Not Now, Not Ever

by Lily Anderson

  My computer finally registered the wireless at the same time that footsteps padded up the stairs. Someone else was ditching the end of dinner.

  “Hey, Ellie.”

  My left eyelid twitched. I pressed my fingertips against it, hoping to settle it. It didn’t work. “Why do you keep creeping up on me? If you’re going to murder me, just get it over with.”

  Chair legs screeched against the floor and Isaiah threw himself down. “A girl on my team went home today,” he said.

  “The girl with the lip rings?”

  He nodded, leaning over to pull a slim silver laptop out of the leather bag swinging from his shoulder. “Avital.”

  “I watched them take her off campus. What the hell happened to her?”

  “Stress, I guess.” He opened the laptop and plunked in a password, cutting his eyes at me as he did it. “That’s what Cornell said.”

  “I’ve never seen stress do that to a person.”

  He gave a noncommittal grunt. “That’s why folks at Lackland cry and puke.”

  The entire air force had been trained on the same base since the forties, so horror stories set at Lackland Air Force Base were as commonplace at Lawrence family holidays as Great Uncle Berry’s watery cranberry sauce. “Like that guy in your dad’s flight that kept shitting himself. What’d they call him? Double Deuce?”

  Revulsion twisted his face. “Right. Not everyone can handle the stress.”

  “That’s not fair.” I turned away from my computer, hopping my chair to face him. “They’re just handling it differently.”

  He scoffed a tiny, condescending laugh. “She went home, Elliot.”

  “That’s her right.”

  “How is she going to handle college if she can’t even do three weeks away?”

  “Don’t try to be cynical. It’s perfectly easy to be cynical,” I said, quoting Earnest without meaning to. “How often is college going to make her memorize three hundred pages of useless, unrelated facts and write a ten-page essay in MLA format in three weeks?”

  His dreads gave an almost imperceptible tremble. He narrowed his eyes at his screen, scrolling and stabbing his fingers into his keyboard until the printer next to us whirred and chugged.

  “Are you going to enlist after you get your degree?” I asked, as we watched crisp white pages slip out of the printer. “If you get in here, I mean.”

  “Of course—”

  I held up a hand to cut him off. “Don’t say ‘of course.’ That’s what you’re supposed to say. Not what you mean. If you could go to a four-year college and the entire family would swear to never give you shit about not joining the air force, would you still enlist?”

  “Would you?”

  I gritted my teeth and focused on my computer again. The pain in the back of my head doubled. I needed to print my essay and go downstairs, away from the stink of Isaiah’s cologne. “I’m sorry. I thought I was talking to a grown person. I forgot that you’re a child. God, are you even sixteen yet?”

  “Next week.” He sniffed. “Thanks for remembering.”

  “Not if we’re twins, you’re not. You’re a Scorpio now.” I dug the heel of my hand into my left eye as it twitched again. Isaiah was fifteen and at camp. If Aunt Bobbie ever found out, she would skin me like a cat. He was barely out of middle school. I hit Print and my essay started cresting out of the printer.

  He puffed out his chest and folded his arm. It was possible he thought it made him look older. It didn’t. “If no one would give me shit, I wouldn’t go.”

  “But you will? Even if you don’t want to?”

  He lifted a shoulder in half a shrug. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “And if you do what that girl—Avital—did, and wash out? What then?”

  A loud whisper interrupted us. It was too far away to know for sure, but it sounded vaguely like “never.”

  “That’s you,” Isaiah said dryly.

  I stood up and walked over to the railing that overlooked the first floor. Brandon was standing at the base of the stairs. With his head tilted back, his hair fell away from his face. His thick eyebrows were lifted high, two questioning black swooshes.

  “Hey,” he said in a carrying stage whisper. “Sorry. You weren’t at Magrathea.”

  “I’ll meet you down there in a second. Grab us a table,” I whispered back.

  He grinned. “But there are so many choices.”

  I felt my cheeks aching with the suppressed need to smile as I walked back to the printer. I extracted my essay pages from Isaiah’s and scooped up my laptop. It was hot against my chest.

