I snapped a knot in my hair, looking up at the Arrakis poster next to Magrathea. The desert planet looked remarkably like Mars, terra-cotta pot red-brown. “But you don’t want to win.”
I had meant to phrase it as a question, but the realization had been brewing inside of me for hours. As we went from class to class, as we sat through meals, as his shoe clicked against mine before he stepped off the elevator onto his floor to get his binder. I couldn’t say anything in front of the rest of the team, in case I was wrong.
Which I wasn’t. I could tell from the way his head sank lower instead of popping up in defense.
“You know how to solve a Rubik’s Cube,” I said. It was a silly accusation, and I felt childish saying it with so much weight, but my skin was too tight—had been too tight for hours now.
“Yeah,” he said. “Of course I do.”
“Of course,” I repeated, chewing at the skin on my lower lip. My mouth was Arrakis-level dry. “There’s the elitist asshole.”
His head did pop up then. Confusion and hurt clouded his face. “You’re mad?”
“Why wouldn’t you let people know that you’re good at something?” I thought I’d feel better for asking, but I didn’t. The questions inflated inside of me, filling my veins to bursting. “Why botch something so stupid? That counselor, your friend, Lumberjack Beard—”
“His name is Ben.”
“Right. Whatever. Ben knew that you were faking it. So why bother?”
He scratched at the soft white skin inside his wrist with the side of his thumbnail, but said nothing.
I picked up my binder and slammed it back onto the table with a shotgun-loud bang. “We’ve been studying together for days now. Why? Are you pitying me? Are you doing me a favor bestowing all your genius boy knowledge on me?”
He goggled at me. “No! Why would you think that? Because I didn’t solve a Rubik’s Cube?”
“Because you pretended not to solve it,” I corrected. “Because you’re so smart that you can coast here while the rest of us struggle.”
“I’m struggling too!” he said, and it was the loudest I’d ever heard him speak. “You’ve watched me do it. I can’t tell you anything about the baroque period! It falls out of my brain every single time.”
“But you can tell me that Onabanjo is a university in Nigeria,” I said, burying my hands in my hair. I gripped hard at the roots to keep my focus. “Are you going to pack up and go home? Like that girl yesterday? Are you going to quit? You live in town. It wouldn’t be hard for you to go.”
His jaw dropped. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No,” I said, talking too fast to have time to be embarrassed by how firm my answer was. “It would just be easy if you wanted to.”
“It really wouldn’t be,” he said. “Not everyone’s parents would let them walk away from a camp that they already paid the tuition for.”
I stabbed a finger in the air at him. “So you have thought about it!”
He let out a quiet growl that, under other circumstances, might have been adorable. “I don’t know what you want from me, Ever. No, it wasn’t my idea to come here. But I’m here and I’m studying and I really don’t understand why we’re fighting right now. I’m sorry I didn’t solve the Rubik’s Cube. Next time, I will make sure that the whole world knows that I can solve one in about twenty seconds, which is four times slower than the record. Okay?”
I shoved my chair back, ire continuing to spark inside my chest. I heard Brandon’s chair fall to the floor and the soles of his Chucks squeaking behind me as I slipped between the redwood bookcases into A–D. On autopilot, I bent to the lowest shelf and plucked the hardcover copy of Survivor that I had discovered on the first day of classes. The scrap of “This Blessed House” that I had torn off for a bookmark was sticking out of the top. As I straightened, I found Brandon standing beside me. I pressed the book to his chest.
“This is an out-of-print Octavia Butler novel,” I explained. “She thought it was too Star Trek-colonial-cliché to stay in print, even though it’s part of a series, and I have waited years to read it.”
Without waiting for him to reply, I walked farther down the aisle, scanning the stickered spines. I grabbed another hardcover and handed it back to him. “That’s a limited edition of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. It’s illustrated and has maps of the San Francisco Mission District. It was never available to buy in the U.S.”
From another shelf I grabbed Ernest Cline’s Armada and added this to the growing pile. “And this is Armada, which was a total letdown, and I want to write papers about why.”
He almost smiled. “Ever…”
“If I don’t get a scholarship here, I don’t know what I’ll have that’s all mine. When we go home, Isaiah will be the smart one again. He’ll always be the smart one. But here, I get to be more than just the girl who runs fast. I get to be capable. And I want to hold on to that in a way that no one can take away from me.” I paused to wet my lips. My pulse was fluttering like a wasp in a jar. “Do you ever miss things before they’re over?”
He looked at me over the small stack of books balanced on his wrists. “Sometimes. Christmas morning. Good songs. Funfetti cake. You know, the kind with the sprinkles mixed into the batter?”
I nodded. Beth made excellent Funfetti waffles from scratch on Ethan’s and my birthdays. “I already miss it here. I miss this room and the books you’re holding and the quad and the garbage trees in Mudders Meadow. I want to find the rest of the tree houses and figure out what Fort Farm is used for and why one of the counselors is living out there. I have to know that I can come back here someday. I can’t afford to skip a footnote or a section of the binder or—”
“Or pretend like you can’t do a Rubik’s Cube,” he finished for me.
I plucked Armada out of his hands and stuck it back onto the shelf. “I don’t want you to study with me because you feel sorry for me.”
“I already told you that I’m not. Why would I feel sorry for you, Ever? I understand that you have a lot riding on this scholarship, but, honestly, so does everyone else. Putting your future on the line is a big deal, no matter what. Other than that, you’re a six-foot-tall hot genius who can do parkour. Which part am I supposed to pity?”
I opened my mouth to correct him—for real, I’m only five ten—when my brain caught the rest of that sentence.
I’m a what now?