If I stood there long enough, she’d tell me what any of this had to do with me.
“You’re going to make me say it again, aren’t you?” She forced a smile. “Asher is a problem.”
I waited. “And?”
“And,” she said, as if she were talking to someone either very young or very slow, “you fix problems.”
“I . . . what?” My voice rose up on that last word. All around us, people were beginning to stare.
Emilia hooked her arm through mine, like we were the best of friends. “You solve problems,” she said again. “I have a problem. Ergo . . .”
“You have a job for me.” This conversation was starting to make so much more sense. And it was becoming that much more an after-coffee kind of endeavor. “You’re barking up the wrong tree here, Emilia.”
“So you’re not the Tess Kendrick that Anna Hayden is swearing is a miracle worker?” Another eyebrow arch. “Anna’s not exactly sharing what the miracle was, but she’s a big fan, and she has a big mouth.”
“Hayden,” I said out loud. “The girl I . . . helped . . . yesterday—”
“Hayden comma Anna.” Emilia dropped my arm. “Freshman wallflower, beloved youngest daughter, and the only person at this school with a Secret Service escort?”
I flashed back to the day before. I remembered thinking that the crying girl had looked young and scared and vulnerable and pissed. The one thing I hadn’t thought was that she looked familiar. She’d never told me her name.
Emilia snorted. “You honestly expect me to believe that you came riding to the rescue of the vice president’s daughter with no idea of who she was?”
No wonder Anna had been freaking out—and thank God that jerk whose phone I’d confiscated hadn’t e-mailed the pictures of her to anyone. I didn’t even want to think about the kind of media storm it might have kicked up if he had.
“Believe what you want,” I told Emilia. “I’m not a miracle worker. I’m not a problem solver. Whatever’s going on with your brother—”
“Asher,” she supplied.
“I can’t help you,” I said firmly.
“I’ll pay you.” Emilia clearly wasn’t acquainted with the word no—but the two of them were about to get downright cozy.
“I don’t want your money.” I pushed past her—successfully this time—and she amended her offer.
“I’ll owe you.”
I wondered who or what I had offended in a previous life to end up in this position: sister of famed fixer Ivy Kendrick, endorsed as a miracle worker by the vice president’s daughter.
“Sorry, Emilia,” I said, almost meaning it. “You’ve got the wrong girl.”
CHAPTER 12
About five minutes into my first class of the day, it became clear that Emilia Rhodes was not the only person who was operating under the impression that I was a chip off the sisterly block. Anna Hayden might not have told the entire school that I was the person to go to if you had a problem, but she’d whispered it in the right ears.
In a school the size of Hardwicke, word got around.
In English, one of my classmates attempted to retain my services to handle “rumor management” in a nasty breakup. In physics, I got a request that—as far as I could tell—had something to do with a show-choir rivalry.
I dearly hoped to never so much as think the words show choir again.
By lunchtime, I was nearing the end of my patience.
“Hypothetically speaking, should I be concerned that you look like you might throw that meatball sub at someone?” Vivvie popped up beside me.
I glanced over at her. “If I was going to throw something, it would be the bread pudding. Hypothetically.”
“Don’t throw the bread pudding,” Vivvie objected vehemently. “It’s got a butter rum sauce!”
She sounded so horrified at the idea that I managed half a grin.
“Here at Hardwicke, we take our baked goods very seriously,” Vivvie informed me pertly. She hesitated just for a second. “Are you looking for someone to sit with?”
Across the room, Emilia met my eyes, then slid her gaze to an empty seat at her table, across from Maya and next to Di. Clearly that was an invitation.
I turned back to Vivvie. “I assumed I was sitting with you.”
Vivvie broke into a smile the way other people broke into song and dance. It lit up her entire face.
“Where do you normally sit?” I asked her. The day before, when she’d been playing official guide, we’d grabbed a seat in the corner, but a girl like Vivvie had to have friends, as alien as that concept felt to me.
Vivvie’s eyes went Bambi wide, the smile freezing on her face. “Well,” she hedged, “sometimes I eat in the art room? And sometimes I just find a place outside?” She said every sentence like it was a question—and like she fully expected me to reconsider sitting with her.
“Outside works for me,” I said. There were too many people in the cafeteria, and I truly did not want to know which of the onlookers would turn out to be my next wannabe “client.”
Vivvie practically bounced with relief and began to lead the way. “I know you’re probably wondering, about the whole ‘sometimes I eat in the art room’ thing.”
“You’re an artist?” I guessed.
Vivvie nibbled on her bottom lip and shook her head. “Not so much. I mostly draw stick figures.” She paused. “They’re not very good ones,” she confessed.
Open book, thy name is Vivvie. “I get eating lunch alone,” I told her. “You don’t have to explain.”
“It’s no big deal,” Vivvie assured me, in a way that told me that for her, it was. “It’s just . . . Hardwicke is a small school. At least half of us have been here since preschool. I know everyone, but my best friend moved away a couple of months ago. We were kind of a pair. There are people I could sit with. I just . . . I don’t want to bother anyone.” She offered me another tentative smile. “I’m kind of an acquired taste.”
Something in the way she said those words made me think they weren’t hers. “Says who?” I asked darkly.
Vivvie came to a halt in the courtyard, her eyes going round.
“What?” I said. She didn’t reply, so I turned to follow her gaze to the Hardwicke chapel. Or, more specifically, to the chapel’s roof. There was a single octagonal window at the base of the steeple. Standing just in front of that window—thirty feet off the ground—was a boy. His toes were even with the very edge of the roof.