The Reckless Club Read online

  “Aargh! No one calls me a cheat!” The other player launches after the first, who ducks behind the table.

  “Oh dear,” Mrs. Mitchell says, and heads toward the old men. “Can you all follow the signs on the wall? The bathrooms are at the end of the next hallway. Let’s meet back here in, oh, ten minutes or so? I’ve got to deal with this.”

  “Let’s go,” Lilith says, and strides out the door. “Agnes is making her way over here to bore me to death.”

  Wes and Jason wince in unison as the paddle-hoisting ping-pong player kicks at the hiding ball-throwing player. The man drops the paddle and wobbles on one leg.

  “Ha!” the hiding player taunts. “Kicked my artificial knee. Titanium! Hope you get a hematoma, you cheat!”

  Agnes, now beside them, shakes her head. “They’re terrible fighters. When I got my first black belt, I fought three master belts at once. And not once did I kick anyone in the knee.”

  “Your first black belt?” Wes asks.

  Agnes bows. “One in tae kwon do, one in kung fu, and a third in judo. But kickboxing is my favorite. Favorite, favorite, favorite.”

  Lilith pops her head back in the door. “Are you guys coming or not? Ally is running up and down stairs for some stupid reason, and Rex took off. She’s bailing on writing this skit, I just know it.”

  “Where’s Ally?” Jason asks.

  “At the stairs, but—”

  “Thanks, see ya!” Jason darts past Lilith and Wes.

  Agnes sings, “Favorite, favorite, favorite!” She exits through the door, as well, waving good-bye to Lilith.

  Rolling her eyes, Lilith says, “Yes, Agnes, I know. Oatmeal’s your favorite.” To Wes, she says, “So, are you coming?”

  But Wes has been scanning the cafeteria, looking for the nurse in teddy bear scrubs. “Which way did Rex go?”

  Lilith points down the hall, and Wes takes off, ignoring Lilith’s, “What about the skit?”

  Trotting down the hall, Wes finally spots Rex. She’s trailing Teddy Bear Nurse, who’s too focused on the iPad in her hands to notice, just like Rex is too focused on her to notice Wes. All of the nurses seem to use iPads instead of paper files, and Teddy Bear Nurse thumbs through the screen, her eyes on it instead of where she’s going. When she bumps into a wheelchair outside a patient’s room, Rex leans against the wall, cramming her hand against her mouth to keep from laughing. Wes grins and picks up his steps. The nurse glances at the doorway of the resident’s room, peers inside, and then continues down the hall. Rex ducks her head and turns her back on the nurse but doesn’t catch Wes trailing her. When Rex turns again, the nurse is striding into a room. Rex pauses to stare at the door—each patient has a printer paper–sized photograph of him- or herself taped to the door. Even from where he stands, Wes can make out the face. It’s the woman with fluffy white hair that Ally had been paired with in the cafeteria.

  “Figures,” Rex mutters. “Someone too weak to defend herself.” She curls her hands into fists at her side.

  Just as she begins to dart forward, Wes trots toward her. “Hey!”

  Rex throws up her arms. She grabs his arm and yanks him into an open room as Teddy Bear Nurse glances back.

  “You almost wrecked the whole thing!” Rex whisper-screams at Wes.

  He knocks into a tray table, toppling the framed photos on top. “What whole thing?” he asks, picking up one of the displaced photos.

  “Yes!” says a shaky voice from the corner. “What whole thing?”

  Both kids jump and turn toward the person speaking. It’s Agnes, the senior Lilith had been paired with in the cafeteria. Wes’s jaw drops a little as he looks around the tiny room, which is dim, lit only by lamps covered in brightly colored scarves. The window frame, tray table behind him, and shelves are jammed full of stuff—trophies, laminated newspaper clippings, photo albums, dried flowers, a small blue glass bottle, and dozens of framed photographs. Most of the photographs show Agnes as a young woman. He glances at the one in his hand; it’s a teenage Agnes with her hair in long thick braids, and she’s standing on an elephant, her arms outstretched like a T.

  “Just behind you, dear,” Agnes says. “Just put that with the others behind you. Those are from my circus days.”

  Wes rights the photo on the tray as Rex peeks out the door.

  “Is that—” He shakes his head, squints, and looks again. The bookshelf behind him is piled with knickknacks and collectibles. The dim light glints against a golden statuette of a man with clasped hands. Wes tilts his head, staring at the statue. “Is that—” he starts again.

