Made You Up (4 page)

M
y next three classes of the day were like the first. I walked into the classrooms and spun in a circle, checking everything. If I found something strange—like a World War II–era propaganda poster on the wall—I took a picture of it. I was asked four times if my hair was dyed. My AP Macro teacher let me know it was against the rules. I told him it was natural. He didn’t believe me. I showed him the picture of my mother and my little sister, Charlie, that I always carried with me, because their hair was the same. He sort of believed me. I sat in the chair closest to the door and kept a watchful eye on him for the rest of the period.

The cafeteria was huge, so there were plenty of open spots. That was a good thing, because no one paid attention to me in the seat against the wall, picking through my food
for Communist tracers. Mr. McCoy came over the PA to make another announcement about the scoreboard. People stopped talking and eating to snicker about it, but no one seemed surprised.

Miles Richter was in all of my AP classes.

My fifth period, study hall, was the only class he wasn’t in. I still wasn’t sure what Tucker had meant when he’d told me not to let Miles pull anything on me. He hadn’t done anything Tucker had warned me about, but he certainly hadn’t ignored me.

Pre-lunch, when I dropped my pencil in AP U.S. History, he kicked it to the far side of the room before I could pick it up. Because he leaned back and looked at me like,
What are you going to do about it?
I shoved his backpack off his desk.

In AP Government that afternoon, he “accidentally” stepped on my shoelace and I nearly fell on my face. When the teacher passed our first homework assignments down the rows, I gave Miles one that had “accidentally” been ripped in half.

In AP Chemistry, Ms. Dalton seated us in alphabetical order and handed out lab notebooks, which look like notebooks on the outside but are filled with graph paper and make you want to kill yourself. She dropped mine onto my desk with a loud
THWUMP
.

I kept a careful eye on the back of Miles’s neck as I wrote my name on the cover. It turned out lopsided and scratchy, but still legible. Good enough.

“I figured we’d start off the school year with a little icebreaker lab,” Mrs. Dalton said with a certain lazy cheerfulness as she returned to her desk, popped open a Diet Coke, and chugged half of it down in one go. “Nothing hard, of course. I’m going to assign lab partners and you can get to know each other.”

I suspected bad karma sneaking up on me with a nine iron. Probably because of the time I flushed Charlie’s entire line of black pawns down the toilet and told her Santa didn’t exist.

Drawing slips of paper from a beaker filled with names, Mrs. Dalton called out pairs, and I watched the desks slowly empty and partners migrate to lab tables stationed around the edge of the room.

“Alexandra Ridgemont,” Ms. Dalton said.

Karma prepared to swing.

“And Miles Richter.”

Direct hit. Results: minor concussion. May have trouble walking, seeing. Should not engage in any strenuous activity or operate heavy machinery.

I got to the lab table before Miles even left his seat. A survey paper waited for us. I checked the kids on the other
side of the table—they didn’t look remotely threatening, but the worst ones were always the least threatening—the cabinets above my head, and the drain in the sink.

“Well, let’s get this over with,” I said when Miles arrived. He didn’t answer, just pulled his pen from behind his ear and flipped open his notebook. I braced my feet farther apart when it felt like the ground was skewing to the left.

I waited until he was done writing. “Ready?”

“You can go first.” He pushed his glasses up. I wanted to grab them off his face and pulverize them.

I grabbed the paper instead. “First question: ‘What’s your full name?’”

“Wow. This is going to be stupid.” It was the first reasonable thing he’d said all day. “Miles James Richter.”

I wrote it down. “Alexandra Victoria Ridgemont.”

“Well, we both have middle names that don’t fit.” Out came the Magnificent Quirked Eyebrow. “Next.”

“Birthday?”

“May twenty-ninth, 1993.”

“April fifteenth, same year,” I said. “Siblings?”

“None.”

No wonder he was such a brat. Only child. He was probably rich, too.

“I have a sister, Charlie. Any pets?”

“A dog.” Miles wrinkled his nose when he said it, which didn’t surprise me—I imagined that Miles was sort of like an overgrown house cat. Slept a lot. Always looked bored. Liked to play with his food before he ate it.

I watched a ladybug crawl along the edge of the sink. I was pretty sure it wasn’t real—its spots were shaped like stars. I’d left my camera in my backpack. “None. My dad’s allergic.”

Miles grabbed the paper from me and looked it over. “You’d think they could bother to make the questions a little more interesting. ‘Favorite Color’? What can that possibly tell you about a person? Your favorite color could be chartreuse, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.”

Then, without waiting for me to answer the question, he wrote “chartreuse” under “Favorite Color.”

