Right. Like LeRoy Hall near the arboretum. I had made a particular note about that because I was almost positive that LeRoy Hall was one of the arts buildings. Balls.
“Switch categories,” Meg chirped. “Philosophy.”
She and Hari leaned in unison again, finding the proper quiz sheet in their stacks.
The mock Melee went on for another forty-five demoralizing minutes. Every ring of the buzzer set my teeth on edge. My Crap You Don’t Know page was filled to bursting with notes that got smaller and more squished together until I was writing upside down in the margins.
Finally, Hari tucked the buzzer into the pocket of his jeans. “That’s enough for today.”
Kate flopped forward, throwing her arms out as she pressed her face into the carpet and groaned. Jams scrubbed his face with his hands. Perla let out a series of sighed curses.
Hari frowned down the line of us, making sure everyone got their turn to feel his radiating disappointment. “An actual Melee skirmish can last anywhere from an hour to three hours. Right now, none of you had a percent-correct high enough to carry this team to a second round. Keep that in mind when you’re studying.”
“Tomorrow is a free day,” Meg said, as the team blearily went to retrieve our binders. “We’ll have checkins throughout the day so we don’t lose anyone, but we won’t have a team meeting and you’re totally encouraged to take a full mental health day. There will be some field day games out, but it’s your day and you’re welcome to relax. You also have the rest of tonight free. It’s taco night in the dining hall!”
“I hate when they play good cop, bad cop,” Galen said, leading the way out of the room while Meg and Hari stayed to clean up the lounge. “It makes them feel like my parents.”
“I think my brain is leaking out of my ears,” Hunter said. “That’s not great.”
Leigh skipped forward, pressing the button on the elevator. “We’ve only been here for a week; of course we aren’t ready for competition. None of the teams would be ready to compete yet.” She stretched her arms over her head. “The dining hall can’t screw up tacos, right?”
“Where have you been eating for the last week?” Perla asked.
I bounced on the balls of my feet, watching the sign above the elevator slowly light up each floor number. All of my wrong answers replayed in the back of my head, a dozen whispered failures. Could we really pull it together enough in a week to even qualify for a second round of the Melee?
“That was a special kind of awful,” Brandon said quietly as he sidled up next to me. “Halfway through, I was sure I was having a nightmare.”
“How did you convince yourself it was real?” I asked.
His mouth scrunched to the side. “I don’t know if I have. If my sisters show up or if I get pantsed, I guess I’ll know for sure that I’m asleep.”
I smiled. “Or just having the worst day ever. How many sisters should I be keeping watch for?”
He shuddered. “Don’t even joke about them showing up. If you talk about them too much, they appear. Like Bloody Mary. Or Beetlejuice.” He held up his notepaper, which was so covered in notes that it was close to weeping blue ink. “I have to study tomorrow.”
I showed him my page. “Me too.”
“Sci-fi section?”
19
“I know zilch about classical music,” I said, pressing my head down on the table. After my morning run and the standard lukewarm breakfast with the team, Brandon and I had met under the Magrathea poster in the sci-fi section. We had swapped binders immediately, both flipping to the music section.
Except neither of us had made any useful notes in the music section.
Teal double knots looked up at me from the tops of my shoes. They bounced as I stretched my calves.
Brandon’s black and white Chuck Taylors flexed. I was beginning to think that he had only packed one pair of shoes to wear for three weeks straight. “I can say ‘zilch’ in three languages and I don’t know anything about classical music.”
I peeked up at him, resting my cheek against the cold pages of the binder. “Three languages?”
He counted on his fingers, starting thumb first. “Non; that’s French. Nil; Latin—obviously.”
I snorted. “Obviously.”
“And,” he aimed three fingers at me smugly, his eyes flashbulb bright, “sod all.”
“One week of living with Jams and you’re already fluent in vaguely British slang. What would you do if you found out that his mom wasn’t actually from England?”
