“I’m seventeen, just like you,” she said, bouncing her head from side to side. “But I’m also about to go into my junior year. Of college. Here. The camp bylaws don’t expressly say that preexisting students can’t win the scholarship. There’s no precedent for it, but it’s not against the rules…”
“How?” I repeated, louder this time.
“Not all geniuses go to the Messina.” Her forehead scrunched in distaste. “It’s a very expensive holding pattern. I don’t know who would blow all that money on not going to college.”
“And the tree house?” I asked, very close to shouting now. “How how how?”
“That’s what they’re for,” she said, giving a little snort into her cup. “Have you seen the prices for on-campus housing? It’s ridiculous. There’s a reason people fight for placement at this camp. That full ride is buku bucks. Anyway, if you want to live off campus, you have to have a car, because the buses don’t run all the way out here all day. It’s a nightmare. And I didn’t have my driver’s license when I started here because I was fifteen—”
I spluttered. “You’re like a real genius.”
“It’s not like there’s a difference between me being a genius and you being a genius.”
“Except you go to college,” I stressed. “And you live in a tree. A tree.”
A handbag! shouted Oscar Wilde. Oh, God. Alcohol made the quoting louder. Or maybe it was the beginning of my real, live nervous breakdown.
“Most of the time, yeah.” She shrugged. “When the weather is really bad, I can usually crash with friends in the residence hall. My parents only qualified for so much financial aid, so…” She stopped. “Are you like really freaked out right now or is the rum making your face do that?”
I touched my face. It did feel freaked out. My eyes were bugging and my mouth wouldn’t close. My head was starting to spin. I set my cup down. “Did you take the binders?”
Her eyes went saucer round. “What? No. Of course not.”
“There is no ‘of course’ when you tell me that you started college at fifteen and live in a tree.”
“You lied about your name and having a twin and I didn’t accuse you of stealing the binders. Plus, the binders getting taken was a blow to my summer, too, you know. I don’t know shit about classical music. Who has a classical music section but no math? What kind of shit is that?” She scooted back until her back pressed against one of the tree house walls. “Fine. Yes, I took most of the water bottles from the dining hall, but that is it. I did not break into anyone’s rooms. That’s such an invasion of privacy.”
“Sorry,” I said. I rubbed my eyes until pinpricks of light floated behind my lids. “Why haven’t any of the counselors recognized you? It’s a small school, right?”
“Who said they haven’t?” she asked. “I’m here under my real name. Simone from Team Five and I took medieval art history together last year. Not that we’re super best friends or anything. It’s hard to make friends when you’re the baby everywhere you go. Camp has been really cool for having other smart kids around. I’ll miss that when the semester starts back up.” Her eyes stared past me. “Oh! Maybe that’s why people go to the Messina. I never factor in the social component. Still. It seems like an expensive way to keep friends.” My face must have still been rum-frozen, because Leigh reached over to pat my knee. “I’m really sorry about all of this. I don’t have a way to keep your parents from stealing you back to California. I’ll miss you when you go. I really liked having a bestie for a couple of weeks.”
“I really liked being your bestie for a couple of weeks.” My voice—too far away from my ears—was as tight as a hug good-bye. Without warning, my eyes burned with an entire ocean of tears. “I really don’t want to go home. I’m not ready to be at the end.”
“It’s okay,” she said softly. “You aren’t.”
I curled up on the floor, taking up almost all of it, like in Alice in Wonderland, when she became a giant and wore that cottage like a romper. Leigh petted my hair while I cried.
*
It was harder climbing down the ladder light-headed from rum and feelings. More feelings than rum, truth be told, since I’d let Leigh finish my cup when the tree house started to spin. She was kind enough not to judge me for being a lightweight.
It was funny. Being a lightweight but outweighing her by so much.
“Come here, swervy,” she said, gently guiding me through the trees. “I thought the rum would take the edge off your shitty night. I didn’t think about having to drag your Amazonian butt back across campus.”
