Not Now, Not Ever

by Lily Anderson

  “Excuse you,” I said.

  “You’re excused,” he said, barely giving me a passing glance before leaning forward to invade Leigh’s personal space. “Hey, Leigh.”

  “Hi, Zay,” she said.

  “Zay?” I echoed.

  He turned back to me, his lips pressed together so tight they had a slope of zero. “Yes, Ev?”

  Oh, wonderful. We had twin nicknames now.

  “Did you find your phone yet?” I asked him.

  “I’m working on it.” He shrugged. “It probably fell out of my pocket when you tossed me around Mudders Meadow. Good thing they’re only letting us up the tree one person at a time.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Who would come get you if you got hurt? Dad is so busy.”

  Translation: Your dad is deployed right now and if you break a bone up here the camp is going to have to call Aunt Bobbie to come get you. So don’t mess with me right now because I will snap your arm in half.

  I hoped he got all of that from my tone.

  “When was the last time you guys climbed a tree?” Leigh asked, stepping back so that she could get a full view of the tree house.

  I thought about the rough bark on the oak tree in front of my house. Ethan often begged to sit on my shoulders so he could swing himself onto the lower boughs. It wasn’t super comfortable up there in the company of territorial squirrels and falling acorns, but he liked the novelty of it. Dad had repeatedly and firmly denied his request for a tree house. A real one with walls and windows, not like the flimsy structure currently hanging over our heads.

  “We have an oak tree in our front yard the perfect height for climbing,” Isaiah said.

  I planted my feet firmly in the grass to keep from jumping out of my shoes before I remembered that he and Sidney had picked me up from my house for our family dinner the night I’d run away. I wasn’t used to Isaiah knowing anything about me other than the information relayed between our mothers.

  To keep the trial from stretching on to lights out, everyone was given a three-minute time limit to reach the bell in the tree house. Most people didn’t make it up the trunk by the time Lumberjack Beard called “Time!” into his bullhorn. Hunter was the first person to ring the bell, followed closely by Jams, who beat his time by fifteen seconds.

  After Jams shimmied down to the ground again, Hunter greeted him at the edge of the field with a whoop. Panting but smiling, Jams threw his arms around Hunter’s neck. They kissed like there was no greater celebration than mashing their faces together. And, really, there probably wasn’t.

  Isaiah opened his mouth—undoubtedly to say something shitty that would leave me no choice but to start breaking his bones—but Leigh clasped her hands over her heart.

  “Oh, I was hoping they’d get together,” she said. “I was afraid their uneven levels of attractiveness would get in the way.” She scrunched her face and looked up at me. “God, don’t tell anyone I said that. I just mean that Jams is an awkward weirdo like me.”

  “You’re not a weirdo,” Isaiah said. “You’re unique.”

  Leigh blinked at him, unaware that the line was moving again. “Oh. Um. Thank you?”

  I held my tongue through the next few competitors. Once Leigh was stretching against the base of the tree trunk, I hissed at Isaiah, “What in the hell are you doing? Stop flirting with my roommate.”

  “What?” he squawked. It was easy to forget how young he was, until he started bugging out his eyes like a cornered animal. “I’m not flirting with her. You let her stand there and talk shit about herself. I was being nice. She’s your friend, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” I said, shoving aside the hiccup of guilt in my throat. Why hadn’t I defended Leigh to herself? She always seemed so comfortable announcing herself as awkward. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might come from a negative place.

  “And I’m your brother. Why wouldn’t I be nice to your friends?”

  “Why aren’t you making friends of your own?”

  “You don’t know my life.”

  Just over his shoulder, I watched as Leigh kicked her flip-flops off, barely missing Simone, the Rayevich counselor with the box braids. Hugging the flat, ribbed bark, Leigh pressed her feet flat against the tree trunk, her butt stuck out in full squat before she jumped. Once, twice, three times, each jump propelling her impossibly upwards. When her arm was close enough, she reached up and swung herself in one fluid arc up into the tree house, landing with a resounding ding on the bell.

