“Right.” Calvin glanced at the GED book in my hand. I’d forgotten I was still holding it. “The pep rallies and prom-mania finally got to you, didn’t they?”
“Go, Sea Cows,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s not mine. A customer left it behind.” I tossed it on the counter, hoping Mrs. Ross didn’t return to her table and wonder why one of her books was missing, and it took heroic effort not to pin Calvin to the floor and threaten to dangle spiders over his face until he told me everything he knew about Tommy. “We can talk here, but I might have to stop to help customers.”
“That’s fine,” Calvin said. “I don’t have anywhere to be.”
The way he said it, I almost felt bad for him. But not so bad that I was going to let him off the hook about Tommy.
“Last Friday,” I said. “At a/s/l. You mentioned Tommy.”
“I did?”
“Don’t do that. Don’t play dumb.” My jaw hurt from grinding my teeth. “Tell me what you know about Thomas Ross.”
Calvin’s expression barely wavered. I thought I saw a hint of genuine recognition, but it might have just been an eye twitch. “Tommy? Does he go to our school?”
“Yes!” I said. “You were on the debate team together! I think. You were on the debate team, right?”
Calvin nodded. “I don’t remember anyone named Tommy.”
I wanted to crush his fingers in a thumbscrew until he told me the truth. “At a/s/l you told me not to wait around Cloud Lake for Tommy. Why’d you say that if you don’t know who he is?”
Calvin was quiet for a moment, and those seconds felt endless. All he had to do was say that he remembered Tommy and it would validate the last few months of my life. I could tell the shrinks and everyone who didn’t believe me to go to hell. All he had to do was say the words.
“It was stupid,” Calvin said. “I shouldn’t have said it.”
“So you don’t know him?”
Calvin shook his head and dropped his eyes. “No.”
He was lying. He had to be. “Then why’d you tell me not to wait around for him? How did you even know his name if you don’t remember him?”
“I heard rumors,” he said. “I have Spanish with this girl whose sister is friends with your brother, I think. I overheard her telling someone about you and this Tommy guy.”
“So, what? You heard gossip about me and decided to track me down at a club to offer unsolicited advice on a subject you know less than nothing about?”
Calvin wouldn’t look at me. “I really did want to see the band, but then we started talking and you looked so sad—”
But I’d stopped listening. “Who does that? How fucked up are you?”
“Pretty fucked up.”
Calvin didn’t know anything, and I’d gotten my hopes up for nothing. I was the only person in the entire world, it seemed, who remembered Tommy. I couldn’t even stay mad at Calvin for lying about it because he seemed so pathetic. Anyway, he didn’t matter; only Tommy mattered.
“You can tell me about him,” Calvin said. “If you want.”
“I don’t want to talk about Tommy. Not with you.” I climbed around the register and dug my physics textbook and notepad out of my bag. I didn’t want to spend a second longer with Calvin than I had to, but since he was there, I figured we should start our project so that I didn’t flunk physics. “We should work on our roller coaster.”
Calvin reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded wad of graph paper.
“I sort of sketched something already.” He spread his sheets of paper on the counter and tried to flatten them with his hand.
I glanced at the drawings, not immediately sure what I was looking at. I was starting to say “We should figure out the math before we draw anything” when I realized Calvin had already designed a roller coaster.
“You drew this?”
His coaster began by catapult-launching the cars up a sharp incline and into the first drop before whipping into a looping corkscrew and finally ending with a camel back. He’d scribbled calculations I couldn’t pretend to understand near each section of the ride. On the other papers, he’d broken the roller coaster into smaller sections and included notes about speeds and g-forces.
“I had some spare time at lunch,” Calvin said.
I looked from the sketches to Calvin and back. “You did this during lunch?” While Calvin had drafted a kick-ass roller coaster, I’d been chugging chocolate milk.
Calvin shrugged. “It’s only math.”
“Only math,” I muttered. I read over his calculations, which seemed to indicate the ride, if built to scale, could reach a top speed of 82 mph. Not the fastest roller coaster, but the impressive twists and turns were theoretically capable of producing five positive Gs of force in some sections. “Can we actually build this?”
“Yeah,” Calvin said. He pointed at the first steep hill. “This is the trickiest bit. We’ll need to devise a way to propel the cars up the incline. Most roller coasters tow the cars to the top of the first drop and allow their momentum to carry them through the rest of the ride.” He scrunched his forehead. “But if we slingshot the cars up the hill, they’ll hit the drop with greater speed.”
A couple of customers interrupted, two of whom bought the Apocalypse Diet book. The other was a regular who usually loitered in the graphic novel aisle but never bought anything, who wanted to know if we had some YA book about ants and aliens I’d never heard of. When I returned, Calvin was busy working out more calculations. Without a calculator.
“This is incredible, Calvin. Fuentes will crap her pants if we pull this off.” He may not have known anything about Tommy, but he was clearly a genius when it came to roller coasters.
“Whatever.”
“Whatever?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s only a grade.”
“Maybe to you.”
Calvin didn’t smile; he seemed bored by the conversation. Like rather than play video games or watch TV or scour the web for porn to fill his empty hours like a normal person, he crunched complicated math problems.
“Did you tell anyone what happened in the restroom yesterday?” he asked.
Calvin stood quietly, the counter and his question between us. I’d honestly been so focused on learning what he knew about Tommy that I hadn’t given much thought to catching him cutting himself.
After a moment I said, “Do I need to?”
Calvin shook his head. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Then why?”
“I told you,” Calvin said, slowly, like he was explaining differential equations to a toddler. “To trigger the release of endorphins and inhibit amygdala function.”
Calvin’s bright blue eyes unnerved me. One was slightly wider than the other, and he didn’t blink often, making me feel like he was constantly studying me. Everything about him—his headphones, his black hoodie, his inscrutable Sphinx face—seemed intentionally tailored to repel people and their silly questions.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You know that, right?”