Not Now, Not Ever: A Novel

I really hoped that wasn’t a nickname that would stick. I was having a hard enough time answering to Ever.

“Oh shit,” Galen murmured, craning his neck to look at the counselor’s table. “What now?”

Rather than their usual huddle of Starbucks cups and whispered conversation, the counselors had cleared their long table. The single speaker that Wendell Cheeseman had used on our first day was being carried over to the picture window by the MIT counselor, who had a mild limp.

Bryn Mawr climbed on the bench seat, balancing neatly as she held her cell phone to a cordless microphone. The speaker played a tinny series of twanging guitar and mushy synthesizer chords.

“Balls,” I said as I recognized it.

“Isn’t this the song from Pitch Perfect?” said someone at a nearby table.

Bryn Mawr grinned into the crowd. She let the phone fall to her side, where it continued to distantly plead for all of us to remember it.

“Good morning, campers,” she said. “I told you that you wouldn’t know when these were coming at you. Saturday, March twenty-fourth, nineteen eighty-four. Shermer High School. Shermer, Illinois. Six zero zero six two.” She gestured at the bare table in front of her. “I need a criminal, a princess, a brain, an athlete, and a basket case.”

“A what?” Jams asked.

“It’s the goddamn Breakfast Club,” Hunter said.

“Every contestant will recite the lines of their assigned character,” Bryn Mawr announced, as people started to line up on the sides of the counselors’ table. “You can ask for assistance once. Forget a second line and you will be replaced. Anyone who looks at their phone will be disqualified, including those in line. The camper who can get the farthest into the movie, wins.”

“Someone’s a big Ready Player One fan,” I muttered, my stomach sinking. So much for my head start on the fifth scholarship. There was no chance I’d retained enough of The Breakfast Club to make it through a single scene, much less to the end.

“A what fan?” Leigh asked, sticking her thumb in her mouth and biting at her nail with her crooked teeth.

“Ready Player One,” I repeated, waving her off. “It’s a book. At one point, they have to reenact a movie word for word—”

“The War Games simulation,” Brandon interrupted, nodding vigorously. “At the first gate. I was thinking the same thing. I love that book. It’s a shame about Armada…”

I swallowed thickly and gaped at this vision of nerd boy, who picked up my references as I set them down. With his fuzzy bedhead and tremulous smile.

“I know, right?” I said, forcing a laugh that ended up slightly maniacal. “Why do second books suck so much?”

“I’m going for it,” Kate said, throwing herself to her feet. Her fists balled at her sides as she stared at the lengthening queue at the counselors’ table. “I sat through the movie three times this week. I think I have a shot.”

“It’s two hours of people sniveling about their virginities,” Perla said, also climbing off the bench. She brushed by her roommate, her elbow scuffing against Kate’s. “How hard could it be?”

Kate’s face went chalk white. She closed her eyes. Her nostrils flared. Her anger was almost a separate entity—a hissing, writhing snake winding itself around her extremities, holding her in place and pushing her to strike.

“Now you have to try,” Hunter said to her. “Because you can’t let Perla win.”

“Amen,” said Jams.

“Don’t make us chant for you, Kate.” Galen chuckled. “We’ll do it.”

Her eyelids flew open. “Don’t you dare.”

“Kate, Kate,” Galen murmured. He threw a look around the table until the rest of us joined in, whispering, “Kate, Kate, Kate…”

The color came back to Kate’s face in a rush as she skittered away from us, joining the line a few people behind Perla.

Leigh bit another of her fingernails. “I knew I should have paid more attention to that stupid movie.”

“How could you have known that there’d be a quiz?” I asked. “None of us knew.”

“This whole camp is a quiz,” she huffed. “Apparently.”





16


With the second Cheeseman trial ribbon awarded to one of the girls from Lumberjack Beard’s team, and the rest of the morning open for studying, I laced up my running shoes and sprinted out of the residence hall. There were clusters of people spread out in the quad and on the steps of the closed buildings. Most had their faces deep inside their binders, prepping before we were due to report to our team meetings. Others napped in the shade of the trees or tossed Frisbees. A solitary white kid was flinging himself around the green, bouncing a hacky sack off of various parts of himself.

Because how would we know that we were on a college campus if there wasn’t a loner with a hacky sack?

My feet burned with the aftermath of amoeba tag, but I needed a mental break. I’d been expecting the weekend to be easier than the constant shuffle of classes during the week, but with the addition of the Cheeseman events, the tension had ratcheted up instead. Kate had cried when Hari buzzed her out of The Breakfast Club. The second we’d been excused from the dining hall, Leigh had started quizzing herself aloud on every meal we’d eaten this week, in case it ended up being pertinent.

When the Melee was over, they’d recover. We would all go back to our normal lives in a few weeks and coast through senior year, fifty geniuses—five of whom would be coming back to Rayevich next fall.

But that was just it. College wasn’t like high school. You couldn’t drag yourself through the same halls every day, counting down to when you could leave. I’d realized that when I talked to Beth. I’d known for years that this school was where I wanted to be, but I’d never considered that homesickness could be a roadblock.

You had to leave home to make a home. You couldn’t wait to leave to be yourself.

I couldn’t let myself start to crumble under the pressure. If I couldn’t hack it for the summer, how could I expect to spend four years here?

When I was in the fifth grade, Sid finished basic training. She’d always been intense, but her new short hair and official air force ranking doubled her aloofness. After all, I was ten years old and still wearing my hair up in two puff balls that Beth thought made me look like a cartoon mouse. Seeing Sid was like looking into my own future and seeing someone terrifying on the other side. She was everything my mom wanted me to grow up to be.

Still, as we both sat on the back porch of Grandmother Lawrence’s house, I had been compelled to ask my cousin if boot camp was hard. I guess I had thought that it was harmless chitchat, the sort of obvious question that adults asked to keep you talking when they didn’t have anything to say.

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