“Business or pleasure?” I asked, gesturing to the notebook with my spoon.
“Just some profit-and-loss specs for the winter ball.” He flushed, waving over the paper with his dirtied napkin. He stabbed a finger at a figure in the middle of the chart. “Here’s what would happen if half of the upperclassmen attended. There’s an eighty-three percent return and it increases steadily from there.”
I took a sip of soup and recoiled as it scalded the roof of my mouth. Choking slightly, I pointed at the chart on the bottom. There were letters under each bar with a plus or minus symbol beside them. “And this?”
B’s face pinched and he glanced around the table, making sure that the crafting council members were still occupied before he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.
“That’s the list of academic probation students charted based on their sway with the rest of the school,” he murmured with a hint of pride.
“Really?” I abandoned my spoon and scooted closer. “How’d you figure that?”
“Eavesdropping, mostly,” he whispered. He tapped the bar with the letters KP underneath. “See, Kenneth Pollack’s probation hasn’t hit that hard—the rest of the basketball team will still buy tickets to the ball for the most part. But Ishaan Singh—” His finger slid over to a much longer bar. “Since he’s—or, was—the captain of the cricket team and the dance is a cricket fundraiser, that means we’ll lose about thirty-two attendees, give or take.”
“Wow, B,” I said, leaning back. “You’re quite the boy genius.”
He squirmed and closed the notebook, turning his attention back to his meatloaf. “It doesn’t mean we know how to actually fix the problem.”
“Step one,” said Ben, dropping his tray onto the table with a clatter, “is to get people to stop cheating.”
Mary-Anne yanked her elbow out of the way to avoid him touching her as he leapt onto the bench. She slid closer to the crafting lowerclassmen.
“Good luck with that,” she said, fluffing her coif as though Ben’s presence had mussed it. “‘Corruption, like a general flood, shall deluge all.’”
The corner of Ben’s mouth twitched and he shot me a sidelong look of exasperation. “That’s not the full quote. You can’t edit Pope.”
“You get the point,” she said. “People are going to cheat because people are cheating.”
I took another slurp of soup, ignoring the protest of my singed taste buds. I kept my eyes on Mary-Anne. “And if all of your friends jumped off a bridge…”
“It isn’t peer pressure, Beatrice.” She sighed, as though I were a very simple creature. She leaned over the table, her chest in danger of falling into her spinach salad. “Right now, it might just be athletes and people whose antianxiety meds stopped working, but what happens when the college rejections start coming in? People who worked so hard and then got wait-listed? They’ll do something desperate. And it’ll be mass hysteria.”
“The seniors can’t deal with the competition,” said one of the junior council members, holding aloft a bottle of Elmer’s glue. “If you compare our top five with your top five, our percentages are—”
“Oh please. You all don’t factor,” Mary-Anne scoffed. She cringed a smile at the girl’s injured look. “No offense.”
“Do you guys have to do that here?” Ben asked, pointing accusingly at the craft supplies.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Afraid of a little glitter in your mystery meat?”
“It’s not a mystery.” He lifted his fork and stabbed into the end of his meatloaf, which wept a puddle of grease. “It’s beef.”
“I think it’s turkey,” B said. “Or pork?”
Ben frowned. “Huh. Then I concede to the mystery.” He jerked his chin toward my bowl. “Still avoiding anything that had a face?”
I opened my mouth to respond and paused, searching his face for signs of pining. This was the boy who was in love with me, after all. But there was no mushiness in his eyes, no radiating waves of adoration. Mostly, he seemed vaguely disappointed in his meatloaf and confused by the accidental staring contest I’d started.
“Pretty much,” I said. “I’d be screwed if they found out tofu was sentient.”
He smiled, displaying the effects of many years of orthodontia. “If you’re worried, we could take a slab to the bio lab.”
I smiled back without thinking about it. “Better not risk it.”
