My brain grappled with this for a moment. We were here to compete. Everyone was working with the same base level IQ. Distracting the rest of the teams from that was a solid tactic.
“And,” Leigh said, “I learned two very important things from this experiment. One, John is not a ghost. He has a heartbeat and a distinct lack of ectoplasm. Two, his name is not John. It’s Brandon.” She stuck out her tongue, as though the name was sour in her mouth. “A total failure on the part of his parents. Have you ever seen someone who looks more like a John?”
You look as if your name was Ernest, said my brain. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life.
Great. The Wilde was back. Why couldn’t Beth have repeatedly done a useful show? People who could quote Shakespeare seemed cultured, not possessed.
Leigh’s forehead scrunched into a single painful-looking wrinkle. “There’s a guy coming over here.” She leaned to the side to see around my shoulder. “Do you want me to get another soda to make sure he’s alive?”
I opened my mouth to laugh, but it died in my throat, threw itself a funeral, and dug graves for every ounce of joy that I could ever feel again, the second a plate fell down next to mine. There was a heap of deli meats and cheeses hidden under a tidal wave of ranch dressing. The air congealed with the smell of mango dreadlock wax and an entire can of drugstore cologne.
Run, my brain screamed. Abort mission. Punch everyone who gets between you and the door. Get on the train back home.
“Hey, Ellie,” Isaiah said.
5
In an instant, I was off the bench and lugging my cousin out of the dining hall. His feet staggered and tripped behind me as he attempted to go full deadweight.
“Elliot, Jesus, stop it. People are watching.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” I hissed, digging my fingernails deep into his arm. My heart was slamming in my chest, pushing me forward, deeper into the nightmare.
When we were little, Isaiah and I would get dumped together a lot. We were close in age and only half an hour’s drive away from each other, and our parents never noticed that we didn’t actually like each other. For years, we had to go to each other’s birthday parties and share babysitters. Once, before my dad and Beth got married, we were stuck together for an entire summer vacation. It was months of jelly sandwiches and tattling and generalized punching and pinching each other while Sid watched TV.
I hated spending time with Isaiah so much that I cried when I found out that I was going to have a little brother, because I thought that he might turn out to be as annoying as my cousin.
Which, of course, Ethan wasn’t, because it was literally impossible for anyone to be as annoying as Isaiah.
Now that we were both too old to need a babysitter—although I wouldn’t have been surprised if Aunt Bobbie still had one on call for her precious baby—Isaiah and I only had to suffer through each other’s company for holidays and family reunions.
Except that he was here. At camp. Which was twenty-one days long.
I kicked open the door. I shoved him out first and he stumbled back toward the stairs before straightening to his full height, exactly at eye level with me. He was wearing ratty jean shorts with round white skate shoes.
Skate shoes? Come on. How in the hell were we biologically related?
I dragged the heels of my hands over my eyes. The inside of my head felt muggy and punch-drunk.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I looked out at the empty quad, waiting for an ambush to come dropping down from the skinny trees. “Where’s Sid?”
“At home.” He rubbed at the four crescent-shaped imprints on his arm; his lower lip stuck out. “Aren’t you in L.A.?”
I gestured around wildly. “Keep up, idiot. Obviously, I’m not in L.A. I’m right here. Why are you here?”
Remembering that his pouting had zero effect on me, he switched into Lawrence defense mode: folded arms over a puffed chest and words clipped down into confetti. “I entered the Melee. Between my Stanford–Binet score and my PSATs, I was an obvious choice for the admissions board.”
I refused to give him the satisfaction of asking what a Stanford–Binet was, but I made a mental note to Google it once I was back in my dorm.
“You decided to try to win free admission to Rayevich?” I asked. “Rather than tell your sister that you don’t want to go to the academy next year?”
“And you’re here to what? Learn to fly?” He cocked his head, sending his dreads sliding across his neck. “You lied.”
