I made a mental note to go to the newspaper room Monday morning and give Claude the pictures.
Miles and I walked back up to the school. The crickets and cicadas had faded for the year, leaving the night quiet and undisturbed. Miles’s truck was parked against the curb, near Erwin’s bushes. The light outside the school’s front entrance illuminated the whole front walk. I grabbed Erwin’s handlebars.
The front half of my bike slipped free of the bush.
Only the front half.
Someone had cut my bike in half. It had been rusting away in the middle, but I was positive I’d get at least another semester out of the poor thing. Anger welled up in my chest.
Someone cut my bike in half.
Pressure built up behind my eyes. I had no transportation.
My mother would call me careless for letting this happen. She’d give me a lecture about respecting my possessions, even though I’d heard it a thousand times before. I wiped my eyes on the back of my sleeve and forced the knot back down my throat.
Dad had bought me Erwin. Brought Erwin all the way from Egypt. He was basically an artifact, and one of the few things I had from Dad that I knew for sure was real. He was priceless.
And now he was broken.
I grabbed the back half and rounded on Miles, who still stood a few feet behind me, looking mildly surprised. “Did you do this?” I asked.
“No.”
“Right.” I grabbed my bag from the bench and started down the sidewalk.
“You’re going to walk home?”
“Yep.”
“Great plan.” He planted himself in front of me. “I can’t let you. Not in the dark.”
“Well that’s too bad, isn’t it?” I wondered when he’d decided to become a white knight. “I didn’t ask for your permission.”
“And I won’t ask for yours,” he retorted. “I will throw you in my truck.”
“And I will scream rape,” I replied evenly.
He rolled his eyes. “I didn’t cut your bike in half. I swear.”
“Why should I believe you? You’re kind of notorious for being a lying, thieving bastard.” He shrugged.
“You don’t explain yourself to anyone, do you?”
He motioned to his truck. “Will you please get in?”
I looked around quickly; finding another ride home would be pretty impossible. And as I looked out at the dark, quiet street, it occurred to me that walking home wasn’t the best idea ever. Sure, I hung out around Red Witch Bridge in the middle of the night, but that was in the cover of the trees with an urban legend and a baseball bat as weapons. Here, I was a teenaged girl with average upper body strength, hair like a signal beacon, and a mental condition that could make me think I was being attacked even when I wasn’t.
At least I knew Miles well enough to understand that the look of frustration on his face wasn’t a ploy. So I tossed the two halves of Erwin into the back of his truck and climbed into the passenger seat.
The cab still smelled like pastries and mint soap. I breathed in deeply without realizing it, and hastily let it out as a sigh. Miles glanced through the driver’s side window, let out a quick curse, and grabbed a stack of papers on the seat.
“Sorry, I have to drop these off. I forgot. I’ll be right back.”
He hurried into the school. The papers must have been his stat charts for the week, but I found it hard to believe he’d forgotten them. Miles didn’t forget things.
His truck was surprisingly clean. The dash had been stripped bare; the radio front was smashed in, and the knob for the heater was missing. Miles had stashed his backpack behind the driver’s seat—apparently in a hurry, because it was on its side, and its contents spilled out in the cramped space.
The corner of his black notebook peeked out beneath his chemistry book.
This was my chance. I could just . . . take a look. Get a glimpse at the tip of Miles Richter’s psychological iceberg. I checked to make sure he was still safely inside East Shoal, then pulled the notebook out.
It was bound in leather. There were several pieces of paper clipped to the inside back cover, but I ignored them and flipped it open to the middle. Both pages were covered with his untidy scrawl.
I went back to the beginning and skimmed through. Math equations filled whole pages. There were symbols I’d never seen and little notes scribbled off to the sides. There were quotes from books and more notes. There were lists of scientific classifications for plants and animals, and even more lists for words I’d never encountered. There were entire passages written in German, dated like journal entries. I noticed familiar names, like my own and the other members of the club.
And then, separated from the rest of the scribbles by a few blank pages, like he’d wanted to remember these things specifically, were short one-or two-sentence declarations, marked with the dates they’d been written.
Intelligence is not measured by how much you know, but by how much you have the capacity to learn.
You are never as great or as pitiful as you think you are.
Those who are picked last are the only ones who truly know what it feels like.