“You never know. He could come to his senses. And even if he doesn’t, do you really have time to worry about a werewolf with a bad attitude? Or a dress? You haven’t even had time to find a dress yet.”
“Do you really think he has a bad attitude?” I stopped short in the hallway. “Scout, am I making a huge mistake by even talking to Sebastian? It’s just information—he’s not going to sway me from one side to another. I’m a smart girl; I can make up my own mind.”
“I know you can. But Jason doesn’t think there’s any choice. In his mind, there’s clearly good and clearly evil and there’s no meeting in the middle. You talking to Sebastian totally crosses his wires, you know? He doesn’t see how you could do that if you were really a good guy . . .”
“Which makes him wonder if I’m really a good guy,” I finished.
“I think so, yeah.”
We started walking again. Feeling totally rejected, I kicked at a rusted chunk of metal on the ground. It skittered away into the dark.
“Do you wonder if I’m a good guy?”
It took her a scary long time to answer. “I want to think you’re a good guy. But you have to make that decision for yourself. And maybe being a good guy isn’t the same for everyone. It’s different for members of the Community than it is for us. So maybe it’s different for some Adepts than others.”
I didn’t exactly like the sound of that. But I knew how I felt. “No one has the right to take something that doesn’t belong to them,” I said. “And that includes stealing souls or energy or whatever Reapers take. But I didn’t grow up with this stuff, Scout. It’s new to me, and the only things I know come from other people. You tell me Reapers are bad, and I believe you. But I also think there’s more going on here than we know. Something more than Reapers-bad, Adepts-good. And I think we need to figure out what that is.”
I think she had a decision to make, too. I’d disrupted her world, made her think about things she probably didn’t want to—the possibility that truths she’d known weren’t entirely truth. That was the risk I took by telling her how I felt about it. I could only hope that she was strong enough to take that leap with me.
“When I first figured out that I could bind spells,” she said, “my parents were appalled. Fortunately, the Enclave found me pretty quickly after my powers popped through. They were nice to me, and what they said made sense, you know? But I was also told Reapers were bad. Always bad. Always self-centered. I don’t want to believe that it’s more complicated than that. I don’t want to believe that the world is this gigantic gray hole and you never really know wrong from right.”
She sighed, and looked back at me. “But that’s not exactly a good way to live, and it can’t be the best way to spend the few years I’ve got this power. If you’re in this, then I am, too. I don’t want to be part of a team just because it’s a team I grew up in. I want to be part of a team because it’s the right team.”
“There’s a risk it won’t be, you know. There’s a risk we’ll find out things we don’t want to.”
She nodded, and that was when I knew she was all in. “Then let’s find out.”
* * *
I knew Jason needed time and space, but that didn’t mean I was thrilled about the fact that he’d walked away. I checked my phone every few seconds, hoping I’d find a text message saying he’d rushed to judgment and was sorry he’d left me crying in the tunnel.
But my phone was silent.
When we made sure the tunnel door was locked up tight, we headed upstairs to bed.
“Long night,” she said after I followed her into her room and locked the door against nosey brat packers.
“It really was.”
“Do you think you’ll hear from Jason?”
“Right now I really don’t know.”
And I was getting so mad at him for walking away, I wasn’t sure I cared.
“You know what we should do?”
“What’s that?” I asked, but she was rifling through her messenger bag. She pulled out a cheap spiral notebook and a pen, then pulled off the cap.
“Are you starting on your novel?”
“Har har har, Parker. And someday, yes, but not today. It’s going to be called The Wicked Witch of the Midwest.”
“Promise me you’re joking.”
The expression on her face said she was dead serious. Which was sad, really, because that title was awful. “It’s, what, like, your memoir or something?”
“It will be,” she said, sitting down on the bed. “But I can’t write it, of course, until people know we actually exist.”
“So they don’t assume it’s just fiction?”
“Precisely,” she said, pointing with her pen. “But that’s not the point. We’re going to do something fun, Parker. We’re going to start a list.”
“That might be the boringest idea I’ve ever heard. A list of what?”
“Just, you know, stuff.” As if to prove her point, Scout flipped open the book and wrote THE LIST in big capital letters at the top of the first page. “It will be like our scrapbook of words. You know, instead of saving ticket stubs and homecoming ribbons and crap like that, we’ll have this list of all our memories, and stuff. You know?”
I didn’t really, but I did kind of like the idea of having a memory book for the two of us. I wasn’t sure there was a lot of my high school experience I’d want to remember—and I was hardly going to forget life as an Adept—but this would just be for Scout and me. Something to look back on in our old age . . . if we made it that long.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s try out this list thing. What do you want to put on it?”
She flicked the pen against her chin. “I feel like the first thing that goes on there should be pretty significant, you know? Something we’ll definitely remember later on.”
“Firespell? Brat pack? Reapers?”
“All good words, but so . . . common. For us, I mean. No—we need something cooler. Something better.”
“Werewolf? Sanctuary? Enclave?”
She shook her head. “Too specific.”
“You know, I’ve already named all the stuff we do on a daily basis. Pretty soon I’m just going to be listing off nouns in alphabetical order. Aardvark. Antelope. Architecture. Avalanche. Stop me when I’m close.”