“He also thinks he’s in charge,” Sammie says. “But he’s not the one signing your paycheck.”
“I am very much in charge.” Virgo puts his hands over my ears. “Ignore her. Listen to me. Listen to everything I say, Signorina Viviana. I know everything about everything.”
“He doesn’t know anything.” A tall girl in a red sweatshirt and matching red shorts, with a sleek black ponytail that hangs all the way down her back, is sweeping the entrance.
“You can listen to her.” Sammie gives her a hug. “Vanessa’s pretty trustworthy.”
I give a wave. “Nice to meet you, too.”
Virgo calls a few of the other guards over to meet me: Vanessa’s a junior, like Sammie and me, and Marquis is a senior who’s just about to graduate. There are a few other guards who aren’t here today, but I’ll meet them tomorrow. I also find out that Virgo’s home after his first year in college, and that he’s studying music, of course.
Thankfully, everyone here is from a private school, and it’s a relief to be surrounded by people who don’t know me, who don’t know about what happened after the physics exam, and, best of all, who don’t know about Dean and me.
It’s a relief to be anonymous.
I wave hello, and they all smile. They all seem nice. And sun-kissed. And shiny.
While it’s nice to be anonymous, I’m also suddenly self-conscious, aware of how pasty I am after spending the last three years holed up in a library or a lab.
“And who is this?” a new voice asks behind me.
I turn to the guy who’s just made his way through the front gate, and oh no—
I know him.
Or at least I knew him once—as a younger, seventh-grade version of myself kissing a younger, ninth-grade version of him. Evan something or another—I can’t remember his last name. But I do remember Seven Minutes in Heaven at Anne Boyd’s birthday party. It was dark, and I was a little tipsy from the one and only beer I’ve ever dared to taste, and there were all these strange new boys from the private school up the road. I was overjoyed when Evan and I got paired together. I’d never kissed a boy before. And I thought there was no way he would want to kiss me. We sat in the dark on the edge of the tub, and finally, at six minutes forty-five seconds, I leaned in, and he leaned back. I tasted Bud Light and peppermint gum and his cold, chapped lips.
It was fifteen seconds of heaven. And then I never saw him again.
Until now.
I remember his short dark hair. Those ridiculous dimples and sharp brown eyes. And now he’s tall, with broad shoulders. Naturally lean but also muscular. And yeah, his shirt is off, so there’s that. Four years have been good to him.
“I’m Evan.” He puts out his hand to take mine.
He doesn’t remember me.
There are four forces in nature that act upon us. Gravity, of course, binds us to the earth. Electromagnetism binds our atoms together. The strong force binds the nucleus, and the weak force governs subatomic decay. Unless you’ve spent the past eight months obsessing over the AP physics exam and the past two years thinking about the design of physical structures and the risk of collapse, you don’t normally think about these forces. You can’t see them, and you certainly can’t control them. They just happen. All you can do is observe.
When Evan puts his hand in mine, I’m inclined to believe there’s a fifth force. It can’t be defined or calculated or memorized, but it pulls me toward him. It’s pulled me toward him before.
And there’s something about him—the sincerity of his smile, the way he looks at me, direct and piercing, the strength of his hand around mine. I search his face to see if he remembers, too.
But when Sammie introduces me, he continues to give me a blank, open smile. “That’s right—the BFF we never got to meet. You live here in Bennett, right? Why have we never been graced with your presence before?”
“I wanted to come down,” I say. “I mean, Sammie invited me. I was just too busy—”
“Vivi’s been too busy geeking it up at a physics academy,” Sammie says with a laugh.
“It’s a Design and Engineering Academy,” I say. “Science is only part of it. And physics is actually my weakest subject.”
“Excuse me.” Sammie hates when I correct her, but it’s like a tic that I can’t control. “A Design and Engineering Academy.” She mocks me with a snotty pseudo-British accent.
“That sounds cool.” Evan picks up my physics book and fans through it. “Did you, like, toss eggs from windows to understand their velocity?”
“Not at the Academy.” I laugh. “But in my physics class, yes. With parachutes. But it was to understand resistance. I’m more into design theories.” There I go correcting again, like a know-it-all, even though I’m more of a know-a-little-bit. I never really understood resistance all that well, and it’s not like I could completely explain it if he asked.
But he doesn’t even blink. “I’m more of a music man, myself, but I’m thinking about minoring in math. I love how it all connects. Geometry. Sequences. Chord patterns.”