“You promised, Brandon,” I reminded him. “Three composers or I can’t get in the car.”
“Bach. Handel.” He grabbed two fistfuls of his hair and made a low groan. “Monteverdi?”
I shrugged and pulled one of his hands out of his hand. “No idea. Sounds right.”
“Oh my God.” He gaped at me. “That was evil.”
I kissed his cheek, just under one of his wide eyes. “You need to study more.”
“You need to run.”
The headlights on the silver car turned on as we rounded the giant sign. There was a shunk of car locks. Brandon dove for the handle of the back door and held it open for me.
I slid in, peeling back the hood from my head and feeling more than a little awkward as I clipped the seat belt. Brandon closed the door behind himself and said, “Hey, Harper. Thanks for the pickup.”
The driver turned to face us, flipping back a sheet of icy blond hair. A pair of rose gold glasses rested on top of her pert freckled nose. She peered over the top of them. “Hey, B. Are you going to introduce us?” Her eyes flicked back at me, unreadably blue.
“Harper, this is Ever. Ever, this is Harper. We went to the Mess together.”
I swallowed, my eyes caught on the corner of the back window, where the NPR logo and a dark green Dartmouth sticker were side by side.
If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated, sneered Oscar Wilde.
With a jolt, I realized that I’d been in this car before.
“Holy shit,” I blurted, catching the blond girl off guard. “Are you Cornell’s girlfriend?”
One of her sandy eyebrows twitched. “Please don’t define me by my partner. I’m Harper Leonard.”
“Sorry. Hi. It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Likewise.” She took another glance at us in the rearview mirror before putting the car in gear and making a U-turn up the drive.
I took Brandon’s hand and tried to resist the urge to watch the Rayevich sign fade behind us.
“How’s camp?” Harper asked.
“Oh, you know,” Brandon said. “Genius kids stirring up shit and the administration overreacting by punishing all of us.”
She laughed, a surprisingly twinkly sound, like a tiny set of bells was trapped in her throat. “They never learn. You trap that much IQ in one place and someone is bound to go rogue. Cornell said that the dean in charge was kind of a sitting duck.”
“Associate dean,” Brandon corrected. “Yeah, he’s pretty ineffectual. Doesn’t show up much.”
“But you aren’t the one who decided to go on a study material rampage?” she asked.
Brandon scoffed. “Nope. I was actually having a good time before someone broke into all of the dorms.”
“I bet you were.” She looked directly into the rearview mirror, her eyes smiling and inquisitive. “Do the others know that you’re going on a date?”
“Ixnay, Harper,” he hissed.
“The others?” I echoed, momentarily unable to imagine anything except a long line of genius school girls in matching uniforms—all private school kids have uniforms, right?
“Our friends,” Harper said, guiding the car smoothly around a corner. Long stretches of brown field and power lines whipped past us. I’d nearly forgotten how remote the college was. “B, doesn’t everyone think it’s suspicious that you’re friends with literally half of the counselors at camp?”
“No one knows,” Brandon said.
“I know,” I said. “And I have wondered…”
“Well, a few months ago,” Harper started, seemingly delighted to elaborate, “we all got an email from the principal at the Mess, asking for candidates for the Onward counselor positions. They ask all of the alumni of a certain age every year, and normally we all say no because we’re busy and don’t live here. But then Brandon told us that his parents had enrolled him this summer. And then Meg didn’t get the internship she wanted and I agreed to do inventory for the comic book store and Trixie and Ben were looking to get a new apartment at the end of summer anyway—”
“Trixie and Lumberjack Beard live together?” I asked Brandon. “Like together together?”
“You couldn’t tell?” he laughed. “They are terrible at hiding it.”
“They’ve been together for almost three years now,” Harper said. “They started dating a month or so after me and Cornell. The time line is kind of wobbly. It was an odd period in our lives.”
“Huh,” I said, counting back the years in my head. “So, is there something in the water at the Mess?”
Brandon frowned. “No. It’s Eugene. We don’t even have fluoride in the water.”
“You know two different couples who went to college together and stayed together.”
“Trixie and Ben go to different colleges,” he said with a shrug. “They live in the middle.”
“It’s okay, Ever,” Harper said. “If we ever forgot how abnormal we are, we have Meg to remind us. She likes to quote the statistical probability of relationships that start in high school…” She trailed off and made a soft clicking sound with her tongue. “Which is not a great first date conversation. How about some music?”
Coffeehouse acoustic guitar and throaty female singers played us on and off the freeway and into Eugene proper. There were people wandering in and out of restaurants and packs of cyclists cruising through the streets. It looked sort of like midtown Sacramento, which put me at ease. We turned a corner and I was startled to see the Amtrak station.
“Are you shipping me home?” I asked Brandon quietly.
He tightened his grip on my hand. “Not a chance.”
Harper pulled to the side of the street, next to a warehouse, and opened the glove compartment. She passed back another coral envelope, identical to the one our escape plan index card had come in.
“Two tickets to the nine o’clock showing of the Roland Emmerich classic.” I thought I detected a hint of air quotes in her voice. “I will pick you up in front of the Minor at midnight.”
“Thanks, Harper,” Brandon said. “I owe you big-time.”
She waved him off. “Just don’t tell Cornell until after camp is over. I can’t promise that he wouldn’t report you. He gets so sanctimonious about rule breaking.”
We got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk, fingers locked together.
“Eugene, Ever,” Brandon said, inclining his head to the street. “Ever, Eugene.”
“Would it be embarrassed if I called it Skinner’s Mudhole?” I asked.
“I think it’s only Skinner’s Mudhole to its family,” he laughed. “I should have asked if you wanted to see the touristy Eugene. We’re like ten blocks up from downtown. And U of O is in the other direction. And you probably haven’t seen Hendricks Park or had a Voodoo doughnut or seen the duck statues—”
“Hey.” I squeezed his hand. “You nervous?”
He made a face at me. “You think?”
“Me too,” I said. “So, point us toward gelato.”
“That I can do.”
We started to walk up the street and I paused. “Wait.”
“Do I need to name more composers?”
“No.” I touched his jaw and brought my lips to his for a brief, almost chaste kiss. “That helps with the nerves.”