Harper and Cornell walked up with Meg and Peter trailing behind. Harper looked from me to Ben to Cornell and seemed to think better of commenting as they sat down. With a flush of embarrassment, I shoved another spoonful of soup into my mouth.
“We thought you’d gone to the library with Jack,” Meg said, throwing herself down next to me before carefully smoothing her skirt over her knees. “According to the schedule, we’re supposed to be at our table today.”
“We are?” I asked, mentally kicking myself. I’d been so focused on making peace with Ben, I’d completely forgotten about our lunch timetable. “I must have confused the days.”
“I offered to print it out,” Harper said.
“I can’t contribute to your spreadsheet addiction,” I said.
“Excel is the gateway software.” Cornell chuckled. “Before you know it, you’re freebasing Gnumeric.”
Harper elbowed him in the ribs and he laughed, capturing her arm and pressing a kiss to her knuckles.
“Speaking of spreadsheets,” Ben said, turning to Peter. “Brandon’s pretty much done with our research on the winter ball. I think we should go ahead and start selling tickets this week. More time only works in our favor.”
“You mean before the rest of the seniors get put on AP and can’t buy them?” Mary-Anne asked.
Ben’s lip curled. There was a small nick in his cupid’s bow. He must have cut himself while shaving off the mustache. It would have been a lot of work getting rid of that much hair in one go.
“Will you let it go?” he growled. “This whole third-dance thing was your brilliant plan. You couldn’t shut up about it a week ago.”
“That was before,” she shouted, throwing her fork down. It somersaulted and rolled to a pathetic stop against a dried cranberry. “Now we might as well cancel the whole damn thing.”
All around the cafeteria, heads turned. No one was focused on whatever conversation about quantum physics or Baroque composers or which video game system had the fastest CPU they’d been engaged in before. Everyone watched in horror as Mary-Anne threw herself, snarling, to her feet.
“This was supposed to be special,” she screamed, slamming her hands onto the table. She wasn’t even looking at Ben anymore. She’d turned on the room at large, her indignation making her seem bigger than usual—like a kaiju rising out of the ocean in a red blazer. “And all of you are going to ruin it. Your damn petty life problems are going to ruin everything.”
She snatched up her plate and chucked it, full force, at the juniors. Vinaigrette-soaked spinach and chicken and cranberries rained down on them, splashing into soup bowls and sticking in their hair. Pink dressing splattered against the wet glitter on the poster board and the crafters howled. The junior girl next to Mary-Anne got the worst of it. She clawed at her eyes, trying to get the dressing out.
Peter leapt to his feet, his hands flying to try to stop Mary-Anne from finding another projectile. She twisted and roared as Peter held her back, her pulse visible in her neck as her manicured fingers scrambled for her bottle of mineral water. The table erupted in a chorus of furious, multilingual curses. The water spilled, forcing the rest of us to get to our feet to avoid the flood. B held his notebook and graphing calculator over his head, looking around wildly for an adult to save him.
Ben and Cornell jumped off the bench and ran around to help Peter, shoving Mary-Anne backward, away from the student council, which was about three seconds from attacking her with their plastic forks while chanting, “sic semper tyrannis.”
“No one cares about you!” Mary-Anne scr
eamed, her voice constrained with the force of Peter’s arms wrapped around her waist. “No one cares about any of you! You’re all insignificant. Why should we do anything for you people? It means nothing! You mean nothing! You’re all going to fail and it doesn’t mean anything!”
“That is enough,” roared a much louder, much angrier voice somewhere outside of the chaos. Dr. Mendoza was striding toward our table, buttoning his suit jacket with one hand as he walked. Even the blob of mayonnaise in the corner of his goatee couldn’t diminish his overall aura of total authority.
The cafeteria hushed. I nudged B in the side and he lowered his arms, clutching his notebook and calculator to his chest like a security blanket.
“Release her, Mr. Donnelly,” Mendoza demanded.
Peter acquiesced immediately, holding his hands up in surrender. He, Ben, and Cornell stood aside, making room as Mendoza eyed Mary-Anne, who was panting with the effort of keeping her mouth closed.
