Chapter 6: The Car at the Bottom of the Steps

Chapel Street hadn’t come all the way back up. The bus was still idling at the corner with its door open, the crossing guard still had the whistle in his mouth. On the low wall a junior had set his phone face-down on the stone and left his hand on top of it, as if it might get up. Halfway up the walk a girl had stepped off the concrete into the grass and stayed there.

Cal took his hand off the gate bar and went out onto the sidewalk.

The car sat at the curb, long and matte black, the kind that had been built rather than bought, with a second, smaller car behind it. The crest on the door was small and dark, and Cal had been looking at that crest since before he could read it.

Benny Ortiz stood at the front fender with his hands folded. He had been there long enough to fold his hands.

“That’s Nadia Brant,” one of the juniors said, in the voice of a person reporting a fire.

“It’s not.”

“It’s her. Look at the car.”

“Then who’s the—“ and he stopped, because he had found the crest.

“That’s Vane.”

“That’s the blank, right?”

“Is that the heir?”

Tessa Whitmore had been talking for two years and had nothing.

Cal crossed the sidewalk without hurrying, his bag hanging off one shoulder.

Nadia Brant stood in front of the car with her hair pulled back and her hands empty. Dark blue jacket, cropped at the waist and zipped to the collar in this heat, which meant she had come out of somewhere cold and hadn’t thought about the weather before she got out of the car. Boots. No bag, no folder, nothing in her hands at all.

Her eyes were gold.

She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking past him—up the walk, along both sides of it where the students had stalled, over her own shoulder at the street behind her, and then back at the gate—and she did it the way a person counts exits.

She had known there would be a crowd. She had gotten out of the car anyway.

He stopped in front of her.

“Brant,” he said. “When’d you get back?”

She looked at him then, properly, for the first time since the door opened, and there was half a second in which she was deciding how much of an answer to spend.

“This afternoon.”

“Nobody’s seen you in this city in two years.”

“Two years and two months.”

“And you came by on the way.”

She didn’t answer that. She didn’t look away either.

“Tomorrow is your eighteenth birthday. There’s family business in the city tomorrow. I came to drive you home.”

“Family business.”

“Yes.”

“What business?”

“You’ll hear it with everybody else.”

Somewhere up the block a car door shut, and the bus let out its air, and nobody on the steps said anything.

“Cal.” Benny had come around the front of the car, and up close his face was doing the thing it did at funerals. “I was told at noon.”

“By who?”

“Get in the car.”

Benny pulled the rear door open. Nadia didn’t get in. She turned around.

“Tessa Whitmore.”

Up on the steps, Tessa came to attention. “Yes—“ Her voice went up and cracked in the middle of it. “You remember me?”

“You’re going to leave him alone from now on.”

“I’m not—“ The bag came up higher against her chest. “I’m not doing anything to him. Somebody has to—“

“Your brother’s in the Advanced Program at Halcyon. Second year.”

The bag stopped moving.

“We hire out of that program every spring.” She let it sit exactly long enough. “He’ll want one of those places.”

She hadn’t raised her voice for any of it.

All the color went out of Tessa’s face at once, and she nodded twice. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I won’t.”

Cal opened his mouth. He didn’t get the chance. Nadia had already turned, and the jacket swung, and she was in the car before he had moved.

“Calder.”

He got in. Almost nobody used that name.

Benny shut the door. It was cold inside, cold enough that the sweat on his back turned uncomfortable all at once, and quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the engine.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Cal said, when the car had pulled out and the low wall was going past.

“I know.”

“Now I owe you for it.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t.”

“You did it in front of forty people. That’s a bill.”

She turned her head and looked at him for a moment, the way she looked at a page she had already read.

“Then don’t make me do it again,” she said, and went back to her window.

At the bottom of the steps, Tessa Whitmore was still standing where the car had been, bag against her chest, watching the two black cars go up Chapel and turn.

“God,” she said, to the street. “She’s so cool.”

The nearest freshman nodded, because it was true, and because Tessa was standing right there.

“I would let her ruin my life,” Tessa said, and hugged her bag.

Up at the corner the crossing guard put his whistle back in his mouth and blew it.

Tessa got her phone out and typed something with both thumbs, deleted it, and typed it again.

Cal put his bag on the floor and his head back against the seat.

“It’s in the dining room,” Nadia said. “Tomorrow. Not the office.”

He turned his head.

“You’ve been in the city four hours.”

“I’ve been in the house four hours.”

“Why the dining room?”

“Because the office has a phone in it.”

The buildings went by. His phone was in his pocket with a message on it about a table at Cooper House, and he still hadn’t answered it, and that was two days out. Tomorrow was closer than that.

The light came through the window in bars and moved across the seat and stopped on her hand.

The ring was there. Small, dark metal, no stone he could see. It had been in a photograph on the Honors Wall for two years. He had never once seen it in daylight.

He looked at it until he caught himself doing it, and then he looked out his own window.

“What happens tomorrow?” he said.

“You turn eighteen.” She didn’t turn her head. “The rest of it’s after that.”

Cal watched the storefronts come at him and started a list. Item one was the dining room. Item two was how many people had known about tomorrow before he did.