When Perfect Meets Crazy

Chapter 9: 09 - Till death do us part

It was a miracle no one else had figured out Masked Idiot’s identity. Whatever it was. If he really didn’t

want me to know he was rich then he should have laid off the labelled sneakers and the expensive

watches that could pay my tuition. And that was saying a lot because Claire Anne High was one of the

most expensive private schools in the state.

He ran off all of two minutes after denying my accusations in the most unconvincing manner. To be

honest, he didn’t feel much like a criminal. He was so bad at it. He just felt like an everyday stupid boy

to me. Maybe if he was a little older or smarter, it would’ve helped. Unfortunately, he looked early

twenties at best and was clearly not half as bright. He was way too young for me to take him seriously,

especially given how idiotic he seemed. I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out that he was cognitively

impaired.

“Idiot,” I muttered, shaking my head in disapproval as I rolled over.

After he left, I turned off the lights and got in bed. It was barely ten o’clock on a Friday night and I was

already tucked in. How boring. I couldn’t help thinking about the party I had chosen not to attend so I

could get back on my mom’s good side. If her reaction to my ‘flying cockroach’ was any indication, it

hadn’t worked. I should’ve just gone to the party. For all their faults, my parents weren’t against parties.

They weren’t strict in the normal way. They were strict in the you-know-your-duties-do-it way. Provided

Olly and I did what we were supposed to do -which included having boring after-school jobs that would

look good on college applications and getting perfect grades-, they didn’t interfere. Provided we stayed

out of trouble, we got free reins till eleven p.m. Well, nine-thirty for Olly. She was only a freshman after

all. Eleven on weekends. I didn’t have an official curfew on weekends.

I sighed heavily, rolling onto my other side.

Life wasn’t going my way a lot these days. For the life of me, I still couldn’t understand why Masked

Idiot felt the need to stalk me. I couldn’t be more normal. More upstanding. More uninclined to break

the law. For heaven’s sake, my mom was a lawyer and my dad was a cop. Not just any cop, the sheriff.

I lived in a house that could’ve come straight out of a magazine. As a matter of fact, the house had

been featured in Aunt Diane’s magazine. It was that house. The one people saw and automatically

knew a successful high-achieving family lived in. The house where people would ask the wife how she

kept the rug and sofa so white. A healthy dose of responsibility mixed with an unhealthy dose of fear.

That’s the big secret to the ever white rug, Mrs. Brown. It was that house with an intimidating display of

awards and trophies honouring each family member. The house where music was never played too

loud, if ever. The house where the kids were always perfectly behaved and cultured. The house that all

other houses got compared to. Literally everything about me screamed that I wasn’t interested in

Masked Idiot’s little illegal business. I was the poster child for good kids all over the world.

“I’m perfectly harmless,” I grumbled aloud, tossing and turning to the other side as I waited impatiently

for sleep to come.

If anything I was the one who was meant to be suspicious, not the other way around. His story was not

at all adding up. I knew I was right about him being rich. There was no doubt about that. The problem

was, that alone blew his story out of the water. No matter how I looked at it, it didn’t fit with the I’m-so-

broke-I-need-to-commit-crimes-for-money vibe most criminals had going on. No rich kid would go to an

underground arena to fight for money he already had. But what other motive could he have? A need to

work out aggression? If he was a rich as he seemed to be, he could very well employ a personal

sparring partner. Or enroll at a proper boxing gym. More so, it couldn’t be aggression since not once in

our time together had he lost his calm and I hadn’t exactly been nice to him. The situation was far too

complicated. I knew intrinsically, the way people sometimes just know things, that there was a web of

secrets I didn’t want to get tangled in lying behind it. Things like this were best left alone. The less I

knew about it, the better but how, for the love of chocolate and ice cream, could I get him away from

me? Think, Avy. Think.

I could hear my mom’s voice in my head telling me to approach the problem calmly, methodically. To

look over the facts. The only problem was there were no facts. I didn’t trust him. He didn’t trust me. And

both us wanted nothing to do with each other. His biggest problem was that I would spill his secret,

except I didn’t know his secret. Not really anyway. I could pick him out in a crowd but I didn’t know his

name or address or anything concrete so it wasn’t like I could send the cops after him. Granted, I could

work with a sketch artist but as I had tried to convey to him, I couldn’t do that without ratting myself out.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t explicitly explain that to him without giving away that he had all the cards and

the one card I had, I couldn’t play. That would be giving him all the power and as the kid of an attorney,

I knew better than to negotiate from a place of weakness. If my opponent was blissfully unaware of the

power he possessed, far be it for me to turn my nose up at such a gift. His other quite ridiculous worry

was that I was some sort of spy. Me, spy? On him?

