The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (11 page)

“Confectionary even.” I giggled.

“Oh,” she squealed with a hop of excitement. “And I saw Harper and Cornell. They're slow dancing to the
Nightmare Before Christmas
soundtrack right now. It is so cute I could scream. I think they're officially official.”

“It's about time,” Peter said.

“And what about you, Meggie?” I asked. “How does Ishaan factor into your rebellion?”

She tittered absentmindedly. “Oh, I dropped a hint about the winter ball. We'll see if he picked it up. But this whole boy thing is pretty exhausting. I don't think I need an everyday boyfriend. It might be more like having a formal dress in your closet. It'd be silly to wear it in the cafeteria, but it's nice to have on hand.”

Peter appeared to wrestle with this information, his forehead wrinkling as his eyes went squinty. He started to say something, choked on it, and covered his mouth with his fist.

“Don't worry about it,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “You get used to her logic eventually.”

Meg propped a hand onto her hip, sinking to one leg with a huff.

“Anyway,” she said loudly. “I don't think we'll be able to pry Harper and Cornell apart for a while. But I'm pretty much done here.”

“Oh, me too,” I said.

“Did you guys drive in together?” Peter asked.

“We walked.” I groaned, thinking of dragging myself back home. My toes throbbed in protest against the stiff leather of my boots. I petulantly threw my empty cider cup into the nearest trash can.

“Do you want a ride?” Peter asked.

“Really?” Meg asked brightly. “That would be fantastic.”

“We'll need to tell Harper,” I said, but Meg was already prancing toward the cafeteria, her skirt swishing around her thighs.

“Don't you need to stay here and clean up?” I asked Peter. “You guys spent a week putting all of this up.”

“We're cleaning everything up tomorrow morning. I have to come back to get my brother later. He's running the music in the haunted house.” He leaned against the trash can, reaching up and peeling off his hood. He brushed his hair forward with the flat of his hand before stuffing the hood into his pocket. “I can't let you guys walk back. Meg looks cold.”

I grinned at him. “Meg looks mostly naked.”

He coughed a shocked laugh. “I mean, she looks pretty—”

“But also not entirely as clothed as usual. It's okay. It's part of her thought experiment.”

Before Peter could reply, Meg reappeared in all her tiny glory, skipping toward us. If she noticed my giggle-snort or Peter's extraneous throat clearing as she approached, she didn't show it.

“Cornell is going to drive Harper home,” she said with a dimpled smile. “She said she'll come get her backpack from your house tomorrow, Trix.”

“Wow,” I said. “She's going to part with her homework for the night? This is serious.”

Peter led us out of the quad, holding the door to the main building open for us to squeeze through. After the raucous festivities, the bright fluorescent light and silent hallway was oddly jarring. All of a sudden, I remembered that we were on campus and that when we came back on Monday, the first ranking would be posted. Suddenly, the Shakespeare quote plastered to the front of the case was less amusing.

We stepped out of the front of the building. The admissions table was still set up, now run by two juniors who were whispering loudly into a walkie-talkie. Kenneth Pollack was roaring at them, his broad shoulders covered in a cheap plastic Roman-soldier chest plate.

“This is bull,” he shouted. “Give me my fucking ticket.”

“We can't,” said a girl in bunny ears. She stabbed her finger near the cash box at a sheet of paper. “You're on the list.”

Kenneth let loose another stream of obscenities as the second girl continued whisper-screaming into the walkie-talkie.

Peter strode forward, his hands open in the universal sign of jocular goodwill.

“Bro,” he said, slipping seamlessly out of English and into Jock. “What's up?”

“What's up is that this bitch—”

“Language, Kenny,” Meg bristled.

He ignored her entirely. “This is ridiculous, Donnelly. Tell them to let me in.”

“I can't do that, Ken,” Peter said softly. “You know the rules. You're on academic probation. You can't—”

“I didn't cheat,” Kenneth snarled, wrenching back. His chest plate swung to the side, revealing the red T-shirt he wore underneath it.

The front door slammed open. Dr. Mendoza, now out of his wet suit and dressed in a lab coat and a stethoscope, pushed past me and Meg. Peter stepped out of his way with a deferential inclination of his head.