It was the most animated I’d seen him all day. Listening to him rant relaxed me, in a weird kind of way. If he was an angry ranting asshole, he wasn’t Blue Eyes.

“Then yours is mauve,” I said, writing it in the blank.

“And look—‘Favorite Food’? What’s that going to tell me?”

“Agreed. What do you like to eat? Pickled frog hearts?” I pressed my pen to my bottom lip and mulled it over. “Yeah. You love pickled frog hearts.”

We got through a few more questions. I knew I wasn’t
imagining the awed looks of our comrades across the table. When we got to “Pet Peeves,” Miles said, “When people say ‘catsup’ instead of ‘ketchup.’ It’s a condiment, not animal vomit.” He paused a moment and said, “And that one’s true.”

“I can’t stand it when people get history wrong,” I said. “Like saying that Columbus was the first explorer to land on North America, when he didn’t even land on North America, and the first explorer was Leif Ericson. And that one is also true.”

We answered a few more, and by the time we got near the end, something strange started happening to his voice.

It was rougher, somehow. Less fluent. His
th
’s slurred together, and his
w
’s started sounding like
v
’s. The group across the table stared at him like it was the advent of the apocalypse.

I moved down to the last question. “Thank God, we’re almost done. What’s one thing you remember from your childhood?”

“
Animalia Annelida Hirudinea
.” Miles bit the end of his pen like he wished he hadn’t said it. He didn’t look at me, but stared at the two silver faucets arching over the sink basin.

Those words . . . the bandages. The pain I hadn’t understood. The Yoo-hoo. The smell of fish.

A chill seeped from my head to my feet, freezing me to the spot. I stared at him. Sandy brown hair that stuck up all over the place. Metal-frame glasses. Golden freckles sprinkled over nose and cheekbones. Blue eyes.

Stop looking at him, idiot! He’ll think you like him, or something!

I didn’t like him. He wasn’t even that cute. Was he? Maybe another look would help.
No, dammit!
Oh hell.

I scratched awkwardly at my notebook, ignoring my pounding heart. Was I supposed to write down what he said? Why was he speaking in scientific classifications? Blue Eyes wasn’t real. There had been no one to help me free the lobsters. He hadn’t just said that. This was my mind screwing with me. Again.

I coughed delicately, pulling on a piece of my hair. “Well. You can write down ‘Yoo-hoos’ for mine.”

“Yoo-hoos,” he said slowly.

“Yoo-hoos—you know, the best drink ever?”

Now he was the one staring at me. I rolled my eyes. “Y-O-O-H—”

“I can spell, thanks.” His voice had snapped back to normal. Fluent and clear. As he began writing, I glanced up at the clock. Class was almost over. My hands shook.

When the bell rang, I sprang to collect my bag and join the others moving into the hallway. I felt better when I got
away from Miles, like the revelation I’d had in the chemistry classroom had been nothing but a dream, and I’d woken up from it. I didn’t understand him—he’d come right out of my delusions, but here he was. He straddled the line between my world and everyone else’s, and I didn’t like it.

We arrived at our lockers at the same time. I ignored him, opened my locker, and reached for my textbooks.

They fell right out of their covers like guts out of a fish.

“Looks like someone destroyed the binding in your books,” said Miles.

No shit, asshat.
Screw him—Blue Eyes or not, I wasn’t putting up with this.

I picked up my ruined books, stuffed them into my bag, and slammed my locker shut. “Guess I’ll have to fix them.” And then I stomped off toward the gym, knowing I wouldn’t be able to get away from him now.

T
ucker was wrong about the East Shoal Recreational Athletics Support Club. Miles hadn’t chosen that name. Principal McCoy had, and he’d told me so when he explained my mandatory community service to me and my mother.

I walked to the main gym now with Miles on my heels. His cat stare burned into my shoulder blades. I stopped inside the gym doors and looked around, trying to be inconspicuous about spinning in circles.

The gym was older than the one at Hillpark; I’d expected it to be newer, remodeled, like East Shoal’s disgustingly expensive football stadium. The bleacher row adjacent to the main doors housed the table with the scoreboard controls. The basketball goals were raised to the ceiling, giving me a straight view across the gym to the scoreboard hanging on
the far wall. “East Shoal High School” was spelled along its top in green letters.

Miles tapped me on the shoulder. Just the tip of his index finger, just a jolt; I jumped.

“Don’t keep them waiting,” he said, slipping past me.

At the scorer’s table stood five kids laughing together. One of them was a girl I recognized from English; she had a pair of pencils spiking out of her messy blond bun. The two boys standing next to her were so identical I couldn’t tell them apart. I’d never seen the other two, but every one of them stood at attention when Miles walked up. I hovered awkwardly behind him.

