The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (33 page)

My messenger bag bounced painfully against my side as I caught up to Ben. I grabbed his elbow and spun him around.

“Who do you know who lives on the stone streets?” I panted. He looked confused and I shook his arm violently. “You know someone who lives across town. Harper's on Onyx. In order to use her IP address directly, someone would have to be on Onyx or Emerald or Agate. They have to be close to her and care about you.”

His eyes were darting around, the same way they did in class when he was about to raise his hand. He scrubbed his hands over his face and cursed at the rain in English, French, and what might have been Orc.

I didn't have to wait for him to elaborate. I knew I was right. It was emotionally, mathematically, and spatially reasonable. “We have to get to the admin office.”

He shivered and brushed some of the water off his face. His voice came out in a rasp. “He's not here. He was absent in American Immigrant, remember? And he wasn't in Gender Roles.”

“How many classes do you guys have—” I cut myself off. It didn't matter yet, but it would. “We have to find a bus schedule.”

 

[12:32 PM]

Me

I might be a little late to the parking lot. And I'm definitely going to be grounded again. But I love you both and I think I have a solution to everything.

 

28

I wished I'd
thought to bring an umbrella. My clothes were soaked and Ben's hair had plastered itself to his forehead. Our uniforms drew the attention of the college students riding with us, but the driver took my money without question. I buttoned my jacket up to my neck as the bus puttered through the storm. Ben's leg wiggled next to mine as he stared out of the window at the buildings of the university.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley had said that in an essay once. He probably hadn't meant that being a genius sucks because you can't pretend that you never thought of the answers, but it worked for that, too.

I leaned over and pressed a kiss to Ben's cheek. A shadow of a smile crept over his lips. I took this as a solid sign that it was less likely that he was about to have a panic attack. He wove his fingers together with mine. He didn't let go, even as the bus dropped us at our stop.

“This way,” he said with a slight tug on my hand for guidance. It was the first time either of us had spoken since we'd left campus.

I recognized the neighborhood from my ride with Meg on Monday. The sidewalk was covered in a canopy of leafless trees. Most of the recessed driveways were missing cars.

We slowed to a stop in front of a large house with a sharply slanted roof. I craned to see the house behind it. I could barely make out a set of airy blue curtains in one of the windows. I wondered if Harper was behind them, practicing her apocrypha or if she'd already left for Marist.

Ben took a deep breath and wiped his face with the back of his sleeve before he rang the doorbell. He started to loosen his grip on my hand, but I held on fast. He glanced down at me in surprise and I rolled my eyes at him.

As I started to worry about whether or not anyone was home, the door creaked open, letting out a rush of blissfully warm air. Mike stood blinking at us in
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
pajama pants.

“Greythorn? Trixie?”

“Hey, Shep.” Ben squeezed my hand a little tighter. “We need to powwow.”

*   *   *

Despite having known Mike for most of my life, I'd never given much thought to his house. I vaguely remembered his mother bringing cupcakes to school once, but he'd never had a big full-class birthday party.

I had not expected him to live in an issue of
Architectural Digest
. There were exposed wood beams and skylights and carefully chosen antiques. As the boys led the way past the living room and down a long hallway, I counted four Tiffany lamps and saw a painting that might have been an original Diebenkorn.

And then we turned a corner and stepped into a bedroom filled with NASA paraphernalia and a flat-screen TV displaying a paused video game. There was a half-eaten bowl of Top Ramen between two massive beanbags and a bookcase filled with
Star Wars
novels and D&D miniatures.

I felt myself relax. This was what I'd been expecting. This was common ground.

Mike leaned over and turned off the Xbox. The TV went to its blue AV screen, giving the room an eerie, cavernous glow.

“I hope my mom doesn't come home. I'm not allowed to have girls in my room.” He went red under his acne as he shoved aside the bowl of ramen. “Go ahead and pull up a beanbag. Is there any chance you're here to give me Cline's notes from this morning?”

