Not Now, Not Ever

by Lily Anderson

  “Seriously, Fallon,” she said in that singsong that was starting to make me feel like peeling off my fingernails. “If you’re pregnant, you’d better drop out of the Melee. You won’t be able to use the scholarship.”

  The toilet flushed.

  “Fuck off,” gurgled Fallon.

  Perla flicked her eyebrows at me. “I’m in her head now.” She grinned before disappearing behind the curtain again.

  I rinsed my mouth at the sink and couldn’t help but think about how much I would truly relish watching Perla—of everyone—lose the Melee.

  *

  “It was like—bam! Total beast mode!” All of our plates jingled against the table as Hunter slapped his hand down. “I knew that the rest of us were in trouble the second you took off.”

  “You should have heard Meg,” Galen said. He plunged his spoon deep into his bowl and brought up a heap of soggy cereal. “I thought she was going to scream herself hoarse.”

  Jams bobbed his head. “It was a proper show.”

  Perla frowned at him. “I don’t know what’s proper about Meg shouting ‘Kill, kill’ at everyone. If they pulled that shit at Princeton, I promise you there would be lawyers involved.”

  “Proper,” Jams stressed, “as in ‘good.’”

  “Like jolly good,” Leigh added.

  Jams flicked a dismissive wrist. “Only tossers say ‘jolly good.’”

  “Pretty sure only ‘tossers’ say ‘tossers,’” Perla said.

  As Leigh had pointed out as we’d walked out of Mudders Meadow last night, no one at camp would be able to say that Isaiah and I were going to take it easy on each other in the Melee. Throwing him headlong into the amoeba had solidified my place as the camp’s first cutthroat.

  It was strange. I’d never been considered a cutthroat before. As Elliot Gabaroche, I mostly slid under the radar. If anything, I was known for wearing my hair big and having a dude’s name, which led to a lot of horrifically transphobic questions from my less evolved classmates.

  Otherwise, I’d never been truly noteworthy. I’d taken some AP classes, but not enough to be considered one of the smart kids. Thanks to overprotective parents who liked having me on call to babysit, I didn’t play school sports. I had friends on teams, so I could sneak an invite to their more inclusive parties. But there was no corner of Hiram Johnson High that I’d stamped as my own.

  And here I was, less than a week into being Ever Lawrence, and I’d already made a name for myself. Literally and figuratively.

  It’d be nice if we could stop talking about it now, though.

  Hunter pointed his fork at me. “You have to show me some of that kung fu.”

  “It’s parkour,” Brandon mumbled. “Or parcours du combattant. It was developed by the French military.”

  “And I don’t really know much more than the rolls.” I shrugged, staring down at my breakfast. “I could show you some Muay Thai techniques, if you want.” I dipped a sausage in syrup and took a bite before I noticed the silence of my teammates’ shock. If they’d been manga characters, there would have been a fog of question marks hovering over us like a quizzical storm. I swallowed with some effort and waved my fork. “I couldn’t join my school’s cross-country team. I needed an extracurricular. Didn’t anyone else want to be a superhero when they were little?”

  Hunter grinned and slapped the table again. “Beast. Mode.”

  I really hoped that wasn’t a nickname that would stick. I was having a hard enough time answering to Ever.

  “Oh shit,” Galen murmured, craning his neck to look at the counselor’s table. “What now?”

  Rather than their usual huddle of Starbucks cups and whispered conversation, the counselors had cleared their long table. The single speaker that Wendell Cheeseman had used on our first day was being carried over to the picture window by the MIT counselor, who had a mild limp.

  Bryn Mawr climbed on the bench seat, balancing neatly as she held her cell phone to a cordless microphone. The speaker played a tinny series of twanging guitar and mushy synthesizer chords.

  “Balls,” I said as I recognized it.

  “Isn’t this the song from Pitch Perfect?” said someone at a nearby table.

  Bryn Mawr grinned into the crowd. She let the phone fall to her side, where it continued to distantly plead for all of us to remember it.

