He lifted a shoulder in half a shrug. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“And if you do what that girl—Avital—did, and wash out? What then?”
A loud whisper interrupted us. It was too far away to know for sure, but it sounded vaguely like “never.”
“That’s you,” Isaiah said dryly.
I stood up and walked over to the railing that overlooked the first floor. Brandon was standing at the base of the stairs. With his head tilted back, his hair fell away from his face. His thick eyebrows were lifted high, two questioning black swooshes.
“Hey,” he said in a carrying stage whisper. “Sorry. You weren’t at Magrathea.”
“I’ll meet you down there in a second. Grab us a table,” I whispered back.
He grinned. “But there are so many choices.”
I felt my cheeks aching with the suppressed need to smile as I walked back to the printer. I extracted my essay pages from Isaiah’s and scooped up my laptop. It was hot against my chest.
“Goodnight, bro,” I said, giving Isaiah a quick salute before I turned my back on him again. I could barely keep myself from skipping away.
“Elliot.”
I paused in my tracks and glanced back. “What?”
“Civilians don’t say ‘wash out.’”
23
After Lumberjack Beard read through the first drafts of our essays on Tuesday, attacking each with a tangle of red ink slashes and cursive, he retrieved a single Rubik’s Cube from a battered army green messenger bag. The clack of the bag’s buckle hitting the floor echoed throughout the dining hall, which Lumberjack Beard seemed to have sole dominion over. It was entirely possible that he was sleeping there. His hair was slicked back with what could have been the same grease that he’d cooked our breakfast in that morning. He certainly smelled of bacon and syrup, but I supposed it could have been a hipster cologne with a name like Brunch Bro or IHOP Fiend.
“If you decide to compete, you will be timed solving this Rubik’s Cube. Every team is being tested during this period and the winner will be announced at lunch.” He held the cube forward, letting it balance delicately on the tips of his fingers. Its sides were scrambled into a jumble of colors. “Any takers?”
I raised my hand, knowing that my teammates would do likewise. The list of Cheeseman events had become as important as our binders. Knowing that we were going to have to solve a Rubik’s Cube meant that Leigh and I had spent the last two nights watching dozens of videos on my laptop and memorizing algorithms. Since we both had one blue ribbon displayed above our beds, we had a vested interest in racking up more wins.
“Why don’t you give it a shot first, Brandon?” Lumberjack Beard said. He tossed the cube to Brandon, who caught it in the crook of his arm.
Lumberjack Beard kicked his feet up onto the table, displaying the muddy bottoms of his battered brown boots. Not exactly seasonally appropriate, but way better than the cracked sandals that Hari had been wearing for the last two days. Although it seemed, from the way Perla was audibly gagging, that she didn’t agree.
“People have to eat here, you know,” she said.
“I have to eat here. This is the big kids’ table,” Lumberjack Beard corrected, sweeping a hand over the table. He pointed both index fingers toward the door. “You have to eat over there somewhere. But it’s Taco Tuesday. Get pumped.”
“I bet it’s the same tacos we ate on Friday,” Jams said under his breath.
“Possible,” Lumberjack Beard said with a jovial shrug. “Go on, B. We’re waiting.”
“My hand wasn’t up,” Brandon said.
“Come on. It’s the prodigy litmus test,” he said, his lips appearing in a smile from the depths of bushy brown beard. He held up his phone, the timer displayed on the screen. “Ready when you are.”
Brandon let out a puff of a sigh that sent a strand of hair flying up off his forehead like an elephant’s trunk. Wedging his tongue into his bottom lip, he spun the Rubik’s Cube dexterously between his fingers.
I tried to imagine how I would describe Brandon to my friends when I got home. Already, it was easy to describe the rest of the team. Leigh was unpredictable and funny. Kate was uptight in that maybe churchy, maybe never spoke to real humans before kind of way. Perla thought she was better than the rest of us. Galen thought no one noticed that he also thought Perla was better than the rest of us. And in the last forty-eight hours, Jams and Hunter had become our golden couple. No one batted an eye as they held hands and shared not-so-secret looks.
But Brandon was at once grudging and giddy. He was the loner boy hiding behind his too-long hair and his typewriter while also being the first person to catch my eye and smile from across rooms or study tables. He wore plain clothes like a uniform and almost never raised his voice above a murmur. He tried so hard to be indistinct that it brought all of him into sharper focus. Watching him with the Rubik’s Cube made me think of the way he flipped pencils when he was sitting across from me in the sci-fi section.
And then there was Brandon, I’d tell my friends as we sat on the bleachers, recreating that scene in Grease with the split screen. He looked like his name was John, and he went to a school for geniuses—I know, I had no idea that was a real thing either. And he had the most nimble fingers I’ve ever seen.
And all of my friends would start screaming with laughter like I’d said something accidentally filthy, and I’d use it as a chance to slip back into the memory of this moment, when he twisted the Rubik’s Cube smoothly into the algorithm I had memorized—front, front, up, left, right inverted. And, just as fluidly, he backtracked the same steps in the same order, setting the cube exactly as jumbled as he’d found it. No one else seemed to have noticed.
No one but Lumberjack Beard, who stopped the timer, his dark eyes going stormy.
“Sorry,” Brandon said. “I guess someone else should have a try.”
*
“It sucks that guy on Ben’s team won the Rubik’s event,” Brandon said as we settled into the sci-fi section after the monstrosity that was Taco Tuesday. He slid his binder toward me. “I know you and Leigh studied really hard for it. You made good time.”
“We did.” I heard the Lawrence clip in my voice.
Brandon didn’t notice. “That Onobanjo kid lasted a long time during amoeba tag, too. I caught him right before the end. Cool name, though. Nigerian, maybe? I’m almost positive that there’s a university in Nigeria called Onobanjo … No. It’s Onabanjo. With an A. Very close.” He huffed a laugh. “More useless information that will not help me win a scholarship.”