“You don’t, not really. Guess you’ll just have to trust me. Well, this, too.”
She tossed me a folder, which thwacked against my chest when I grabbed it. Inside were my transcripts, detailed notes on my freshman year, what I’d been up to the first few months of my sophomore year, and copies of graded tests I hadn’t even received back from my teachers yet. No one person could have collected this information, but the Red Court had resources.
I looked back up at Haley with new eyes; she was the real deal.
CHAPTER 3
I CLEARED MY THROAT and gathered my scattered thoughts back together. “What now?”
Her face shifted to a professional smile—a magnanimous Don Corleone with an offer I couldn’t refuse. “Now we talk. If you don’t like what you hear, you walk. No harm, no foul.” To my surprise, she raised her hands in a supplicating gesture.
“You would just let me leave? But I’ve seen you. I know who you are and what you do.”
“Of course. We wouldn’t hold you against your will. Joining has always been a choice. Even after you agree, you can change your mind whenever you want. As for seeing me, you’ve seen your dossier. You know what we’re capable of. I doubt you’ll be talking.” Her eyes twinkled like she knew the punch line to a joke I missed.
She waited a beat before continuing. “Here’s how it works. We’re a team. Everything we do, we do together. There are other teams of two, but we don’t know them and they don’t know us. We get assigned jobs from one central contact—”
“The Queen of Hearts,” I interjected. The Queen of Hearts. The ultimate prize. I hoped my excitement at saying her name was masked by the anxiety rolling off me.
“Yes, she accepts all the requests and hands out assignments. Sometimes they are our own projects, sometimes we run support for other teams.”
“What kinds of jobs do we do?”
“Everything. The Queen of Hearts makes all the decisions. She knows us and our strengths, but my personal specialty is election rigging.”
I felt a jolt of excitement at the idea of rigging a student body election. All those hours spent designing posters, campaigning, and making promises could mean nothing in the end. What would it be like to be the one in control?
“So, tell me what you know about us and I’ll let you know what’s real.” She took a seat on the slouchy couch and tucked her long legs under her.
I pulled a chair over and sat in front of her like we were conducting a bizarre job interview. “Requests don’t cost any money, and any student can make a request of the Red Court in exchange for favors later on.”
“True. We don’t need money. We work on favors. We can call in our markers at any time, as often as we want. Those favors can be supplies for an assignment, which can cost money, but we only ask when the Favored can easily acquire what we need.”
Favored? Interesting term. Ironic. “If you don’t pay up, you’re ruined.”
Haley cut me a sharp look. “Ruined is a strong term. Kids know the rules. There’s a cost, and they agree to pay.”
“Ok,” I said, thinking of the girl from the parking lot. Ruined was exactly the way I’d describe her reputation. Only, she didn’t make a deal with the Devils of Hell High; she was just their victim.
“What else?”
“All communication is done by locker.” I held up my playing card to demonstrate my point. “But if you want to make a request or would like to join, you slip a note into locker 1067.” A nervous laugh bubbled out of my mouth. This was the part that had made me the most anxious, dropping my name through the slot. I could only go off theories and rumors I’d heard and April’s educated guesses. No one spoke openly about requests they’ve made. “But no one has ever seen anyone opening that locker before,” I continued.
“And you never will.”
I waited to see if Haley would share any other details, but she remained tight-lipped.
“You must have access to every locker, though, right?”
“Yes, we have skeleton keys that get us into every locker in the school.”
“Handy,” I replied. “What about the Whisper Wire? Is that real or myth?”
In addition to the unassigned locker acting as the mailbox for requests, there were rumors that students slipped notes through its slot for the Red Court to use as leverage.
“Real. We get anonymous tips and secrets constantly. A lot of it is nonsense or things we already know, but we keep track of what we hear. You never know what might be useful later.”
I nodded. Sifting through fact and fiction when it came to the Red Court was hard. No one ever talked about it, but it was always there, roiling just under the surface.
“That’s kind of it for what I know. Can I ask some questions?”
Haley made a sweeping gesture, indicating I could proceed.
I didn’t ask the questions burning to get out. Those would only raise suspicions. Instead, I asked, “What’s with the name?”
She pointed at the school logo and mascot painted on the wall behind me, a red knight. “We rule the school. Royalty holds court.”
“And the playing cards?”
Haley produced some playing cards, fanning them out in her hand. “Inside joke. It started with the Queen of Hearts. Who else would lead a red court? All our jobs were coded to follow suit. You’ll learn them, but a Straight is something to do with fixing grades, a Queen of Clubs is a breakup assignment, a Joker is for a takedown. When you get playing cards in your locker, it’s the beginning of something. Since you’re the newbie, I handle all the cards and communication. If you stick with this next year, it will be you.”
It seemed so easy—this tampering with people’s lives and handing students grades they hadn’t earned. Somehow, it seemed to devalue what others had worked so hard to achieve. Not that any favor came for free; the payment was the equalizer. In the end, either you put in the time to earn what you wanted, or you paid for it. And payment was never cheap.
The Joker caught my eye, reminding me of the weight of a single card. That Joker may have already ruined a life, like another card hurt April.
I asked the first question that came to mind, needing a moment to recover my composure. “What’s your favorite color?”
Haley’s smirk was amused, like she could tell how unsettled I was but decided to play along. “Black, like my cold heart and the pit I’ll throw you in if you betray us.”
My vision went fuzzy around the edges. Did she know that was my plan?
She rolled her eyes. “That was a joke. But, from what I heard, the last girl to betray us had to change her name and move to Canada after she was caught selling her mom’s Xanax at school. That was over a decade ago.”