by Melissa Grey
“Neither did I,” she said. There was a light in her eyes he’d never really seen before. “I can’t believe I stole a book!”
Chase couldn’t believe it either, but then, he still couldn’t quite believe he’d formed a friendship with Rebecca “Inevitable Valedictorian” Johnson at all, so he supposed stranger things had happened.
“I didn’t have time to go through it,” Bex said, “but I thought maybe …”
She hefted her backpack onto her shoulder again. It looked at least twice as heavy as Chase’s. Maybe three times as heavy. He thought about offering to carry it for her, but Bex didn’t seem like the type of girl who’d be into that.
“Maybe what?” Chase prompted, when she let the silence hang too long.
“We could try going over it at my place? You know, if you want. I mean, if you don’t, that’s cool.”
Chase smiled at Bex as he watched her fingers nervously dance over the strap of her backpack. Not smiling at her would have involved a Herculean effort and he wasn’t interested in resisting the urge. It was a nice urge, so he gave in to it.
He leaned against his locker. “Don’t you have a million things to do after school? Like clarinet practice or Model UN or, I don’t know, performing open-heart surgery?”
“Okay, first of all,” Bex said, “I play the flute.”
“Dorky woodwind instrument. Tomayto, tomahto.”
“Hilarious.” Bex glanced at her watch, her brow pinching as she looked at her rating. Her face always did that when she checked her number. Chase wasn’t sure why. Hers was miles beyond most Maplethorpe students, but she never seemed pleased about it. Chase would have donated all his unnecessary organs and at least half of the necessary ones to crack 90. “I skipped out on the Mathletes today, and they’re not happy about it.”
“Can’t please ’em all,” Chase said. “And yeah, we can go to your place.”
Better hers than his.
“And on the way,” he added, “how about we stop by Lucky’s and get some burgers and shakes?”
He’d pinched enough money from his father’s wallet to pay this time.
The frown fled Bex’s expression at the mention of empty calories and copious sugar. “Yeah,” she said. “That’d be nice. Let’s go.”
* * *
And that was how Chase found himself sitting on a rooftop in the more affluent section of Jackson Hills, quite literally on the other side of the tracks from where he lived. It was too dark to see the railroad tracks, but he could imagine the undulating line that cut across the landscape, dividing the haves from the have-nots. The highly rated and the poor. He’d dreamed of crossing that line as a child and now he had. Just not in the way he thought he would.
“Oh my god.” Bex’s voice pulled him from his thoughts, which was honestly for the best. “Look at this thing. It’s the size of my head.”
The thing was a cheeseburger, and Bex’s assessment was only a mild exaggeration. The Lucky Penny didn’t make small cheeseburgers. Small cheeseburgers were for the weak. They made monsters.
“I don’t remember the last time I ate a cheeseburger.” Bex unwrapped hers so delicately that Chase wanted to die a little bit. She seemed like the kind of person who hated being called adorable, so he kept his thoughts to himself.
Fast food comprised a percentage of Chase’s diet that was unhealthy at best and potentially catastrophic at worst. He compensated by working out, but he had a feeling that one day the trans fats or cholesterol or whatever it was in fast food that made it so delicious would catch up to him. Then he’d develop the Donovan paunch his father boasted. But burgers and fries were an efficient way of getting enough calories into his system on the nights when his father couldn’t be bothered to cook. Which was most nights. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, though. Chase loved a generous serving of meat, cheese, and bread.
“A life lived without cheeseburgers,” Chase said, “isn’t a life lived to its fullest.”
He nodded to the book Bex had brought up along with their feast. There was a very real possibility someone was going to smear grease all over it, but surprisingly Bex didn’t seem to mind.
“So, any idea why the Jester stole that quote from that book?”
Bex nodded as she chewed a dainty bite of her burger. She swallowed, then said, “Yeah. It’s all about the rights of the people and trying to build a fair and free society. I think it’s safe to say our good friend the Jester doesn’t think ours fits that description.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Chase said. He held up his wrist and pointed to the smartwatch. The display was dimmed so he didn’t have to see his rating. “Not when these things call the shots.”
