The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (34 page)

“Mike, what's your IQ?”

He took in a deep snuffle as fat tears started rolling through the nooks and crannies of his face. “One hundred and ninety-two.”

The mad genius range. That stood to reason. “And where are you in the ranking?”

“Bouncing around the thirties,” he said to the carpet. “I got bored in Gender Roles.”

“Have you ever considered testing out of school? With your IQ and everything you learned at the Mess, you could walk into any high school on Monday and be done. They give credit for proficiency.”

“Really?” He wiped his nose on the back of his arm in a long swipe. “Why haven't you done that?”

“Stockholm syndrome. But you should think about it.” I leaned forward and patted him on the shoulder. With more than a little effort, I dislodged myself from the beanbag chair. “I'm gonna go make sure Ben isn't Hulk-smashing your living room.”

 

[3:05 PM]

Dad

Got a call from your school again. This is a really poor thank you, Beatrice.

[3:07 PM]

Me

I know. I'm sorry. I found out who framed Harper and had to go get him to confess. He's being expelled in the other room.

[3:08 PM]

Dad

WHAT?!

[3:10 PM]

Me

It's a crazy long story. I'm on my way to Harper's now to tell her.

[3:12 PM]

Dad

How did you get across town without Harper picking you up?

[3:13 PM]

Me

I gallivanted on the bus. Sorry sorry sorry. I'll have her drive me home for dinner.

 

29

By the time
Ben and I left, the rain had let up and Mike was on a conference call with his parents and Harper's dad. I couldn't endure listening to his sobbing confession again. While he had called Dr. Mendoza, I'd put in for another favor from Jack. First thing Monday morning, Nick would go into the administrative office and have Mike's transcripts sent over to Sheldon High. The Donnellys would get the pleasure of knowing that Mike was expelled and Mike would get to test out of school. He was eighteen. There wasn't any way for his parents to stop him.

I put my hands in the damp pockets of my jacket. My uniform had mostly dried while we'd been at Mike's, but my coat was a cold, clammy weight. Thankfully, it was a short walk around the corner. Harper's car gleamed in the driveway of the big white house. Peter's minivan was parked on the curb in front of Cornell's silver hybrid.

“God, I hope there are cookies,” Ben said as we cut across the soggy lawn. “I would give my left hand for cookies.”

I nudged him with my shoulder. “I'm the one who solved the case. If anyone gets cookies, it's me.”

“Your case, my emotional trauma,” he said, skipping the step up to the front door.

“Hey, your enemies list is down to just Jack and Ken Pollack. That's good news, right?”

I reached in front of him for the doorknob. The door swung inward, letting out the screams.

“How could you possibly think that I would be happy about that, you addlepated, impetuous jackass?”

I shoved past Ben and found Harper in the middle of the living room whacking Cornell with a wad of rolled-up paper. Cornell had thrown his arms up to shield his face.

“That's what we've been trying to tell him,” Peter said from the couch in front of the window as Harper continued to abuse Cornell.

“He's been displaying symptoms of oppositional defiance this week,” said Meg, standing safely back near the fireplace.

“You thought that I would break up with you over my grades,” Cornell yelped, bobbing and weaving gracelessly as Harper's paper found purchase on the top of his head. “I had to prove to you that I loved you more than I cared about being valedictorian. You wouldn't take my calls.”

“Because I was grounded, you feckless goon!”

“Oh good,” Ben said, closing the door behind us. “More people pissed about the ranking. Can I go home now?”

“No,” I said.

Harper spun around, her glasses crooked on the edge of her nose. She shoved them upward and pointed her swatting papers at me.

“And you,” she growled. “I told you not to skip school again. I told you not to put yourself into any more trouble. This was supposed to be a nice day. We were going to get Slurpees—”

“And make a fort,” Meg added.

“And make a fort,” Harper wailed, waving her paper roll in a figure eight over her head like a lasso. “But, no. You two run off campus together for God knows what reason—”

“I don't think you're allowed to use the Lord's name in vain if you're going to go to Marist,” Peter said.

