Hunter laughed, displaying a lump of partially masticated mozzarella. “Yeah, constantly having the runs is an important part of your emotional development.”
“Gross, Hunter,” Kate squeaked. “I’m eating.”
“We are all eating,” Perla concurred darkly.
Leigh flopped down on her back, next to me, and stretched her legs out, feeding herself slices from above. “This pizza is so good that you could honestly talk about anything during it and it wouldn’t deter me at all.”
“Let’s not test that theory,” I said, popping a slice of bell pepper in my mouth.
Hari shook out a napkin and placed it over his lap before taking his first bite of the vegetarian pizza. “Goddamn I missed real food. Our dining hall actually makes really good food when it isn’t being run by students. I can’t wait for the chefs to come back from summer break. I’m never going to eat another frozen waffle in my life.”
“Can we talk about tomorrow morning?” Kate asked delicately. “It is the second-to-last skirmish.”
“It’s the last skirmish for five teams,” Brandon said. I had been trying so hard not to look at him, but his voice drew my attention across the circle, where he was sitting next to Meg. Only the tip of his nose and his top lip were visible between his hair and his bent knees. I wasn’t sure he’d even had any pizza. Realizing people were listening to him, he added, “Hopefully not us.”
“Not us,” Meg said firmly.
Kate nodded. “Positive thinking.”
Brandon rocked to the side in what might have been a shrug if he’d let go of his legs. “Logical thinking. Statistically, we’re ahead by enough points that—”
“Never tell me the odds,” I blurted.
Brandon’s eyes flickered up to mine and, for the first time in days, held.
I hate this, I tried to tell him silently. I don’t think there’s any way to fix it, but I wish I could. I wish I could stay here forever and not look ahead.
I miss you. I miss you. I miss you.
“Sorry,” I said dumbly, turning away first. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“There’s always time for Star Wars quotes,” Meg said cheerfully.
“Ever,” Brandon breathed. Or maybe I imagined it. When I looked up, he was uncurling himself to reach for pizza.
Wishful thinking, then. I returned to my dinner. I had put in most of my train snack money to help pay for it, after all.
Footsteps crunched against the grass. Cornell was coming from the residence hall with his head down and his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. He looked particularly gloomy for someone whose team was currently ranked in second place, behind us.
“Cornell!” Meg said, turning on her megawatt smile. “I’d offer you pizza but I don’t want to share. Why aren’t you at dinner?”
He winced half a smile at her in return. “I need to borrow Ever, if it’s all right.”
“Huh?” A long string of cheese fell across my chin. “Me?”
Cornell nodded, politely looking away as I scrubbed the cheese off my face. “Your brother needs to talk to you. Alone. He got a call from home and it doesn’t seem like good news. He’s pretty shaken up. Did you hear from your parents tonight?”
“No.” I moved to pat my sweatshirt, but I knew it was empty. Not that it mattered. Isaiah and I didn’t get the same emergency calls. “I don’t have my phone on me.”
“You can go on up to his room,” Cornell said. “It’s the last one on the left. Next to the lounge.”
“Okay. Um. Thanks.” I got to my feet and brushed blades of grass off my legs before jogging to the lobby.
I could feel my lips trembling as my adrenaline spiked. I pushed down thoughts of Uncle Marcus, deployed in God knows where, or Grandmother Lawrence, with her paper-thin skin and eternally high blood pressure. Or Sid, driving her car like it was a freaking fighter jet up and down the highway.
I took the stairs up to the first floor and elbowed open the door. With everyone at dinner in some fashion or another, the hall was quiet. The last door on the left was open. The chalkboard sign had been wiped away once, with fingerprints left behind. On top of the smear was written “Wy & Zay.” It was almost adorable.
Inside, Isaiah’s dorm was identical to my own. Same narrow beds and cheap desks and tall wardrobes. His roommate had clothes all over the floor, whereas Isaiah’s side was tidy the way everyone in our family was tidy—compulsively and under threat of consequences.
Isaiah was sitting at his desk, facing the windows that overlooked the quad. With only his roommate’s desk lamp on to illuminate the room, his shadow was gigantic on the wall. Seeing my reflection in the window, he turned around. His eyes were so red that he looked almost extraterrestrial, even more like the Predator than normal.
“What are you doing here?” he asked with a globby sniffle.
“Cornell came to get me,” I said, leaning on the door until it closed. “Because I’m your sister for another couple of days. What’s going on? Is Uncle Marcus okay?”
He flinched, his dreads snaking around his cheeks. “Oh, Dad’s fine. He can’t get out here in time.”
I looked for a place to sit, but nowhere on Wy’s side of the room was even remotely clean enough. I settled for standing at the head of Isaiah’s bed, one hand on the bed frame. “In time to what? What’s going on?”
“It’s my mom,” he said, with a snivel that was organic for once. Fat tears welled in his eyes and he wiped his nose on the back of his arm in one long swipe. “She knows. Sid’s ex mailed my T-shirt to my house instead of here and my mom opened it.”
My heart sped up. “Wait, so your mom knows you’re here? Because of a T-shirt from leadership adventure camp?”
“There was a note in the package, wishing me luck on the Melee. That dumb asshole. I’m glad Sid cheated on him.” He threw up his hands and didn’t seem to notice that tears were leaking out of his eyes. “She’s coming up here to get me. First thing tomorrow morning.”
“Wait, that’s it?” I gasped. “She’s just going to pull you out of the Melee? You’re so close to the end! You’re in the semifinals! What if your team makes it to the end?”
He stood up, his shadow looming all the way up to the ceiling. “That’s the point. We don’t get to finish. We don’t get to make this choice. We’ll both be lucky if they don’t ship us down to one of the military schools. There’s one in Oakland. We wouldn’t even have to move. It’s only an hour away from home.”
I shook my head. “The military schools are army. No Lawrence is getting shuffled off to be a goddamn ground pounder.”
He stamped his foot against the carpet. His lower lip was quivering nonstop, but it wasn’t an act. He couldn’t stop crying. He had opened a valve and it was all coming out now. His bright red eyes narrowed with the effort of talking. “Do you think they care? We ran away, Elliot. We ran away and we lied and they know.”
Panic started to spark underneath my skin, using my bones as a flint. “Why do you keep saying ‘we’ like this is on both of us?”