Jordan was still friendly with TJ, but she wouldn’t have partied with his more boring friends without an ulterior motive. And here the motive was: a woman in a smart, purple pantsuit and tinted round glasses. Bernadette Feinman. With her silver hair gripped tight in a glinting pearl claw, Feinman looked like the only adult in the room. She looked not only like an adult but also like an adult ready to make a coat out of one hundred and one Dalmatians. Unknown to probably everyone else in the room, Feinman was also one of the gatekeepers for the DC Fairy Market, a rotating, global, underground black market that traded in all sorts of prestigious illegal goods and services. Emphasis on prestigious.
Not just any old criminal could display wares at the Market. You had to be a high-class criminal.
Jordan wanted in. She needed in.
Bernadette Feinman would decide.
Feinman stepped deeper into the house. She had a creaky, particular way of walking, like a mantis, but when she spoke, her voice was soft and melodic. “I would say I didn’t mean to be late, but I think we should be honest with each other.”
TJ pressed a drink into her hand, looking like a little boy cautiously making sure a respected grandmother had everything she needed. Everyone else got beer, Jordan noted, but Feinman got a stem glass with a leggy white wine for one hand and a clove cigarette for the other.
“This is Bernie, guys. She’s my Yoda, my mentor, so let’s drink to our elders!” TJ said. He kissed her cheek. The partygoers drank to their elders, and then they turned on the PS2.
Feinman leaned over the table to look at the signatures. She raised her gaze to Jordan. “So you’re Hennessy. Surely this isn’t all you’ve got.”
Jordan flashed a huge grin at her. Her world-eating grin, full of confidence and goodwill. No sign of nerves or how important this was to her.
TJ frowned a little. “What, Bernie?”
“Hennessy’s interviewing for a spot at the agency.” Feinman lied so swiftly that Jordan wondered if she’d had the lie prepared before she got there.
“Doing biz at my party?” TJ said. “You’re supposed to pay the daily rate for my living room conference room if it’s for business purposes.”
Feinman handed him her still-full glass. “Go find me some more wine, Tej.”
TJ went away, silent and obedient as a child.
Clacking silver-painted nails on Breck’s forged signature, Feinman cut through the bullshit. “I trust I’ll be looking at more than party tricks.”
“These are candy bars at the cashier,” Jordan said. “Don’t mistake them for an entrée.”
Feinman’s teeth were a little line of pearls hidden behind tight lips. “Fetch me the meal, then.”
“Back in a tick.”
Jordan’s grin vanished the moment she wound out into the cold November. For a moment she steadied herself by looking at the Supra on the curb she’d won it from, at the way the suburban houses behind it were lit by washes of porch and garage lights, the way the cars slept quietly in the half-light beneath skeletal fall trees. She thought about how she’d paint this neighborhood, where she’d place the focal point, what she would emphasize, what she would push back into obscurity. She thought of how she’d make it art.
Then she pulled six paintings from the car and rejoined the party.
Inside, she laid her goods on the dining room table for Feinman to examine them, wine glass held in mantis grip. They were copies. Demonstrations of power. A Mary Cassatt, a Hockney, a Waterhouse, a Whistler, and a Mona Lisa with Jordan’s tattoos, because Jordan liked a joke as well as anyone.
If the partygoers had been amused before, now they were properly impressed. Even forged Breck Myrtle had returned to look closely.
“You’re scary,” TJ said. “You can really look like anyone, can’t you?”
Feinman leaned close to study the important parts: the edges of canvases and boards, marks on backs, textures, brushwork, pigments used, accuracy of the supports. She wasn’t going to find a fault.
“What does your own art look like?” Feinman asked.
Jordan didn’t know. She spent all her time painting other people’s. “A lady never tells.”
“I think it must be pretty spectacular.” Feinman and her clove cigarette moved close to the parody Mona Lisa. The paint was aged and cracked and looked precisely like a museum find, but the anachronistic tattoos proved its etymology. “Although these games have their pleasures.”
Jordan held her breath.
She needed this. They needed this.
TJ said, “So is she getting the job?”
Feinman turned her mantis body toward Jordan and peered with the same intense gaze she’d previously used on the copies, her eyes unblinking behind her tinted glasses. She was, Jordan thought, someone who was used to her word being god—her word being god both to someone like TJ and to someone like Jordan. It seemed to Jordan that if you could hold dominion over both those worlds—both day and night—you had quite a lot of power indeed.
“Sometimes,” Feinman said, “you have to turn someone down because they’re too qualified. You don’t want to hold them back from who they’re meant to be.”
It took Jordan a beat to realize that she was being told no.
“Oh, but—”
“I’m doing you a favor,” Feinman said. She cast a last look at the Mona Lisa. “You might not know it yet, but you’re meant for originals, Hennessy.”
If only any part of that sentence had ever been true.
5
Adam Parrish.
This was how it had begun: Ronan had been in the passenger seat of Richard Campbell Gansey III’s bright orange ’73 Camaro, hanging out the window because walls couldn’t hold him. Little historic Henrietta, Virginia, curled close, trees and streetlights alike leaning in as if to catch the conversation down below. What a pair the two of them were. Gansey, searching desperately for meaning, Ronan, sure that he wouldn’t find any. Voted most and least likely to succeed, respectively, at Aglionby Academy, their shared high school. Those days, Gansey was the hunter and Ronan the hawkish best friend kept hooded and belled to prevent him tearing himself to shreds with his own talons.
This was how it had begun: a student walking his bike up the last hill into town, clearly headed the same place they were. He wore the Aglionby uniform, although as they grew closer Ronan saw it was threadbare in a way school uniforms couldn’t manage in a single year’s use—secondhand. His sleeves were pushed up and his forearms were wiry, the thin muscles picked out in stark relief. Ronan’s attention stuck on his hands. Lovely boyish hands with prominent knuckles, gaunt and long like his unfamiliar face.
“Who’s that?” Gansey had asked, and Ronan hadn’t answered, just kept hanging out the window. As they passed, Adam’s expression was all contradictions: intense and wary, resigned and resilient, defeated and defiant.
Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God:
Please.
And now Ronan had followed Adam to Harvard. After Declan dropped him off at the gate (“Don’t do anything stupid. Text me in the morning.”), he just stood inside the Yard’s iron perimeter, regarding the fine, handsome buildings and the fine, handsome trees. Everything was russet: brick dorms and brick paths, November leaves and November grass, autumnal scarves round students’ throats as they idled past. The campus felt unfamiliar, transformed by the seasons. Funny how quickly a handful of weeks could render something unrecognizable.