I withdrew my hand from my pocket and placed the sticker on his lower back, and I had not taken my hand away when Max Cobey, a junior standing to my left, said, “I saw that, whatever-your-name-is freshman girl, and you’re so busted. Hey, Mills, look at your back.”
McGrath turned toward Max, and Max pointed at me.
“She just tried to kill you,” Max said.
McGrath turned around. I was looking down, blushing furiously; without raising my chin, I glanced up, and I saw that McGrath was grinning. “You?” he said.
The swarm was moving forward, and the three of us found ourselves outside, in front of the chapel.
“You’re totally busted,” Max said again, quite loudly, and he pointed down at me; he was several inches taller than I was. But he didn’t seem hostile, as Devin had; rather, he was simply enthusiastic. A few other junior guys, friends of either Max’s or McGrath’s, gathered around us.
“What’s your name?” McGrath said. He had a Southern accent, a slight twang, and he’d stuck the orange sticker from his shirt onto the pad of his middle finger.
“My name’s Lee.”
“Did you try to kill me back there, Lee?”
I darted glances at the faces of the other boys, then looked back at McGrath. “Kind of,” I said, and they laughed.
“Here’s what I’m gonna tell you,” McGrath said. “It’s okay to try. But it would be wrong to succeed. You got that?”
“Tell her,” one of the other guys said.
“Let’s recap.” McGrath held up his right hand, the hand with the sticker. “Try, all right,” he said. He held up his left hand. “Succeed, wrong.” He shook his head. “Very, very wrong.”
“I’ll see if I can remember.”
“Ooh,” Max said. “She’s feisty.”
Already, I felt like I had crushes on both him and McGrath.
“All right now, Lee,” McGrath said as he turned away. “I’ll be watchin’ you.”
“Me, too,” one of the other boys said, and he mimed like he was holding binoculars in front of his eyes. Then he smiled at me, before catching up with his friends. (Simon Thomworth Allard, Hanover, New Hampshire–that afternoon in the dorm, I studied the school catalog until I’d figured out his identity.)
I was leaving the dining hall after dinner that night, wheeling Sin-Jun’s bike beside me for Conchita’s next lesson, when I glanced over my shoulder and saw Edmundo Saldana, a quiet-seeming sophomore I’d never talked to. Though several students had left the dining hall just before I had, Edmundo and I were alone; I was about ten feet in front of him.
“Are you trying to kill me?” I asked.
He scowled noncommittally.
My heartbeat picked up. “If you try to, I’ll yell,” I said. “And they’ll turn around.” I gestured ahead. I was half-bluffing-probably I wouldn’t yell because it would be melodramatic. But I also might, because of how much I wanted to stay in the game.
“It’s all kind of stupid,” Edmundo said. He mumbled his words, but I was listening intently. “I’m not that into it, you know?”
“So you are trying to kill me?” I couldn’t believe that I’d been right-as soon as I’d asked him, I’d realized he could easily have been headed to the library.
“I don’t really care,” Edmundo mumbled. “You want to live, I won’t kill you. I don’t know why they play this.” He was barely making eye contact with me, and I wondered if it was all a setup-he’d pretend not to care while inching closer, and then he’d pounce. But when I thought back to other times I’d noticed him around-Edmundo was from Phoenix, he was (I was nearly sure) on scholarship, and he and his roommate, a rich zitty white kid from Boston named Philip Ivers, supposedly did nothing but play backgammon in their room-it seemed like maybe Edmundo was always this shy and evasive. Certainly, he was an even more uncomfortable person than I was.
“If you don’t care, then will you let me live?” I said. “Will you turn around? Or you just stay here, and I’ll keep walking.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Edmundo said. “You keep walking, fine.”
When I told Conchita what had just happened, she said, “Edmundo has you? Edmundo Saldana?”
“Yeah, why?”
She had climbed onto the bike and was pedaling while I held on-she had definitely made progress, even in just the first lesson. “No reason, really,” she said. “I’m in MSA with him.” MSA stood for Minority Student Alliance, and I knew practically nothing about the group, except that it met on Sunday nights.
“You don’t have a crush on him, do you?” I asked.
“On Edmundo? Are you for real?”
“You just got kind of excited when I mentioned him.”
“I don’t believe in crushes,” Conchita said. “What’s the point?”
The question was unanswerable. What was the point of being a person, what was the point of breathing air?
“Don’t tell me you have a crush on someone,” she said. She glanced at me, inadvertently turning her arms as she twisted her neck. The bike swerved to the left, and she quickly faced straight ahead again. “Who?” she said. “I won’t tell. I promise.”
“I’m not telling someone who thinks all crushes are pointless.” In fact, I had never talked about Cross with anyone. I had not even said his name aloud since surprise holiday. But I had thought of him so often that sometimes when I saw him, it was weird-real Cross, moving-around Cross, Cross talking to his friends. He was the person I always thought of?
Part of the reason I hadn’t talked about him was that it preserved his specialness, but another part was that I’d never before had an eager ear. “You really can’t tell anyone,” I said. “I’m serious.”
“I would think you’d know you can trust me,” Conchita said, and she sounded hurt.
“It’s Cross,” I said. “On surprise holiday-”
“Cross? You like Cross?”
“Conchita, do you want me to tell you this or not?”
“Sorry.”
“So it was surprise holiday,” I continued, “and we ended up in a-what’s so wrong with liking Cross? Do you even know him?” I was strongly reminding myself of someone, but it took a few seconds to figure out that the someone was Dede.
“He’s in my math class,” Conchita said. “He seems okay, but I’d imagine you liking someone more like-maybe like Ian Schulman.”
“I don’t even know who that is.”
“He’s a sophomore who’s really good at art. He draws comic strips and stuff. And he wears black Converse sneakers.”
“Are you sure that you don’t like him?”
“I don’t have time to,” Conchita said. “Seeing as Edmundo and I are passionately in love.”
In spite of myself, I laughed.
“So go on,” she said. “It was surprise holiday and then what?”
After I’d told her-the mall, the taxi, Cross stroking my hair-she said, “Did he kiss you?”
“John and Martin totally would have seen that,” I said, and as I felt myself implying that circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people-for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling.
“Wait a second,” Conchita said. “Cross has a girlfriend.”
“He wasn’t cheating,” I said, and we were turning around-already, I had lost count of how many times Conchita had ridden up and down the road-so it was possible for her to fix her gaze on me without fear of tilting. “He really wasn’t,” I said. “Kissing is cheating. Sitting next to someone in a taxi isn’t.”
“Would you feel that way if you were Sophie Thruler?”
She had turned the bike around completely and was facing north again. “Go,” I said. “Start pedaling.” The truth was that I rarely thought of Sophie. She was beautiful, she was a junior, and Cross may have been her boyfriend, but he could not possibly matter to her as he mattered to me. If they broke up, I suspected she’d be dating some other guy within a week. But I didn’t even want them to break up-if Cross wasn’t going out with anyone, there’d be danger present in the glance of every other girl, in their proximity to him in chapel, their laughter during conversations. As long as he was off-limits to me, he was off-limits to the rest of the female population, too. “Never mind about Sophie,” I told Conchita. “The point is that now I’m hoping I’ll get Cross or he’ll get me for Assassin.”