I folded my arms back at him. He could use the Lawrence voice on me all he wanted. Only one of us had learned to argue from an attorney. My father wasn’t a great lawyer, but he was the king of talking in circles until he found a chink in the armor.
“Sid and Aunt Bobbie know where you are?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t lie to my mom,” he said.
“Yeah, like when you told her about breaking her favorite snow globe? Remember how loud it popped? You got glitter water all over our church shoes. Oh wait. You swore that I did it and Grandma put me in time-out for all of Christmas.”
He shook his head. “I’m grown, Elliot. I’m not six anymore.”
“Tell that to your bottom lip. It’s shaking again.” The offending lip tucked back into a scowl. “And stop calling me that. I’m not Elliot here. I’m Ever Lawrence.”
His eyebrows went up. “You stole my last name?”
“It’s one of my last names, too. It’s on my driver’s license and everything. Not that you’d know what a driver’s license looks like, since your mommy won’t let you take the test until you turn eighteen.”
He wasn’t listening. He scuffed the toe of his offensive shoe against the cement until the rubber bent. “What kind of name is Ever? Like Everett? Did you really pick another dude name? Couldn’t you live with a girl name for once? You could be an Ashley or a Lauren or something normal.”
Embarrassment ratcheted up my spine as I thought about scrolling endlessly through baby names online. Ever had struck me as effortlessly feminine, a breezy giggle of a name. It was the sort of nickname that begged an adorable backstory: My parents used to say, “I love you forever,” and I thought Forever was my name!
Or something less stupid. Whatever.
“Where do Sid and Bobbie think you are?” I asked Isaiah again. “You aren’t even allowed to compete at out-of-state academic decathlon meets.” Family gossip rattled around in my brain, vague information from phone calls with Mom and Grandmother Lawrence that had never been useful before. “Didn’t you miss the finals last year because your mom didn’t want you to go all the way to Nevada alone? She’d never let you leave home without a chaperone.”
“She would for the leadership camp!”
He looked like he wanted to stuff the sentence back into his mouth, but it was too late. Triumph welled in my stomach as he squirmed.
“The air force leadership adventure camp?” I asked, shoving him hard in the shoulder. “The one in Washington? How are you this stupid? You know that they’ll be able to track whether or not you’re there, right? One phone call from your mom or my mom or Sid and you’ll get caught. And that means I’ll get caught!”
“No one is getting caught doing anything,” he said. “Sid’s ex is running the camp. He said that he’d keep my name on the roster for all three seminars. He’s even going to mail a T-shirt here so I can wear it on the flight home. Did you make plans for a mock trial T-shirt?”
I goggled at him. “What? No. That plan sucks. Sid’s ex could slip up. Sid could go back to base early and decide to come visit you and no amount of free Tshirts is going to save you. You need to go home. Now.”
“Okay.” He shrugged. “Let me take a selfie of us real quick—”
He started to reach into his pocket and I kicked him, hard, in the shins. I could hear my Muay Thai instructor crying foul. You were never supposed to hit someone who wasn’t padded. But the rules needed to be broken for blackmailing
douche-canoes.
“Ow!” he whined, taking two steps away from me before I could smash his nose into his brain. “It’s mutually assured destruction, El—Ever. If anyone finds out that I’m here, then you have to go home, too. And then we’ll both end up at the academy. I need this scholarship. My dad isn’t going to pay for me to disappoint him.” His mouth twisted into a mocking smile. “Not that you’d know anything about that.”
Fear flashed through my system, raising the hairs on my arms. How disappointed would my parents be if I won the Melee? Would I have to leave for college on the same midnight train, with no one to hug me good-bye?
I swallowed, struggling to hold on to my rage as I glared at my cousin. “You’re running away.”
“Duh. So are you.”
“Did you just ‘duh’ me? Who says ‘duh’? How did you even qualify for a place here?”
The door to the dining hall swung open. Cornell-the-counselor’s head popped out. He was already smiling. It was possible that he never stopped smiling. It was obnoxious.
