When I came up for air, I found my hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt. I left them there as our chests rose and fell, hammering heartbeats pressed together. Our panting breaths turned the air around us humid. Brandon’s gaze was sharp with surprise, but his thumb was sweeping arcs on the small of my back. The inside of my head was thrumming, past runner’s high and into stolen sips of champagne on New Year’s giddy.
“You are one of the things I already miss.” I stole another urgent kiss from his stung lips. “So I want you to win, too.”
“I will memorize baroque composers for you. Not just three examples. All of them. Once I figure out how to go back to studying after this. I don’t want to stop the this part.” He gave me a jittery grin and squeezed my waist. “I wasn’t studying with you so that this would happen. I never thought that this would happen, that you would want—I mean, you know I’m a nerd, right?”
“You’re a nerd?” I pushed the hair away from his forehead. “We are standing in the science fiction section of the most selective liberal arts college on the West Coast. If there was gelato nearby, this would literally be my heaven.”
“Get gelato. Noted,” he said, inching close enough that the syllables brushed against my lips. “I really like you, Ever.”
I could feel my heartbeat from the top of my head to the soles of my feet.
“Ever is a nickname. My real name is Elliot,” I murmured.
He smiled. “I really like you, Elliot.”
I wound my arms around his neck, pulling his face down to mine again. My eyelids closed. My tongue licked at his lower lip, requesting permission.
The lights flashed like lightning as a familiar screech lacerated through the former silence. Brandon and I stumbled apart, staring up at the ceiling at the fire alarm.
“Do you think it’s real this time?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
It didn’t. We grabbed our binders and ran.
24
Goose bumps raised on my arms and legs as Brandon and I hustled into the cool evening air. The sky was sapphire streaked with orange clouds, the setting sun hidden somewhere behind the administrative buildings, where windows burned white in time with the alarm.
“This is probably a bad time to ask,” Brandon said, power walking beside me. “But if the school doesn’t burn down, do you want to maybe go out? Like actually out? Off campus out?”
I looked at him, worried that my tongue had dislodged some of his IQ. “We’re stuck here.”
He tripped over a seam in the pavement. “Only technically.”
“Eventually we’re going to have to talk about how cryptic all of you Messina Academy people are.”
“The Mess,” he corrected, and then gave an agitated shake of his hair. “That’s not the point. If I could get us safely off campus, would you want to go?”
“Safely as in ‘not getting caught and disqualified from the Melee’? Remember before we made out, when we were talking about how much I have to get that scholarship?”
He snorted. “Remember how all of my friends are counselors and it hasn’t been useful for anything? It might be useful for this one thing. I thought of it when you said gelato. There’s a gelato place downtown, across the street from this movie theater that shows old movies and serves food. I could get us there with limited blackmail.”
I hitched my binder higher against my chest. “You thought of all of that while we were making out?”
“Not all of it. Just the gelato part. I was going to get off campus anyway because the theater does an Independence Day limited run during Fourth of July week that I don’t want to miss. And you love science fiction and I love Irish nachos—”
Our binders knocked together as I stopped short and turned to him. “Independence Day? The nineteen ninety-six Will Smith movie? My dad and I have watched it together every Fourth of July of my life. I’ve seen it more than I’ve seen real fireworks. I thought I was going to have to stream it in my dorm this year.”
“Is that a yes?”
I kissed him quickly and scooped up his hand, pulling him down the path. The closer we got to the residence hall, the stronger the alarm got. The sound made my molars buzz.
“‘I know how to run without you holding my hand,’” Brandon quoted loudly.
I grinned at him over my shoulder. “If you start quoting Star Wars at me, we’re never going to get anywhere.”
“When you catch my references, I really don’t care if we get anywhere. Did you say yes to going out with me?”
“If the school isn’t on fire and you can outline exactly how effective your blackmail is and you actually learn the names of three baroque composers, then yeah. I’m in.”
“You had to throw the composers in there.”
“You promised!” I laughed. “And I didn’t include any rules about the typewriter, so…”
We rounded the corner, the quad coming into view in short bursts of light from the surrounding buildings. I dropped Brandon’s hand as I saw the somber crowd standing in front of the dining hall. No one seemed to be in team formation, just scared clumps. There were people visibly crying together, but no one seemed to have taken charge of consoling them.
“What the hell?” I whispered.
“This way,” Brandon said, and took a turn for the grass that separated our residence hall from the dining hall. A cluster of counselors stood at the edge of the green, keeping watch over the campers. In the pulsating light, I recognized some of the Messina counselors.
“I thought we only had the alarm disconnected from the fire department for amoeba tag,” Lumberjack Beard said.
“We did,” Cornell said. He ran his hands over his scalp. The noise seemed to be getting to him, too.
“Well, then someone had better go start a fucking fire,” Meg snapped.
The Perfect Nerd Girl rubbed her arms and bounced a little for warmth. “I’ll be so glad when this year’s experiment ends. The swearing is wearing on my nerves.”
“Don’t start with me, Beatrice Lea,” Meg said. “You guys are so close to getting us all fired—”
“Ever! B!” Cornell said, noticing Brandon and me getting closer to them. I was sure he wasn’t actually over the moon to see us, but our names worked as a verbal blanket on the grease fire that was Meg’s rage.
