“This!” shouts Tommy. “This is how much I love you, Oswald Pinkerton! This much!”
Enough to stand in the middle of a hurricane. That’s how much Tommy loves me. There are no units of measurement for love. No yards or kilograms or degrees Kelvin. No way to compare the love of one person to that of another. Love defies quantification. Maybe it doesn’t matter that he sometimes thinks about kissing other people. He loves me.
I step off the patio to retrieve my idiot boyfriend, and he collapses. I sprint across the grass. My foot sinks into mud, and I twist my ankle, but I ignore it because I’m thinking what if Tommy fell face forward and is drowning. It’ll be my fault if he dies trying to prove how much he loves me.
Tommy’s already starting to sit up when I reach him. He’s holding the side of his head. Rita yanks the trellis on the side of the house out of the ground and flings it across the yard.
“Come on,” I say. “We need to get inside.” I pull his arm around my shoulders.
But Tommy doesn’t move. “Do you get it?” he yells. “This is only a fraction of how much I love you.”
“I get it! Let’s go!” I haul him to his feet and half drag him inside. I have to lean all my weight against the door to shut it. It’s a wonder no one’s come to investigate.
Inside, I grab the lantern and Tommy’s clothes and lead him into the kitchen. When he’s got his boxers and shirt back on, I check him over. He’s bleeding from a cut on the side of his head. It probably needs stitches, but butterfly bandages will have to do.
“Are you stupid or what?” I clean the cut, which is as long as my thumb, with iodine, ignoring Tommy’s winces.
“Stupid for you, Ozzie.”
“You could’ve been killed!”
Tommy catches my wrist and pulls my hands into his lap. He looks me right in the eyes. Tommy’s brown eyes are evening sunlight. “There are exactly two people in my life worth dying for: my mom and you.”
“That’s sweet, but idiotic. And just because you’re willing to die for me doesn’t mean I want you to.”
“I’m not looking to die either,” he says. “I just want you to know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. That’s how much I love you. Don’t ever forget it.”
219,764 AU
I PICKED UP CALVIN FOR school on friday so we could bring in what we’d completed of our roller coaster for Ms. Fuentes to evaluate. We hadn’t talked about my rejection from Amherst or why he’d skipped school and spent the entire day in bed. And I hadn’t told him that his father had asked me to spy on him. Sometimes it seemed the list of things we didn’t talk about was longer than the list of things we did.
When Calvin walked outside, carrying the half-finished track, I barely recognized him. He’d shaved his unruly blond curls, leaving behind pale stubble on his scalp. My first thought was that at least he had a nicely shaped skull.
“Did you get into a fight with an electric razor?” I asked when I got out of the car to open the trunk. I was trying to make a joke, but Calvin didn’t laugh.
“I needed a change,” Calvin said. And it was all he said. He didn’t speak on the drive to school, and we parted ways in the parking lot. I wondered if this was the type of behavior Mr. Frye had asked me to watch for. The hair on its own wasn’t a big deal—Lua changed hairstyles and colors more frequently than most people changed their underwear—but I couldn’t help wondering if the drastic transformation was a sign of a larger problem. I’d always felt guilty for not telling someone about Mr. Ross beating on Tommy, and I wondered if I was letting Calvin down the same way by keeping his secret. But I’d already lost Tommy, and I was scared I’d lose Calvin too if I ratted him out.
When Calvin arrived at physics with our project, the other students whispered.
I nudged him with my elbow when he sat down. “Is everything all right?”
Before he could answer, Dustin waltzed in. “Nice cut, Frye.” He nodded at me. “What’s up, Pinks? That your project?” He set his own roller coaster, which was a little further along than ours, on our table. “Damn. Pretty good. Not as good as mine, of course.”
“It was mostly Calvin’s idea,” I said. “But I bought the wood.”
Dustin rolled his eyes. “Why does that not surprise me?”
I gave him the finger, and caught Ms. Fuentes frowning.
The bell rang, and while Ms. Fuentes walked around to each team, I tried to get Calvin to talk to me. I was the one who should have been sullen and mopey. Yeah, I’d applied to other colleges, and I held out hope that at least one would accept me, but that first rejection had wounded me more than I wanted to admit. It stood as proof that some choices were beyond my control, and that, despite my best efforts, my life might not turn out the way I wanted.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
Calvin tinkered with the track, working on a section of the corkscrew that we hadn’t gotten quite right. “I’m fine.”
“You’re a terrible liar, you know?”
“It’s nothing, Ozzie. I promise.”
Ms. Fuentes chose that moment to approach our lab table. She tilted her head to the side and circled our roller coaster, viewing it from different angles. “How do you intend to move your roller coaster up this first incline?” she asked.
As far as I knew, we hadn’t figured out that part yet. Calvin’s simulations just shot it up the slope, but I hadn’t devoted much thought to how we were going to implement it on the model.
Apparently, Calvin had. “I’ve been working on a spring-loaded propulsion system,” he said. “With a latch and release mechanism.”
“And have you calculated the strength of the spring required to launch the cars?”
“I think so,” Calvin said.
Ms. Fuentes nodded. “Interesting. Are you confident it will provide the necessary momentum required to maintain speed through these loops?”
“We ran some simulations,” I said, because I didn’t want Fuentes to think I hadn’t helped with the assignment.
Calvin pulled his laptop out of his backpack to show Ms. Fuentes the program. For a moment—talking g-forces and momentum with Fuentes—Calvin returned to life. I understood physics conceptually, and I could do the math well enough to pass the exams, but Calvin lived and breathed the stuff. He understood it like a language he’d grown up speaking. It reminded me of the way Tommy had understood . . . well, everything.
“Interesting,” Ms. Fuentes said again. “It seems like you boys have a great start here. But your entire ride hinges on your ability to launch the cars up that first incline. Simulations are well and good, but I’d suggest not waiting much longer to design that feature. If you can’t make it work, you’ll want to have enough time before the due date to figure out an alternative.”
We thanked Ms. Fuentes, and she moved on to Dustin’s table. Jake Ortiz was absent, again, and the first thing Dustin did was complain about how he’d done all the work.
“I don’t think I can do lunch today, Ozzie.” Calvin examined the track, conspicuously not looking at me.
“Oh.”