Get a Clue

by Tiffany Schmidt

  “Then I’m not letting us hit pause. We’re not doing that. I won’t make it through another four days—not after . . .” His eyes focused on my mouth with a look that made me swallow and pray to the gods of lip balm and sibling wisdom.

  “I have one question.”

  His laughter rumbled beneath my hands. “You always do.”

  “Do you want to go to Hero High?”

  I didn’t emphasize the pronoun or list off all the people whose opinions I didn’t want. I didn’t need to when we were standing so close our sneakers overlapped and our words ghosted across each other’s cheeks.

  I watched him process the question, felt his pulse flare beneath my palm. I waited for his expression to shutter or his posture to stiffen. Instead he met my eyes with a look that was pure, vulnerable, and raw—and nodded.

  Our gaze held, and I was microseconds from leaning in to kiss him again—I figured we were owed a reward for our courage and honesty—when he blinked and pulled back.

  “Come with me.”

  “Where are we going?” But I put my hand in his and followed without waiting for an answer.

  Which was good, because clearly I wasn’t getting one beyond “You’ll see when we get there.”

  We turned toward his house, but that wasn’t our destination. Instead he squeezed my hand and headed into one of the small parks that dotted our town. Having no real reason to visit playgrounds or dog parks, I hadn’t been here before, but I felt my dimples emerging in anticipation of whatever memory Win was about to share.

  Had he and Morris terrorized Wink on that pirate ship play structure? Had Curtis fallen from one of these trees? Had he won some photography award capturing the way the seasons revealed themselves in the branches of the maples and oaks?

  We were communicating in presses of his fingers around mine, each pulse sending energy up my arm and sparking electricity in my blood. Because whyever we were here, it was just a precursor. After he shared his nostalgia, we’d be making our own memory. At least that’s what I assumed from the way our eyes kept landing on each other’s mouths and the shivers of anticipation that seemed to originate in my chest and resonate in his.

  He led me past pickleball courts and across a jogging trail to a tree beside a tall chain fence. His free hand closed around the links, but I barely spared a glance for the concrete expanse on the other side. I wanted my explanation from him.

  “This public pool is where I learned to swim.” The lift of his eyebrows and hesitant lilt in his voice communicated its personal significance. “It was my first swim team too. I was here every summer morning when I was little. And when Mom went back to work full-time and needed us in all-day camp, the swim director invented some fake junior lifeguard position so I could stay on the team and then spend the afternoons here instead.”

  “They must really like and believe in you.”

  He shuffled his feet at the compliment but didn’t deny it. Progress. “This summer I’ll be old enough to actually lifeguard, once I pass the course.” He was looking through the fence, but I doubted he was seeing the taut gray pool cover, the salt- and leaf-strewn concrete, the stack of picnic tables, or the lifeguard stands that had been lowered to their sides. I wanted to know what it looked like in his mind—when the water sparkled and there were ladders and slides and diving boards, crowds of people laughing and splashing, a line at the boarded-up snack bar, people headed in and out of the locker rooms, towels on the grass. Him in red trunks sitting on one of the stands, sunglasses on, a whistle around his neck.

  New summer plan: invest heavily in sunblock, because I was about to become a poolside groupie.

  “I’ll teach you to swim here,” he said. “We’ll wait till the end of June so the water has a chance to warm up.”

  “Um, no.” My lifeguard fantasy was rapidly fading into panicked images of myself sinking awkwardly in the middle of a group of three-year-olds more adept at floating like a starfish or whatever.

  His laugh was a low rumble as he turned toward me. “Where’s the trust?”

  The question made me pause, because the amount of trust he’d shown me was extraordinary. It made my chest tight as I thought over every secret and fear and flaw he’d laid bare, offered up, and endured. “Fine.”

  He grinned as he stepped closer. “They’ll be lessons before the pool opens or after it closes. You, me. I won’t let you sink—just like you haven’t let me. I would’ve drowned these past couple of weeks if you hadn’t been holding me above water.”

