The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (13 page)

B, trapped between us, had the horrified expression of a kid stuck between warring parents. I prayed that he had a happy home life, otherwise he might go into some kind of regressive blackout.

“I thought you were acting like a human being for once,” West said. “My mistake.”

“One of many mistakes. Like your personal grooming and the lack of filter between your brain and your mouth.”

“You didn't have any complaints on Friday night.”

The people around us had turned to watch now. Whispers rose around me and I couldn't be bothered to try and decipher them. I thought I could see Cornell out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't look away from West.

“And you did? You seemed perfectly content to squire me around, practically holding my hand. You knew who I was. What's your excuse?”

An intense flush spread across West's cheeks. He spun around, craning his neck to see the front of the crowd. Mary-Anne France had her finger pressed to the case, scanning downward.

“Mary-Anne,” West shouted over the hubbub of the crowd. “Who's third and fourth?”

There were various protests shouted, but Mary-Anne moved her fingernail up the list. I held my breath, my hands still clenched into fists.

“Trixie is third,” Mary-Anne called. “And you're in fourth, Ben.”

I let out an audible sigh of relief, expelling every knot and tangle from my muscles. Thank Thor. I deserved something good to happen today.

West's chest puffed up and down against the Mess emblem on his polo.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum,”
I said with a satisfied smirk.
If you want peace, prepare for war
.

“Me mordre, chienne.”

B gave a shocked gasp as West barreled his way through the crowd, throwing his elbows at anyone who stood in his way.

“You speak French?” I asked B.

He squirmed, both nodding and shaking his head at the same time, adding to his general appearance of a shivering dog.

“A little bit,” he murmured. “He said ‘bite me.' And then, uh, some other stuff.”

“Lazy even in another language,” I chuckled, ruffling B's hair with the flat of my hand. “Good luck, sport. I'm going home.”

I moved around the crowd, unconcerned with trying to find my friends in the mass. If they were there—and I was sure they were—they would have undoubtedly watched the entire exchange between me and West and would be primed to make me feel like crap about it. Admittedly, having a shouting match in the middle of the entire student body wasn't the best choice, but all that really mattered was that I was well on my way to achieving my goal of beating him in the ranking come graduation. All I had to do was maintain my grades.

I danced home.

 

[6:05 PM]

Unknown Number

Here's the link to that NPR interview Cline referenced this morning.

 

Oh, sorry. It's Cornell. Hope you don't mind Harper gave me your number.

[6:08 PM]

Me

No problem. Thanks for the extra credit points.

 

10

I got to school
the next morning, bone tired and hiding behind my aviators. I'd been up late working on an essay for Russian Lit and woken up much too early to edit and upload it to the homework portal on the Mess website. To my surprise—and slight annoyance—I hadn't heard from Harper or Meg after the ranking came out. I had at least expected a chastising text message from one of them. Even if they hadn't personally witnessed my blowout with West, someone would have informed them of what happened.

Meg was waiting for me at the front gate as I hit campus. She wore neon-green tights under her khaki skirt and had a bow in her hair to match, making me feel even more slapdash than I had before. She beamed at me.

“Good morning. Congrats on placing third.”

I yawned, peering at her over the top of my sunglasses. “Where did you—”

“Fourteen,” she sighed, flourishing an unconcerned hand. “It's the ocean of three point nines. Not all of us can surpass a four point oh in the first month of school. Did you see Kenneth's rank?”

“No.” I yawned again and my jaw cracked. “Mary-Anne told me where my rank was. I haven't looked at the list.”

Meg's eyes glittered deviously. “He's on the bottom. They didn't even give him a number. It just says AP. As in ‘academic probation.'”

“Whoa,” I said. “I've never seen anyone stripped of their rank.”

“It's crazy. They should have just expelled him. It'd be less humiliating.”

“I don't think Kenny Pollack cares that much about his position on the list.”

