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I put my phone face down. “Hey, do you know anything about Felicity Keating? She wasn’t in class today.”

Alyssa sighs. It takes me a moment to realize I interrupted her. “Who?”

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Wednesday afternoon.

The after-school crowd is in full force, kids tromping up the stairs and tourists huddling by the information desk. It’s packed, and loud, and every too-high squeal or squeak makes me suppress a wince: the perfect choice for this meetup. It’s impossible to end up alone and cornered in one of the busiest museums in the country.

And mandatory metal detectors at every entrance means I won’t have to worry about that switchblade today.

I stand beside the taxidermy elephant at the center of the rotunda as Felicity grimaces her way through security. She’s traded her academy uniform for some oversized all-black getup, and she sways uncomfortably on her feet while a lady searches her bag.

“How’s your face?” I ask as she approaches.

She tentatively prods at the stitched-up mess of her earlobe, the gauze taped to her jaw, the bandage plastered to her neck. Her intact ear now sports a stud instead of a hoop. I wonder if the injury was actually enough to keep her home two days in a row or if she skipped on a whim.

“It hurts,” Felicity says shortly. Apparently her voice isn’t only like that when she’s doped up on adrenaline; she speaks with a permanent anxious edge. “We’re not having this conversation under Twinkles, are we?”

“What?”

“The elephant.”

I’d put money on the elephant’s name being literally anything else. “No, we’re not talking here. Come on.”

My favorite exhibit is the Ocean Hall. I have a distinct fondness for aquariums, and harbor a deep bitterness for the fact that my parents never bothered to take me to one. Dad never had time, and Mom says humidity ruins her hair. So this is the closest I’ve ever been able to get, barring the fish section of a pet store. I lead Felicity into the neoclassical hall of deep-sea organisms suspended in formaldehyde and life-sized re-creations of oceanic leviathans hoisted over the display floor. A group of preteens have decided to hog the fish tank. Unfortunate.

Felicity gawks at the gangly spider crab statue presiding over the first booth.

“Haven’t you been here before?” I ask.

“I like the rock exhibit,” Felicity says. Her attention is immediately snagged by a wrinkled little creature in a tube, and she bends at the waist to inspect it. “And the bugs. And my sister told me I have a deeply unstable and unreliable attention span for anything I’m not immediately obsessed with, to the detriment of myself and everyone around me, so no, I probably haven’t.”

How did someone like her manage to get the better of me? Out of uniform, she’s nothing more than some messy rich girl: combat boots, zip-up hoodie, black tee reading WE‘LL MAKE IT LOOK LIKE AN ACCIDENT, indulging an oral fixation with the corner of her manicure or the cross necklace trapped between her canines. There’s no thought given to how she moves, and even less to what she says. She reminds me of someone attempting to exist entirely raw, as if the top layer of skin has been removed: Every single thing is an impulse.

I hate not having the upper hand. I hate it even more when someone like Felicity manages to get it from me.

I say, “How did you know.”

Felicity straightens up. The chain falls out of her mouth to dangle against her chest. “Does it matter?”

On the train here (four stops to the Smithsonian station, the Blue Line today), I considered trying to bluff my way out of this. Tell Felicity Keating that she’s come to a bullshit conclusion and I have no idea what she’s talking about. But the way she laughed in the bathroom stall when she accused me—I must have crumbled immediately. I tipped my hand as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

My brain helpfully supplies the memory of Dad’s lawyer pointing a finger in my face: How did you KNOW.

“It matters a lot, actually,” I say.

She smiles. I realize it’s her equivalent of a nervous dog showing its teeth when backed into a corner. “It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. You have bigger things to worry about.”

“Oh, fuck off.” A young mother next to us frowns at my impolite language, steering her child away. “As far as I know, you’re guessing. You don’t have any evidence. If you did, you’d show me.”

Felicity says, “But it’s obvious.”

The constant hum of so many people wandering the museum turns into a high-pitched ring.

Obvious.

“Everyone knows he used you as bait,” she says, fiddling with the red, swollen skin around her injured ear. “Claimed he needed a babysitter for you, right? Started advertising for tutors by the end there.”

Not tutors, exactly. Dad used the fact that I was autistic to pad out the ruse. He was looking for someone to interact with me, help with my social skills; paying good money for a few hours of easy work.