Made You Up(40)

“You don’t explain yourself to anyone, do you?”

He motioned to his truck. “Will you please get in?”

I looked around quickly; finding another ride home would be pretty impossible. And as I looked out at the dark, quiet street, it occurred to me that walking home wasn’t the best idea ever. Sure, I hung out around Red Witch Bridge in the middle of the night, but that was in the cover of the trees with an urban legend and a baseball bat as weapons. Here, I was a teenaged girl with average upper body strength, hair like a signal beacon, and a mental condition that could make me think I was being attacked even when I wasn’t.

At least I knew Miles well enough to understand that the look of frustration on his face wasn’t a ploy. So I tossed the two halves of Erwin into the back of his truck and climbed into the passenger seat.

The cab still smelled like pastries and mint soap. I breathed in deeply without realizing it, and hastily let it out as a sigh. Miles glanced through the driver’s side window, let out a quick curse, and grabbed a stack of papers on the seat.

“Sorry, I have to drop these off. I forgot. I’ll be right back.”

He hurried into the school. The papers must have been his stat charts for the week, but I found it hard to believe he’d forgotten them. Miles didn’t forget things.

His truck was surprisingly clean. The dash had been stripped bare; the radio front was smashed in, and the knob for the heater was missing. Miles had stashed his backpack behind the driver’s seat—apparently in a hurry, because it was on its side, and its contents spilled out in the cramped space.

The corner of his black notebook peeked out beneath his chemistry book.

This was my chance. I could just . . . take a look. Get a glimpse at the tip of Miles Richter’s psychological iceberg. I checked to make sure he was still safely inside East Shoal, then pulled the notebook out.

It was bound in leather. There were several pieces of paper clipped to the inside back cover, but I ignored them and flipped it open to the middle. Both pages were covered with his untidy scrawl.

I went back to the beginning and skimmed through. Math equations filled whole pages. There were symbols I’d never seen and little notes scribbled off to the sides. There were quotes from books and more notes. There were lists of scientific classifications for plants and animals, and even more lists for words I’d never encountered. There were entire passages written in German, dated like journal entries. I noticed familiar names, like my own and the other members of the club.

And then, separated from the rest of the scribbles by a few blank pages, like he’d wanted to remember these things specifically, were short one-or two-sentence declarations, marked with the dates they’d been written.

Intelligence is not measured by how much you know, but by how much you have the capacity to learn.

You are never as great or as pitiful as you think you are.

Those who are picked last are the only ones who truly know what it feels like.

Schools without bike racks should be convicted of criminal negligence.

I stared at that last line, dated on the first day of school, urging it to change, to revert to its true form, because I knew I must have made it up. If that wasn’t a quote from somewhere, if that was one of his own observations . . . then he’d lied about not standing up to Cliff for me. Celia’d scoffed at Erwin, and Cliff had stood in my way, and Miles had said he hadn’t done any of it for me. . . .

This notebook didn’t sound like Miles. It sounded like someone a lot more na?ve than Miles. Someone who really liked to know things. Scientific classifications. Complex math. Words.

I looked up. Miles was coming out of the school. Groaning, I stuffed the notebook back under his chemistry book. I faced forward, trying to look inconspicuous. He slid into the driver’s seat.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“You seem to have forgotten that someone cut my bike in half.”

“And you seem to have forgotten that I have a truck,” said Miles. “I can give you a ride. To school, at least.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Really. I’m not joking. Unless you’re that against having anything to do with me. I don’t care. You can get in line.”

He turned onto the main road. The line from the notebook felt like a dead weight in my stomach.

“No, not against it.” I realized with a strange sort of happy dread that we were falling back into the easy conversation we’d had at the bonfire. “But I’d like to know why you’re offering.”