“What I want to know is why that quote specifically.” Bex wiped her hands on a napkin, picked up the book, and flipped through the pages. “Gimme a light?”
Chase picked up his phone and switched on the flashlight, illuminating the pages for her. “Do you actually remember what page it’s from?”
“It’s how the book starts,” Bex said as she skimmed the text. “Just gotta get past the front matter … people love adding a lengthy foreword to things like this. And it’s all in French so …” She stopped, her fingers tracing the lines of a page as she silently mouthed words as she read. “Got it.”
“Man, you’re good.”
“I try.”
Bex pointed to the quote on the page. “This is it, but … wait.” She put her hands on his and directed the flashlight to the top of the page.
Someone had scribbled a series of numbers in the margins.
Chase leaned closer to get a better look. “Are those GPS coordinates?”
“I think so.” Bex pulled her phone from her pocket and punched the numbers into her maps app. She frowned when she saw the location.
“So? Where is it?”
“Maplethorpe,” Bex said. “Literally, our school.”
She held out her phone as if he needed extra convincing. He didn’t.
“That’s … odd?” And unsatisfying. “What good is a scavenger hunt that sends you right back to the same place you found the clue?”
“I don’t know.” Bex angrily shoved an onion ring into her mouth. Even her chewing seemed displeased.
“Can I take a look at it?” Chase asked, holding his hand out for the book.
Bex shrugged. “Be my guest.”
Chase held his own flashlight as he flipped through the pages, while Bex grumpily ate her burger beside him. Nothing else was written in the margins on any other page. No words were underlined, no page numbers circled. Nothing. He flipped to the last page of the book. There was a paper pocket affixed to the back cover, with a library checkout card inside.
“Huh. Haven’t seen one of these in ages.” Chase slipped the card out of the sleeve and turned it over. “Bex.”
She grunted something that sounded like “Yes?” around a mouthful of burger.
He held up the card, one finger pointing to the date stamped at the top.
Bex leaned in, squinting to read it in the harsh glare of the phone light. When she realized why he’d pointed it out, her eyes went wide.
“This book hasn’t been checked out in ages, if the dust is anything to go by,” Chase said. “But this date is in the future. A week after Founder’s Day. And I’m pretty sure the four zeroes after it mean midnight. Military time.”
Bex swallowed what had to be a painful lump of cheeseburger. “It has to be a sign! Coordinates! And a date! We go there on this date! At this time!”
“Yes. Yes, we absolutely will. We’re doing this.” It felt right. Chase couldn’t fight the goofy grin on his face. He didn’t really want to. But there was something else, something that didn’t quite fit. “Wait … how does this relate to the other message? The one I got?”
Bex fumbled for her tablet. “I wrote it down,” she said. “And I think I figured it out.”
“When?”
“During calculus.” She tapped the screen a few times,
and when she’d found her notes, she held them out proudly.
“ ‘On the day of the prophet false,’ ” she recited. “That’s gotta be Founder’s Day. I wasn’t sure, but after the stunt with the statue of John Maplethorpe and the thing about the ratings not being real—being false—it adds up.”
“ ‘One mustn’t dance a forbidden waltz,’ ” Chase read. “The dance. The Founder’s Day Dance. Is it telling us not to go?”
Bex nodded. Her excitement was contagious. “Yeah. It wants us to go somewhere else while everyone else is at the dance.”
“Okay, but where?”
“A copper found,” Bex said. “A copper found.”
Chase puzzled over the words for a moment before it dawned on him. “The Lucky Penny.”
“Oh my god, yes,” Bex said. “I don’t know what a fortune told means, but I can guess the last line.”
“ ‘All beside a box of gold,’ ” Chase said. “The jukebox.”
“The only one with the gold trim,” Bex confirmed.