She rushed forward and, for a second, I thought she might hug me, until she reached out and pried my binder out of my arms.
“Um,” I said, holding back the urge to snatch the binder back from her. It wouldn’t have been difficult. My hands were twice the size of hers. She was lucky not to be living inside of my pocket.
The Perfect Nerd Girl held her hand out to Brandon. “I need your binder, too, B.”
He glowered at her, but surrendered the binder. “Why?”
The Perfect Nerd Girl didn’t look up from riffling through the pages. “It’s full of typewritten notes. It checks out.”
“We could have Mary-Anne confirm it, but the handwriting here all seems to match the name on the front,” Meg said, reading through my notes.
“Can you guys cut the forensics for a second and tell us what’s happening?” Brandon said.
Cornell blew out a long, puttering sigh. “Did you guys bring your binders to dinner?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And you didn’t return to the residence hall?” Cornell asked.
“We went straight to the library from the dining hall. We’ve done the same thing for the last four days,” Brandon said, yanking his binder back from the redhead. He frowned at me. “Is this what you meant by all of us being cryptic?”
“Yes,” I said. “This. Like all the time.”
“Binders left in the residence hall between open study and the end of dinner have gone missing,” Lumberjack Beard said. “All of them.”
I looked back at the campers standing together outside of the dining hall. Their shell-shocked, stricken faces suddenly coming into too-crisp focus. They all looked like Fallon, realizi
ng that all of her notes were gone. Except it wasn’t only notes. Without the binders, there was no way for anyone to study, and there were only six days until the first skirmish.
“The rest of the counselors are doing a search of the rooms to see if they can track anything down,” Cornell said.
Lumberjack Beard reached out, pulling the Perfect Nerd Girl to him. He crossed his arms around her waist and rested his chin against her temple. No one else seemed surprised to see them publicly snuggling, so I checked my face for placidity.
“No one would be stupid enough to hide forty stolen binders under their bed,” he growled. “Or did you all forget what it was like to be surrounded by evil geniuses? One of these rug rats probably buried all those binders in Mudders Meadow for the thrill of it.”
The Perfect Nerd Girl patted his hand. “Then that’s where we’ll search next.”
“We’re so fucking fired,” Meg muttered.
“Why don’t you guys leave your binders with us?” Cornell said to me and Brandon. “It’s not a great time to flaunt them around.”
Brandon chewed on the inside of his cheek, but surrendered his binder to Cornell. Meg waved me away, since she was already holding mine. I knew a dismissal when I saw one. I led Brandon toward the dining hall, scanning through the crowd for any of our friends.
“There,” Brandon said, pointing at the stairs.
A jolt of cold shock flooded across my chest as I spotted Leigh sitting on the stairs, her arm around a sobbing Perla. Hunter and Jams sat nearby, motionless and pale.
“I thought Avital was such a moron for leaving,” Perla sobbed into Leigh’s shoulder. “We made it through the UCLA camp together a couple of years ago. And she and Samira did the Columbia immersion program last summer. Columbia! But this was too much for her. She was right. This is cruel.”
Leigh stroked Perla’s hair. I noticed that her face was blotchy red, too. “It’s too far.”
Perla hacked a wet cough, her body trembling. “They won’t be happy until we all drop out.”
“You guys don’t think the counselors set this up?” Brandon asked, aghast under his hair.
Leigh glared up at him, tears dripping down her cheeks. “Why not? They set everything else up.”
Hunter swung his head. “If we can’t study, we’ll all get trounced in the Melee. There won’t be anyone left to win.”
I considered pointing out that our team had at least two binders left and that we could share the study materials, but I thought of Cornell’s warning about flaunting that and stopped.
“It’s just paper. It’s not irreplaceable. They’ll print out new pages for us,” Brandon said. “It won’t take long.”
“Blank paper,” Jams said heavily. “All of our notes are gone.”
Leigh wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. “And any essays that weren’t written on a computer.”
“Where are Galen and Kate?” I asked.
“Kate wanted to freak out in private,” Leigh said. “She went to hide in the bathroom.”
“And Galen?” Brandon asked.
“He went to check on something in our room,” Hunter said, eyeing Perla nervously before mouthing, The list.
Balls. The Cheeseman list. We’d all memorized its contents, but the original copy was living in Hunter and Galen’s room. And if the counselors found it, we’d be royally screwed.
The fire alarm cut out abruptly, leaving the quad in expansive silence broken only by the sniffling and whimpering of campers.
There was an amplified metallic click and then the tinny distortion of a bullhorn-magnified voice saying, “All students, please return to the lobby of the residence hall.”
Wendell Cheeseman had arrived.
*
It was vaguely humiliating to be asked to sit while all of the counselors and Wendell got to stand. I was pretty sure that when real college kids got in trouble, no one told them to sit crisscross applesauce. But that was most likely the point that Cheeseman was trying to get across. We weren’t grownups. We were a group of seventeen-year-olds—plus Isaiah—and we were in the deepest of shit.
