Made You Up (6 page)

I tried not to think about the fact that shipping things like that across the ocean must cost a lot of money.

I remembered a few times, before I was diagnosed, when I’d lay in bed and my artifacts would talk to me or to one another and I would listen to them until I fell asleep.

My artifacts didn’t talk to me anymore. At least not when the medicine was working.

I turned off my light and rolled over onto my side, pulling my sheet with me. The little boy at the lobster tank was losing his definition—until I reminded myself that even if he was real, which he wasn’t, he and Miles were not necessarily the same person.

That was
ten years ago
. Ten years, and I hadn’t seen him since. It would take some ridiculous odds to bring us full circle like that.

I didn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t. I waited until I heard Mom walk down the hall and close her door (Charlie had shut herself in her room half an hour ago), then slipped out from under the covers, put on a jacket and an old pair of sneakers, and grabbed the aluminum baseball bat I kept under my bed. I popped the screen out of the window and set it carefully against the wall.

I didn’t often ride my bike in the dark, but I walked. Baseball bat clinking against the heels of my Converse,
nighttime breeze brushing against my legs, I trekked through my backyard and into the woods of Hannibal’s Rest. The creek whispered up ahead. I took the last bend in the road and stood face-to-face with Red Witch Bridge.

I didn’t feel the need to do a perimeter check, because this was where the worlds met. Everyone thought they saw or heard strange things here, and I didn’t have to hide the fact that I really did.

I laughed when I remembered Tucker bringing up the bridge earlier. The Red Witch? The one who gutted travelers, coated herself in their blood, and screamed like a banshee? No, I wasn’t scared of her. The nighttime might have made everything upside down, inside out, scary as hell, but not to me.

The baseball bat
clink-clink-clinked
as I walked toward Red Witch Bridge.

I was the scariest thing out here tonight.

E
instein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I kept taking pictures, hoping I’d look at one and know its subject was a hallucination. I did my perimeter checks, thinking I’d eventually be able to walk around paranoia-free. I spent every day hoping someone would tell me I smelled like lemons.

If I wasn’t insane by anyone else’s definition, I figured I was at least insane by Einstein’s.

T
he first thing I did the day after the parking-lot incident was look for Miles’s truck at school. Rusty, sky blue, 1982 GMC. Looked like he’d saved it from a scrap heap. It wasn’t there. Marvelous.

My second order of business was with his locker. I hurried into school, checked to make sure no one was around and the ceiling wasn’t wired, then delved into my bag in search of superglue. Two tubes and seventeen Popsicle sticks later, Miles’s locker was well and truly glued shut. I tossed the evidence into the nearest trash can, swapped out what books I needed from my own locker (most still severed from their covers), and left to find a uniform.

The janitors’ closet was next to my chemistry room. When I knocked, there was a crash inside. The door cracked
open and a familiar bespectacled eye looked out.

“Oh, hi, Alex.” Tucker opened the door a little wider. His gaze flitted around the hallway behind me. “W-what are you doing here?”

“Uh, they said I could get a uniform from the janitor.”

“Oh, yeah. There are some here . . . hold on a sec. . . .”

He disappeared and I heard some muted, angry cursing. When he returned, he held a uniform. “It might be a little big, but it’s the only clean one. The others were yellow.”

I took the uniform. “Thanks, Tucker. What are you doing in the janitors’ closet?” I looked behind him, but I didn’t see anyone else.

He gave me a weak smile. “Don’t worry about it.” And then he closed the door.

I forced myself not to take any pictures—it was Tucker; Tucker was not a hallucination, even if he was hanging out in a janitors’ closet—and ducked into the nearest bathroom to change. Tucker had really been playing it down when he said the uniform might be “a little big.” I needed swimming lessons to wear it.

I had to pass through the science hallway on my way to class, and that was when I saw the snake.

Its head hung down between ceiling tiles that had been shifted to the side for some reason. I jumped. I’d only ever seen pythons in the zoo, behind glass—but annoyance
settled in when I got over the initial shock of seeing it.

Freaking snake. I didn’t even bother getting my camera out. A snake hanging out of the ceiling was exactly the sort of thing my mind would cook up. I stuck out my tongue and hissed at the python as I walked underneath it.