“She's not going to Marist,” I said, peeling off my jacket. “I just had Mike Shepherd expelled.”

*   *   *

“I would have gone with baking Ben cookies before committing academic fraud,” Harper said after I had finished explaining the events of the day. “But that's just me.”

“God, I wish there were cookies,” Ben grumbled.

“Personally, I think what Mike did was kind of sweet,” Meg said.

“Trying to get five people expelled?” Peter frowned, stretching out his bad leg with a wince. “That's way more crazy than nice.”

“Extreme, not crazy,” Meg corrected. “He didn't even change his own ranking. It was totally selfless.”

“Hallmark doesn't make a ‘sorry I kicked you out of the role-playing club' card,” Cornell said.

The Leonard household wasn't set up for company. Finding seating had taken almost as long as my explanation of what had happened once Ben and I had left campus. I was stuck between Meg and Peter on the couch. Harper and Cornell were a hand span apart on the brick ledge in front of the fireplace. Ben was on the floor with his back against the oak cabinet where the TV was hidden. It was a decent impression of himself—his knees akimbo, his head tilted to examine the room—but his expression stayed blank. I thought about pressing my nose into his cheek, kissing his jaw until his lips turned up in the corners.

But I stayed where I was.

“So, Mike framed everyone so that Ben's mom would come to graduation, Trixie's grounded again, and Cornell decided to destroy his academic future and possibly bankrupt the entire charter of the student government in the process,” Harper said lightly. “You guys had a busy week.”

“Leadership is a half-credit class,” Cornell said. “It wouldn't ruin my entire future. It probably wouldn't even take me out of the top ten. I just wouldn't be valedictorian.”

Harper turned to him with an impish smile. “I thought you were doing it to prove how much you loved me. Now it's only a half-credit class and a place in the top ten?”

“When we were in Mendoza's office, you said that I wanted to be valedictorian more than I wanted to be with you,” he said, scooping up her hands and holding them between his. “I love you more than I love any place on the ranking. I tried to convince my parents to send me over to Marist, but they wouldn't let me. I could transfer myself after I turn eighteen and flunk out of there, too—”

“So much intellect, so little common sense.” She rested her forehead against his. “I love you. Don't flunk anything that you don't want to.”

“Okay.” He nodded against her nose. “Does that mean you'll take me back?”

“I never let you go, you nitwit.” She tipped her face to kiss him and Cornell's hand came up to shield them from view.

After the events of the winter ball, I had expected seeing the two of them together again to fill me with indignant rage. But there was no anger left in my body. They were so strangely comfortable together, even in knowing that everyone was watching them, expecting explanations. Beside me, Meg sniffled.

Ben didn't appear to be listening. He was looking up at the mantel, where a dozen pictures of Harper sat between various award statuettes. He seemed to shake himself out of his reverie, blinking rapidly as his eyes adjusted on Harper and Cornell.

“Harpo, are you going to come back on Monday?” he asked.

Harper extricated herself from Cornell and pushed her glasses up her nose. “The course load at Marist is much simpler than at the Mess. Really, I could do the same thing that Mike's doing and test out. It'd take a lot of work to make up for all the religion classes I missed.”

After days of sleepless nights, frying my brain for answers, ditching school, and constantly fighting off the urge to cry, I had never stopped to consider that Harper could choose not to come back to the Mess. I'd been so desperate to make things right, to bring everything back to proper equilibrium. And what if it had all been a waste?

Harper flapped her hands. “And if I didn't come back then you guys could graduate with a higher ranking.”

“Or we could never talk about the ranking ever again,” Ben said. “That would work, too.”

“I'm happy being number three,” I said honestly. “Besides, Ben and I haven't tried to destroy each other in ages. Why bring that back?”

“Agreed.” Ben yawned, closing his eyes. “The peace has been nice.”

“Oh, please,” Meg said. “You guys couldn't destroy each other if you tried. It's different now.”

“Meg,” Peter hissed, his eyes shining a warning at her from the other side of me.