“Mr. Pollack,” Dr. Mendoza said, his salt-and-pepper Mr. Sinister goatee gleaming in the low light. “You have already been benched for the next two games. Do you want to be pulled off the team entirely?”

“I didn't cheat,” Kenneth repeated, carefully keeping his voice down. No one shouted at Dr. Mendoza. He controlled our college references.

Peter's shoulders slumped. He glanced at me and Meg and motioned for us to follow him. We did, trying to slip around Kenneth's bulk without brushing him. We walked through the front gate and into the parking lot in silence. Peter retrieved a set of keys from his pocket and let us into a silver minivan. I had to remove my horns to fit into the passenger seat.

“So,” said Meg as Peter started the engine. “What in the holy hell was that?”

Peter blew out a breath, peering over his shoulder as we backed out of the parking space. I pointed him in the general direction of my house.

“Ken got caught cheating in Cline's class,” he grumbled.

“Already?” Meg gasped. “We're a month in.”

Carefully, I peeled my gloves off and pressed my hands to the air vents, letting the cool air roll over my fingers. “He keeps saying he didn't do it.”

Meg freed her tiara from her hair and massaged her scalp. “I'm sure he did it. He's just another meathead.…” She shrank back in her seat, seeming to remember where we were. “Sorry, Peter.”

Peter shrugged her off, steering the minivan around a corner. “No, he is a meathead. He beat the crap out of Ben last year. And he used to steal notes out of our lockers during practice. I wouldn't be surprised if he was cheating. They gave him a slap on the wrist for it, but he could have been expelled.”

“He should have been,” I said.

“I don't think they have enough proof yet.” Peter frowned. “He kept saying the freshman class treasurer framed him.”

“It wasn't B,” I said. “He didn't even know he had school email.”

“That's what Ben said,” Peter said. “When he heard about it, he went straight to Dr. Mendoza's office and proved that Brandon hadn't accessed his account yet.”

“That was nice of him.” Meg yawned. “He didn't have to do that.”

“No, but he wanted to make sure Brandon's name was cleared. So, now the administration is ‘looking into it.' Whatever that means.”

“It means Ken gets to keep playing basketball and roughing up innocent bystanders,” I said, sighing. “Damn it. This is the second time this week I wished I was a detective.”

Meg tilted her head at me, letting her crown flop to one side. “Do you want me to dig out my Nancy Drews for pointers?”

I tossed a glove at her.

*   *   *

Back in my bedroom, Meg changed into her uniform and lovingly folded her costume before stashing it in her bag. My mom offered to drive her home and I took a boiling-hot shower, clawing the green paint off my face. With half a bottle of shampoo suds sloughing the gel out of my hair, I considered what would happen if I told Harper and Meg that I had turned down Peter's offer of default dating. They probably would have forced me to commit seppuku, the only honorable death a traitor to my gender could hope for.

There had to be at least a hundred people at the Mess who stayed up late at night wishing that Peter would just look at them, much less ask them out. He was tall and good-looking and chivalrous to a fault. In the span of two hours, he'd found Meg a dance partner, stopped Kenneth Pollack from going berserk, and driven me and Meg home. He was Captain America without the emotional baggage. I knew perfect when I saw it. And Peter was the kind of perfect that girls made lists of. He was MASH-bait, if you were the kind of person who was into notebook fortune-telling games.

So maybe I was crazy. Because for all of that perfection, I couldn't force my brain to see him in
that way
—the making-out-in-a-supply-closet, think-about-him-instead-of-homework kind of way. His goofy smile had no effect on my knees. Talking to him was pleasant, but not Earth shattering. At no point while he was squiring me around the festival did I have any elaborate fantasies about holding hands or him winning me a stuffed animal at the beanbag toss.

There was no spark of interest there. I'd had more chemistry with the homicidal clown. Even mid-panic attack, I'd enjoyed the warmth of the masked boy's arm, his mute sense of humor, the faint peppery smell of his jacket.