  “Oh!” says Agnes, clapping her hands. “My Hollywood days!” She waves her arms through the air as if dancing a hula and begins to hum.

  Again Wes shakes his head. “But didn’t you say you never lived anywhere but here?”

  Still dancing—now shaking her hips, too—Agnes smiles. “Well, no other place has ever been home.”

  “But—”

  Rex grabs Wes’s wrist and yanks him toward the door. “She’s getting away. We have to go.”

  “Who’s getting away?” Wes twists out of her grip.

  Agnes, still dancing the hula, answers, “She’s following that awful nurse, that’s who.”

  Rex’s eyes turn to marbles. “You know her? I mean, you know that she’s awful?”

  “The worst,” Agnes sing-songs. “Worst, worst, worst.”

  “What did she do to you?” Rex asks.

  “Oh, nothing, dear,” Agnes replies. “I’d axe kick her if she got too close. You think she’s got sticky fingers, don’t you? Can’t say she does. Can say she’s mean as the dickens, though. Never lets us have any fun.” Agnes twists in a circle, still dancing. Wes notices that she’s wearing slippers with giant owl heads over the toes.

  “Well, I’m going to prove she steals stuff,” Rex announces.

  “Did you see her take something?” Wes asks.

  “Not today.” Rex crosses her arms.

  Wes rocks back on his heels. “Wow, you must’ve done something huge for Hardy to sentence you to multiple days of service.”

  Rex glares at him and doesn’t answer.

  “Fine, fine. Keep your secrets.” Wes crosses his arms, too, mimicking her pose. “For now, anyway.”

  “Go on back to the others. I’ve got this.”

  Wes grins.

  “Ding,” Rex mutters, which only serves to widen Wes’s smile.

  “Nah,” he says, “we’ve got this.”

  “Not necessary,” Rex snaps. She peeks out the door again. “You’re just going to slow me down.”

  “How long have you been trying to catch her in the act?” Wes asks.

  Without thinking, Rex answers, “Six months.”

  Wes blinks at her a moment. Did Hardy make her volunteer for six months? What had she done? What was she hiding? He swallows the questions, knowing Rex will never answer. Instead, he focuses on the only thing she seems willing to open up about—Teddy Bear Nurse. “You haven’t caught her nabbing anything in six months, and you suspect she’s onto you?” Wes crosses his arms. “She’s not onto me. Or Jason. Or Lilith. Or Ally.”

  “So what?”

  “So what?” Wes half laughs. “So, you need us to help you catch her in the act.”

  9:23 a.m.

  JASON “The Nobody”

  Lilith’s sigh drifts past Jason as he turns the corner toward the stairwell and Ally. He passes Mike at the elevators. The old man nods at him, coughing into a big white hankie.

  “Have you seen—” Jason starts, but Mike cuts him off by pointing farther down the hall.

  “She’s that way,” the old man wheezes.

  Jason thanks him just as the doors to the elevator open. “Aren’t you getting on?” he asks Mike.

  “I’ll wait for the next one.” Mike pushes his folded-up hankie into his back pocket. The elevator doors close and, once it begins moving to the next floor, Mike presses for it again.

  “Are you waiting for Opal?
” Jason guesses.

  He just smiles. “She’ll be headed this way soon. Takes her a bit to get moving sometimes.”

  Jason opens his mouth to say something—he doesn’t know what—but then he hears the quick smack of Ally’s sneakers on the stairs. Mike, coughing again, waves him away.

  Jason trots down the hall, pushing his backpack up his shoulder. Slap, slap, slap. Ally’s sneakers hit the stairs in quick succession as she sprints up them. Jason squints, seeing just a flash of her purple sneakers two flights over his head. He lets the backpack slide down his arm onto the tiled floor and slumps next to it. Unzipping the bag, he grabs his sketchbook and flips to a fresh page. He pulls the pencil from behind his ear and breathes out as his hand takes over.

  The scratch of his pencil against the thick creamy paper is the only soundtrack to the steady beat of Ally’s footsteps up and down the stairs. Jason’s bangs fall over his forehead as he leans forward, the pencil making swoops and shades. There’s a moment in drawing where his mind and his hand disconnect, where he can finally stop thinking before acting and just do. Just draw. His hand seems now to move on its own, the images pouring through the pencil onto the page. As easy as breathing.