  They were words punctuated with brushes of his lips to my cheeks, my jaw, my ear. Until I could practically feel the future sunburn on my skin and taste chlorine on my lips as I nodded and lowered them to his.

  28

  I floated home with swollen lips and two dozen texts from Rory. Mostly made up of !!!s and emojis, all responding to the one message I’d sent her: I kissed him!

  I was giving myself until eight p.m. to revel—to bask in Ms. Gregoire’s brilliant, brilliant idea to take a break—but then I had to buckle down. Win’s answer about Hero High had raised the stakes but hadn’t given me any clarity.

  Hopefully clarity would come at 7:59.

  But first: family dinner. Pork chops, mashed potatoes, and green beans, served with a side of parental gloating about last night. “You finally put yourself out there and look at all those nice kids who’ve just been waiting to be your friends.”

  I nodded and uh-huh’ed and estimated I needed to sit there for fourteen minutes and clear approximately two-thirds of my plate in order to avoid raising their suspicions. Both tasks felt Herculean—it was hard to tone my smile down from megawatt to sure-I’m-listening. Impossible to actually listen.

  Eventually Mom said, “Okay, Huck, we’ll stop picking on you now,” and prompted Dad to share something about his day.

  “A student fell asleep in my afternoon class.” Dad helped himself to more beans. “Normally, I just let them get their REM on. It was a really good lecture—on aggregate demand—so I figured anyone who wasn’t rapt must’ve truly needed the sleep.”

  Mom nodded as he paused to cut a bite of pork chop, and I grinned into my water glass. They were both dead earnest; they couldn’t imagine a scenario where Dad’s economic lectures would be anything but scintillating.

  “But this boy—Colin—started snoring. At first I thought it was a radiator. Everyone sort of froze and—”

  There was a knock on the door. A banging really. Even though the doorbell was right there, waiting to play “Hello!” from The Book of Mormon when pressed.

  Mom and Dad looked at me. “Maybe one of your friends forgot something last night. Why don’t you go see?”

  I put my napkin over my plate. Regardless of who was at the door—and I was praying to the gods of interruptions and getaways that it was Rory—I was done eating.

  “Curtis?” It was the reverse of our usual pattern: me on their doorstep. Except I usually managed to stand still while waiting, and he was pacing our front porch like Dad right before midnight when he hadn’t met his step count goal.

  “We need to talk.”

  I nodded and called over my shoulder, “It’s Curtis—official Knight Light stuff.”

  “Does he want any dinner?” Mom asked.

  “Or to come in and tell us about his brother?” added Dad.

  “Another time, Mr. and Mrs. Baker,” Curtis called before yanking me onto the porch and shutting the door.

  Our porch wasn’t small—it ran the length of the house—but the only place to sit was a white wooden swing. It could technically fit two, but this didn’t feel like the setup for a cozy, swinging conversation—and with Curtis as fidgety as he currently was, he’d probably flip us over.

  “Are you sure?” Curtis abruptly stopped pacing and pointed a finger at me. “Are you really sure that Win’s not behind the page?”

  If he hadn’t looked so hurt, I would’ve hit him. But thank the gods of neural pathways and reaction times that instead of a fi
st, I formed a response. “I’m absolutely, fundamentally positive. Why? What happened?”

  He groaned, cupping his face in both hands.

  I grabbed a wrist and pulled it down so I could see his expression. “Tell me you didn’t tell him you were doubting.”

  “No.” Curtis pulled away to pace again. “At least I didn’t screw that up. But there’s a new post.”

  “Hang on.” I grabbed my phone and pulled up the site. “Give me context.”

  “Win and I got in a fight at dinner. A real one, not just, you know, our usual passive-aggressive sniping.” He sighed. “I thought we were past the whole ‘anything I do is to make you look bad’ mind-set, but my parents brought up how there’s going to be this stupid thing at Convocation this Friday. It’s a congrats-on-the-Avery slash good-luck-at-the-international-science-fair hoopla.”

