Page 68 of Random in Death
“It’s not about me,” Eve began, and the music stopped; the light held bright.
Then she stood in that bright light in the buzzing hallway of her state school.
She could smell it: sweat, cheap cologne that couldn’t cover the sweat, hints of—forbidden—gum and candy. Whiffs of the even-more-forbidden Zoner wafting from the bathrooms along with the faint aroma of piss.
Other kids brushed past her. Some sneered, some snickered, some ignored her as beneath notice.
She preferred being ignored.
She wore the ugly blue uniform—the pants too short because her legs kept growing, the top baggy because her frame stayed too thin.
She’d tried to cut her hair, and made a mess of it, so even pulled back it looked ragged and uneven.
She just wanted to get to class. Get through the next class, and the next. Get through the day, get through the night. And mark another off. One day closer to freedom.
Freedom came in twenty-two months, one week, and three days.
She’d take the money she’d saved from the stingy monthly stipend—the money most of the others blew on snacks or smuggled-in Zoner—and she’d go to New York. Into the Academy.
She’d be a cop, and when she was a cop, she’d be somebody.
She could get through twenty-two months, one week, and three days more, as long as at the end of it she climbed on a bus headed for New York.
Thinking of it, dreaming within the dream of it, she didn’t pay attention. She knew better.
“Uh-oh,” Jenna said, and snagged her attention.
“Here it comes.” Arlie winced. “No bruisers allowed, either. But you’ll live through it. We didn’t.”
She saw the bruiser, a girl who’d earn the title at five-ten and a solid one-sixty of muscle and mean.
“Shouldn’ta sassed me, bitch.”
She didn’t have time to block the punch before it landed and shot waves of pain from her jaw to her toes.
It shoved her out of sleep so that she reared up, a hand on the jaw she swore felt that fist.
“Lights on, ten percent. What the fuck time is it? Display.”
The lights glowed low. On the display she saw five-twenty-two.
“Okay, fine.” Galahad crawled into her lap, bumped his head on her arm. “It’s fine, it’s fine.” She gave him long, slow strokes to comfort them both. “Should get up anyway.”
Seconds later, wearing one of his king-of-the-world suits, Roarke rushed in.
“I’m okay, I’m okay. God, you didn’t have to break off from buying Australia or whatever. I’m fine.”
“I’d just broken off—though I still lack owning a continent.”
“Only a matter of time.”
“You… well now, you yelped.” He sat beside her, stroked her hair as she had the cat. “Grabbed your face and shot up in bed like an arrow out of a bow. A dream, I take it.”
“Yeah, ending with Big Bitch Brenda—she called herself that—sucker punching me in the face.”
She wiggled her jaw. “I swear, I felt it.”
Because he believed her—her dreams came so lucidly—he brushed a kiss over her jaw.