“Ever! B!” Cornell said, noticing Brandon and me getting closer to them. I was sure he wasn’t actually over the moon to see us, but our names worked as a verbal blanket on the grease fire that was Meg’s rage.
She rushed forward and, for a second, I thought she might hug me, until she reached out and pried my binder out of my arms.
“Um,” I said, holding back the urge to snatch the binder back from her. It wouldn’t have been difficult. My hands were twice the size of hers. She was lucky not to be living inside of my pocket.
The Perfect Nerd Girl held her hand out to Brandon. “I need your binder, too, B.”
He glowered at her, but surrendered the binder. “Why?”
The Perfect Nerd Girl didn’t look up from riffling through the pages. “It’s full of typewritten notes. It checks out.”
“We could have Mary-Anne confirm it, but the handwriting here all seems to match the name on the front,” Meg said, reading through my notes.
“Can you guys cut the forensics for a second and tell us what’s happening?” Brandon said.
Cornell blew out a long, puttering sigh. “Did you guys bring your binders to dinner?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And you didn’t return to the residence hall?” Cornell asked.
“We went straight to the library from the dining hall. We’ve done the same thing for the last four days,” Brandon said, yanking his binder back from the redhead. He frowned at me. “Is this what you meant by all of us being cryptic?”
“Yes,” I said. “This. Like all the time.”
“Binders left in the residence hall between open study and the end of dinner have gone missing,” Lumberjack Beard said. “All of them.”
I looked back at the campers standing together outside of the dining hall. Their shell-shocked, stricken faces suddenly coming into too-crisp focus. They all looked like Fallon, realizing that all of her notes were gone. Except it wasn’t only notes. Without the binders, there was no way for anyone to study, and there were only six days until the first skirmish.
“The rest of the counselors are doing a search of the rooms to see if they can track anything down,” Cornell said.
Lumberjack Beard reached out, pulling the Perfect Nerd Girl to him. He crossed his arms around her waist and rested his chin against her temple. No one else seemed surprised to see them publicly snuggling, so I checked my face for placidity.
“No one would be stupid enough to hide forty stolen binders under their bed,” he growled. “Or did you all forget what it was like to be surrounded by evil geniuses? One of these rug rats probably buried all those binders in Mudders Meadow for the thrill of it.”
The Perfect Nerd Girl patted his hand. “Then that’s where we’ll search next.”
“We’re so fucking fired,” Meg muttered.
“Why don’t you guys leave your binders with us?” Cornell said to me and Brandon. “It’s not a great time to flaunt them around.”
Brandon chewed on the inside of his cheek, but surrendered his binder to Cornell. Meg waved me away, since she was already holding mine. I knew a dismissal when I saw one. I led Brandon toward the dining hall, scanning through the crowd for any of our friends.
“There,” Brandon said, pointing at the stairs.
A jolt of cold shock flooded across my chest as I spotted Leigh sitting on the stairs, her arm around a sobbing Perla. Hunter and Jams sat nearby, motionless and pale.
“I thought Avital was such a moron for leaving,” Perla sobbed into Leigh’s shoulder. “We made it through the UCLA camp together a couple of years ago. And she and Samira did the Columbia immersion program last summer. Columbia! But this was too much for her. She was right. This is cruel.”
Leigh stroked Perla’s hair. I noticed that her face was blotchy red, too. “It’s too far.”
Perla hacked a wet cough, her body trembling. “They won’t be happy until we all drop out.”
“You guys don’t think the counselors set this up?” Brandon asked, aghast under his hair.
Leigh glared up at him, tears dripping down her cheeks. “Why not? They set everything else up.”
Hunter swung his head. “If we can’t study, we’ll all get trounced in the Melee. There won’t be anyone left to win.”
I considered pointing out that our team had at least two binders left and that we could share the study materials, but I thought of Cornell’s warning about flaunting that and stopped.
“It’s just paper. It’s not irreplaceable. They’ll print out new pages for us,” Brandon said. “It won’t take long.”
“Blank paper,” Jams said heavily. “All of our notes are gone.”
Leigh wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. “And any essays that weren’t written on a computer.”
“Where are Galen and Kate?” I asked.
“Kate wanted to freak out in private,” Leigh said. “She went to hide in the bathroom.”
“And Galen?” Brandon asked.
“He went to check on something in our room,” Hunter said, eyeing Perla nervously before mouthing, The list.
Balls. The Cheeseman list. We’d all memorized its contents, but the original copy was living in Hunter and Galen’s room. And if the counselors found it, we’d be royally screwed.
The fire alarm cut out abruptly, leaving the quad in expansive silence broken only by the sniffling and whimpering of campers.
There was an amplified metallic click and then the tinny distortion of a bullhorn-magnified voice saying, “All students, please return to the lobby of the residence hall.”
Wendell Cheeseman had arrived.
*
It was vaguely humiliating to be asked to sit while all of the counselors and Wendell got to stand. I was pretty sure that when real college kids got in trouble, no one told them to sit crisscross applesauce. But that was most likely the point that Cheeseman was trying to get across. We weren’t grownups. We were a group of seventeen-year-olds—plus Isaiah—and we were in the deepest of shit.
Kate and Galen joined the rest of our team as we settled onto the scratchy carpet of the lobby. I felt some of the tension go out of my shoulders when Galen gave us a discreet nod, indicating that the list was safe. Kate refused to look at anyone. She kept her eyes trained on the floor, her narrow face ashen.
The overly jocular, finger-guns-pointing Wendell Cheeseman was gone. His gap-toothed smile was missing, replaced by a furious thin line. His button-down shirt was rumpled and missing a tie, as though he’d dressed in a hurry. He wasn’t even sweating. I would have put twenty dollars down on him being a pod person, if I thought anyone was in a betting mood.
He ditched the bullhorn. He stood in front of the crowd of sitting campers, his arms folded tight across his chest. He let the line out on his silence. I was familiar with this tactic because my father also used quiet as a weapon, letting it weigh everyone down until they were ready to confess anything just to hear sounds again.
It didn’t work here. Unless Cheeseman’s intention was to highlight how many people were still crying.