I scoffed.

That made absolutely no sense no matter which way I looked at it. There was nothing in it for me. No

incentive. Nothing to gain. Just a waste of my time and effort.

I sighed heavily.

At the end of the day, all our problems boiled down to both of us not trusting the other to keep the

secret of our unfortunate first meeting. Unlike him however, I had every right to be distrustful. He was a

criminal. A real one. Probably with a criminal gang backing him and now that I figured out that he

wasn’t your run-off-the-mill kid from the wrong side of the tracks, I was even more distrustful. Whatever

reason he had for doing what he did was far more sinister than survival and a lack of better options. I

shuddered to think what it might be. What we both needed was assurance that neither would rat the

other out but--

“Oh my God!” I gasped, flinging the covers off me.

I got to my feet and I hurried to my study table. I booted up my laptop and opened a word document.

This was it. How I hadn’t seen it before was beyond me. It could actually work. It was exactly what we

needed.

“Oh God, please let it work,” I whispered in the dark room as I hammered out a non-disclosure

agreement tailored for us.

This was what we needed. A contract. A promise that we would both keep our goddamm mouths shut.

A contract that would protect me from every eventuality. It wasn’t fool proof. Masked Idiot could slip

accidentally but if nothing else, the contract would allow me sleep better at night because it would

render any such slips inadmissible as evidence. Ohhh, the beauty of an ironclad NDA. I found myself

grinning as I typed, tweaking and rereading well into the early hours of the morning. I went to bed only

after I was completely sure that no matter how things played out, provided the contract was signed,

even if things blew up, I’d come out relatively unscathed. Fingers crossed.

• • •

I printed it out at the first seemingly mundane and untraceable chance I got. I would’ve done it at home

but 3:47 a.m. was decidedly an odd time to indulge a sudden urge to print a document. It would’ve had

my mom sniffing at my heels. I wouldn’t have been able to lie that it was a last-minute assignment

since she very well knew I was the embodiment of organized and I wouldn’t have left an assignment till

the last minute. That and it was Saturday morning. No school. I didn’t get a chance during the day

either. I was due to put in a few hours at her law firm and I just didn’t feel safe printing it in the same

building she was in. Any little mishap could spell trouble. So I waited throughout the weekend, smiling

and pushing papers at her firm like the perfect little daughter she wanted her partners to see. I wasn’t

willing to risk printing it at school on Monday either. With my luck, a mishap that would leave a half-

printed page jammed in the printer wasn’t so far-fetched. There weren’t enough people who could write

a proper contract, much less one as detail oriented as this. If it got stuck and someone happened upon

it, they’d instantly guess it was mine. I was the first one people thought of when the seemingly

impossible became possible in school. So I waited. And waited. And waited. The knowledge of what I

had on my phone made me excessively self-aware and jumpy but still, I waited some more.

The perfect opportunity finally presented itself after school, at the library. My co-worker was far away

enough, busy with the books that needed to be re-shelved. I had the printer all to myself. The library

was the perfect place. All sorts of people came and went here. No one would find it any more than a

little intriguing if they found such a document jammed in the printer nor would they even bother trying to

find who it belonged to. Heck, it’d rank lower than the kids I caught making out behind the history

shelves, dirty talking in some made-up language that, from what I could tell, was partly Japanese.

So I printed the contract oh so casually and stashed it in my bag. I kept my gaze trained on the door,

hoping to catch Masked Idiot’s entrance. He didn’t show up the entire weekend so I figured he would

show up today. I needed him to show up today. I needed his signature. Yesterday.

For the first time in two weeks, God answered my prayer. Masked Idiot showed up. I must have jumped

in my seat because my co-worker flashed me a questioning frown. I pretended not to notice.

“Can you hold things down here? I’ll be back in ten?”

She scowled.

“You know what, I’ll finish with the reshelving,” I offered, to butter up the deal, swinging my bag over my

shoulder as I rose to my feet.

April raised an eyebrow at the bag but didn’t question it. It wasn’t like me to ditch and she knew it.

“Have at it,” she agreed with a flick of her wrist, losing interest instantly.

She hated anything that meant she had to get up. It was a peculiar kind of lazy but I was used to her

quirks by now. I nodded at Masked Idiot, indicating that he should follow me as I headed to to where

April left off with the books.

“This is weird,” he declared when we finally came to a stop upstairs, cocooned between shelves with

books on economics.

I arched a brow, wordlessly asking what was weird.

“You seem almost happy to see me,” he answered.