“You aren’t dragging me,” I said, pointedly striding ahead of her. I stopped short and looked around. All of the trees in front of me had forks and yarn wound through the branches. “But I might already be lost.”
Her hands found my elbow again, pulling me away. “It’s not your fault. Trees kind of all look the same.”
“Racist.”
“Arborist?”
“That one.”
I started to laugh—or maybe cry again—when Leigh’s hand clamped over my mouth. My complaints were muffled against her palm. As I considered whether to bite her for freedom—a tactic Isaiah used on me dozens of times when we were little—I finally clued in to why we’d stopped walking. There were voices in Mudders Meadow.
“Dad said—” screeched one. A girl. A familiar girl.
“Dad said…” parroted another, this one crueler, colder. “You are being a child, Katie. No one else gets to use their security blankets. Are you saying that you aren’t as smart as everyone else?”
“My team has missed the same question about the Murakami short story every single skirmish.”
That was odd. Our team had missed the same question about “A Shinagawa Monkey” every round of the Melee so far.
A second too late, I froze down to my bones.
“It’s Kate,” Leigh breathed in my ear.
Our Kate? Kate with her narrow face and braying laugh. Why was Kate screaming in the meadow in the middle of the night?
“I want to know the answer before it costs us the semifinals,” Kate continued, on the other side of the trash trees.
“Fine. I’ll get you the stupid binder,” said the other voice. “But this is it. You told Dad that you could handle the same pressures as everyone else. If you can’t even memorize the binder, then how do you expect to survive your first term here?”
“It’s not the same thing, Rowan!”
Rowan? I thought. I didn’t know anyone named Rowan. I looked over at Leigh, who seemed as confused as I was.
Good. I was afraid it was the rum.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Okay. Some of it was the rum. Drinking looked like way more fun when the Shakespeare company got drunk at Beth’s Christmas party. It mostly made my whole body feel like it was full of sand and sparklers.
“Meet me on my floor during breakfast,” Rowan said. “You can look through the binder then. I need to get back before anyone notices that I’m gone.”
“Yeah, me too,” Kate said.
There was a peal of laughter. “Yeah, I’m sure your Salieri is desperate to know where you are.”
Leigh and I crept forward as the girls’ footsteps started to retreat, but both of them were wearing black hoodies pulled over their hair.
“Shit,” Leigh hissed. “More siblings? What the hell is going on? Do you know anyone named Salieri? Since when does Kate have a sister here? Oh my God! She out-awkwarded me! I was so played!”
I clasped her shoulders, with awful, drunken awareness banging like a gong in my head. “It’s a full-on Wildean farce.”
36
A bottle of water was tucked into bed with me. There was a Post-it wrapped around the label that read, “For your first little baby hangover. Love, Leigh.” My head did hurt a bit, but I wasn’t sure if that was the alcohol dehydrating me or all of the crying I’d done last night.
I sat up foggily, unsure what had woken me. I had a vague memory of Leigh tel
ling me she was going to breakfast, but I didn’t know how long ago that was. I wasn’t wearing any of my blankets.
Because all of my blankets were in my suitcase.
Because I was going home today.
This morning.
Now?
I looked over at my desk and saw my phone screen flashing with a text message from Beth.
You can ignore our phone calls all you want, Elliot. We will be at Rayevich at 10:00. Be packed and ready to come home. We have already spoken to Dean Cheeseman.
“Associate dean,” I said to the phone. Not that it or Beth could hear me.
It was my last morning at Rayevich, and that was going to have to be okay. I had done the selfish thing. All of the selfish things, really. Running away, publicly humiliating and injuring Isaiah—twice—and almost, maybe, falling in love with a guy whose voice was like the coziest sweater. And then spent the night drinking and crying about it with my new college best friend. Who was already in college.
Today, I would own up to it. If it took military school or never driving again or only driving Ethan and his friends to and from Scandia Fun Center so that they could play mini golf while I sat in the car, that would have to be enough. It would be worth it, because I got what I wanted. I got two and a half weeks that were mine. That no one could take away from me.