“Hey, Ever,” he crowed, like we hadn’t seen each other in years. “Everything okay?”
“Great, good, thanks,” I grunted.
He took a step out, aiming his goodwill and two-pump handshake at Isaiah. “Cornell Aaron. I’m one of the counselors here.”
“Isaiah Lawrence,” Isaiah said, his voice dropping down to match Cornell’s postpubescent bass. “Sorry, I got here late. My flight was late. I guess my sister had the right idea, taking the train.”
It took a second for me to catch up with that statement. Before I could open my mouth to point out that we were cousins, Cornell was bobbing his head and saying, “No sweat, man. Good to meet you. I think you’re on my Melee team.”
“Cool.” Isaiah bobbed his head back. “I didn’t think I’d see any other brothers up here. You hear things about Oregon, you know?”
I tilted my head back and cringed at the cloudless sky. Even the darkest recesses of my brain wouldn’t have been able to conjure up a moment more horrifying to me than this.
“The camp’s very diverse,” Cornell said, regaining his bearings. “You guys should head back inside. Wendell’s going to announce the teams soon.” He waggled a finger at us. “No collusion. I don’t care if you’re twins.”
My jaw flopped open as he disappeared inside again.
“Twins?” I spluttered at Isaiah. “Twins? We don’t look anything alike.”
“We’ve both got Grandpa’s eyes. Everyone says so.”
“Everyone” being Grandmother Lawrence.
Really, Isaiah and I both had buggy eyes—round, with a lot of eyelid. And we weren’t exactly the same shade of brown, but we were both dark. Darker than the Lieutenant. Darker than Cornell-the-counselor.
After that, all comparisons ground to a halt. Isaiah’s head was almost perfectly square. Mine was round. My legs took zero pit stops from the ground to my shoulders, whereas Isaiah was built like a satyr, with stubby little bowlegs. I’d always be taller than him by at least an inch.
“We’re the same age,” he said with an irritating calm. “We’d have to be twins.”
“I’m a year older than you!”
“We’re both seniors. And everyone at camp has to be at least seventeen. Like enlisting.”
“But you aren’t seventeen.”
His face split into a maniacal grin. “I am now, Sis. Mutually assured destruction.”
“This is some racist bullshit,” I said. “I am not going to spend all summer pretending to be your sister. I don’t even like being your cousin. I’m not upgrading our genes because of one color-struck counselor.”
“Hey, you’re the one who stole my last name. It’s an understandable mistake.”
“It’s my name, too, you—”
“You heard the man,” he interrupted, with an infuriating chuckle. “We need to head back. I haven’t eaten since I left for the airport. Who was that girl you were sitting with? I saw her bust a soda on some skinny kid when I got here. She better not have touched my sandwich.”
I followed him back inside, feeling like most of my more vital organs had been replaced with steel wool. There was no argument to make him leave. If I tattled, I was screwed. We’d both end up at home, grounded until we left for the academy together next year.
On the same plane.
In the same cadet training.
If one of us didn’t win the scholarship at the end of the Melee, we’d be shackled together for the next five years.
Mom was right. I couldn’t choose my deployment. I’d ended up in my first combat zone—a liberal arts college in the second-largest city in Oregon, crawling with geniuses and kamikaze roommates. And my entire future rested on the hope that Isaiah didn’t take both of us down in a rain of friendly fire.
“You’re going to have to be nicer to me, now that we’re twins,” he said as we walked back toward Leigh.
What nonsense, said Oscar Wilde. I haven’t got a brother.
6
“This is a competition, not a bacchanalia,” Bryn Mawr shouted at the eight campers sitting in a circle around her, as she stabbed the makeshift flag into the ground. The hot pink poster board attached to the top of the wooden dowel read “Team Six” in silver glitter. “I go to an all-girls’ school. If I can keep it in my pants for twenty-one days, so can you.”
“Whoa, whoa, Mary-Anne,” the Rayevich counselor next to her said. “I really don’t think that we need to—”
Leigh pulled me away from their group. “Are you sad that you and Isaiah aren’t on the same team?”