I sat on the nearest beanbag, which crunched and billowed underneath me awkwardly. I shoved an elbow into it to stay afloat. “He wants us to use MLA footnotes on the final instead of a bibliography.”

“Oh. Cool,” Mike said. He glanced over at Ben, who was settling into the beanbag beside me. “But that's not why you're here?”

“No,” Ben said. “You know why we're here.”

Even with the acne and the bed head and the cartoon jammies, Mike seemed much older as he sat down across from us. His face sagged as he stared at his hands, avoiding Ben's inscrutable gaze.

There was no point in tiptoeing. I was giving up the valedictorian slot. I was grounded again, probably for much longer than a week. I had to bet everything on being right.

“Hacking into Kenneth Pollack's account, I understand,” I said to Mike's bowed head. “He's a douche and a bully. You knew that he stuck Ben's head in a toilet last year and didn't get suspended for it, so you decided to take it into your own hands.”

Ben tossed me a look of confusion. I knew that he'd assumed that I would focus on Harper, but if he was going to leave this line of questioning in my hands, he was going to have to trust me.

“You found a way into B. Calistero's account to cover your tracks, used your own essay to frame him—because it's so obvious that no one would think of pinning it to you—and watched Ken get pulled off the basketball team.” Mike twitched, but I kept going. I'd spent all week with the puzzle pieces scattered through my thoughts. It was easy to shuffle them into place now. “Cline's speech at the dance was wrong. Ishaan Singh did let his grades slip when he was suspended. He was fifth when you got into his account. Meg said so at the harvest festival. You needed his slot as wiggle room to start carving out the top four to your liking. You didn't want me, Harper, and Cornell to drop too far. You weren't waging war. You were playing chess. We were your major pieces. You wouldn't risk us getting knocked off the board. Our GPAs were protecting the top slot for Ben.

“But Jack would have ruined all that. He was supposed to be a pawn, but he started jumping ahead too quickly. It took him less than a semester to break into the top ten. It wouldn't be impossible for him to make it to valedictorian. So, you had to take him out, even though it would draw the attention of the administration.”

“You forgot Alex,” Ben interrupted icily. “He was so far down in the ranking, he didn't even factor. And Shep tried to get him expelled anyway.”

Mike's hands had started shaking. I could see him clutching them into painful fists, his knuckles burning white. His teeth grit together, desperate to keep whatever was rising up in his throat from coming out. I'd never seen anyone look so petrified.

“Anyone could go into the ranking and shuffle people around,” I said. I ducked my head, trying to catch Mike's eye. “Making Ben the valedictorian was only half of the goal. I bet you didn't even touch your own grades, did you?” He swung his head. “But if you succeeded in getting Alex expelled, the role-playing club wouldn't have a quorum. It'd either have to shut down or—”

“Or it'd need a new vice president,” Ben said.

“The real vice president,” Mike whispered as he forced himself to look at Ben.

“You kicked me out,” Ben said, awestruck. “You had me voted off the board when I ran against you for treasurer. You hate to lose.”

Mike wrung his hands. “We started this together. It's not right, running it without you. The game's not the same.”

There wasn't a little fire in Ben's eyes. It was like Vesuvius detonating from inside Mount Doom on top of the volcano planet Mustafar. “You couldn't have shot me an email? ‘Hey, come by on Friday to play a campaign.'”

“You didn't respond when I emailed you over the summer,” Mike said so quietly that it was hard to make out the words.

“I was busy getting coffee for congressmen,” Ben snarled. “And you apparently lost your shit, so I don't feel too bad about it.”

“Enough,” I said, keeping my voice level. “Ben, didn't you think it was odd that he volunteered to work the harvest festival?”

“Under the bylaws, all school clubs are required to work any event that could be classified as a carnival, bazaar, or moveable feast,” Mike said. “The harvest festival is technically a carnival.”

“The rest of the role-playing club didn't work the haunted house,” I said, thinking of Mike standing at the entrance in his lab coat. “And you weren't required to go to the winter ball. But you knew from reading Ben's emails that he had to be there. It would have been in Mary-Anne's weekly reports from the student council meetings.”