Even if they could interrupt it. It was only two days early, and I’d gotten to keep my good underwear the whole time. Suck on that, BMT.
I chugged the bottle of water in full. I could feel it splashing into my stomach, creating tidal waves of rum-soaked acid. I padded down to the bathroom and washed my face and brushed the sour plaque off my teeth. I couldn’t help myself from mentally saying good-bye to everything I passed. The broken soap dispenser next to my favorite sink with the water least likely to scald your hands. The lemon-yellow lounge in the hall. The chalkboard doors full of names I never bothered to learn.
And then I stopped.
I was accepting an ending again. I had gone to bed defeated and kind of drunk and possibly trying to convince Leigh that Kate’s mysterious sibling had been trying to say “Salami yeti,” not “Salieri.”
I didn’t know it was over. As long as I was on campus, I refused to jump to the end.
I went back to my empty dorm and got down on the floor. The thin carpet pinched against the lines of my hands as I pushed myself into a plank. I would live my last day at camp as Elliot Gabaroche. Starting with forty-five push-ups and fifty sit-ups.
I had left home looking for something that was all mine, something outside of my parents and their families. But that wasn’t right.
According to the Onward entrance exam, I was a genius. And we needed geniuses in the service, same as anywhere else. Maybe more than anywhere else. You didn’t want to hand a bunch of idiots military tech. Hiding my light under a bushel wouldn’t help me or my country or my family—any of my families.
For as long as I had understood that college happened after high school, I’d known that my mother was waiting for me at the Air Force Academy. Not literally. She wouldn’t be in the next room, ready to come in and chat when I couldn’t sleep, or sit up sipping tea with me, the way Beth did sometimes. But we could experience more time together than we’d ever had before. Dinners. Weekends. Trips off base. Not just for a week or two at a time, like we did now over spring break, but for years.
Years when I was supposed to be spreading my wings.
That didn’t scrub all of the military as a prospect. I didn’t have to go to the Academy. Just like Brandon didn’t have to go to an Ivy League school to do math. Being gifted didn’t go away because you chose a different fork in the road. That was the beauty of taking your brain with you wherever you went.
You didn’t have to be the first person to be good at something to own it. The air force wasn’t my destiny, but I’d been running toward it and away from it for too long.
Maybe I’d enlist right out of high school, like my mom had done. Maybe I’d go to college first and enter as an officer, like my uncle Marcus. That wouldn’t make it less mine. Just like sharing this summer with Isaiah wouldn’t diminish my memories of camp.
I was ready to be comfortably in the middle of a story instead of running toward the end. I was done trying to outpace myself.
I got dressed and stacked my suitcase, laptop bag, and backpack on my bare mattress before descending the stairs to the first floor. It wasn’t like anyone could send me home. The freedom was empowering, like wearing an invisible mecha robot suit or one of the force fields that Isaiah always threw up when we used to play together. I was almost disappointed when I got to the end of the hall and didn’t get caught. I knocked on the ampersand between the chalk Wy & Zay.
A rail-thin white kid with fluffy blond hair answered the door, his eyes wide as he said, “Uh-h-h…” with such sustained breath that I was actually impressed.
“You must be Wy,” I said. When he didn’t move, I gestured to myself. “I’m Isaiah’s sister. I need to talk to him.”
“Oh, right. I’ll leave you guys alone,” Wy said, jittering away from the door and clearing a path for me to step inside the dorm. Instead of closing the door behind him, he slipped through it. “See you at breakfast, Zay!”
Isaiah was sitting on his bed. He hadn’t yet unmade it. The sheets were neatly tucked under the corners, ready for another night.
“Have you heard from Aunt Bobbie?” I asked.
He glared up at me. “Why?”
I put my hands up in surrender. “My folks are going to be here at ten. I was wondering if they caught the same flight.”
“Must have,” he muttered. “My mom will be here at ten, too.”
“Good,” I said. “I need you to stay with your team. Go to the skirmish. Start competing.”
He squinted at me like I’d lost my mind. “What? No. Why?”
“Because I’m asking you to?”
