* * *
We knock out some of the easy clues as we drive downtown—yeti ice cream at Molly Moon’s, a display of Washington-grown apples at a corner market (something local, organic, and sustainable).
On our way to the Seattle Public Library, Neil tells me more about the Quad. He and Sean were best friends most of elementary school, and same with Adrian and Cyrus at a private school. Sean and Adrian used to be neighbors, so by middle school, the four of them were spending time together pretty regularly. Neil even goes to Sean’s family reunions every year.
The conversation feels weirdly natural. Somehow, Neil and I are getting along, which necessitates a mental reminder that I’m going to destroy him at the end of this. That was the whole reason we teamed up.
I get lucky with downtown parking, and I can’t help admiring the building as we head inside the library. It’s an architectural marvel, geometric shapes and bright colors and displays of public art. And it’s always busy. There’s an awkward moment on the main level with Chantal Okafor and the Kristens, where we clutch at our armbands, but when no one lunges for anyone else, we all exhale in relief. Then Chantal lifts her brows and looks pointedly at McNair. All I can do is shrug, since there isn’t enough time to explain.
“It’s—really red,” Neil says when we get to the Red Hall on the fourth floor. The shiny curved walls make it feel like we’re inside someone’s cardiovascular system.
“Any other insightful observations?”
“That whoever designed this was probably a little sadistic?”
We submit our photos before our phones buzz with another Howl update.
TOP 5
Neil McNair: 10
Rowan Roth: 10
Iris Zhou: 6
Mara Pompetti: 5
Brady Becker: 4
“Wow,” I say. “We pulled way ahead.”
“Naturally,” Neil says, but he’s clearly pleased.
With the library clue conquered, I can’t get what Sean said earlier out of my head. He’s not the most forthcoming about his personal life.
“Do you… usually go to Sean’s house?” I ask, trying to sound casual as we retrace our path through the Red Hall.
“As opposed to…?”
“I, um, saw them earlier, Sean and Adrian and Cyrus, before the game started. They said you’d had a family emergency and that they hadn’t been to your house in a while. They’re your best friends, so I didn’t get it, I guess.”
McNair’s quiet for a few moments. “Doesn’t… everyone have their secrets?” he says finally, flatly. His tone isn’t cruel, but it’s not exactly warm either.
Just when I think we’re making some progress, beginning to open up to each other, he shuts it down. Except—something’s wrong. His face has gone ashen, and he has a hand against the wall, as though he can’t remain steady without it.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
“I’m—not feeling great,” he says as he sways, pressing his head into his elbow. “Dizzy.”
“All the red?” I ask, and he nods. He looks miserable. Some instinct I wasn’t wholly aware of kicks in. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”
Before I can overthink it, I place a hand on his shoulder and guide him out of the Red Hall and into a chair near the elevator. He may not be my favorite person, but that doesn’t mean I want him to feel like this.
He cradles his head in his hands. “I haven’t eaten anything today except for that slice of pizza,” he says. “I know, I know, bad idea, but I was dealing with my sister, and I ran out of time, and…”
“Stay here,” I tell him. “I’ll be right back.”
His sister. The family emergency. One answered question and about a hundred more.
From a scrap of paper wedged between the windshield wipers of Rowan’s car
You may have noticed the white lines on the street indicating you are currently taking up two parking spots. I wanted to do you a favor and let you know that your car can actually fit just fine in one spot.
Sincerely,
A concerned citizen
4:46 p.m.
NEIL PICKS UP a packet of saltine crackers. “Did you open this for me?”
“No,” I lie.
In a minimart across the street, I found a bottle of water, a can of ginger ale, and the crackers. It’s possible I overdid it.
“You didn’t have to do all of this,” he says, taking a slow sip of water. “Thank you. I’ve always had kind of a weak stomach. Road trips with me are a real blast.”