  If only speaking could be as simple. But Jason’s thoughts clog before they reach his lips. When he does speak, he seems to say the wrong words, to just blurt out the tip-of-his-iceberg thoughts. But when he draws, everything he’s feeling, everything he’s sorting out, just flows.

  Jason bends over the sketch as a face emerges on the page. He pauses a half second to recognize it. He had thought he was sketching Ally, but Opal emerges instead. The figure is slightly altered from reality, with Ally’s darker eyebrow slashes over Opal’s cloudy eyes. Opal’s frizzy hair frames Ally’s straight-line mouth. The two couldn’t be more different in real life; how or why he was merging them didn’t make any sense. But Jason doesn’t pause to think about his reasons. He leans over the page, watching as if it were a movie, as his own ideas take shape. He’s so lost in his creation that he misses the sudden silence of Ally’s backbeat steps.

  “What are you doing?” Ally’s sitting on the stair just behind him, peering down at the drawing.

  “Nothing.” Jason whips shut the notebook, but Ally is faster. She nabs it from his hands and flips it back open to the page he had been drawing. “Is this…?”

  “Yeah. It’s Opal.” Jason pushes his hair back, painting a charcoal pencil smudge across his forehead. “It’s not a big deal.”

  Ally sinks back onto the stair, staring at the page. Her eyes are wide. Her leg drums up and down. As Ally scans the page, Jason closes his eyes and feels his face burning.

  “This is amazing,” she says, and his eyes pop open. “Did you just do it?”

  Jason shrugs. Again he grabs for the notebook, but Ally swerves to the side, clutching it in both hands. She shudders, then hands it back.

  “What?” Jason asks. “I mean, it’s just a sketch. It’s not, like, ready for public consumption or anything.” Not that anything he does is ever meant to be public. Except for those two times, he thinks, and look how that turned out.

  “Dude, it’s not the drawing that’s giving me shivers. The drawing is, well, it’s incredible,” she says.

  Jason clamps down on his tongue, trapping it in his cheek to keep from smiling.

  Ally glances at him, her hazel eyes locking with his. “It’s just, it’s so her. It’s like she’s right in front of me.”

  “Opal?” Jason glances at the drawing. Opal’s face is as wrinkled as if someone had crinkled up the paper and tried to smooth it out. But the corner of her eyes tilt to prep for a smile.

  “I mean”—Ally shudders again—“I can see her in front of me, her mouth open for more applesauce.”

  Jason scratches at the back of his neck, as if coaxing the words to his throat. “She seems to like you. Seems to like you helping her, I mean.”

  Ally’s leg drums against the step. She never stops moving, Jason thinks. An invisible energy vibrates through Ally at all times. He thinks about how fully he falls into drawing, where the pencil against the paper is the only sound, the only action, the only thought. Did Ally have anything like that? Or was she always moving in different directions? Her leg still popping up and down, she gathers her hair into a tighter ponytail on top of her head.

  “Opal,” Jason starts, “she’s not so bad. I think—I think maybe she’s trying to tell you something.”

  “What could she want to tell me?” Ally’s eyes narrow.

  Words clog in Jason’s throat, but before he can cough any up, Ally’s back on her feet, ready to sprint the stairs again.

  “What are you doing?” he manages to croak out.

  Ally raises an eyebrow. “Getting my steps in,” she says in an isn’t-it-obvious voice.

  “Why?”

  Ally glances down at her wrist. She taps her watch, then twists her arm to show Jason. “I’m at sixteen thousand steps. My goal is twenty. If I squeeze in a few flights, this day won’t affect my training much.”

  “Isn’t it, like, a good thing to get ten thousand steps?”

  Ally shoots a grin his way. “Yep. That’s why I double it.” She pushes past him.

  “It’s one day,” Jason calls up the staircase after her. “Does it really matter if you skip it?”

  “Every day counts,” her voice drifts toward him.

  “We’re supposed to stick together,” he says toward her quickly retreating back. “Mr. Hardy’s going to know if we separate.” Why’d I say that? It’s not even true. Jason gently bangs the back of his head against the wall. While it isn’t technically true that he and Ally were supposed to stick together, he knew Mr. Hardy wouldn’t be cool with all of them scattered around the nursing home when they were supposed to be on a bathroom break.

  “One more flight!” Ally huffs as she heads back down.

