The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (18 page)

“I am saving a lot of money on mustache wax.” He grinned. “And tiny combs.”

“There was wax in it?” I laughed. “That can't be hygienic.”

“Probably not, but it was cool while it lasted.” He glanced at me sidelong. “My mom didn't want it in my graduation pictures.”

My first impulse was to express my surprise that he still spoke to his mother. I'd never really thought about the current state of their relationship. I didn't even know if he'd met his half sibling.

“Ben.” It was weird using his first name. I didn't know the last time I'd attempted it aloud. I was fairly sure that I hadn't been calling him by his last name when we were in first grade. Then again, my parents had always maintained that I'd been overly precocious from the word go.

“I—” I faltered again. I'd spent all weekend trying to craft the perfect apology, but in practice, I couldn't seem to find the right sequence of words. “About the harvest festiv—”

“Don't worry about it,” he interrupted as we reached the front of the math and sciences building, the most imposing of the Mess's various brick structures. Its spire stabbed into the blackening sky. “You were having a panic attack. No big deal.”

“No,” I insisted, stepping in front of him before he could reach for the door. The umbrella slipped and a raindrop hit me in the eye. Partially blinded, I could only vaguely make out the downward turn his lips had taken. “You were really nice to me and I was—”
Abhorrent. Reprehensible. A demon from a Hell dimension that only makes really mean people.
“Awful to you for no reason. Thank you for helping me.”

“Don't worry about it,” he said. “Thanks for sharing your umbrella. We're square.”

He reached around me and opened the door. I looked up at him, from the damp droop of his hair to his earnest brown eyes to his toothy grin and thought,
Oh hell. I don't think we are.

 

To:
West, B.

From:
Watson, B.

Subject
: A Request

 

 

If I concede that Saga is amazing, will you bring the rest of the series to school tomorrow? Because it's crazy amazing and I'd rather not rob Busby to get the rest of the books.

 

Can of soda for your trouble.

 

Trixie

 

 

 

To:
Watson, B.

From:
West, B.

Subject
: Re: A Request

 

 

Don't rob Busby over Saga. Over the Who figurines, maybe. I'd help with that heist. Dibs on the Cyberman.

 

A can of soda and the newest Buffy. Deal?

 

Ben

 

14

“No eating, spitting,
or smoking within six feet of them,” Ben said, holding the plastic-wrapped comics reverentially between us as people shoved their way past into the computer lab for fifth period.

“I don't smoke,” I said with a sigh of impatience. “I didn't make you work this hard for your soda.”

Strictly speaking, that wasn't entirely true. I had purchased the soda and left it—with the
Buffy
issue—underneath Ben's usual seat at the student council table before everyone else had sat down. There was no point in alerting the world to this exchange of goods. B had seen me do it, but, being a good frosh, he'd kept his mouth shut as Ben had slipped the comic into his backpack. Everyone else had been too busy stressing the newest ranking coming out to notice.

“You lack my foresight.” Ben smiled, propping one Mess-regulation dress shoe against the wall. A haphazard amount of shoe polish had been slathered across the toe, highlighting the scuffs and divots rather than masking them. “For all you know, I could read
Buffy
in a bathtub filled with barbeque sauce and a handful of lit matches.”

“Whatever keeps you bathing regularly,” I said, laughing. “I need to know what happens to Alana and Marko. They're like Wash and Zoe from
Firefly
but they've also got the whole star-crossed warring alien species thing going. And Lying Cat! Have I mentioned how much I want a gigantic cat who can tell when people are lying?”

“You could try to train Meg to do it,” he said. “She's about the same size as Lying Cat.”

“I'll work on that. But first—”

I reached out and snatched the comics out of his hand. He released them easily, chuckling as I tucked them into my messenger bag. As I redid the clasps on the bag, Ben's wide smile shifted into a rigid blankness. I followed his glance over my shoulder and saw Mike Shepherd lumbering down the hallway toward us. He was impossible to miss, a colossus of acne stuffed into a drenched polo.