I nod, remembering. When we took the bus to school events, like last year’s field trip to the Gates Foundation, he told teachers he had to sit in the front. Bus law dictates the front is for the painfully uncool among us, and for whatever reason, I felt such extreme secondhand awkwardness on Neil’s behalf that I took the seat across the aisle from him (not next to him; everyone knows you take your own seat if there’s enough space) and argued with him for the rest of the bus ride.
We’ve been together for a couple hours now—the most time we’ve ever spent just the two of us—and McNair’s been strangely normal. Dorky and occasionally annoying, sure, but not exactly hateable. I’m not sure if the end of school flipped a switch, or whether we’ve never been in a situation where we didn’t immediately pit ourselves against each other.
I lower myself into the chair next to him in a little alcove on the fourth floor, fiddling with a bottle cap. We sit in silence for a while, the only noise the crunch of the plastic bottle or McNair chewing. He even offers me a cracker. Every so often, he rakes a hand through his hair, messing it up more. We must share that nervous habit.
His hair, though—it doesn’t look bad when he does this. And it’s there, on the fourth floor of the library, watching my nemesis take slow slips of ginger ale, that I have a horrifying realization.
Neil… is cute.
Not in an I’m-attracted-to-him way. Just, like, objectively nice-looking. Interesting-looking is maybe more accurate, with his red hair and wild freckles and the way his eyes are sometimes deep brown and sometimes almost golden. The curve of his shoulders in that T-shirt isn’t bad either, and neither is the definition in his arms. Even that smirk of his is kind of cute. Lord knows I’ve seen it enough times to make that assessment.
Cute. Neil. Unexpected but true, and it’s not the first time I’ve thought so.
“I could tell you something to cheer you up.” It must be the still-mostly-miserable look on Neil’s face that makes me say this.
“Yeah?”
I’ve never told this to anyone, not even Kirby or Mara, because I knew they’d never let me forget it. “Do you remember freshman year?”
“I try not to.”
“Right. Right.” I bury a hand in my bangs. They really are too short. This is probably a terrible idea, but if it’ll take his mind off the Red Hall, it’s worth it. Maybe. I charge forward before I can reconsider. “Before the essay contest winners were announced and you revealed your true self, I… had a crush on you.”
Nope, that was definitely a terrible idea. Regret fills me almost instantly, and I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for the laughter. When it doesn’t come, I tentatively open one eye.
Neil meets my gaze, no longer nauseous-looking. Now there’s amusement on his face: a deeper curve to his mouth, like he’s trapping a laugh in his throat.
“You had a crush on me.” He turns it into a declarative sentence. He’s not asking for clarification; he’s stating a fact.
“For twelve days!” I rush to add. “Four years ago. I was basically a child.”
He doesn’t need to know what, exactly, I found so appealing about him back then. At first I was mesmerized by the sheer number of freckles he had, thought they were beautiful, really. I nodded along with the insights he shared in class, offering my own and feeling a spark of pride when he agreed with me.
He doesn’t need to know that every so often over the course of that year, I found myself wishing he hadn’t turned out t
o be the worst kind of lit snob so I could resume my English-class daydreams, the ones where we lounged beneath an oak tree and read sonnets aloud to each other. I was so disappointed he wasn’t the guy I’d dreamed up. He doesn’t need to know that a couple times, when our shoulders brushed in the hall, I felt this flip in my belly because I was fourteen and boys were a mysterious new species. Touching one, even by accident, was like passing your hand through a flame. I wasn’t proud of it, but my body hadn’t quite caught up with my brain. And my brain had decided twelve days into freshman year that Neil McNair was to be despised, his destruction earning slot number ten on my success guide. By sophomore year, all those belly-flips were gone, and I could barely remember having a crush on him at all.
He also doesn’t need to know about the dream I had a few months ago. It wasn’t my fault—we’d been texting before bed, and it had screwed with my subconscious. For all I know, his subconscious gave him wacky dreams too. We were at a fancy restaurant eating math tests and lab reports when he took my face in his hands and kissed me. He tasted like printer ink. My logical side intervened and woke me up, but I couldn’t look him in the eye for an entire week after that. I’d dream-cheated on Spencer with Neil McNair. It was horrifying.
