“Would you have to fight your people if they found out you can read English?”
“I am not afraid to fight,” he growls. His eyes smolder with my assumed insult.
I throw up my hands in apology. “I never said you were.”
He crosses his arms with a big huff. It’s so childish, I almost laugh.
“I can teach you in secret. No one has to know.”
“Why would you do that for me?” he says warily.
“Let’s call it a trade,” I say. “I want you to stop following me through the halls. There are lots of humans who think a friendship between you and me is wrong. I for one am very afraid to fight, and I don’t have swords in my arms.”
“They are not swords.”
“Okay, what do you think? I’ll bring books and we’ll start tomorrow.”
“No,” he says, pointing at the nasty words I wrote on the dry-erase board. “Let’s start now.”
Doyle’s smug smile makes me sick. I regret telling him Fathom wants to learn to read. I hate that this guy feels like he’s winning his little war, and I don’t want him thinking like he can say he told me so. I just want to get out of his creepy spy room and go home, but I suck it up and smile at him anyway.
“I don’t actually know how to teach someone to read,” I confess.
“I’ll have Mrs. Sullivan get you some books about it,” he says. “This is very good, Lyric. See? I knew you would be a big help.”
“That’s what you said,” I grumble under my breath.
When the bell rings for the end of the day, Mrs. Sullivan stops me in the hall. She’s an older woman, tall and lean, with snow-white hair. She looks like she was born with a limited number of smiles. She’s not wasting one on the likes of me.
“Don’t ruin these,” she barks, then hands me a burlap tote bag. Inside are some preschool picture books and a few brochures on how to teach phonics and sight words. Then she looks around like someone is watching us.
“I don’t like being caught in Doyle’s web either,” I say.
She grimaces, then lumbers off down the hall.
“How was today?” my mother asks when dinner comes to the door. We ordered Chinese from the only takeout place still open in the Zone. Bex feasts on dumplings, and I hog the moo goo gai pan.
“Fine. Better,” I say as I bite into an egg roll.
We skirt around the truth. The real questions have to wait until Bex is asleep. Which is fine with me. I’d like to get lost in this moment, enjoy my dinner, end the night with a fat belly and a smile. When we’re all so full that it hurts, the three of us clean up and I help Mom take the trash down to the recycling room.
“He talked about the Great Abyss today,” I say quietly as I eye Mrs. Novakova’s door.
Mom nods. “The giver and the taker.”
“How come you never told me about him . . . her? It?”
She shrugs. “You never wanted to know much, Lyric. After you freaked out in the bathroom that time—”
“You made me watch you transform in the tub. It was—”
“Gross?”
“No. I mean, yes, it was, but it was too soon. I was still trying to get used to the scales and the breathing underwater.”
She shrugs. “I figured you’d ask when you got curious.”
“But I never did,” I say, feeling the guilt like a pebble in my shoe. The truth is, I never wanted to know. It was easier to pretend that she was just my mom—Summer Walker, beach Buddha—but now I see I’ve snubbed who she is. “I’m curious now,” I say.
She smiles a full-strength, turned-up-at-the-ends grin, and the eyes are riding alongside, bright as diamonds. “Anytime.”
When we get back to the apartment, Bex has escaped into my room. I track her down and close the door behind me. She has slipped off her jeans, and now she’s lying in the dark, pretending to be asleep.
“Don’t try to change the subject,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“I know, but you will, and I’m not going to let you do that thing you do.”
“What thing I do?”
“The thing you do where you tell me everything is fine, that I’m worrying over silly stuff, and then smile at me like I’m simple. Show me your arms.”
She looks down at her sleeves and pulls on the cuffs, stretching them out at the ends.
“You know what’s under them,” she says.
“You have to tell my dad,” I say.
She sits, tucks her legs up against her chest, and wraps her arms around her knees. “I’m not sure I see the point.”
“The point is Russell will be arrested.”
“He’s been arrested before.”
It hurts that she’s right. Domestic violence is not a priority in the Zone.
“Bex, why didn’t Tammy do something?” I say as I sit down, nudging up beside her so she can feel me near.
She shakes her head. “I think she’s probably happy it’s not her for once. Don’t worry, I have a plan.”
“Bex!”
“Well, not so much a plan . . .” She trails off until her words are barely a whisper. Her face caves in on itself, and tears form on her lashes, but in some sheer act of stubbornness she fights them back. I hate that her stepfather slaps her mother around and, when he’s particularly drunk and surly, turns his aggression on her, but I hate him more for turning my strong superhero of a best friend into a timid, broken bird. I want to grab her and shake her, make her take the steps necessary to protect herself, but she doesn’t need a lecture. She needs me.