  “Thirty-five seconds,” Lumberjack Beard said, reading from the Perfect Nerd Girl’s phone. He had forgotten the booming announcer voice he usually used into the bullhorn. He turned to face the line of us. “Does anyone think they can beat that?”

  As Leigh descended Meg broke into wild applause, which the rest of us picked up. Leigh’s cheeks went livid pink as her bare feet hit the ground.

  “That was pretty cute, though,” Isaiah said, clapping his hands loudly. “She’s mixed, right?”

  “Shut up, Zay.”

  “Never, Ever.”

  I couldn’t stop my hand from flying up and slapping him upside the head. As he whined, I rushed out to the sidelines to watch Leigh receive her blue ribbon.

  22

  To: Elliot L. Gabaroche

  From: Lieutenant Colonel Marissa Lawrence

  Subject: Hey Stranger

  Ellie,

  I hope Cross Fit is going well. All that shit looks like too much jumping for my old bones. And in Sacramento summer? Whew. You’re going to be a superhero by the end of all this.

  I put a little extra money into your checking account. (Don’t get too excited. It’s not enough money for new shoes.) Do something other than sit around the theater and the gym, okay? Go get a smoothie or an ice cream cone. Oh, and return a phone call sometime. Your voicemail is tired of me.

  Loving you,

  Mom

  My heart gave a painful squeeze as I closed the email. I wasn’t ready to engage with my life outside of camp. I made a mental note to check my bank account and write a thank you text to my mom before bed. I closed the Internet browser, letting my unfinished essay take over the screen again.

  “Ever, I need you to learn everyone’s name,” Leigh said, stretching her arms over her head and pointing her toes. She made tiny kicking motions like she was swimming through the grass in the quad.

  I turned off my computer’s Wi-Fi surreptitiously. Leigh was distraction enough. “We’re only here for another two weeks. By the time I learn them, I’ll be back in California.”

  “Don’t say that.” Her head popped up while her body remained planted against the ground. “I’m not ready to think about the end yet.”

  Since everyone at camp was hyperfocused on their binders and the Cheeseman events, the counselors had carved out an extra period for us to work on the essays that were also required for the Melee. We were allowed to use the essays we had submitted with our Onward applications, as long as we padded them out from two pages to ten.

  Ten pages. Not including the required footnotes.

  Rather than holing up inside while the sun was out, Leigh had agreed to sit with me in the quad. Her notebook and pencil sat forgotten beside her while she contorted her body into a variety of yoga poses that were supposed to get her inspiration flowing. It didn’t appear to be working.

  Lumberjack Beard—or Ben, as Leigh had just insisted I call him—had broken down the structure of our theses last week before letting us flounder in our own ideas. It should be a personal statement backed by historical facts and evidence, leading back into personal information. I’d gone through my essay on why I wanted to go to Rayevich and found all of the places where I could easily slip in information about the history of the science fiction I liked. It was harder finding the places where I could talk more about why I liked it.

  Some things click into place so quietly that you can’t even hear it, I typed, as Leigh tumbled backwards into a headstand. I don’t know the first time I understood
what space was. It’s always been there, waiting for me to return to it.

  Now how was I supposed to connect that with real, historical facts? It was like opening up my rib cage and stuffing memos inside. I remembered Galen scoffing at the idea of us needing help with our essays, on the first day of classes. I missed agreeing with him.

  “Damn and crap and balls. I need to have a full draft of this ready to print by dinner so I can print it out in the library before we have class tomorrow.” I closed the laptop screen and glanced at Leigh’s rapidly reddening upside-down face. “You know, if you popped your head off right now, you would look exactly like the Cheshire cat.”

  “I hate Alice in Wonderland,” she mused. “And Peter Pan. We glorify so many books written by pedophiles.” She bent her knees and slowly lowered herself into downward dog. “Are you studying again tonight?”

  “Aren’t we all studying literally all the time?” I asked the top of her head. The neon yellow was starting to fade, letting the hint of dark roots start to bleed through. Until Isaiah had mentioned her being mixed, I hadn’t considered what her hair would look like grown out. I couldn’t picture her with my springy-soft curls. Maybe her hair would be ringlety, like my brother’s had been before Dad convinced Beth to let him start shaving it off.

