Not Now, Not Ever

by Lily Anderson

  “Uh, sure,” Brandon said, glancing up from the floor. “You’d have to look up their phone numbers, but there’s plenty of decent pizza.”

  “If you guys are willing to chip in money for it,” Meg said carefully, “I don’t see a problem with it. We could set up a picnic outside during dinner, so it doesn’t look like we’re lording it over the other teams…”

  Leigh punched her fist in the air. “Tonight we dine in hell!”

  “I was thinking the quad,” Meg said. “But I always appreciate your enthusiasm, Leigh.”

  *

  “Why didn’t we do this weeks ago?” Jams said, his eyes closed in delight as he stretched out on Meg’s My Little Pony blanket, a plate heaped with pizza in front of him.

  “And can we do it forever?” Galen asked, covering his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Crappy camp food is a time-honored tradition,” Meg said, carefully selecting a slice from one of the three open boxes in the center of our haphazard circle of blankets.

  Hunter laughed, displaying a lump of partially masticated mozzarella. “Yeah, constantly having the runs is an important part of your emotional development.”

  “Gross, Hunter,” Kate squeaked. “I’m eating.”

  “We are all eating,” Perla concurred darkly.

  Leigh flopped down on her back, next to me, and stretched her legs out, feeding herself slices from above. “This pizza is so good that you could honestly talk about anything during it and it wouldn’t deter me at all.”

  “Let’s not test that theory,” I said, popping a slice of bell pepper in my mouth.

  Hari shook out a napkin and placed it over his lap before taking his first bite of the vegetarian pizza. “Goddamn I missed real food. Our dining hall actually makes really good food when it isn’t being run by students. I can’t wait for the chefs to come back from summer break. I’m never going to eat another frozen waffle in my life.”

  “Can we talk about tomorrow morning?” Kate asked delicately. “It is the second-to-last skirmish.”

  “It’s the last skirmish for five teams,” Brandon said. I had been trying so hard not to look at him, but his voice drew my attention across the circle, where he was sitting next to Meg. Only the tip of his nose and his top lip were visible between his hair and his bent knees. I wasn’t sure he’d even had any pizza. Realizing people were listening to him, he added, “Hopefully not us.”

  “Not us,” Meg said firmly.

  Kate nodded. “Positive thinking.”

  Brandon rocked to the side in what might have been a shrug if he’d let go of his legs. “Logical thinking. Statistically, we’re ahead by enough points that—”

  “Never tell me the odds,” I blurted.

  Brandon’s eyes flickered up to mine and, for the first time in days, held.

  I hate this, I tried to tell him silently. I don’t think there’s any way to fix it, but I wish I could. I wish I could stay here forever and not look ahead.

  I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.

  “Sorry,” I said dumbly, turning away first. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “There’s always time for Star Wars quotes,” Meg said cheerfully.

  “Ever,” Brandon breathed. Or maybe I imagined it. When I looked up, he was uncurling himself to reach for pizza.

  Wishful thinking, then. I returned to my dinner. I had put in most of my train snack money to help pay for it, after all.

  Footsteps crunched against the grass. Cornell was coming from the residence hall with his head down and his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. He looked particularly gloomy for someone whose team was currently ranked in second place, behind us.

  “Cornell!” Meg said, turning on her megawatt smile. “I’d offer you pizza but I don’t want to share. Why aren’t you at dinner?”

  He winced half a smile at her in return. “I need to borrow Ever, if it’s all right.”

  “Huh?” A long string of cheese fell across my chin. “Me?”

  Cornell nodded, politely looking away as I scrubbed the cheese off my face. “Your brother needs to talk to you. Alone. He got a call from home and it doesn’t seem like good news. He’s pretty shaken up. Did you hear from your parents tonight?”

  “No.” I moved to pat my sweatshirt, but I knew it was empty. Not that it mattered. Isaiah and I didn’t get the same emergency calls. “I don’t have my phone on me.”

  “You can go on up to his room,” Cornell said. “It’s the last one on the left. Next to the lounge.”

