Page 8 of The King (Masterpiece Duet 1)
If I had only stayed there I might have eaten last night.
I could eat right now if I open a can of soup.
Instead I pull out the heavy volume of Trigonometry Proofs. I feel bad for pretending to be dumb when the man asked me questions, especially after Mrs. Keller went through so much trouble. I know I’m supposed to trust grownups, but I don’t trust him.
I lose myself in Pythagorean identities and inverse trig functions.
This is where things make sense. There’s no such thing as hunger when I’m solving proofs, no such thing as darkness. No way to fall into the water while turning pages and twisting equations in my head.
* * *
When I wake up the moon peeks between the plastic slats at my window, the quiet creak of the trailer the only sound. But I know something’s different. The air feels different.
Someone is here.
My chest feels full with relief and a stupid kind of happiness, before I realize it can’t be Daddy. He would never be so quiet, especially coming from a two-week bender. He would crash into the counters, bang his head on the doorframe, and swear in loud whispers before finally falling asleep with snores that rattle the walls.
A burglar? We don’t have much of anything to steal, but people get dumb when they’re desperate. Maybe Mr. Romero told someone I had a hundred dollars.
Or maybe it’s Mr. Romero himself, come to my trailer since I won’t come to his. My heart beats wild and loud, banging against my ribs like it’s trying to break out.
“Trigonometry,” says a voice in the darkness.
For a half second I think it’s the man from school. The one who’s tall and dark, his voice too smooth and his smile too cold to be trusted. Jonathan Scott. The terror that rises up in me is bigger and sharper than when I thought it was a burglar, or even Mr. Romero in my trailer. The very worst threat. The same as drowning, my very own nightmare.
And then my sleepy mind registers something about the voice. It’s not deep.
“What’s a little kid doing with a trigonometry book?”
I sit up in bed. My gaze moves over the shadows in the room until I find him against the wall, his shadow thumbing through my textbook. “Don’t touch that.”
He flips the book open to a page, pale white from the moonlight through the blinds. “To prove an identity, you have to use logical steps to show that one side of the equation can be transformed into the other side of the equation. You know what that means, Penny?”
I’m supposed to feel bad for stealing his money, and I do, but right now I’m mad. Mad that he wasn’t there and mad that he suddenly appeared. Mad that he scared me.
“Yeah, I know what it means. Probably more than you.”
His laugh sounds so much like the man from school that I narrow my eyes, looking at the way he holds his head, the way his shoulders are set, the way he carries himself. Same, same, same. “You some kind of baby genius?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“And I’m the dumbass who left you with my money.”
My cheeks turn hot. “I’m sorry I did that. I have it here, under my pillow. The rest of it, anyway. After I paid for the soup. But you can have that too, if you want.”
He laughs, the sound clanging like bells. “I don’t want it back.”
“You have to take it,” I say, scared that he sounds so much like that stranger. “The soup is enough for me, if you leave it. And you need the money more than I do.”
His shadow goes still. “What do you know about that?”
“I know you have a dad who’s mean, mean enough to run away from.”
“Doesn’t take a baby genius to figure that out. I pretty much told you.”
“Then there’s the man from the school.”
“What school?”
“From some fancy private school, I guess. He came to visit me at recess.” Something cold touches my bones, making me shiver. There’s a reason his laugh sounds the same. A reason he’s run away from home. The answer comes to me the way numbers do, before I’m even sure I want to know.
Black eyes narrow. “What did he look like?”
“Like you.”
This strange feeling comes over me, like it did when I first cheated. I knew I had something important I needed to do. But I didn’t have a deck of cards in front of me. No trigonometry proof to solve. Numbers were easy, but people are hard. They always have been.
A boy without any place to go.
A man who promises me safety, a real future.
The proof doesn’t write itself inside my mind. There are gaps between each logical jump. Unsolved variables. Unknowns. I can figure out the answer anyway. It makes too much sense.