“You read my emails?” Ben roared.

Mike shriveled deeper into the carpet. “Not all of them.”

“Just enough to know where you were going to be,” I finished, looking at Ben. “That's why Mike came and sat with me at the dance. That's why he told you that I'd left with Jack. That's why he let Cornell sit with him at lunch. People who hate you don't go out of their way to see you. They don't make sure they pass you in the halls every day or take classes with you. They don't get close to your friends. They don't try to make you valedictorian. He's been trying so hard to make up with you—”

“He's been trying so hard that he hacked into the administration and got four people put on academic probation?” Ben shouted, leaping out of his chair and pacing the floor in front of Mike's bed. He looked deranged with his wet hair sticking up in odd cowlicks from where he'd tugged at it. “That makes no sense! That's the most asinine, roundabout, pathetic, completely fucking illogical thing that I've ever heard.”

“No, it's not,” Mike said. “You said that the only way your mom would fly all the way out for graduation was if you made valedictorian.”

Ben stopped pacing. His breathing was ragged. “You can't be the dungeon master of real life. My grades, my family are none of your damn business. I don't have to roll to your liking anymore.”

“Don't you get it?” I asked. How was it possible for us to have the same IQ when he was so much slower on the uptake than I was? “Those are exactly the things that your friends care about. God, Ben, you know that I've been going crazy this week because of Harper's grades and Harper's family. That's what happens when you care about someone.”

“Let's talk about Harper,” he shouted. He pointed at Mike with a vibrating finger. “He got her expelled. He's the reason Cornell dumped her and you and Meg stopped talking and your parents grounded you. He did that, Trixie.”

“I didn't…” Mike gulped and turned to me. “I didn't mean to involve Harper in this. I downloaded this software that would unlock the passwords to the nearest routers and their IP addresses. It wasn't like I went looking for Harper's house. The router had the name it came with from the manufacturer and the password was ‘Sarah.' I thought it was the people next door. Their dog's name is Sarah.”

My veins went cold. “Sarah was Harper's mom's name.”

Mike put his face in his hands as Ben gave an unintelligible roar of rage and kicked the nearest bookcase. There was a tinkle of pewter statues falling over.

“West,” I snapped without thinking about it. I'd almost forgotten the power of last-naming him. He immediately paused, glaring at me mutinously. “It's going to take too long for us to ride the bus back across town. Call everyone and tell them to get to Harper's.”

“Everyone,” he repeated flatly.

“I don't care what lie you have to tell Cornell to get him there. We can't fix this without the whole group.”

He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment, undoubtedly trying to come up with a reason why this was not a rational request. Coming up short, he stormed out of the room, pulling his cell phone out of his backpack as he went.

“Please believe me,” Mike whispered into his hands, which were still pressed against his nose. “I really was just trying to help Ben. I wanted my best friend back. It all went wrong and then it got worse and I—I never would have done anything to Harper.”

“I know,” I said. “I mean, you did get her expelled and didn't come forward when she was forcibly removed from campus, but we'll overlook that bit. Right now, I need you to promise me that you will help us put everything back the way it should be.”

He lowered his hands, revealing his damp eyelashes. “I'm going to get expelled.”

I wished I could tell him that there was another way for this to play out, but I knew there wasn't. The administration would be out for Mike's blood when they found out that they'd been duped into expelling their salutatorian for no reason. The Donnelly family would threaten to pull their funding if Mike wasn't punished for threatening their legacy. Not to mention the parents of all the other AP students, the basketball and cricket teams that had lost players, and all of our classmates who'd always thought that Mike was on the weird side.

It was a shame. Mike was on the weird side, but he was really just a nerd with too much time on his hands. He had thought that if he helped Ben, he'd get his best friend back. I understood that. I would have gone over to the dark side for Harper and Meg. I'd spent all week on the verge of it.