Mark goes rigid. “I thought we had a plan, guys.”
Before he can argue, Ash calls out to Alva and points to the seat next to him.
“Hey, guys,” she says, walking up to the table.
And then she blows straight on past us without even slowing down.
“Hey! Where’re you going?” says Ash. “We saved you a space.”
“No thanks, I’m good. Cole saved me a seat tonight.”
She nods to the Stachesquatch across the dining hall.
“Oh,” Ash says.
“Wait,” I say. “Since when isn’t Cole sitting with us?”
Alva’s mouth quirks upward. “Have you really not noticed that he got squeezed out like two days ago?”
Ash and I look at each other. Has Cole been sitting alone for the past two days? As I’m trying to figure out how I didn’t notice that, Alva gives me a thin-lipped smile.
“Have a super cool dinner, you guys,” she says, and turns away.
“Hey, come on!” pleads Ash. “We want you to stay, Alva.”
“Yeah, Cole can come too,” I say. “Come back and hang out!”
Just then Devon arrives with his taunting voice: “Yeah, Alva! Come back—we really, really want to hang out with you.”
I burn with embarrassment as she scowls at us and makes a gesture I cannot describe in front of a famous inventor.
And then I feel Devon slide into the seat between me and Ash. He smiles hugely at us. “Thanks for saving me a seat.”
I keep watching Alva as she eats her dinner, laughing and talking with Cole. Their presence appears to totally annoy the other guy at their table—Deadeyes, who always eats alone and pretends to read a book, while secretly using his phone.
“Okay, seriously,” says Devon. “Are you even paying attention?”
“Huh?” I ask. I guess he’s been talking to me.
Devon stares. “I thought we were gonna hang out, Ian. Didn’t you want to tell jokes? Isn’t that what you told Mark? That you were sick of being ignored or whatever?”
“What?” I ask lamely.
Devon gets frustrated. “Dude, what is going on with you?”
“I’m sorry. I just—I’m not feeling good, I think.”
He frowns at me and throws his hands in the air like he gives up. “Whatever,” he says, grabbing a handful of sweet-potato tots before rising to his feet.
“See ya later,” he says, already halfway to the other end of the table. Miranda’s side.
I look over at Cole and Alva, and Mark grips my shoulder.
“Don’t do it, Ian,” he says. “It’s fixed. Just leave it.”
“I just want to go over for a minute and talk to her,” I say. “Tell her why we’re being weird.”
“Why would you stir things up right now?” he whispers in frustration. “She’s happy over there.”
I look at Ash. But he shakes his head no too.
“He’s right. She didn’t even want to sit with us. Leave her alone.”
He stares at his plate and pokes his half-eaten food, like he’s just been told that the sauce on his spaghetti is actually dog barf.
“Be a little easier on yourselves, guys,” Mark says with a small smile. “You can’t solve every problem.”
I flick my gaze sideways like I’m slinging a water balloon at him. Mark dodges out of the way.
Inside my head, the Freak is fired up. And as much as I fight against it, before long I’m thrusting my legs against the ground and lurching out of my seat.
“What are you doing, Ian?” says Mark.
“I am going over there before this gets out of control,” the Freak announces. “No one try to stop me!”
Probably because they’re really surprised, nobody makes a move to grab me. I walk over to Alva’s table so quickly that the Freak and I don’t have time to figure out what we want to say.
Cole and Alva slowly raise their heads.
“Hi, Ian,” says Cole.
“Hi, guys?” I say, somehow making it into a question.
“Whatcha doing?” Alva asks.
But I’m frozen. Standing there with my mouth hanging open and no words coming out. And then? As may happen when you let your mouth hang open, something flies into it, like a plane landing at the airport … only its runway is alive and definitely doesn’t want to be landed on. I start to cough, trying to spit out the bug or whatever flew into my mouth.
Everyone is staring.
And the next thing I know, the Stachesquatch is thumping me on the back over and over, and I cough up something weird: a little pellet of paper.