  “Okay. Um. Thanks.” I got to my feet and brushed blades of grass off my legs before jogging to the lobby.

  I could feel my lips trembling as my adrenaline spiked. I pushed down thoughts of Uncle Marcus, deployed in God knows where, or Grandmother Lawrence, with her paper-thin skin and eternally high blood pressure. Or Sid, driving her car like it was a freaking fighter jet up and down the highway.

  I took the stairs up to the first floor and elbowed open the door. With everyone at dinner in some fashion or another, the hall was quiet. The last door on the left was open. The chalkboard sign had been wiped away once, with fingerprints left behind. On top of the smear was written “Wy & Zay.” It was almost adorable.

  Inside, Isaiah’s dorm was identical to my own. Same narrow beds and cheap desks and tall wardrobes. His roommate had clothes all over the floor, whereas Isaiah’s side was tidy the way everyone in our family was tidy—compulsively and under threat of consequences.

  Isaiah was sitting at his desk, facing the windows that overlooked the quad. With only his roommate’s desk lamp on to illuminate the room, his shadow was gigantic on the wall. Seeing my reflection in the window, he turned around. His eyes were so red that he looked almost extraterrestrial, even more like the Predator than normal.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked with a globby sniffle.

  “Cornell came to get me,” I said, leaning on the door until it closed. “Because I’m your sister for another couple of days. What’s going on? Is Uncle Marcus okay?”

  He flinched, his dreads snaking around his cheeks. “Oh, Dad’s fine. He can’t get out here in time.”

  I looked for a place to sit, but nowhere on Wy’s side of the room was even remotely clean enough. I settled for standing at the head of Isaiah’s bed, one hand on the bed frame. “In time to what? What’s going on?”

  “It’s my mom,” he said, with a snivel that was organic for once. Fat tears welled in his eyes and he wiped his nose on the back of his arm in one long swipe. “She knows. Sid’s ex mailed my T-shirt to my house instead of here and my mom opened it.”

  My heart sped up. “Wait, so your mom knows you’re here? Because of a T-shirt from leadership adventure camp?”

  “There was a note in the package, wishing me luck on the Melee. That dumb asshole. I’m glad Sid cheated on him.” He threw up his hands and didn’t seem to notice that tears were leaking out of his eyes. “She’s coming up here to get me. First thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Wait, that’s it?” I gasped. “She’s just going to pull you out of the Melee? You’re so close to the end! You’re in the semifinals! What if your team makes it to the end?”

  He stood up, his shadow looming all the way up to the ceiling. “That’s the point. We don’t get to finish. We don’t get to make this choice. We’ll both be lucky if they don’t ship us down to one of the military schools. There’s one in Oakland. We wouldn’t even have to move. It’s only an hour away from home.”

  I shook my head. “The military schools are army. No Lawrence is getting shuffled off to be a goddamn ground pounder.”

  He stamped his foot against the carpet. His lower lip was quivering nonstop, but it wasn’t an act. He couldn’t stop crying. He had opened a valve and it was all coming out now. His bright red eyes narrowed with the effort of talking. “Do you think they care? We ran away, Elliot. We ran away and we lied and they know.”

  Panic started to spark underneath my skin, using my bones as a fl
int. “Why do you keep saying ‘we’ like this is on both of us?”

  He put his head in his hands and let out a sob that racked his entire body. “I was so fucking close … I just wanted a fucking chance…”

  I walked around the bed to stand in front of him. I thought about reaching out to touch him, to console him, but it wasn’t what we did. I was sure he’d see it as an act of war and take a swing at me.

  “What did you do, Isaiah?” I demanded. “What did you tell your mom?”

  He sniveled and slurped and gulped down a breath before lifting his head to face me again.

  “Mutually assured destruction,” he said thickly. “You bitch.”

  35

  Leigh was nursing a final slice of pizza when she stopped short in the doorway.

  “Hey, Ever,” she said in the same tone you would use on a rabid dog. Or on your deranged-looking five-foot-ten Muay Thai–trained roommate. “You wanna talk now?”