He considered this. He must have been scrunching his forehead, because his hair slid all the way down to his eyelashes. His hair was hypnotically shiny and super thick. I kept thinking about running my fingers through it to test its depths, even though it was so hypocritical. There was literally nothing worse than strangers asking to touch my hair. It was so creepy and invasive.
But being this close to Brandon was starting to make me feel like a creep. So.
“I would take that secret to my grave,” he said.
“Really? You wouldn’t let it slip even in the split second before you died?”
He shook his head solemnly, letting the hair sway across his forehead. “No way. What if Perla heard me?”
“Oh, good point. The gloating would be unbearable.”
“Besides, I think he might be telling the truth,” he said, reaching for a pencil and twirling it between his fingers like a tiny baton. “This morning, I heard him say ‘yaw-gert.’”
I pried my attention away from the whir of the spinning pencil. “What the hell is yaw-gert?”
“Yogurt.”
“I don’t think that’s how British people say yogurt. I don’t think that’s how anyone pronounces anything.”
“That’s also possible.” The pencil stilled, resting on top of his middle finger. “Okay. Classical music.”
I patted the open binder in front of me and forced myself to sit up straight again.
“I blame Faulkner,” I said.
“That’s not fair. None of the counselors have actually taught anything.”
“But I’m looking at this page,” I stabbed my finger onto the offending sentence, “and it says that the baroque period was ‘typified by its ornate sound and exaggerated dissonance.’ Maybe if I’d actually heard a baroque symphony I would have an idea what that means. I can run back to my room and get my phone, I guess. We could stream a freaking symphony while we study—”
“No!” he blurted. The pencil dropped onto the table and rolled into the unlit lamp.
“No?” I prompted.
He shrank back, his mouth going wiggly. “Remember when you said you were hoping for some genius school juice?”
The most embarrassing thing I’ve ever said? I thought. I wish I could forget about it so quickly.
“I remember,” I said.
“This is it. I think.” He squinted at me as though bracing for impact. When I raised my eyebrows and waited for him to continue, he exhaled. “I think what the counselors were pointing out by not actually hosting classes last week was that it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve internalized the lessons. It’s not about being the most well-versed person in the Melee. Actually, filling in too many of the gaps in the information that the binder provides would be a disadvantage. You can’t live in the details. You’ll drown.” He knocked on the binder in front of him—my binder. “This is us drowning.”
“Because we’re in here and it’s supposed to be our free day?”
He gave an emphatic nod that sent ripples through his hair. “Because everyone is studying on their free day. There were people with binders all over the place between the residence hall and here. And I bet some of them are thinking what you are—they should listen to symphonies. Or download the audiobooks. Or research in the library.”
I could feel awareness starting to crest, a sunrise slowly filling the inside of my head in deep purples and streaky pinks. “But what the Melee is really measuring is how much we c
an take from the binders themselves. It’s like our first lesson with Hari. Jams tried to add information about Oscar Wilde and he got shot down. They’re overloading us to see if we can be overloaded.”
Like boot camp, I thought. I could kick myself for not putting that together earlier. No one at boot camp would volunteer to get less sleep or to do an extra set of push-ups. You took what was given to you and proved that you could thrive in it.
“And to see who cracks under the pressure,” he said. “If you want to know what the Mess is like, it’s that. It’s watching the smartest people you’ve ever met constantly melting down. Crying in the hallways. Getting notes from their psychiatrists that the workload is too much.” He picked up the pencil again and wove it between his fingers. “But you get through it by sticking to the curriculum. You don’t do them any good if you can’t cope.”
“And since they helped write the rules of the Melee, you think it has the same rhetoric?”
“Probably?” He swept a thumb over the edge of the binder’s pages, making a heavy ruffling sound. “This is too much information for one person to memorize. The odds are against us going in. They start with overloading us with information, and then leave spaces where it would make sense to research. Filling in the gaps between dates. Listening to the music. Reading the books that include our short stories.”