“Miss France,” Mendoza said, his voice back to its usual quiet gravitas. “Perhaps I should make a phone call to Vassar and submit an addendum to your letter of reference.”
Harper gasped, but Mary-Anne stared back at him with no outward sign that she’d heard him at all. A piece of her perfect hair slid out of place across her forehead. Seeing her vaguely unkempt was even scarier than watching her flip out.
“With me, please,” Mendoza said. It was not a request.
Mary-Anne yanked her backpack out from under the table. It slammed into the shoulder of the junior girl next to her, sending the glue bottle flying across the wet winter ball sign. As the crafters squealed and scraped smears of glitter off the poster board, Mendoza sighed and led Mary-Anne out of the room, his hand hovering behind her elbow, poised to grab her if she tried to run.
We all stood and surveyed the damage. I kicked my messenger bag out of the way of the river of mineral water spilling down the sides of my tray.
“I’ll go get napkins,” Harper announced.
Meg scurried around the boys, patting the arm of the junior girl who’d been closest to the green zone. The girl’s eyes were red and streaming and there was a chunk of chicken on her polo.
“Come on, honey,” Meg said sweetly. “We’ll go and get you cleaned up.”
She ushered the girl out the same way that Mendoza and Mary-Anne had left, a line of other salad-coated officers following behind like ducklings.
Harper passed out handfuls of napkins like relief blankets. We all worked in silence, sopping up the puddles while the remaining crafters tried to clean the worst of the damage to their poster.
“In positive news,” I said, sitting down and checking to make sure nothing had landed in my soup, “she’ll probably write a bitchen sonnet for the yearbook about all this.”
* * *
The bell rang and everyone pushed toward the rain-soaked quad. I waved to B as he scurried off to his next class. Harper and Meg were still deep in a renewed conversation about the merits of renting a limo for the winter ball versus driving someone’s mom’s car. Peter and Cornell were pretending to be interested. They moved through the door and I fiddled with my umbrella. When I looked up, the group was running in separate directions and Ben was holding open the door for me.
“Thanks,” I said, lifting up the umbrella as I slid into the quad. Rainwater slammed into Spider-Man’s face, sliding off the sides and flecking against my shoulders.
“No problem.” He released the door and stepped into the deluge with a grimace. His hair immediately started to wilt as the rain hit it, sloughing off whatever product he’d used to create the spikes. He looped his thumbs in the straps of his backpack, ready to bolt.
“What’s your next class?” I asked abruptly.
“Computational Biology.” He paused, brushing water out of his eyebrows. “You?”
“Multivariable Calculus,” I said, holding back the urge to demand which math class he’d opted for this year. Instead, I held the umbrella high enough to cover both of us. “No point in ruining your hair.”
“Thanks.” He ducked under the canopy, his neck swiveling to avoid losing an eye to one of the plastic bits on the end.
We walked toward the math and sciences building like we’d accidentally entered a three-legged race and instantly regretted it. His arm brushed mine and I clutched the stem of the umbrella until the metal cut into my hand. Which was ridiculous. I’d had a full week to come to terms with the fact that Ben was the clown. I’d held onto that arm for dear life at the harvest festival. It shouldn’t take a zombie hoard to make us comfortable with each other.
He looked down at me and gulped before looking away.
“Cline’s getting a bit overzealous in American Immigrant, huh?” he asked.
“Today’s bit of Angela’s Ashes was all right,” I said. “His Irish accent is really coming along. It was decidedly less Jamaican today. Although it was almost New Zealander.…”
“Well, they’ve got sheep there, too. He’s getting closer. I’ve got Graham for Math in the Ancient World. He sings equations. I’d gladly listen to Cline butcher dialects for hours than hear the Euclidian algorithm jingle again. ‘The GCD is A and B. They’re natural, you see.…’”
“Wow. That’s both really obnoxious and really catchy.”