  “Goodnight, bro,” I said, giving Isaiah a quick salute before I turned my back on him again. I could barely keep myself from skipping away.

  “Elliot.”

  I paused in my tracks and glanced back. “What?”

  “Civilians don’t say ‘wash out.’”

  23

  After Lumberjack Beard read through the first drafts of our essays on Tuesday, attacking each with a tangle of red ink slashes and cursive, he retrieved a single Rubik’s Cube from a battered army green messenger bag. The clack of the bag’s buckle hitting the floor echoed throughout the dining hall, which Lumberjack Beard seemed to have sole dominion over. It was entirely possible that he was sleeping there. His hair was slicked back with what could have been the same grease that he’d cooked our breakfast in that morning. He certainly smelled of bacon and syrup, but I supposed it could have been a hipster cologne with a name like Brunch Bro or IHOP Fiend.

  “If you decide to compete, you will be timed solving this Rubik’s Cube. Every team is being tested during this period and the winner will be announced at lunch.” He held the cube forward, letting it balance delicately on the tips of his fingers. Its sides were scrambled into a jumble of colors. “Any takers?”

  I raised my hand, knowing that my teammates would do likewise. The list of Cheeseman events had become as important as our binders. Knowing that we were going to have to solve a Rubik’s Cube meant that Leigh and I had spent the last two nights watching dozens of videos on my laptop and memorizing algorithms. Since we both had one blue ribbon displayed above our beds, we had a vested interest in racking up more wins.

  “Why don’t you give it a shot first, Brandon?” Lumberjack Beard said. He tossed the cube to Brandon, who caught it in the crook of his arm.

  Lumberjack Beard kicked his feet up onto the table, displaying the muddy bottoms of his battered brown boots. Not exactly seasonally appropriate, but way better than the cracked sandals that Hari had been wearing for the last two days. Although it seemed, from the way Perla was audibly gagging, that she didn’t agree.

  “People have to eat here, you know,” she said.

  “I have to eat here. This is the big kids’ table,” Lumberjack Beard corrected, sweeping a hand over the table. He pointed both index fingers toward the door. “You have to eat over there somewhere. But it’s Taco Tuesday. Get pumped.”

  “I bet it’s the same tacos we ate on Friday,” Jams said under his breath.

  “Possible,” Lumberjack Beard said with a jovial shrug. “Go on, B. We’re waiting.”

  “My hand wasn’t up,” Brandon said.

  “Come on. It’s the prodigy litmus test,” he said, his lips appearing in a smile from the depths of bushy brown beard. He held up his phone, the timer displayed on the screen. “Ready when you are.”

  Brandon let out a puff of a sigh that sent a strand of hair flying up off his forehead like an elephant’s trunk. Wedging his tongue into his bottom lip, he spun the Rubik’s Cube dexterously between his fingers.

  I tried to imagine how I would describe Brandon to my friends when I got home. Already, it was easy to describe the rest of the team. Leigh was unpredictable and funny. Kate was uptight in that maybe churchy, maybe never spoke to real humans before kind of way. Perla thought she was better than the rest of us. Galen thought no one noticed that he also thought Perla was better than the rest of us. And in the last forty-eight
hours, Jams and Hunter had become our golden couple. No one batted an eye as they held hands and shared not-so-secret looks.

  But Brandon was at once grudging and giddy. He was the loner boy hiding behind his too-long hair and his typewriter while also being the first person to catch my eye and smile from across rooms or study tables. He wore plain clothes like a uniform and almost never raised his voice above a murmur. He tried so hard to be indistinct that it brought all of him into sharper focus. Watching him with the Rubik’s Cube made me think of the way he flipped pencils when he was sitting across from me in the sci-fi section.

  And then there was Brandon, I’d tell my friends as we sat on the bleachers, recreating that scene in Grease with the split screen. He looked like his name was John, and he went to a school for geniuses—I know, I had no idea that was a real thing either. And he had the most nimble fingers I’ve ever seen.