I looked over her shoulder at the people walking through the front gate. The morning after the ranking was always a more somber affair than a normal day. Everyone looked as beaten down and exhausted as I felt. Except for Meg, of course, who looked like she'd woken up at the bottom of a coffee pot and drank her way to freedom. Which she probably had. Caffeine had been her thought experiment in sophomore year. We'd had to scale her back on quad shot mochas after she'd started tap dancing in first period.

“Let's go in,” she breathed. “Harper is driving in with Cornell and they'll probably get distracted by loving each other.”

I wondered if the real reason for us not hanging out near the gate was to keep me from seeing West again. Maybe Peter had given her pointers on how to keep the peace. I wasn't sure why the idea bothered me so much, but it did. I didn't like the notion that I was being treated like a feral animal.

“About what happened at lunch yesterday,” I said. “I want to point out that the haunted house made for very unusual circumstances. I didn't seek out West on purpose to torture him.”

“And he was a clown,” she said pertly. “Which is terrifying. I understand.”

“Right. I was having a meltdown. I didn't mention it before because…”
I was harboring secret fantasies about the clown being tall, dark, and nerdy?
The thought slipped into my brain without my permission and I shuddered it away. “Because I was embarrassed about it. I got an A in Chemistry of Emotions and I still got roped in by the negative stimuli.”

“I get it. Why do you think I didn't go in?” She bounced her backpack against her spine and led me through the gate. “But, you know, he really isn't that bad. Ben, I mean. He made a really good
Doctor Who
reference in our Gender Roles class the other day. About that episode where the Doctor and Martha go back to that all boys' school?”

“‘Human Nature' and ‘The Family of Blood,'” I muttered. “It's a two-part episode.”

“Right. That one.” A smile cracked over her face like a gooey egg. “Anyway, you both like
Doctor Who
and you read the same comics and you have…” She paused and gave a shifty look around us before whispering, “The same IQ.”

My Mary Janes dragged to a stop against the gleaming white pavement. “Can we forget about that? The nerd duel was a mistake.”

“I'm just saying,” she stressed, placing her hands on her hips defiantly. “Maybe you could try to be nicer to him? You can't spend every lunch in the library. You'll starve to death.”

“I'll play nice,” I said. “Just don't let him talk to me.”

*   *   *

“I think we should go with a Russian Winter theme,” Mary-Anne France announced to very little interest. “Like the ball in
Anna Karenina
. I bet Ms. Gronski would give us extra credit for it.”

I stabbed my fork into my salad and Harper shot me an apologetic look. Our first lunch with the student council was off to a running start. Peter had done his best originally to keep his underlings from talking about the winter ball, but there was no stopping it. The other officers had all pushed aside whatever textbooks and novels they'd been using to distract them from the noncouncil members at their table. Mary-Anne had dug out her official secretary notebook and had her pen poised over a fresh sheet of paper.

“I could sew jewelry into the hems of everyone's dresses if we're going all Romanov with it,” I offered.

“Would we have to pay extra for the firing squad?” West asked. There were six people between us, but I could still clearly see him decimating a plate of French fries.

“It's not Romanov themed,” Mary-Anne corrected sharply. “It's Russian Winter. It's romantic.”

Peter frowned and tapped his thumb against his tray. “Maybe we should steer clear of race-related themes.”

“It's already the winter ball,” Cornell said, sliding a bag of chips toward Harper. “Does it really need a second theme?”

“The theme is let's make enough money to pay for the cricket team's whites,” said a boy next to Peter.

“And to keep shipping them off to other schools that play cricket,” muttered one of the sophomores.

“But that isn't romantic,” Mary-Anne protested, slamming her pen down and reaching for the bottle of iced tea that apparently constituted her meal.

“What about something like ‘a night to remember'?” asked one of the junior officers to my right.

“We're at a school for the gifted,” parried one of the sophomore girls. “We have to be able to think of something less trite than that.”

