“Look, you actually did something useful,” I pointed out. “Even if it was by accident.” Her stray bullet had hit one of the enemy aliens.
But I’d started a war. I’d barely gotten the word “accident” out of my mouth before Rachel started pelting me with couch pillows. How had she grabbed them so fast? We started whaling on each other like we had when we were little, before Dad left, before Hayden, even. I took so many blows to the head my ears were ringing, though I’m pretty sure I got in a few good shots myself.
I don’t know how long we were fighting before we collapsed on the floor, out of breath and starving. After raiding the kitchen for Mom’s hidden stash of junk food, we settled back in to play another round. Cooperatively, this time, like we were supposed to in the first place.
We played for so long she ended up blowing off a date with Jimmy, which I would have felt bad about if we weren’t actually having a good time. We’d trashed the living room, but it was totally worth it. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d done something fun together.
I knew video games weren’t going to solve my problems, though. They wouldn’t help me make new friends, they wouldn’t make Astrid decide she wanted to ditch Eric and hang out with me, and they wouldn’t answer the question of who’d beat up Jason and Trevor, a question that in some ways I was afraid to learn the answer to. But they kept my mind off of everything, and right now, that was all I could possibly want. Sitting in front of the TV had the added benefit of keeping me away from my computer; I was afraid the Archmage would come back, and I wasn’t quite ready to hear what he had to say.
But Monday had to come eventually, and with it came a note in homeroom telling me to go see Mr. Beaumont as soon as I had a free period. This couldn’t be good. I spent the morning ignoring my teachers in class and the stares of people in the hall who must have heard about Trevor and the rumors that I’d been involved. I could tell my teachers weren’t sure if enough time had passed to start calling me out for not paying attention, but they all opted against it, for which I was only somewhat grateful. Getting yelled at would have taken me out of my own head, where I contemplated the odds of my having gotten so blackout drunk that I could have no memory of taking a baseball bat to Trevor. I didn’t want to think about why Mr. Beaumont wanted to see me; I wasn’t ready to deal with him yet.
I was still stewing over the likely scenarios at lunch, while I waited in line for a slice of pizza that looked as if it had been microwaved twice, listening to the playlist on my iPod on random. My appetite wasn’t improved by the sight of Astrid sitting at my lunch table, waiting for me; the sight of her made my stomach drop, though in a good way. I took out my earbuds as soon as I saw her. She looked as pretty as ever; the streaks in her hair were different shades of green today, making her look almost like a sea creature and bringing out the green in her eyes. Her fingers drummed on the tray in front of her, and she jumped up as soon as I put my tray down.
“I know you don’t really want that pizza, am I right?” she asked.
I looked down at it. The cheese was an abnormal yellow, as if someone had drawn it with a Magic Marker. “Not really,” I admitted. “But it was the lesser of several evils.”
“You haven’t considered everything,” she said. “Come on, you look like you need to get out of here.”
She was right, but I’d never skipped school before. Kids in the college-prep classes I was taking never skipped school. And for all my online bravado I’d never done anything anyone would really consider bad, or at least I didn’t think I had. But things were different now. Missing a few classes wouldn’t kill me. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“I’ve got a plan. We just need to very, very casually wander out back.” She pointed to the doors that led straight out to the soccer field. There was usually a teacher stationed in front of them, but I didn’t see one now. “Mr. Cartwright’s out and they didn’t get a sub. He’s the lunch monitor today. There’ll never be an easier time for us to ditch. Let’s go!”
“As long as you’ve got a plan,” I said, but really, I didn’t care. I’d have followed her anywhere, plan or not. I stayed right behind her as she walked—no, strolled—right out the back doors of the cafeteria, like it was no thing, even though she was carrying the enormous overstuffed bronze backpack she’d had at the party.
Astrid started laughing as soon as we made it outside. “You were perfect!” she said. “Didn’t look back once. I was worried you’d go all Orpheus on me and turn around.”
“Orpheus?”
“It’s a Greek myth, where this guy’s wife ended up in Hell and he could only have her back if he didn’t look behind him as they left the underworld.”
“I never read that one. But it sounds like the story of Lot’s wife.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s from the Bible,” I said. “I learned about it in Hebrew school. God let Lot and his family leave Sodom and Gomorrah before he destroyed them, as long as they didn’t look back. But his wife turned around and got turned into a pillar of salt. Sounds almost like the same thing.”
“It’s funny how much overlap there is between all the different kinds of myths and religions,” she said. “I love all of it. I was obsessed with Clash of the Titans as a kid. I watched it whenever it came on cable. It really got me into Greek mythology.”
“I love that movie!” I said. “The original, not the remake. I tried to get Hayden to watch it—I thought since we were both so into fantasy that he’d love it too. But he thought the Claymation was cheesy.”
“It was,” she said. “That’s what made it so great!”
“I know,” I said, though I felt guilty, almost as if I was choosing Astrid over Hayden. Though I reminded myself that I didn’t really have a choice, not anymore.
The sky was bright blue and full of puffy clouds, not the kind that made me worry about rain but the pretty ones, the ones that seemed like they really could be made out of cotton. The brightness of the sun made it easy to see the path we were following, but occasionally there were low branches and weeds blocking us; Astrid would kick them out of the way so they didn’t trip me up. She seemed to know where she was going, which was great, because I was completely lost. And I was starting to get hungry—I almost wished I’d eaten that radioactive-looking pizza. “Are we almost there?”
“Almost.”
After we’d walked through the woods for about five more minutes I could see a field in front of us. It was a vast open space, with nothing but fields of corn and soybean as far ahead as I could see. In the middle of the field was a strange building that looked kind of like a barn. But not any barn I’d seen before—it wasn’t round, exactly, but it wasn’t square, either. Its wood was gray and faded; it didn’t look like it had ever been painted before. “Is that it?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What is it?”
“An octagonal barn,” she said. “It’s one of the few left in Iowa. It’s really old, and very cool.”
Okay, that explained the shape. “What’s so cool about it?”