It wasn’t a lie. Isaiah had plenty of interests. But even Rayevich wouldn’t let him major in whining, tattling, or disgusting food combinations.
“Ever’s a twin,” Leigh explained to Kate and Perla. “Her brother is on Team Three.”
“You both got in?” Kate asked. She studied my face with a sudden curiosity. “Dizygotic twins only share fifty percent of their genes. What’s the discrepancy between your IQs?”
I shrank back from her intense stare. I didn’t like knowing that she was picturing my brain. “I don’t know. It’s not like we got the results back from the admissions test.”
Perla tossed her scissors aside with a clatter that made Leigh and Kate jump. “Well, this is great. If Ever takes it easy on her twin, we’ll never make it to the final round.”
“We aren’t those kind of twins.” I didn’t know much about being a twin, but I knew that there was no way I would ever take a dive for Isaiah.
“Oh yeah?” she sneered. “What are you going to do if only one of you gets the scholarship?”
Throw a parade from here all the way back to Sacramento? Buy his plane ticket to the academy?
“I’ll go to school here and he won’t,” I said.
“Entering the Melee is a shortcut,” Leigh said. “It’s not the only way to get in. Isaiah could always apply in the fall.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” I muttered.
“Is that a Firefly?” asked a voice above me.
I tilted my head back and saw the Perfect Nerd Girl staring down at my poster. Her eyes were pale to the point of being nearly reflective. Combined with her supremely fake red hair, the overall effect verged on terrifying.
“‘Love keeps her in the air,’” I said, unable to stop the quote from tumbling out. I didn’t know if I wanted her to like me or if I just wanted to stop her before she started gatekeeping. A lot of old-school Joss Whedon fans thought that anyone who couldn’t talk about the vampire shows didn’t deserve to be a fan of the rest of the Whedonverse. Like just enjoying something wasn’t enough to be considered a fan.
Besides, I might not have known anything about Buffy or whatever, but I could talk about Titan A.E. or Alien Resurrection for hours.
The Perfect Nerd Girl smiled. Not enough to show teeth, but it took some of the edge off of her face as she said, “And the glitter makes her gorram fancy.” She nodded to the other girls. “I’m here to take your water cup. We need to pack up before dinner. And Meg is…” She glanced over her shoulder at Meg, who was deep into making her banner. “Otherwise occupied.”
Kate looked up, the puff paint tube poised between her thumb and forefinger. “You went to the Messina, right?”
The Perfect Nerd Girl twitched a shrug. “All four years.”
“What’s the incentive for you to come back to be counselors?” Kate asked.
“Yeah,” Perla jumped in. “Don’t you guys have jobs and apartments and lives?”
The Perfect Nerd Girl pressed her lips together, locking back whatever had first leaped to the tip of her tongue. She tried again, measuring the words. “We get class credits and free housing. Not paying rent for two months is a definite bonus. And we get to see each other again. We all spread out for college.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “But mostly we all owed a favor that got called in. The proverbial ‘offer you can’t refuse.’”
“Then why didn’t Cornell’s girlfriend come, too?” I asked.
Her eyes locked in on my face. I had to force myself not to flinch away. “Because she’s much, much smarter than the rest of us.”
She bent down and took the water cup before moving on to the next group.
“Do you think the Messina teaches all of their students how to be that vague?” I asked no one in particular.
“Okay, everybody,” Meg crowed, bouncing to her feet at the front of the room. “It’s time to decorate. But the rule is, no one can decorate their own room or the room of anyone on their team! Go introduce yourself to a new Onward lady and get her room key!”
“No,” Perla said, mashing her valentine heart to her poster. “I think they’re all dicks.”
8
While lights-out was set, unshakably, for ten thirty, there wasn’t a real “lights-on.” The sun threw a wrench into the idea of controlling when people could and couldn’t be awake. As I stretched on the cement outside of the residence hall, I considered that, if I’d bothered asking one of the RAs, there were probably rules about when we were officially allowed to wander campus.
