The Jump, page 10
YAS: Just tried that. Nothing.
The hell does she mean, “nothing”? You don’t unscramble twelve letters and get “nothing”—you get words that don’t mean anything to you. But that’s why you share them with the group! My neck is getting hot with anger, but instead of jumping in with a “Care to share with the group anyway so we can decide that for ourselves?” I jump up off my bed, log into my computer, and unscramble the letters myself. The longest word available only uses seven of the letters to make the word “deicide,” as in “the killing of a god.” My heart skips for a moment at the idea that maybe the Order is suggesting that their “power” prize involves murder, specifically the murder of someone already of immense power.
But I wouldn’t take advantage of that if given the chance, even if I knew I’d never be found out. Mama says that those who take life are doomed to suffer the rest of theirs, even if they’re never caught. The guilt, the paranoia, the bad karma. None of it’s worth it.
I couldn’t live with it.
I sigh in defeat. The word “deicide” just doesn’t make sense, and even if it did, that would leave six letters hanging. HIHICE. Nothing.
ME: I think you’re right, Yas. This word unscrambler returned nothing important.
YAS: You looked it up yourself? Then why even ask me??
Oh yeah, she’s right. Probably should’ve just quietly agreed with her. Now she thinks I don’t trust her, which isn’t exactly helping the situation that is our friendship right now.
ME: Just wanted to double-check. Never hurts to have two people looking at it, right?
YAS: Sure, whatever.
Ugh, I don’t have time for this drama.
I look at those numbers again and wonder if it’s an amount. Like, dollars maybe?
$934,589,594,853
I search “934 trillion dollars” and find articles like “Hedge Fund Industry Now Worth $934 Billion” and “Student Loan Debt Tops $2 Trillion.”
What has a balance of 934 trillion dollars?
SPIDER: Maybe it’s a dollar amount?
I grin, loving that my team is thinking the way I am here.
ME: I was just thinking that, but what has a balance that high?
YAS: Maybe something with a balance today could have enough APY over time to get to $934 trillion?
The hell? AP-what?
ME: Explain please, boomer, for the youth in the room.
Sure, Yas is the oldest, but she sometimes sounds way older.
YAS: APY? Annual Percentage Yield? Did your parents not teach you about how interest works?
SPIDER: Is that like APR?
YAS: Similar. APY factors in compound interest. When you buy a car, companies looooove saying 0% or 1% APR, but they don’t tell you the APY, which is often higher. Predatory, truly.
And that is the point at which I check out of the conversation. Yeah, yeah, the white establishment is predatory, especially in the financial department. Why does that mean we have to know every detail of this crap?
ME: I’ll call you if I ever need to buy a car, Yas. Now, can we get back to the puzzle, please?
Three knocks ring out from the front door downstairs, and I look at my phone clock to see that it’s 10:05 p.m. Who the hell is coming by the house this late? Curious, I push myself to my knees and crawl across my bed to the window, where I look down at the street along our front yard. I guess you could call it a yard. My heart jumps into my throat. Or my throat sinks into my stomach. Something inside me gets rearranged at what I see.
A girl my age in a black long-sleeve shirt and tight black pants, with a blond impossible-to-miss straight bob. It’s the girl from Team ROYAL!
My mind swims with questions, and panic sets in at each one.
Why is she here?
How did she find my house?
What the hell is she here to do to me?
At this point, I fully expect her to pull a gun out from her back pocket and turn it on whoever answers the door. And then a whole new wave of panic sets in at the realization that Mama, Zaza, and maybe even Ava are downstairs.
“No!” I holler, throwing myself off the bed and scrambling to the door, racing down the stairs so fast, I miss one and lose my footing with just a few steps left. I go down quick, tumbling heels over head, praying to hit the floor soon. When I do land, I’m cheek-first on the tile floor.