Wendell Cheeseman had announced all of the Melee teams before we’d been excused from the dining hall. Every team had eight campers—four boys from the same floor, four girls from the floor above them. Isaiah was one floor below mine, but too far to the side to end up on my team. Thank God.
“No,” I said. “We don’t really get along.”
No matter what ideas Isaiah had about us playing nice for the summer, there was no way that this was going to build into some movie moment. There would be no tearful confessions or hugs of understanding.
First of all, Lawrences didn’t hug.
Second, if I got too close to Isaiah, I’d never be able to wash off the stink of his cologne.
Thankfully, Leigh had taken Isaiah’s appearance in stride. They’d bonded over a shared love of academic decathlon. They’d spent the rest of lunch trading war stories about the worst books they’d been required to read for competition.
It was boring, but harmless.
“For the next three weeks, you will refer to me only as ‘Captain,’” the Perfect Nerd Girl from Stanford was saying to her team as she tossed binders at them. “And if we lose a single competition to Team Four, I will have all of you wishing that I had an airlock to throw you out of. Do I make myself clear, nuggets?”
“This is what I was telling you about,” Leigh hissed, keeping her head down. “Messina people are freaking strange.”
I started to point out that the Perfect Nerd Girl was referring to Battlestar Galactica, but the speaker set up in front of the dining hall thrummed to life.
“Victor Onobanjo,” growled Lumberjack Beard. His mouth was way too close to the microphone, garbling his voice. “Please report to Team Four. Victor Onobanjo.”
I yanked Leigh back as a scrawny, dark-skinned kid in a soccer jersey raced past us, waving his arms over his head.
“Seriously,” Leigh said, wrenching the hem of her cola-stained shirt down around her shorts. “With this many smart kids in one place, you’d think they could follow basic signage. This is the problem with trusting an IQ test for admission. It doesn’t factor in common sense.”
“Says the girl who attacks ghosts with soda.”
“You’re going to have to let that go, Ever.” She sighed. “It’s very twenty minutes ago.”
In the shade of a wide oak tree, the green poster board Team One flag was planted. A circle of mismatched blankets was set
out. Meg was sitting cross-legged next to our Rayevich counselor, who was thin with owlish brown glasses balanced on his long, light brown nose. A stack of thick plastic-wrapped binders sat between them. Most of the team was already seated—two girls that I vaguely recognized from the lobby of the residence hall were sharing a My Little Pony blanket, and two boys were beside them, staring vacantly at their cell phones.
“Oh, honey,” Meg said as Leigh and I approached. “I told you that you could go back to your room to change.”
“I’m fine,” Leigh said, folding her arms over the worst of the stains on her shirt. “I don’t want to slow us down.”
“I love that you’re already a team player,” Meg said. She sounded as though she really meant it, but that could have just been because everything she said sounded vaguely like it was licensed by Disney. She twisted to the side and her face lit up with a megawatt smile as Brandon-Who-Was-Not-Named-John and a boy in a sweater vest approached. Each of them was carrying an armload of the water bottles from the beverage table.
“Oh, B, you sweetums,” Meg said as the boys set the water bottles next to the flagpole. “Thank you both.”
“Tosh,” said the boy in the sweater vest, collapsing down next to Meg.
Brandon looked around, as though hoping for another blanket to appear, before he sat down next to me. He folded his elbows and knees close to himself, making sure not to brush a single thread of my blanket.
Uh. Did we not share a moment back in the dining hall? I totally fought my resting bitch face for that not-John.
That’s it, Ever, I thought. Take a page out of the Elliot Gabaroche handbook. No more smiling back.
He leaned forward, his shirt riding up in the back, revealing a stretch of snowy skin that had never seen the sun before. He snagged two water bottles from the pile and sat back, holding them out to me.
“Do you want one?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly husky. Not smoker raspy, but softly scratchy. Like a wool sweater.
Not Now, Not Ever Page 4