But that was why I hadn’t asked.
After hours of falling in and out of consciousness on my new tiny mattress and scratchy sheets, it was bliss to be out under the bruise-purple sky. The air was so cold that it felt solid as it scraped through my sinuses and pressed against my cheeks.
I’d left my headphones in the dorm. The only music I wanted this morning was the patter of my own feet on the concrete.
Hours away from breakfast, I stopped worrying about getting lost. Losing myself on campus was the first step to knowing where everything was. I passed the library and made a sharp turn, heading straight toward a cluster of buildings and the arboretum that spread across the back of the campus.
As I approached a squat brick building with a sign that read “LeRoy Hall,” there was a clomping sound in the grass behind me, and a wheeze, before, “El, wait up!”
I closed my eyes but didn’t slow down. Not my name. Not my problem.
“You’re the worst twin in the world, you know,” Isaiah gasped. From the sound of his footfalls, he was stumbling behind me. He must have been trying to run in skate shoes. Too slippery.
“I believe it,” I said, refusing to look behind me. “Considering I was born to an entirely different woman from an entirely separate egg over a year before you.”
In my peripheral vision I could see a hint of dreadlocks. I turned my head a fraction and saw my cousin gasping for air beside me. I was moderately surprised to see that he didn’t sweat ranch dressing.
“I can see why you’re trying to get out of the academy,” I said. “You’re in terrible shape. BMT would kill you.”
“I have asthma,” he panted. “And I had to catch up with you.”
Against my better judgment, I slowed—just a little. “Had to?”
“I figured you wouldn’t want to talk about our, you know, secrets in front of your team.”
“Don’t get all winky-nudgy with me. The secret that we aren’t really twins is entirely your doing, remember? I really don’t care what people think.”
“You don’t care if people find out that your name is Elliot Gabaroche and you ran away from home to win a scholarship to a school your parents would never let you attend?”
“Is this the part where you start legitimately blackmailing me?”
He snorted. “You don’t have anything I want.”
“How did you know that I would be up this early?”
“I saw you stretching outside of the dorms and followed you out.”
“Oh, good. I was afraid the answer was going to be something creepy.”
“It’s not creepy. I thought we should clarify our story.”
I lengthened my stride again. “You can clarify as long as you can keep up.”
His face tightened into pained concentration as his arms flapped wildly. “I assume you’ve been telling people that you’re from Sacramento?”
“You mean because that’s where I live?”
He rolled his eyes grandly, lids quivering and tongue lolling. If I also looked like a demented ventriloquist dummy when I did that, I’d have to stop immediately.
“Are you going to answer every question with a question?” he asked. “Because eventually my lungs will start to spasm. I can already feel my mucus thickening…”
“Don’t talk to me about your mucus,” I begged. While the dining hall’s food wasn’t going to win any awards, I did have to eat it at some point after the sun was fully risen. “Yes,
I have told people that I’m from Sacramento.”
“That’s fine,” he said, apparently no longer in danger of having a full asthma attack. “So, we live in Sacramento and go to your high school—”
“And you never skipped a grade because apparently you’re my age now.”
“Huh.” He frowned at a cement bench as we passed it. “I hadn’t thought about that. That sucks. It’s really rare for people to skip a grade.”
“Uh-huh. Now how will the rest of genius camp know how smart you are?”
He wasn’t listening. He swatted one of his bouncing dreads away from his face. “I guess we can keep your parents. Does your stepmom have to be white?”
I curled my lip at him. “What do you mean? She is white.”
“It raises a lot of questions.”
“No. It raises literally zero questions.”
“Okay, fine. So, we have a white stepmom—”
“You could also call her Beth. That’s her name.”
“—and a half brother.”
I clenched my teeth together. I hated the term half brother. I hadn’t found out about it until after Ethan was already in preschool. No one ever explained to me that there was a difference, that I was supposed to have some kind of lesser relationship with him because we had separate moms.
