Within/Without

chapter twenty-seven.

Simon

She chooses a truly wonderful time to call me.

I'm in a lecture for psych—as Oliver—and the class is dead silent as the professor drones on and on about Pavlov's dog and how it connects to modern day relations, and such. I would be interested, very interested, if I was not more interested in Val's name flashing back at me from my phone screen.

I can't get over it, any of it. It all still feels like a dream.

Muttering under my breath, I shoulder my backpack and get to my feet, the jingle of my keys and the rustling of my clothes as I move to the center aisle disturbing the relative silence. The professor shoots me a questioning look, and I just lift an apologetic hand as I wave and drift out the door.

I hit answer, cradling the phone against my ear. The hallway stinks again; the bathrooms never stay clean in this building, and no one ever takes the time to clean them. "Hello?"

"Simon?"

"Uh," I say. "Oliver, right now. But yeah. It's me."

"What?" she says, and there's a thoughtful pause before she just grunts under her breath and continues: "Okay. Whatever. Look, I need your help with something."

I rake my hair back from my face, catching a glimpse of my reflection in the trophy case across the hall. The one thing I never get used to about wearing Oliver's face is the eyes. Everyone in my family has some degree of brown eyes, whether they're dark like my little sister Abbie's or more gold-tinged like my mother's. So seeing those baby blues blink back at me is sometimes a bit unsettling, to say the least. "Okay?" I reply. "Is everything alright?"

"Yeah. It's great. If I'm right, I think I just cracked this story wide open," Val says, and it's that voice, that voice I love, the quiet and rushed way she talks when she's excited about something and is talking more to herself than to you. These little things, these little notions I've picked up on the longer I've known her—it's even crazier now to think that I have the freedom to learn even more of them. "You told me briefly about your cousin last night, didn't you?" she goes on. "How he's a shapeshifter too?"

I narrow my eyes. "Sure he is. But—"

"Is his name Larry, by any chance?"

I jolt a little, remembering the last time I saw him, the frayed look in his eyes when he'd said, We were born cheaters. "How do you know—"

"The internet. I saw the name Larry St. John and then I sorta connected the dots. So do you think he could have a persona that was a professor here, once?" she asks, still in that quiet, brisk tone of hers. "Like how you're Oliver right now but you're actually Simon. Does this Larry guy do that too?"

"Considering what I know about him, I'd imagine he would—"

"Jesus. Jesus! Where is this guy?" Val demands. "I've got to talk to him. Right now, I've gotta talk to him."

The lecture hall's doors open, and student after student begins flooding out of them. I get a few strange looks, enough to make me turn and face the window. In my ear, Val is still rambling. "Hey, Val? Valerie? Can you listen to me for a second?"

"And I—what?"

"Larry's not..." I fight for the right word, or at least the one that makes the most sense. I settle on: "Safe."

"He's not safe?" Val scoffs. "What is he, a switchblade? What do you mean he's not safe?"

I mean that ever since my family realized I was a shapeshifter, too, they've done everything they can to keep me away from Larry. I mean that he kidnapped me once when I was twelve. I mean that he forced me to rob a gas station once, and break into someone's car another time, and make a massive withdrawal from a stranger's bank account just with the info we found in a dropped wallet. I mean that he's convinced the only thing he can do with his power is use it to cheat and steal and plunder, and because of that, nothing that touches him is safe.