“It was the boiler room, actually. And it was just a mouse,” Bryan said. He noticed the look of mock disappointment on Jess’s face. “But it did try to attack me. A cunning and vicious creature.” Nearly all the buses had pulled away now. Still no sign of Oz. It didn’t matter quite so much anymore, though. “How about you?” he finally managed to ask. “How was your day?”
“Over,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be on one of those buses, are you?”
“I usually bike home.” Already this conversation was longer than any they had had in the last three years. “I thought you walked?”
“I do.” Jess nodded. “Just not by myself. Not that I can’t. I just prefer to have company.”
“Right,” Bryan said. Company. Blond, perfect, shiny company. With great teeth. She was probably just standing here waiting for Prince to arrive. Except she wasn’t looking around. She was looking at Bryan.
Not just looking. She actually nudged him with her eyebrows. At least, he thought it was a nudge, a little hint, a fill-in-the-blank kind of gesture. Distinctly pointed at him.
“You mean?”
Jess shrugged. “It’s not that far,” she said, as if that mattered.
Bryan felt a tingle work its way to the tips of his ears. He looked behind him. He could see the baseball diamond and the teachers’ parking lot, and the little alley behind the old playground. The one with the Dumpsters where you could conveniently hide the body of a dead middle schooler. He turned back to Jess, who was watching him, eyebrows still arched, waiting for an answer. He could almost hear the timer ticking down in his head. Oz might be looking for him. Wattly was probably tearing the heads off of stray kittens and drinking their blood as some kind of prefight ritual. And the girl he’d been crushing on for four years was staring at him for a change. Why, he couldn’t be sure, but he wasn’t going to question it.
“Yeah. Okay,” he said.
Jess smiled and brushed by him. The last bus pulled out into the street. “Let’s go, then,” she said.
They walked across the school’s front lawn, through the damp grass, past the bronze statue of the Mount Comfort lion, captured in midleap. Jess walked beside him, not touching but close enough that he could grab her hand if he dared. Yet even having faced the likes of Reynolds, Wang, and Baylor-Tore hadn’t given him that much nerve. Instead Bryan tried to be cool, afraid that if he smiled, his face might break in half. He hadn’t walked next to her since the fourth grade when they were line leaders.
“I heard you got called down to the Boss’s office,” she said, a hint of admiration in her voice.
“That was only twenty minutes ago!” Bryan sputtered.
“Yeah. Jamie C., who plays flute, texted Kasarah, who texted me. You know how this place is. If it’s nobody’s business, you can be sure everybody knows about it. Was it terrible? Were there handcuffs on the chairs? I heard he straps you in and shines a bright lamp in your face.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Bryan said. “He just gave me a lecture. But if you should ever find yourself paying Petrowski a visit, just remember to always choose rock.”
“What?”
Bryan shook his head. “Sorry. Forget it. You’ll probably never be called down to the principal’s office anyway.”
Jess smirked. “Don’t be so sure,” she said.
They pulled up at the street and stood on the curb. Mount Comfort Road was bustling, much busier than usual, and nobody seemed to care that it was a school zone either. Most of the cars had to be going at least fifty in a twenty zone. If there had been a cop there, he could have pulled over an entire parade full of cars.
“I’ve never seen it this busy,” Jess remarked as a pickup truck zoomed past, spraying water that just missed their feet. Bryan nodded. The street was packed both ways. Six lanes full. Unusual, to say the least.
At least, it would be unusual on any other day.
“We should probably just walk down to the light and cross there,” Jess suggested, pointing to the school entrance a ways down.
Suddenly Bryan saw a path open before him. He knew what he had to do. “Nah,” he said. “We can make it.” He looked left, then right. Then he took a deep breath and counted to three before doing the very thing he’d told himself he couldn’t only minutes ago. He grabbed Jess’s hand.
“Trust me,” he said.
And then he pulled her out into the busy road.