  And all of my friends would start screaming with laughter like I’d said something accidentally filthy, and I’d use it as a chance to slip back into the memory of this moment, when he twisted the Rubik’s Cube smoothly into the algorithm I had memorized—front, front, up, left, right inverted. And, just as fluidly, he backtracked the same steps in the same order, setting the cube exactly as jumbled as he’d found it. No one else seemed to have noticed.

  No one but Lumberjack Beard, who stopped the timer, his dark eyes going stormy.

  “Sorry,” Brandon said. “I guess someone else should have a try.”

  *

  “It sucks that guy on Ben’s team won the Rubik’s event,” Brandon said as we settled into the sci-fi section after the monstrosity that was Taco Tuesday. He slid his binder toward me. “I know you and Leigh studied really hard for it. You made good time.”

  “We did.” I heard the Lawrence clip in my voice.

  Brandon didn’t notice. “That Onobanjo kid lasted a long time during amoeba tag, too. I caught him right before the end. Cool name, though. Nigerian, maybe? I’m almost positive that there’s a university in Nigeria called Onobanjo … No. It’s Onabanjo. With an A. Very close.” He huffed a laugh. “More useless information that will not help me win a scholarship.”

  I snapped a knot in my hair, looking up at the Arrakis poster next to Magrathea. The desert planet looked remarkably like Mars, terra-cotta pot red-brown. “But you don’t want to win.”

  I had meant to phrase it as a question, but the realization had been brewing inside of me for hours. As we went from class to class, as we sat through meals, as his shoe clicked against mine before he stepped off the elevator onto his floor to get his binder. I couldn’t say anything in front of the rest of the team, in case I was wrong.

  Which I wasn’t. I could tell from the way his head sank lower instead of popping up in defense.

  “You know how to solve a Rubik’s Cube,” I said. It was a silly accusation, and I felt childish saying it with so much weight, but my skin was too tight—had been too tight for hours now.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Of course I do.”

  “Of course,” I repeated, chewing at the skin on my lower lip. My mouth was Arrakis-level dry. “There’s the elitist asshole.”

  His head did pop up then. Confusion and hurt clouded his face. “You’re mad?”

  “Why wouldn’t you let people know that you’re good at something?” I thought I’d feel better for asking, but I didn’t. The questions inflated inside of me, filling my veins to bursting. “Why botch something so stupid? That counselor, your friend, Lumberjack Beard—”

  “His name is Ben.”

  “Right. Whatever. Ben knew that you were faking it. So why bother?”

  He scratched at the soft white skin inside his wrist with the side of his thumbnail, but said nothing.

  I picked up my binder and slammed it back onto the table with a shotgun-loud bang. “We’ve been studying together for days now. Why? Are you pitying me? Are you doing me a favor bestowing all your genius boy knowledge on me?”

  He goggled at me. “No! Why would you think that? Because I didn’t solve a Rubik’s Cube?”

  “Because you pretended not to solve it,” I corrected. “Because you’re so smart that you can coast here while the rest of us struggle.”

  “I’m struggling too!” he said, and it was the loudest I’d ever heard him speak. “You’ve watched me do it. I can’t tell you anything about the baroque period! It falls out of my brain every single time.”

  “But you can tell me that Onabanjo is a university in Nigeria,” I said, burying my hands in my hair. I gripped hard at the roots to keep my focus. “Are you going to pack up and go home? Like that girl yesterday? Are you going to quit? You live in town. It wouldn’t be hard for you to go.”

  His jaw dropped. “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No,” I said, talking too fast to have time to be embarrassed by how firm my answer was. “It would just be easy if you wanted to.”

  “It really wouldn’t be,” he said. “Not everyone’s parents would let them walk away from a camp that they already paid the tuition for.”

  I stabbed a finger in the air at him. “So you have thought about it!”

  He let out a quiet growl that, under other circumstances, might have been adorable. “I don’t know what you want from me, Ever. No, it wasn’t my idea to come here. But I’m here and I’m studying and I really don’t understand why we’re fighting right now. I’m sorry I didn’t solve the Rubik’s Cube. Next time, I will make sure that the whole world knows that I can solve one in about twenty seconds, which is four times slower than the record. Okay?”

