I agree with Mom,” I said. “We need some ground rules. And rule number one: you need to trust me to do my job!”
“You could have been kidnapped!”
“Or worse!”
“Oh my God!” I said for the thirtieth time that night. “Okay, you know what? You guys need to decide whether you want me to do this or not.”
That stopped them in their tracks.
“I mean it,” I continued. “Because I can either do this job and hang out with this guy and make friends with people and get the information that I was assigned to get, or I can quit and someone else can do it.”
I had no intention of quitting, though. This was the first solo assignment I had ever had, and the perks included making out with cute guys. I was going to try to hang on to this for the rest of my natural life.
My mom finally spoke. “We need to compromise. A curfew.”
“Excellent,” my dad said. “Ten o’clock at night.”
My eyes almost fell out of my head. “Ten o’clock?” I screeched. “In New York? Are you trying to sabotage me?”
“Margaret.” My mother’s tone of voice was warning enough. Sabotage was not a thing we joked about in our household, but I didn’t feel like backing down.
“I’m serious!” I sent my own message right back. “This is the first time in my entire life that I get to hang out with people my own age, and you’re trying to stop it!”
“We’re not trying to sabotage you,” my dad insisted. “We’re trying to make sure you’re safe. We need to know where you are because there are dangerous people out there, and I’m not talking about regular-city dangerous people, either. There are people that want to be able to do what you do.” He paused for a few seconds. “They would do anything to get your talent.”
The air hung heavy between us. I knew this, of course. I had always known it. You don’t grow up like this and not know it. “It’s just … it’s nice to pretend to be normal,” I told them. “You guys already had your teenage years before you joined the Collective. I didn’t get to do that.”
My parents exchanged glances. “Being a normal teenager means having rules and boundaries,” my mom said.
“But I’m not normal,” I shot back. “That’s the problem.”
My dad sighed and leaned against the countertop. “Let’s just go to bed,” he said. “It’s late, we’re all tired. We can figure this out tomorrow.”
The idea of waking up and having this conversation all over again was exhausting, but I didn’t say that. “Oh, by the way,” I said instead. “I had a really fun time tonight. Thanks for asking.”
Chapter 14
I barely slept that night, thinking about my parents and Jesse and Jesse and my parents some more. I wasn’t sure how my evening had gone from sublime to shitty so quickly, but it had. My parents and I had never fought like that before. No one had ever kissed me before. It was an odd night of first-time experiences, let’s just say.
I finally dozed off right when the sun was a pinkish hue in the gray sky, and when I woke up again, rain smacked against my window and Angelo’s card was propped up next to my bedside lamp. I squinted at it, trying to focus my eyes on a pencil sketch of a garden atrium, a tiered fountain in the middle surrounded by Greek columns. It was the garden court at the Frick Museum on the Upper East Side. Angelo used to take me there on rainy days. I was being summoned.
My phone started buzzing and I scrambled for it. Was it Jesse? Was he calling me? I was too busy turning my phone around and around in my hands to look at it. Was Jesse doing the same thing? Was he debating whether or not to call me? Should I just wait until Monday morning at school to talk to him?
Roux’s number flashed on the screen.
“Pray tell,” she croaked when I answered, “why are there feathers everywhere?”
“Hi to you, too,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“Eeuuuuurgh.” She made a sound that didn’t sound human. “Seriously. Feathers. Why?”
“No clue.”
“I think I dreamed that I was the Black Swan. Oh my God, I need coffeeeeeeeee. If I don’t have coffee, I will shrivel up and die just like one of those little roly-poly bugs.” She paused. “There’s a feather in my mouth. Blechhh.”