He could hear her screaming behind him, but Jess’s voice was drowned out by the beeping of the car that zipped past in the next lane over. He felt her grip tighten, trying to break his fingers, as they sprinted across the first two lanes of traffic before Bryan pulled them both to an abrupt stop to let a truck zoom in front of them, so close Bryan could have reached over and tweaked the passenger’s nose through his open window. Another pickup barreled toward them in the middle lane, its driver laying on his horn. Bryan dodged right, took three steps, and then leaped for the median, pulling Jess alongside. She crashed into him, nearly knocking him off the curb into the oncoming traffic headed the other way.
“Are you crazy?” she shouted, nearly breathless, her fingers clenched, knuckle-white, in his.
“I think so. Yeah,” he said, his eyes on the traffic, watching the pattern, waiting for the right moment. It was a matter of reflexes. He could feel his muscles twitch. Cars and trucks shot by on either side. The median was only two feet wide and his Breeches of Enduring Stiffness were buffeted by spray from puddles. He squeezed Jess’s hand. “Ready?” he asked.
“No!” she shouted.
Bryan bolted off the median anyway, dragging her into the street with another shriek. A car darted in front of them. Another behind. A third actually swerved around them, its driver calling out a few names that Bryan had never been called before. He heard the long bellow of a semi’s horn passing in front of them and turned to see another car closing fast. He held his breath, waiting for the truck to pass, and then tugged hard on Jess’s hand, pulling both of them across the final lane and into the grass beyond.
The grass was slicker than the pavement. Bryan’s feet slid beneath him and he dropped, pulling Jess with him, the two of them tumbling down the slope of the drainage ditch, soaking their backs on the wet grass and coming to a rest only a foot from the sloppy mud bottom.
Bryan felt Jess wrench her hand free. He was afraid to look at her. She was mad. That had been stupid. And dangerous. He wasn’t sure what had come over him. He’d seen an opening and he’d taken it.
Jess sat up. She turned to face him. “That was—”
“Idiotic,” he said, saving her the trouble.
“Completely idiotic,” she repeated, then her voice softened. “And kind of fun.” She shook her head and smiled up at the sky. Bryan looked back at the convoy of cars skimming through the puddles on Mount Comfort Road. Already, it seemed, the traffic was starting to thin out and slow down.
“You wanna go again?”
Jess looked down at the slick grass. “I think I’m dirty enough already.” She stood up and twisted around. Sure enough, the back of her jeans was streaked with mud. She shrugged, then bent over and offered her hand. Bryan took it and let her pull him up. She craned her neck to look behind him.
“Yours isn’t so bad,” she said. Then with one hand she brushed the back of his jeans. He felt his face get hot and hoped she wouldn’t notice, just as he barely noticed the blue letters now floating in the air above them.
+50 XP.
For what, exactly, he wasn’t sure. For being brave or stupid or both. For jumping across six lanes of traffic. For making it to the other side.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“See what?”
Bryan shook his head. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” He wasn’t sure why he’d even asked. He just thought/hoped that maybe Jess, of all people, could tell him he wasn’t crazy.
Instead she told him to come on, and to try not to get her killed again.
They passed a gas station a
nd a church and turned into a neighborhood full of older houses, nicer than Bryan’s but only a little. As they walked, he asked her how her day had really gone. She already knew enough about his. The whole school knew. And yet, strangely, they really had no idea. She started telling him how she had been selected to be a photographer for the yearbook.
“It’s called ‘Reflections in Time.’ How awful is that?”
Bryan admitted it was pretty bad. He didn’t think he was going to bother getting a yearbook. He could think of only about seven people who would sign it, and three of them were teachers. Though if Jess was taking pictures for it, he supposed he would have to. She pointed down a road to her right.
“If you turn down that way and go, like, six blocks, you hit our elementary school. Do you remember Ms. Buttes?”
“Of course,” Bryan said. Ms. Buttes was their third-grade teacher. The year he and Jess first met. He remembered very little about the woman except that no one ever pronounced her name right. On purpose. It was supposed to be pronounced “Boo-tez.” But they were third graders, so it was always Butts.
