Made You Up(48)

“I’m looking at Ackerley next—I think he’d give a killer foot massage.”

Tucker laughed, but glanced over his shoulder as if Cliff was going to appear behind him and slam his head into the desk.

I knew how he felt.

For the rest of that week, I felt strangely buoyant. At work, at school, even when I had to go near the scoreboard. Everything was good. Celia was suspended for the paint job. I got all my homework done on time (and even understood my calculus, which was a miracle in itself), took enough pictures and did enough perimeter checks to put my paranoia at ease, and I had people to talk to.

Real people. Not homicidal people.

Miles drove me to and from school. Like most people, he didn’t act the same when you got him alone. He was still an asshat, but alone he was more Blue Eyes than jerk. On Wednesday, when the club stayed after school to work a swim meet, he even helped me bury Erwin.

“You named your bike Erwin?”

“Sure, why not?”

“After Erwin Rommel? You named your bike after a Nazi?” Miles narrowed his eyes at me. Erwin’s back half swung at his side.

“My dad got him from the African desert. Plus, Rommel was humane. He got an order straight from Hitler to execute Jews, and he tore it up. And then he traded his family’s protection for his own suicide.”

“Yeah, but he still knew what he was doing and who he was fighting for,” said Miles, but without conviction. “I thought you were scared of Nazis?”

My step faltered. “How did you know that?”

“You’re a history buff; I assumed that whatever you were scared of would come from history, and Nazis were pretty scary.” The corner of his lips twisted up. “There’s that, and whenever someone calls me a Nazi, you get this look on your face like I tried to kill you.”

“Oh. Good guess.” I gripped Erwin’s handlebars tighter. We rounded the back of the school and headed for the Dumpster behind the kitchen doors. I could smell tobacco and wood shavings and suspected Miles’s jacket. He wore it every day now. He pushed the top off the Dumpster and we tossed Erwin’s halves inside, closing the lid on my poor bike forever.

“Why does being called a Nazi make you so mad?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t know why anyone would be happy about it, but I thought you were going to rip Cliff’s teeth out the other day.”

He shrugged. “People are ignorant. I don’t know.”

He knew. Miles always knew.

As we turned back toward the gym, he said, “Heard you’ve been on some sort of scavenger hunt with Beaumont.”

“Yep. Jealous?”

It sort of slipped out. I was too paralyzed to say anything else. He didn’t know about the library, did he? He couldn’t know that I’d found out about his mom.

But then he snorted loudly and said, “Hardly.”

I relaxed. “What is everyone’s problem with him? I don’t think he’s that bad, honestly. Yeah, he’s got a Cult in a Closet, but he’s really nice. He hates you, but doesn’t everyone?”

“He actually has a reason to hate me, though. Everyone else does it because it’s expected.”

“What reason?”

Miles paused. “We were friends in middle school,” he said. “I thought he was a decent guy because we were both smart, we got along well, and I was new and he didn’t make fun of my accent. But when we got here, I realized—he lets other people walk all over him. He’s got no ambition. No drive, no end goal.”

And what kind of ambition do you have? I thought. The kind where you see how effectively you can kill someone’s puppy?

“He’s smart,” Miles continued, “he’s really smart. But he doesn’t put it to use. He could have as much leverage as I do, but he sits around with his stupid conspiracies and does his little chemistry equations and obsesses over girls who won’t look twice at him.”

“Like who?”

“Like Ria.”

“Tucker likes Ria?” How did I not know that?

“Since I’ve known him. If he had any sense, he would’ve tossed out that romanticized idea of her he’s had for so long and gotten to work doing something useful.”

“So you ditched him,” I said.

“Well . . . yeah.”

“You ditched your friend—your only friend—because he didn’t want to help you control the school.”