Foreseen (The Rothston Series) Page 8

  She looked confused for a moment, before firmly shaking her head. “Rex Brolie? No. Sasha insisted we go out once, I guess that was a date. But it was a disaster.”

  “Good. Brolie’s an ass,” I informed her. “You ought to steer clear of him.”

  “He’s Sasha’s friend, not mine,” she assured me as her phone chimed once. Her eyes narrowed as she pulled an ancient flip phone from her pocket. “Sasha,” she said, reading the tiny front screen.

  I held my breath as she pulled the phone open to read the text. Her face hardened as she read the words. Maybe Sasha was giving her a hard time for working with me, or filling her in on exactly how I broke up with her. What would I say to explain it? I had no excuse.

  “Look at this,” she spat, turning the oblong device toward me. My heart hammered as I slowly read the tiny black words: “OMG! OMG! Where are you?? I went to dinner with Rex. We went to the Pizza Place. It was great! Everybody was there. I mean everybody! But when I came back to the room and he was here and wanted to know “

  “It cuts off. Where’s the rest of it?” I asked, uncertain now why she was showing it to me. “What’s that mean?”

  “That’s the point. It’s too long. She does that all the time.” Kinzie looked at the message again and snapped the phone shut. “Well, at least I got that it was about Rex. I can’t imagine it’s important,” she said with finality, shoving the device back in her pocket.

  “We should finish our work,” I said, burying myself back in the list on my computer. I didn’t know this girl. I’d hardly spent any time with her at all. And yet, she’d given me a glimpse of what was behind that confident, loner exterior. And maybe she wasn’t as different as she thought.

  ψ

  Kinzie bolted up in the passenger seat as I pulled into the black-topped parking lot for her dorm. “Stop! I need to go,” she said urgently.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That,” she said pointing at a dirty blue Chevy Impala – out of place in this parking lot of Lexuses, Audis, and the occasional Honda. “My dad’s here.”

  “Mr. Heisenberg makes a good get-a-way car,” I joked, patting the wheel. She didn’t laugh or even smile. I wasn’t sure she even heard me. She slid out of the leather seat and walked toward her dorm, like she was headed for an execution. I couldn’t imagine why.

  I watched until she’d disappeared from sight, before heading back to the Alpha Delt house. There, I yawned and settled onto the couch in my basement room to study. I stared at the page of my physics text, reading the same paragraph over and over, but kept thinking about Kinzie. Struck by the privilege that she had let me get to know her even a little bit when she seemed so determined to keep everyone out. I picked up my phone and let my finger hover over her icon, but didn’t want to call her in case she was with her dad. And what would I say? Had a great time doing homework? Hope things are okay with your dad? Then I had a thought – keep it simple. I tapped out a simple text: “Goodnight, Czarina!”

  Chapter 7

  Kinzie

  “I’m not a child!” I shouted at the salt-and-pepper haired man standing in my doorway. I grabbed the orange hoodie next to my pillow and whipped it into my closet. My hand slammed the closet shut and I leaned against it, crossing my arms in defiance. Dad needed to stop. Sure, there was a time that his meddling made me feel good – like when he took on Ms. Graham, my third grade teacher, who thought I’d cheated on a math test just because I was the only one who got everything right. But I was little then, and he was like some knight in shining armor who’d protect me no matter what. I wasn’t that kid anymore – and he’d never been the knight I thought he was.

  “What was I supposed to do,” he yelled back. “Not answering your phone or your roommate’s text? Out somewhere by yourself. Who knows where – with a boy?”

  I wanted to kill Sasha for telling him that last part, which Dad made out to be a major crime. I narrowed my eyes in a glare. “We were studying, Dad.”

  “Where were you?” he demanded.

  “None of your business.”

