UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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My next three classes of the day were like the first. I walked into the classrooms and spun in a circle, checking everything. If I found something strange—like a World War II–era propaganda poster on the wall—I took a picture of it. I was asked four times if my hair was dyed. My AP Macro teacher let me know it was against the rules. I told him it was natural. He didn’t believe me. I showed him the picture of my mother and my little sister, Charlie, that I always carried with me, because their hair was the same. He sort of believed me. I sat in the chair closest to the door and kept a watchful eye on him for the rest of the period.
The cafeteria was huge, so there were plenty of open spots. That was a good thing, because no one paid attention to me in the seat against the wall, picking through my food for Communist tracers. Mr. McCoy came over the PA to make another announcement about the scoreboard. People stopped talking and eating to snicker about it, but no one seemed surprised.
Miles Richter was in all of my AP classes.
My fifth period, study hall, was the only class he wasn’t in. I still wasn’t sure what Tucker had meant when he’d told me not to let Miles pull anything on me. He hadn’t done anything Tucker had warned me about, but he certainly hadn’t ignored me.
Pre-lunch, when I dropped my pencil in AP U.S. History, he kicked it to the far side of the room before I could pick it up. Because he leaned back and looked at me like, What are you going to do about it? I shoved his backpack off his desk.
In AP Government that afternoon, he “accidentally” stepped on my shoelace and I nearly fell on my face. When the teacher passed our first homework assignments down the rows, I gave Miles one that had “accidentally” been ripped in half.
In AP Chemistry, Ms. Dalton seated us in alphabetical order and handed out lab notebooks, which look like notebooks on the outside but are filled with graph paper and make you want to kill yourself. She dropped mine onto my desk with a loud THWUMP.
I kept a careful eye on the back of Miles’s neck as I wrote my name on the cover. It turned out lopsided and scratchy, but still legible. Good enough.
“I figured we’d start off the school year with a little icebreaker lab,” Mrs. Dalton said with a certain lazy cheerfulness as she returned to her desk, popped open a Diet Coke, and chugged half of it down in one go. “Nothing hard, of course. I’m going to assign lab partners and you can get to know each other.”
I suspected bad karma sneaking up on me with a nine iron. Probably because of the time I flushed Charlie’s entire line of black pawns down the toilet and told her Santa didn’t exist.
Drawing slips of paper from a beaker filled with names, Mrs. Dalton called out pairs, and I watched the desks slowly empty and partners migrate to lab tables stationed around the edge of the room.
“Alexandra Ridgemont,” Ms. Dalton said.
Karma prepared to swing.
“And Miles Richter.”
Direct hit. Results: minor concussion. May have trouble walking, seeing. Should not engage in any strenuous activity or operate heavy machinery.
I got to the lab table before Miles even left his seat. A survey paper waited for us. I checked the kids on the other side of the table—they didn’t look remotely threatening, but the worst ones were always the least threatening—the cabinets above my head, and the drain in the sink.
“Well, let’s get this over with,” I said when Miles arrived. He didn’t answer, just pulled his pen from behind his ear and flipped open his notebook. I braced my feet farther apart when it felt like the ground was skewing to the left.
I waited until he was done writing. “Ready?”
“You can go first.” He pushed his glasses up. I wanted to grab them off his face and pulverize them.
I grabbed the paper instead. “First question: ‘What’s your full name?’”
“Wow. This is going to be stupid.” It was the first reasonable thing he’d said all day. “Miles James Richter.”
I wrote it down. “Alexandra Victoria Ridgemont.”
“Well, we both have middle names that don’t fit.” Out came the Magnificent Quirked Eyebrow. “Next.”
“Birthday?”
“May twenty-ninth, 1993.”
“April fifteenth, same year,” I said. “Siblings?”
“None.”
No wonder he was such a brat. Only child. He was probably rich, too.
“I have a sister, Charlie. Any pets?”
“A dog.” Miles wrinkled his nose when he said it, which didn’t surprise me—I imagined that Miles was sort of like an overgrown house cat. Slept a lot. Always looked bored. Liked to play with his food before he ate it.
