Made You Up(15)

“Don’t listen to anything Cliff says,” Theo chimed in, pulling the pencils from her bun and shaking her hair out. “He’s a moron—he thinks we planned to have you do something to make him look stupid. That’s why he left you alone. Besides, I don’t think he’d know how to use a razor if he had one.”

“I’m pretty sure his mother shaves his facial hair,” said Evan.

“I’m pretty sure a monkey shaves his facial hair,” said Ian. “Did you see his face last track season? I thought he’d need a blood donation.”

“Disregarding his faults in personal hygiene,” Miles interrupted, “I still think he needs his head shoved into a wood chipper.”

I took a long step away from Miles. “Right. Well, I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

The Light triplets said good-bye. Maybe they weren’t so bad after all, even if Evan and Ian did look like the exact same person. I hopped on Erwin and rode out of the parking lot, trying to forget about Cliff, Celia, that weird-ass scoreboard, and everything else.

I marked Miles’s parking spot so I could find his truck again tomorrow morning.

I wouldn’t let East Shoal and its psychotic inhabitants get the best of me.





Chapter Eight




My delusions became more frequent in the dark. More than once when I was little, I heard voices coming from beneath my bed, claws reaching up around the mattress to get me. Riding home, the sunlight fading, an enormous red bird with long tail feathers sailed over me. I stopped to take a picture of it. On the camera screen, its feathers glowed like fire. Freaking phoenixes. I’d had an obsession with phoenixes when I was ten, and this one followed me home every night. The Phoenix of Hannibal’s Rest.

Hannibal’s Rest. Home.

Here’s the thing about Hannibal’s Rest, Indiana: It is astoundingly small. So small I’m sure it wouldn’t show up on a GPS. You’d pass right through without realizing you were anywhere different. It’s just like the rest of central Indiana: hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and the only way to know the weather other times of the year is to walk outside. You drive west to get to Hillpark and east to get to East Shoal, but nobody from either school can tell you the name of a single person who goes to the other, and they all hate one another.

My parents didn’t grow up here or anything. They chose to live in this nowhere town. Why? Because it was named after Hannibal of Carthage. Their basic train of thought was this: Hannibal’s Rest? And we’re naming our child after Alexander the Great? MARVELOUS. Ah, the history, it tickles.

Sometimes I wanted to beat my parents over the head with a frying pan.

If you could say one thing about them, it was that they loved history. Literally, both of them were in love with history. Sure, they were in love with each other, but history was like the be-all, end-all of intellectual stimulation to them. They were married to each other and to history.

So, naturally, they weren’t going to give their kids any old normal names.

I was the lucky one. Alexander to Alexandra wasn’t a huge leap. Charlie, on the other hand, got the entire blunt force of the namesake sledgehammer: Charlemagne. So from the day she was born, I called her Charlie.

I turned down my street and aimed for the one-story, dirt-colored house lit up like a Christmas tree. My mother had this thing about leaving all the lights on until I got home, as if I would forget which house was ours. The sounds of a furious violin poured from the living-room window. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, as usual.

I leaned Erwin up against the garage door and did a perimeter check. Street. Driveway. Garage. Front yard. Porch. House. The porch swing creaked and swayed like someone had just gotten out of it, but that could’ve been the wind. I did another check when I stepped in through the front door, but the house looked like it always did, cramped and barren at the same time. Charlie stood in the living room with her violin, playing her musical prodigy stuff. When my mother wasn’t teaching online college classes, she homeschooled Charlie like she had me, so Charlie was always practicing.

My mother was in the kitchen. I braced myself, remembered not to do another perimeter check—my mother hated them—and went to find her. She stood at the sink, dishrag in hand.

“I’m home,” I said.

She turned. “I left out a bowl of soup for you. It’s mushroom, your favorite.”

Minestrone was my favorite soup. Mushroom was Dad’s. She always got them mixed up. “Thanks, but I’m not really hungry. I’m gonna go do my homework.”