“This is Alex,” he said without any sort of greeting. “Alex, this is Theo
philia
.” He motioned to the girl from English class.

“Just Theo,” the girl replied, glaring at him.

“—and these are her brothers, Evan and Ian.” He motioned to the two identical boys, who grinned in unison.

“To reduce confusion, we’re triplets.” Theo thrust out a hand, very businesslike. “And please don’t call me Theophilia.”

“No worries,” I said, staring at her hand—guilt had made me shake Miles’s, but I had no good reason to go near hers. “My parents wanted two boys—they named me after Alexander the Great and my sister after Charlemagne.”

Theo put her hand down, apparently not at all offended by my refusal to shake it, and laughed. “Yeah, my parents wanted boys, too. Instead they got two idiots and a girl.”

“Hey!” Theo’s brothers cried in unison. She dropped the clipboard and faked a punch toward their crotches. Both boys recoiled. I knew how genetics worked—even normal identical twins didn’t look as identical as Theo’s brothers. My fingers tightened around my camera.

Miles rolled his eyes and went on. “And this is Jetta Lorenc and Art Babrow.”

Jetta shot Miles a dimpled smile, shoveling her mass of curly hair back over her shoulder. “Eet is nice to meet you,” she said, holding out a hand like she’d wait as long as it took for me to shake it.

I didn’t. “Are you French?” I asked instead.

“Oui!”

Foreign. Foreign spy. French Communist Party acted on Stalin’s instructions during part of World War II. French Communist spy.

Stop it stop it stop it

I turned to Art, a black kid who was a foot and a half taller than me and whose pecs were about to burst out of his shirt and eat someone. I gave him a two on the delusion detector. I didn’t trust those pecs.

“Hi,” he rumbled.

I waved weakly.

“This is the rest of the club,” Miles said, gesturing around to all of them. “Theo, concession stand. Evan and Ian, bleacher duty.”

“Aye aye, Boss!” The triplets saluted and left for their posts.

“Jetta, net and ball carts. Art, get the poles.”

The other two departed as well. I relaxed once they were all gone, even though I still had Miles to deal with. Miles, who turned to the scoreboard controls and forgot about me.

“So what do I do?” I asked.

He ignored me.

“MILES.”

He turned, sporting the Magnificent Quirked Eyebrow.

“What do I do?”

“You’re going to go up there”—he pointed at the empty bleachers—“and shut up.”

Was there some kind of law about drop-kicking assholes in the face? Probably. They always had laws against things that really needed to be done.

“No,” I replied. “I think I’ll go sit over
there
.” I pointed to a spot a few feet from where he had, then marched off to sit there. I crossed my arms and glared at him until he and his eyebrow looked away. Then I yanked all the ruined
books out of my bag, piled them beside me, and started my homework.

When the volleyball team entered the gym, I paused homework to snap pictures: Jetta and Art setting up the volleyball net like pros; Theo manning the concession stand; Evan and Ian scouring the bleachers for trash; the volleyball team looking perky and athletic in their spandex.

The only thing missing was Miles. But he was probably circling somewhere, destroying villages and hoarding gold in his mountain lair.

I cracked my neck and returned to calculus. Homework was a bitch, especially since this year I’d be doing it in the free time I had between school, work, and community service. Not to mention I still had to look for scholarships and fill out college applications. And visit my damned therapist twice a week.

But I had to do it. Had to get it right this time. No screwups with my medicine, however much I hated the stuff. No distractions. I didn’t have time to worry about what other people thought of me, yet I had to—if I seemed too on edge, too paranoid, it wouldn’t matter what my grades were. If anyone decided I was crazy or dangerous, I could say good-bye to a future and hello to the Happy House.

Miles walked back into the gym and settled himself at the scorer’s table. For half a second he turned, stared up at
me, and quirked that eyebrow, before facing the Spandex Squad again. The base of my skull tingled. I hadn’t thought about it before—why hadn’t I thought about it before? Miles. Miles was a genius. Miles liked to screw with people.

Miles didn’t seem to particularly like me, and I’d been antagonizing him all day. It would be easy for him to figure me out. Especially if I kept staring at him like I had in chemistry. Maybe I could head him off. Tell him about it before he found out, then beg for his silence or something.

Or you could grow some balls
, said the little voice. That was probably the best option.

I turned my attention to the scoreboard. McCoy had made at least five different announcements about it today, and during each one somebody would mimic him and everyone would laugh.

