Today Tonight Tomorrow(32)
“Hypothetically, if I agree to this scheme of yours, let’s say you win the whole game. You get the glory. What do I get? Seems like a shit deal for me at that point.”
I consider this. “We split the money. Fifty-fifty. Regardless of outcome.”
A grin spreads across his face and dread churns in my stomach. This cannot be good. “What if we upped the stakes?”
“I’m listening.”
“A bet,” he proposes. “You and me. A bet to cap off our epic four years of academic bloodshed.”
“What, like the loser has to go naked under their gown at graduation?”
He snorts. “Seriously? Are you twelve? I was thinking something far more personal.”
I rack my brain. There are probably plenty of things McNair wouldn’t enjoy doing, but I don’t know him well enough on a personal level to guess what any of them would be.
Then I gasp, covering my mouth to conceal a grin when the idea hits me. “The loser has to write the winner a book report on a book of the winner’s choosing.”
“How many paragraphs?”
“Five, at least. Double-spaced, no fewer than three pages.” I cross my arms over my chest, aware this is the nerdiest bet in history. But wow, the books I could have him read… “Are you in or not?”
For a beat, neither of us blinks. In all our competitions, we’ve never placed a bet. There was always plenty at stake.
“As weird as it is to talk about book reports on the last day of school, it’s kind of perfect,” he says. “The only question is, should it be The Old Man and the Sea or Great Expectations? Or wait, I’d love to see what you do with War and Peace. Unabridged, naturally.”
“So many mediocre white men to choose from.”
“And yet there’s a reason they’re called classics.” McNair turns in the seat and sticks out his hand. “To mutually assured destruction,” he says, and we shake on it.
Despite our matching height, our hands aren’t the same size, which I had no reason to notice until now. His hands are slightly larger, his skin warm, freckled fingers woven between my pale ones.
“You really do have a lot of freckles.”
He withdraws his hand from mine and glances down at it in mock astonishment. “Oh, that’s what these are.” Then he drops his hands to his lap. “I’ve always hated them.”
“Why?” I know he gets embarrassed when I tease him about them, but I don’t think they’re unattractive or anything, though of course I’d never say that to his face. They’re just plentiful. “They’re… interesting. I like them.”
A pause. A lifted eyebrow. “You… like my freckles?”
I roll my eyes and decide to play along. “Yeah I do. I’ve always wondered if you have freckles everywhere.”
It’s nearly automatic now, the way I can make him blush like this. He really is so sensitive about them. Still, he clucks his tongue and says, “Some things are better left a mystery.” He runs a hand up and down his bare arm. “Get ahold of yourself, Artoo. We’re teammates now. If you can’t handle all these hot, hot freckles, then we might be doomed.”
It must be talking about them that makes me stare at his face a moment longer than I normally would. Because the thing is, I have wondered if he has freckles everywhere. In a purely scientific way, the same way you’d wonder when the next big earthquake will hit Seattle or how long it takes chewing gum to decompose. Given they’re just as densely dotted on his arms as they are on his face, he must, right?
He has to know I’m not being serious. I don’t want him to think I’m calculating his ratio of freckled to unfreckled skin. Even if it’s in a purely scientific way.
“Your glasses are crooked,” I say, hoping this will return us to normal, and he adjusts them.
There. Except normal isn’t Rowan versus Neil; it’s Rowan and Neil versus the rest of the senior class.
This is probably a really bad idea.
* * *
Over a slice of what McNair declares is Seattle’s best pizza, we strategize. Well—first we argue. I start to pay for my food, but he insists on doing it since I’m the one driving us around. Then I begrudgingly agree to share my photo of the gum wall as long as he shares his photo of an umbrella. Until this point, we’d been equal. And I suppose we still are.
I’d love to decipher every clue right now, but McNair thinks it’s a waste of time. He wants to focus on what we know and figure out the rest along the way.
“There’s such a thing as planning too much,” he says, shaking red pepper flakes onto his pizza. Upper Crust is not the best pizza in Seattle, in my opinion. My slice has too much gooey mozzarella, not enough sauce. “Need I remind you of the summer reading incident?”
I grimace. Our junior English teacher had sent out a list of titles the week school let out, and I decided to read all five as quickly as I could so I could read what I wanted the rest of the summer. The day I finished, she emailed to let everyone know she’d sent the wrong list and “surely” no one had started yet.
“That was an anomaly.” I play the car card: if he wants to walk, he’s welcome to take off as soon as we finish eating, but I’m staying here until I figure out a few more. He relents.