I slunk to Mr. Gunthrie’s room, hoping I wouldn’t meet Cliff or Celia or, God forbid, Miles on my way. People still stared at me—this hair, this damn hair, why did it have to be so damn red—but I ignored them.

Theo was kneeling outside the classroom door, mixing condiments inside a Mason jar, while Miles stood next to her with his arms crossed. A shiver ran up my spine when I walked past him, but I forced my face to remain expressionless. He didn’t notice me—if he did, he didn’t say anything.

I got a glimpse of Theo’s disgusting concoction. Pickle juice, mustard, what looked like pepper shavings, sour cream, horseradish—basically all the things you put together when you’re thirteen and you want to trick a younger sibling into a vomit-induced coma (Charlie had never forgiven me for that one).

I slipped into my seat, keeping them in my peripheral vision while I did a perimeter check. Theo capped the Mason jar, shook it, and handed it to Miles. Miles watched the cloudy, swirling liquid for a second, then raised it to his
lips, and chugged the whole thing in one fell swoop.

I gagged and yanked my collar up over my nose. Ironically, the collar smelled like barf already, so I lowered it. Miles sauntered into the room and dropped into the chair in front of me, his gaze fixed on the whiteboard.

Class started normally. As normally as it could, I suppose, when the first announcement of the day is about a scoreboard, and your drill sergeant of a teacher is yelling at everyone. I tried paying attention to Mr. Gunthrie’s lecture on British literature, but the side of Miles’s face had turned chalky white and was morphing into sickly green.

“. . . THE FACT THAT BURGESS TAUGHT ALONGSIDE THE WOMAN WHO WOULD GIVE HIM IDEAS FOR
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
IS VERY LITTLE-KNOWN. HE WAS IN THE ARMY AT THE TIME.”

Mr. Gunthrie stopped in front of Cliff’s desk, leaned over, and got right into Cliff’s face. Cliff, who had been making hand signs across the room at Ria Wolf, jumped and faced forward.

“TELL ME, MR. ACKERLEY, DO YOU KNOW WHERE BURGESS WAS STATIONED?”

Cliff’s mouth popped open like he was going to say something.

“NO? THAT’S A PITY, MR. ACKERLEY. PERHAPS
I SHOULD ASK SOMEONE ELSE. DO YOU THINK I SHOULD ASK SOMEONE ELSE, MR. ACKERLEY?”

“Uh, yes?”

“WHO DO YOU THINK I SHOULD ASK, ACKERLEY?”

“Uh . . . Richter?”

“UH, RICHTER. THAT SOUNDS LIKE A QUESTION, ACKERLEY. DID I GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO ASK ME A QUESTION?”

“No.”

“NO WHAT?”

“No, sir!”

“NOW I’M GOING TO ASK YOU AGAIN, MR. ACKERLEY. TO WHOM SHOULD I ASK THE QUESTION YOUR INCOMPETENT ASS COULDN’T ANSWER?”

“Ask Richter, sir!”

Mr. Gunthrie straightened up and marched across the room to Miles’s desk.

“RICHTER. COULD YOU PLEASE TELL ME WHERE ANTHONY BURGESS WAS STATIONED WHEN HE TAUGHT ALONGSIDE ANN MCGLINN AND TOOK HER IDEAS ON COMMUNISM FOR
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
?
”

Miles didn’t answer at first. He was hunched in his
seat, swaying a little. Slowly, he looked up and met Mr. Gunthrie’s gaze.

Please throw up on him
, I thought.
Please, please throw up on Mr. Gunthrie.

“Gibraltar,” Miles said, then he lurched out of his seat and made it to the trash can in time to be violently ill. Several girls squealed. Tucker yanked his collar up over his nose.

“You all right, Richter?” Mr. Gunthrie dropped his book and walked over to clap Miles on the back. Miles spit one more time and put a hand on Mr. Gunthrie’s shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Must have eaten something bad at breakfast.” Miles wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “If I could go to the restroom . . . clean up . . .”

“Of course.” Mr. Gunthrie gave Miles another sharp slap on the back. “Take as much time as you need. I’m sure you’ve got this all memorized anyway, haven’t you?”

Miles gave him a wry smile and left.

T
ucker found me after lunch and reassured me that Miles had been running a job.