  He crosses his arms and legs as he waits. For a moment, his eyes snag on a sign detailing the different levels of the building. First floor is for residents, meeting rooms, and the cafeteria. Second floor is for intensive care. Third is for hospice and long-term medical care. Fourth is for evaluations and rehabilitation.

  As Ally reaches the end of the stairway, Wes turns around the corner. When he sees them, he throws up his hands. “Hey! Where’ve you guys been?”

  Jason shrugs. Ally checks her watch again. She grins at the number reflecting on her wrist. Looking up, she asks, “Is Hardy back and looking for us already?”

  “No, but what are you guys doing?” Wes’s eyes slide back and forth between the pair. The longer he looks, the more bored Ally seems and the hotter Jason’s cheeks burn. Wes’s mouth tucks back in a half grin, flashing his dimple. “Huh,” he says.

  “What?” If Jason had been drawing his own face, flames would’ve burst from his cheekbones at Wes’s appraising look.

  Ally crosses her arms. “What’s up? You looked like you are in a hurry.”

  The smile drops from Wes’s face. He nods, suddenly serious. “I am. We need your help.”

  “Who’s we?” Ally asks.

  “Me and Rex.”

  “With what?” Jason grabs his backpack, shoving his notebook inside.

  “Follow me.” Wes turns the corner. Ally glances at Jason, one eyebrow cocked. He shrugs and gestures toward Wes and, for just a second, Ally smiles.

  9:55 a.m.

  LILITH “The Drama Queen”

  Lilith checks under the doors of the bathroom stalls. No feet. She stands in front of the mirror and uses the palm of her hand to smooth her hair. She swivels her head back and forth and notices the light isn’t shimmering against her thick, dark hair. Sighing, she rummages in her satchel and pulls out a tiny spray bottle of coconut oil.

  Even though her interest lies in Hollywood, Lilith loves Bollywood. Never underestimate the power of cross-promotion. Her mother never shows any interest in anything on a screen other than her laptop or phone, so Lilith asked her grandmother how the Bollywo
od stars keep their hair so shiny. Dida said they oil their hair and showed her how to massage a thin layer of melted coconut oil through the strands and then braid them so the follicles marinate until morning. Mom rolls her eyes whenever Lilith does it and warns her people are going to make fun of how it makes her hair smell. But Mom’s so out of it, she doesn’t even know how in coconut everything is now. Lilith ran out of the good stuff—virgin coconut oil—on Thursday and her mom still hasn’t stopped by the store for more. She’d been settling for the cheap spray since then, but soon her hair would look like her mother’s—coarse and dry. Not that Mom cares. All Lilith’s mom cares about is the latest social injustice inflicted in the world. She’s a lawyer for the ACLU and can spout off for hours on end about immigration disputes and constitutional law. B-o-r-i-n-g, Lilith thinks with another sigh. Her dad is just as bad—a history professor at the local university. He focuses on comparative Euro-Asian empires, whatever that means. Everything about her parents is boring.

  Boring is the worst trait in the world. Nothing could be worse than being boring.

  Lilith’s mom doesn’t even wear makeup and, therefore, neither can Lilith. She digs deeper in her satchel to the diary at the bottom. Spinning the little combo lock, she clicks it open and flips the page. Lilith plucks a ruby-colored lip gloss from the hollowed-out middle of the “book” and smears it across her lips. She squeezes a dollop onto her fingertips and rubs it into her cheeks.

  “Okay, Lilith,” she says to her reflection, “we can do this. We can get through this day.”

  She closes her eyes and opens them again. “Act One, Scene One. The beautiful and wrongly convicted Lilith enters the Northbrook Retirement Village. She is a stunning starburst in an otherwise dull room. She bravely takes her seat next to the degenerate students also forced to spend their day serving the elderly.”

  Lilith’s eyes widen, and she gently blinks before continuing her stage direction. “Tasked with creating a skit out of the punishment unfairly bestowed upon her, Lilith knows she cannot rely on the others to help. One, Rex, is a criminal. Another is Jason, a boy with too much hair hanging in his face and who might not be able to speak in full sentences. A third, Ally, is too busy showing off her muscles to care about something as important as the theater. And while the fourth, Wes, does have a certain charm about him, there can only be one star of this show.” Lilith fluffs her now shiny hair and shoots a gleaming smile into the mirror.