“Researching the Mollos before starting on the Incas?” I offered.
“Exactly,” he said excitedly. “But can you think of a single question during the practice last night that didn’t come from the binders?”
I replayed the night before on fast-forward, stealing a glimpse at my Crap You Don’t Know sheet for reference. “Uh. None?”
“None.”
“So we don’t deviate from the binders at all. Even when there are gaping holes, like how ornate the sound of the baroque period was?”
“Even then.”
I rubbed my lips together, feeling a snag of dead skin. I nipped at it. “Can I ask you something without you getting offended?”
He frowned. “That’s ominous, but sure?”
“Did you really just think of this, or did one of your friends tell you?”
“You heard Meg tell Kate that cheating wasn’t worth her losing her paycheck. Believe me. They all feel that way. If it were an internship, they wouldn’t shut up. Now they won’t shut up, but they aren’t helpful.” He hazarded an awkward smile. “I swear, the counselors won’t tell me anything about the inner mechanics of the camp. And if they let anything slip, I will tell you.” He held up two fingers. “Geek’s honor.”
“Getting into this school means everything to me,” I said. “My family would never agree to let me go to a liberal arts school. They’d never pay for it. I have to win placement to go here.”
His wide, hot chocolate eyes bore into mine. “I know you and your brother are here. I promise I wouldn’t try to screw up your chances at this scholarship. I really believe that this is how they’re testing us, Ever.”
It was like he’d turned off the oxygen in the room. I struggled to take in a full breath, my pseudonym echoing in his quiet baritone. I had actually expected to hear him say “Elliot.”
Your Christian names are still an insuperable barrier, quoted my brain.
Why couldn’t things have worked out like they did in the movies? If my life were a romantic comedy, we would study The Importance of Being Earnest and I could dazzle everyone with my prodigious skill for quoting Oscar Wilde.
“I trust you,” I said, forcing a smile. “Let’s start memorizing this binder then. How do you feel about flash cards?”
*
“Noon,” Brandon announced, checking the binary clock built into the wall above the archway. “We should go find a checkin.”
In order to make sure that none of us strayed too far, we had been given a list of checkin spots at breakfast. Between each meal, we were expected to hit up a sign-in sheet manned by a counselor. I was sure it was a legal buffer that would not hold up in court.
“You know what would make these flash cards even better?” Brandon asked as we started clearing the Magrathea table.
“If they weren’t scraps of binder paper?”
“Sure, if you’re going to be picky about it. I was thinking they’d look nicer typed.”
I closed his binder and slid it across the table to him. “Your typewriter obsession is so bizarre.”
“Yeah. It’s shocking that my genius school education didn’t make me cooler,” he said in a sarcastic monotone.
“Sure, blame the Messina.” I laughed. “I’m sure you were super cool before high school.”
“No one’s cool before high school. It takes a while to figure out that popular and cool aren’t synonymous.”
I tucked my pencils back into the pocket of my binder. I certainly hadn’t been cool before—or during—high school. Switching schools twice in elementary school had left me permanently on the fringes of high society. Hitting my growth spurts hard in middle school only made me noticeable in a You look too old to be here sort of way.
“Are the popular kids in genius school still the pretty people?” I asked as we walked out of the sci-fi section and into the dim of the library proper.
“Some of them,” he said, hoisting his binder under his arm. “Or the rich kids. It’s private school and it’s not cheap, so there are plenty of rich kids to choose from. The basketball team is usually more popular than the cricket players…” He seemed to be waiting for me to flip out when he said “cricket.” We slipped through the fiction section, side by side. “Mostly people stick to their extracurricular groups.”
“And where do you fit in?” I asked.
He shrugged. “None of the above. I was on student council my freshman year because the administration picks the frosh cabinet. I got voted out my sophomore year. I’ve kept out of extracurriculars since. Keeping up with the workload seemed like enough. It wasn’t. Apparently.” He lowered his voice as we passed by a row of occupied tables with lamps lit and books stacked high with nonbinder study material. “What about you? Does your school have a club for parkour and Muay Thai enthusiasts?”