“That’s fair,” I conceded. Given my history of aggressively confrontational welcomes where he was ConTEent bel0ngs to Nôv(e)lD/rama(.)Org .

concerned, I could see why he would find my current reaction weird. “I am though. Happy to see you.”

Surprise coloured his features making it clear that even though he said it, he didn’t actually believe I

could be happy to see him.

“Did you hit your head?”

“I just need your signature then we can go back to dreading each other’s presence like the plague and

hopefully never seeing each other again. Till death do us part.”

His expression could only be described as; fair enough.

“So what’s this thing that’s supposed to do that?” he inquired.

I held up a finger, indicating that he wait while I fished out the contract from my bag. My fingers closed

around it and I brandished it with flourish, holding it just a little reverently.

“Here.”

“What is it?” He collected the stapled document, leafing through it with a confused frown on his face.

“A contract.” I breathed.

“A contract?” He sounded unimpressed.

“The contract,” I amended.

He arched a skeptical brow.

“So your big solution is... words? Ink on a paper.”

I nodded eagerly despite the skepticism coating his tone.

“Well, look who’s been watching too much bad TV now.”

I rolled my eyes, shaking my head at the jab.

“Not just words, dummy. A contract. A legal and binding document that ensures that neither of us can

disclose anything about the other person without facing serious consequences.”

“Right. Fancy words on a paper.”

My expression warned him to tread carefully.

“Fine.” He nodded. “I guess I’m supposed to trust you to uphold your end of the deal?” His tone wasn’t

just skeptical, it was patronizingly insulting.

It was all I could do not to slap him up the back of his head.

“No, idiot. That’s the whole point of a contract,” I bit out. “We don’t need trust. The consequences are

written there and they are consequences neither of us can afford.”

If my parents ever got wind of this and asked about it, I could shut them down saying I was

contractually bound to keep my mouth zipped and if they never knew the details, then maybe they

wouldn’t know just how much I had messed up. My mom was a lawyer after all. She knew what

breaking a contract could lead to so I was really hoping this would work. It was my holy grail.

“Just read it,” I said impatiently. “Read it and you’ll see.”

“Fine.” He rolled up the brilliantly worded contract I had stayed up all night working on and tucked it

under his arm. Seriously?

“What?” he asked, taking note of my irritated frown.

I snatched the contract, smoothened it out and presented it back to him.

“I said read, not roll up and put away.”

“You meant now?” His tone made it clear he hadn’t even considered that as a possibility.

“Here?”

I raised my eyes heaven-ward, pinching the bridge of my nose as I sent up a quick prayer for patience.

“You’re in a library, where people go to read. I think here is a good place as any to read it.”

“But... now?”

“What difference does it make whether you read it now or later?” I hissed. “I want it signed before end

of day so yes, now.”

“I can’t. My lawyer has to look over anything I...” he trailed off, eyes widening as he realized he had

said too much.

“You have a lawyer,” I echoed, tucking that piece of information away. It fit with the rich kid image, a

family lawyer to clean up any messes he got himself into. The petty criminal image, not so much. “What

firm?”

“Like I’d tell you,” he bit back angrily.

I pressed my lips to a thin line to keep from smiling. I hadn’t even set him up for that one. He fell into it

on his own. He was within his rights to be pissed at himself but I couldn’t afford to give away how much

the slip-up meant to me. Hopefully, he would interpret my compressed lips as displeasure at not having

my follow-up question answered. Oh, Masked Idiot. Stupid Masked Idiot. When are you going to realize

you are no match for me? Sure, I didn’t know the firm his lawyer was with but thanks to his reply, I now

knew his lawyer worked at a firm. No small time one-room-with-a-tiny-window lawyer for Masked Idiot.

Whoever his lawyer was, he was part of a firm somewhere. Again, it fit with the rich boy image but just

how that all fit with the criminal image was still eluding me. If he was as rich as he appeared to be, why,

for heaven’s sake, was he fighting at a cheap grimy arena that reeked almost as bad as a clogged up

public toilet?

“Fine.” I heaved a sigh, shaking my head to dispel the thoughts. “Take it to your lawyer but here’s what

he’ll tell you, ‘it’s a good deal, sign it’.”

I met his gaze squarely, wondering just who he was under everything.

“I expect the contract back by tomorrow.”

“You’re awfully confident,” he countered. “There could be mistakes, you know?”

“There won’t be. I wrote it myself.”

He rolled his eyes.

“I think there will be because you wrote it yourself. You’re just a high school kid.”

And yet I’m smarter than you’ll ever be.

“Well, I guess we’ll let your lawyer be the judge of that.”