“Exactly. It’s been in my head for weeks. I can’t shake it.”
We lapsed into silence, continuing to plod forward. I was intensely aware of his proximity, the hint of laundry detergent smell on his clothes, the slight swing of his arms as he moved. I couldn’t stop myself from cataloging all of it, overriding the existing Ben West folder in my head.
“Look,” I blurted at the same time Ben said, “So, uh.”
We both stopped moving, frozen in the middle of the mosaic M set into the concrete at the center of the quad. Rain pelted noisily into the top of the umbrella.
“Go ahead,” I said.
He shifted his weight and his right arm shot back under the umbrella, the sleeve of his jacket soggy. He wiped it pointlessly on his hip. “Are you reading Saga?”
“I’ve never heard of it,” I said. “Is it a comic?”
“Better. It’s a Brian K. Vaughan comic.” His eyebrows went up a fraction. “You do know who Vaughan is, right?”
“I’m not a dilettante, West. I read all of Runaways.”
“He did a run of Buffy, season eight, too,” he said. “But you should check it out. Saga. It’s kind of gory, kind of Star Wars-y.”
“That sounds like my deal. I’ll add it to my list,” I said.
Around us, people were dashing off into buildings and the clock was ticking, each second getting us imminently closer to the fifth-period bell. I was positive that anxiety couldn’t lead to anaphylaxis and yet my throat did seem to be closing up.
Ben coughed and gestured forward.
Right. Walking to class. Breathing air. Avoiding rain. Normal things. Be normal. But my heart continued to pump a little too fast.
“You were going to say something,” he said, tromping through a puddle. “Before.”
“Oh,” I said, with a sinking feeling that was not entirely unrelated to fear. “I was just going to say that you look much better without the mustache. Less like a supervillain. More … not a villain.”
I know, I know. Beatrice Watson, you have a genius IQ and that’s the best you could come up with?
“I am saving a lot of money on mustache wax.” He grinned. “And tiny combs.”
“There was wax in it?” I laughed. “That can’t be hygienic.”
“Probably not, but it was cool while it lasted.” He glanced at me sidelong. “My mom didn’t want it in my graduation pictures.”
My first impulse was to express my surprise that he still spoke to his mother. I’d never really thought about the current state of their relationship. I didn’t even know if he’d met his half sibling.
“Ben.” It was weird using his first name. I didn’t know the last time I’d attempted it aloud. I was fairl
y sure that I hadn’t been calling him by his last name when we were in first grade. Then again, my parents had always maintained that I’d been overly precocious from the word go.
“I—” I faltered again. I’d spent all weekend trying to craft the perfect apology, but in practice, I couldn’t seem to find the right sequence of words. “About the harvest festiv—”
“Don’t worry about it,” he interrupted as we reached the front of the math and sciences building, the most imposing of the Mess’s various brick structures. Its spire stabbed into the blackening sky. “You were having a panic attack. No big deal.”
“No,” I insisted, stepping in front of him before he could reach for the door. The umbrella slipped and a raindrop hit me in the eye. Partially blinded, I could only vaguely make out the downward turn his lips had taken. “You were really nice to me and I was—” Abhorrent. Reprehensible. A demon from a Hell dimension that only makes really mean people. “Awful to you for no reason. Thank you for helping me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Thanks for sharing your umbrella. We’re square.”
He reached around me and opened the door. I looked up at him, from the damp droop of his hair to his earnest brown eyes to his toothy grin and thought, Oh hell. I don’t think we are.
To: West, B.
From: Watson, B.
Subject: A Request
If I concede that Saga is amazing, will you bring the rest of the series to school tomorrow? Because it’s crazy amazing and I’d rather not rob Busby to get the rest of the books.
Can of soda for your trouble.
Trixie
To: Watson, B.
From: West, B.
Subject: Re: A Request
Don’t rob Busby over Saga. Over the Who figurines, maybe. I’d help with that heist. Dibs on the Cyberman.
The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You Page 13