A spitball. A sharpshooter shot right into my mouth.
I try to look around for the shooter, but Cole is still thwacking me on the back. Whacking the air out of my lungs.
“Stop!” I wheeze at him. “Stop, I’m fine. Cole!”
“You alive?” he asks.
“Gentlemen!” says Mr. Dunford, coming up behind us. “What’s going on here?”
“He’s hitting me,” I complain.
“Hitting you?” says Cole. “I was saving your life!”
“Looked like you were choking pretty bad to me, dude,” Deadeyes pipes up, suddenly distracted from his phone. “Ooh! Ian, you totally owe him a life debt now.”
“Ooh!” Cole echoes. “Yeah, you have to follow me around and do what I say forever.”
Mr. Dunford decides to let the matter drop. “You okay, Ian?” he asks, quietly. I give him an embarrassed nod.
“Good,” he says. “Have a seat, then.”
For a moment he leaves a comforting hand on my shoulder. It only makes me feel worse. I look super pitiful right now, and I’m clearly not fooling anybody.
As Dunford walks away again, my eyes flick toward Alva to see what she’s thinking about all of this.
Which is when I realize that she’s gone. Vanished, Tom. Like snow when you step inside the house.
“Ah, crap,” I say.
“You choking again?” says Cole.
He winds up to start hitting me again.
“No, no—where did Alva go?”
Cole and Jeremy point to where she’s heading out of the dining hall, and I’m about to chase after her when there’s a commotion at Devon and Miranda’s cool-kid table. I see them leap backward with an “Ugh!” as a bottle of soda explodes like a fire hose, drenching the entire table in sticky brown liquid.
“Who did that?” Mr. Dunford turns back to face the room.
For a second, there’s no response. Then just a single, small voice:
“It was Alva, Mr. Dunford,” says Ash. “I saw the whole thing.”
Everyone’s head swivels to Alva, who pauses in the doorway and looks back at Ash in shock.
Devon and Miranda’s expressions go from completely grossed out to wide, wide grins.
“Ash and Alva?” says Mr. Dunford. “Judge Cressett’s office, please.”
After dinner, a group of boys settle into a game of slap on the floor in the dorm, but the game ends and begins and ends again and Ash is still in the Judge’s office.
He comes in right before lights-out, and Devon cheers for him like he’s a hero, clearing room in the circle for him to sit. But Ash climbs up into my bunk and sits with me instead. Staring into space.
“You okay?” I ask him.
“How do you know if you’re doing the right thing?” he asks.
“… asking the wrong guy,” I say.
He swings his head around toward me. There’s a little laugh in his throat, but it doesn’t make it the whole way to his mouth. “Everything’s screwed up,” he says. “But at least they won’t try to get her kicked out now.”
For a minute, I just sit there—and then I shake my head. “Only you could make being the bad guy a selfless act.”
Ash’s eyes are full of guilt anyway. “She hates me now.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“I’m gonna go read, okay?” says Ash.
I nod, and he starts
to climb down. But he pauses on the ladder and thinks again.
“Actually. There’s something I need to tell you,” he says.
“About what?” I ask.
He climbs up again. “Remember when Devon slipped Max that peanut butter?”
I feel a little chill. “Sure.”
“He knew, Ian. About Max’s allergy.”
“Yeah,” I say. “He thought it’d make Max sneeze.”
At Ash’s expression, I feel the chill tighten around me.
“No. He knew how dangerous it was for Max.”
I feel a giant, icy thing gripping me.
“And I warned Max to be careful,” Ash goes on. “That Devon might try something like that. So he wouldn’t fall for it.”
I feel the sinking, swirling beginning of a flush! and force myself to hold firm right in the moment where I am. “But if you warned him, then why did Max fall for it?”
Ash shakes his head. “He didn’t want to lose us as friends. He thought Devon wasn’t that evil—”
I feel the flush! coming closer, like a storm rolling in …
“He thought you were cool, dude. Me and you. So he hung in there through it all.”