She threw up her hands. “What? Are we really going to keep pretending that we don't know?”

“That was the plan,” Cornell said, shooting Harper a nervous glance.

Ben opened one eye and stared around. “What plan?”

Harper gave a nervous cluck. I turned to Peter, who inspected the ceiling.

“Margaret?” Ben said. Meg blew a raspberry in return.

“You know,” I said loudly, fisting my hands in my lap. “Considering I found the way to revoke Harper's expulsion, I think I've earned the right to know what in the hell is going on here.”

Peter, Meg, Harper, and Cornell exchanged another round of shifty glances. Cornell sat taller, his head tilted with a hint of haughty arrogance.

“It's just that you two couldn't be in the same place for five minutes without going nuclear,” he said with all the diplomacy he usually reserved for ending student council fights. “And if we had to hear about the monkey bars one more time—”

“See, I needed a test group for my thought experiment,” Meg broke in. “I was planning on using myself and Ishaan, but the more I thought about him, the more I realized that it would be so inconvenient to date someone on the cricket team. Their games are always so far away. But then he got suspended and we were having so much trouble with you guys. There was the harvest festival debacle and the nerd duel and all of those miserable lunches.” She rubbed her feet together as she wriggled into the arm of the couch. “And so we had a meeting.”

“You had a meeting?” I repeated.

“A couple of meetings,” Peter admitted.

“We thought that maybe you'd be nicer to each other if you thought the other person had a crush on you,” Harper said.

“Enemies to lovers. It's a very common trope,” Meg said in a rush. “It comes up a lot in regency and Victorian literature. Standoffish man, opinionated woman. I noticed it when I started doing my extra credit for Gender Roles. And I thought to myself, ‘Well, there has to be a psychological basis for this plot.' And there is! Your putamen and insula light up when you're being faced with something you love or something you hate. Your brain literally can't tell the difference without context clues. By rewriting the negative preconceived notions of your prior relationship, you were free to see each other as positive stimuli!”

Silence.

“She sold it to us as sexual tension,” Cornell said.

“Classic Elizabeth and Darcy,” Meg said.

“I am not Mr. Darcy,” Ben said.

“No…” Harper laughed. “You're the Elizabeth.”

All of the air rushed out of my lungs. I felt like I'd been hit with a semitruck or a wrecking ball or Thor's hammer. I couldn't bring myself to look at Ben, who was motionless on the floor.

“The day in the park,” I said. My face felt numb as I remembered being wedged under the tube slide, crying into a damaged comic. “When I heard you and Harper talking about how Ben was on the brink of suicide because he was in love with me—”

“Suicide?” Ben echoed.

“You did say you'd kill yourself if you had to spend more time with her,” Peter said weakly.

“Hyperbole,” Ben snapped. He reached for his backpack and dug around inside for a minute before pulling out a piece of notebook paper that was more tape than anything else. It looked like it'd survived a war. He thrashed it toward Cornell. “Then what in the hell is this?”

Peter made a choking sound. “You kept the poems? They were in the trash.”

“What poems?” I asked.

Ben thrust the paper at Meg, who passed it to me gingerly. The page was covered in handwriting eerily similar to my own. Except I knew for a fact that I'd never written a sonnet, much less six of them. Whoever had written these had a patience for counting syllables that I lacked.

“What the hell is a
devinette
?” I asked.

“It's French for ‘riddle,'” Ben said.

“I took three years of Italian,” I said, shoving the paper back at Meg. I didn't want it near me ever again. “Those poems were obviously written by Mary-Anne. And I'm pretty sure they're about Jack.”

“She did an excellent job matching your handwriting, though,” Harper said. “Who knew she was an accomplished forger?”

“You know,” Ben said stiffly, “I thought that Mike trying to get everyone expelled so that I could be valedictorian would be the worst thing that happened today. Congrats, guys. You really outdid yourselves.”

“But it all worked out,” Meg said frantically. “You two totally love each other. Under the stress of the last week, you crystallized into a perfect polymer. You surpassed the control group!”