Now it seemed like the only thing he could think about. He would have been better off, he imagined, focusing just on the tests. On passing the tests. Yet when Megan was near him, when he smelled her skin, when their arms brushed against each other, all that went away for a while.
Maybe he was just a late bloomer, he thought. Maybe he was perfectly normal, and that his hormones just hadn’t been jumpstarted at age twelve like most boys, but that from now on he would be just like them. It was a comforting idea.
In the darkened theater she took his hands and twined her fingers through her own, then let their hands rest on her thigh. After a few minutes Jake’s arm started to fall asleep but he knew he would never voluntarily move it from that position.
The movie was pretty bad—a very slow story about a reporter who was only dating a millionaire to gather information for the story she was writing on his shady business dealings, only to find out that she really loved him after all. Jake couldn’t follow the plot very well, and after the first few minutes he didn’t try. Occasionally Megan would laugh and look over at him and he would smile back. Their eyes would meet for a very enjoyable second and then she would go back to watching the screen.
He spent a lot of the movie studying the curve of her neck. He wondered if it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen or if it just felt that way.
Eventually the movie ended and they got up to head back to the parking lot. Jake offered to drive her straight home but she said she wanted to walk a little. Of course he agreed. They walked along a covered sidewalk along a row of shops that were closed for the evening, talking about the movie—Jake, feeling almost comfortable for a change, took a chance and admitted he hadn’t seen much of it, that he was much more interested in the curving shape of her ear.
She stopped and froze in place. He watched as a shiver went through her and suddenly alarm bells went off in his head, clanging out a million different warnings.
“My ear?” She stared at him with wide eyes.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, not knowing how else to explain. “I’ve been thinking that for the last hour. You have a beautiful ear.”
“You’re unbelievably weird, do you know that?”
“Yes,” he said, sighing. He turned away from her. “I do. I’ve never been like anybody else.” This was it, he decided. His heart sank in his chest. This was the part where he had to face up to the fact he wasn’t cut out for dating, or at least not for dating someone incredible and well-adjusted like her. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” she asked.
He still couldn’t face her. “I wanted this to be a normal date. I wanted us to be boyfriend and girlfriend. You have to believe me. But I can’t change who I am. I’m weird.” He threw up his hands in resignation. “I’m a nerd. A geek. I’m so sorry. I can’t get through one date without creeping you out. I’ll take you home.”
She grabbed his chin in her hand and he went rigid as she pulled his face around so she could stare into it.
“I said you were weird, Jake. I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”
She grabbed at his hands and pulled him down a narrow alley between two stores. They came out on the side away from the parking lot, a narrow strip of asphalt full of dumpsters and lost shopping carts.
“Nobody’s ever said anything about my ear before,” she told him, with a laugh. “It makes me feel special, do you understand? Do you know how rare that is?” She didn’t let him answer. She was too busy pushing him back against a rough wall and kissing him deeply.
He went into shock, a little. He closed his eyes. He opened them again. She was still kissing him. Her tongue was in his mouth. Her hands were on his chest, her short fingernails digging through his shirt.
It was exactly the wrong time for him to notice that someone had tagged the dumpster behind her. It was the last thing he should have paid attention to. Yet what he saw made his blood run cold, even as other parts of him were starting to warm up. Written in red spray paint were the words:
DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 17
Chapter Eighteen
DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 17
Jake read it again, and again.
He was seventeen. So was Megan, and Cody. Everyone over that age—Mr. Zuraw, the Principal, the police—had turned against him. The message on the dumpster could have just been crude adolescent paranoia, the passing whim of a teenager unable to accept or understand the adult world. Except Jake didn’t think that was it at all.
Maybe he was reading too much into what was, honestly, a very simple message. Except that—well—he couldn’t be sure. But he thought it was written in exactly the same shade of red spray paint as the string of Ps and Fs he’d found in the ruins behind the school. Which meant that maybe the same person had left both messages.
Messages meant for him, and him alone.
DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 17
“Megan,” he said, “when’s your birthday?”
Megan stopped kissing his neck and took a step backwards. “Not until March,” she said. She looked confused.
“So you’re still seventeen.”
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself,” she told him. “It’s not illegal to kiss me. And that’s as far as I planned on going tonight.”
“Wait—what?”
The start of a rage was smoldering behind her eyes. What he said next could fan the flames into a conflagration, if he wasn’t careful. “I didn’t mean… what you think I meant,” he said. “I was looking at that.” He pointed at the graffiti on the dumpster.
She turned to look at it. Her face was a mask of suspicion. “You were reading graffiti while I was trying to make out with you.”
He could only nod. She was going to be pissed. She had a right to be pissed. He wanted very, very much to rewind his life about thirty seconds but that wasn’t an option. “That message means something to me. Something… I can’t explain.”
He was still struggling to get his mind around the implications of the fact that someone was leaving him messages all over town. He had to think about that. He had to decide what it meant. In the process he could, quite possibly, lose Megan forever.
