“Yeah, they’re pretty intense. Anyway, I’ve never gotten along with my parents. I’m too much of a bad boy.” He wiggles his eyebrows at me.
“Oh yeah, with that clean-shaven K-pop face and that sweater vest, you are clearly a gangster.”
“Hey, I’m bad. I even ran away from home.”
“You ran away? Really?”
He shrugs. “Kind of. I went to my uncle’s place.”
“Again, clearly, you are a gangster.”
“Okay, running away definitely qualifies for gang behavior in our culture.”
“True.” I like how he says “our” culture.
“So I pretty much stayed with Uncle James all through summer. It turned out to be a good summer, actually. He was pretty happy to have me around. I think he’s been struggling since his divorce.”
The mention of Mr. Werner sours the sugarcane juice in my mouth. I shove aside the thought of him and try to focus on Danny, who’s suddenly looking shy.
“Um, I haven’t told anyone about me being broke. I only have enough credit left on my student card for ten more meals, so—”
“I won’t tell a soul,” I say quickly.
“Thanks.” He sighs. “I just don’t know if anyone at school would get it. I mean, not that I’m special in any way, just—”
“You’re right, they won’t get money troubles, and it sucks to have to hide shit from your friends because you don’t want them to look at you different.” Wait. If he’s only got enough money in his student account for ten more meals… “That first night we met, when you swiped me in—”
He grimaces. “I was hoping you wouldn’t remember.”
“What, that I wouldn’t remember you paying for my meal? So you’ve been scrimping and saving all this time, but you paid for my meal? Why? We’d only just met then.”
“I don’t know.” He looks down at his shoes. “You seemed really hungry, and you were sort of crying a little. Anyway, I’d had a big lunch that day, so.”
“You pretended you had to go get your laptop because you couldn’t afford to buy dinner for yourself after swiping me through?”
He doesn’t say anything. The air is charged. Electric. Full of magic and light, myriad possibilities at my fingertips. I take one step toward him, then another, until a single, lonely inch separates us. I want to remember all of him, in this moment, the way his hair flops messily across his forehead, the dark mahogany of his eyes, reflecting the fairy lights above us. Then I rise on tiptoes and our lips meet, and every cell in my body glows as bright as the stars.
Chapter 7
In the morning, I float out of bed before my alarm goes off, and not like in a gloomy, ghostly way but like in an angels-singing, forty-year-old-virgin-who-just-got-laid way. Not that I got laid last night.
I reach for my phone and see that I have an email from SiliconBrains.
The floaty sensation disappears, and I crash back to reality.
There’s something attached to the email. I click Open. It’s today’s test paper, complete with answers. Oh shit. I close it quickly and jump out of my bed, feeling disgusted at myself.
I’m not a cheater. Ibu raised me better than that.
My reply is swift and angry. Wth? I’m not gonna cheat on a test! I hit send and pace with righteous anger. Who the hell does SiliconBrains think I am?
There’s a boop. I pounce on my phone.
FFS. You don’t get it, do you? Mr. Werner sells grades to the wealthiest students. It fucks up the bell curve, but people haven’t really noticed. They just assume it’s because his class is really challenging. He makes his tests ridiculously hard so he can nitpick on the answers and control your grades that way to make it look like he’s got a normal bell curve. So unless you’ve got the money to pay for a passing grade or know the answers to these obscure questions, this is your only chance of passing.
God, I feel sick. My thumbs fly across the phone screen.
Prove it.
I have nothing to prove to you. Take my help or leave it, I rly don’t give a shit.
Argh. They have a point, but still.
I can’t deal with human interaction, so I choose to have breakfast in my room after track practice. And then, hating myself more than I can possibly imagine, I open up SiliconBrains’s message again, and this time, I actually read the test paper. And SiliconBrains is right. These questions are so difficult, so obscure, they would’ve driven me mad.
But I won’t cheat. I won’t. I’ll come up with my own answers.
My phone beeps with a message from Danny: So last night was sort of awesome.
Yeah, very definitely sort of awesome. I look for an equally adorable emoji to add, but nothing beats nerdy smile, not with its two buck teeth and glasses. I settle for closed-eye smile emoji. Not as standoffish as slightly smiling emoji, not as thirsty as grinning emoji.
See you at lunch?
Sounds good
Our conversation makes me smile, but as soon as it’s done, anxiety resumes squeezing my stomach.
By the time I’m seated in Mr. Werner’s classroom, I’m so jumpy, I feel like a meth head in need of her next fix. Mr. Werner meets my eye and I look away like his gaze burnt me. When he hands out the test paper, I pounce on it, and—
Everything stops.
Because it’s the exact same paper that SiliconBrains sent me. My stomach sinks. I mean. Just. This proves it. Mr. Werner is really selling test papers.
Hang on, it doesn’t actually prove that. All it proves is that SiliconBrains managed to get his hands on a test paper, either by buying it or, more likely, by stealing it. Argh, why does everything have to be so complicated?
My stomach boils as I fill out my name. Is this what it feels like to have guilt eating away at you? It actually does feel like my stomach is eating away at itself, gnawing the same way a dog worries at a bone when it knows it’s done something bad. I grip my pencil so hard, it snaps. The top half bounces off my desk and clatters to the floor. In the hushed room, it sounds super loud.
“Sorry,” I whisper to no one in particular. Oh god, I can’t do this. I can’t cheat on a test. Ibu would freak the eff out. I’m freaking the eff out.
But as I pick my pencil up, I catch sight of Mandy. She’s leaning back in her chair, twirling her pencil, wearing the world’s most bored expression. Which, you know, that’s weird, right? Or maybe that’s just her thinking face? Yeah, she’s probably deep in thought—
And then Mr. Werner catches her eye and gives the tiniest shake of his head. Mandy sighs and moves her hand over her test paper, scribbling. But from where I sit, I can see that she’s not actually writing anything on her paper. It’s all swirls and doodles of vines and flowers.
Oh.
My.
God.
SiliconBrains was right. Mr. Werner is selling test papers, and now I know for sure who one of his customers is.
At first, I’m just so shocked that my head is devoid of any thought. Then, like a faucet turning on, rage pours into every fiber of my being.
I got kicked off varsity because of this. Because of them. I’m seething, fire spitting out of my eyeballs. God, I could just—