A shadow passed over his face, a darkening of disappointment or hurt. This boy wanted to kick it with me and help me prep for this huge contest that we were in. Was I really going to turn him down because I was scared of a mostly dead form of theatrical comedy? He was cute and presumably very smart and, unlike so many other white dudes, he’d never told me how much hip-hop meant to him like my melanin made me a rap ambassador.
“I mean, three’s a crowd,” I said, my voice too loud, too jokey. God, I was already one foot into a bad community theater production of Earnest. “So you’re gonna have to choose between me and the typewriter.”
He sighed, but the corners of his lips quirked. “Everyone hates the typewriter.”
17
I stood alone in the sci-fi section. The edges of my binder bit into my forearms as I hugged it to my stomach. Leigh hadn’t been in the room when I had stopped in to grab my study supplies, so I had seized the opportunity to mop off my shiny forehead and reapply my deodorant, unquestioned. But I probably could have given my face another blot, now that the nervous sweats had fully set in. I was going to dampen my fresh shirt soon, and then how would everyone know how cool I was for owning a Tor Books shirt?
I couldn’t choose between the armchairs and the study table. Sitting in the armchair might send the wrong message—like I was more into lounging than studying. But sitting at the tables could make me look like a joyless study-loving robot. And my normal spot—flat on my belly with Octavia Butler’s books looming over me like a shrine—was clearly out for about a dozen reasons.
Hearing footsteps outside of the room’s arched entryway, I threw myself down in the closest chair, which happened to be at one of the tables. I had enough time to set my binder down before Brandon shuffled into the room, unencumbered by his typewriter case. He smiled at me, almost surprised to find me sitting in front of him. His eyes slid up to the massive travel posters framed on the wall above us.
“Magrathea?” he read. “That sounds familiar.”
“It’s from Hitchhiker’s Guide,” I said.
“Right. Very cool.” He gave an approving bob of his head. “Don’t hate me, but I’m actually more of a sword and sorcery guy. Like Patrick Rothfuss and Robert Jordan?”
“Long books by middle-aged white guys?”
“Long books about worlds where no one cares what grade you got in calculus-level general physics.”
“Was that a brag?”
“Not at all. Especially not if you knew what grade I actually got in calculus-level general physics.” He took the seat across from me. He angled his chair to the side and stretched his legs out. “I’ve only been back here once. Wesley Chu did a book signing here last year. He gave a really good talk before it—did you read the Time Salvager series?”
Uh-oh. Was that my heart skipping a beat? I was literally wearing the shirt of the publisher that put him on the map.
“Now you’re bragging,” I said. “Wes Chu is freaking amazing. My jealousy is physically painful right now.”
He cut his eyes at me and grinned. “If it makes you feel better, I missed it when N. K. Jemisin came to campus.”
“That does make me feel better,” I said. “Because if you told me that you’d met N. K. Jemisin, we couldn’t study together because I would be stuck in a rage blackout for the rest of my life. She’s one of my all-time favorite authors, hands down. No question. I literally brought the entire Inheritance Trilogy with me for the summer.”
He snorted. “For all your downtime?”
“And the twelve-hour train ride from California.”
He pulled a face. “Twelve hours? You should get the scholarship based on time commitment alone.”
“If only it were that easy.” I looked over at the rows and rows of redwood bookcases, each packed with literally every book I had ever wanted to read. “I really love it here. The campus, I mean. It’s gorgeous. And the weather is so much better than at home, I can’t even get over it.”
“Have you found any of the tree houses yet?”
I turned back to him. “The what?”
“Tree houses,” he repeated, pushing the hair out of his eyes as though maybe that was why I hadn’t heard him. It was strange to glimpse his eyebrows. They slashed across his forehead, about as wide as my thumb. “The students build them during the school year. The administration has them taken down whenever they find them, because they’re made of scraps and are structurally unsound. But there’s usually a few around. It’s not something they list in the brochure or anything, but you run a lot, so I figured you’ve seen more of campus than I have.”
