Bad Blood

by Carly Anne West

  Mya and I are nearly silent as we walk side by side, which makes hearing the two kids behind us so easy.

  “How do you get this far in life and not know the difference between a mule and a donkey?” says a girl.

  “I do know the difference, and it was one thousand percent a donkey,” says a guy.

  “Bet me a sandwich,” the girl says.

  A pause.

  “A sandwich?”

  “Yeah. I like sandwiches. You know that. Much better than you know the difference between a mule and a donkey,” she says.

  I have to turn and look. I really have no choice. I didn’t realize Mya had already turned to stare.

  “Hey, settle this for us,” says a tall, skinny kid with braces and a mess of dark, curly hair. The girl next to him is much smaller, but she’s got to be about Mya’s age by the way she talks.

  “Um, okay,” I say, because really, what else am I gonna say?

  “Donkeys versus mules,” says the girl, and I’m confused. Is this a question?

  “Like, who would win in a battle, or—?”

  The girl rolls her eyes. “Obviously, it would be a mule. That’s not what I mean, though.”

  “The difference between them?” Mya tries.

  The girl looks at my sister like she’s finally found another smart person.

  “Yes! Thank you,” she says.

  “They aren’t the same thing?” I say before I mean to. The three of them look at me like I’m bringing down the human race or something.

  “Mules are a mix between a donkey and a horse,” says Mya. “Donkeys are just … donkeys.”

  “Right,” says the girl, looking at the boy who’s probably my age. “Which means mules look more like horses. They’re bigger because they’re part horse. It was a mule.”

  The boy clenches his jaw as he debates. The girl hops a little victory hop, clasping her hands together.

  “Oooh, I see a sandwich in my future!”

  Then she looks at my sister. “I’m Maritza,” she says, now that the great donkey/mule debate is settled.

  My sister waves back. “Mya. This is my brother, Aaron.”

  The girl smiles and rolls her eyes, grabbing Mya’s arm and pushing ahead of us. “Aren’t brothers great?”

  Mya looks back at me for a second before letting the girl pull her away.

  “Enzo,” says the guy. “My sister’s annoying.”

  “I have one of those,” I say, and hey, maybe I’ve made my first friend since moving here.

  “We just moved into my gran—um, a house … on Friendly Court,” I say. I don’t know why, but it feels too soon to be telling people we’re living in my grandparents’ old house. I don’t know, maybe it was something about the way people stared when we were unloading the truck.

  “Friendly Court,” says Enzo, looking up like he’s trying to place the street.

  I point behind us. “Right over there,” I say.

  “Oh! One of the old streets,” he says, and immediately, I feel like he’s socked me in the stomach. Okay, maybe I haven’t found a friend.

  He seems to pick up on what I’m thinking, though, because he looks down at the sidewalk while he walks. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” he says. “That’s just what people call it. It … it doesn’t mean anything, you know?”

  He means it doesn’t mean we’re worse than the people who live in the newer houses.

  “Oh,” I say, not sure I want to let him off the hook yet, but one more sidelong look at Enzo makes me think he’s not a bad guy. Maybe he just doesn’t think before he opens his mouth all the time.

  In fact, I’m not sure Enzo could lob an insult even if he was trying to. There’s a sort of dopey smile all over him, not just on his face, but in everything he does: the way he takes big strides with his even bigger feet, or the way he swings his arms while he walks, or how his nose whistles when he breathes because he tries to keep his mouth shut over his braces. The weirdest thing, though, is that he doesn’t try to hide any of it. If Enzo is aware that he’s not the coolest, he doesn’t seem to care. There’s a certain kind of relief that comes with being around a person like that; like for once, I can take a deep breath and let my face and my body do whatever they’re going to do, and who cares if someone is watching?

  “By the way, and I’m just putting this out there,” says Enzo, “if you’ve seen the new SpaceKills movie, don’t tell me anything. Like five people have almost spoiled the ending for me, and I’m totally on edge.”

  It’s so random. It’s so perfect.