“You’re telling,” he shot back.
I held my tongue and counted to ten. Then I tried it again with Mississippis. There wasn’t a world where he made it easy to be nice to him.
“Whoever they see first is going to take the brunt of this,” I said.
“So?” He smashed his arms over his chest. The movement threw a wall of his cologne at me.
“So, that should be me,” I said, wincing at the smell. I guess it would mask whatever was happening with all of Wy’s dirty clothes. I squared my shoulders. “You were right, Isaiah. You need this more than me. You need the room to make this choice for you. Go compete. If you can beat my team, then I don’t doubt that you’ll get your placement here. You deserve a scholarship here.”
He stared at me, possibly waiting for me to crack up and tell him it was all a joke. When I didn’t, he sniffed. “Is this because you kicked me in the stomach?”
I scuffed my heel against the carpet. “Sort of. I don’t mean to be a bitch to you. You’re just…” I thought about Leigh saying how hard it was to make friends when you’re always the youngest, and Crumbs ignoring Brandon’s pleas in French. “You’re the baby. It’s not your fault that you’re an annoying douche-canoe. You just make it so hard to be nice to you. We were doing okay before you tried to blackmail me during the lightsaber duel.”
He hung his head, clasping his hands together. His thumbs rubbed together awkwardly. “I wouldn’t have told anyone about your boyfriend.”
I gritted my teeth. “The first chance you got, you told your mom I was here.”
“Well, yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “But she would have found that out when she got here, wouldn’t she?”
“Make sure that you make it to the skirmish. Before I change my mind about trying to be nice to you.”
He examined my face. “Are you going to enlist?”
I shrugged. “Someday.”
“Because that’s what Lawrences do?”
“I’m not a Lawrence.”
“Are so. You’ve got two last names, don’t you?”
He got to his feet. I was momentarily paralyzed with fear that he was going to hug me, but he straightened up tall and saluted me.
“Aim high, Ever.”
I returned the salute. “Fly, fight, win, Zay.”
*
As I opened the door to the stairwell, the pocket of my shorts buzzed. I froze, bracing for another rage-filled text from one of my parents, but was surprised to see Leigh’s name pop up.
Come to breakfast! I found Rowan! I am the greatest detective in the world!!! (Simone helped.)
I paused. I had some time before the plague of screaming adults was timed to hit campus. And I would get hungry while they were yelling at me. And maybe if I made it to the end of breakfast, I could say good-bye to Brandon. Or not say good-bye and just see him again. Depending on my current level of cowardice.
There wasn’t much left on the breakfast buffet when I made it to the dining hall. I managed to get a single pancake and a couple of sausages before throwing myself down at the open spot at the end of the bench, next to Perla.
“Ever!” Meg said, barely concealing her shock. “I didn’t think you were going to make it down today. I got a message from Professor Cheeseman last night—”
“I was hungry,” I said simply, ignoring the confusion passing around the table.
“And just in time!” Leigh said, leaping off the bench and showing zero sign that she was feeling any of the rum we’d shared the night before. She threw her arms out wide. “May I have your attention, please?”
“Leigh,” Hari said wearily. “Sit down.”
“Stuff it, Bhardwaj,” Leigh said, pirouetting to point a finger at him. She strode to the middle of the dining hall. “Pop quiz! Who is Salieri?”
There was a lot of confused muttering before one of the guys from the Team Five table called out, “He was Beethoven’s nemesis!”
“Mozart, not Beethoven,” corrected Fallon loudly from the Team Two table. “Get it together, Team Five.”
“Hasn’t anyone else seen Amadeus?” Jams wondered aloud.
“Nope,” Hunter said. “I’ll add it to the list of movies that we have to watch when we get home.”
“Antonio Salieri was an eighteenth-century composer,” Leigh continued, theatrically loud. “And yet he is best remembered for his rivalry with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. There’s a whole section about it on his Wikipedia page. But unless you’re like Jams and just have a passion for the Tony Award–winning play based on Mozart’s and Salieri’s lives, why the hell do any of us know this?”
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