Already she was walking away from him, back toward the alley. Toward the parking lot and his car. She wanted him to take her home. The date was over.
“Wait,” he said, and this time, there was no hesitation. He knew exactly what to say. It came to him in a sudden flash of inspiration that left him sweaty and a little breathless. “Megan.”
She turned, her short hair swinging across her cheek. Her eyes were narrow slits.
“I trust you,” he said. “I want to tell you everything.”
That at least stopped her where she was. So he began. He told her about the row of initials on the underside of his bedside table. He told her about what he’d been doing and thinking when her car hit the side of his house. He told her about his worst suspicion: “They can make people fall asleep on command—it’s a post-hypnotic suggestion, I think. A voice says ‘sleep’ in a certain tone and you just lose consciousness instantly. They could have broadcast the command over your car radio. You said you blacked out for a second, and I think that’s why. They wanted you to crash your car, to see how I would react. They would have let you burn to death in there if I hadn’t got you out.”
She was still angry but now she looked a little scared. “That’s insane, Jake. Crazy—totally crazy. You actually believe this?”
“Yes,” he said. “Do you want me to stop? To stop talking about this?”
She bit her lower lip. “No.”
He went on. He told her about the blue envelope, and his initial talk with Mr. Zuraw. How he and Cody had tried to bring in the police, and how that had been a failure. He told her about the test in Classroom 187 and the history quiz in Farsi. He told her about breaking into Mr. Zuraw’s office, where she’d surprised him.
He couldn’t tell if she believed him or not. It didn’t matter, on one level, because he just had to
get it off his chest. He had to tell somebody other than Cody. Somebody who was seventeen, like him. Someone he could trust. Maybe whether she believed him or not meant everything.
It especially mattered a lot whether she believed what came next, because he wasn’t sure if he believed it himself, and he wanted a second opinion.
“Every adult in town may be in on this.”
“What, you mean our parents?”
“Well, no,” he admitted. That didn’t seem right. Jake’s Mom and Dad didn’t seem the type to torment schoolchildren for fun. “All the teachers, though. And the school board. And the police, and—”
“Getting crazier, Jake,” she said. “So who can you trust?”
“Well, you. And Cody. I don’t think the other students know what’s going on. And then there’s somebody… there’s whoever painted that. Somebody who is trying to send me messages. To help me.”
“Who is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know! It must be another student, or at least somebody our age. I have to find out. I have to find them, and find out what they know. If I can find them maybe they can answer some of my questions. Maybe they can help me pass some of the tests.”
Jake couldn’t think. He needed to work this out, to think about what he was being shown, and why, and by whom. Maybe the graffiti artist knew a way to get out of the Curriculum. He stopped for a second. “You believe me, don’t you? You don’t just think I’m crazy?”
“What, about this whole thing? About passing and failing and guys in silver masks giving you weird tests?”
“Yeah,” Jake said.
She said nothing. She just stared at him, looking right into his eyes. Then she did the thing he feared the most. She looked away.
“Jake, I don’t know you all that well. I was just starting to figure out who you are. This changes a lot of things.”
“No. It doesn’t change the fact that I think you’re beautiful. That I want you to be part of my life.”
Her eyes went wide and she stepped farther away from him. “Don’t do that.”
He shook his head. “What? Don’t do what?”
“Don’t pressure me like that. Give me time to think, to process this. It’s not fair,” she said, turning away from him, walking back to the alley that led to the parking lot. She wanted to escape. “It’s not fair that you’re crazy. Not when I was starting to really like you. That’s not fair!”
“If I’m crazy,” he said, “then I’m sorry. But if I’m not, if this is all real, if everything I told you is real—”
“Enough,” she said. “Take me home right now. And don’t say another word the whole way.”
He did as she asked. She got out of the car without even looking at him and hurried inside her house. He watched her front door for a while after it closed behind her. Then he drove home and parked the station wagon in his garage.
Another test, he thought. Not one in the Curriculum, but one he was going to have to pass all the same. He was going to have to convince her. That, or lose her forever.
Chapter Nineteen
“Maybe it’s for the best, Jake,” Cody said in homeroom on Monday. “I know you really liked Megan, and it seemed like she liked you. But if she can’t handle this—”
“She just doesn’t believe me,” Jake said, staring at the scratched top of his desk. Generations of kids had scrawled things there, digging into the soft wood with the sharp ends of compasses or just scribbling in permanent ink. Many of the words were obscene, but none of them looked like secret messages from a mysterious benefactor. MARTIN F IS GAY, he read. AMY LOVES SAM, and then below that, in a different hand, DOES NOT! A little to one side someone had written D WAS HERE. None of it meant anything to him. “And why should she? It does sound crazy, if you haven’t seen the Proctors. If nobody has ever shot at you.”
Cody leaned close. “Do you want my advice or not?”
Jake sat up and looked at his friend. “Always,” he said.
“Then take this as a sign that you need to concentrate on your tests. You know what’s at stake. Can you really afford a distraction like her right now?”
