“What?” I say.
“You’re not seriously washing graduated cylinders with tap water, are you?”
I’m almost impressed. That level of derision could flay a person with thinner skin than mine. I turn off the tap. “Yeah, what’s the problem?”
“Deionized. You have to use deionized water. You’re going to contaminate the—it’s over the—oh, just let me—” The kid strides toward the cabinets and throws them open one by one, muttering under his breath. He chucks his backpack to the ground. It slumps against the counter.
After a straight minute of muttering, the boy flings open the last cabinet. “Here.” He pulls down a pair of plastic squeeze bottles with thin nozzles attached to their lids. As he sets down the bottles by the sink, I catch his eyes. They’re sharp, an indeterminate bluish-greenish-grayish color. Chameleon eyes. He doesn’t hold my gaze long, though—his glance darts away to my hairline, my neck, the wall behind me.
I wait for him to leave, but he stands there as if he’s waiting for a gold star. After the most uncomfortable silence in recorded history, I clear my throat. “So, you gonna go, or what?”
“I’ll help.” He grabs a bottle of his special miracle water and starts rinsing out a graduated cylinder.
“Uh.” What’s the politest way to say, Like hell you will? “No,” I say, “that’s really fine.”
“I’m going to be here anyway,” he says. “My mom’s a guidance counselor, and I have to wait for my ride home. So maybe you should be the one leaving. This was my job first.”
“Look, AP, I don’t need the attitude.” A muscle over my left eye spasms. I rub it. Like a retort, it spasms again.
“Looks like what you need is some sleep,” he says.
“No shit, genius.”
When the guy says nothing, I glance back at him. “Sorry,” I mumble. “That just sort of came out.”
He cocks his head like a perplexed puppy. “It’s all right. Social interaction is generally not my forte, either.”
“Your what?”
“My forte,” he repeats.
“You mean for-tay?”
“No, that’s an Italian word used in musical notation. The English word is adapted from the French fort, meaning strong. One syllable. Forte.”
My mouth droops open, and I try not to let anything too disparaging fall out. Who the hell is this guy, some sort of malnourished TA? It’s almost refreshing, his total weirdness.
Something about him in general soothes my nerves, although I can’t pinpoint what.
I take a bottle and draw out a cylinder from the second bucket. Beside me, the kid’s pale hands move in jerks and starts, impatient, hyperefficient. “Rinse them three times each,” he says, “then line them up overhead. Got it?”
I nod.
He turns to me.
“Got it?”
“I nodded.”
“Ah. Right.” He goes back to washing. “Didn’t see.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not.”
“What?”
“Worrying,” he says. “I’m not worrying about it.”
I look at him for a second, wondering how long it’s been since he spoke to a human being. I’m not a master of small talk by any means, but this kid is something else.
I go back to my cylinders. We lapse into blessed silence, but it doesn’t take long for him to break it. “Valentine Simmons,” he introduces himself. “Junior.”
“Sure,” I say, putting a cylinder into one of the cabinets.
“Despite common belief,” he adds, “Valentine is a boy’s name, since Saint Valentine was a man. So. So it’s not weird.”
“Okay,” I say. “I didn’t say it was weird.”
Another silent minute trickles by before Valentine asks, “What grade are you in?”
Jesus, this guy won’t take a hint. “Same,” I say.
He squeezes a thin jet of water from his bottle’s nozzle, his expression carefully neutral. Still, I get the sense he’s disappointed I won’t bite.
It hits me why he seems disarming: this air hovers around him, and I only recognize it because it’s familiar. He’s one of those kids who, like me, has zero friends. Nice to know my superpower is detecting social failure.
I make a peace offering. “So, how about that assembly? What a waste of time, huh?”
“Waste of . . .?”
“One email, and they go batshit crazy? It was probably someone trolling.”
“If that’s what you choose to believe,” he says, an air of superiority cloaking him so thickly, I can almost smell it. He goes back to his cylinder, silent at last.
“I’m Kat Scott,” I say. “So, why’d Norman put you on cleaning duty?”
“He didn’t. I offered.”
“Best buds, huh?”
“Well, we ate lunch together today, if that qualifies.”
I eye him. “That’s, uh.”
“You think it’s strange.”
“I mean, I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong.”
“Yes, well.” Valentine shrugs. “It was raining, so I couldn’t eat outside.”
“And you couldn’t just go to the cafeteria because . . .?”
His nose wrinkles. “I don’t particularly enjoy the company of my peers.”
“. . . right. That didn’t sound rehearsed at all.”