“I understand your concerns, but this is an issue that comes up from time to time.” She was smiling as she spoke, but she kept pushing the blondish girls forward, making them skip and stumble. “Students can become overwhelmed by the distance. Classic homesickness. My own daughter did the same thing her first semester at college. Of course, the course load is a factor. But I’ve got to tell you that there are forty-seven other students, as well as hundreds of Onward graduates, who have been extremely successful under our unique conditions…”
The girl with the two lip rings started to cry loudly again, her hands trembling against her mouth. Bryn Mawr cupped her elbow and steered her toward the parking lot; the rest of the assembled party marched behind.
“Jesus Christ,” Hunter said softly. “It’s not that bad here, is it?”
“Sometimes it is,” Kate murmured.
“Feels like home,” Brandon said under his breath. I thought about him saying that his school was full of people randomly sobbing in hallways. I hadn’t considered how disturbing that would be in person.
“She will call you from the airport,” the brunette woman shouted into the phone. She seemed to be attempting to be louder than the crying, which was impossible. Even as their huddle disappeared behind the dining hall, the girl’s sobs left a bone-chilling echo.
“Let the record show that it was a Monday when the first camper fell,” Galen said with an uneasy half smile.
“Is this where the summer takes a turn for the Hunger Gamesy?” Leigh asked.
Brandon shriveled under his hair again. “I’ve always preferred Battle Royale.”
“What about Lord of the Flies?” asked Jams.
“Hell no,” Galen said. “I am not going to be your Piggy.”
“And I am not going out like Rue,” I said.
“They never say for sure how Panem was formed,” Kate said, her words gaining strength as she picked up steam. “It could take place inside of a nuclear holocaust and you’d never even know it.”
“Oh, well, in that case sign me up for the freaking Quarter Quell,” I laughed. It wasn’t strong enough to soothe the feeling of the girl’s cries burning in my ears.
Would she be relieved when she sat down on the plane or would she want to claw her way back? Was her family happy to have her coming home?
I turned back to my laptop, the essay fragments floating on the screen. I was going to keep clawing my way forward. I hoped it was the right choice.
*
That night, I stood in the upper level of the library, gnawing on my lower lip as I tried for a third time to get my laptop to hook into the Wi-Fi. There had been a rush on the printers all day, but I had slipped out of dinner early to make sure that my essay would be printed, stapled, and set to be eviscerated before I went to sleep.
The library was sort of spooky when it was completely empty. There was no click of table lamps, no rustle of turning pages. Only the sound of my own laptop keyboard and the thrum of the massive old wireless printer that I was attempting to connect to. And the pounding of blood in my temples. A headache had taken root at the nape of my neck and had been sending tendrils of pain slithering around my skull since lunch.
The endless flicker in the fluorescent lights and the hard plastic chair I was sitting on weren’t helping. Rayevich was all plush or ergonomic furniture until you needed to borrow one of their printers. Then it was the same aluminum-legged blue plastic chairs that we had in the computer lab at my school.
I checked the clock in the corner of my screen. Brandon was going to meet me in the sci-fi section after dinner. We had agreed to look over each other’s essays and make flash cards for the social sciences section of the binders. It was the segment Meg was in charge of overseeing and I, for one, had not spent enough time studying it. Kate was the only person on our team who had any understanding of how the limbic system affected psychological development. That seemed to disappoint Meg on a personal level.
My computer finally registered the wireless at the same time that footsteps padded up the stairs. Someone else was ditching the end of dinner.
“Hey, Ellie.”
My left eyelid twitched. I pressed my fingertips against it, hoping to settle it. It didn’t work. “Why do you keep creeping up on me? If you’re going to murder me, just get it over with.”
Chair legs screeched against the floor and Isaiah threw himself down. “A girl on my team went home today,” he said.
“The girl with the lip rings?”
He nodded, leaning over to pull a slim silver laptop out of the leather bag swinging from his shoulder. “Avital.”
“I watched them take her off campus. What the hell happened to her?”
“Stress, I guess.” He opened the laptop and plunked in a password, cutting his eyes at me as he did it. “That’s what Cornell said.”
“I’ve never seen stress do that to a person.”
He gave a noncommittal grunt. “That’s why folks at Lackland cry and puke.”
The entire air force had been trained on the same base since the forties, so horror stories set at Lackland Air Force Base were as commonplace at Lawrence family holidays as Great Uncle Berry’s watery cranberry sauce. “Like that guy in your dad’s flight that kept shitting himself. What’d they call him? Double Deuce?”
Revulsion twisted his face. “Right. Not everyone can handle the stress.”
“That’s not fair.” I turned away from my computer, hopping my chair to face him. “They’re just handling it differently.”
He scoffed a tiny, condescending laugh. “She went home, Elliot.”
“That’s her right.”
“How is she going to handle college if she can’t even do three weeks away?”
“Don’t try to be cynical. It’s perfectly easy to be cynical,” I said, quoting Earnest without meaning to. “How often is college going to make her memorize three hundred pages of useless, unrelated facts and write a ten-page essay in MLA format in three weeks?”
His dreads gave an almost imperceptible tremble. He narrowed his eyes at his screen, scrolling and stabbing his fingers into his keyboard until the printer next to us whirred and chugged.
“Are you going to enlist after you get your degree?” I asked, as we watched crisp white pages slip out of the printer. “If you get in here, I mean.”
“Of course—”
I held up a hand to cut him off. “Don’t say ‘of course.’ That’s what you’re supposed to say. Not what you mean. If you could go to a four-year college and the entire family would swear to never give you shit about not joining the air force, would you still enlist?”
“Would you?”
I gritted my teeth and focused on my computer again. The pain in the back of my head doubled. I needed to print my essay and go downstairs, away from the stink of Isaiah’s cologne. “I’m sorry. I thought I was talking to a grown person. I forgot that you’re a child. God, are you even sixteen yet?”
“Next week.” He sniffed. “Thanks for remembering.”
“Not if we’re twins, you’re not. You’re a Scorpio now.” I dug the heel of my hand into my left eye as it twitched again. Isaiah was fifteen and at camp. If Aunt Bobbie ever found out, she would skin me like a cat. He was barely out of middle school. I hit Print and my essay started cresting out of the printer.
He puffed out his chest and folded his arm. It was possible he thought it made him look older. It didn’t. “If no one would give me shit, I wouldn’t go.”
“But you will? Even if you don’t want to?”