“A job? What, like the mafia?”

“Sort of.” Tucker leaned back against the wall outside the cafeteria. “People pay him to do things. Usually revenge stuff. You know, steal someone’s homework and paste it on the ceiling. Put dead fish in someone’s glove compartment. Stuff like that.”

“So what was he doing this morning?” I asked.

Tucker shrugged. “You usually don’t know until it happens. One time he hid a hundred water balloons full of grape juice into Leslie Stapleford’s locker. When she opened it, there were toothpicks or something that popped all the balloons and set off a chain reaction. Ruined everything she had.”

Note to self: Stand to side of locker door when opening.

“Did you hear the announcement today?” Tucker asked, changing the subject.

“Oh, about McCoy hiring someone to fit the scoreboard with gold plating?”

“Yeah. I told you he was crazy, right? I heard he does some weird stuff at home, too.” He said it with a conspiratorial stage whisper. “Like mowing his lawn, and trimming his peonies.”

“Peonies?” I balked. “God, he really is a freak.”

Tucker laughed. The cafeteria doors beside him swung open and Celia Hendricks walked out with Britney Carver and Stacey Burns. I stepped back, slightly behind Tucker.

“What’s funny, Beaumont?” she asked with a sneer, as if he’d been laughing at her.

“None of your business, Celia.” All humor left Tucker’s face. “Don’t you have a Makeup Addicts Anonymous meeting to get to?”

“Don’t you have a Cult in a Closet to get to?” she shot back. “Oh, wait, I forgot, you have no friends. My bad.”

The tips of Tucker’s ears turned pink and he glared at her, but didn’t say anything else.

“God, Beaumont, you’re so weird. Maybe if you acted like a normal person once in a while—”

“I’m his friend,” I cut in. “And I think he’s perfectly normal.”

Celia looked me up and down, her eyes lingering on my hair. And then she huffed and stomped away without another word.

“You didn’t have to say that,” Tucker mumbled.

“Yeah, I did,” I replied.

There is no force in high school more powerful than one person’s blunt disagreement.

The rest of the day passed without a hitch. Miles did not acknowledge my presence. I did not acknowledge his.

Miles’s locker was still glued shut when I left for the gym.

The entire west side of the school was for extracurriculars. The gym, pool, and auditorium were all connected by hallways that ran behind them and a large rotunda at their center, linked to the rest of the school by a main hall. Lining the rotunda were huge glass cases filled with trophies the school had won over the years: athletics, music competitions, color guard. There were pictures in black and white of the winning teams alongside some of them.

The picture that caught my attention didn’t have a trophy and wasn’t from a competition. It was a framed newspaper clipping. Someone had taken a bright red marker to the girl in the picture, partially obscuring her
face, but I could tell she was pretty, blonde, and wearing an old East Shoal cheerleader’s uniform. She stood next to the scoreboard, which looked brand-new.

Beneath the picture was the caption: “Scarlet Fletcher, captain of the East Shoal cheerleading squad, helps introduce ‘Scarlet’s Scoreboard,’ a commemoration of the charity and goodwill her father, Randall Fletcher, has shown toward the school.”

The picture was framed in gold and set up on a tiny dais like it was sacred.

I spotted Miles on the other side of the rotunda. He was standing outside the concession stand, talking to a kid I’d never seen before. As I watched, they made a quick exchange. Miles gave the kid something thin and gold and got a handful of cash in return.

“What was that?” I asked, stomping up to Miles as soon as the kid had walked away. “It looked very much like Mr. Gunthrie’s fountain pen. I’m not ruling out the possibility that you’re an accomplished pickpocket.”

Miles raised his eyebrow as if I was a very amusing puppy.

“So that’s the only reason you drank that awful stuff this morning? So you could steal a teacher’s pen? For money?”

Miles shoved his hands into his pockets. “Are you done now?”

“Lemme see.” I tapped my chin. “Yep, all done. Asshat.”

I started to walk away.

“Alex. Wait.”

I turned back. It was the first time he’d said my name. He held a hand out. “Well played,” he said.

Oh no. No, we were not doing this. I hadn’t spent ten minutes gluing his locker shut just to admit it to him. So I arched my own eyebrow and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The corners of his lips twisted up right before I walked away.