  “Good morning, campers,” she said. “I told you that you wouldn’t know when these were coming at you. Saturday, March twenty-fourth, nineteen eighty-four. Shermer High School. Shermer, Illinois. Six zero zero six two.” She gestured at the bare table in front of her. “I need a criminal, a princess, a brain, an athlete, and a basket case.”

  “A what?” Jams asked.

  “It’s the goddamn Breakfast Club,” Hunter said.

  “Every contestant will recite the lines of their assigned character,” Bryn Mawr announced, as people started to line up on the sides of the counselors’ table. “You can ask for assistance once. Forget a second line and you will be replaced. Anyone who looks at their phone will be disqualified, including those in line. The camper who can get the farthest into the movie, wins.”

  “Someone’s a big Ready Player One fan,” I muttered, my stomach sinking. So much for my head start on the fifth scholarship. There was no chance I’d retained enough of The Breakfast Club to make it through a single scene, much less to the end.

  “A what fan?” Leigh asked, sticking her thumb in her mouth and biting at her nail with her crooked teeth.

  “Ready Player One,” I repeated, waving her off. “It’s a book. At one point, they have to reenact a movie word for word—”

  “The War Games simulation,” Brandon interrupted, nodding vigorously. “At the first gate. I was thinking the same thing. I love that book. It’s a shame about Armada…”

  I swallowed thickly and gaped at this vision of nerd boy, who picked up my references as I set them down. With his fuzzy bedhead and tremulous smile.

  “I know, right?” I said, forcing a laugh that ended up slightly maniacal. “Why do second books suck so much?”

  “I’m going for it,” Kate said, throwing herself to her feet. Her fists balled at her sides as she stared at the lengthening queue at the counselors’ table. “I sat through the movie three times this week. I think I have a shot.”

  “It’s two hours of people sniveling about their virginities,” Perla said, also climbing off the bench. She brushed by her roommate, her elbow scuffing against Kate’s. “How hard could it be?”

  Kate’s face went chalk white. She closed her eyes. Her nostrils flared. Her anger was almost a separate entity—a hissing, writhing snake winding itself around her extremities, holding her in place and pushing her to strike.

  “Now you have to try,” Hunter said to her. “Because you can’t let Perla win.”

  “Amen,” said Jams.

  “Don’t make us chant for you, Kate.” Galen chuckled. “We’ll do it.”

  Her eyelids flew open. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Kate, Kate,” Galen murmured. He threw a look around the table until the rest of us joined in, whispering, “Kate, Kate, Kate…”

  The color came back to Kate’s face in a rush as she skittered away from us, joining the line a few people behind Perla.

  Leigh bit another of her fingernails. “I knew I should have paid more attention to that stupid movie.”

  “How could you have known that there’d be a quiz?” I asked. “None of us knew.”

  “This whole camp is a quiz,” she huffed. “Apparently.”

  16

  With the second Cheeseman trial ribbon awarded to one of the girls from Lumberjack Beard’s team, and the rest of the morning open for studying, I laced up my running shoes and sprinted out of the residence hall. There were clusters of people spread out in the quad and on the steps of the closed buildings. Most had their faces deep inside their binders, prepping before we were due to report to our team meetings. Others napped in the shade of the trees or tos
sed Frisbees. A solitary white kid was flinging himself around the green, bouncing a hacky sack off of various parts of himself.

  Because how would we know that we were on a college campus if there wasn’t a loner with a hacky sack?

  My feet burned with the aftermath of amoeba tag, but I needed a mental break. I’d been expecting the weekend to be easier than the constant shuffle of classes during the week, but with the addition of the Cheeseman events, the tension had ratcheted up instead. Kate had cried when Hari buzzed her out of The Breakfast Club. The second we’d been excused from the dining hall, Leigh had started quizzing herself aloud on every meal we’d eaten this week, in case it ended up being pertinent.

  When the Melee was over, they’d recover. We would all go back to our normal lives in a few weeks and coast through senior year, fifty geniuses—five of whom would be coming back to Rayevich next fall.