  It seemed rude to ask her, though.

  “Are you studying with Brandon tonight?” she clarified, the question aimed at her own belly button.

  “I don’t know.” And I didn’t. Sure, we had studied together regularly for the last few nights, but every day was a new possibility that he wouldn’t at some point look at me and say, “Sci-fi?,” as though I wasn’t already heading there or disappearing to the Magrathea table mentally throughout the day.

  “Ever,” she said. “Come on.”

  “What? You come on.”

  “No.” She drew out the word into a trill. “You come on.”

  “We could do this for the rest of our lives and neither of us would get anywhere.”

  “Fine.” She dropped into a push-up position and curved her body upward like a snake so she could look me in the eye. “If you tripped and fell into Brandon’s mouth, would you immediately back away or would you—I don’t know—make yourself at home?”

  I glared at her. “I am not going to dignify that with a response.”

  “Okay. A nonconsensual hypothetical wasn’t the best place to start. What if you had a written confession from him that he would be into you tripping and falling onto his face?”

  “Why am I so clumsy in this fantasy?”

  “There are trip wires everywhere. Or tree roots. Or you’re so overwhelmed with ghostly lust that you forget how to use your feet.”

  I reopened my laptop. Working on my essay was way more useful than putting a magnifying glass up to how I felt about my study buddy.

  God. Were we study buddies? That was the most sexless sanction you could give someone, outside of actually becoming related to them.

  “How close are we to lunch?” Leigh asked, dropping back down onto her forearms so that her body went board straight. It was no wonder she’d been able to scurry up the ash tree in the arboretum. She had the abdominal strength of a steel beam.

  I laughed. “You’re kidding, right? We’re fifteen minutes into this period.”

  She raised one arm off the ground and pointed toward the residence hall. Kate was marching down the steps, her binder hugged to her chest as tightly as possible. She took short, scuttling steps toward us.

  “Sorry,” she said, halting abruptly a couple of feet away. “It is so loud in the hall right now. I couldn’t focus. It’s like no one else is worried about their essays. You guys don’t mind if I join you, do you?”

  “Go right ahead,” Leigh said.

  Kate let out an audible sigh of relief and sat down next to Leigh’s stretched legs, smoothing her binder over her knees. She plucked a pencil out from the rubber band holding back her ponytail and starting writing in a flurry.

  Leigh caved to the peer pressure, finally lying down flat and drawing her notebook under her nose.

  The three of us worked in relative silence for about ten minutes before I looked up to see Galen and Hunter coming out of the residence hall, both with laptops under their arms. They sat down with us in time to watch Brandon and Jams following their footsteps.

  “In case you were wondering if we can hear what’s happening on your floor,” Jams said with a grimace as he sat down beside Hunter, “we can.”

  “I already knew that,” I said. “You knocked on my floor yesterday.”

  “Well, we knocked on our ceiling,” Brandon said. I was unsurprised to see that he’d left the typewriter behind. It really wasn’t a practical piece of equipment.

  “Is that girl still crying?” Kate asked Jams, who nodded.

  “Who’s crying?” Leigh asked.

  “Someone on your floor,” Hunter said. “There’s been a lot of thumping and shouting and crying.”

  Jams nodded. “Sounds like a nasty row.”

  “He means ‘fight,’” Brandon translated.

  “That was an easy one,” Hunter said, turning his beatific smile to Jams. “That one is in Harry Potter.”

  “But who was it?” Leigh repeated, aiming the question at Kate again. “Did you check to see if she was okay?”

  “It was one of Perla’s friends,” Kate said, her chin retreating into her neck. She was particularly horselike when she was affronted. “Meg is taking care of it. It is her job.”

  Leigh tapped her pencil against her teeth. “She must not be doing a great job if the noise drove you all out here.”

  “But now we get all this great quality time,” I said.

  Brandon brought his knees up to his chest. “I bet that was Meg’s plan all along.”

