Galen threw up his hands. “What happened to Cheeseman? Shouldn’t he be supervising something?”
“He was at dinner last night for about a minute,” I said. I’d caught a glimpse of Cheeseman’s bald head bobbing around the counselors’ table, but he’d disappeared before we’d been excused to stack our plates.
“We are two weeks away from the first round of the Melee,” Hunter said. “We’re totally screwed.”
“We’ll mutiny!” Jams said, punching his fist into the air. “It can’t be only our team who isn’t learning anything. There’s forty-eight of us and only twelve counselors. If we rally, they can’t hold us down.”
“Truth,” said Galen.
Kate crouched low, her chin almost landing in her sandwich as she used the rest of us as cover. She lowered her voice to a hiss as her bright blue eyes slid from person to person. “Do you really want to unionize with our competitors?”
Jams mockingly mirrored her hunched back and loud whisper. “No. I really want to tie down all of our fake professors until they’re forced to actually bloody teach something, but I don’t think that will work.”
“James—Jams—whatever you’re calling yourself,” Perla said, “you are an American. You are from Oregon. You do not have an accent, pip pip. So stop being so bleeding, bloody, bollocksing barmy.”
Jams’s ears lit up neon pink as he thrust a shaking finger at her. “My mum—”
“‘Mom,’” Perla corrected loudly. “You’re putting a U where an O goes, you Anglophile arsehole.”
“I am not an Anglophile!” he shot back.
“Yesterday, you wore Union Jack socks,” Leigh noted, running a hand over her scalp.
“Leave him alone,” Hunter said. “He has dual nationality.”
“Ch-cheers, Hunter,” Jams said, his tongue tripping with indignation. “Not that I have to prove anything to you all, but, yes, I am a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom.”
“Fifty bucks says he’s never been outside of Oregon,” Perla said in a cruel singsong.
Jams’s mouth pinched tight into whatever the opposite of a poker face was.
I couldn’t stomach the idea of Perla winning this argument. None of us would benefit from her having a feather in her cap. “We can’t mutiny and we can’t force anyone to teach us anything. We’ll just keep studying.”
“And watching The Breakfast Club,” grumbled Kate.
“Screw that,” Hunter said. “I’ll study, but I refuse to watch the same movie every night. I tried watching it on Monday. And guess what? The Breakfast Club sucks.”
I gave him a small salute, remembering at the last minute to let my wrist limp to keep it from being too regulation. “‘So say we all.’”
“Mail call!”
All of our heads turned toward the source of the trill. Meg was prancing toward us, flapping an envelope around her face like a fan.
“Mail?” Galen repeated, his mouth slack.
“For one B. Calistero, care of Camp Onward,” Meg said, handing the envelope to Brandon.
Jams craned his neck, trying to see the return address. “I thought you were local, Bran?”
“I am,” Brandon said, tucking the letter into his binder. “I have friends.”
“Friends who don’t know your email address?” Galen asked.
“Or what century this is?” Perla added.
“Be nice,” Meg said, smiling daggers. “There’s something to be said for epistolary discourse. If you want the handwriting analyzed, B, you know that Mary-Anne is—”
“Thanks, Meg,” Brandon interrupted, squirming under the team’s attention. “I think I’ll be all right without.”
She planted her hands on her hips, swaying cheerfully. “And how is my favorite team doing? I didn’t see any of you at movie night yesterday. We have a machine on loan that makes the most delicious kettle corn you’ve ever eaten. Seriously, I thought about it the whole flight here. And there’s always regular popcorn and candy.” She ticked off her fingers. “Skittles, sour straws, licorice—both red and black—and all the fun-sized chocolate you could ever hope for. Unless you were hoping for peanut butter cups. I think Peter ate all of those already.”
She shook herself and clasped her hands to her chest like she was bracing to burst into song. “It would really mean a lot to me if you guys could come tonight for some Team One bonding time. I know you have a ton of studying to do, but I feel like I haven’t seen you since classes started. And we’re showing a great movie…”
“Bollocks,” muttered Jams.
I couldn’t have agreed more.
12
“I grant you that it was a different time,” Leigh whispered, a fistful of kettle corn clutched in her fist. “But are we really supposed to believe that a parent would buy their son a whole carton of cigarettes for Christmas?”
“Cigarette packs have had the surgeon general’s warning on them since nineteen sixty-six,” Kate whispered back. “I looked it up after I watched this last night.”
I bit a licorice whip in half. “If he said, ‘I’ve never had a Christmas present in my life,’ I’d feel worse for him. Now, it seems like his dad was trying to get him something he’d want. He probably is a smoker, right?”
Kate scrunched her face in thought. “I think the implication is that Bender’s dad wants him to die.”
The movie flickered against a sheet hung between two trees in the center of the quad. With the blankets spread out in the grass and the kettle corn machine churning out sweet and salty gold in the lobby of the residence hall, movie night had a sort of drive-in feeling to it.
Day five of the Breakfast Club marathon had chased off most of the other teams and their counselors, leaving us with room to sprawl in the grass. Bryn Mawr was writing in a small notebook next to Meg, who was contentedly stuffing her face with kettle corn. Hari was sitting behind the projector cart, unabashedly reading a hardcover book that was missing its dust jacket.
“That blond kid is the smallest wrestler I’ve ever seen. What’s his weight class? Ninety pounds?” Hunter asked from behind us, twitching as a mosquito flew too close to his head. Meg’s homemade bug spray succeeded in making us smell like Vicks VapoRub but didn’t do much when it came to repelling insects.
“Does anyone else think he and the nerd kid look too much alike?” Jams asked, hugging his knees to his chest.
“That’s the point,” Perla said. “The movie is trying—heavy-handedly—to point out that, despite their archetypes, they’re not that different after all. It’s total horseshit. Five white kids from the same rich imaginary suburb would be basically interchangeable.”
“You had me and then you lost me,” Galen said. “With the racism.”
“You can’t be racist against white people,” Leigh hummed. “FYI.”
“For real,” I agreed.
“Five Caucasian cisgender heterosexuals from homes with a median income that would allow for all of them to go to school in Shermer do not represent range,” Perla drawled. “Popular versus not popular is not diversity of circumstance. It’s caring too much about what other people think.”
“Oh,” said Galen. “That makes more sense.”