  But that was just it. College wasn’t like high school. You couldn’t drag yourself through the same halls every day, counting down to when you could leave. I’d realized that when I talked to Beth. I’d known for years that this school was where I wanted to be, but I’d never considered that homesickness could be a roadblock.

  You had to leave home to make a home. You couldn’t wait to leave to be yourself.

  I couldn’t let myself start to crumble under the pressure. If I couldn’t hack it for the summer, how could I expect to spend four years here?

  When I was in the fifth grade, Sid finished basic training. She’d always been intense, but her new short hair and official air force ranking doubled her aloofness. After all, I was ten years old and still wearing my hair up in two puff balls that Beth thought made me look like a cartoon mouse. Seeing Sid was like looking into my own future and seeing someone terrifying on the other side. She was everything my mom wanted me to grow up to be.

  Still, as we both sat on the back porch of Grandmother Lawrence’s house, I had been compelled to ask my cousin if boot camp was hard. I guess I had thought that it was harmless chitchat, the sort of obvious question that adults asked to keep you talking when they didn’t have anything to say.

  But Sid had run her tongue over the tip of her canines as she thought about it. Her eyes stared off a thousand yards and then some while her hands held on tight to a sweating bottle of water. When she finally spoke, her voice was low.

  “It’s the worst food and the hardest physical challenges and the shortest, coldest showers. It’s people screaming at you more than you’ve ever been screamed at in your life. And through it all, do you know what you’re wearing?” She had paused, staring me down until I shook my head.

  “Granny panties,” she said. I must have looked shocked, because she actually smiled as she went on. “Big, white, itchy-ass cotton panties. You can’t wear anything with a logo on it, so good-bye Calvin Klein and Under Armour. You’re running around and getting yelled at and thinking, I’m gonna do this shit for the rest of my life? And when you think that you can’t handle it—you’re going to truly fucking lose your mind—they let you put your own chonies back on. And it all makes sense. They turn up the heat so you can transform into something else. Hot sand doesn’t turn into glass, Ellie. Molten sand does.”

  I hadn’t understood it then. Then, my main takeaway was that I must have been getting older, because Sid had never sworn in front of me before. She never cursed in front of Isaiah. He would have told.

  I understood it now. Now I was feeling the heat get cranked up and my sand was figuring out how to melt.

  This was my trial run. At the end of my senior year, I was going to have to make a choice as to which parent I hurt. If I enlisted, my dad and Beth would be crushed—constantly scared, always half in the dark about what I was doing. If I stayed close to home and got a business degree, coming home on weekends to do my laundry and babysit my brother, my mother would be ashamed.

  I wanted to try on my third option, the nuclear option—getting a degree that I wanted. Not close to home. Not with the military. The route that hurt everyone. I wanted to know if it was worth it.

  And—bonus!—I got to keep my good underwear.

  I slowed as the corner of the Lauritz library came into view. A familiar dark-haired figure was wedged into the corner of the stairs with a typewriter. I’d almost forgotten about the typewriter. Brandon made all of his notes in pencil, like the rest of us, during classes. It was strange to watch him mashing at the round keys and shoving aside the roller.

  Now that I’d spotted him, it would have been rude not to say hello. We were teammates, after all. And, unlike Perla, Brandon wasn’t a teammate that I fantasized about decimating in the Melee.

  I took my headphones out and wound them around my wrist as I climbed the first stair.

  “Hey,” I said. My stomach immediately contracted as I waited for him to register my voice. This was already a mistake. This was why I had Leigh. She was supposed to help me not make an ass out of myself.

  At least, once I humiliated myself, I could go inside and read more of the Octavia Butler book in the sci-fi section.

  Hands still poised over the keys, Brandon’s head popped up. He quickly pushed the hair out of his eyes, looking down at me intently. Like he was really trying to commit my visage to memory.

  My sweaty, sweaty visage. I was sure my lucky Angry Robot shirt was sticking to me in big wet clumps. God, this was a dumb idea.

  “Ever,” he said. “Hey. Hi.”