  “It is my business,” he roared pacing across the room. “You’re my business. I drove three hours down from Tipton because you wouldn’t answer your phone. You can’t run off like that,” Dad dictated, taking a stand in front of Sasha’s desk. “That boy could have …”

  “He didn’t do anything. We were doing homework, and we’re just friends!” I interrupted, waving him away with my hand as I marched over to the window. Outside, students passed under the lights on the walk, free to come and go as they pleased. Their fathers didn’t act like they were precious jewels everyone wanted to steal. Their fathers hadn’t lied to them their entire lives about what and who they were.

  “Homework?” he bellowed. “You do homework here, on campus, so I know exactly where you are.”

  I bit back fast. “I’m an adult, and this isn’t a prison – or a convent.” Silence filled the room at those words, but I let it. I knew Dad would have preferred either of those settings to the freedom of a college campus, but I’d never been a wild teen, drinking or running around. I’d never even broken curfew. I wasn’t the one being unreasonable. After a minute, I heard Dad sigh behind me. I’d won.

  “Let’s start over. I was worried about you, Sweetheart. Maybe I worry too much, but when you’re missing …” He paused, but didn’t need to say more. The scene was etched into my memory more vividly that he would ever know. The Thanksgiving parade in Chicago. The beautiful woman on the float tossing out candy as she passed. The big round kid pushing me out of the way to grab everything nearby before I’d had a chance. I’d thought I’d outsmarted him, running out into the road gathering the bits further out. And the next thing I knew, I was in a forest of legs. Long legs, pumping up and down, sweeping me further and further from my dad. Jostling me between the press of ribboned pants, and black shoes, and the blare of brass. Looking up to see a giant clown face blocking out the sun high above, and the legs kept going, twisting and turning me until I was spewed from the wave of the marching band to crash into strangers. A sea of faces loomed over me. Staring. Bending toward me. More and more. Inches from my face. I could feel their breath. Inhaled their perfume. Felt their heat. Until I didn’t remember anything else. Dad told me later that I’d passed out. He said he’d been as scared as I was, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t true.

  “We need to talk,” Dad said gently, bringing me back to the present. His hair now had white strands mixed through its dark, wavy mass, but the eyes were the same as they were that day. Worried. Frightened. Relieved I was okay.

  My heart thumped unevenly, and I walked over to the window to hide my reddening cheeks. He’d called three times in the past twenty-four hours and I hadn’t answered because I didn’t know what to say. This man I’d trusted all these years had hidden the truth from me. And I wouldn’t let him use my fear of what happened years ago to mask that betrayal. I spoke without looking at him. “Seems to me you’ve had fifteen years to talk to me, and you never did. I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  “Fine. Then listen,” he said sternly.

  I took a deep breath, knowing he wasn’t going away.

  “Let me start with Rothston …”

  “No,” I demanded, wanting this to be on my terms, not his. “Start with …” I paused, trying to pick what I wanted to hear, and said the first thing that popped into my head. “Start with my parents.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. Uncle Mark said my father was adept, but there was more. I could tell.”

  “Of course you could tell, Sweetheart. You’re adept.” I looked over my shoulder to see my dad hanging his head. He leaned against the corner of Sasha’s desk, looking older, more tired, than I’d ever seen before.

  “You knew?” I watched him carefully as he raised his head. A sadness filled his eyes.

  “No, I didn’t,” he answered quietly. “I thought you were like me. Just a common. I would have told you
everything if I’d known.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I accused. “You must have known.”

  “I didn’t,” Dad maintained, then his brow knotted. “But looking back, you’ve always gotten out of things you didn’t want to do – like having speaking parts in grade school plays, or I don’t think you did a single group project in high school. You were always excused from them. Never thought about any of that before. But nothing clear ever happened. Not that I noticed.”

  “Maybe because you were too busy hiding everything from me,” I accused, walking back across the room to lean against the closet again. “Like who my parents were. Now, tell me about them.”

  “There isn’t that much to tell. Nathanial Clarison – Nate – was a friend of mine and he left you to me.”

  “Left me to you? You never told me you were friends.”

  Dad nodded. “Nate was my best friend back then,” he said somberly.

  “So what happened to him? How’d he die?”