I groan and blink my eyes open to see a blurry image of Ava by the front door, which she leaves open to turn and run to me. I see an ocean of black through the door outside, because it’s dark, and because that girl—what was her name again?—is dressed in all black, and all I can see is that platinum-blond hair walking over the threshold. I do hear her combat boots on our tile, though—sounding strange and out of place in our tiny, sacred kitchen.
“Jax, are you okay?!” cries Ava. I feel her firm hand on mine. “Can you move?”
“Don’t—” I manage to croak out, but I’m interrupted by my own body. Cough! Cough-cough! I guess I knocked the wind out of myself on the way down. I instinctively turn on my side until the coughing subsides and I can finally breathe enough to say, “Don’t let her in.”
Ava looks up at her—Sigge! That’s her name. And Sigge, to my surprise, kneels and extends a hand to me.
“I’m not here to fight,” she says, her voice quiet but sharp, like the hiss of a soda can when it’s pressed open after being only slightly tossed around. “If you can move, if you can stand, I’d like to talk to you.”
* * *
Once I’m off the floor and we’re all seated at the kitchen table with cups of Mama’s dragonwell tea and agave nectar—I don’t know why Ava decided to give this girl Mama’s special-occasion tea, but okay—I fold my arms over my chest and look at Sigge without a word.
Now that I can get a good look at her face, I see how smooth and translucent her skin is, like a porcelain doll. Her eyelashes are snow white too. And her eyebrows are the faintest blond because maybe she colors them in—
“See something you like?” she asks me before taking another sip of her tea. I bristle at that, glancing at Ava before a blush creeps into my cheeks and a smirk plays at the corner of Ava’s lips.
I clear my throat and move right along, but before I can, Sigge is talking again.
“Relax, kid, I’m not into boys, and you can’t look at me without looking ill. I didn’t come here to flirt.”
“What did you come here for?”
My voice is more biting than even I was expecting, and as she looks up at me mid-sip, I clear my throat again and soften up, remembering Mama’s words to me for practically my entire childhood. Everything you do, do it gently.
I hope she’d classify taking down Roundworld’s stupid refinery as “gentle,” because that’s exactly what I’m going to do as soon as I win this puzzle and join the Order’s ranks.
Sigge sets down the mug she’s drinking from—my special Baby Yoda mug that I only drink coffee with salted-caramel oat creamer out of. I flash a look at Ava. Doesn’t she know I’ve been through enough today?
“I came to apologize.”
That’s the last thing I expected to hear in this moment.
“Go on…,” I say, turning up the end of the word “on” so it sounds like a question. I take a sip of the crisp tea and let it warm me from the inside out. My muscles already hurt from that tumble down the stairs. I’m just glad we didn’t wake Mama and Zaza.
“I’m sorry,” she says, leaning back in her chair, which creaks, and crossing one leg over the other. “My teammate Lucas—you met him.”
“You could say that.”
“He shouldn’t have taken that poster,” she continues.
I hope she knows it’ll take more than that for me to believe her. Why would she take time away from this precious puzzle just to come to my house to apologize?
Oh right, she’s in my house! She found my house!
“How’d you find out where I live?” I ask, noticing the gold bracelet around her wrist. The famous Cartier Love bracelet. Saw it on an ad once. The price ranges from $6K to $50K. Assuming this isn’t a knockoff, this girl could pay for my future college education with a single bracelet. “You paid somebody on the dark web for my address, didn’t you? Just wrote a check, huh? Or did Daddy wire you some money?”
“Jax,” snaps Ava. “Come on.”
“This ain’t even your business, Ava. Why are you still down here?”
Ava’s eyes flicker as she holds her mug in midair. She’d been about to take a sip, but now she’s setting it down and thinking better of it, pushing back in her chair, standing up.
“I was making sure you weren’t concussed after that fall,” she says. “Since I’m going into nursing next year. Just wanted to help.”
My throat closes up with shame.
What do I even say to that?
She takes her mug to the stairs, turns back to Sigge, and says, “It was nice to meet you,” and retreats up to her room, the brush of her slippers against the floor getting softer and softer.
I don’t recognize myself.
