He shook off my hands, his hair flying around his forehead in wrathful tendrils. “Haven’t you ever heard of long-distance?”
“I’m not even your girlfriend!” God, I didn’t want him to think that I’d been staying up at night wondering why we weren’t putting labels on this, so I barreled ahead. “Because we’ve only known each other for two weeks. Maybe in two more weeks we’d hate each other.”
He looked scalded. “That’s ridiculous. I really like you. And I thought the feeling was mutual.”
“It was. It is! But it won’t have time to grow into something else. You can’t fall in love with someone you’ve known for two weeks. This isn’t a Disney movie, and there’s no white horse to ride into the sunset.” I wished I’d never started talking. I wished that, instead of coming into the sci-fi section, I’d asked Hari for permission to run laps around the quad. I wished that Brandon and I were back in the pumpkin, watching Independence Day and breathing each other’s CO2. Because I couldn’t stop what came out of me next. “We aren’t Ben and Trixie. They get to go home together, even though they can’t stay here. Or Hunter and Jams—they can stay together if they want to because they live so close together. But when this is over, I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. And not everyone gets a high school sweetheart. Most people don’t! In all honesty, it’s actually really weird that your friends all decided to stick it out.”
He moved a single scoot away from me, but it felt like a gorge. “So, the second camp is over, we’re nothing? We’re strangers?”
My voice was tired and thin. “What else could we be?”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. “We could be two people who like each other, who care about each other. I want to know you. I want to know what happens when you go home. I want to know what you think about things and what you’re reading and what you see.”
I shook my head. “You want to be Facebook friends. That’s what you’re describing.”
“No! Fuck. I don’t even have a computer,” he growled, digging his fingertips into the corners of his eyes. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “You said your mom lives in Colorado. When was the last time you lived with her?”
I frowned. “When I was five?”
“And is she still your mom?”
“Yes,” I said. “But that’s not the same—”
“But it’s similar enough for a chance.” He reached out and scooped up my hands. He brushed his lips over my fingertips and I could feel him shaking. “Don’t give up on me, Elliot. I won’t give up on you, either. I want you! Just you!”
“I can’t promise you that,” I said, internally punching down every impulse to cry. Crying meant something was broken. Crying meant that I couldn’t win. “I like you so much. More than I’ve ever liked anyone. I wouldn’t be here with you if that weren’t true. But you can’t promise me that you’ll be all mine forever, either. It’s not realistic. So, why can’t we have this?” I squeezed his hands, and I wasn’t sure which of our pulses was hammering against my palm. “Just this. You and me.”
“For the next five days.”
I nodded.
He dropped my hands. They fell back into my lap, heavy and forgotten.
“That’s not fair,” he said in a harsh whisper. He looked away from me and through the books on the wall. “Every second we’re together, I’m more invested in you. I want you to win the scholarship. I want you to get away with running away. And you’re planning on forgetting everything about me.”
“That’s not what I said,” I snapped.
“But it’s true,” he said. “You want to do the same thing as Perla: come in, get what’s yours, and leave. Why did you even bother making friends with anyone? Why would you spend time alone with me?”
“Not everything has to last forever!” I said. Maybe I was shouting, but it was hard to tell over the sound of my rising panic.
“Not everything has to end immediately!” he shot back. “You’re burning everything behind you as you go. Why even bother running away from home and spending time here? You’re always looking to the end. What is the point of having a beginning or a middle?”
“I-I don’t know,” I said.
“Great. Cool. Good. Thanks for clearing that up.” He got to his feet, his face hidden in the shadow of his hair. “Next time, maybe stick to the kick to the stomach. It’s a cleaner finishing move.”
I leaped to my feet as he started walking for the door. I ran to the end of the aisle and called after him, “Brandon!”
He paused under the archway, his face in profile under the binary clock. He looked up at the posters on the wall. “What’s the difference of a couple of days, Elliot?”
The answer spread out inside of me, filling up my lungs and asphyxiating me in three syllables.
Everything.
34
“Something is up with you,” Leigh said, nipping at my heels like a yellow-haired Chihuahua, as we headed toward the dining hall for lunch after our second skirmish. The rest of the team was far behind us. “Is this about having to go up against Isaiah tomorrow?”
“No,” I said, kicking a pinecone off of the path in front of us. It skittered and rolled toward the trees that blocked Mudders Meadow from view. “I’ve had weeks to deal with the fact that Isaiah and I are going to have to go up against each other. I’m ready for it.”
Although, in all honesty, after the last two miserable days of hours and hours of skirmishes and rereading the books that had become mostly decorative on my desk, I didn’t know if I cared about beating Isaiah anymore. Before, facing my cousin on the battleground of the Melee had felt like the culmination of all of my accomplishments and fears and risks tangled up into one three-hour-long proctored trivia challenge.
And now I wasn’t sure.
Did I deserve to win because I’d run away first? Because I’d kicked him in the stomach to prove how much I wanted the scholarship?
Or were those the reasons that I shouldn’t be here at all?
I didn’t want to let my team down by taking a dive. We were currently leading the board in points.
The board itself had started out figurative. The counselors were kept up to date on the teams’ points by the proctors, and that information was disseminated to us during dinner.
But then Bryn Mawr tracked down some lime-green poster board and started writing out the day’s points, team by team, in oddly elaborate calligraphy. It was pinned up in the lobby of the residence hall, next to the elevator.
It made me think of Brandon’s stories about the Messina publicly ranking its students. I couldn’t begin to imagine how horrified I’d be if my personal points were listed, rather than those of our team as a whole. One of the best things about the Melee was that questions were thrown around so randomly that it was hard to get a sense of how many you, personally, had answered. I didn’t need to know what percentage of our wins I was responsible for.
I didn’t care.