  “Dude, I thought I was the last person in the world who hadn’t seen it yet,” I say.

  His eyes widen. “The way they left the last movie, I swear I don’t know how it could get any more gruesome than that.”

  “Here’s hoping they find a way. I heard they almost had to pass out barf bags in the theaters.”

  We both stand for a moment, lost in thought, before continuing the walk to school.

  The campus looks completely different now that it’s swarming with sweating kids who all look about as lost as me, which automatically makes me feel a little bit better. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

  Mya and Maritza split off toward the elementary school, and I give Mya an almost imperceptible nod, but she catches it and nods back, so she knows I won’t be far in case anything goes south.

  “What’ve you got first?” Enzo says, peering over my shoulder at my schedule. “Oh, Mr. Davni. He’s cool. Just don’t touch the toy collection on his desk. He’s weird about that.”

  I register the warning.

  “How about Mrs. Levy? I have her for Biology.”

  “Strict,” he says. “I heard she kicked a kid out of class for having hiccups. Turns out he had this condition. They didn’t go away for three months. She still failed him, though.”

  “Whoa. What about Tierney for Algebra?”

  “He hates grading, so basically, you do all your homework in class while he comes around and checks it.”

  “That sounds great,” I say.

  “Yeah, except he eats a ton of garlic. I mean like inhuman amounts. How long can you hold your breath for?”

  “I’ve never timed it,” I say.

  “You’ll get good. Okay, who else?”

  “Ryland for Geography.”

  “Obsessed with earthquakes. You’ll basically be learning about fault lines for the entire year.”

  “Delvy for History,” I say.

  “Hates Ryland.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry. It only ever comes up when we do Class Battles, and that’s not until midway through the year.” He leans in conspiratorially. “It’s like my dad says: all politics.”

  Interesting. Not a problem I was expecting in middle school.

  “Oh, hey, you have Donaldson for Civics. Me too! We’ll be in final period together.”

  “Cool,” I say. Honestly, more than being in the same class as him, I’m relieved that he seems excited about it.

  “I probably better go find my locker. It always takes me about a million tries to get the combination right,” he says, and there he goes again, openly admitting he’s pure dork. I’m baffled. Also, I’m jealous.

  Then, suddenly, I watch him fall apart, piece by piece, right there in front of me.

  He starts to quake so hard, I can actually see him vibrating from where I’m standing. Sweat breaks out on the back of his neck so fast, I think at first that it must have started raining inexplicably. But nope, that’s classic nervous sweating, and if that wasn’t enough, the distinct shade of red his cheeks have turned would have been a dead giveaway.

  He swallows audibly.

  I look past him to find a tallish girl with dark brown skin and sparkling brown eyes approach us with complete ease. If she’s aware that she’s just destroyed my new friend with barely a glance in his direction, she doesn’t acknowledge it.

  “Did you see Kornwell’s teaching Study Skills instead of Chemistr
y this year?” she says, diving right in like she’s picking up a stray conversation.

  She turns to me like we already know each other. “He tried to shrink a rabbit last year,” she says to me. It’s a lot to process.

  “Wait … what?”

  “Exactly,” she says, smiling, and I’m starting to understand why Enzo is a useless pool of sweat and babble next to me. It’s sort of hard not to be charmed by her.

  “He claimed to have the chemical composition for a shrinking formula figured out, so he ‘borrowed’ Mrs. Neederman’s class bunny, but all the chemical did was make the rabbit smell like rotten eggs, and then it got loose and made its way into the ventilation ducts. It hid for three days before they could find it, and the entire school smelled like sewage until they did.”

  “That can’t be real,” I say.

  “I couldn’t get the smell out of my nose for a week,” she says. “Anyway, now Mr. Kornwell is teaching Study Skills, which is basically where kids go to take after-lunch naps,” she says. “Hi, I’m Trinity.”

  “Hey. Aaron,” I say.

  “Blurbum,” says Enzo.

  We turn to him.

  “Bu—blurb—um …”

  What is happening?