Neil’s full-on grinning now. “But I was like… the dorkiest fourteen-year-old.”
“And I was so cool?”
“You were,” he insists. “Aside from your inability to acknowledge The Great Gatsby as the quintessential American novel.”
“Ah, yes, The Great Gatsby. A feminist text,” I say, though my mind stumbles over his profession of my coolness. “Nick is a piece of white bread. Daisy deserved better than that ending.”
He snorts at this. But I can’t deny he seems to be feeling much better. His complexion has gone from ashen back to his regular shade of pale. Debating books in a library—this is our natural state, perhaps.
“So like. This crush,” he continues. “Did you write poems about me? Did you doodle my name in your notebook with a heart on the i? Or—oh! Did you imagine me as the hero of a romance novel? Please say yes. Please say I was a cowboy.”
“It sounds like you’re feeling a lot better.” I stretch out my legs, eager to get moving again.
He glances down at his arms. “I didn’t even realize—am I exposing too much skin? I don’t want to be parading myself in front of you, taunting you with what you can’t have. I have a hoodie in my backpack. I can put it on if you’re—”
“You’re definitely better. We’re leaving.”
* * *
My mom calls when we get to the main floor of the library.
“We made it!” she announces. Her phone’s on speaker, and my dad is cheering in the background. “The book is done!”
“Congratulations!” I motion for Neil to follow me around the corner so we won’t disturb anyone. “Is it going to come out the same time as the next Excavated book?”
“A few months before. Next summer.”
“And most importantly, is this going to be the one that finally gets made into a movie?”
“Ha ha,” she says dryly. She and my dad are still salty about the Riley movie getting stalled years ago. “We’ll see about that.”
“How was your last day, Ro-Ro?” my dad asks. “Did you make valedictorian?”
His words peel the Band-Aid off the wound. “No,” I say, glancing at Neil. “I’m salutatorian.”
“That’s great. Congratulations!” my mom says. “Where are you? It’s almost sundown. Are you coming home for Shabbat dinner?”
Neil is watching me with an odd expression. “I don’t know if I can. We’re—I’m in the middle of Howl. Is the power still out?”
“Unfortunately. But we can do takeout from your favorite Italian place. It’ll take an hour. Please. Your last Shabbat dinner of high school?”
This is what gets me. Plus, Neil and I are solidly in the lead, and it would be a chance to change my clothes. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
When I end the call and the background photo of Kirby, Mara, and me reappears, my stomach twists. I switch off the screen to find McNair gaping at me.
“Your parents,” he says, his tone full of reverence, “are Jared Roth and Ilana García Roth.”
“Yeah…?”
“I read their books. All of them. I was obsessed.”
Now it’s my turn to gape back at him. This happens on occasion, sure, but I never suspected Neil McNair was a fan of my parents’ books.
“Which book is your favorite?” I ask, testing him.
He responds without missing a beat. “The Excavated series, hands down.”
“Riley’s pretty great,” I agree. I used to dress up as her for my parents’ events, in her red cardigan and trademark pterodactyl stockings they had custom made, my hair in two messy little buns.
Neil gets nostalgic. “The one where she had her bat mitzvah, and her abuela and abuelo visited from Mexico City and learned all about Jewish traditions… Artoo, I bawled.”
“Number twelve, Mi Maravillosa Bat Mitzvah?” It was based on my own bat mitzvah, although it wasn’t quite the ideal exchange of cultures presented in the book. Rather, my mom’s family from Mexico was convinced that my dad’s family was avoiding them, and my dad’s family complained about the food and that they hadn’t been able to hear the rabbi. I wished, not for the first time, that I knew more Spanish, even as I read the Hebrew.
“Yes. I read that one all the time.” He says it in present tense.
“Wait. You still read them?”
