When Perfect Meets Crazy

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.

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

in two weeks, God answered my prayer. Masked Idiot showed up. I must have jumped in my seat because my co-worker flashed

things down here? I’ll be

She scowled.

offered, to butter up the deal, swinging my bag

the bag but didn’t question it. It wasn’t like me to ditch and

it,” she agreed with a flick of her wrist,

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

he declared when we finally came to a stop upstairs, cocooned between shelves with

brow, wordlessly asking what

to see me,” he

could see why he

making it clear that even though he said it, he didn’t actually believe

you hit your

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

be described

that’s supposed to do that?”

bag. My fingers closed around it and I brandished it with

“Here.”

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

I breathed.

contract?” He

contract,” I amended.

arched a skeptical brow.

solution is... words? Ink on

despite the skepticism coating his

who’s been watching too much bad TV

shaking my head at

document that ensures that neither of us can disclose anything about the other

Fancy words on

him to tread carefully.

guess I’m supposed to trust you to uphold your end of the

do not to slap him up the back of his head.

whole point of a contract,” I bit out. “We don’t need trust. The consequences are

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

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