“Yes. But you have to be black and tall and nerdy to join,” I whispered back. “Enrollment isn’t great. But our one member does have excellent taste in books, and awesome hair.”
“Damn,” Brandon said as we reached the exit. “I have two out of the three requirements.”
“Oh, did I not mention that members can’t own typewriters?”
“Ha-ha,” he said dryly.
The truth was, Dad and Beth let me take Muay Thai a couple of times a week because the schedule moved around enough that I could continue babysitting Ethan when needed. Neither of them had been thrilled when I announced that I wanted to learn a full-contact fight style, but they had shut up when I reminded them that they hadn’t let me try out for track because Beth had been in her fifth production of Earnest.
The glare of summer sunlight and a whoosh of warm air hit us as we passed through the door and took the first step. I looked up just in time to keep from crashing into Leigh and Isaiah.
Together.
Binderless.
Did I mention that they were together?
“Hey, Ever,” Isaiah said, stretching my camp name out a mile as he threw on a full shit-eating, teeth-baring grin that really made me want to pop him upside the head.
“This is my brother,” I said to Brandon, and every word was like yanking out one of my own teeth. “Brandon, Isaiah. Isaiah, Brandon.”
“Good to meet you,” Brandon said.
Isaiah lifted an eyebrow at him. “Don’t we share a bathroom?”
“Yeah,” Brandon said slowly. “I’m across the hall from you.”
Isaiah nodded. “Right. With the big-eared kid.”
“Hi, Ever. Hi, Brandon,” Leigh said, her shoulders inching closer and closer to her ears. “Isaiah was looking for his cell phone, so I volunteered to help him out. His team was totally usel
ess.”
“Do you guys need help?” Brandon asked.
“Nah,” Isaiah said. “We’ve got this.”
“If you’re sure,” I said stiffly. “I’d hate for you to miss any important calls from home. Let me know if you need help.”
“Will do, Sis,” Isaiah said, and I wondered if Leigh or Brandon noticed the hiss he threw in at the end.
“I’ll catch you guys at lunch!” Leigh said with a small, sharp wave.
I watched the two of them skip into the library together. Isaiah’s elbow bumped Leigh’s. Her giggle floated to us on the breeze, riding on the back of Isaiah’s astringent cologne.
20
“He was looking for you,” Leigh said, stripping off her sheets and wadding them into a zebra print ball in her arms. “And his team really is useless. Fallon keeps locking herself in her dorm, and I don’t think Cornell is running their mock Melees correctly. He’s being way too nice.”
“It’s not a problem,” I lied. Even after lunch, I hadn’t been able to shake the uneasy feeling caused by seeing my roommate and my fake twin together. It was too farcical. Too Earnest. “I was surprised because you guys only met once.”
“And then we met a second time, this morning, when he was searching for you in the quad.” She kicked under her bed until her heel caught the handle of a voluminous blue IKEA bag that was big enough that she could have comfortably slept in it. She dropped her sheets into it. “Go ahead and toss in your socks.”
“Thank you,” I gasped. I unzipped my suitcase, rummaging to the bottom to find the dirty socks I’d tried to smell-proof in a ziplock bag over the last week. “When is our next checkin?”
“Three o’clock in the lobby.” She shook her head. “Not like they even need to bother. If anyone got seen breaking the rules, someone would turn them in.”
“It’s a liability waiver,” I said, shaking my dirty socks into the laundry bag. “If someone runs off campus or gets pregnant, the school can say that they have written proof of where everyone else was.”
She giggled. “Okay, Miss Lawyer’s Daughter.”
My stomach dropped through the floor, landing somewhere in the lobby. I had never talked to her about my dad. “Isaiah mentioned that, huh?”
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