The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (21 page)

“There is no shame in asking for help,” Cline continued, raising his voice to its usual theatrical echo. I faced forward again, choking down a laugh. “And there is no quick fix for falling behind. A grade you had to steal is a personal failure, whether or not it has been reflected in the letter red-penned to the top-left corner.
Fide et veritate,
kids. Truth and loyalty. Both will out in the end.

“And with that,” he said, dusting off his hands as though their serious position had tainted them, “my duty is done. Please remember to read the McCune essay, making particular note of the idea of assimilation. There may or may not be something in the family tree of a quiz tomorrow.”

The bell rang on cue and everyone launched to their feet, grabbing backpacks and coats in a flurry of activity.

“All of that because Jack stole an essay off the Internet,” Ben grumbled, pushing his way over to me, Harper, and Cornell.

“Ben,” Harper said in a scathing whisper, searching around us for obvious eavesdroppers. She dropped her voice to an almost inaudible murmur through clenched teeth. “You know that Peter doesn't want it to spread.”

“What Peter wants and what Jack wants are unrelated,” Ben said, adjusting his backpack and following as Harper and Cornell led us out of the room.

We stepped into a throng of passing students. Cornell inclined his shaved head toward the end of the hall where Brad Hertz and Nick Conrad were shoving their way into the quad. “Brad and Nick are already telling people that Jack's suspended for the week. They were talking to Mary-Anne when I got here.”

“Are they hoping to turn him into a slacker Che Guevara?” I asked. “I would not wear
that
T-shirt.”

Harper snatched the headband off her head and replaced it aggressively as she walked. “It does not matter if other people are talking about it. We do not need to assist the rumor.”

“It's not a rumor,” I pointed out, carefully skirting around the fact that gossiping about Jack Donnelly was how most of the senior class spent their lunch hour. “It's a fact. He is, in fact, suspended.”

Ignoring me, she tilted her chin at Cornell. “I made chocolate chip cookies for Peter. He'll like them, right? I know you said that he liked oatmeal, but my dad—”

“God, Harpo.” Ben groaned. “It's not like Jack has cancer. He just cracked under the pressure of being a Donnelly.”

“Being a sullen jerk takes its toll,” I added. “He's the Loki to Peter's Thor.”

“Minus the costumes,” Ben said.

“And the dead sexiness of Tom Hiddleston,” I said.

Ben scoffed. “Man, I wish Peter would rock a winged helmet.”

“You could get him a hammer as a hint,” I suggested.

Harper stopped short. If she could have whipped off her specs and shot us with ocular laser beams, she would have. “You two are completely impossible. It was so much easier when you just went at each other.”

I raised my eyebrows at her in patient quizzicality. “As you wish.” Without waiting for her to respond, I turned to Ben. “Benedict, you have all the tact and intellectual capacity of an unmanned Muppet.”

The corners of his mouth twitched. “We can't all be Skeksis. It must be hard since the Gelflings wiped out the rest of you.” He looked back at Harper. “Better?”

I laughed. “We could bring up the monkey bars, but I think it'd feel forced.”

Harper glared back, seemingly unaware that Cornell was straining with the effort of not laughing. She raised a threatening finger at us.

“If I'm late to second period because of that, neither of you gets cookies at lunch.”

Turning on her heel, she strode off.

“Tough, but fair,” Cornell said. “I'd better catch up to her before she starts ranting at innocents.”

He jogged up the hall, following Harper out into the quad. Ben and I trailed behind at a safe distance, still giggling.

“A Dark Crystal pull?” I asked. “Old school. Very solid.”

“I just took your lead. I hope we still get cookies.”

“Me too. She made them with M&Ms. Meg will sneak some to us. She appreciates humor. Well, except for pretending to be a Lying Cat. She still refuses to say ‘lying' on cue.” I nudged him with my elbow as we came to the doors to the quad. I gestured to the left. “I'm off to Econ. Yay, Third World politics.”

He twitched his head to the right, indicating the opposite hall. “I've got Gender Roles. I'll start hinting to Meg about the cookies. See you.”