Kate and Galen joined the rest of our team as we settled onto the scratchy carpet of the lobby. I felt some of the tension go out of my shoulders when Galen gave us a discreet nod, indicating that the list was safe. Kate refused to look at anyone. She kept her eyes trained on the floor, her narrow face ashen.
The overly jocular, finger-guns-pointing Wendell Cheeseman was gone. His gap-toothed smile was missing, replaced by a furious thin line. His button-down shirt was rumpled and missing a tie, as though he’d dressed in a hurry. He wasn’t even sweating. I would have put twenty dollars down on him being a pod person, if I thought anyone was in a betting mood.
He ditched the bullhorn. He stood in front of the crowd of sitting campers, his arms folded tight across his chest. He let the line out on his silence. I was familiar with this tactic because my father also used quiet as a weapon, letting it weigh everyone down until they were ready to confess anything just to hear sounds again.
It didn’t work here. Unless Cheeseman’s intention was to highlight how many people were still crying.
“What happened here this evening is not a joke,” he began, which seemed too on the nose, considering all of the sniffling and wheezing. “I understand that you all have had an exciting first week of camp. The events of the counselors’ endowment may be fun and games, but this is not.”
So he did know about the Cheeseman trials, even if he didn’t know that they were his namesake. It did shatter some of the illusion, knowing that the games were authorized by the governing authorities. They had probably even had to clear their events with the college before putting us through them.
“This evening, a person—or persons—broke into multiple dormitories and removed the study materials found there. At present count, thirty-two binders are missing.” Cheeseman paused, letting this sink in. With Avital gone, there were forty-seven of us left at Onward. So, fifteen people—myself and Brandon included—had binders left. I wondered how many had also taken their binders to dinner. It wasn’t uncommon to see people reading and eating in the dining hall.
“At this time,” Cheeseman continued, still rooted to the carpet, “it is unclear if anything else was taken. Later, you will be excused to make an itemized list of anything else missing from your room.”
I closed my eyes, momentarily inventorying my room. My laptop and cell phone were on my bed. There was cash in the front pocket of my backpack. My train ticket for my journey home was tucked into one of the N. K. Jemisin books on my desk. My debit card, with my real name embossed on it, was hidden in a pair of socks in my suitcase, in case of emergency. If any of it was missing, I would be completely helpless.
It was getting hard to breathe.
“Do you think my typewriter is okay?” Brandon whispered in my ear.
I swallowed thickly and saw his wobbly smile. It was strange to have someone consistently noticing when I started to get under water. It was the kind of surprise sweetness you could get used to if you weren’t careful.
I wrapped one of his shoelaces around my finger, the same way he did when he was thinking. It was comfortable closeness, but not Lumberjack Beard–Perfect Nerd Girl loud about it. His pinky brushed mine in a way that made me think maybe he didn’t mind the quiet route.
“At this point, there are two courses of action we could take,” Cheeseman said, drawing my attention regretfully back up front. “The first and the easiest is that the person or persons responsible for this come forward. The binders will be redistributed and we will continue with the camp as it has been run for the last twenty years.
“The second option is that the camp goes into lockdown. Instead of the collegiate-level freedoms you have been given in the last week, you will answer solely to your counselors, who, in turn”—he glared at the line of standing college kids—“will answer to me. Study materials will be shared, one binder per team, so that everyone will be equ
ally disadvantaged by this heinous and invasive act. You will not go to the bathroom without permission and a written pass. Use of the campus facilities outside of the dining hall will be prohibited. Lights-out will be pushed up to nine p.m.” He shook out his wrist and theatrically held it in front of his face. I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever been part of Eugene’s community theater scene. He would have made an excellent Dr. Chasuble in Earnest. “Which would start in seven minutes.”
Heads turned, everyone searching the lobby for the one person who would stand up and put a stop to this. I saw Isaiah mean-mugging near the back of the room. Leigh was ripping at her fingernails with her teeth. Onobanjo, the possibly-Nigerian Rubik’s Cube whiz, was whipping his head frantically, conducting a seated one-man investigation of the room. Next to the girl with the petal-pink hijab, Perla had started to cry again, her shark eyes getting puffier.
But no one spoke.
Wendell Cheeseman’s head lowered an inch, just enough to close the lid on the conversation.
“Counselors,” he said, disappointment making his voice rumble. “Please collect your teams and escort them to their rooms. Lights out in three minutes.”
“Oh God,” Perla sobbed unabashedly. “I hate this place.”
As we filed toward the counselors, to be sorted by floor, I caught Brandon’s elbow. “What were you saying about being able to get us off campus?”
“Give me two days,” he whispered back. “It just got a little more difficult.”
25
“Socks, check,” Leigh murmured to herself as she sifted through the pile she’d amassed on her bed. “Face wash, check. Beanie, check…” She gasped. “The burglar stole like four of my fancy tampons!”
“That was me,” I said, flipping through the pages of N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms until my train ticket came into view. Safe and sound. Thank God.
“Oh, that’s fine, then. Only top quality for my bestie. No cheapo cardboard,” Leigh said, raining feminine hygiene products back into her battered blue backpack.
Not Now, Not Ever Page 16