  I shoved my chair back, ire continuing to spark inside my chest. I heard Brandon’s chair fall to the floor and the soles of his Chucks squeaking behind me as I slipped between the redwood bookcases into A–D. On autopilot, I bent to the lowest shelf and plucked the hardcover copy of Survivor that I had discovered on the first day of classes. The scrap of “This Blessed House” that I had torn off for a bookmark was sticking out of the top. As I straightened, I found Brandon standing beside me. I pressed the book to his chest.

  “This is an out-of-print Octavia Butler novel,” I explained. “She thought it was too Star Trek-colonial-cliché to stay in print, even though it’s part of a series, and I have waited years to read it.”

  Without waiting for him to reply, I walked farther down the aisle, scanning the stickered spines. I grabbed another hardcover and handed it back to him. “That’s a limited edition of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. It’s illustrated and has maps of the San Francisco Mission District. It was never available to buy in the U.S.”

  From another shelf I grabbed Ernest Cline’s Armada and added this to the growing pile. “And this is Armada, which was a total letdown, and I want to write papers about why.”

  He almost smiled. “Ever…”

  “If I don’t get a scholarship here, I don’t know what I’ll have that’s all mine. When we go home, Isaiah will be the smart one again. He’ll always be the smart one. But here, I get to be more than just the girl who runs fast. I get to be capable. And I want to hold on to that in a way that no one can take away from me.” I paused to wet my lips. My pulse was fluttering like a wasp in a jar. “Do you ever miss things before they’re over?”

  He looked at me over the small stack of books balanced on his wrists. “Sometimes. Christmas morning. Good songs. Funfetti cake. You know, the kind with the sprinkles mixed into the batter?”

  I nodded. Beth made excellent Funfetti waffles from scratch on Ethan’s and my birthdays. “I already miss it here. I miss this room and the books you’re holding and the quad and the garbage trees in Mudders Meadow. I want to find the rest of the tree houses and figure out what Fort Farm is used for and why one of the counselors is living out there. I have to know that I can come back here someday. I can’t afford to skip a footnote or a section of the binder or—”

  “Or pretend like you can’t do a Rubik’s Cube,” he finished for me.

  I plucked Armada out of his ha
nds and stuck it back onto the shelf. “I don’t want you to study with me because you feel sorry for me.”

  “I already told you that I’m not. Why would I feel sorry for you, Ever? I understand that you have a lot riding on this scholarship, but, honestly, so does everyone else. Putting your future on the line is a big deal, no matter what. Other than that, you’re a six-foot-tall hot genius who can do parkour. Which part am I supposed to pity?”

  I opened my mouth to correct him—for real, I’m only five ten—when my brain caught the rest of that sentence.

  I’m a what now?

  “I’m here because my friends conspired against me. Someone sent the brochure to my parents and they shipped me off. They didn’t ask if I wanted to be here or if this was even a school I’d be interested in going to. But I’m a screwup, so I don’t get a vote anymore,” he said, his face flush with newfound steam. He shook out his hair and started to pace the aisle, shoving Survivor and Little Brother back into their places. “Also, if you want to go here so badly, then why don’t you let me take all of the dives? If I won that Rubik’s challenge, then you wouldn’t have. Now I want you to win the scholarship. How is that supposed to help anything?”

  I caught his wrist as he tried to pace by me. His arm was hot under my palm. I set my other hand against the back of his neck. His hair bristled against my fingertips.

  The kiss had seemed like my idea a moment ago, but somehow his mouth met mine when I was halfway to where he had been. Our lips bumped, awkward and mismatched. My stomach plummeted to the floor, then buoyed, as Brandon slipped his arm from my grasp and wrapped it around my waist, gripping me tight as we readjusted our bodies in the narrow space between the bookcases. I combed my fingers through his hair, leveraging him closer—closer lips, closer tongues, closer hands and legs and bodies. It was a kiss that couldn’t be portioned out in sips. We took in heavy, gasping chugs of each other that only got thirstier.