Lock and Key(114)

I knew it, I thought. Out loud, I said, “No.”

“Did you see him this weekend?”

I shook my head. “Not since school on Friday.”

“She hasn’t seen him since Friday,” Jamie repeated into the phone. “Yeah, absolutely. We’ll definitely let you know if we do. Keep us posted, okay?”

I opened the dishwasher, concentrating on loading in my bowl and spoon as he hung up. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Nate’s gone AWOL, apparently,” he said. “Blake hasn’t seen him since Friday night.”

I stood up, shutting the dishwasher. “Has he called the police? ”

“No,” he said, taking a bite of cereal. “He thinks he probably just took off for the weekend with his friends— you know, senioritis or whatever. Can’t have gone far, at any rate.”

But I, of course, knew this wasn’t necessarily true. You could get anywhere on foot, especially if you had money and time. And Nate hadn’t had a fence to jump. He’d just walked out. Free and clear.

And I was too late. If I’d just gone over there that night I’d seen him swimming, or talked to him on Friday at school, maybe, just maybe, I might have been able to help. Now, even if I wanted to go after him, I didn’t know where to start. He could be anywhere.

It was weirder than I’d expected, driving myself to school after so many long months of being dependent on someone else. Under any other circumstances, I probably would have enjoyed it, but instead it felt almost strange to be sitting in traffic in the quiet of Jamie’s Audi, other cars on all sides of me. At one light, I glanced over to see a woman in a minivan looking at me, and I wondered if to her I was just a spoiled teenage girl in an expensive car, a backpack on the seat beside her, blinker on to turn in to an exclusive school. This was unnerving for some reason, so much so that I found myself staring back at her, hard, until she turned away.

Once at school, I started across the green, taking a deep breath and trying to clear my head. Because of my certainty that Nate had taken off—even before I knew it for sure— I’d actually ended up following Gervais’s Zen-mode plan, if only because I’d been too distracted to study the night before. Now, though, calculus was the last thing on my mind, even as I approached my classroom and found him waiting outside the door for me.

“All right,” he said. “Did you follow my pre-test instructions? Get at least eight hours sleep? Eat a protein-heavy breakfast? ”

“Gervais,” I said. “Not right now, okay?”

“Remember,” he said, ignoring this, “take your time on the first sets, even if they seem easy. You need them to prime your brain, lay the groundwork for the harder stuff.”

I nodded, not even bothering to respond this time.

“If you find yourself stumbling with the power rule, remember that acronym we talked about. And write it down on the test page, so you can have it right in front of you.”

“I need to go,” I said.

“And finally,” he said as, inside, my teacher Ms. Gooden was picking up a stack of papers, shuffling them as she prepared to hand them out, “if you get stuck, just clear your head. Envision an empty room, and let your mind examine it. In time, you will find the answer.”

He blurted out this last part, not very Zen at all, as he rushed to fit it in as the bell rang. Even in my distracted state, as I looked at him I realized I should be more grateful. Sure, we’d had a deal, and I had paid him his twenty bucks an hour when he invoiced me (which he did on a biweekly basis on preprinted letterhead, no joke). But showing up like this, for a last-minute primer? That was above the call of duty. Even for a multipronged, proven method like his.

“Thanks, Gervais,” I said.

“Don’t thank me,” he replied. “Just go get that ninety. I don’t want you messing up my success rate.”

I nodded, then turned to go into my classroom, sliding into my seat. When I looked back out the door, he was still standing there, peering in at me. Jake Bristol, who was sitting beside me looking sleepy, leaned across the aisle, poking my shoulder. “What’s up with you and Miller?” he asked. “You into jailbait or something?”

I just looked at him. Jerk. “No,” I said. “We’re friends.”

Now, Ms. Gooden came down the aisle, smiling at me as she slid a test, facedown, onto the desk in front of me. She was tall and pretty, with blonde hair she wore long, twisting it back with a pencil when she got busy filling up the board with theorems. “Good luck,” she said as I turned it over.

At first glance, I felt my heart sink, immediately overwhelmed. But then I remembered what Gervais had said, about taking my time and priming my brain, and picked up my pencil and began.

The first one was easy. The second, a little harder, but still manageable. It wasn’t until I got to the bottom of the front page that I realized that somehow, I was actually doing this. Carefully moving from one to the next, following Gervais’s advice, jotting the power rule down in the margin: The derivative of any given variable (x) to the exponent (n) is equal to product of the exponent and the variable to the (n-1) power. I could hear Olivia saying it in my head, just as I heard Gervais’s voice again and again, telling me the next step, and then the one following, each time I found myself hesitating.

There were ten minutes left on the clock when I reached the last problem, and this one did give me pause, more than any of the others. Staring down at it, I could feel myself starting to panic, the worry rising up slowly from my gut, and this time, no voices were coming, no prompting to be heard. I glanced around me at the people on either side still scribbling, at Ms. Gooden, who was flipping through Lucky magazine, and finally at the clock, which let me know I had five minutes left. Then I closed my eyes.