Without pausing, he reached down and took my hand, squeezing gently. My breath caught in my throat and I managed a choked “Later” before he released me and darted down the hall.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets, trapping the foreign warmth as I hustled toward second period.

*   *   *

“This,” said Cornell, raising half a cookie over his head, “is a fine cookie.”

“Mighty fine,” Ben agreed, dusting crumbs off his shirt.

“You really didn't have to bring me cookies,” Peter said, unironically shoving another one into his mouth and chewing with relish. “I'm not the one who got suspended.”

Adhering to the seating schedule, we were tucked away at our old table in the cafeteria, away from the prying ears of the student council. As much as I felt guilty for abandoning B to the claws of his political peers, it was nice to have some semblance of privacy.

Harper turned up her nose with all the poise and profile of a monarch. “That doesn't mean you aren't also under stress.”

Peter nodded in concession and swallowed with some effort. “It's been tense. It's not just my parents who are pissed. My whole family went here. So, half of the family is pissed that Jack is ruining the legacy and the other half is pissed that the Mess thinks that a Donnelly would cheat.”

My ankle exploded in white-hot pain as Meg's heel slammed into it. I jerked my head to glare at her, but she just batted her makeup-enhanced lashes at me in slow, pointed blinks. She slid a cookie across her lunch tray, leaving it hovering on the rim. Her eyebrows waggled a fraction.

“Well,” I said, picking up the bribe cookie begrudgingly, “did he do it?”

As Harper narrowed her eyes at me, Peter leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. He spun his cookie between his fingers, examining the cracked candy shells of the M&Ms.

“I don't know,” he said. “He keeps saying ‘it'll work out.' I don't know if that means he's expecting the family to buy his way out of it or if he's actually innocent. They're saying that one of his essays is a copy of something that was turned in last year. But I've never even heard of the kid who wrote the first one. Just some girl who went here last year. She's a frosh at Brown now.” He took another bite, wincing sheepishly. “I looked her up to make sure.”

“I'm sure that Jack is right,” Harper said, not even slowing down to acknowledge that it was definitely the first time anyone had ever said that. “It will work itself out. If he didn't know the person who wrote the original essay, then how could he possibly have cheated? It's not like there are copies of old essays floating around the school.”

“Not unless there's a black market on campus we don't know about,” Ben said affably.

“Do not make me take away your cookies,” she snapped.

“No, he has a point,” Meg said, scooting forward on the bench and dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The Mess is a school for geniuses. You can't rule out malicious mischief.”

“Idle nerds turn into supervillains,” I said.

Ben grinned at me from across the table. “I like that. ‘Idle nerds.'”

“I can't take the credit. Harper's dad said it.”

“It's a flub,” Harper said, her breathing coming in short bursts. “A mistake. There's no reason to start making up conspiracies—”

“What about Ishaan and Alex?” Cornell asked her. “And Ken Pollack? They all said they didn't do it, too.”

“Then maybe they didn't. They weren't expelled, were they?” She pointed across the cafeteria in three different directions, pointing out all three of the AP boys at their respective tables. Alex was sitting with Mike Shepherd and the rest of the role-playing club. Ken was throwing something at Brad Hertz while one of the other guys from the basketball team held his phone under the table, secretly taking a picture. Ishaan was reading an extracurricular paperback book with a robot on the cover.

Cornell gave an incredulous laugh. “What do you think happened? There were four random clerical errors that only hit the senior class?”

“Why do you want to believe the worst?” Harper countered hotly, swinging around on the bench to face him. She pushed her glasses up her nose as patches of pink indignation spread under her freckles. “Everyone assumes that the APs are guilty, but there's no evidence. It could be a glitch or the teachers being too quick to start calling plagiarism. We're all getting the same lectures and taking the same notes and reading the same books. It isn't out of the realm of possibility that some people use similar phrasing in their essays.”

“But that isn't logical!” Cornell exclaimed.

Harper's jaw shifted, pushing out her lower lip, the tips of her teeth showing like the edge of a buzz saw. “Excuse me?”