What the hell have I done? I don’t have time to think.
“Your sister seems nice,” says Sigge, taking another sip.
I tear my eyes from the stairwell and glare at her.
“Well, you came to apologize, and you’ve done that,” I say, unable to finish the sentence.
So get the hell out, I want to say.
Her mug goes back on the table, her shoulders rise to her ears, and her eyes meet mine.
“I have a little brother myself, actually,” she says. “He’s very sick.”
Silence passes between us. So much that the ticking of the big red apple clock above the kitchen sink is the only sound in the room until I clear my throat and take another sip of my tea.
“I’m… I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Leukemia,” she says flatly. “Of course, we have medical benefits from my father’s job at Roundworld to keep us afloat, but if we were to lose them…”
I let more silence pass by, as I’m still working on absorbing the “Of course” in front of “we have medical benefits.” I must be staring at her with eyes glazed over, because her voice cuts through my train of thought.
“It would sink us.”
“Can’t your dad just… I don’t know, get another job with medical benefits?”
“No,” she says bitterly. “Because the leukemia would then be a preexisting condition. And even with ACA provisions, even if they did cover us, it would still cost a fortune.”
So wait, this girl, with the six-thousand-dollar bracelet, wants me, a Shannon High kid from Ballard who wants more than anything to save his mother’s community garden, and barely has money for bus fares, to what? Throw away the game?
“What do you want?” I ask point-blank. “Are you asking me to just give you the puzzle?”
“I’m asking you to give up the game so a little boy can get his leukemia treatments without leaving his family destitute.”
“It’s not my game to give up,” I say. “It’s everyone’s game.”
It’s my team’s game. It’s Mama’s game, although she doesn’t yet know it. I can’t just let this refinery demolish Mama’s garden.
“I know you’ll use your ‘power’ to take down Roundworld if you win,” she says.
Her mouth is pursed, but her eyes are pleading. I know how badly she wants to win this. I can see it in her face. I know she’s telling the truth.
So I decide to give her some truth back.
“If the refinery goes up…,” I begin, hands clasped around my ceramic mug, beige with dark speckles. Ava made it a few years ago at a pottery event hosted at—you guessed it—the garden. “My neighborhood’s community garden goes down. For most of the families around here, that’s the only grocery store they have. We don’t live around much else, and most of the food there is free, all we can afford. You’re asking me to choose between your family’s medical care and my family’s food supply. That’s not my decision to make.”
A long moment goes by in which she takes a nervous sip of her tea, I take a contemplative sip of my tea, and we both look at each other.
A clear stalemate.
“Fine,” she says, her eyebrows going flat. “Then at least give us the garbage-bin clue back so we can have a fair chance.”
That takes a long moment to sink in.
“Did someone take the second clue?” I ask.
She reaches down to pick up her black leather backpack—I can smell that it’s real leather from here—and reaches in to pull out her phone and starts scrolling. She shows me the screen, where I find our forum, specifically a post from the Order. I take the phone in my hand and examine the words closely.
AMATEURS RESORT TO CHEATING.
TAKE TO HEART THIS REPRIMAND.
THE ORDER HAS EYES EVERYWHERE.
STEALING CLUES WILL GET YOU BANNED.
“But we didn’t take anything,” I say, unable to mask the alarm in my voice, looking up at Sigge again. Her narrowing eyes says she doesn’t believe me. “I swear! JERICHO doesn’t cheat. We don’t steal clues. For karma’s sake, I was there when the damn forum etiquette was written!”
Sigge snatches her phone out of my hand, clearly still doubting me.
But I have my own doubts about her.
“How do you know it wasn’t your boy Lucas stealing the poster clue?” I ask. “You know he has sticky fingers.”
She scrolls, her eyes glued to her phone as she answers, “Lucas learned his lesson.”
And that’s all she says. Silence.
“Oh, I’m just supposed to believe that?” I ask. “He almost got Yas in trouble with South Lake Union security!”