I felt a sting of shock that he knew that I was a runner, before realizing that I was literally wearing running shoes and running shorts—and that I was basically always wearing running shoes and running shorts. I hadn’t even bothered to bring jeans with me, since back home it wouldn’t be comfortable to wear long pants until at least October.
Get it together, Beast Mode.
“I haven’t seen any,” I said. “I guess I should look up more when I run. How do you know they exist if they aren’t listed in the brochures?”
“I live here, remember?”
“Right. You have much Oregonian knowledge.”
“Buckets of it. Did you know that Eugene was originally called—”
“Skinner’s Mudhole?” I interrupted. “I’ve heard.”
“Then I have nothing left to teach you.”
“Well, shit,” I said, snapping my fingers. “I was hoping you’d bring some of that genius school juice to this study session.”
Juice? my brain screamed. Please tell me you did not just ask this boy for his genius juice.
He frowned at me. “You know that you have to be a genius, too? By virtue of being here.”
“Yeah, but it’s not the same. I go to public school,” I said, grateful to be past the juicing part of this conversation. I resisted the urge to actually sigh with relief.
“There’s nothing wrong with public school.”
“I’m sorry,” I laughed. “Say that again and then remember that we’re in America.”
“Okay. Fair enough. I get it. It’s just—Really, the Mess isn’t that great. We call it the Mess for a reason.”
“People call this place the Mo-Lo,” I said, gesturing around. “Which sounds like a hashtag or an epithet.”
“Actually, the Mollos were a predecessor to the Incan people of South America…” He trailed off and tapped on the cover of his binder. “Oh. That’s the juice you were talking about?”
“Yep.”
He reached up, rubbing the back of his neck right above the collar of his shirt. In the last week, he’d rotated through a series of nearly identical shirts. Plain, solid-color Tshirts cut close to his narrow torso, with no decoration to betray any clues as to his interests. Today’s shirt was heather gray and looked as flannel-soft as his voice. “You didn’t study ancient Bolivia in sophomore year?”
“Uh, no.”
“You have no context for the rise of the Incan empire?”
“Zero context. And I took AP world history.”
“Huh.” He flipped open his binder and yanked out a mechanical pencil. The lead clicked down as he chewed on the inside of his cheek. “There’s a chance that my entire education has been useless and esoteric. I haven’t taken classes on any of the history periods we’re supposed to cover in the Melee.”
“There’s a chance that I’ve spent more time reading Octavia Butler books than studying this week,” I said, flopping open my binder and slapping aside pages until I reached the history section. I slid it across the table. “So you can help me with the esoteric and I’ll help you with the obvious.”
He smiled, pushing his binder to me. “That sounds good.”
18
“Didn’t she say that she didn’t come here to make friends?” Galen asked, resting his chin on his hand and gazing over my shoulder.
“Apparently, she meant she didn’t come here to mak
e friends with us,” Leigh said.
“Fine with me,” Kate said, not looking up from the slice of pizza she was deconstructing. The tips of her fingers were coated in a fine slime of marinara. “One of them can trade me roommates for her. Her deviated septum has already stolen one week of sleep from me. And she won’t shut up about the expensive lotion she lost.”
Following the route of Galen’s stare, I twisted around on the bench. Perla was seated across the dining hall with Bryn Mawr’s team, planted firmly between a girl wearing a pale pink hijab and a girl with double lip piercings. All three of them were guzzling generic soda and laughing like they were in some cool, alt-girl commercial for Big K Cola.
“If it wasn’t obvious we were spying on her before, it is now.” Galen snorted. “Cool it, Ever. You’re not invisible, you know.”
I threw him a scowl. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You’re an Amazon,” Hunter said, snapping a carrot stick with his molars. “You could carry Meg and Leigh in your pockets.”
“That’s sizeist,” Leigh said, wagging a finger at Hunter. “Even if it does sound like fun. I could get so much done if I wasn’t responsible for walking myself places. Think of all the research I could do!”
