Holly Black (41 page)

The tattoo burned my eyes. I thought of those pages from my notebook, now carefully torn out and left at home, where they could no longer incriminate me—too late.

And then…

And then he rolled his sleeve down. Slowly. Like an afterthought. Like he was trying to be casual about it. He stared straight ahead while he did it, not looking at me.

She told.

She
told
him.

I wanted to die. I wanted to combust, to burn up and die right there, leaving nothing but the smell of fried hair and a black scorch mark on the chair and the desk and the floor.

I heard nothing throughout bio. It was my favorite class, my
best
class, but I heard nothing and when I looked at my notebook later that day, there was nothing on the page. Just the date, printed neatly like on the rest of the pages, and then nothing.

Same thing with my memory. Just a white space—a blank like my notebook—in my brain where the carbon cycle should have been.

I stumbled out of class. Jamie knew. He knew I was in love with him. She’d told him. I had lost everything.

She could have just walked away from me. She didn’t have to be mean. If I wasn’t a threat, she could have been kind and just walked away and never mentioned it to anyone, ever.

And that’s the thing: She could have been
kind
. Why wasn’t she? Why was she so mean? If you’re not going to eat the prey, why smack it around? It just doesn’t make
sense
.

I spent the day in my own little hell, trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out what she had to gain by it. If she was right, if Jamie would never be interested in me (and she
was
right—I knew it, and I knew it all along), then why hurt me like that? Why?

Just because she could? Just because she was a dinosaur? Just because
she
was a dinosaur and I was a lizard, predator and prey, and she
could
?

She could. That’s what it came down to: She could do whatever she wanted just because she was Andi Donnelly, and there was nothing I could do about it.

And then…

And then, on the bus on the way home…

It hit me.

Like a comet.

It
hit
me:

The dinosaurs were more powerful, but the lizards
survived
.

Look around. They still exist. In forms almost identical to their dinosaur-age forebears. I could show you a salamander from the late Triassic and you would think, “Hmm, that looks like a salamander.” You would recognize it right away. Because it survived and the dinosaur didn’t.

They used to be prey, but they lived. They thrived, these lizards. Some of them are even predators now.

It’s scientifically, biologically impossible for a lizard to evolve into a dinosaur.

But prey
can
become a predator. It happens all the time.

All the time.

“Well, what are you going to do about her?” Sooz asked when I finally told her everything.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard the words come out of my mouth:

“I’m going to destroy her.”

Sooz stared at me as I told her my plan. I waited. I was nervous. Had I gone too far?

Finally, she said, “It’s about damn time.”

And then she said, “That bitch. I swear to God…Finally.
Finally
, Katya.”

I waited for her to get it all out.

“I hate her. Do you understand me? I
hate
her. And I’ve been sitting here while you talk about how
great
she is and how
wonderful
she is and it’s been
killing
me. Because she’s
not
great and she’s
not
wonderful.”

She took a deep breath.

“Do you remember that one story I told you about her?”

“Which one?” There were millions. Sooz was the editor of
The Compleat Crimes of Andi Donnelly
.

“About the girl. In the bathroom.”

“Yeah. What about…oh.” It hit me. “Oh, God. Sooz. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you were so in
love
with her, that’s why! Because all you could talk about was how great she was and I didn’t want to…I don’t know. I don’t know.”

I hugged her. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Sooz.”

“Never mind. It’s all over.” She shuddered. “Let’s kick her perfectly rounded ass.”

So, Sooz was on board. Good. I needed her Photoshop expertise.

I would have to spend a little bit of the money I was saving. But if I was willing to do that before, for makeup, shouldn’t I be willing to do it now, for revenge?

Maybe it was insane to take on Andi. She was bigger than me. She was more popular, more important.

But here’s something every good paleontologist knows: Even the biggest die. Even the meanest get killed off by something that they can’t see coming. Like a meteor. Or an insect.

What it comes down to is this: In this world, you’re either predator or you’re prey.

There are
many
ways that dinosaurs caught and killed their prey. Everyone thinks that T. rex or allosaur or whatever just ran out into the open air and chased the little guys and ate them up. But the truth is that most of the meat-eaters were ambushers. They lay in wait very carefully and then grappled their prey. Chasing after prey was useless—it consumed too much energy and left too great a chance that the predator would injure itself. Besides, a high-speed pursuit of a smaller, more agile creature isn’t to your advantage when you can only move in a straight line.

So the big boys learned how to be patient. And stealthy. And to attack when least expected.

Like me.

Like a
paleontologist
.

Because you have to be patient to study dinosaurs. There are massive advantages to patience. On a dig, you can’t just go ahead and rip up everything in your path in your quest for fossils. You’d just end up destroying what it is you’re looking for. Fossils are
fragile
. They’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years and they won’t react kindly to someone tearing them out of the ground.

So you take your time. You dig out the earth in teaspoons. You don’t gouge the ground—you
brush
it away gently. You don’t pound the rocks to release the knowledge within—you
chip
at them. Fragment by fragment. It’s the patient work of centimeters.

It takes forever.

And once you’ve got the ground chipped and swept and brushed away, you have yet
another
long wait ahead of you. Maybe you want nothing more than to pull it up and marvel at it, but you can’t. There are procedures.

Because once you isolate the fossil in the ground, you have to sketch it for the record and for cataloging. You sketch and take notes and then finally pull it up, but you can’t enjoy it. No. Because you have to wrap it in plaster of paris, for protection. And pack it in a special crate. And send it off to a museum, where it will sit in a basement vault somewhere. It’ll sit there for years until someone has the time (and the grant money) to pull it out and break open the plaster of Paris (again, carefully—patiently) and sit down to clean it and examine it and draw more sketches and officially decide what it is and where it belongs and everything else.

Years.

That’s what I had waiting for me in my future. So I was ready. I was ready to be as patient as I had to be.

Someday, I’ll be the world’s greatest paleontologist. Because I am patient like nobody’s business.

After three months, I began to lose faith in the “ambush theory” of predation. There’s no way a meat-eater could or would wait so long for its prey.

I didn’t have a choice, though. I had to wait for soccer season.

I had to wait for Andi to be in practice pretty much every day of the week.

So I waited. And waited.

On one of my gym days, I “accidentally” left my math book in the locker room after changing. I begged Mom to take me back to school for it.

We got there just as practice was ending. A stream of girls headed into the locker room.

Coach Kimball gave me an annoyed look, but Mom said, “She really needs this book. It’ll just take a second.”

Coach made me give her my cell phone first—cell phones aren’t allowed in the locker room because of the cameras.

But no one noticed my new little credit card–size camera. That’s because I hid it in an empty blush compact, with a hole drilled through for the lens. So I could hold it up and look like I was just looking in the mirror, but I was actually snapping pictures.

When I’m stressed—like I was in the locker room that day, surrounded by Andi’s friends, all of whom just ignored me, thank God—I try to remind myself that over ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are already extinct. So it’s not like I matter. Or any of us. But on that day, I didn’t care that my existence was just a blink of the universe’s eye. I wanted Jamie Terravozza. And if I couldn’t have him, well, at least I could make sure that
she
couldn’t, either.