“So, on the day of the Founder’s Day Dance we’re supposed to go to Lucky’s, and hang out at the booth with the gold jukebox?”
“Sounds like it,” Bex said.
“Okay …” Chase stole one of Bex’s onion rings. She didn’t seem to mind. “I’m down with that, but what do we do until then?”
Bex looked at him, blinking against the light of his phone. He turned it off. It took a moment for his eyes to readjust to the darkness. Bex’s soft laugh came out of the gloaming.
“I have no idea,” she said. “Guess we could actually get some studying in.”
“Oh,” Chase said. “Studying. I was sort of hoping you’d forgotten about that.”
Bex barked out a short laugh. “I never forget about studying.”
Chase flicked a renegade crumb off his shirt. “Though to be honest, I don’t even know why I bother. I’m never gonna do well enough to keep my scholarship.”
Bex angled herself to look straight at him. “Don’t say that. You’re going to pull through.”
“But how can you be so sure?”
“Because failure’s not an option.” The conviction in her voice was almost enough to convince Chase. Almost, but not quite. “That’s like my mantra. And it’s a lot less soul-crushing when I apply it to helping someone else achieve something.”
“Instead of you trying to be perfect all the time?” Chase asked.
Bex plucked a fry out of the greasy paper bag between them. “Bingo. So long as you’re cool with a little hard work, everything’s going to be okay. I can feel it in my bones.”
“Ah, yes. The bones,” said Chase. “They’re never wrong.”
Bex offered him one of her fries. She’d gotten the curly kind while he’d opted for the standard straight-cut. “Will you laugh at me if I attempt a sports analogy?”
“Probably … but go on.”
That earned a wisp of a smile from Bex. Pleased, Chase stole another of her curly fries. She didn’t protest.
“Okay, so,” Bex began. “Baseball’s always struck me as a sport rooted in strategy. It’s not just about who runs the fastest or throws the hardest or hits the ball the farthest, though those things are important, right?”
Chase nodded. “Yeah. All that stuff is great, but it’s not worth much if you don’t have a good strategy to back it up.”
“Right, exactly.” Bex, Chase observed, started talking with her hands when she was excited about something. He found it endearing. “So our study time is a lot like baseball. You and I are going to come up with strategies to help you score that game-winning touchdown.”
Chase nearly choked to death on a curly fry. “Oh man. You were doing so well, but you just couldn’t stick the landing, could you?”
“Mocking my failed sports analogy with one of your own.” Now it was Bex stealing Chase’s french fries. “Devious.”
As he chewed, he mulled over Bex’s scattered metaphor.
“You know … that does actually make a lot of sense. Even if you did veer into my least favorite sport at the end.”
“What, football?” Bex asked. “Wasn’t your dad on the Maplethorpe team like a million years ago?”
“He was,” Chase replied, “but how did you know that?”
“There’s a gigantic silver football with ‘Chase Donovan’ stamped on it in the trophy case I walk by every day to get to my locker. And since it’s clearly older than you are, I figured it must be a relative. It’s always bugged me that the athletics department gets those huge awards while the academic achievements get teeny tiny ribbons at the end of the year.”
“Now that you mention it, that does kind of stink,” Chase said. “But yeah, football was my dad’s thing. Baseball’s mine.”
“You didn’t want to follow in his footsteps?” Bex asked. It was an innocent question, but it made that sick feeling in his stomach swell.
“When I was little, I did … but not so much anymore.”
Bex was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, as though she knew she was treading on fragile ground. “What happened?”
The direction the conversation was taking made something twist deep in Chase’s gut. It was the same sense of foreboding he always felt when the subject of his home life came up with friends or their parents. Usually he lied, to cover up his father’s bad behavior. Chase wasn’t sure who those lies were meant to protect. His father or himself.
But Bex’s rooftop had the feeling of a sacred place. There was no one to eavesdrop on their conversation. Anything Chase said was between him, Bex, and the stars.
