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Most likely, it replied.
By late September, we had regular labs every week. I glanced at him a few times as he made tables in his lab notebook. He was bent over, his glasses slipping down his nose, his left hand curled around so he could write properly. His sleeves were rolled up, and I noticed for the first time that his forearms were freckled, too. Were they warm? They seemed like they’d be warm. Blue Eyes’s hand had been warm. There were four inches between my hand and his arm—four inches and I’d know for sure.
Don’t do it, idiot. Don’t you dare do it.
I stifled the urge and asked a question instead.
“So. Can you really speak another language?”
I hadn’t heard that weird accent from him since the first day, but I knew he and Jetta had been speaking German.
“Where’d you hear that?” Miles didn’t look up.
“Is it true?”
“Maybe. Depends on who told you.”
“I figured it out myself,” I said. “It wasn’t hard. Is it German?”
Miles slapped his pen on his lab notebook. “Why are you here, exactly?”
“Because they put me in this class. Don’t look at me like it’s my fault.”
“Why are you here? In this school? In the club?” His voice was too low for our neighbors across the table to hear. “What did you do?”
“What did you do?” I shot back. “Because it must have been pretty weird if they made you run the whole club by yourself, without a teacher supervising.”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Seriously, though.”
“Seriously, nothing. Now why don’t you answer my question, since you seem so intent on getting information out of me, but refuse to give any up yourself.”
I looked at the calcium carbonate. “I spray-painted the gym floor.”
“Spray-painted what?”
“The gym floor, I just said.”
“What did you spray paint on the gym floor?” The w in “what” came out hard like a v.
“Words.”
I smiled brightly at the pissy expression on his face. Screwing with him was so unexplainably worth it. I turned back to the Bunsen burner and listened to him seethe.
Game nights in the concession stand hit occasional lulls, so Theo and I entertained ourselves making plastic cup pyramids and talking about English class.
I found out that Theo wrote for the school newspaper, which was why I always saw her talking to Claude Gunthrie, the editor. (“I know he looks kind of constipated all the time”—she knocked over a stack of cups in her excitement—“but you haven’t seen his biceps. My God, they’re beautiful.”)
“I feel like I should constantly be watching my back in that class, you know?” I said. “I’ve had a weird feeling about Ria since school started.” Ria sat near me in class, but all I’d ever seen her do was bat her eyelashes at Cliff and giggle like some kind of perky, latte-fueled automaton.
“Ria’s really not all that bad,” said Theo. “You’d think she would be. She’s popular, but she doesn’t go picking for food among us lower beings. Unless she’s looking for a distraction from Cliff.”
“Why would she need a distraction from Cliff?”
“They’ve been dating since seventh grade, but the real drama didn’t start till freshman year. Biggest. Shitstorm. Ever. She always accuses him of cheating; he’s always treating her like a trophy. So, like, once a year, she’ll go find a guy to sleep with to make Cliff jealous. Cliff finds the guy, beats the crap out of him, and then Cliff and Ria make up and the whole cycle starts again.” Theo reached over her head to place a cup on top of the pyramid. “No, the people you really want to watch out for are Celia and the Siamese Twins.”
Celia’s two cronies, Britney and Stacey, might as well have been joined at the hip. I could tell Theo’s brothers apart better than I could those two. I reached around and added to the pyramid’s edge. “Celia gives Miles these looks in English class. Like she wants to eat him.”
Theo shivered. “Don’t mention that while Boss is around. She’s obsessed with him. Has been since freshman year, since she started getting weird. Never came out and said it, but you can tell.”
“Well, she’s a bitch and he’s a douche; they’re perfect for each other,” I said, smiling.
Theo gave me one of those looks, the ones parents give their kid when the kid is talking about something they don’t understand. That look stung more than I thought it would; I shifted and hid behind the pyramid, my face burning. What had I said? What was there about this picture that I didn’t get?
“Bored again?” Theo asked suddenly. Miles stood at the window, still holding that tattered black notebook.
“I hate volleyball,” he said.
Theo smiled wickedly. “No, you hate Ria Wolf. Don’t take your anger out on the poor sport.”
Miles gave her the same pissy look he’d given me earlier and drummed his long fingers impatiently on the counter.
Theo rolled her eyes and kept stacking. “I’ve got someone,” she said.
“Were you alive during the last century?”
“Yes.”
Miles rested his chin on top of his notebook, looking (as I couldn’t help noticing) very much like a mischievous little boy knowing he was about to win a game. A golden-freckled, blue-eyed little boy. “Were you an Allied leader in World War II?”
I heard Theo grinding her teeth. “Yes.”
“You’re Chiang Kai-shek.”
Theo hurled her cup and the entire pyramid came tumbling down. “Why didn’t you say Churchill? Dammit, you were supposed to say Churchill or Roosevelt or Stalin!”
Miles just stared at her. Theo grumbled loudly and turned to help me clean up.
It was in English a week later when possibly the strangest thing of all happened.
When I tried to sit down, I instead found myself on the floor in a very painful position. The bar connecting the desk and the seat had been partially severed at one end, so my weight broke it the rest of the way. For a second, I thought I was imagining it. People were staring at me. Cursing under my breath, I got up, shoved the ruined desk to the back of the room, and pulled over an unused whole one.
Mr. Gunthrie hadn’t even looked up from his paper. Miles, always politely oblivious, pretended nothing had happened and continued writing in his black notebook.
That also meant that he wasn’t paying attention when I got into his backpack and emptied a tube of fire ants from the colony I’d found in the woods. With six classes together, there was no way I wouldn’t see the reaction.