I laughed, nearly inhaling a piece of lettuce. While I already missed having conversations about things that interested me—like anything other than the winter ball—it was fascinating to watch the student council snipe at each other. Sixteen politicians in training at one table was a cage match just waiting to happen. I hoped poor B would escape unharmed. He was doing his best to hide behind his scientific calculator.

“Then what about separating the caf into an Oslo party and a Stockholm party?” West asked, flourishing a fry around to gesture to the imaginary dividing line.

The rest of the table turned to him in confusion. He cocked his head to the side, his face twisted in annoyance.

“Really?” he asked. “No one got that?”

The confused silence persisted. Honestly, at a table where almost everyone could speak another language, recognize passages of ancient text, and build a functioning computer, it really was abysmal that no one could find the connection between Oslo and Stockholm.

“It's a Nobel Prize joke,” I said.

“Thanks, Trix,” West said.

The previous day's boiling hatred seemed to have mellowed back to the usual amount of indifference. I assumed Peter had given him the same stern talking-to that Meg had tried on me.

“There's ketchup in your 'stache,” I said, turning back to my lunch as he hunted for a napkin.

Meg gave me a smile that said,
See? Isn't it fun when we're all nice to each other?

“We can't really say that it's a Christmas dance,” Peter said, blithely steering the conversation back to a safe place. “But it could be something like a Mistletoe Ball.”

“Formal wear and mononucleosis?” I asked.

“Gross,” said Meg.

“It's not a Christmas dance,” said one of the sophomores. “It's the week after Thanksgiving. It's not even in winter.”

“We've been over this,” Mary-Anne said. “It's in December. It's the cultural idea of winter.”

“The Cultural Idea of Winter ball.” West sniffed. “No, I don't think that's going to work either. A little too on the nose.”

“What about a quote or something?” asked Harper, daintily retrieving one of Cornell's chips.

The lowerclassmen threw out a bunch of terrible song quotes, which digressed into a long string of insults about everyone's musical taste. Harper and Cornell got distracted entirely and muttered sweet nothings at each other.

B's voice floated around West's shoulder. “What about From Spring Days to Winter?”

The rest of the table didn't seem to have noticed him, preoccupied with explaining to the junior secretary why they refused to use a Taylor Swift song as the quote.

“Say that again, Brandon,” West said.

“From Spring Days to Winter?” B squeaked.

West's eyebrows drew together and he reached up to stroke his mustache.

“‘Love whom mine eyes had never seen,'” he quoted lightly. “‘O the glad dove has golden wings.'”

That pulled everyone's attention. Benedict West randomly spouting poetry was not everyday lunch behavior. I wondered if anyone else felt like they were having a stroke. Mary-Anne was certainly a little greenish, but that could have been because poetry was her deal and she should have thought of it first. She was the only person at the table with a literary agent, after all.

“We could have little gold doves everywhere,” said one of the sophomores. “Like, fake ones.”

“It works,” said Peter, nodding in approval.

West seemed thoroughly unimpressed by his victory. “The last stanza is all about death, but the rest of it works.”

“It's Oscar Wilde,” I said, still staring at him in shock.

He grinned at me and inclined his head, silently thanking me for catching a second reference. The motion drudged up the memory of him proudly miming in the haunted house. I hadn't entirely reconciled myself to the fact that we'd had a pleasant moment together. I'd made excuses and denied it and avoided giving explicit detail about it, but that couldn't wipe it out of my head.

“You still have ketchup in your mustache, friend,” I told him. I leaned back so that I could see B. “Good work, B.”

The frosh gave me a self-conscious smile before turning back to his lunch. West glared at me, scrubbing his face with a battered napkin. Whatever insult he was trying to piece together was cut off when Brad Hertz scrambled up to the table. His polo was drenched in sweat. There was a pungent odor wafting off him that reminded me of when my mom had forgotten about a Tupperware full of curry in the back of the fridge. I promptly pushed away my salad.