“My mom left about six years ago. My dad changed after that. He started drinking. Sometimes, he got violent.”
“Chase …” The tenderness in Bex’s voice made his skin itchy all over.
He shrugged, attempting to dislodge that feeling. “But yeah … football reminds me of him. It’s bad enough we share a first name. I picked baseball because I wanted something that was just mine.”
He tried to lighten his voice at the end, but the frown forming on Bex’s face told him he’d failed miserably.
She reached for him. Chase went still. When her fingers brushed the cut on his cheek, he flinched. She pulled her hand back, as if worried she’d caused him actual pain.
“Did he do that to you?”
Chase looked away from her. He had to. Her voice and her touch and everything about her in that moment was so gentle. Too gentle. He didn’t know what to do with it.
A part of him felt good to get that off his chest. He’d never told anyone about his father, not even his closest friends on the team. But another part was screaming at him to clam back up. It was too much, too soon, in what he wasn’t even sure was a real friendship. He felt scrubbed raw. Vulnerable. It wasn’t a nice feeling at all. His heart was thudding wildly in his chest. He felt like some kind of prey animal, scampering to safety in the woods. He’d never opened himself up like that before. He didn’t hate the way it felt, but it was a new and terrifying experience all the same.
“Look, it’s fine,” he told Bex, even though it clearly wasn’t. “I just have to stick it out until graduation, then I’m out of that house for good.”
“Chase, that’s not okay. You shouldn’t have to live like that.”
How easy it must be for her to say that. Her pressure cooker of a life may not have been emotionally ideal, but at least she was safe.
“I shouldn’t have to, but I do. It is what it is, okay? Can we drop it?” And then, because she didn’t deserve to be snapped at like that, Chase added, “Please?”
Bex worried her bottom lip between her teeth for an interminable moment. Then she nodded.
Silence stretched between them as they finished their meal.
Chase tilted his head up toward the stars. They were far enough from the lights of downtown Jackson Hills that he could actually pick out half-remembered constellations. His first-grade teacher, Ms. Redding, had pinned a large star map
to the wall of their classroom, and she’d told them stories to go with the connect-the-dot constellations drawn on it. He’d liked her. She was patient when he stumbled over passages in even the simplest of chapter books. And she never mentioned the Rating System in class once. She’d only taught at Jackson Hills Elementary for a year. He never saw Ms. Redding after that, and a part of him always wondered what had become of her.
“Sometimes,” Bex said, her voice soft and buttery smooth in the darkness, “when things get to be too much, I come up here.”
Chase pulled his gaze from the stars to settle it on her.
“It’s quiet,” she continued. “And if you just look up, you can’t really see anything else. It’s easy to forget that there’s a whole world out there.”
“What are you trying to forget?” Chase asked.
“How stressed I am, mostly.”
He nodded. He understood that. But it seemed like so much of Bex’s stress was self-inflicted. “Why do you work so hard?”
Bex shrugged. “To have a better life, I guess.”
Chase spread his arms wide. The suburban neighborhood below glittered with the soft lights of people living their lives inside their stately homes. “Better than this? Man, you really won’t be satisfied until you take over the world, will you?”
Bex smiled, but it was the barest whisper of one.
“I don’t know.” Her voice held the air of a confession. “I guess I never really thought about why. I just did things because they were the things you were supposed to do.”
“But what about the things you want to do?” Chase asked. It seemed to him such an obvious question, but he was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t as obvious to Bex. Her life was so different from his own. Greatness was expected of them both but in very different ways. Chase had to be good at one thing. Bex had to be good at everything. Just the thought of trying to master all the skills she did made his stomach twist in anxiety.
Again, she shrugged. “I never really thought about that either. I’ve always just known that I was going to be a doctor, like my mom. Or a scientist, like my dad. Getting to choose which one almost felt like freedom. But now … I don’t know. I want to do lots of things. I want to see all the things outside Jackson Hills.”