  “Okay,” says Trinity, entirely unfazed. “Gotta get to first period. Nice meeting you,” she says to me, then smiles at Enzo like he didn’t just say “blurbum.”

  “That was … I’ve never seen a meltdown like that,” I say to Enzo.

  “She’s magical. I have no control over it,” he says, recovering faster than I expect him to.

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Three hundred and sixty-eight days,” he says.

  “And you still haven’t said—?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Wow.”

  “It almost feels like I can’t break the streak now,” he says. “What would I even say?”

  “I mean, you could start with ‘Hi, Trinity’ and go from there,” I say. “Just a thought.”

  He considers this. “It could work.”

  He’s an absolute mess. Definitely my friend.

  * * *

  The day goes reasonably well, and I guess somewhere along the way, I became a pessimist, because I’m actually surprised. But glad-surprised.

  Mr. Davni is absolutely weird about his desk toys. Our first ten minutes of class were devoted to all the consequences for touching them, playing with them, stealing them, even staring at them for too long. Mrs. Levy is strict, and it seems like she’s got an especially short fuse for bodily functions. A girl next to me coughed, and I watched Mrs. Levy wipe an actual chill from her arm. Mr. Tierney is cool, and it turns out I can hold my breath for eight seconds, ten if I really push it. Any more than that, I’ll definitely pass out, so I just need to time my work right so when he comes around, I only need help with an easy problem to explain. Mrs. Ryland believes The Big One is coming any day. She described her home earthquake preparedness kit, showed us where the classroom kit is, and even told us she keeps a kit in her car. Nobody brings up the fact that we don’t even live near a fault line. And Mr. Delvy for sure hates Mrs. Ryland. Classroom Battles didn’t even come up (whatever that is), but he still managed to get a dig in about “kooky Mrs. Quakes.”

  By the time I get to Mr. Donaldson’s class for Civics, a class we share with the grade above us, I almost have myself convinced that it won’t be so bad starting over in Raven Brooks. Maybe it could be this easy to fall into a place and not worry about how you land.

  “Over here,” says Enzo, waving to me the minute I walk through the door. He’s grabbed us seats front and center. Not usually my style, but I’m grateful to see a familiar face, especially after practically short-circuiting during lunchtime when I realized I didn’t know where I was going to sit, so I ended up on the edge of a planter box outside.

  “So?” he says.

  “You prepped me well,” I say.

  “Was I right about the toys?”

  “Seriously, what’s that all about?”

  “I don’t know, but I haven’t met anyone who was willing to risk their hand to find out,” says Enzo.

  Trinity walks in, and immediately, he starts in with his disintegrating act.

  So, I try to repay him for being so cool to me and call her over. That was apparently the wrong move.

  “What are you doing?” he says.

  “Say it with me: ‘Hi, Trinity,’” I say.

  “I’m not sure I like you anymore,” he hisses, and Trinity sits down right beside him in the front row. I’m behind Enzo, so I can see the sweat starting to form on his neck already.

  I scrawl him a note on my pad of paper and slide it under the desk to his left.

  The back of his neck tenses, and he takes his giant foot and kicks me like a mule. Or a donkey? Anyway, he hits me right in the shin.

  “Dude!”

  Mr. Donaldson walks through the door like he’s had just about all he can take for the day.

  “Sit!” he grumbles, even though everyone is already seated.

  “I’m Mr. Donaldson,” he says like he’s said it a million times already, like he hates his name, and he hates everyone. Still, there’s something about this guy I like.

  “Hello, sir,” says the class with the perfect level of sarcasm.

  Well, most of the class says that. Everyone, in fact, except for the tall kid in the front row who’s sweating hard enough to flood the room. He says “Hi, Trinity.”

  If her name had only been one syllable, the fumble might have been drowned out by the rest of the class’s voices. But no, Trinity is three syllables, and everyone—everyone—heard Enzo finally say his first actual words to her.

  I may have just lost my only friend.

  “Actually, that’s a good idea,” Mr. Donaldson says, and at first I think he’s going to embarrass Enzo even worse, but he decides to embarrass us all instead, one by one.