“What’s his name?” Isaiah continued in a huff. “Evan?”
“Ethan,” I snapped. The day he was born, I’d climbed up on Beth’s hospital bed and petted his conical bald head. I’d apologized that I got to share Dad’s name and he didn’t. “And keep his name out of your mouth.”
“Don’t bite my head off. I’ve never met him. How old is he?”
“He’s nine. Just … forget about it. We don’t have to have a little brother.” I didn’t like the idea of sharing Ethan, even a fictional version of him. Isaiah would probably tell everyone that he was Ethan’s favorite twin, or make him into a Tiny Tim character to get sympathy from his team.
The sidewalk curved left into a man-made forest. I wondered if talking to Isaiah had distracted me from the sign or if the university assumed that everyone on campus would be smart enough to figure out that they were in the arboretum by the lack of buildings and increase of arbor. The path wound between trees and bright bursts of flowers as colorful as the sunrise we could no longer see through the thick branches that twisted together into a twiggy ceiling.
If Isaiah was moved by the beauty of our surroundings, he buried it in a sniff. “How did you hear about the Melee?”
“In real life or in your fantasy world where we’re twins?”
“In real life,” he said, unperturbed.
“I got an admissions packet so that I could look through the brochure not on my computer. There was a flyer included about the Melee. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, but … I don’t know. I started thinking about it more and more.” Whenever my mom pointed out that I didn’t have much longer left at home. Or when my dad made a snide comment about the air force over dinner. When my future started to feel too much like the final event in the Mom versus Dad championship fight, like my choice of career would decide who got to be the good parent.
“And then I was signing up to take the admissions test,” I finished. I hazarded a look at Isaiah. “What about you?”
“There was an article about it in Young Mensan Magazine.”
I tried to be shocked that (a) there was a Young Mensan Magazine and that (b) Isaiah was a subscriber, but it checked out as his brand of uncool and elitist. Aunt Bobbie had always padded out Isaiah’s ego with useless accessories, as though his IQ wouldn’t count unless it was tangibly better than other people’s. Like when we were kids and he got all of the Smithsonian science experiment kits. Or when Bobbie had decided to move off the air force base so that Isaiah could be closer to his chichi charter school.
I’d never asked how Sid had felt about her family moving off base while she was at the academy. Or how Uncle Marcus felt, coming back from deployment to a new home. Not that he came back very often. Lawrences weren’t great at being tied to anything but the military.
Up ahead, the path forked. At the point of divergence, there was a tall wooden fingerpost with multiple arrows pointing in all directions—like the signage in the 100 Aker Wood, but instead of guiding toward Eeyore’s house or Pooh Corner, there was Fort Farm, Community Garden, Mud Trail, and South Parking Lot.
“Fort Farm,” Isaiah read. “What’s with all the alliteration here?”
I shoved the sweat from my forehead back into my hair and took the right branch of the road. Isaiah made a gurgling sound before his frictionless shoe soles started scraping behind me again.
“What if we jog instead of running full out?” he asked. “It’s hard to talk and run.”
“Aren’t we done talking? Because I feel done.”
“A couple more things,” he said. There was a rustle of paper. I turned in time to see him pulling a piece of lined paper out of his back pocket. He narrowed his eyes at me before I could say anything. “It’d be suspicious if our stories didn’t line up. I don’t want to get caught and be sent home, do you?”
I resisted the urge to groan.
It turned out that the paper was full of questions, most of them inane. Did we share a bedroom? No. Whose bedroom was bigger? Neither. Beth used her real estate prowess to find us a house with bedrooms with exactly the same square footage. Was I allergic to any foods? Kiwis. What was our high school mascot? Warriors. Could I pretend not to know how to drive, since it’d be weird if I knew and he didn’t? No problem. Left my license at home anyway.
“What the hell is that?” Isaiah blurted as we hit the edge of the arboretum. The trees abruptly stopped and the world ahead of us was flat and green, except for a dozen small wooden structures sprouting out of the ground.