“Joke’s on you. I don’t have pockets,” I said with a faux-haughty sniff. “And I’m not that tall. I’m five ten. Maybe six foot if you include my hair.”
“That’s an ineffective spying height,” Jams said.
I rolled my eyes. “Balls. There goes my career with the CIA.”
“Because your degree in science fiction would be so useful as a secret agent,” Galen snickered.
“Who are you going to turn to when our alien overlords take over the planet?” I asked. “Regular English majors? Good luck. They are way unprepared for the nuclear holocaust.”
“You talk about nuclear holocausts so much,” Kate said.
I looked around theatrically. “Whoa. Am I the new Perla? Did I start spouting Ayn Randian nonsense?”
“No,” Jams said firmly. “We josh you because we like you.”
“‘Josh’ isn’t a Briticism, is it?” Kate asked.
“Why would it be?” Jams asked, blinking innocently. “I’m from Oregon, Kate. Haven’t you heard?”
“Did you know that you only need a three-point-oh GPA in college to qualify to be a CIA special agent?” Brandon mused.
We all turned to him. His face pinched into an embarrassed scrunch. “That’s not a normal thing to know, is it?”
The hour we had spent alone together in the sci-fi section had been mostly quiet, the two of us reading each other’s notes. It was interesting to peek inside of his strange nerd-boy brain, to watch him decode passages of our study material while his hands fidgeted. His typewritten pages were, as expected, full of coded references to scraps of a very strange education—bits about the chemical makeup of emotional responses and allusions to texts I’d never heard of. But he had seemed equally ashamed to have to ask me to explain a comment about The Red Badge of Courage and a line of Hamilton lyrics I’d written in the margins of my history section.
We’d arrived at the dining hall separately, but he hadn’t hesitated to take the seat next to me. Which felt like something.
Under the table, I swung my leg over into his and tapped the sides of our shoes together. “Esoteric to the max.”
He gave me a split-second secret smile before turning back to his pizza.
On the other side of me, I could feel the intensity of Leigh’s curiosity aimed at the side of my head. I really wished she were less observant.
“Did anyone else notice that they’re completely out of water bottles today?” I asked, reaching for the small box of apple juice I’d had to settle for.
Jams took a deep pull from his soda. “Maybe our alien overlords want us chockablock with diabetes when they take us over.”
“‘Chockablock’ is hella British,” Kate said.
“‘Hella’ is hella Californian,” Jams retorted.
“‘Hella chockablock’ is hell of redundant,” Leigh giggled.
We were all laughing when Meg appeared and threw herself down on the bench next to Galen.
“Hello, happy people,” she said, propping her elbows on the table.
Kate stiffened. “Hello, traitor.”
Meg’s face softened to a down fluff. She gave a curious cartoon kitten tip of her head. “Kate, I already told you that there was no way I could have warned you guys about the Cheeseman trials. We would all be disqualified if I cheated for you. That would mean no scholarship for any of you and no paycheck for me and Hari. It’s not worth it. But it’s okay!” She gave a shudder of excitement. “Since Miss Ever already placed in the Cheeseman, you guys are in the running to be the team that takes home five scholarships! With that in mind, I wanted to let you know that this afternoon we’re going to do our first mock Melee. It’s only amongst our team, just to get some practice in. You know, take the edge off a little bit.” Her eyes scanned over each of us, as though taking attendance. “Oh. No Perla? Well, someone make sure to let her know, okay? I need to track down Hari and prep.”
A look passed around the table, a nonverbal contract signed and sealed in the span of two breaths. Kate’s blue eyes flashed, a detonation of glee.
“Don’t worry, Meg. We’ll make sure she knows.”
*
Meep.
Meep.
Perla slammed her palms down on her knees. “Hari, if you buzz that thing one more time, I will shove it down your throat.”