Developing some kind of gender-swapped Cinderella scenario about a boy who could be anyone—a freakishly tall frosh or complete stranger or, worse, Jack Donnelly—was beyond the pale of pathetic. It reeked of deep-seated psychosis.

The real point was that I couldn't force myself to have the warm and fuzzies for Peter. And I got the impression that the feeling was mutual. His offer had been logical in that I was female and he was male. We were both singular and could, in fact, combine to a plural. It wasn't romantic. It was an equation. From what I could tell about relationships and love and all that noise, it needed to be more than just mathematically reasonable.

I dried my hair, aggressively rubbing a towel over my head and relishing the feeling of being clean from head to toe. I put on pajamas and flopped down on my bed, fingering the threadbare hem of the
Flash Gordon
T-shirt that had once belonged to my dad.

Sherry curled up on the edge of my mattress while I made Calculus notes. The empty Plexiglas case where the ranking would be posted swam in front of my eyes, daring me to work harder.

An hour or so into working through asymptotic and unbounded behavior of single variables—yes, I am aware how much that sounds like a metaphor for my life—my phone rang, startling both me and Sherry, who tried to sniff out the source of the whooshing TARDIS takeoff sound. With a yawn, I reached over to my nightstand and answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” said Harper. “It's me.”

I rolled my eyes, knowing full well that she couldn't see me. Considering we'd been friends since kindergarten, I really didn't need her to divulge her identity to me at the beginning of a phone call.

“Harper?” I croaked, adopting a wizened tone. “Harper Leonard? Is that you? It's been a dog's age, old friend.”

“Oh, shut up.” She laughed. “Can we meet at the park tomorrow?”

“Of course,” I said, straining to push Sherry's face away from mine as he attempted to lick my cheek. I tucked the phone under my chin and wrestled him into lying down.

“Great,” Harper said. “I already texted Meg. Does ten thirty work for you?”

I could picture her sitting in her immaculate bedroom, a pen hovering over her sacred day planner. The image was much more entertaining when I remembered that she was dressed as Supergirl.

“Yes,” I said. “I have no plans tomorrow other than homework.”

“Great,” she said again. “I'll see you then. Please don't forget to bring my backpack with—”

I sat up straight and cut her off. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's it? See you tomorrow and don't forget your backpack?”

“Hmm?” she said, undoubtedly distracted by writing in her planner. “Oh. Um. Did you have a good time tonight?”

“Did
I
have a good time?” I repeated. “Harper, if you think I'm going to let you hang up without telling me what happened after you left the haunted house, you have sorely underestimated me.”

“But I'm going to see you in twelve hours. I'll have to repeat everything to Meg.”

I shot Sherry a conspiratorial look that he did not have the cognitive functions to reciprocate.

“Are you still out with Cornell?” I asked, carefully keeping absolutely anything resembling judgment out of my voice.

“No,” she said quickly. “He dropped me off about half an hour ago.”

“Then you can give me bullet points now and save the epic recitation for tomorrow.”

“Well,” she said. “We danced. We split a candied apple. We talked.”

“Just talked?” I asked, grinning madly.

“He told me that he hasn't been able to stop thinking about me. For years, I guess.” She had started whispering. “He was afraid I was just being nice or something and that I didn't, you know, feel the same way.”

“What clued him in? The fact that you went all klutzy when he was around or the long lingering looks in the lunch line?”

“Neither. He decided to try anyway.” She gave a breathy laugh. “So, now we're together. Together-together. We're going to the library on Sunday.”

“Oh, nerd love,” I said, reaching over to scratch Sherry's ears. “That's really great, Harper. I'm happy for you.”

“Thanks, Trix. I can't believe it, you know? It's—”

“Magical?”

“Yeah. That.”

We promised to see each other in the morning. I set my phone back down and shoved aside my Calculus textbook, laying my head on Sherry's back. He idly licked my hand.

It couldn't be that difficult to track down the homicidal clown, I thought, staring at the posters on my wall. If I was going to be sitting with the student council at lunch now anyway, I could at least ask for the name of the boy who had escorted me through the haunted house. Maybe I could try to leech some of the magic of the harvest festival for myself after all.