“Yas?” she asks, looking up at me, and then I remember that Yas specifically said Yasmin. Dammit.
“Yasmin. My teammate,” I concede.
“The girl in white?” she asks, unable to hide the sharpness in her voice. I smile. Does this girl think she can compete with our Yas? Our fearless flyer? Our astonishing acrobat? Our parkour princess?
That stunt Sigge pulled—the jump off the roof back at the bus stop, was pretty incredible. But I’ve seen Yas do better.
“Yeah. Her.”
“Sorry to have gotten her in trouble,” she says, a trace of honesty in her voice surprising me. Her eyes return to her phone before she shows me the screen.
On the forum, someone’s posted a photo of adhesive stuck to something green and plastic-looking. The photo was taken with flash, indicating that it was probably taken in the dark, outside since there’s a streetlight in the far distance, and the adhesive’s in the shape of a square.
“You’re saying there was a clue on… whatever this is?”
“We all know it’s a garbage bin, Jax—that was the most obvious part,” she says, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back in her chair. “No need to be cryptic. Just tell me where your team hid it, and we can both get on with being professionals here.”
“I’m telling you, I have no idea who took it.”
And I really don’t! JERICHO doesn’t steal clues. Han was the only one of us to see it on the bottom of the bin, and he sent us a picture. He wouldn’t just… take it. And then I realize, that’s my proof! I’ve got to give up a photo of the clue. “Just to prove it to you,” I say, taking out my own phone out and pulling up Han’s picture. “Here’s the picture my teammate Han took of the clue. If he took it, why would he need a picture of it?”
Sigge takes my phone, blows up the picture, and closes out of the picture to make sure it’s really in my messages and really from a contact by the name of “Han.”
It all checks out, apparently.
Her face softens into a sad, resigned kind of expression, and she sighs.
“I still don’t trust you. Or your team.”
I shrug and admit, “You have no reason to, except our word. But I’ll send you this picture anyway since the clue is missing.”
I want to protect Mama’s garden more than anything, but not badly enough to want to cheat my way to the top. I’d better get some good karma for this.
Sigge and I exchange numbers, and soon the picture is in her messages, she’s standing on my front step, and I’m leaning against the doorframe saying goodbye.
“Thanks for the tea,” she says, slinging her backpack more comfortably on her shoulder and turning to leave. “And tell your sister thanks for letting me in.”
Oh right. Ava.
Sigge reaches the gate and glances over her shoulder at me and says, “And that you’re sorry.”
Then she turns the corner and steps off down the sidewalk into the night. I let out a long sigh, knowing I owe my sister a huge apology after treating her the way I did. She was just being hospitable with what we had. Isn’t that what Mama’s garden is all about after all? Sharing what we have with those who need it?
I turn back inside and shut the door behind me.
“Who was that?” asks a voice from the stairwell, startling me. I look up to see Mama stepping out from the shadows, her orange nightdress sweeping against her ankles as she walks. She reaches up to scratch around the perimeter of the bandage on her forearm.
“Um,” I begin, wondering how the hell I’m supposed to explain to my mama that my favorite hobby has evolved from competing in digital scavenger hunts with other teens from all over Seattle to having those strange teenagers over for tea at ten at night. “A friend.”
Pretty sure in the silence that passes between us, we both follow the same thought train: I’ve always let my friends meet my mama and zaza. Why is this friend any different? And then a smile spreads across her face as she looks me up and down, and I realize what’s happening.
Oh no.
Oh no.
She thinks Sigge is…
“Mama, it’s nothing like that—”
“Okay, okay,” she says, hands up in surrender before she’s even said anything. I knew it. “Just sayin’, if you ever need any positive love energy, I’ve got plenty of rose quartz and years of advice—”
“Mama, it’s not even like, let alone love.”
I’ll never understand the “love at first sight” concept. How do people just know they like someone by looking at them? You know nothing about them! Before I like someone, I need to know if they’re kind, if they’re patient, if they like animals, where they see themselves going in life, what makes their eyes light up.