“Fort Farm,” I said. “They meant it literally.”
Each building was built out of five wooden pallets—the kind usually seen on forklifts at Costco. With sharply pointed roofs and only two walls, they looked like house skeletons. Except for one that had been draped in navy blue sheets. A literal blanket fort in the middle of a field.
The sheets rustled. Isaiah took a jump backwards, as though expecting a wild animal to come charging out. Instead, there was red bedhead, an unfolding of limbs, and then the Perfect Nerd Girl standing in an R2-D2 nightshirt that skimmed the top of her knees. On brand, even at sunrise.
She squinted her reflective eyes at us and yawned. “Ever, right? From Meg’s team?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Uh, hi.” Isaiah coughed and I jerked my head at him. “This is my brother. We were out for a jog.”
“Mm,” the Perfect Nerd Girl grunted, her mouth set into a deep frown. “Jog elsewhere.”
“Sure thing,” Isaiah said. He spun on his heel and put on speed for the first time, tearing back the way we came.
I thought I heard voices behind me as I followed him, but when I glanced over my shoulder the counselor was gone and the sheets were still.
“God,” Isaiah whispered as we passed the directional sign again. “Can you imagine how much shit we’d be in if that RA had heard us talking about not being related? We almost outed ourselves.”
“Yeah, we really lucked out there. I guess we’ll have to stop talking about it forever.”
I wondered if anyone else knew that one of our resident advisers had forsaken her post on our floor. And—if no one else knew—what would it mean that I did?
9
The first day of classes loomed like an electrical storm over the cafeteria. Every table seemed to be filled with equal parts excitement and terror. And supreme disappointment in the breakfast options.
I should have remembered, said Oscar Wilde, that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals.
“What’s our first lecture today?” I asked, looking up from the oil slick that was my plate. The sausages were cold in the middle. I dipped one in lukewarm maple syrup, hoping tha
t the temperature would balance out.
It didn’t.
“Literature with Hari,” Leigh said. “Then philosophy, lunch, art history, and essay prep.”
Galen snorted. “How can we have an entire class on essays? Didn’t we all prove we could write one when we got in?”
“It’ll be fine,” Brandon said, balancing his tray under his nose as he settled onto the bench between Galen and Hunter. “Ben’s our essay tutor. It’ll probably be a study hall.”
I had hoped it was the whole mistaken-for-a-ghost thing that had made Brandon so interesting yesterday, but there was something about him that immediately made my skin feel too tight. I couldn’t stop myself from examining him—his hair wet around his ears and neck, his voice extra woolly from sleepiness. It made me feel hot and gangly and like maybe Oregon didn’t have enough oxygen.
“Who’s Ben?” Kate asked.
“Third-floor resident adviser,” Leigh said. “Messina graduate, currently attending the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in political science.” She winced around at seven blank stares. “What? I’m the only person who read through the binder?”
“You can just say UC Berkeley,” I said.
“Noted,” she chirped. And I was positive that she actually had made a mental note. While I’d dressed for the day, she’d started memorizing the brands and properties of the hair products I used. She claimed it kept her brain limber.
“I am dying,” Perla wailed, digging her fingertips into her temples and smooshing the skin forward. “Who do I have to blow for a cup of coffee?”
“That would also be Ben,” Brandon said. “He’s in charge of the kitchen.” Perla glared at him, and he shrank back on the bench as though he could hide behind Jams’s right ear. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be heteronormative. There’s a female counselor on kitchen duty, too. I think her name’s Simone?”
“Simone Freeman, Rayevich rising junior,” Leigh said. She propped herself up on her elbows and leaned toward Perla. “Regardless of your sexual preferences, I would suggest appealing to Simone for coffee. She’s a philosophy major with an emphasis in ethics. You could present a case for the social mores of daily caffeine intake versus the subjugation you feel juice presents to your lifestyle. And I thought I heard her talking about doing a Starbucks run for the counselors.”
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