I sit with Ash and feel like I’m just a tiny speck in a stormy ocean of a toilet bowl. I paddle to keep my head up. “And everyone knew it was happening but me?” I ask.
Ash shrugs.
“Motto of my stupid life,” I mumble.
Ms. Fitz’s voice calls “LIGHTS OUT” from the hallway and everyone starts to scamper through the darkness like well-trained cockroaches.
“Ash?” I whisper in the flurry of motion. “We said no secrets. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I’ve been wanting to … but …”
Then I figure it out. “You were protecting me.”
He looks back up at me from the ladder. “Did it work?”
“Two point six.”
He climbs down leaving me staring at the dark ceiling, all the stuff about Max swirling around my mind … and I pull the covers over my head, trying to block it all out and avoid getting sucked into the cosmo-flush.
But there’s a big flaw in this plan. Maybe the best way to put it is … well, you know what happens when you flush a toilet but it doesn’t go down, Tom?
Exactly.
I lie there in horror as the toilet-time machine belches up more and more rotten memories. As all the disgusting guilt and fears flood over the edge, pouring on and on and on.
But even late at night, I better not stop pretending to be brave. Not in a room full of monsters. So I heave off my covers and climb down my bunk to go to the one place I can drop the act. But before I get there—
“What are you doing out of bed, Mr. Hart?”
I turn. “Mr. Dunford?”
“Are you feeling okay, Ian?”
“Can’t sleep.”
He nods. “You know what the best thing about insomnia is?”
I shake my head.
“It’s the snacks.”
“The snacks?” I ask.
“The snacks. For insomniacs.”
I feel a little tug at my mouth. “Insomni-snacks?”
“Indeed,” he says.
He leads the way to the kitchen pantry and lets me sit at the table in the middle of all the shiny metal appliances and the dirty gray light from the lonely fluorescent lamp above.
“Let’s see what there is.” He rummages through the shelves and pulls a can of sliced peaches and a bag of pretzels from the stash. “Take your pick.”
He doesn’t ask to talk. He doesn’t make me listen. There’s just the crinkling of a bag, and the hum of the giant refrigerator thrumming through the night.
The next morning, Ash and I barely say a word at breakfast. We just stare at our food while the cool kids laugh on and on at Devon and Miranda’s jokes. The two of them are an unstoppable force now. I’m pretty sure they found a cheat code that makes them invincible, even though the rest of us are stuck on the same level—with the difficulty all the way up to Impossible. It’s like we’ve been taking so long getting to the final boss that it’s gotten bored from waiting: It just comes out to stomp us in the middle of the game and drop-kick us the whole way back to the beginning, taking our power-ups too.
Ash and I keep slogging along, barely managing to keep up with the rest of the group, while Devon and Miranda are actually having fun. Like, on the hike to the hilltop when they’re sneaking around, and Devon makes this little sidestep across the trail right before Razan face-plants on the ground.
Well, almost face-plants. Let’s not forget who we’re dealing with: As soon as she loses her balance, Razan turns the fall into a somersault and propels right back to her feet.
“Rookie move, Rembrandt.” The conspirator-clones have already closed in around Miranda and Devon.
Razan shoves Rembrandt with some sort of secret dance-based martial arts move, and he stumbles into a thorny bush.
“Real mature, Razan.” He reappears, shaking burrs from his perfect hair and needles from his clothes.
“You wanna start this now?”
“Start it? This has been coming for a long time,” he says. Then he swipes out at her with a leg and suddenly they’re a blur of movement before Remy ends up flat on his back. As with most ninja fighting, their battle lasts six seconds at most. Too stealthy for the teachers to notice.
“Had enough?” she asks.
He looks up at her, breathing heavy but just getting started. “To be continued,” he says. “Later, in private.”
“Much better idea,” says Razan.
Rembrandt scowls. “Then why’d you start it here, unless you wanted an audience?”
“You started it,” says Razan.
“What’re you talking about? You just treed me out of nowhere.”
