Page 2 of Flickerstate

Mom catches my arm, and I recoil like she’s a toddler grabbing for a loaded gun. I don’t want her to feel the bandage under my sleeve. She doesn’t know about the bite. And she can’t find out. No one can.

She lets go. “What?”

“Nothing. I—you have a forceful grip, you know that?”

“No need to be dramatic.”

“I’m not dramatic. You squeeze like a nutcracker.”

While she rolls her eyes, I sneak a glance at my bicep. My sleeve is dry. No blood. No evidence of the bite I’ve been hiding from everyone beneath maxi Band-Aids and unseasonable sweatshirts. Thank God.

I swerve past Mom into a pool of light. A stained glass window over the staircase drops a mosaic of color across the carpet. It looks like something from a chapel, except the woman it depicts is no robed martyr. She wears a crown of turreted houses instead of a halo, she balances a wheel on her palm, and—despite the retro iconography—her features are modern, a haughty nose and narrow eyes beneath swirling platinum hair. It’s Victoria Highwall, celebrity scientist, first U.S. secretary of navigation, and the Academy’s founder.

I examine the glass woman, wondering whether Highwall commissioned the window herself and, if so, whether sherequestedtheartist give her the armor-piercing bullet nipples tenting her toga.

I also search for ruby tooth marks on her glass arms.

Yeah, I know. She straight up denied having possibility wounds in that one Barbara Walters interview back in the ’90s. Why put them in her own fake-saintly portrait? But in the footage from her Nobel lecture—

“Excuse me?” a male voice asks.

I jolt.

A guy appears through a door beneath the staircase. “Have you seen a student come through here? Short guy. Dark hair.”

I’ve always been intrigued by boys outside my parochial-school social circuit: boys I haven’t known since toddlerhood, boys I’ve never witnessed eating bugs or boogers, boys who don’t conform to a hideous dress code of hand-me-down polos and ill-fitting khakis.

Ugh. Khakis. Where hotness goes to die.

Meaning, under other circumstances, I’d find this guy at least curiosity-inducing. Granted, he looks wrecked. His black hair is flat on one side, wild up top, and his Academy hoodie’s so wrinkled he must’ve slept in it. But he’s also—ahem.

Wiry, broad-shouldered. Thatface. Eyes so dark they’re like ink.

Right now, though, his eyes feel like an attack. Today of all days I cannot afford the bat-to-the-head sensation they give me.

He takes my silence for hesitation. “He might’ve been limping. And wearing a red shirt.”

“Sorry,” I say shortly. “Haven’t seen him.”

“Me neither,” Mom says behind me. I’d forgotten she was there.

“Thanks anyway.” He frowns and ducks back through the door.

A second later Dr. Langmore pops from her office and strides toward us in nude pumps. “Norah. So nice to meet you. And you must be…?”

Mom and I don’t look alike. When six-five, freckly redhead Connor Sullivan married tiny, olive-skinned brunette Steff Marino, it was anybody’s guess which one the kids would take after. In my case, the answer’s neither. My one inheritance from either side of the family is Grandma Sullivan’s creepy blue eyes.Iditarod eyes, Jo calls them, because they’d look more natural on a snarling sled dog. Still, it shouldn’t be a head-scratcher who the middle-aged woman chaperoning me to my interview is.

Mom seems to agree the question is silly. “Her mother,” she says flatly.

“The Academy asks both parents to attend candidate interviews, if possible,” Dr. Langmore says. “Where’s Mr. Sullivan this weekend?”

I can’t tell Dr. Langmore the truth about Dad. But I can’t lie in front of Mom. Mom hates lying. So I try misdirection: “My sister Jo has a softball tournament. And the twins—they’re eight—they have a chapter-book reading marathon for school. Dad’s at home with them.”

Dr. Langmore looks Mom up and down. “Four kids. That must be a handful.”

“It’s enough,” Mom says.

“Hmm,” Dr. Langmore says. “And can you tell me about yourinterest in the Academy, Norah?”