“Yeah, so my mom and I ran into her at the grocery store the other day and found out she got married to Mr. Mackin, the music teacher.”
“I remember Mr. Mackin,” Bryan said. He had no hair and two chins.
“Right. Apparently they are just made for each other, but when they got married, she hyphenated the last name, so now . . .”
She stopped walking and waited for it to sink in, staring at him expectantly. It took a moment, but then Bryan snorted laughter. “Mrs. Buttsmackin’? Oh my God, that’s so sweet.”
“I know, right?” She laughed right alongside him. It was kind of musical. Even better than band practice. Much better than band practice.
“Third grade was awesome.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” She reached up with one hand and retucked that same loose sprig of hair behind her ear. Bryan started to think she shook it loose just so she could put it back whenever he was around.
All down the block the backyards were filling up with younger kids—some of them probably third graders—finishing their after-school snacks and playing make-believe games, completely oblivious, Bryan thought, to what they were in for in a few years. “Speaking of third grade,” he said hesitantly, “you remember how everybody always brought treats for, like, everything? Little goody bags with cheap pencils and stale candy for, like, birthdays and Halloween and stuff.”
“Earth Day. Kiss Your Grandmother Day. Teacher Appreciation Day,” she answered.
“And you had to bring a bag for everyone, even the kids you didn’t like,” Bryan mused.
“I liked everybody,” Jess said, smiling.
“You lie.”
Jess shook her head. “I’m serious. I liked everybody. It’s not until you grow up that you realize what jerks some people are.”
Bryan hoped she didn’t mean him. He had a whole list of people he thought were jerks. That list hadn’t gotten any shorter today. “You couldn’t have liked everybody. Nobody likes everybody.”
“In third grade I did. In our class I did.”
“Even Robbie Vaughn?”
Robbie Vaughn was the really weird kid in third grade. Like, fifty times weirder than Oz, which made him at least a hundred times weirder than Bryan. Bryan once caught Robbie licking the sidewalk, that’s how strange he was. His family moved away two years ago. Probably a good thing, or else he would have ended up going to middle school with Tank Wattly. Then Robbie’s parents would be scraping him off the school parking lot too.
“Robbie Bug-Kisser? He was sweet,” Jess said. “He had really big eyes, though.” Bryan made his own eyes bug out of his head. He could tell she didn’t want to laugh. “He was a little odd, I guess.”
Bryan took a deep breath. “And do you remember Valentine’s Day? I don’t know, you must have forgotten to hand all of yours out or something because after class you came up to me and gave me an envelope. And it had one of those candy hearts in it. The ones that taste like chalk. Do you remember?”
He wasn’t looking at her. He couldn’t look at her. They were both looking at the road unfolding before them, the mail truck parked alongside, the dogs barking, balking at invisible fences. He noticed her shake her head out of the corner of his eye, though.
“You know, the little pastel ones?” he pressed. “With the messages? And the one you gave me was white with red letters that you could barely read.”
BE MINE, it said, but Bryan couldn’t bring himself to say that part.
Jess shook her head again. “What did it say? Do you even remember the message?”
Bryan shrugged. “Something stupid, probably,” he said. “I was just curious.” He stomped at the edge of a puddle, making a small tremor that carried to the other side, distorting his reflection.
“I do remember this one time, though,” Jess said, “in the fifth grade. At lunch. With the sandwich?” She looked at him questioningly. Bryan shook his head. “Really? You don’t remember? My mother had mixed up my lunch with my dad’s, and I got a bologna and mustard sandwich and a note telling me to have a good day at work?”
Bryan tried to think back. He might have a vague recollection of something like that.
“And you must have heard me talking to my friends, even from two tables away, because you came over and asked me if I wanted your peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off.”
Bryan turned and looked at her finally. She was grinning at the thought of it. Crusts cut off. Yes. He remembered now. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. Not like giving someone a chalky piece of candy on Valentine’s Day.
