A thump echoes through the line. “Nailed it! Finally!” Meg shouts triumphantly. Happily.
I haven’t seen the powerless darkness in Meg’s eyes since I told her she needed to pass math. Hopefully her recent math test conquest banished it for good, but I’m not telling her about this and risking bringing the darkness back—not when there’s basically no chance whatsoever that we could win. If there was a decent chance we’d win, I’d have already told her that I don’t fly.
“Now, tell me again about the painting,” Meg says, panting.
So I ignore the twisting in my stomach, and I do.
After I say good-bye to Meg, I finish my English reading, put on my pajamas, and brush my teeth. Then, instead of my recent nightly ritual of checking if there have been any more plane crashes in the world, I trace my finger over the shape hidden in the drawing’s shadows again and again until I finally fall asleep.
CHAPTER 20
MEG
I’M NOT NERVOUS.
The guys beside us are both wearing baggy geek shirts and glasses and look like they’re really smart, but their project is about dung beetles, and no one cares about that. Across from us is Marcia, who’s mixed but such a pale brown that she could be white-passing—especially since she’s started straightening her already loose curls. She spends our entire homework time in math period talking to Dylan, which could mean she’s really smart and has already done her homework, but I doubt it, and her partner is this Asian girl I don’t know who looks like she’s about ten years old, and long story short, our project is better than every other project in this entire place.
And there are a lot of them. Our whole grade is here. Thank goodness Grayson’s a grade ahead. I don’t want to have to go out of my way to avoid him like I do in the hallways.
The background of our poster board is splattered with fiery red paint—for the past week, Kat’s been complaining that she keeps finding red splashed in every corner of her kitchen—which looks incredible, like splashes of lava. We’ve pasted screenshots from a speed run around the outside, so it looks like Kat’s character is doing her own stop-motion speed run around our board. Across the top in big bubble letters, it reads, “Are your children eating too much sugar?” and then under that, in slightly smaller print, “Can video games provide the answer?”
My math teacher, Mrs. Brown, the first of our three judges, walks up to us with a clipboard. Her earrings—small, sparkly gemstones—are two different colors. Is she wearing them that way on purpose, or did she grab the wrong one from her dresser this morning? “Well, girls,” she says, “tell me about your project.”
I force myself to stop staring at her ears. “Parents often hate video games,” I say, launching into our practiced spiel—rehearsed so many times, I could probably say it in my sleep. “Violence, obesity rates, all that jazz. But video games can also have many technological, academic, and other advantages. We were able to use the mechanics of a popular computer game to test the effect of sugar on speed and reaction rates.” I explain the tests and the results, Kat goes through our analysis and conclusions, and we both answer questions.
After we finish, Mrs. Brown beams at me. Well, at both of us, but mostly at me. “Great project, girls,” she says. “Meg, you’re really pulling things together—a B on your last math test, and an excellent project. Well done.”
“Why, thank you,” I say, and give a little bow, which makes her laugh.
Our second judge—a stocky white teacher with black hair and a mustache—is much less pleasant. He doesn’t even laugh at my joke about having to take only one person to the hospital due to a sugar overdose, and he asks questions we didn’t practice, about control test placebos or something, which, fortunately, Kat answers without even blinking. But I watch his hand while we talk—he’s wearing a wedding ring, which means he’s probably kissed someone with that hairy-capped mouth of his—and every time he circles something on his paper, he does it on the far right side, which, I know from the marking grid we were given, is where he would circle all the ten out of tens.
Parents are allowed to come to the science fair, and apparently most people’s parents don’t have to work on Friday afternoons like my mom does, so while we wait for our final judge, Kat and I play a game I invent called Guess Whose Parent.
“Ha-ha, I win,” I whisper to Kat when a tall black woman in a plaid suit, who’s a bit darker than Mom, walks up to Marcia and tells her, “Honey, I’m going back to work now. Good job!”
“Man, I would not have guessed that,” Kat whispers back. Considering how few black kids there are in here, people probably think Marcia’s mom is mine. “How do you get so many of these?”
“I’m just gifted, I guess.”
Marcia’s mom turns around just then and smiles at us. “Hello, Meg,” she says. “Is your mom here?”
I shake my head, feeling Kat’s angry villain glare drilling holes in the side of it. “No,” I say. “She had client meetings today that she couldn’t reschedule. She made me present our project for her last night.”
“Well, tell her I said hello,” Marcia’s mom says, and I promise that I will.
“You’re just gifted, eh?” Kat hisses at me when Marcia’s mom leaves.
“Okay, so I might have cheated on that one.” When she doesn’t stop glaring, I add, “All right, all right—you can have one penalty smack,” and hold out my hand, palm down.
She doesn’t even hesitate, just slaps it once, hard enough to make a small thwack.
“Ladies,” comes a booming voice, “no violence in the school, you know that.” It’s Mr. Goldsmith, a science teacher I know for the same reason every girl knows him—his jawline alone, with its perfectly sloped angles meeting at his dimpled chin, deserves its own place on a magazine cover.
“Sorry,” Kat mumbles at her feet as her face flushes bright red.
I just grin. “It’s okay,” I tell him, putting my arm around Kat’s shoulder. “We’re besties. And besides, I deserved that.”
It’s a good thing my part is first, because Kat’s face is still red through my entire presentation. I throw in a couple of extra jokes to stretch my section out a little longer—Mr. Goldsmith actually laughs properly at them, which only makes him more dreamy—and by the time we get to Kat’s part, she looks less flustered. Sure enough, she breezes through it, with barely a stutter.
And then we’re done. I bump my hip happily into Kat’s as Mr. Goldsmith walks away. We have won this. For sure.
KAT
ALL OF THESE PROJECTS ARE CRAP.
Like, seriously, folks, is this really the best you can do?
My fellow classmates have had almost seven months—seven months!—to whip together a thought-provoking, prizeworthy project, and the best they’ve come up with is a couple of projects about watering plants, one about a dung beetle, and way too many about the dangers or nondangers of microwaves.