In my peripheral vision I could see a hint of dreadlocks. I turned my head a fraction and saw my cousin gasping for air beside me. I was moderately surprised to see that he didn’t sweat ranch dressing.
“I can see why you’re trying to get out of the academy,” I said. “You’re in terrible shape. BMT would kill you.”
“I have asthma,” he panted. “And I had to catch up with you.”
Against my better judgment, I slowed—just a little. “Had to?”
“I figured you wouldn’t want to talk about our, you know, secrets in front of your team.”
“Don’t get all winky-nudgy with me. The secret that we aren’t really twins is entirely your doing, remember? I really don’t care what people think.”
“You don’t care if people find out that your name is Elliot Gabaroche and you ran away from home to win a scholarship to a school your parents would never let you attend?”
“Is this the part where you start legitimately blackmailing me?”
He snorted. “You don’t have anything I want.”
“How did you know that I would be up this early?”
“I saw you stretching outside of the dorms and followed you out.”
“Oh, good. I was afraid the answer was going to be something creepy.”
“It’s not creepy. I thought we should clarify our story.”
I lengthened my stride again. “You can clarify as long as you can keep up.”
His face tightened into pained concentration as his arms flapped wildly. “I assume you’ve been telling people that you’re from Sacramento?”
“You mean because that’s where I live?”
He rolled his eyes grandly, lids quivering and tongue lolling. If I also looked like a demented ventriloquist dummy when I did that, I’d have to stop immediately.
“Are you going to answer every question with a question?” he asked. “Because eventually my lungs will start to spasm. I can already feel my mucus thickening…”
“Don’t talk to me about your mucus,” I begged. While the dining hall’s food wasn’t going to win any awards, I did have to eat it at some point after the sun was fully risen. “Yes, I have told people that I’m from Sacramento.”
“That’s fine,” he said, apparently no longer in danger of having a full asthma attack. “So, we live in Sacramento and go to your high school—”
“And you never skipped a grade because apparently you’re my age now.”
“Huh.” He frowned at a cement bench as we passed it. “I hadn’t thought about that. That sucks. It’s really rare for people to skip a grade.”
“Uh-huh. Now how will the rest of genius camp know how smart you are?”
He wasn’t listening. He swatted one of his bouncing dreads away from his face. “I guess we can keep your parents. Does your stepmom have to be white?”
I curled my lip at him. “What do you mean? She is white.”
“It raises a lot of questions.”
“No. It raises literally zero questions.”
“Okay, fine. So, we have a white stepmom—”
“You could also call her Beth. That’s her name.”
“—and a half brother.”
I clenched my teeth together. I hated the term half brother. I hadn’t found out about it until after Ethan was already in preschool. No one ever explained to me that there was a difference, that I was supposed to have some kind of lesser relationship with him because we had separate moms.
“What’s his name?” Isaiah continued in a huff. “Evan?”
“Ethan,” I snapped. The day he was born, I’d climbed up on Beth’s hospital bed and petted his conical bald head. I’d apologized that I got to share Dad’s name and he didn’t. “And keep his name out of your mouth.”
“Don’t bite my head off. I’ve never met him. How old is he?”
“He’s nine. Just … forget about it. We don’t have to have a little brother.” I didn’t like the idea of sharing Ethan, even a fictional version of him. Isaiah would probably tell everyone that he was Ethan’s favorite twin, or make him into a Tiny Tim character to get sympathy from his team.
The sidewalk curved left into a man-made forest. I wondered if talking to Isaiah had distracted me from the sign or if the university assumed that everyone on campus would be smart enough to figure out that they were in the arboretum by the lack of buildings and increase of arbor. The path wound between trees and bright bursts of flowers as colorful as the sunrise we could no longer see through the thick branches that twisted together into a twiggy ceiling.
If Isaiah was moved by the beauty of our surroundings, he buried it in a sniff. “How did you hear about the Melee?”
“In real life or in your fantasy world where we’re twins?”
“In real life,” he said, unperturbed.
“I got an admissions packet so that I could look through the brochure not on my computer. There was a flyer included about the Melee. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, but … I don’t know. I started thinking about it more and more.” Whenever my mom pointed out that I didn’t have much longer left at home. Or when my dad made a snide comment about the air force over dinner. When my future started to feel too much like the final event in the Mom versus Dad championship fight, like my choice of career would decide who got to be the good parent.
“And then I was signing up to take the admissions test,” I finished. I hazarded a look at Isaiah. “What about you?”
“There was an article about it in Young Mensan Magazine.”
I tried to be shocked that (a) there was a Young Mensan Magazine and that (b) Isaiah was a subscriber, but it checked out as his brand of uncool and elitist. Aunt Bobbie had always padded out Isaiah’s ego with useless accessories, as though his IQ wouldn’t count unless it was tangibly better than other people’s. Like when we were kids and he got all of the Smithsonian science experiment kits. Or when Bobbie had decided to move off the air force base so that Isaiah could be closer to his chichi charter school.
I’d never asked how Sid had felt about her family moving off base while she was at the academy. Or how Uncle Marcus felt, coming back from deployment to a new home. Not that he came back very often. Lawrences weren’t great at being tied to anything but the military.
Up ahead, the path forked. At the point of divergence, there was a tall wooden fingerpost with multiple arrows pointing in all directions—like the signage in the 100 Aker Wood, but instead of guiding toward Eeyore’s house or Pooh Corner, there was Fort Farm, Community Garden, Mud Trail, and South Parking Lot.
“Fort Farm,” Isaiah read. “What’s with all the alliteration here?”
I shoved the sweat from my forehead back into my hair and took the right branch of the road. Isaiah made a gurgling sound before his frictionless shoe soles started scraping behind me again.
“What if we jog instead of running full out?” he asked. “It’s hard to talk and run.”
“Aren’t we done talking? Because I feel done.”
“A couple more things,” he said. There was a rustle of paper. I turned in time to see him pulling a piece of lined paper out of his back pocket. He narrowed his eyes at me before I could say anything. “It’d be suspicious if our stories didn’t line up. I don’t want to get caught and be sent home, do you?”