“You said that bologna was your favorite,” Jess continued. “But I watched you. You didn’t take a single bite of that sandwich. You just put it back in your lunch box untouched. And I realized you hated it just as much as I did.”
She was right. He’d put it back in his box, and when he got home, he’d thrown it away, burying it beneath a used coffee filter so his mom wouldn’t ask any questions.
“Just mustard,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t mind bologna. It’s the mustard I can’t stand.”
“Me neither,” Jess said. She took a deep breath before adding, “It was one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever done for me.”
Bryan nearly turned into a puddle himself. Had she actually just called him sweet? She hadn’t exactly, but it was close enough. “I’m sure people do nice things for you all the time,” he said. “I’m sure Landon Prince . . .”
Input error. System failure.
He stopped himself from at least finishing the thought, but it was too late. Jess’s smile disappeared. She seemed to tense up at hearing Landon’s name. If it was possible to kick your own butt without falling over, Bryan would have tried. He looked to the sky for messages in blue writing, options he could choose from, but nothing appeared. He was all on his own with his big mouth.
“Sorry,” he said quickly, hoping she would just let it pass and they could keep talking about third grade and bologna sandwiches and the fact that she liked everybody. But the damage was done.
“No. You’re right,” Jess said, staring now at her mud-stained shoes. “He’s great. I mean, he’s Landon Prince, right?” she said with a sigh. “What’s not to like? He’s cute. And athletic. And popular. He even has good taste in clothes.”
Bryan looked down at his Tunic of Unwashing, now with bonus sweat and a spot of Oz’s blood on the sleeve. Or maybe that was ketchup. Could be ketchup.
“He gets straight As and he never gets in trouble,” Jess continued.
Bryan got As occasionally. And up until today he’d never wrestled with a teacher, tackled a hall monitor, or been sent to the principal’s office.
“Plus he’s nice to just about everyone, and he helps out at the community center, and his family rescues stray dogs. I mean, he’s practically perfect. I’m sure every girl at Mount Comfort thinks so.”
They did. At least according to the messages on the girls’ bathroom walls, they did, but Bryan figured he shouldn’t say that. Instead he thought about the third grade, and Ms. Buttes, and the time when a girl in pigtails handed him an envelope with a candy heart inside. Really? Rescues stray dogs? Suddenly, saving Mr. Mouskerson didn’t seem like a big deal.
“I mean, you’d have to be crazy not to like a guy like that,” Jess added. She looked at Bryan.
He wanted to ask her if she was crazy. He wanted to ask her so many things, in fact. Did she like Star Wars? And did she prefer barbecue chips or sour cream and onion? Dogs or cats? Marvel or DC? What television shows did she watch? Did she know how it made him nuts when she did that hair-tuck thing? He wanted to ask if she ever thought about him, and what she thought about him. And why she had invited him to Missy’s party. And did she ever write him long e-mails and then delete them because they sounded stupid and cheesy and she was afraid he would just laugh at them and tell all his friends? And did she know that walking down the street with her had made this whole whacked-out day of his almost worth it?
But he couldn’t bring himself to say any of those things. He couldn’t even bring himself to look her in the eyes. All he could say was, “I guess so.”
Jess nodded, then took her phone from her pocket, checked it, and put it back. “My house is that one,” she said, pointing down a cul-de-sac to a two-story colonial trimmed in brown to match her eyes. “Thanks for walking me.”
Bryan still didn’t look up from the puddle-splotched street. “No problem,” he murmured.
“Okay. Well. See you around.” Jess turned to go, made it about ten steps, then stopped and turned back. “It’s after four, by the way,” she said from across the street. “Just thought you should know.” Then she turned and disappeared into her house.
After four. Why would she . . .
Bryan shook his head, then fished in his backpack for his own phone, double-checking the time. It was ten after four.
Four o’clock. The Dumpsters behind the diamond. He had missed it. Walking home with Jess, he had lost all track of time. He had lost all track of everything.
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