The Vigilante's Handbook (Misfits #1)

Fourteen: Psychoanalyzing My Classmates

"Come again?"

"You're on my team."

"Says who?"

"Me."

"No." In my head it was more of a: No, no, no, no, no. This is not happening. She is not going to ruin this for me. She is going to make sure I never graduated and die of exposure while I'm at it. No. No. NO.

"You can't say no. I'm a team captain."

"I can strongly object and hope you change your mind." Mona was shuffling awkwardly next to me now. The message was clear, Don't make this harder than it has to be. If Mona was saying that, then there really was no winning. I knew I was going to regret listening to her. "Fine. But I'm not happy about this."

"Neither am I," Julien added. So I was supposed to be his second pick. That was what he got for choosing Valentine over me. I stopped myself there. This was a game, just like dodgeball. There was never a reason to get this worked up over dodgeball unless it became an Olympic sport. "I'll take Diego then."

Payback. If she takes one of his, then he takes one of hers.

I expected her to take Alek next. Steal his girlfriend and his best friend. That would have really gotten under his skin. Instead she said, "Stitch." Apparently, I was enough of a rash by myself.

"Alek." No surprise there.

"Ariana."

"Malee."

"Foster."

"Mona."

Mona should have been snatched up sooner. Lucia should have known that. Not just because Mona was my best friend and one of the smartest people I knew. She would also be clutch in a tough situation. Being stuck in the wilderness could easily get people hurt. Mona was the closest thing we had to a doctor. She was better than a doctor most of the time.

Before Lucia could go on, I elbowed her. "Get Miguel."

"Why would I do that?"

I didn't have a good answer for that. He wasn't much of a trump card. We had Stitch for that. In fact, Miguel was as useless of a metaphorical dodgeball player as me. "He's your cousin."

For a second she considered my less than convincing proposition. She took in a deep breath like she was sniffing out its flaws. A slow release through her nose. I recognized the tactic from a leadership seminar we had attended a few years ago. Pretend to listen to your subservients, it makes them feel useful. Unless they know what you're doing. "I appreciate the insight, but I have a plan." Then, "Cody."

"Evan."

The boys did not look happy at the prospect of being split up, but none of them argued. So far I was the only one outraged by Lucia's and Julien's choice of teams.

And that left... "Miguel." Then, just to me, Lucia added, "I got him for you." I didn't like her tone. There was something conspiratorial about it. Like she had done me a favor and now I owed her. It hadn't cost her anything. She was left with Miguel, and I didn't like it. He joined without meeting my eyes. Like he was hiding something from me.

To be fair, Miguel was usually hiding something--my stolen fruit snacks, that he thought I was being childish, repressed memories that played in his eyes like movies, his gift, my bag of chips. I was getting sick of it. We were on a team now, a team more legitimate than my crew of misfits. Teammates needed trust in order to work together to achieve whatever vague goal they were given.

I took a glance at everyone on Lucia's team. I knew Stitch was more than he looked. Those wide blue eyes and gap-toothed smile that said, "I'm just happy to be here" hid calculations and games. They didn't fool me.

Ariana was a loose cannon. Everyone knew it. She was one of the easiest people to manipulate at Paramount Lake if you knew how to play into her motives. But she was creative. It was a requirement with her gift.

Cody was a trickster, prankster, pain in the rear end, however you wanted to put it. But he was smart. There were few attending Paramount Lake who couldn't be classified as smart, but he had the street know-how that most of us old timers lacked. He was thirteen when he got picked up by the academy. No one knew for certain how long he had been on his own. Longer than I had been, not that I had ever actually been on my own even if it felt like it.

Foster was the biggest flirt to step foot on Paramount Lake soil. The others I could trust. But not Foster. Hearing your own voice played back to you was unnerving at best, and Foster knew how to play into that weakness. If there was anyone here who could match my ability to manipulate a target it was Foster. I knew it, and he did too from the way he was surveying me.

I knew the weakness and strengths of all of my classmates inside and out. The idea that someone could read me just as well was more unnerving than his mimicry.

Then there was Lucia next to me. Big bad Lucia who hated me, as far as anyone knew. But she had picked me first.

Did she recognize my skill? My ability to stay alive? She definitely knew that I knew how to work a crowd. It had been her that got everyone into Pirate Nick's Nifty Nickelcade last week though, hadn't it? I could take as much credit as I wanted for it, but without her final word of agreement, no one would have moved off the sidewalk.

Then she had saved my misfits and me that night.

I paused in my checklist. I had never asked how she knew we were in danger. Julien hadn't gotten my text. We told no one else when we left. Yet she and Diego had come just soon enough to keep Stitch from bleeding out, Miguel from getting shot, and all of us from getting picked up by the Lincoln Police Department.

Her eyes were trained forward, surveying the other team just as I was dissecting ours. She could focus on the enemies, or whatever Julien's band could be called. I would make sure our team worked together.

Her strategy was unclear and incomplete at best, hazardous and altogether absent at worst. She had deliberately riled up Julien by making me her first pick. Then she had weighed our team down with a bunch of useless and borderline useless gifted. Julien was wielding a power team. They could hit us once and we wouldn't be able to fight back. Alek was practically unstoppable. Julien and Valentine couldn't be brushed off, even if they didn't have combat-heavy gifts. Lucia knew better than anyone that Diego shouldn't be underestimated. Malee was straight up deadly. Even Evan, arguable the weakest, could wipe us out.

And do not get me started about Mona. She was a healer and fighter wrapped into one. And my best friend.

I wished she was on my team instead of Foster. Mona replacing Lucia would have been even better, but that much couldn't be helped. I hated that she had become the enemy after all this time I spent trying to find a friend.

When had I started thinking about this as a war? When did Julien and Mona, my boyfriend and my best friend, become enemies? It was like a switch had been flipped in my brain that I had been waiting for all these years at Paramount Lake. Now I had someone, a group of someones to focus my energy on. And an excuse to give my peers a taste of their own medicine.

As Mona said, we had one simple instruction: win. 

And that's a wrap on act 1. I'm currently shoulder deep in dead week (the week before finals) and have roughly 30 academic pages to write in the next few days, so y'all aren't going to get a new chapter for a second. Expect 2-3 weeks of no updates and then I'll return to my regular schedule. 

m nicole