“Nah,” Isaiah said. “We’ve got this.”
“If you’re sure,” I said stiffly. “I’d hate for you to miss any important calls from home. Let me know if you need help.”
“Will do, Sis,” Isaiah said, and I wondered if Leigh or Brandon noticed the hiss he threw in at the end.
“I’ll catch you guys at lunch!” Leigh said with a small, sharp wave.
I watched the two of them skip into the library together. Isaiah’s elbow bumped Leigh’s. Her giggle floated to us on the breeze, riding on the back of Isaiah’s astringent cologne.
20
“He was looking for you,” Leigh said, stripping off her sheets and wadding them into a zebra print ball in her arms. “And his team really is useless. Fallon keeps locking herself in her dorm, and I don’t think Cornell is running their mock Melees correctly. He’s being way too nice.”
“It’s not a problem,” I lied. Even after lunch, I hadn’t been able to shake the uneasy feeling caused by seeing my roommate and my fake twin together. It was too farcical. Too Earnest. “I was surprised because you guys only met once.”
“And then we met a second time, this morning, when he was searching for you in the quad.” She kicked under her bed until her heel caught the handle of a voluminous blue IKEA bag that was big enough that she could have comfortably slept in it. She dropped her sheets into it. “Go ahead and toss in your socks.”
“Thank you,” I gasped. I unzipped my suitcase, rummaging to the bottom to find the dirty socks I’d tried to smell-proof in a ziplock bag over the last week. “When is our next check-in?”
“Three o’clock in the lobby.” She shook her head. “Not like they even need to bother. If anyone got seen breaking the rules, someone would turn them in.”
“It’s a liability waiver,” I said, shaking my dirty socks into the laundry bag. “If someone runs off campus or gets pregnant, the school can say that they have written proof of where everyone else was.”
She giggled. “Okay, Miss Lawyer’s Daughter.”
My stomach dropped through the floor, landing somewhere in the lobby. I had never talked to her about my dad. “Isaiah mentioned that, huh?”
“In passing.” She shook her pillow until the case slipped into her hands. She looked at me over her shoulder. “What’s the deal with you and the ghost? Are you testing the corporeality of his mouth yet?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
Her slanted front teeth peeked through her smile. “A few more protests, please.”
“We’re studying together,” I said, slowly and pointedly. “Last night’s Melee was a massacre. No one has time to think about anything other than these stupid binders. And when we do, it’ll be time to go home. I needed a study partner, and my new bestie wasn’t available.”
Her smile vanished. “Oh. I’m sorry. I’m not used to my hermiting getting in other people’s way. You probably don’t have to deal with being completely invisible, but it kind of becomes second nature to blend in.”
“You can go unnoticed while also being an Amazon.” I folded my arms over my chest. “But you aren’t invisible here. You don’t have to blend in. That was our deal, remember? You can hermit when you want to, but I’m here to kick it whenever you need to be seen.”
She wrung her hands in the hem of her shirt. “Have I told you recently how glad I am that I get to live with you this summer?”
I smiled. “No, but the feeling is mutual.”
Underneath the wardrobe on Leigh’s side of the room, there was a thump and a muffled roar. We both turned toward it.
“Um,” she said. “If that’s a possum, I am going to run.”
Another set of thumps—this time under my bed. I got down on the floor, gazing into the darkness under my bed frame. There weren’t even dust bunnies under there. But with my ear against the carpet, I could just barely make out the next shout.
Eee! Mmfer!
I glanced back at Leigh. “Who lives under us?”
“Teams are divided up based on room number. Under us is the boys’ floor. So it must be either Galen and Hunter or—”
The next thump landed right under my hand. I jolted back into a squat.
Leigh clapped her hands together and cackled. “G-g-g-ghost!”
“What do you think they want?” I asked, as two more knocks sounded under the wardrobe again. “We can’t go in their room and find out. We’ll all get disqualified. And I don’t have either of their phone numbers.”
“We don’t have to go to their room,” she said. She leaped into a pair of flip-flops and stashed her room key in her bra.
“Because you packed two cans and a piece of string?”
She bent down in front of her wardrobe and cupped her hands around her mouth. Lips dangerously close to the carpet, she yelled, “Hold on!”
“Wait,” I called to the back of her head as she rushed toward the door. “What about our laundry?”
She was already disappearing into the hallway, the door hanging open in her wake. I scrambled to my feet and charged after her. Thanks to my much longer stride, it was easy to catch up with her. The two of us power walked down the hall. When we hit the elevator, Leigh made a hard left, throwing open the door to the stairs. I stumbled behind her, listening to the echo of her sandals slapping her feet as we trotted down.
I jumped the last step, landing in front of the first-floor entrance. Leigh’s small, square fingers incrementally pushed in the touch bar handle until it gave a delicate click. The door inched open, revealing a long beige-carpeted hallway identical to our own, except for the handwriting on the chalkboard doors.
“Give me your shoe,” Leigh whispered. When I opened my mouth to argue, she tipped her head back to glare at me. “My flip-flop won’t fly far enough. It’s basic Newtonian physics.”
“Effing Newton didn’t pay a hundred bucks for Nikes,” I muttered, hopping out of one of my shoes. I handed it over, shying back toward the stairs as Leigh held the door open with her hip and chucked the shoe as hard as she could at the first door on the left. The shoe bounced off the door and rolled pathetically on the floor.
Leigh looked over her shoulder at me, her forehead crinkled.
I cleared my throat and did my best impression of my father trying to scare the neighborhood cats out of our flower beds, stomping and letting out a deep, “Hey!”
There was a breath-holding, sweat-forming silence before Jams darted into the hallway, Brandon, Galen, and Hunter behind him. The four of them bum rushed the door.
“My shoe!” I pointed at the lone Nike on the floor. Hunter grabbed it without slowing and tossed it to me, underhand.
“Upstairs, upstairs,” Jams puffed, rushing past us and swinging himself up onto the stairs by the railing. Leigh was at his heels, her sandals louder than ever.
I stuffed my foot back into my shoe and followed the stampede of my teammates.
“We have to keep an eye on the time,” Hunter said, propelling himself off of the cement wall and onto the next flight. “If we miss check-in, we’re screwed.”
“I set the alarm on my phone,” Galen said.