  “Since this class has students from different grades, let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves.”

  Low-level groans.

  “Oh, I know, it’s terrible. You actually have to act like sociable young people instead of animals in pants. Poor you.”

  Whoa. There’s cynical, and then there’s what I’ve heard Mom refer to as “clinically jaded.” I think that’s Mr. Donaldson.

  We go down the rows, telling the class and a stony-faced Mr. Donaldson our first and last names, and on the bright side, this is less time we have to spend going over class rules and a syllabus that will be followed for half the year before it’s discarded because nobody’s doing the homework on time and everyone is confused.

  “Enzo Esposito,” says Enzo when it’s his turn, and when he shifts in his chair, I can see that his notepad is sitting in his lap, and so help me the poor kid has actually written his own name so he was sure to get it right this time. I would laugh if I didn’t feel like I was partly to blame.

  “Young man?” says Mr. Donaldson, and at first I think he’s talking to Enzo before I look up to find his eyes on me, eyebrows lifted in mild expectation.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. That’s what we’re doing here. You might have noticed a theme,” he says.

  Jeez.

  “Um, Aaron,” I say.

  Mr. Donaldson closes his eyes like his head hurts. Trinity turns and mouths, last name.

  “Oh, Aaron Peterson,” I say.

  Mr. Donaldson wakes up. In fact, his eyes are wider than they’ve been since he walked into the classroom looking like he wanted to walk right out.

  “Peterson?” he says.

  I’ve done something wrong. It’s not my name. I’m still talking. I forgot to wear pants.

  But no, none of that seems to be true.

  It seems I’m not the only one confused. The rest of the class is taking turns staring at me, then staring at Mr. Donaldson, then at me again.

  “Any relation to Roger and Adelle Peterson?” he says.

  Thirty pairs
of eyes fix on some part of me: my face, my back, my hands. Thirty pairs of eyes are looking for an answer to this question. And apparently, that answer means something.

  “They’re uh—were—they were my grandparents,” I say. Weirdly, it’s the first time I’ve said that aloud.

  Mr. Donaldson cocks his head while his eyes peel through me. “Interesting.”

  “Is it?”

  I didn’t mean to say that part. It just sort of slipped out.

  Now Mr. Donaldson looks as lost as I do.

  “Wait, that’s where you live? In the blue house on Friendly Court?” says Enzo, turning around in his seat. If he was trying to get me back for “helping” him talk to Trinity, bravo. Really, well done. Now everyone isn’t just staring. They’re whispering.

  “Your grandparents were geniuses,” says Mr. Donaldson above the murmurs. Somehow, it doesn’t come out like a compliment.

  “Okay,” I say. What do you even say to something like that?

  “Your, uh … your parents go into the family business?” Mr. Donaldson asks. How is it my eighth-period Civics teacher knows more about my grandparents’ professions than I do? And why does he sound so … what? Suspicious? Concerned?

  Is that fear?

  I look slowly around the room for clues on the other kids’ faces, but every time one of them catches me looking, they clam up and cast their eyes down.

  I turn back to Mr. Donaldson. “I don’t think so.”

  It’s the most honest answer I can give, and it seems to both satisfy and disappoint him.

  Then, just when I think the interrogation is almost over, a kid with stiff hair and a peeling sunburn who introduced himself as Seth Jenkins chimes in.

  “I didn’t know being the town wingnuts was a family business,” he says, and the ripple of laughter through the class is enough to a) tell me what all the whispering was about, and b) make me wonder if I could fold a paper airplane sharp enough to pierce Seth Jenkins’s skull.

  Mr. Donaldson’s already on it, though.

  “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘geniuses,’ Mr. Jenkins, but I suspect that’s not a word you come across too often.”

  Some kids start to laugh, but Mr. Donaldson puts a stop to that, too. “Roger and Adelle Peterson’s advancements in geology and meteorology are still being studied at the university to this day. Their theories were way ahead of their time.”