  I looked up from ripping the sheets off my bed. My suitcase was open on the floor, most of my shoes already paired off inside. The glittery Firefly poster was laid across the top of my newly empty desk until I could track down a rubber band. I’d tried to talk myself into leaving it behind, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out.

  “I’m going home,” I said. It was a relief to say it out loud. It had been playing on a loop in my head since I’d run out of Isaiah’s room and checked my phone. Twenty-seven missed calls from all three of my parents. I hadn’t managed to get through all of the voice mails, but the gist was that Beth had booked a flight for first thing in the morning and that repercussions the likes of which I had never imagined were about to fall down on me.

  Aunt Bobbie had called Beth during her final dress rehearsal, so I had ruined not only my parents’ night but also the integrity of Woodland Opera House’s umpteenth production of The Importance of Being Earnest. So that was one more mark in the Elliot’s An Asshole column, alongside “Kicked her cousin in the stomach instead of discussing problems like a rational adult,” “Broke a cute boy’s heart,” and “Was never nice enough to Perla and maybe that’s why she’s such a snob.”

  Oh. And the whole “Ran away, using Oscar Wilde as an excuse” thing.

  “Is this about you and Isaiah not actually being related?” Leigh asked, edging into the room and closing the door.

  I snapped around to face her and she shied closer to her wardrobe, eyebrows worn high and imperious on her forehead.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Come on,” she scoffed, waving her pizza in the air. “There is one thousand percent no way that you two are twins. Not even brother and sister. Are you ready to talk about it, because you look like you might have snapped and I have a lot of questions.”

  My fitted sheet finally detached from the farthest corner of the mattress and whizzed into my arms. I sat down, the wad of billowing cotton settling on my lap.

  “You knew?” I asked.

  “Are you serious?” She laughed, throwing herself down on her mattress. “From the second he showed up. You were shocked to see him on the first day. Like the-boogeyman-showed-up shocked. I mean, I let it go because it was your business, but now…” She gestured to my luggage. “It looks like shit’s gone sideways?”

  “The most sideways,” I said.

  “Can I help?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I rubbed my lips together. “Do you mind listening to a bunch of truth all at once?”

  She grinned. “I’ve been waiting weeks for you to ask me that.”

  So I laid it all out for her. From the beginning, all the way until Isaiah pulled the trigger on our mutually assured destruction, with long, hyperventilating detours to explain how I’d told Brandon that we had no future together and that I hadn’t returned a single phone call home since the night we’d watched The Breakfast Club.

  “Hm,” she said, when I’d run out of steam and she’d run out of pizza. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” I repeated. “Did you hear all of that crap I just spewed at you?”

  She smiled in recognition. “Ever—”

  “It’s Elliot, actually,” I interrupted. “My real name is Elliot.”

  “But my summer camp best friend’s name is Ever. You chose it yourself, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Then I am keeping it. I like it. It’s a very romantic name,” she said. She hopped up, dusting herself off. “All right. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  She winked at me as she scurried for the door. “To my big secret.”

  I followed her out of the dorm, checking over my shoulder the entire way, prepared to see Meg or Harper jump out of the shadows.

  “Calm down. You can’t get sent home if you’re already going home,” Leigh laughed, as we entered the stairwell.

  “You could!” I hissed at her back.

  “Same difference,” she said with a wave of her wrist.

  I stopped protesting once we were out of the lobby and into the quad. The night was bracingly crisp and the stars were out in full effect. The crickets were louder than they had been when we’d been out for dinner, or maybe I was free to notice them now that basically everything had come crashing down around me. I felt like my whole body was made of raw, broken skin. Without the scab of secrets, everything was too free to sink in.

  Leigh took a left, pointing us in the direction of the Lauritz and walking in surprisingly long strides on her short legs.

  “So,” I said. “You were going to tell me something?”

  “No,” she said in cheery singsong. “I was going to show you something.”

  “Is it a dead body?”

