*
It was harder climbing down the ladder light-headed from rum and feelings. More feelings than rum, truth be told, since I’d let Leigh finish my cup when the tree house started to spin. She was kind enough not to judge me for being a lightweight.
It was funny. Being a lightweight but outweighing her by so much.
“Come here, swervy,” she said, gently guiding me through the trees. “I thought the rum would take the edge off your shitty night. I didn’t think about having to drag your Amazonian butt back across campus.”
“You aren’t dragging me,” I said, pointedly striding ahead of her. I stopped short and looked around. All of the trees in front of me had forks and yarn wound through the branches. “But I might already be lost.”
Her hands found my elbow again, pulling me away. “It’s not your fault. Trees kind of all look the same.”
“Racist.”
“Arborist?”
“That one.”
I started to laugh—or maybe cry again—when Leigh’s hand clamped over my mouth. My complaints were muffled against her palm. As I considered whether to bite her for freedom—a tactic Isaiah used on me dozens of times when we were little—I finally clued in to why we’d stopped walking. There were voices in Mudders Meadow.
“Dad said—” screeched one. A girl. A familiar girl.
“Dad said…” parroted another, this one crueler, colder. “You are being a child, Katie. No one else gets to use their security blankets. Are you saying that you aren’t as smart as everyone else?”
“My team has missed the same question about the Murakami short story every single skirmish.”
That was odd. Our team had missed the same question about “A Shinagawa Monkey” every round of the Melee so far.
A second too late, I froze down to my bones.
“It’s Kate,” Leigh breathed in my ear.
Our Kate? Kate with her narrow face and braying laugh. Why was Kate screaming in the meadow in the middle of the night?
“I want to know the answer before it costs us the semifinals,” Kate continued, on the other side of the trash trees.
“Fine. I’ll get you the stupid binder,” said the other voice. “But this is it. You told Dad that you could handle the same pressures as everyone else. If you can’t even memorize the binder, then how do you expect to survive your first term here?”
“It’s not the same thing, Rowan!”
Rowan? I thought. I didn’t know anyone named Rowan. I looked over at Leigh, who seemed as confused as I was.
Good. I was afraid it was the rum.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Okay. Some of it was the rum. Drinking looked like way more fun when the Shakespeare company got drunk at Beth’s Christmas party. It mostly made my whole body feel like it was full of sand and sparklers.
“Meet me on my floor during breakfast,” Rowan said. “You can look through the binder then. I need to get back before anyone notices that I’m gone.”
“Yeah, me too,” Kate said.
There was a peal of laughter. “Yeah, I’m sure your Salieri is desperate to know where you are.”
Leigh and I crept forward as the girls’ footsteps started to retreat, but both of them were wearing black hoodies pulled over their hair.
“Shit,” Leigh hissed. “More siblings? What the hell is going on? Do you know anyone named Salieri? Since when does Kate have a sister here? Oh my God! She out-awkwarded me! I was so played!”
I clasped her shoulders, with awful, drunken awareness banging like a gong in my head. “It’s a full-on Wildean farce.”
36
A bottle of water was tucked into bed with me. There was a Post-it wrapped around the label that read, “For your first little baby hangover. Love, Leigh.” My head did hurt a bit, but I wasn’t sure if that was the alcohol dehydrating me or all of the crying I’d done last night.
I sat up foggily, unsure what had woken me. I had a vague memory of Leigh telling me she was going to breakfast, but I didn’t know how long ago that was. I wasn’t wearing any of my blankets.
Because all of my blankets were in my suitcase.
Because I was going home today.
This morning.
Now?
I looked over at my desk and saw my phone screen flashing with a text message from Beth.
You can ignore our phone calls all you want, Elliot. We will be at Rayevich at 10:00. Be packed and ready to come home. We have already spoken to Dean Cheeseman.
“Associate dean,” I said to the phone. Not that it or Beth could hear me.
It was my last morning at Rayevich, and that was going to have to be okay. I had done the selfish thing. All of the selfish things, really. Running away, publicly humiliating and injuring Isaiah—twice—and almost, maybe, falling in love with a guy whose voice was like the coziest sweater. And then spent the night drinking and crying about it with my new college best friend. Who was already in college.
Today, I would own up to it. If it took military school or never driving again or only driving Ethan and his friends to and from Scandia Fun Center so that they could play mini golf while I sat in the car, that would have to be enough. It would be worth it, because I got what I wanted. I got two and a half weeks that were mine. That no one could take away from me.
Even if they could interrupt it. It was only two days early, and I’d gotten to keep my good underwear the whole time. Suck on that, BMT.
I chugged the bottle of water in full. I could feel it splashing into my stomach, creating tidal waves of rum-soaked acid. I padded down to the bathroom and washed my face and brushed the sour plaque off my teeth. I couldn’t help myself from mentally saying good-bye to everything I passed. The broken soap dispenser next to my favorite sink with the water least likely to scald your hands. The lemon-yellow lounge in the hall. The chalkboard doors full of names I never bothered to learn.
And then I stopped.
I was accepting an ending again. I had gone to bed defeated and kind of drunk and possibly trying to convince Leigh that Kate’s mysterious sibling had been trying to say “Salami yeti,” not “Salieri.”
I didn’t know it was over. As long as I was on campus, I refused to jump to the end.
I went back to my empty dorm and got down on the floor. The thin carpet pinched against the lines of my hands as I pushed myself into a plank. I would live my last day at camp as Elliot Gabaroche. Starting with forty-five push-ups and fifty sit-ups.
I had left home looking for something that was all mine, something outside of my parents and their families. But that wasn’t right.