Meg shot me a look and I knew that she was also hearing the ominous music that preceded Harper going berserk. Soon, her hands would curl into talons and her shoulders would shake and the freckled and bespectacled blond girl we loved would turn into a towering inferno of telekinetic rage.

“It isn't logical,” she repeated menacingly. “You mean to tell me that there is no reality where Jack happened to use the same angle for an essay as a girl he never met and the administration decided to make an example of him?”

Peter drummed his fingers on the table and I thought I recognized the Morse code for SOS in the patter. “Guys, we really don't need to—”

“Here,” Harper snarled, shoving the Tupperware container of cookies toward him without taking her eyes off Cornell. “You really think that if there was any evidence whatsoever they wouldn't immediately expel all four of the boys who were supposedly caught?”

Cornell reached for her hands. “Harper, I love you and I love that you want to believe the best of everyone but—”

“Don't,” she bit off, rapping his knuckles as she shoved herself away from him. “Don't you pander to me, Cornell Aaron. Answer the fucking question.”

Ben's eyes went wide at me and he mouthed,
An F Bomb?
I sighed, mentally retracting all of my previous delight at not sitting with the student council. Harper never would have lost her temper in front of the froshlings. Next time, I'd make sure B was with us.

“I think they gave Ken a slap on the wrist so he could keep playing basketball. They did the same thing last year when he beat up Ben,” Cornell said flatly.

“Ah, memories,” Ben said, grabbing another cookie. “I didn't know people gave swirlies in real life.”

“What's a swirly?” Meg asked.

“Ken shoved Ben's head in the toilet,” Peter said.

“And flushed,” Ben added.

Meg cringed. “That's disgusting.”

“Not expelling Kenneth for cheating set a bad precedent,” Cornell continued, raising his voice over the others. “So the most Mendoza could do was suspend the others. That doesn't make anyone innocent. It means that the administration took a soft route and it paved the way for more bad behavior.”

Harper clucked, swishing her hair over her shoulder. “The obvious parallels to McCarthyism are nonsensical? Everyone's guilty because they look guilty?”

“Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and use the dictionary definition of a coincidence. It's not something that happens over and over again,” Cornell said. “People don't just happen to write essays that look like other people's work.” His cheeks inflated with a breath that he slowly exhaled in a low hiss. “I'm sorry, Peter. I don't mean to say that your brother deserves to be expelled.”

“No, I get it,” Peter said. “If he did cheat, then he shouldn't get to stay. I don't want it to be—”

“Why?” Harper exploded. “Why should he be expelled?”

Peter twitched in alarm and looked around the table for assistance. Cornell squeezed his eyes closed, tapping out of the battle.

“Because,” I said, with all the care and delicacy of passing a land mine, “academic dishonesty is the number-one no-no of the Mess? Or any school.”

Harper bent forward like a predator ready to strike. Meg shivered closer to me as though I could stop Harper from diving across the table.

“Has anyone else considered the insane amount of pressure they put on us here?” Harper hissed, a wild glint behind her specs. “Do you know what other seniors are doing right now? They're reading Jane Austen—for the first time. They're taking pre-calc and getting a full night's sleep every night. When was the last time any of you got eight hours of sleep?”

A longing silence passed over the table. I distantly remembered waking up at noon sometime in July.

“But we're not normal seniors,” Meg said softly. “We're here because we're different.”

“There are geniuses everywhere,” Harper said. “Other schools don't push them to the breaking point. Everyone who has been caught cheating went from Aragon Prep to the Mess. Thirteen years of never being cut a break. It's not healthy. I mean, if it weren't for the ranking, Ben and Trixie wouldn't have spent four years trying to kill each other. Now that it's been taken down, it doesn't matter who's number three.”

Ben coughed, throwing me a horrified look. “It's not that it doesn't matter.…”

“Not knowing isn't the worst thing,” I conceded. “Not that I have any doubt about where I placed.”

Harper folded her arms over her chest. “But you don't know and so you can't flip out about it. If—and I'm not saying that I think he did it—if Jack cheated, it wouldn't be because he wasn't capable of writing an essay himself. Any one of us could have gotten into college years ago. There are genius kids all over the country who aren't stuck in a holding pattern. They leave middle school and go to college.