  She goggled up at me, her mouth slack. “Why would I show you a dead body?”

  “I don’t know!” I huffed, skipping to keep up. “What else would you show me that you couldn’t tell me about first?”

  “Oh my God, so many things before dead body,” she said. “A basket of puppies or a mossy log or a cloud that looks like a pony? All of those before dead body.”

  “There aren’t any clouds out. It’s nighttime.”

  “Okay, then maybe I wanted to show you the moon,” she said.

  I looked up, but it was impossible to find the moon beyond the shadowy rooftops and tree branches.

  Leigh grabbed my arm and tugged. “I didn’t want to show you the moon, Ever. You’ve seen the moon. And don’t even guess that I’m a ghost, because I will be seriously pissed if you think I’m imaginary.”

  “Imaginary people don’t have tiny sharp nails digging into my wrist,” I said, wincing at the pain as she continued to pull me up the sidewalk. We took another left and entered the trees. “Are you taking me to Mudders Meadow?”

  “Mudders Meadow is for freshmen and orgies,” she sneered. “I can’t believe they included that on the list of must-see places on campus. We are going through the meadow.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, ducking as branches started to lodge in my hair. “Did you just say ‘orgies’?”

  “Yes, Ever, my secret is that I’m a sex maniac,” she said sarcastically. She gave my arm another tug. “You really make surprising you less fun than it could be.”

  “You make revealing surprises more cryptic than it needs to be.”

  “Touché.”

  We pressed on, cutting across the clearing that was Mudders Meadow and onward, deeper into the trees. Overhead, owls screeched.

  Finally there was a glimpse of light. Ahead, the trees started to thin out, and I thought I could see something white on the ground. Leigh pushed me to the right and we bumped into a knobby old oak tree.

  “Up,” she said.

  “Up?” I echoed, but then I looked up and understood. A giant four-walled tree house loomed large over us. Not the rinky-dink kind that had been in the arboretum. This was more like one of the Fort Farm forts mounted in a tree, with two-by-fours holding it steady to the trunk.

  “Will we both fit in it?” I asked.

/>   “Sure,” Leigh said. “I don’t take up much room. Give me a second. I’ll throw down the ladder.”

  And just like the afternoon of the climbing event, she hopped up the trunk and landed inside of the house. A metal ladder descended, the kind people use to escape the second story of a burning house. My parents had one in their closet.

  I climbed awkwardly and landed on the wooden floor. Light erupted, and I threw an arm up against the glare. When my eyesight adjusted, I saw a camping lantern illuminating the inside of what Beth would call a “cozy studio” tree house. My hair brushed the ceiling, but otherwise the tree house was much roomier than it looked from below.

  “I know,” Leigh said airily. “It’s bigger on the inside.”

  There was a single storage container on Leigh’s side of the room, which she opened, leaving the lantern between us. She retrieved a single bottle with a pirate on the label and two plastic cups and set them next to the lantern. And then she pulled out a plain red leather wallet, which she handed to me.

  I opened the wallet’s flap and saw a small photo of Leigh. Her hair was black, not yellow, and was stick straight, so long that it disappeared out of frame. She also wore thick black glasses, the kind that people sometimes wore even without a prescription.

  It took me a second to realize what I was looking at. On the top, in bold font, it read “Rayevich College: Class of 2019.”

  I looked up. Leigh twisted the top off of the pirate bottle and a strong alcoholic breeze filled the tree house. She poured some of the dark brown liquor into each of the cups and handed one to me.

  “Surprise?” she said.

  I took a long drink from the cup she’d handed me. It tasted like syrup that was also on fire. I couldn’t tell if I hated it. I drank it again and my entire throat felt like it was pulsing red hot.

  Leigh took her sips more carefully, watching me with nervous eyes.

  “I shaved my head to get off the creamy-crack wagon,” she said. “You know. The big chop?”

  I couldn’t tell if she really believed that her using relaxer was the biggest shock here.

  “You go here?” I asked. The alcohol made my voice feel far away, so I said it again. “You. Go. Here. How?”