Read Hush Money for Free Online

on her
soda can. “I’m not going to ask you about you—yet. Tell me about
Krista.”
    My soda almost came out my nose. Direct
much? “Um, I didn’t really know Krista.”
    “That’s not a huge surprise. You’re not
exactly ambassador material. But you do pay attention. You’re not
right in it, but you’re watching. All the time. You think a
lot.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that. It freaked
me out to know that someone was noticing me. Analyzing me.
    “Look, everyone’s really worked up about
Krista. You can feel it, you know? But no one’s talking about it. I asked a few questions and people got really weird about
it. So I get that we’re not supposed to talk about it.”
    “So why are you trying to talk to me about
it?”
    She leaned back, sipped from her can, and
said in a careless, joking tone, “Because even if you think I’m out
of line, or suspicious, or whatever it is people think around here
for wanting to talk about it, who’re you gonna tell?”
    “Oh! Niiiice.” I couldn’t help but crack a
smile at that. It was the kind of jab I’d make at myself. It was
kind of ok to have her make it instead.
    “So come on. I know Krista must have had a
Talent. She wasn’t the first kid to ever be taken to a State
School, but she is the first one I ever met.”
    “She wasn’t the first one from around here,
ok? There have been…a bunch.”
    “What’s a bunch?”
    “I don’t know. Enough so it’s a thing here. A
thing we don’t talk about. Enough so we start to think there must
be more. And we wonder if the person sitting next to us is hiding a
Talent.”
    “And there’s probably a bunch of Talents
around wondering if the person next to them is gonna figure them
out and turn them in.”
    I took a bite of pizza while she was talking,
not caring how it burned the roof of my mouth. At least she
couldn’t read anything from my expression except Oh my God,
cheese burn! Kat bit into hers too, with more care than I had,
and we ate in silence for few minutes. But of course I knew she
wasn’t finished.
    “So these kids who disappear, they never come
back?”
    “No.”
    “No letters? Phone calls?”
    I wiped my mouth, trying to figure out what
to tell her and thinking that Dad was so right about how having
friends would just complicate my life, make me constantly have to
decide what to say and what not to say.
    “A long time ago, there used to be some
letters. But they were censored. You know, lots of lines marked
through with black marker so you couldn’t read them. Then there was
this big deal where someone managed to reconstruct what had been
censored. I think it was someone with a Talent who did it, but I’m
not sure how it happened. It was just a flash in the
media—something that came out and was hushed up really fast. Most
major news outlets, papers and stuff, didn’t run it. It would be
hard to track down anything about it now.”
    “But you heard about it.”
    “Like you said, I listen a lot.”
    “Ok, so the reconstructed letter. What did it
say?”
    I looked around. I didn’t know why I was
telling her this stuff. I had this feeling like I wanted to
tell her. It wasn’t like I was getting more comfortable with
talking to her. But it almost felt like some kind of release to
tell her, to talk to someone about this stuff I knew. It was weird,
but I liked it. So I was going to keep going.
    “It talked about what it was really like at
the State Schools. Like prison. It talked about working the kids to
improve their Talents, but like hard. Like you can make your
players do laps to get them in better shape, or you can make them
run until they drop and then kick them until they get up and make
them run some more. It was like that. It talked about experiments.
Torture. Food and sleep deprivation. Just all kinds of horrible
stuff. That sense that everyone has that they do not want to
go to a State School, despite what the government says about
helping Talents? The Koenig