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I looked up. Miles was coming out of the school. Groaning, I stuffed the notebook back under his chemistry book. I faced forward, trying to look inconspicuous. He slid into the driver’s seat.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“You seem to have forgotten that someone cut my bike in half.”
“And you seem to have forgotten that I have a truck,” said Miles. “I can give you a ride. To school, at least.”
“No thanks,” I said.
“Really. I’m not joking. Unless you’re that against having anything to do with me. I don’t care. You can get in line.”
He turned onto the main road. The line from the notebook felt like a dead weight in my stomach.
“No, not against it.” I realized with a strange sort of happy dread that we were falling back into the easy conversation we’d had at the bonfire. “But I’d like to know why you’re offering.”
“What do you mean?” Honest confusion crossed his face. “Isn’t that the good thing to do?”
I burst out laughing. “Since when have you been good? Are you feeling guilty or something?”
“A little sentimental, maybe. My first idea was to drive up and down in front of you a few times to prove I had a car and you didn’t.” His tone was light and he was smiling.
Holy crap, he was smiling. A real, teeth-showing, nose-scrunching, eyes-crinkling smile.
The smile slipped off his face. “What? What’s wrong?”
“You were smiling,” I said. “It was kind of weird.”
“Oh,” he said, frowning. “Thanks.”
“No, no, don’t do that! The smile was better.” The words felt wrong coming out of my mouth. I shouldn’t say things like that to him, but they hung neatly in the air and cleared out the tension. Miles didn’t smile again. He turned down my street and pulled into my driveway.
“Charlie’s playing her violin again,” I said. The music floated out of the house like a bird on a breeze. The 1812 Overture. I had to throw my weight against the passenger door to get it open.
“The smile was better,” I said again as I closed the door behind me, the words sounding less awkward now. “I think people would like you if you did it more.”
“What’s the point, though?” said Miles. “So, Monday.”
“Monday.”
“Should I be here?”
“Do you want to be here?”
He looked like a cat eyeing its prey. “Seven o’clock. After that I’m leaving without you. Do you work tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Guess I’ll see you there. And Alex?”
“Yeah?”
“I won’t tell anyone. In case you were wondering.”
I knew what he meant. And I knew he was telling the truth. There was something in his voice that said he understood. I believed him.
I fished Erwin out of the truck bed. Then I propped the halves up against the garage door and headed inside as Miles drove down the street. My head spun with everything that had happened. Celia’s revenge. Erwin. The increasingly plausible idea that Blue Eyes was not a hallucination at all, and never had been.
My mother let me get ten steps inside the front door before bombarding me with questions.
“Who was that?”
“What happened to your bike?”
“Did you forget you have work tonight?”
And my personal favorite, “Do we need to have the talk?”
I cringed. I did not need to think of Miles in that way. I was plenty confused about him as it was.
“No, we do not need to have the talk, Mom. I understand how boy and girl parts work. Yes, I have to go to Finnegan’s. No, I don’t know what happened to Erwin.”
“Who was that in the truck?” She waved her empty coffee mug around. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or excited—her zealotry managed to cover pretty much all the emotional bases.
“That was Miles.”
Chapter Twenty-one
I giggled a little when I found out the librarian I’d accused of being a Communist five years ago still worked at the library. I giggled a little more when Tucker and I walked in and she glared at me.
“She remembers me,” I whispered to Tucker, grinning.
Tucker snorted and pulled me to a section of the library in the back, where several aging computers sat in a line against the wall. We took the two open computers at the end.
“I can’t believe they don’t have these records online,” Tucker said, clicking incessantly at his yellowed mouse. The old computer wheezed as it started up. “I don’t even think these are connected to the Internet. I don’t think they have Ethernet ports. Oh God, what if they don’t have network cards?”
“You make it sound like the nineties were hell,” I said.
“They probably were. Our childish naiveté saved us.”
The computers blinked to life and allowed us to access the newspaper archives from the desktop. The catalog seemed recently updated, despite looking like a victim of 1990s pattern choice.
“Okay, so I’m thinking there must have been something to spark this scoreboard legend,” Tucker said. “Look for anything that says anything about East Shoal or the scoreboard itself.”
I didn’t mind scouring old newspaper articles—they were still forms of history, just slightly more recent than I was used to. Twenty minutes later, I found the first clue, one that I’d already seen before.
“‘Scarlet Fletcher, captain of the East Shoal cheerleading squad, helps introduce “Scarlet’s Scoreboard,” a commemoration of the charity and goodwill her father, Randall Fletcher, has shown toward the school.’”
I turned my screen toward Tucker. He frowned. “I thought the scoreboard was older than that. This was twenty years ago.”
In the picture, Scarlet beamed and flashed a set of white teeth. Her face wasn’t obscured here; she looked vaguely familiar. There was another picture at the bottom of the article. Scarlet stood beneath the scoreboard with a boy with dark hair, wearing a football captain’s uniform. His smile was strained.
“He’s hot,” I said absentmindedly.
“Sure, if you like the classical look,” Tucker mumbled.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
“Are you jealous, Mr. Soggy Potato Salad?”
“Jealous? When I’ve got this?” Tucker whipped off his glasses, bit the tip of the earpiece, and squinted at me. I laughed.
