“Where have you been eating for the last week?” Perla asked.
I bounced on the balls of my feet, watching the sign above the elevator slowly light up each floor number. All of my wrong answers replayed in the back of my head, a dozen whispered failures. Could we really pull it together enough in a week to even qualify for a second round of the Melee?
“That was a special kind of awful,” Brandon said quietly as he sidled up next to me. “Halfway through, I was sure I was having a nightmare.”
“How did you convince yourself it was real?” I asked.
His mouth scrunched to the side. “I don’t know if I have. If my sisters show up or if I get pantsed, I guess I’ll know for sure that I’m asleep.”
I smiled. “Or just having the worst day ever. How many sisters should I be keeping watch for?”
He shuddered. “Don’t even joke about them showing up. If you talk about them too much, they appear. Like Bloody Mary. Or Beetlejuice.” He held up his notepaper, which was so covered in notes that it was close to weeping blue ink. “I have to study tomorrow.”
I showed him my page. “Me too.”
“Sci-fi section?”
19
“I know zilch about classical music,” I said, pressing my head down on the table. After my morning run and the standard lukewarm breakfast with the team, Brandon and I had met under the Magrathea poster in the sci-fi section. We had swapped binders immediately, both flipping to the music section.
Except neither of us had made any useful notes in the music section.
Teal double knots looked up at me from the tops of my shoes. They bounced as I stretched my calves.
Brandon’s black and white Chuck Taylors flexed. I was beginning to think that he had only packed one pair of shoes to wear for three weeks straight. “I can say ‘zilch’ in three languages and I don’t know anything about classical music.”
I peeked up at him, resting my cheek against the cold pages of the binder. “Three languages?”
He counted on his fingers, starting thumb first. “Non; that’s French. Nil; Latin—obviously.”
I snorted. “Obviously.”
“And,” he aimed three fingers at me smugly, his eyes flashbulb bright, “sod all.”
“One week of living with Jams and you’re already fluent in vaguely British slang. What would you do if you found out that his mom wasn’t actually from England?”
He considered this. He must have been scrunching his forehead, because his hair slid all the way down to his eyelashes. His hair was hypnotically shiny and super thick. I kept thinking about running my fingers through it to test its depths, even though it was so hypocritical. There was literally nothing worse than strangers asking to touch my hair. It was so creepy and invasive.
But being this close to Brandon was starting to make me feel like a creep. So.
“I would take that secret to my grave,” he said.
“Really? You wouldn’t let it slip even in the split second before you died?”
He shook his head solemnly, letting the hair sway across his forehead. “No way. What if Perla heard me?”
“Oh, good point. The gloating would be unbearable.”
“Besides, I think he might be telling the truth,” he said, reaching for a pencil and twirling it between his fingers like a tiny baton. “This morning, I heard him say ‘yaw-gert.’”
I pried my attention away from the whir of the spinning pencil. “What the hell is yaw-gert?”
“Yogurt.”
“I don’t think that’s how British people say yogurt. I don’t think that’s how anyone pronounces anything.”
“That’s also possible.” The pencil stilled, resting on top of his middle finger. “Okay. Classical music.”
I patted the open binder in front of me and forced myself to sit up straight again.
“I blame Faulkner,” I said.
“That’s not fair. None of the counselors have actually taught anything.”
“But I’m looking at this page,” I stabbed my finger onto the offending sentence, “and it says that the baroque period was ‘typified by its ornate sound and exaggerated dissonance.’ Maybe if I’d actually heard a baroque symphony I would have an idea what that means. I can run back to my room and get my phone, I guess. We could stream a freaking symphony while we study—”
“No!” he blurted. The pencil dropped onto the table and rolled into the unlit lamp.
“No?” I prompted.
He shrank back, his mouth going wiggly. “Remember when you said you were hoping for some genius school juice?”
The most embarrassing thing I’ve ever said? I thought. I wish I could forget about it so quickly.
“I remember,” I said.
“This is it. I think.” He squinted at me as though bracing for impact. When I raised my eyebrows and waited for him to continue, he exhaled. “I think what the counselors were pointing out by not actually hosting classes last week was that it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve internalized the lessons. It’s not about being the most well-versed person in the Melee. Actually, filling in too many of the gaps in the information that the binder provides would be a disadvantage. You can’t live in the details. You’ll drown.” He knocked on the binder in front of him—my binder. “This is us drowning.”
“Because we’re in here and it’s supposed to be our free day?”
He gave an emphatic nod that sent ripples through his hair. “Because everyone is studying on their free day. There were people with binders all over the place between the residence hall and here. And I bet some of them are thinking what you are—they should listen to symphonies. Or download the audiobooks. Or research in the library.”
I could feel awareness starting to crest, a sunrise slowly filling the inside of my head in deep purples and streaky pinks. “But what the Melee is really measuring is how much we can take from the binders themselves. It’s like our first lesson with Hari. Jams tried to add information about Oscar Wilde and he got shot down. They’re overloading us to see if we can be overloaded.”
Like boot camp, I thought. I could kick myself for not putting that together earlier. No one at boot camp would volunteer to get less sleep or to do an extra set of push-ups. You took what was given to you and proved that you could thrive in it.
“And to see who cracks under the pressure,” he said. “If you want to know what the Mess is like, it’s that. It’s watching the smartest people you’ve ever met constantly melting down. Crying in the hallways. Getting notes from their psychiatrists that the workload is too much.” He picked up the pencil again and wove it between his fingers. “But you get through it by sticking to the curriculum. You don’t do them any good if you can’t cope.”