I sat down beside him. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I?” He cocked his head to the side. “And what, exactly, do you suggest we do?”
“Move to Siberia,” Spencer said, “and pray they don’t find us.”
I smirked. “Funny.”
Jesse checked his phone. “You could transfer,” he suggested, typing as he talked. “Or maybe try homeschooling?”
He was attempting to be helpful, but those were cowardly options, bordering on insensitive. “We can’t run away from this,” I said. “There’s got to be a solution we’re missing.”
“Like what?” Gabe uncurled his legs and planted his feet on the ground. “Talk to them? My mom suggested that freshman year. ‘Just have a conversation with them, mijito. They’ll understand.’” He snorted. “I came home with a wedgie so deep I had to send in spelunkers to get it out.”
“Go to the principal?” Jesse said.
“We’ve already tried to get Ramos involved,” I explained. “We’re not important enough for her to discipline her championship football team.”
“See?” Spencer said. “Siberia doesn’t sound so bad.”
Jesse shoved his phone into his pocket. “I have to go,” he said.
I turned to him, confused. “What? Why?”
“I forgot I have an appointment,” he said. “Do you want me to take you to your mom’s?”
“She’s at her dad’s tonight,” Spencer said before I could answer. Three and a half days split evenly between the two households, and Spencer always remembered when I was where. “I’ll take her home.”
“I’ll call you later, okay?” Jesse took my chin in his hand, angling it up toward him. “Meanwhile, you can use that math brain of yours to figure out this problem. ’Bye!”
I stood rigid beside the sofa, Jesse’s words echoing in my ears. Figure out this problem.
“You okay, Bea?” Gabe asked.
I nodded. Problems had solutions. Solutions were equations. And who was better at solving equations than I was? No one. Without thinking, I moved toward my wheelie bag and pulled out a notebook and pen, then sat down on the sofa next to Gabe.
“What is it?” Spencer squeezed in beside me.
Something was percolating inside me, that familiar flutter of excitement I got whenever I was on the brink of a mathematical breakthrough. There was always a moment when I shifted my perspective, and in an instant, all the elements would come together with a beautiful simplicity that made me feel like a moron for not having seen it before.
This was one of those moments.
Our current sociological predicament could be boiled down to a simple linear equation. We knew the result, i.e., a tolerable school environment where we weren’t living in fear of an ass kicking every five minutes. I just had to work backward from there.
“We’ve been looking at this all wrong,” I said, noting the tremor in my own voice.
“How?” Spencer asked. “Milo and Thad are misunderstood? They just need a hug and everything will be fine?”
“No one has to hug anyone,” I said. My pen began to fly over the page, an automatic flow of symbols and letters. “Unless you’re both hugging me in gratitude.”
Spencer leaned over my shoulder and glanced at my preliminary scribbles. “For what?”
I held my notebook out in front of me. “The Formula for Happiness in High School.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Pixie Vision Productions
GRETCHEN McNEIL is an opera singer, a writer, and a clown. She is also the author of Get Even as well as Ten, which was a 2013 YALSA Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, a Romantic Times Top Pick, and an ALA Booklist Top Ten Horror Fiction for Youth and was nominated for Best Young Adult Contemporary Novel of 2012 by Romantic Times. Gretchen blogs with the Enchanted Inkpot and is a founding member of the vlog group the YARebels. You can visit her online at www.gretchenmcneil.com.
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BOOKS BY GRETCHEN McNEIL
Possess
Ten
3:59
Get Even
Get Dirty
Relic
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RELIC. Text copyright © 2016 by Gretchen McNeil. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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