I can’t afford to feel the way I do, Jake thought, but he kept it to himself. His stomach hadn’t felt right since he’d driven her home after their failed date. It felt tight and scrunched up, like someone was squeezing it all the time. The feeling just wouldn’t go away. He tried to think of a logical reply. “Right now, you’re the only one who knows about the tests. You’re the only one who can help me. If I had somebody else I could count on it would really help.”
Cody shook his head. He might have said something more but just then the bell rang for first period and they gathered up their books and went to their separate classes. Jake did his best to pay attention through Pre-Calculus and English, but it just didn’t work—his mind was elsewhere and he did little but jot down occasional notes and try not to stare out the window.
After lunch he had Physics II, which was taught by Mr. Irwin, a very thin man with a bald head and a huge beard. Mr. Irwin had always been one of Jake’s favorite teachers, in part because he actually tried to make science interesting, but also because he had a way of helping his students grasp complicated ideas, somehow giving each of them personal attention even when he was addressing a class of thirty. He was lecturing about vectors and Newton’s laws, which was pretty abstract, but somehow he made it seem simple. When the class was dismissed Jake got up from his desk but he didn’t leave right away. “Mr. Irwin,” he said, “do you have a minute to talk?”
The teacher looked up from the papers he was grading on his desk. “Sure, Jake. I don’t have another class until sixth period. Something on your mind?”
Jake had been coming up with a plan all day but he needed help to implement it. “I need to convince somebody of something,” he said.
“Not really my area. You want to talk about elastic and inelastic collisions, maybe I can help.” The teacher smiled warmly. “Okay. Did you have somebody specific in mind?”
Jake sighed. “Yeah. And I thought you could help because—you know all about electronics, I remember we did a unit on circuits back in Physics I. This… person… thinks I’m lying to her. About… something. I thought maybe you would know how I could build a lie detector.”
“Intriguing question,” Mr. Irwin said. “I like your practical approach. Well, maybe there’s something we could do.” He got up from his desk and headed back towards a storage closet at the back of the classroom. As he dug in his pocket for the key, he asked, “So it’s a girl you’ve taken an interest in?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. That was not a conversation he really wanted to have with his science teacher but he did need Mr. Irwin’s help.
“And you told her something she didn’t believe,” the teacher went on. He was trying to draw Jake out, make him explain himself better. When Jake didn’t say anything, he shrugged. “Well, I have to say in my experience real people aren’t entirely bound by the laws of matter and energy.”
Jake laughed.
“In fact, I’ve met very few young women who were impressed by heavy machinery. I think if you’re just sincere enough with her that might work a little better. Still. Just the fact you’ve gone to so much trouble on her behalf might score you some points. Come in here for a second.” He opened the door and led Jake into the storage closet, which was narrow but long enough for them to walk in a ways. The closet’s walls were lined with deep metal shelves that held all of the school’s science supplies—microscopes, boxes of prepared slides, boxes and jars of chemicals, even a wide selection of fetal pigs prepared for dissection. The physics equipment was at the back. The shelves there held prisms and mirrors and simple machines: wedges, blocks and tackle, pulleys. The electronic equipment was on a bottom shelf and Mr. Irwin stooped to sort through it: an old oscilloscope, a Crookes tube on an elaborate metal stand, plastic boxes full of diodes and anodes and resistors, huge dry cell batteries that looked like they had corroded over time.
The two of them were far from any prying eyes—or ears. Jake felt strangely safe back there as if he were hidden from the Proctors for the first time since the school year began. He supposed he knew better but, after all, Mr. Irwin had always been nice to him, had always been more than a teacher, almost a friend. When Jake had won the junior year science fair for his experiment with growing grass seed under ultraviolet lights, Mr. Irwin had been more excited for him even than his parents and had shaken his hand warmly and said some really encouraging things. He decided to take a chance.
“Are you in on it, Mr. Irwin?” he asked.
The teacher grew very still. He was crouched down by the shelves, his thin knees up around his ears. “In on what, Jake?” he asked. His voice sounded very controlled.
“The Pass/Fail Curriculum. I mean. I hate to ask.” It was possible, he supposed, that some of the teachers weren’t Proctors. That Mr. Irwin didn’t have a silver mask in the bottom drawer of his desk. “But I need to know.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.” Mr. Irwin dug a cardboard box out of the back of a low shelf. It was about the size of a cake box and it was covered in dust. He handed it to Jake and stood back up. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, in fact,” he said, as if he wanted to make something very clear. “But maybe you’ll do me a favor and answer a question for me.”
“Okay,” Jake said.
“This is purely hypothetical, now. Very abstract. Unlike your young woman it has nothing to do with the real world.” He was looking right into Jake’s eyes.
“Sure.”
“Let’s say that someone asked someone else the question you just asked me. Let’s call them Student X and Mr. Y. Now, perhaps Mr. Y would very, very much like to tell Student X all kinds of interesting things. He’s a teacher after all, our Mr. Y, and imparting knowledge is his passion. But let’s say there’s another variable in this equation. We can call our third entity Mr. Z if you like.”
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