“There’s an urban legend about that scoreboard, you know.” Tucker appeared next to me, holding a Coke. I looked around. The bleachers were already full.
How did that happen?
I glanced over my shoulder, expecting someone to be standing there with a knife.

“Really?” I asked absentmindedly, doing a belated perimeter check. “Somehow I don’t find that surprising.”

Cliff Ackerley and a few other football player types stood at the foot of the bleachers, holding up signs for Ria Wolf, who I gathered was the starting setter. I spotted Celia
Hendricks on the edge of a bigger group of students who didn’t look like they were putting any effort toward actually watching the game. Parents filed into the gym from the rotunda, holding popcorn and hot dogs and wearing shirts that read “Go Sabres!”

“What a ridiculous sport,” said a woman near me, her voice laced with acid. “Volleyball. They should call it ‘sluts in spandex.’”

I searched for the disgruntled parent, but teenagers surrounded me. I squeezed myself into a smaller space.

“Did you hear that woman?” I asked Tucker.

“What woman?”

“The one who said the thing about volleyball players being sluts.”

Tucker looked around. “Are you sure that’s what you heard?”

I shook my head. “Must’ve been nothing.” I’d learned a long time ago that asking someone else if they heard something was much safer than asking them if they saw it. Most people didn’t trust their ears as much as they trusted their eyes. Of course, auditory hallucinations were also the most common kind of hallucinations. Not good for me.

“Now
cheerleading
, that’s a sport. A sport with dignity. You make it or you don’t. There’s no gray area, not like with
volleyball
.”

Her voice mingled with the crowd and the squeak of shoes on the court, then faded out.

Tucker shifted beside me. “The legend says that some chick who went to East Shoal years ago was so obsessed with high school that she refused to leave it, and, in a weird suicide stunt, made the scoreboard fall on herself. Now her soul inhabits the scoreboard, influencing matches to help East Shoal win. Or lose. Depends on how she feels that day, I guess.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before? Geez, I thought everyone was obsessed with it for no reason.”

“Well. I don’t know if everyone’s obsessed with it because of the legend or if the legend grew because everyone’s obsessed with it. Anyway, McCoy says we’re not supposed to talk about it. But if you
really
want creepy, you should watch him take care of it. Cleans every lightbulb by hand.
Caresses
it.”

I laughed.

Tucker paused, his neck and ears turning red. He fidgeted. “There’s also the myth about a python in the ceiling tiles, being fed by the lunch ladies. But that one’s not too interesting. Do you know about Red Witch Bridge?”

I shot him a look out of the corner of my eye. “I’ve heard of it.”

“Never drive through the covered bridge by Hannibal’s
Rest at night. You hear the witch scream right before she rips you to shreds and leaves your car empty by the side of the road.” A gleam of excitement lit his eyes as he waited for my reaction. Normally he only got that look when he was telling me about one of his conspiracy theories.

“Have you ever done it?” I asked.

“Me? Drive through Red Witch Bridge? No, I’m brave as soggy potato salad.”

“You? Soggy potato salad?
No
.”

Tucker laughed and puffed out his skinny chest in mock bravado. “I know I don’t look it, but I’d run the other direction before I got anywhere near that bridge.” He dropped the act and offered me the Coke. “Thirsty?”

“You don’t want it?”

“Nah. Bought it and then remembered that I hate soda.”

I took it hesitantly. “You didn’t put anything in it, did you?”

“Do I look like that type of person?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Soggy Potato Salad. You’re a wild card.”

I technically wasn’t supposed to have caffeine—my mother said it made me too excitable and screwed with my medicine, which made her a liar because I felt perfectly fine whenever I broke the rules—but I drank it anyway.

“I see your textbooks have had a rough day.” Tucker
prodded the binding of my calculus book.

“Mm,” I said. “Stray cat found its way into my locker.”

“Superglue will fix that right up.”

Superglue? Now there was an idea. I glanced down at Miles. He was staring over his shoulder at us, eyes narrowed. The enormity of this balancing act hit me all at once, made my stomach lurch. I couldn’t let him walk all over me, but I couldn’t make him angry, either.

Tucker gave him the finger. Miles turned back to the court.

“I’ll regret that later,” Tucker said, “when my steering column is gone.”

Either Tucker would regret it, or I would.

“Are you okay?” Tucker asked. “You look like you’re going to vomit.”

“Yes.” No. “I’m okay.” This was the least okay thing that had happened to me since the Hillpark Gym Graffiti Incident.

I realized too late that I’d snapped at him. I didn’t mean to be harsh, but I hated worry, and pity, and that look people got when they knew something wasn’t okay with you and they also knew that you were in denial about it.

I wasn’t in denial. I just couldn’t let it slip this time.