Hari’s thumb lovingly circled the buzzer’s button, poised to strike. “If you threaten the examiners, you will be disqualified.”
“Are the examiners going to go apeshit on a Taboo buzzer?” Perla snapped.
Meg daintily straightened the stacks of sample questions and realigned her highlighters. “I know it lights up your limbic system, but swearing is also an immediate disqualification.”
Perla threw her hair behind her ears and stared at the door as though imagining storming through it.
For privacy and comfortable seating, Meg and Hari had set us up in the lounge on the uninhabited top floor of the residence hall. I hadn’t realized how acclimated I was to the noise of my floor until we stepped off the elevator into silence. The blank-chalkboard doors that lined the hallway had no voices or music pulsing behind them. There were no muffled footsteps on the carpet. Even the communal bathroom was locked. Meg said that it’d keep anyone from trying to live up here.
The lounge was almost identical to the one on my floor, except that the walls were burnt orange instead of yellow. It was like studying inside of a giant pumpkin.
Meg and Hari had seated themselves in two of the room’s armless upholstered chairs, with a squat table set between them. My teammates and I sat across from them, cross-legged on the floor, with our binders piled out of reach against the wall.
Ten minutes into our mock Melee, I missed my binder.
Fifteen minutes in, I would have killed for it.
“Which language takes its roots from migratory farmers and Southwest Asian traders?” Hari asked Kate.
“Swahili.”
Hari’s thumb circled the buzzer again. “Name three of the languages from which Swahili takes its roots.”
“Arabic. Portuguese.” Kate rocked forward, the muscles in her shoulders roiling. Her narrow face started to purple. “French?”
Meep.
“The question passes to Galen,” Hari said.
This was my least favorite rule of the Melee. Not only could the categories switch on a dime, but questions answered incorrectly could get thrown to another team member, so there was no time to relax. It was a randomized attack. Even the smallest distraction could tank your score.
“Arabic, Portuguese, and German,” Galen said.
“Correct.” Hari glanced over at Meg, who marked Galen’s new score down in a notebook.
“Switch categories,” Meg said. She and Hari leaned left
in sync like they were controlling a mecha robot together. Meg planted her finger on the page they were looking for. “Art history. Hunter, please name three of the members of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers credited with the creation of the impressionist movement.”
Hunter raked his hands through his hair. “Are all of the questions going to ask for three examples?”
“Would you prefer that they ask for all of the examples?” Hari asked.
“Nope. Three is great,” Hunter said quickly. “Impressionists: Monet, Degas,… Pissaro?”
Damn. I definitely hadn’t known that one. I made a note on the single piece of plain paper that the counselors had allowed us to keep. Leigh had titled her page “Additional Study Needed.”
I called mine “Crap You Don’t Know.”
“For full credit, you will need to know the first name of those artists as well,” Meg said to Hunter, wagging a highlighter at him. “Can you list them now?”
He shook his head and leaned over his list of unknown crap. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Jams bump their knees together.
“Ever,” Hari said, pulling my attention forward. “For what painting was the impressionist movement named?”
“Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise?” I swallowed. Even from however many hundreds of miles away, I was sure Grandmother Lawrence could feel me phrasing a statement as a question. Lawrences did not uptalk. It made one appear “flighty and uneducated.”
“Follow-up question,” Meg said. “Which French critic observed Impression, Sunrise to be more of a sketch than a finished painting?”
I tried to picture my binder and the notes I had jotted down while Cornell’s cocounselor had ignored us in our art history “class.” But nothing was there.
“I-I don’t know.” The words left my throat in a painful dribble, like water wrung from a towel. I closed my eyes against the sound of the meep.
“The question is passed to Leigh,” Hari said.
Leigh swung her head, her eyes focused on the carpet. “I don’t know the answer either.”
One of Hari’s eyebrows twitched as he checked Meg’s notes to make sure that our scores were updated. “The question is discarded after two failed attempts. The correct answer was Louis Leroy.”
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