“Hey, Mike,” I said, ignoring the silencing look Ben was shooting at me.

Mike blinked at me before raising a meaty hand in a loose wave. “Oh. Hi, Trixie.” He and Ben eyed each other in a moment of profound and unbearable silence, as though every second of their former friendship was being replayed in real time. Mike broke first and said simply, “Greythorn.”

Ben gave an upward jerk of his chin. “Shep.”

I watched as Mike continued down the hall and disappeared into one of the labs. Ben grabbed his backpack from the floor and swung it heavily over his shoulders.

“How long were you two chums?” I asked lightly.

“Eighth grade,” Ben bit off, looking at the door Mike had disappeared into.

“Didn't you found the role-playing club together?”

He turned to me sharply, a familiar wall of hostility starting to rise up between us. “Do not start calling me Greythorn.”

“Wouldn't dream of it.” I pressed my lips together to prove that I could easily resist the impulse to mock him. He relaxed a fraction and I continued, “I was wondering what you thought about Alex Nguyen getting put on the AP list. He played Dungeons & Dragons with you and Mike, didn't he?”

He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “Yeah. But there's not much to think about. I don't talk to any of those guys anymore. Shep didn't like losing the student council election to me.”

I stopped myself from pointing out that the student council treasurer position was a dumb reason to end a friendship. It wouldn't help and I wasn't going to risk reigniting the battle of Watson versus West. If we went back to openly hating each other, I'd have to give back the
Saga
volumes currently poised inside my bag. And there was no way I was going to do that. They were my preciouses.

“But do you think he did it?” I asked.

“Why not? He was pretty far down in the ranking. I never saw him copying anyone's homework, but we didn't talk about classes much. It was all just the game. D&D is pretty involved.”

I held back a derisive snort. Again, mocking him would accomplish nothing. But it was almost adorable how much weight he'd given that last sentence. “Meg said that Mike got heated about it.”

“Yeah, well. Mike expects a lot from people.” He tugged on the straps of his backpack. “The bell's gonna ring soon. Tell me how you like the books.”

“Sure,” I said. “Would you like that essay in MLA or APA?”

“MLA. I like a good parenthetical.” He smiled and I watched the freckle next to his eye wrinkle out of existence. “Or just text me.”

I felt my eyebrows fly up toward my hairline. Exchanging emails through the Mess site had felt safe. It wasn't unusual to get emails from people who'd missed a lecture or wanted confirmation on a due date. Texting felt personal, unregulated. It was completely outside of our lives inside school, where cell phones were strictly forbidden.

“I don't…” I paused and cleared my throat like I could somehow regulate my heartbeat through my esophagus. “I don't have your number.”

“Oh. Right.” He swung his backpack around and unzipped the front pocket, retrieving a small notebook and a mechanical pencil from inside. His hand flew across the paper. He tore it out and handed it to me, his fingertips brushing mine for a split second.

I opened my mouth to say something—not that I had a witty line prepared—and the bell rang.

“Oh, hell.” I shoved the paper into my pocket and started running toward the Calculus classroom.

It wasn't until after I was seated and Dr. Kapoor had started her lecture that I slipped the note out of my pocket and saw that, above the scrawl of numbers, he'd written
Ben “West” West
. Stifling a laugh, I put the paper in my binder.

*   *   *

The student body crowded into the halls of the administration building at exactly 2:50. It took about fifteen seconds before the screaming started.

The Plexiglas case was empty. The pushpins that had held October's ranking lists were still sunk into the corkboard, but there wasn't a scrap of paper left behind.

“No ranking today,” Mr. Cline called, using his briefcase to push through the crowd as people hurled questions at him. “You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.”

At 2:53, the office staff had entered the fray, a legion of administrative assistants refusing questions and trying to push all of us toward the front doors. Mrs. Landry, the head secretary, was holding a stack of hall passes and using them to wave everyone away from the office.

