Not Now, Not Ever: A Novel

He swung all of his weight to the side, like he was going to hit a home run with my rib cage. I parried and hacked toward his face. He blocked.

“Why does it always have to be so personal with you?” he asked, his arms shaking as he held his sword in a bunt over his head. He shoved hard, throwing me backwards. “Nothing can ever just be fun. You have to be such a bitch. I’ve never done anything to you.”

I rasped a laugh that I couldn’t feel. “Everything I’ve ever done has been compared to you. Everything I’ll ever do will be compared to you.”

The blue sword swung low and Isaiah panted, the dust undoubtedly starting to clog his weak lungs. “You think I have any choice but to follow what you do?”

“Then don’t!” I snarled, making a hasty jab for his middle and missing. “Make up your own mind!”

“And what should I decide?” He whipped the dreads out of his face and swung his sword in a figure eight between us. “Go to college and get disowned? Enlist and hate the rest of my life? It’s a lose-lose and you know it.”

“No one’s going to disown you. You’re the baby and you’re the brain. If anyone is supposed to go to college, it’s you.”

“Yeah?” Swipe, block. Swipe, block. Spin away. “Then why is Sid telling me what to eat? Why are you pointing out when I can’t run fast enough to pass the BMT standard? My whole life is supposed to fit into this box just because yours does.”

“My life does not fit into any box. Why the hell would I be here if it did?”

“Because you want more. Not something. More. You’d be perfectly happy if you got shipped off tomorrow. And I’d probably die. If you really cared about going here, you wouldn’t be here skanking around. God, if the family knew that you were making out all over campus with some dude, they couldn’t hold you up as the paragon—”

Rage lifted my leg up in a blur. The heel of my shoe connected with his solar plexus, folding him in half. With a wheeze, he collapsed to the ground and slid on his back, his face scrunched in agony.

The whistle blew.

I stood over Isaiah, feeling nothing but a black hole of anger spreading out of my chest and over my extremities. “If you want to live your own life, here’s your first lesson. Stop whining and make a choice. Stop letting other people make your choices for you. And do not ever fucking threaten me again.” I looked over my shoulder at Cornell and Ben. “You guys didn’t say ‘no kicking,’ right?”

“An oversight,” Cornell said.

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes. “Too late now.”

*

After a day of letting my anger cool, I was slightly less proud of the third blue ribbon taped above my bed. Annihilating Isaiah in amoeba tag had silenced anyone questioning my loyalty to my team and labeled me a straight-up cutthroat.

But it turned out that kicking your own twin in the stomach to win a lightsaber duel was less beast mode and more … unhinged.

Since he was the only other person who knew that I wasn’t actually a twin, Brandon was more understanding than most, seeking me out while everyone else kept their distance. As we walked back to the residence hall so I could shower and brush the chalk off my teeth, he had asked what Isaiah had said to provoke the attack.

“I don’t want to be the thing he holds over your head forever,” he had murmured, after I gave him a rundown of the smack talk.

“If it weren’t you, he’d find something else,” I’d said. “The point is that he shouldn’t be trying to extort me at all anymore. We agreed at the beginning of camp that if one of us got caught, we’d both go down. I thought we had a truce.”

“Maybe he wanted to make sure you didn’t change your mind. Since you, uh, hate him.”

“I don’t hate him,” I’d said instinctively. Grandmother Lawrence would never let hatred stand in our family. “I just wish I didn’t ever have to deal with him ever again. I would be fine if we could live in complete ignorance of each other’s lives.”

My wish was more or less granted in the days that followed. Isaiah didn’t look at my side of the dining hall or stand too close to me in line. His team was always there to buffer us, to encircle him in a human shield.

Which was great about fifty percent of the time. Maybe seventy percent.

The rest of the time, the quiet stares and muttered comments stripped everything out of my head except for a single razor-edged line of Earnest: You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.





32


My eyes opened the morning of the first Melee skirmish to the same cement walls and the same view of Leigh tangled up in her zebra print sheets. The bathroom was silent when I went in to shower. I put on my lucky Angry Robot shirt and shambled to the dining hall with the rest of the pre-Melee zombies.

Meg, on the other hand, was on red alert. It was entirely possible that she had found a stash of coffee somewhere and decided to drink all of it in one go. She had sent Brandon and Jams back to the buffet line twice to add more protein to their breakfasts. She squinted at all of our faces, searching for signs of sleepiness or fear. When I set my most recent Crap You Don’t Know list on the table next to my toast, she snatched it up before the creases even considered smoothing.

“No studying,” she said, folding the paper down into a palm-sized square and tucking it under her plate. “You’ll psych yourself out. You already know it. If you tell yourself you don’t, it’ll all fall out of your brain.”

“That’s not a thing that happens,” Galen said, shooting a panicked look around the table. “Is it?”

“No, Galen,” Kate said. “Knowledge can’t fall out of your head. Unless it’s stuck in your gray matter at the time.”

“You’ll be fine,” Hari said. Both of his elbows were on the table. He speared a piece of honeydew from his plate and bit it in half. “And if you aren’t, we’ll all go home early.”

“No, we won’t. Everyone is going to be great,” Meg said, her already sharp voice spiking into new realms of squeakiness—Minnie Mouse on helium. “Just remember to keep your answers short. If the proctors need more information from you, they will ask for it. Rambling is more likely to lead you to a wrong answer. Keep it short and sweet.”

“And correct,” Hari drawled.

“And profanity free,” Meg added, with a glance at Perla, who glared in return.

“Best get it out of the way now,” Jams said, grudgingly shoveling a heap of fluffy yellow scrambled eggs into his mouth. “Piss. Bollocks. Assclown.”

“Shit sandwich,” Leigh added.

“Ew. We’re eating,” Kate whined.

I only half listened as everyone started throwing in their favorite curses. A glint of something shiny outside of the front window caught my attention. It took a moment for me to realize it was the sun refracting off Wendell Cheeseman’s head. He was standing with Trixie and Ben. Trixie had an R2-D2 resting against her leg. Only after I saw the large canvas duffel slung over Ben’s shoulder did I realize that the R2 must be Trixie’s luggage. Because of course she would have a droid suitcase.

Except why would they have their suitcases out now?

“Balls,” I blurted out.

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