“After you tried to make me eat dirt!”
“I did not,” says Remy, and there’s a weird, wounded look on his face. “As if I’d ever think you could be taken down by being tripped.”
“Then how … ?”
She stops and, in the silence, a tiny snort escapes from the army of clones.
“Hooold on,” Razan tells Remy.
She wheels toward the clones as they try to stifle their laughter, yanking girls aside until she’s face-to-face with Miranda and Devon. “I want to thank you two.”
Miranda smirks. “For what?”
Razan doesn’t answer. She just turns away from Miranda and grabs Remy by the front of his shirt, hauling him along behind her. “Rembrandt, this little feud has been a lot of fun and everything, but we have something more important to do.”
“Uh. Yeah?” says Remy.
Razan nods fiercely. “Unite to destroy Miranda and Devon.”
“You mean we’re getting the team back together?” he asks. “Well it’s about time!”
And just like that, Remy and Razan’s feud is ancient history—even as, on the far side of our salmon-colored infestation, Ash and Alva’s is just beginning.
“Are you gonna avoid her for the rest of the summer?” I ask at the beginning of group therapy.
“Maybe. I don’t know … I just need some space, you know?” says Ash. “Not all of us can keep it together as easy as you do.”
But he sounds sort of jealous, and it makes me laugh.
“You think I’m keeping it together? You have got to be kidding.”
“You just keep going,” he says, totally sulking.
“It’s not—it’s all an act, dude.”
“No it’s not. You’re really brave. It’s really annoying.”
I look at him like he must be telling a joke I don’t understand, but there’s no hint of it in his expression.
“Ash, I—”
“Good morning!” Dr. Ginschlaugh booms, slamming the door. “Quiet down, please. Let’s begin.”
He plops into the chair next to Ash and asks for a volunteer like usual, but as he does it, he scribbles on a scrap of paper and drops it into Ash’
s lap.
Ash reads it with a frown, and then embarrassment. And his eyes flit up to meet mine. He sort of laughs, and passes me the note.
It says: What’s the difference between acting brave and being brave?
I watch him thinking about this, and I know I need to help Ash fix things with Alva. I spend the rest of group therapy thinking of a way to get him to talk to her, but I know Ash wouldn’t do anything to make her a Target for Devon and Miranda again. And he’s probably one of the most stubborn people I know. Especially when he’s got a good point. So I decide to try something else: tell Alva what’s really going on. I wait until the moment after dinner, when everyone at my table has fallen into food comas, and I catch up to her outside the dining hall.
“Alva!” I call out. “Wait up.”
“What do you want, Ian?”
“Could you slow down? I wanna talk to you.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“More about what I’m leaving behind,” she says without looking back.
“Alva, come on …”
She’s right at the door to the girls’ dorm now. “No,” she says, and pushes inside.
I catch the door before it closes and prop it open with my foot. “We gotta talk.”
“Ian.” She’s totally exasperated. “You’re not allowed inside here.”
“I’m not technically inside.”
I try to avert my eyes in case it helps my case—but after two seconds, the Freak gets really curious and forces me to look around. There isn’t a huge difference between the way the boys’ dorm looks and the way the girls’ dorm looks, Tom. But there is a big difference between the way they smell. The boys’ dorm smells like old sweat and gummy bears, and the girls’ dorm smells like crushed grass and sunscreen—but now I’m getting distracted.
Through it all, Alva is watching me like a thunderstorm eyes a tall tree. “Your friends are not technically buckets of sewage,” she says, “but I think we’re past technicalities, don’t you?”
I look at my feet, hoping to diffuse the storm, or maybe find some brilliant words down there on the ground.
“Don’t you dare act like a puppy, Ian.”
“Sorry, I’ll leave. I just—forget it. Sorry.”
“Oh my gosh!” she cries. “If you’re capable of bursting in here, then you don’t get to play sweet and innocent. Just say what you need to say and then we can all go back to being forlorn at literally everything.”
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