There was a buzz of static through the speakers hidden in the ceiling. After a moment of muttering and paper ruffling, Dr. Mendoza's voice cut through the noise in the hall.

“Messina Academy students,” he boomed. “I apologize for the lack of warning, but there will be no class ranking posted today. You will be notified by your first-period teacher when the list will be available to you. For now, we ask that you leave the campus. Any student remaining on campus after three p.m. will be dealt swift disciplinary repercussions.” There was a pause. “Have a good afternoon.”

The front doors burst open and I was swept up in the tide of vacating students. As I walked into the bracing cold of the front steps, I could hear a hundred different theories being bandied about. A junior girl was loudly declaring that Mary-Anne France was to blame for the ranking being pulled. Another was openly crying about needing her current ranking for her college applications.

“It has to be another probation,” Harper said as she drove me and Meg off campus. “There's no other logical explanation.”

“I'm texting Peter,” Meg said from the backseat. “I tried to find him when Mendoza was talking, but I didn't see him.”

“Why would Peter know anything?” Harper asked.

“He's student council president,” Meg said, as though this should have explained everything. When Harper and I turned to her, she tossed her cell phone into her open backpack. “He's the liaison between the students and the administration. If they were going to tell anyone what's going on, it'd be him, right?”

“I don't think he even gets his own parking space,” Harper said.

“Well, he should,” Meg said, sulking. “And we deserve to know what's going on. They've never withheld the numbers from us before. It's an academic apocalypse.”

“We'll survive,” I said. “It's not forever. It's just not today.”

With it being freezing cold out and periodically pouring rain, the girls and I had forgone our last few post-Busby trips to the park. Considering the last time I'd sat in my cubby, I'd overheard the girls casting—accurate, but hurtful—aspersions on my character, I was more than happy to spend time in Harper's bedroom instead.

To say that Harper was spoiled would be both an understatement and a skosh unfair. Nothing in Harper's personality reflected her state-of-the-art Apple products, her king-sized bed, or her custom-made comic book shelving. In talking to her, you couldn't see that her bedroom could have easily held mine and Meg's and still had some extra space for her walk-in closet.

Of course, Mr. Leonard, for all of his generosity, did prohibit her from having a television in her room, which was why my house was used for movie nights. But, still. The three of us could have lived in Harper's room for days without ever seeing each other.

With mugs of instant hot chocolate and bags full of new comics, the three of us settled into a comfortable silence. Thoughts of the ranking and the Mess disappeared as I turned the pages of
Uncanny
X-Men
and
Scarlet Spider
. I curled up on the floor as I finished my hot chocolate and retrieved the first of Ben's
Saga
comics from my messenger bag.

“What is that?” Meg asked from her position on the gray loveseat in the corner.

It took me a moment to see that she was pointing at the comic I'd laid in front of me. I propped myself up on my elbows to see Meg's face clearly from over the bed between us.

“Oh, it's a Brian K. Vaughan series. Star-crossed lovers in space, intergalactic war. It's like if Joss Whedon wrote a
Futurama
episode.” I paused, glancing down at the next panel. “A really R-rated episode.”

Harper scooted down the bed and peered over the edge, squinting behind her specs to try to discern the page I was open to.

“Cool,” she breathed, tilting her head to examine the artwork. “Where'd you hear about that? You never read indies.”

“It's not that indie,” I said, quickly closing the book. I knew that I could have told the girls that Ben West had been the one who'd mentioned it to me, but I didn't want to deal with whatever the reaction would be. As far as everyone was concerned, the last couple of weeks had been pleasantly incident-free. I couldn't explain that Ben and I had made a concerted effort to make small talk between classes without also explaining that I knew that he was in love with me.

And if the girls knew that I knew, they'd ask a lot more questions. Like what I intended to do about that particular problem. Or if I was encouraging him by playing nice. Or if I'd noticed the freckle next to his left eye that wrinkled when he smiled.