White Cat Read Free Page B

late,” one of the food service ladies says without looking up from wiping the counter. She looks past retirement age—at least as old as my grandfather—and a few of her permed curls have tumbled out the side of her plastic cap. “Dinner’s over.”
    “Yeah.” And then I mumble, “Sorry.”
    “The food’s put away.” She looks up at me. She holds up her plastic-covered hands. “It’s going to be cold.”
    “I like cold food.” I give her my best sheepish half smile.
    She shakes her head. “I like boys with a good appetite. All of you look so skinny, and in the magazines they talk about you starving yourselves like girls.”
    “Not me,” I say, and my stomach growls, which makes her laugh.
    “Go outside and I’ll bring you a plate. Take a few cookies off the tray here too.” Now that she’s decided I’m a poor child in need of feeding, she seems happy to fuss.
    Unlike in most school cafeterias, the food at Wallingford is good. The cookies are dark with molasses and spicy with ginger. The spaghetti, when she brings it, is lukewarm, but I can taste chorizo in the red sauce. As I sop up some of it with bread, Daneca Wasserman comes over to the table.
    “Can I sit down?” she asks.
    I glance up at the clock. “Study hall’s going to start soon.” Her tangle of brown curls looks unbrushed, pulled back with a sandalwood headband. I drop my gaze to the hemp bag at her hip, studded with buttons that read POWERED BY TOFU , DOWN ON PROP 2 , and WORKER RIGHTS .
    “You weren’t at debate club,” she says.
    “Yeah.” I feel bad about avoiding Daneca or giving her rude half answers, but I’ve been doing it since I started at Wallingford. Even though she’s one of Sam’s friends and living with him makes avoiding Daneca more difficult.
    “My mother wants to talk with you. She says that what you did was a cry for help.”
    “It was,” I say. “That’s why I was yelling ‘Heeeelp!’ I don’t really go in for subtlety.”
    She makes an impatient noise. Daneca’s family are cofounders of HEX, the advocacy group that wants to make working legal again—basically so laws against more serious works can be better enforced. I’ve seen her mother on television, filmed sitting in the office of her brick house in Princeton, a blooming garden visible through the window behind her. Mrs. Wasserman talked about how, despite the laws, no one wanted to be without a luck worker at a wedding or a baptism, and that those kinds of works were beneficial. She talked about how it benefited crime families to prevent workers from finding ways to use their talents legally. She admitted to being a worker herself. It was an impressive speech. A dangerous speech.
    “Mom deals with worker families all the time,” Daneca says. “The issues worker kids face.”
    “I know that, Daneca. Look, I didn’t want to join your junior HEX club last year, and I don’t want to mess with that kind of stuff now. I’m not a worker, and I don’t care if you are. Find someone else to recruit or save or whatever it is you are trying to do. And I don’t want to meet your mother.”
    She hesitates. “I’m not a worker. I’m not. Just because I want to—”
    “Whatever. I said I don’t care.”
    “You don’t care that workers are being rounded up and shot in South Korea? And here in the U.S. they’re being forced into what’s basically indentured servitude for crime families? You don’t care about any of it?”
    “No, I don’t care.”
    Across the hall Valerio is headed toward me. That’s enough to make Daneca decide she doesn’t want to risk a demerit for not being where she’s supposed to be. Hand on her bag, she walks off with a single glance back at me. The combination of disappointment and contempt in that last look hurts.
    I put a big chunk of sauce-soaked bread in my mouth and stand.
    “Congratulations. You’re going to be sleeping in your room tonight, Mr. Sharpe.”
    I nod, chewing. Maybe if I make it through