Twisted Fate(6)

“Probably thirty,” I called back to him. “Maybe forty. But who’s counting?”

Declan and Becky stifled their laughter.

“Carry that board out of the building or I will confiscate it this time.”

I flipped the skateboard up into my hands and kept walking, ignoring him. Becky and Declan followed behind me.

“’Sup, Mr. Fitz?” Declan said as they passed. “Happy to go home after a long day as guardian of America’s future rocket scientists and Walmart greeters?”

Fitz said, “Watch yourself, Wells. Have a good afternoon, Becky. Oh, just a minute . . . Wells, we have a new student starting next week. He’ll need to shadow someone for a day and get shown the ropes, and guess who’s going to be doing the showing?”

“Aw, serious? Me? I’m not like Virgil or something, you know, guiding some newbie through hell. That’s really not the archetype I prefer, Mr. Fitz.”

Mr. Fitzgerald smiled and shook his head. “Nice Dante reference, Wells. You have such a good brain in there. Maybe your attitude could catch up to it, huh? And guess what? You are gonna be Virgil for a day or some of those missed detentions are going to magically multiply. The student’s name is Graham Copeland. Nice kid. Getting a little bit of a late start and I think he needs someone like you to show him around.”

“C’mon!” I yelled from the end of the hallway. I didn’t hear everything Fitz had said but I’m sure it wasn’t worth spending another two seconds of our lives at school. “Half pipe’s awaiting! And so’s the other pipe.”

They caught up to me and we ran downstairs and out into the parking lot. Becky was already taking the little bowl out of the top pocket of her flannel and she started packing it as we walked. She could barely get through the day anymore without medicinal help. She’d just started getting high a couple months ago but she was already making up for lost time. Usually she would smoke right after school, then go straight to her room and listen to LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver over and over again while she wrote computer code and did other hacker things that were so geeky even me and Declan could barely understand her. She also made jewelry out of sea glass and superglue and wire that she gave to people as gifts. It was like some kind of stoned Santa’s workshop in her room with electronic music instead of Christmas carols.

And she was running out of people to give them to. Their cleaning lady already had two necklaces, a bracelet, and three sets of earrings. And the cleaning lady’s kid had a sea glass necklace she had made him that he’d drawn a big W on with a Sharpie marker. “For Wolverine,” he told her. I had a whole cigar box full of necklaces. Some of which I’d just hang in the windows of my room to catch the light. Declan took her sea glass stuff and actually put it back in the sea. “It’ll get better with time,” he told her when she caught him doing it. Before Becky started getting high, she used to do schoolwork with the same intense concentration. But now it was just coding and sea glass and she seemed much happier now.

“What did Fitz want?” Becky asked, brushing her long red hair out of her face as we ducked beneath the low branches that hung before the footpath down to the creek. The fall leaves crunched beneath our feet and the air smelled good, like autumn: wood smoke and mud and pine and the faint brackish salty smell of the ocean that hung in the air all around.

Declan said, “He wanted me to show some new kid around. I swear, he thinks just ’cause of my PSAT scores, I always gotta represent the school or some bullshit.”

“It’s your own fault,” I said. “You could stop winning chess games and science fairs and maybe drop out of the Model UN and debate team. The reason he got that idea is because you actually do represent the school. Duh.”

Becky nodded in agreement. “Shoulda done the wake-and-bake method of studying for the P-sat,” she said, inhaling deeply and passing the bowl to him. She coughed and smiled. “I think that helped knock me down to average from slightly above. Except in math.”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t think anything could depose you from being the scary computer math nerd queen,” I said. “Anyway, who’s the kid?”

“Graham somebody.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Graham Copeland?!” I shouted. “Gross. That’s the creepy f*cking dweeb I was telling you about.”

I took the bowl from Declan. Becky was laughing at the way I’d said “creepy dweeb,” or maybe the way a squirrel had run across our path, or she was just laughing because, as usual, she was high or thinking about something else when other people were talking—I couldn’t tell which.

Declan shrugged. “The car kid?”

“Creepy dweeb,” Becky said to herself, snickering.

“Oh my God, you’ll be with him all day and telling him about school? This is too good. You have to tell me all about him.” I handed Becky the bowl and grinned back at Declan. “I just know there’s something weird going on there. There’s a story in there that we don’t know.”

Declan shrugged. “Your motivations seem suspect, Tate. Him being a dweeb or a nerd or socially outside the norm is hardly a reason for me to spy on him, but perhaps you’d like to simply admit to us how you feel about this creeb. This dewy breec, this weepy bed wrec.”

“Oh God! Stop with the anagrams!” Becky yelled. “He’s worse with the anagrams when he’s stoned,” she told me, but of course I already knew this.