Made You Up(75)

“Put those in the laundry room,” Miles called to her.

Celia nodded. Miles was the only person she’d take orders from without cursing under her breath or glaring.

“Hey, Green Queen!” Evan, Ian, and Jetta came out of the locker rooms in bathing suits.

“What are you doing?” Miles asked, glancing at his watch. “It’s six.”

“Which means there’s plenty of time to swim before we have to close!” Ian climbed the diving board.

“Mein Chef! Alex! You should come swimming wiz us!” said Jetta, floating over to the side of the pool and looking up at us.

“Yeah! Boss, come on!” Ian cried before diving.

“No,” said Miles. “I hate getting wet.”

“That’s what she s—” Evan began, before being dunked by his brother.

“You know I don’t like swimming,” said Miles when Jetta wouldn’t stop giving him a very hurt-puppy-dog look.

“Zen we should play your game. I ’ave someone.”

Miles fought a smile for a few seconds, but lost in the end. They started a game of twenty questions in German. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I was pretty sure Miles was dragging the game out on purpose. When it was just him and Jetta, he could find any excuse not to speak English.

I was glad he had Jetta to talk to, but I was missing out. There was a whole other person inside him I couldn’t see because I didn’t speak his language.

When the game was over—Miles made it to fifteen questions before guessing correctly—Jetta lifted her arms toward him and wiggled her fingers.

“I’m not getting in,” he said one last time, and Jetta admitted defeat and swam away.

“Don’t tell me you can’t swim,” I said.

Miles scoffed. “Of course I can swim. If I couldn’t swim I’d be dead by now,” he said. Then, softer, “My dad used to take me fishing with him when I was little. You know, most sons fish with their dads; that’s a nice family bonding experience, right? Well, add the attention span of a flea with ADHD, a bit of booze, and a large body of water, and you end up with a dad who thinks it’s fun to throw his kid off the boat and watch him swim for shore.”

“Like he did to your mom?”

He nodded. “He got me first.”

“That’s awful,” I whispered. “You could have drowned! Or gotten really sick—there’s all sorts of bacteria in lakes— or . . .”

“Or gotten pulled under by something I couldn’t see?” Miles offered quietly. “Yeah, that was the best part. He knew I was scared of the things in those lakes. Bastard.”

The smell of algae and pond scum.

“That was the day before my mom and I went to Germany,” he went on. “She realized that Cleveland had done something and came looking for me. We stayed in the car that night, and the next day she decided we were leaving. We only went back to the house for a minute, for our passports. Then straight to Meijer so she could grab stuff she thought we’d need, and finally to the airport.”

I hugged him, something I’d been doing a lot lately, sometimes because I could, most of the time because he seemed like he needed it.

So far, no one had tried to do anything to Miles. I’d hardly seen McCoy at all since the new semester started, and Celia didn’t seem to have it in her to hurt anyone. Whenever I caught her staring, I only had to look at her to get her to go away again. But she was always hovering, like a ghost waiting for someone to join her on the other side.

Miles had been taking fewer and fewer of his mafia hit man jobs, and it was clear that he didn’t have enough occupying his mind. He frequently paced the length of the gym, wrote so often in his notebook that he had to get a new one, and would occasionally start his sentences in the middle of a thought. His limp went away, but he wore his sleeves rolled down and came to school one day with a black eye. His mood infected the club like a disease; nothing ran smoothly anymore. And soon his gloom infested the whole school.

Mr. Gunthrie went on an hour-long rant about the flickering light over my desk, throwing away an entire class period. Ms. Dalton couldn’t find any of her notes and even forgot her Diet Coke. Students who normally paid Miles for his services began taking matters into their own hands, and detention was full for the first time all year.

I wondered if the gloom was affecting me, too, but I got the feeling it had more to do with the thin envelopes I kept getting from colleges and scholarship foundations. Most of them started with “We regret to inform you . . .” I tried not to take it personally—how many mentally ill, lower-class high school girls could there be in Indiana? Probably more than I thought—but handing each one over to my mother was like running the gauntlet of passive-aggressive pep talks. Are you sure you signed up right? Maybe you just forgot something. Should I have Leann explain things to them?