Pink spots appear on his cheeks. “Maybe.”
If we’d been closer to friends than rivals, I wonder if he’d have told me this sooner. All this time, he’s only been half the lit snob I thought he was. It’s unnerving, realizing how much I have in common with someone I spent so much time plotting to destroy.
“I’m not judging. I’m just surprised. Why haven’t you been to any of their signings?”
“I didn’t want to be the creepy guy in the back who’s clearly too old for the books.”
“You’re never too anything for books,” I say. “We like what we like. My parents have plenty of adult fans, and yet they hate romance novels.”
The pink on his cheeks deepens. “Once again, I’m sorry. Your parents really don’t approve of what you read? Shouldn’t they be, I don’t know, glad that you’re reading at all?”
“That’s never been an issue with me,” I say. “Children’s books, those are fine, but romance novels?” If they knew about Delilah’s book signing, they’d shake their heads and purse their lips and I’d know, before they even said anything, that they were judging not just me but Delilah and her fans. “I’ve sort of started hiding my books from them. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“My mom likes them,” Neil offers. “If that helps at all.”
“I hope you don’t ever give her shit for them.”
He grimaces. “Not anymore.”
I slip my phone back into my pocket. “I have to go home for Shabbat dinner,” I explain. “It’s the Jewish Sabbath. We’re not, like, the best Jews, but we try to have Shabbat dinner every Friday, and—”
“I know what Shabbat is,” he says, and points to himself. “Also Jewish.”
“Wait. What?”
How has he blown my mind twice in the span of a single minute?
“I’m Jewish. My mom is Jewish, and I was raised Jewish.”
“Where do you go to temple?” I ask, still unconvinced.
“I had my bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Am. ‘Vezot Hab’rachah’ was my Torah portion.”
“I go to Temple De Hirsch Sinai,” I say. That’s the only other Reform synagogue in Seattle. In our city of nearly eight hundred thousand people, we get two. Within three blocks of my house, there are five churches.
I examine him, as though looking for some obvious Jewishness I missed. Of course, there isn’t any—just his objectively cute face. I usually have this instant connection with other Jews.
It’s happened my entire life, despite how few Jews I know.
Neil McNair is Jewish, and there’s that tug in my chest, the one I feel when I learn I share a religion with someone.
“Faulty Jewdar?” he asks.
“Guess so. It’s the last name, too.”
He makes an odd face. “My dad’s. I was planning to change it when I turned eighteen. My mom’s maiden name is Perlman. But then I… didn’t.” His voice falls flat.
“Oh,” I say, sensing some awkwardness there but unsure how to deal with it. “So… I do have to go home for this.” But it doesn’t feel right to split up yet, not when an entire army of seniors is out there plotting our demise.
He glances at his watch and then back at me. “Would it be okay if I stopped by for a minute? Just to like… say hi to your parents and tell them that I think they’re literary geniuses?” With his teeth, he tugs on his lower lip. “No, that would be weird. It would be weird, right? You’ve already done a hundred nice things for me today. You don’t have to,” he adds quickly. He’s babbling, oh my God.
It’s such a relief to hear he doesn’t want to split up—or at least that he doesn’t mention it—that I have to force my face not to react. And then I’m wondering why I’m feeling relief, of all things. I would have assumed I’d be desperate for a break by now, but I guess my McNair tolerance levels are higher than I thought.
“Do you… um… want to have dinner with us?” I ask. “You can meet them if you promise to be normal.”
I just asked Neil McNair to Shabbat dinner with me and my parents. At my house. Any other time, I’d text Kirby and Mara about it, but I’m not sure how I’d explain it. I can barely explain it to myself.
Neil’s eyes grow wide. “You’re sure?”
“Of course,” I say. “They love having people over.”
“Would it—” He breaks off, shoving his glasses up, which have once again slid down his nose. “Would it be okay if we stopped at my house on the way there? I want to get some books for them to sign. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
Today Tonight Tomorrow Page 12
