Schools without bike racks should be convicted of criminal negligence.
I stared at that last line, dated on the first day of school, urging it to change, to revert to its true form, because I knew I must have made it up. If that wasn’t a quote from somewhere, if that was one of his own observations . . . then he’d lied about not standing up to Cliff for me. Celia’d scoffed at Erwin, and Cliff had stood in my way, and Miles had said he hadn’t done any of it for me. . . .
This notebook didn’t sound like Miles. It sounded like someone a lot more na?ve than Miles. Someone who really liked to know things. Scientific classifications. Complex math. Words.
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.