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already.”
    “Much,” I said, and put down the scraper to resume my pacing. “The problem is that I don’t know what I agreed to.”
    “You didn’t agree to anything,” Karen said. “Except maybe lunch on Friday.”
    “Lunch,” I said, squeezing past the stepladder once again. “That’s how they get you. It starts with lunch, and soon you’re agreeing to everything they say.”
    “You make it sound like a cult,” Karen said.
    “A cult,” I said, turning on my heel and shaking a finger. “That’s exactly what I’m dealing with. Propaganda. Brainwashing. Indoctrination. You just watch. On Friday, I’ll come home, and I’ll be a different person. They know which buttons to push. They know how to get me to do what they want. They know because they made me who I am.”
    “Then don’t go,” Karen said.
    “I have to go,” I said. “That’s part of the program.”
    “Then there’s really no point in obsessing over it, is there?”
    “I’m not obsessing,” I said.
    To prove it I squeezed past Karen’s stepladder one last time, picked up the scraper, and went back to work on the wallpaper. This was about Billy, I reminded myself as the blade bit into the wall. I was working with the Academy because his mother said that he loved the place. I was meeting with Ennis out of deference to his good name. I was honoring his memory because I should have been a better friend while he was still alive.
    I was selling my soul to save it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN  
    O n a good day, Neil’s commute was two hours long. That Friday, however, was not a good day, and he let me know it as I shoved my giant dollar sign into the backseat of his car. An overturned tractor-trailer had snarled traffic on I-95 for the better part of the morning, so by the time he got to work, he was already late for lunch. In practical terms, this meant that he’d have to stay at his desk until eight or nine that night, depending on how late our meeting with Ennis ran, or he could spread the hours out over the course of the following week. Either way, it meant less time at home and more time at his desk, all because some moron in a tractor-trailer took a turn too quickly.
    And, Neil failed to add, because some moron dressed like a giant dollar sign had committed him to a lunchtime meeting he could have easily gone without. That my costume was shedding tiny flakes of green and gold glitter all over his backseat didn’t make matters any better, nor did the fact that I was wearing a pair of lime-green stockings under my cargo shorts. At least the boots made sense, I told myself as I untied the balloons from my wrist and wrestled them to the rear of the car. Or they would make sense, anyway, if the morning’s weather report proved right and we got the rain we’d been promised.
    “Have you thought about working from home?” I asked, pulling the puffy white gloves from my hands as if doing so might offset the effect of the stockings. “Telecommuting. The virtual office. I hear it’s the next big thing.”
    “That’ll never work,” Neil said. “I need to be in the office. I’m a different man behind a desk—as any stenographer will tell you.”
    “You have a stenographer?” I asked.
    “No,” Neil said. “It’s a line.”
    “Right,” I said. “Groucho Marx.”
    “ A Night in Casablanca. ”
    “I was about to say that.”
    “Sure you were,” Neil said.
    “Just tell me one thing,” I said, trying to hide my ignorance by giving Neil the only Marx Brothers line I was reasonably sure of. “Why a duck?”
    “Too easy,” Neil said. “ The Cocoanuts. I’m all right. How are you?”
    If he objected to my ridiculous choice of footwear, he didn’t let on, just like he didn’t balk when I told him about Ennis’s request for an audience or even when I asked if he’d give me a ride. Instead, he just asked where and when to pick me up—two questions I could answer with relative ease. Everything else about the situation had me