  He hesitated for a moment before admitting, “I don’t know. Don’t even know for sure that he’s dead.”

  Rage flashed through me faster than I could repeat the words. My hand slapped the wall beside the window. “You told me my parents were dead, and that’s why you adopted me. They aren’t alive!” I blasted, clinging to the truth I’d been raised with. “They can’t be. They-have-to-be-dead!” I enunciated clearly. Every fiber of me insisted on it as if my own life depended on it.

  Dad walked to my dresser and stared distantly into the mirror. “They could be alive. I don’t know.”

  They’re dead, I screamed inside my head, almost drowning out his words. My chest heaved in anger, and I wanted to smack him, or shake him, and make him tell me it wasn’t true. They had to be dead. My entirely life could not be built on a lie. Could-not-be!

  “Maybe I should have told you all this before,” Dad continued. “But it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  “You lied to me!” I shrieked, clinging to my anger to fend off the panic that was growing in my stomach. “I had the right to know.”

  “But you’ve never even asked about your parents, Kinz. Why are you so angry?”

  I threw up my hands and words exploded from my mouth. “Why? WHY? Because you’ve kept secrets from me. My whole life is a sham. And now … now everything has changed and these … these parents I don’t know did something to me – passed me their genes. Suddenly they matter and I can’t keep pretending that they don’t exist, and …” My mouth clamped shut at my own words – pretending they don’t exist. My stomach twisted with the realization that maybe I’d known they hadn’t died. They were alive … I lashed out again to stop those thoughts. “What else have you lied to me about?”

  “Sit down, Kinzie,” Dad ordered, pointing to my desk chair.

  “No.” I crossed my arms again, daring him to make me.

  He didn’t back down. “You want to know. I’m going to tell you everything … now,” he said firmly.

  I felt like a kid having a temper tantrum. We stood challenging each other, until I finally broke, but I refused the chair and slumped onto my bed in defiance. He waited for the grimace to leave my face before grabbing the chair himself and pulling it backwards in front of me. He silently assessed my mood for a moment before speaking.

  “My mother was adept and I grew up at Rothston …”

  “If your mother was adept, then why aren’t you,” I challenged, making clear I didn’t care about his story, but it didn’t stop him.

  “Genetics, Kinzie. Just like she had blue eyes and I have brown. She was adept and I am not. But I still grew up there with Mark Collier and Nate Clarison. They were my best friends. Did everything together – well, what we could. Nate, your dad, disappeared a few months after I got married. No one knew where, but he was a free spirit, so we figured he’d come back. But he didn’t. A few months after Marjie died …” Pain washed across Dad’s face as he remembered the woman in the picture he kept on his dresser. I’d caught him talking to it once or twice when I was little, but he never said much about her. He inhaled deeply. “A few months later, I found you sleeping on Rothston’s front steps.” He shook his head slowly. “You were a godsend. Exactly what I needed then – someone to take care of. A reason to go on.”

  I calmed some as he spoke. The pain and loneliness in his voice made it difficult to stay mad.

  “You were so cute,” he said wistfully. “All alone. Curled up on the steps in Linus.”

  His last word smacked me like wet leather, and my anger roared back. “You lied about a blanket!?!” I batted a pillow across the bed. “A blanket!?!” I shrieked at him. That oversized purple beach blanket that I took everywhere when I was little still lay at the end of my bed at home. He had told me it was a gift from some uncle of his I never knew. Now, he looked me in the eye, and showed no sign of regret.

  “I couldn’t tell you your parents abandoned you in it,” he said as if it were a fact.

  “Why not? It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Sweetheart, it’s not like that … “ he started, sounding like I was a child in need of comfort.

  “Yes, it is. If they didn’t die, then they ditched me,” I argued back, hysteria edging into my voice.

  “Stop it, Kinzie,” Dad ordered. “Your parents loved you.”

  “Then why didn’t they keep me?” I demanded, pointing out the inescapable fallacy in his statement. “Why did they dump me on you?”