  “Hello,” I said, assuming this was the next greeting in the sequence. “Nice typewriter.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was actually a nice typewriter. It could have been the worst typewriter ever made—The Plan 9 from Outer Space of typewriters. But it was shiny and not currently rusting in an antique store, so it seemed like the appropriate response. What the hell is up with that ancient bucket of bolts? didn’t have the same ring.

  “Thanks,” he said, passing a possessive hand over the keys. “I don’t have a laptop.”

  Mystery solved.

  Well, no. Not really. I knew plenty of people who didn’t have their own computers and none of them—literally zero percent—had opted for a typewriter. Generally, people used school computers or borrowed their parents’ tech.

  “It’s not, uh, super practical,” he said. He must have been used to questions about it. “Jams says that the noise is distracting, so I come here to transcribe my notes.”

  He gestured to his binder, laid flat on the step above him with a three-hole punch and a collection of pencils rolling toward freedom.

  I shot a look toward the library’s doors. “Why don’t you go inside?”

  “The general consensus is in favor of Jams,” he said. He mimed typing in midair. “The clacking. It’s not exactly white noise.” His hands flopped into his lap. “But how are you? Leigh didn’t kick you out of your room, did she?”

  “No. I left of my own free will so she could have some space to do her yoga and study. She needs a lot of alone time. And she’s kind of freaked out about not entering this morning’s event.” I winced a smile as I leaned against the warm metal railing. “All of this must be pretty standard for you. Compared to actually going to the Messina, a couple weeks of camp must be nothing.”

  “Oh. I guess. It’s still a lot of work.” He glanced around, as though expecting a crowd to gather, even though there wasn’t anyone even remotely near us. “Look, I really don’t want everyone to know that I go to the Mess. If you already told Leigh, that’s fine. I should have been clearer about it when I mentioned it last night—”

  “I haven’t told Leigh,” I interrupted. Curiosity fluttered around my insides. I tried to keep my face neutral. “Did you go to school with all of the Messina counselors?”

  His long nose scrunched in the middle. “Yeah. Ben was my student government mentor when I was a freshman. I kind of fell in with their crowd. But only for a year. Then they all graduated. I can tell you that Trixie is a vegetarian and Cornell is a Magic cardsharp, but that won’t help anyone wi
n the Melee.”

  I searched my brain and came up with a blank. “And which one is Trixie?”

  “Um.” His cheeks went pink. “Red hair, blue-gray eyes. Not as tall as you, but tallish—”

  “Oh. The Perfect Nerd Girl.”

  He sputtered a laugh. “Is that what you call her?”

  “It seemed nicer than the busty white girl.”

  Not that I hadn’t mentally referred to her as that also.

  He started to say something but stopped himself with a twitch of his shoulders. “Since the Mess helps run the camp, if I told people I went there, they’d think I had some insight about what’s coming at us. I don’t. Being here is proof enough of that.” Reading the continued confusion in my face, he added, “Most Mess kids already have their early admission locked. We have a class junior year that’s just for perfecting admissions essays and picking out your safety schools. None of my classmates would ever consider going to summer camp to win placement.” He brushed his hair back into his eyes, possibly to hide the lemon rind bitterness that had seeped into that last statement. “Ugh. That makes me sound like such an entitled, private school asshole. I don’t think I’m too good to be here. I’m definitely not. Hey, is it rambling out here or is it just me?”

  I laughed. “You don’t sound like an asshole.”

  “Just batshit, then?”

  “Stressed?”

  “Everyone here is stressed. I’m … I don’t know. Extra stressed.”

  “See, you wanting to be special is kind of entitled.”

  His mouth flinched into a smile. “Sorry. You were heading up to the library and I stopped you like a rambling troll. You’ve paid your listening toll for the day. Thanks for letting me rant.”

  “I wasn’t going to the library,” I said. “I was saying hi.”

  “Oh.”

  I wished that I could mine that single syllable for more meaning, but it was too quiet and his eyes were mostly obscured by his hair. The scuffed toes of his high-tops tapped against the brick.

  “Do you want to study together?” he asked.

  “Like, the two of us?” I asked.

  Farce, farce, farce, said my brain.