I watched a ladybug crawl along the edge of the sink. I was pretty sure it wasn’t real—its spots were shaped like stars. I’d left my camera in my backpack. “None. My dad’s allergic.”
Miles grabbed the paper from me and looked it over. “You’d think they could bother to make the questions a little more interesting. ‘Favorite Color’? What can that possibly tell you about a person? Your favorite color could be chartreuse, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.”
Then, without waiting for me to answer the question, he wrote “chartreuse” under “Favorite Color.”
It was the most animated I’d seen him all day. Listening to him rant relaxed me, in a weird kind of way. If he was an angry ranting asshole, he wasn’t Blue Eyes.
“Then yours is mauve,” I said, writing it in the blank.
“And look—‘Favorite Food’? What’s that going to tell me?”
“Agreed. What do you like to eat? Pickled frog hearts?” I pressed my pen to my bottom lip and mulled it over. “Yeah. You love pickled frog hearts.”
We got through a few more questions. I knew I wasn’t imagining the awed looks of our comrades across the table. When we got to “Pet Peeves,” Miles said, “When people say ‘catsup’ instead of ‘ketchup.’ It’s a condiment, not animal vomit.” He paused a moment and said, “And that one’s true.”
“I can’t stand it when people get history wrong,” I said. “Like saying that Columbus was the first explorer to land on North America, when he didn’t even land on North America, and the first explorer was Leif Ericson. And that one is also true.”
We answered a few more, and by the time we got near the end, something strange started happening to his voice.
It was rougher, somehow. Less fluent. His th’s slurred together, and his w’s started sounding like v’s. The group across the table stared at him like it was the advent of the apocalypse.
I moved down to the last question. “Thank God, we’re almost done. What’s one thing you remember from your childhood?”
“Animalia Annelida Hirudinea.” Miles bit the end of his pen like he wished he hadn’t said it. He didn’t look at me, but stared at the two silver faucets arching over the sink basin.
Those words . . . the bandages. The pain I hadn’t understood. The Yoo-hoo. The smell of fish.
A chill seeped from my head to my feet, freezing me to the spot. I stared at him. Sandy brown hair that stuck up all over the place. Metal-frame glasses. Golden freckles sprinkled over nose and cheekbones. Blue eyes.
Stop looking at him, idiot! He’ll think you like him, or something!
I didn’t like him. He wasn’t even that cute. Was he? Maybe another look would help. No, dammit! Oh hell.
I scratched awkwardly at my notebook, ignoring my pounding heart. Was I supposed to write down what he said? Why was he speaking in scientific classifications? Blue Eyes wasn’t real. There had been no one to help me free the lobsters. He hadn’t just said that. This was my mind screwing with me. Again.
I coughed delicately, pulling on a piece of my hair. “Well. You can write down ‘Yoo-hoos’ for mine.”
“Yoo-hoos,” he said slowly.
“Yoo-hoos—you know, the best drink ever?”
Now he was the one staring at me. I rolled my eyes. “Y-O-O-H—”
“I can spell, thanks.” His voice had snapped back to normal. Fluent and clear. As he began writing, I glanced up at the clock. Class was almost over. My hands shook.
When the bell rang, I sprang to collect my bag and join the others moving into the hallway. I felt better when I got away from Miles, like the revelation I’d had in the chemistry classroom had been nothing but a dream, and I’d woken up from it. I didn’t understand him—he’d come right out of my delusions, but here he was. He straddled the line between my world and everyone else’s, and I didn’t like it.
We arrived at our lockers at the same time. I ignored him, opened my locker, and reached for my textbooks.
They fell right out of their covers like guts out of a fish.
“Looks like someone destroyed the binding in your books,” said Miles.
No shit, asshat. Screw him—Blue Eyes or not, I wasn’t putting up with this.
I picked up my ruined books, stuffed them into my bag, and slammed my locker shut. “Guess I’ll have to fix them.” And then I stomped off toward the gym, knowing I wouldn’t be able to get away from him now.