The warning bell rang and our smiles faded as our eyes cut to the chem lab door. Monday mornings after rankings were posted were the hardest, when crossing the lab threshold felt like stepping through the ropes to a death match. Students lingered in the hall, waiting for the bell. I braced myself as I walked past Vince where he huddled quietly with a handful of his teammates. He didn’t look up, which made me eerily cautious. He’d never passed up an opportunity to humiliate me before. It was like he hadn’t even noticed the spectacle I’d just made of myself, even though his blond head stood several inches taller than the rest of his friends’ and I was sure he’d had an unobstructed view. Strange. The hallway hummed with a somber intensity, everyone talking in
hushed tones, including Vince, who didn’t come with a volume control.
Inside the lab, the air lightened considerably. Oleksa perched on top of a table, one long leg dangled coolly off the side, his red shoelaces grazing the floor. A cluster of boys hovered around him, which was odd. Oleksa was a loner—the kind with a razor-wire wall that said No Trespassing in big red letters. Don’t get me wrong, the guy wasn’t bad-looking. If he ever smiled, he might even be handsome, with his full lips and sharp cheekbones—but those features didn’t necessarily equate to attractive. More like he was good-looking in a dangerous, off-putting sort of way.
Oleksa shrugged off his hoodie. “How much?” His lab partner, a mouthy kid named Eric Miller, whipped out a small stack of dollar bills and slapped them on the desk like some heavyweight high roller.
“Fifteen bucks,” he said, rolling his narrow shoulders and looking Oleksa in the eye. I wondered if Eric would’ve been so ballsy if Oleksa had been standing up. Eric looked like maybe he was having the same thought. He took a small step back and looked away.
“We’re in too.” Four others dropped their own money on top of Eric’s.
Part of me wanted to get closer to see what they were doing, but I stayed back.
Oleksa’s clear gray eyes revealed nothing as he glanced at their faces, then at the cash.
“Deal,” he said. He didn’t move. Simply inclined his head and gestured with a quick curl of his long fingers. “Give to me.”
Eric withdrew a Rubik’s cube from the pockets of his baggy shorts. He grinned, twisting the sides of the puzzle until it was a jumble of random colors. Another boy drew up a sleeve and poised his watch in the air, fingers twitching over the stop mechanism. Oleksa’s eyes met theirs. He didn’t blink.
“Ten seconds,” the timer said, shuffling from foot to foot.
“Starting . . . now!”
Oleksa caught the cube and his fingers flashed over the surface in quick successive turns, each pass aligning the colors with increasing accuracy. My heart sped up as I counted down in my head.
“There’s no way . . .” Eric clenched his hands, glancing at his money. “The world record is just under seven.” I rocked forward, inching up on my toes for a better look.
The timer looked from Oleksa to his watch. “Five . . . four . . . three . . .”
Oleksa gave the cube a final turn and slammed it down on the desk between them.
“I win,” he said.
The class bell shattered the silence. Mouths hung open, but no one spoke. The watch’s alarm rang, rubbing in Oleksa’s victory. Students filtered into the room and took their seats, but my feet were glued in place. Oleksa could give Anh and me both a run for our money for the scholarship. And probably win.
I’d chalked Oleksa’s poor grades up to laziness, a lack of competitive edge, but the steel in his eyes told me I was wrong. He clearly had the edge. So why wasn’t he leveraging it? Oleksa turned his cold stare on me, that same gouging look I’d seen in Sunny View on Friday night. Then his hand shot out, smooth and quick, palming the money just as Rankin came through the door.
I hustled to my desk, feeling Oleksa’s eyes on my back.
The blue ink letters were lighter today, as if the custodian had tried unsuccessfully to scrub them out. I covered them with textbooks, but the words dead or alive felt like more
than random graffiti and only intensified the feeling of being watched.
“Attention, people,” Rankin called the class to order. He stepped through the aisles, pausing to count off sheets of paper. He dropped a stack in front of me and I took one before pushing them to Anh. “You have forty-five minutes to complete this assignment.”
The room was quiet as we all read the instructions for today’s lab. “We will be identifying mystery solutions. If you completed your homework assignment, then you have already researched the sixteen solutions you will correctly identify today.”
Eric groaned. “Hydrochloric again? When do we get to work with something cool, like hydrofluoric?”