  “And Win said something snarky?”

  “No. My parents want the whole family to come—Win refused.”

  “Can you really blame him?” I asked. “You’re being honored by the school the same week he expects it to reject him.”

  “Can you blame me for wanting him there?” He tugged his hair. “This is a big deal for me.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You’re both wrong. Finish the story.”

  Curtis shrugged. “Then we fought—though nothing we said to each other was as bad as that—”

  He nodded at my phone and I looked down at the post: Is there a word for when your peak is the high school science fair and the rest of your life will be a disappointment? Maybe in German? #MeinBrotherCheated #HeroHighCheaters

  I sucked in a breath. “Who was there during the fight?”

  “My parents. Win. Wink. Reese.”

  “When did it go up?” I could see the timestamp, but I meant in relation to the rest.

  “Reese left almost as soon as we got shouty, and Wink went to hide in her room. Win stormed off a few minutes later. I stayed at the table because we can’t both sulk in a shared room. I still wasn’t thinking it was that big a deal, so I was making jokes about needing hundreds of cupcakes to demo the project for all of Hero High.” His words and feet had been racing, but both slowed to a crawl. “Then Lance called. He’s been watching the page since the post on him. I saw it, and I came straight here.”

  I pressed my lips together, dreading the question I was going to ask, because I already knew the answer, knew what it meant I would have to do. “So Win doesn’t even know?”

  “If you’re sure he didn’t post it? Then no. Not unless Wink told him, and I seriously doubt it. She was whining on the phone to Reese when I left.”

  I sighed. Looked like my break was ending early. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  29

  “Go away, Wink. I don’t want to talk about it.” Win didn’t look up from his math notebook when I knocked on his bedroom door. Not that he appeared to be doing homework. He was etching dark Xs down the margin of his page. They were probably just angry doodles—but the visual, like he was marking problems wrong before even trying them, hit a little too close to home.

  “I’m not Wink.”

  His chin shot up and his eyes lightened. “Oh, hey.” His gazed dropped to my mouth, his own lips curling. “Miss me al—” But then he read something on my expression and narrowed his eyes. “No. I thought we agreed we weren’t doing this four-day pause.”

  “That’s not why I’m here.” I stifled a groan of regret, because I didn’t want to mix the guy who’d spent an hour kissing him with the guy who gave him bad news. But I was both those people, and separating them felt impossible.

  “iLive?” His posture stiffened, but his voice was deliberately disinterested as he drummed the eraser end of his pencil on his notebook. “Who did I piss off this time?”

  Yeah, I should’ve guessed he’d take the transition even worse than me. “Your brother.”

  His mouth gaped, but I shoved my phone at him before he could ask. It was only a two-line post, but it took him fifteen increasingly shallow breaths to look up. And when he did, there was a weariness in his eyes that made my chest hurt. “What now?”

  “This post went up within fifteen minutes of your fight with Curtis. Whoever is doing this knew about that.” I watched his face bunch then panic as he came to the first logical conclusion. “It’s not Reese.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Reese knew we knew the page was fake; if she’d been savvy enough to run it for months, there was no way she’d give herself away like this. Plus, her reaction when I told her about the page had exonerated her forever. I gave him the same answer I’d given Curtis when he asked about Win. “Positive.”

  He stared past me to his door, like he was looking through it to the hall and bedroom across. The color drained from his face. His inhale was a marathon, and the exhale sounded like he was pushing against the weight of the world. “I . . . I have to tell you something.”

  I put a hand on his dresser, because while other people might claim Spidey sense, my Sherlock sense was tingling, alerting me that I’d need to brace myself. I looked at the slump of his shoulders, the set of his jaw. I wished I was wrong about what he was going to say; I knew I wasn’t. “I’m listening.”

  “I did the post about Curtis. The other ones too. And the emails.” He still wouldn’t look at me, but I could see a sheen on his eyes, or maybe it was on mine, because the whole world had gone distorted. He turned away with a muffled “I’m so sorry.”