  He shook his head and looked down at his fingertips. “Nate said you weren’t safe with them, and wanted me to raise you.”

  “Not safe? That’s a lie.” The words blurted out of me, but panic heaved like a tidal wave in my stomach. I wanted my dad to stop talking. I wanted to scream at him to leave. To never come back. I wanted him to drop the subject and never say it again. I wanted to run away. I wanted to go home and bury myself in Linus. I wanted none of this to be real.

  Dad met my eyes steadily, willing me to calm down. “It’s the truth, Sweetheart.”

  “Then why wasn’t I safe?” The question twisted in my throat, as Dad’s head dropped again.

  “I don’t know, Kinz. Nate didn’t say, and nothing’s ever happened to let me know. Maybe I should have told you all this before, but it never seemed right. You were too little back then, and after that, I figured you weren’t adept and that’s why Nate left you to me. There wasn’t any reason for me to tell you about Rothston – you could have a normal life.”

  A normal life. I closed my eyes, feeling the turmoil in my stomach. Nothing about my life was normal anymore. I’d been so excited earlier but that was a mistake. This shouldn’t be happening. I’d taken a wrong turn, but I’d had no choice. Nobody had asked me.

  “You should have told me this before,” I said harshly, but the anger was fading.

  “Would you have believed me before now?”

  I scowled at the geometric pattern on the throw rug next to Sasha’s bed. It would have sounded like an elaborate story – a fairy tale he made up to make me feel like someone special. He did that when I was little – told stories with me as the main character. I would have thought it was another of his creations. I sighed, letting go of the ragged remnants of my anger, as my cell phone buzzed sharply in my pocket. I ignored it. Exactly why was I so angry? I’d accepted the idea of being adept so easily. Why was this … my history … so hard? Just thinking about it made my heart speed up, and my stomach tighten.

  My dad settled in, with his arms propped on the back of the chair, and told me stories of my birthfather, Nate. He sounded like a character. Happy-go-lucky and from a long, unbroken line of adepts, the elite of Rothston. He sounded nothing like me. We didn’t even look alike according to my dad. Nathanial Clarison had been tall with reddish-blond hair and freckles. Nothing like me at all.

  “Who is my mother? Is she adept?”

  “I don’t know anything about her. Not even a name.”

  We fell into a silence as I tried to imagine what
she would have looked like. Like me, I guess, but I couldn’t really picture it. I settled back onto my bed, calmer now, as my dad talked about the Rothston Institute tucked into the coast of rural Maine. He said it was a good place with lots of good people. He said he’d been a bit of an outsider, not being adept himself, but had planned to live there with his wife. I took comfort in that. The idea of the Rothston Institute excited me, and I wanted it to be the place I imagined – a place where’d I have the chance to do things a janitor’s daughter would never get to do in the real world. But that seemed like a betrayal of the man who’d raised me.

  “Dad?” I asked when he paused. “Are you disappointed that I’m adept? That I’m not like you?”

  I expected him to assure me he wasn’t and talk about what wonderful things were in store for me, but he didn’t. Instead, he studied his folded hands in silence for a moment, before looking up, not quite meeting my eye.

  “Disappointed? No, I’m not disappointed. But it does make me sad. You’ll be able to do things, to read the future in a way that I can barely imagine. You’ll forget what it’s like to never know what people around you are going to do before they do it. You’ll never be my little girl again.” His eyes grew moist as he said it. I climbed off the bed and gave him a hug.

  “You’ll always be my dad,” I told him softly. “And I thought I was like you – a common – my whole life. That will never change.”

  “I hope not,” he said, giving me a squeeze. Then he wiped his eyes and changed the subject. “Now, tell me about this boy you were with.”

  I gave a quick laugh. “Dad,” I answered patiently. “He’s just a friend, and stop calling him a boy. You make it sound like he’s ten years old.”

  “I know he’s not,” Dad answered with a wink. “That’s what worries me.”

  Chapter 8