I jumped back as the door opened, revealing a tiny girl with short, dark hair. She had a cell phone pressed to her ear. Her hand slapped against the door with a thwack, right on the M of Margaret, which she set to erasing with the heel of her palm.
“You are setting a fucking terrible example,” she said to the person on the other end of her call. Her voice was a cartoonish squeak. She pulled a chalk pen out of her jeans and scrawled “Meg” where the Margaret had been. “Of course it was you. Your handwriting is chicken scratch. Do not teach your campers that they’re allowed on this floor. If I catch you up here, so help me, Benedict, I will destroy you. I’ve done it before…”
I reached for my doorknob and was relieved to find it unlocked. I slipped inside before the teensy, raging RA could notice me.
There was a skinny girl sitting on the bed across from mine, cross-legged on top of zebra print sheets. It took a second for me to see anything other than her hair. It was shaved down to a fine fuzz and bleached so unnaturally yellow that it looked like she’d painted it with highlighter ink. It matched the Onward folder that was open in her lap. She blinked up at me as the door clicked shut, her dark eyebrows bushy and stark against her rosy skin.
Brown-eyed roommate. Score.
“Ever?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “You must be Leigh.”
We both twitched as the windows rattled with the force of a door being slammed in the hall. Leigh glanced at the wall and then back to me.
“Meg finally noticed that the other RAs rewrote her door?”
I collapsed onto the bare mattress on my side of the room. “If Meg is an Asian girl who wants to murder someone named Benedict, then yes.”
“Yep. That’s her,” Leigh said. “Lucky us, we get to sleep next door to one of the weirdo RAs.”
I stripped off my running shoes, quickly stuffing my old socks inside before they could funk up the room. “You’ve met her before?”
“No.” She held up her folder and wiggled it at me. “But it said in here that she was a Messina alum. So you can just tell, you know?”
I grabbed the handle of my suitcase and dragged it toward the bed to search for fresh socks. “The counselor who picked me up from the train station told me that half of the RAs went to the same high school. Is that a bad thing?”
“Oh. You’re not from here,” she said. “From your shirt, I’d guess you’re Californian? Unless you just hate Oregonian sports teams. It’s always seemed to me that fan loyalties are more related to familial and societal influence than actual proximity. It’s not like the players are actually from the states they represent.”
I glanced down at my Warriors shirt, uncomfortable with how much it telegraphed about me. “I don’t have anything against Oregon teams.” I shook out a sock and tugged it on. “But, yeah, I’m from California. You’re local?”
She addressed her sheets, tracing the stripes with her nails. “Not exactly. I’m from Florence. It’s on the coast.”
“No way,” I blurted, the nerd quadrant of my brain clicking faster than the “don’t geek out at strangers” portion. “That’s where Frank Herbert got the idea for Dune! You guys have the moving sands.”
“And the largest sea cave in the world.” She smiled, revealing slightly elongated canines that twisted inward. “It’s about an hour away, but…” She leaned forward and lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “We still hear stories. The Messina is this giant academy where they, like, play cricket and build nuclear reactors and stuff. You took the IQ test to get in here, right?”
I thought of the paper-and-pencil test I’d sat through back home. I’d been alone in a classroom at the community college for almost two hours while the proctor ignored me and graded papers. After I’d spent weeks drilling through AP guides, trying to commit all of the information to memory, the test had ended up being mostly patterns.
“That’s only half of the test that the Messina kids have to take to get in,” Leigh said. “They only take ubergeniuses. But their school helps Rayevich sponsor the camp, so a bunch of their grads come back to be counselors.”
I hadn’t given much thought to the other schools sponsoring the camp. The Onward website had made the Messina seem like any other bourgeois private school.
“Having an ubergenius for a counselor ups the odds on us winning, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“I think everyone gets one, so, no, not technically. And since everyone here passed the test to get in, we all qualify as geniuses, too. The girl who checked me in said that every team has to have an equivalent median IQ, but we don’t get to know what it is. It’s a Messina policy.”
I shrugged. I was cool staying in the dark on everyone’s IQs. I didn’t even know my own. After years of having Isaiah lord his Mensa membership over me, I was kind of shocked that I qualified as a genius, too.
I knew I was smart, but I’d only pulled a B minus in geometry.
“As long as they don’t ask me to play cricket, I’m fine,” I said. “All I know about it is that a sticky wicket is a bad thing.”
I lifted the package of sheets out of my suitcase. It would be best to get settled sooner rather than later. As I wrenched open the plastic, Leigh leaped off her bed and bounded toward me in two skips. She wasn’t much taller than Meg-Margaret the RA had been. The top of her electric hair barely made it to my shoulder. Up close, I could see that her face was covered in clusters of zits and a slathering of pinkish foundation.
“I have to be super blunt with you, Ever,” she said, wringing her hands in the hem of her T-shirt. “I need to agree, right now, that we’re going to be besties. I can’t do a month of drawing a line down the center of the room and calling our friends back home to talk smack. At best, it’s Nick at Nite hijinks, and, at worst, it’s a Berlin Wall situation.” She paused, rolling her eyes up at the low ceiling. “And I don’t have, like, a ton of people in Florence to call. Very few. Basically none.”
I realized with a pang that my phone was full of numbers I couldn’t call. Anyone I talked to outside of camp would have to be fed some lie of corroboration. Ever Lawrence didn’t have any friends. Just a backpack full of sci-fi novels, a couple of protein bars left over from the train ride, and hella cool hair.
An image of Beth popped into my head. Last week, she’d been wandering from room to room with her hands folded against her stomach and her neck lifted high. She passed through the kitchen, tilting her face toward the sliding glass door to catch her reflection.
Gwendolen doesn’t walk like me, she’d said when she saw me and Ethan staring. A good character starts in your bones.
I adjusted my posture. Ever Lawrence had never had a grandmother who smacked her with a hairbrush for slouching. My shoulders hunched in freedom.