  Galen’s eyes widened. “I don’t think so, guys…”

  The doors to the residence hall opened and adults appeared. I was more surprised to see them than I should have been. The school couldn’t be completely abandoned. Presumably there were people working in the admissions office, and custodians working in the shadows. But I hadn’t seen a real, live, non-Cheeseman adult in a full week.

  The single teen in the group was a girl with blunt bangs, bloodshot eyes, and two lip rings, who I recognized as one of Perla’s cool cola-drinking friends. Now, her entire face was wet with tears and mucus and smeared mascara. She was flanked by Bryn Mawr, Meg, and three women I’d never seen before. Two of them—both youngish and blondish—held suitcases and backpacks. The third was squat, with light brown skin, and spoke into a cell phone, with a slight Spanish accent.

  “I understand your concerns, but this is an issue that comes up from time to time.” She was smiling as she spoke, but she kept pushing the blondish girls forward, making them skip and stumble. “Students can become overwhelmed by the distance. Classic homesickness. My own daughter did the same thing her first semester at college. Of course, the course load is a factor. But I’ve got to tell you that there are forty-seven other students, as well as hundreds of Onward graduates, who have been extremely successful under our unique conditions…”

  The girl with the two lip rings started to cry loudly again, her hands trembling against her mouth. Bryn Mawr cupped her elbow and steered her toward the parking lot; the rest of the assembled party marched behind.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hunter said softly. “It’s not that bad here, is it?”

  “Sometimes it is,” Kate murmured.

  “Feels like home,” Brandon said under his breath. I thought about him saying that his school was full of people randomly sobbing in hallways. I hadn’t considered how disturbing that would be in person.

  “She will call you from the airport,” the brunette woman shouted into the phone. She seemed to be attempting to be louder than the crying, which was impossible. Even as their huddle disappeared behind the dining hall, the girl’s sobs left a bone-chilling echo.

  “Let the record show that it was a Monday when the fir
st camper fell,” Galen said with an uneasy half smile.

  “Is this where the summer takes a turn for the Hunger Gamesy?” Leigh asked.

  Brandon shriveled under his hair again. “I’ve always preferred Battle Royale.”

  “What about Lord of the Flies?” asked Jams.

  “Hell no,” Galen said. “I am not going to be your Piggy.”

  “And I am not going out like Rue,” I said.

  “They never say for sure how Panem was formed,” Kate said, her words gaining strength as she picked up steam. “It could take place inside of a nuclear holocaust and you’d never even know it.”

  “Oh, well, in that case sign me up for the freaking Quarter Quell,” I laughed. It wasn’t strong enough to soothe the feeling of the girl’s cries burning in my ears.

  Would she be relieved when she sat down on the plane or would she want to claw her way back? Was her family happy to have her coming home?

  I turned back to my laptop, the essay fragments floating on the screen. I was going to keep clawing my way forward. I hoped it was the right choice.

  *

  That night, I stood in the upper level of the library, gnawing on my lower lip as I tried for a third time to get my laptop to hook into the Wi-Fi. There had been a rush on the printers all day, but I had slipped out of dinner early to make sure that my essay would be printed, stapled, and set to be eviscerated before I went to sleep.

  The library was sort of spooky when it was completely empty. There was no click of table lamps, no rustle of turning pages. Only the sound of my own laptop keyboard and the thrum of the massive old wireless printer that I was attempting to connect to. And the pounding of blood in my temples. A headache had taken root at the nape of my neck and had been sending tendrils of pain slithering around my skull since lunch.

  The endless flicker in the fluorescent lights and the hard plastic chair I was sitting on weren’t helping. Rayevich was all plush or ergonomic furniture until you needed to borrow one of their printers. Then it was the same aluminum-legged blue plastic chairs that we had in the computer lab at my school.

  I checked the clock in the corner of my screen. Brandon was going to meet me in the sci-fi section after dinner. We had agreed to look over each other’s essays and make flash cards for the social sciences section of the binders. It was the segment Meg was in charge of overseeing and I, for one, had not spent enough time studying it. Kate was the only person on our team who had any understanding of how the limbic system affected psychological development. That seemed to disappoint Meg on a personal level.