Here So Far Away(51)

No one moved.

“You probably want me to ask the janitor for a new desk,” Ernest said.

Mr. Huskins just nodded and turned back to the board.

“That’s your answer about nurture versus nature right there,” Bill said as we crossed the hall to the lab. He was back in his old plaid shirts again. Maybe Lisa was too busy with the play to patrol his wardrobe.

“You’re saying it’s in Ernest’s biology to have his desk fall apart?”

“I’m saying it’s not like he doesn’t know what the difference is between cool and not cool—”

“Does he?”

“He must be able to see that cool people don’t wear pants that are three inches above the ankles or ask a lot of dumb questions—”

“Or spend so much time on the floor. Shelley-with-an-E should create a new yearbook category: most likely to fall into an open manhole.”

We snickered. Open manhole.

“That’s his deal,” Bill said. “Can’t fight nature. Tracy hooked up with someone.”

He slid it in there so slickly that I almost didn’t catch what he’d said.

“Oh, buddy.” I tried to hug him, but he was already turning away to check the equipment at our station, so we ended up in an awkward T-shape position.

“What is happening?” Bill said.

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re squeezing my bruises.”

“I’m sorry.” I flicked donut crumbs off his collar and let him go. “Who’d she hook up with?”

“My cousin Kenny.”

“Geez.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Isn’t that breaking some kind of code, for both of them?”

“Yup.”

I couldn’t read him at all, so I just said: “I guess sometimes good people do bad things.”

“Uh, no. Bad people do bad things.” He flipped open his binder so violently it flew off the counter and hit the floor with a loud bang.

“Oops,” I said to all the eyeballs now looking at us, jarred and otherwise.

“Doing bad things is what makes people bad,” Bill said as I set the binder in front of him. “That’s the only thing that makes them bad. Here’s a biological fact: No one who was born bad just hasn’t gotten around to doing bad things.”

Maybe, but bad was in the eyes of the beholder. All hell would break loose if anyone found out about Francis and me, and there would be nothing we could say to make anyone understand, but there was also nothing anyone could say that could convince me that what we were doing was wrong.

“Just out of curiosity,” I asked, “how many bad things do you have to do to officially become a bad person?”

“Are you saying that Tracy doing Kenny is a gray area? Whatever. We’re broken up.”

For now, I thought, but there was always a chance they’d get back together. In the end, it wouldn’t work out, that I was sure of, because whatever force it was that kept dragging those two toward each other, it wasn’t real love. Real love is deeper. Stickier. Bigger. Francis and I were big-time in love, and we were navigating our whole crazy situation with sharp, practiced strokes, while Bill and Tracy and everyone else at school splashed around in circles like they had no idea they were paddling giant pumpkins. A whole lot of drama that wasn’t getting them anywhere.

Huskins tossed a dissection tray on the counter in front of us.

Fetal pig.

“You’ll have to make the first cut,” I said to Bill. “That looks too much like someone I know.”

“You need to get better at projecting your anger,” he said, taking the knife I held out to him.

Francis was leaning on his cop car in the school parking lot. The final bell had rung, and the students streaming out of the building were giving him a wide berth. He gestured me over.

I slipped past Nat and Doug, who were sitting on the front steps, talking heatedly. Bill had said that he was meeting Nat in the library to study, but it seemed like he’d be waiting a long time. She was poking Doug’s shoulder with her twiggy finger.

“I had to give a talk about drug-free schools to the tenth graders, so I brought your pay,” Francis said. The envelope he passed me was empty. “Could we meet somewhere to talk?”

Something was wrong. Very wrong. One of Francis’s legs was crossed over the other, all casual, except his foot was vibrating almost violently. He was having trouble meeting my eyes. All my animal instincts told me to run.

“Sorry, I have a biology quiz to study for,” I said, shifting my weight heavily onto my heels, as though that would tether me to the ground.

“Okay.” He smiled, sort of. “We’ll talk on the weekend.”

“Did the medal ceremony go alright yesterday?”

“It was nice. I met the brass. I’ll show you the, you know.”

“The medal?”

“Yes, the medal.”

“Constable McAdams?”

“Frances George?”

“What’s going on?”

His foot stopped twitching. “Let’s not talk here.”

I knew our love was precarious, every moment as dangerous and delicate as raising the mast of a ship in a bottle, but I’d had this strange confidence that the only thing that could end us before next fall would be getting caught. It hadn’t occurred to me that we could break it off voluntarily, not after we’d said we loved each other. I’d never considered that it would be just like Francis to change his mind.