  “Stop.” I pressed a hand to my chest for emphasis and to counteract the pain blooming there. “Just stop.”

  Old habits were hard to break. He may have promised to be my lifeguard today, but he had years of experience saving someone else. Even when she didn’t need saving.

  “Can you say something?” he begged. “You can’t really be surprised. This is me we’re talking about.” His hands were tight fists, and I remembered the morning they’d been split, how he’d winced each time the cleaners got in his raw cuts. This stung more. “This is what I do: I screw up. You’ve got so much evidence of it—”

  “You don’t get to dictate my opinion of you.” My voice was low—more like a growl—but it got louder as I continued. “You don’t get a say in how I feel about you. Or to take away all the kind things I’ve observed you doing. And the fact that you’re sitting there trying to think of a way to put yourself down breaks my heart.”

  “Huck—”

  I shook my head, ignoring the wetness that was gathering in the corner of my eyes. “I’m not going to stand here and pretend you’re not lying. I quit. I’m done.”

  It was the dishonesty that hurt the most. I would rather he had done it than have him tell me this lie. Like I wouldn’t see through it. Like I hadn’t been there to gauge his first shocked reaction to that page, or been beside him while he processed the ramifications. Like I didn’t know his pattern of sacrificing himself for his sister. Like I hadn’t spent the past two weeks reassuring him I believed his innocence and trying to prove it.

  “Huck . . .” But he didn’t follow my name with an explanation, an apology, or anything true. Except maybe that was the deepest truth: that like his voice, he was broken and all regrets.

  It hurt to turn my back on him and face his door with its growth-chart markings. I didn’t want to remember how tall Win was on his fifth birthday and how tall he was the day he kissed then gutted me. “I talked to Ms. Gregoire about your application.” I hadn’t had a chance to tell him this; we’d been too busy kissing. “She says the biggest obstacle you’re facing with the admissions committee is that they don’t believe you want to attend. That you spent your interviews acting like you don’t. So the thing standing in your way is . . . you.”

  “What else is new?”

  I ignored him. “It’s you not sticking up for yourself. For what you want. You need to know that you deserve to go there.” I looked over my shoulder and swallowed against a tightening throat. “You deserve me. You deserve anything you want. You just need to be w
illing to fight for yourself. Because I’m fighting for you. So many people are fighting for you. But we need you to step into the game too.”

  “Were.” Win’s eyebrows challenged me to correct his use of past tense. “You were fighting for me. But were you ever interested in me as more than a problem to solve?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I raised my hand to lips that’d so recently been touching his.

  “You didn’t have to save me to date me.” Win half rose, then froze—maybe realizing this was a conversation we should’ve had weeks ago. The conversation we should’ve had instead of me throwing up boundaries and roadblocks to us getting together. “I didn’t like you because you were trying to solve this. I wouldn’t have stopped liking you because you couldn’t.”

  “I didn’t like you because you were a puzzle. I like you because you’re you.” I couldn’t use past tense. And maybe he wouldn’t notice, and maybe it didn’t matter, but my heart and my hand were still extended—with caveats. “When you’re ready to tell me why you lied just now, you know where to find me.”

  Then, because I already knew his answer, and knew he’d hold it in and torture himself with the belief, I added a parting gift as I let myself out. “And by the way: Wink didn’t do it.”

  30

  “What the heck, Huck? I vacuum your basement and you don’t even tell me something this major?”

  It was too early for me to handle Mira standing hands-on-hips and glowering. I was too under-caffeinated, and there were too many things wrong with her statement.

  “You asked to vacuum.” I turned to Clara. “It was on the record.” Also, what major thing hadn’t I told?

  Clara winked at me, and Mira’s stern expression cracked into a smile. “Of course I did—your parents have a Dyson. Seriously though: You and Win? It’s a thing?”

  I blinked. She was a very odd girl—I kinda liked it.

  Clara added, “Bancroft told us—but I’m smacking myself for not figuring it out sooner. You guys are perfect.”