Had either of us begged for her help?
I looked to Tristen, mouth starting to open, about to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we might want to consider a partnership. Just to improve our chances.
But before I could speak, he said, with a laugh, “And Tristen Hyde doesn’t work at all!” Then he crammed the flyer into his messenger bag, where presumably his lab manual was also crumpled and already forgotten. “Or at least not that hard.”
Then both Darcy Gray and Tristen Hyde turned on their heels and headed for their next classes, leaving me. The odd girl out.
“That’s a shame,” Mr. Messerschmidt mused, shaking his balding head at their abrupt departure. “For both of you.”
“Um . . . how’s that?” I asked, taking time to refold my flyer, tuck it into my chemistry folder, and zip that into my backpack. What did my teacher consider unfortunate for me and . . . who did he even mean? Darcy or Tristen?
“I really thought the whole idea of a Jekel-Hyde team of chemists might be just interesting enough in itself to get you an advantage,” Mr. Messerschmidt said. “Too bad Tristen’s not interested.”
My hand stopped in mid-zip, and my head jerked up.
Jekel and Hyde.
Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d thought of our names in that way. When Tristen had arrived at Supplee Mill at the start of our junior year, people had made the connection and joked about us being soul mates. Not only was the teasing embarrassing, but it was obvious that nobody really remembered the old Robert Louis Stevenson novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which we’d all read in freshman lit. In the book, mild-mannered Dr. Henry Jekyll had created a formula that changed him into his evil alter-ego, “Mr. Hyde”—a ruthless killer. It was far from a love story. Thankfully, since Tristen and I hardly ever crossed paths, the jokes had quickly gotten old and pointless, and before long, like everybody else, I’d pretty much forgotten our names were even linked.
Certainly, when Mr. Messerschmidt brought up the connection again in the context of a chemistry competition, that was the first time in months I’d thought about the coincidence of Jekel meeting Hyde again—and connected us both to the old locked box in Dad’s sealed home office.
I resumed zipping my backpack, but my thoughts were a million miles away.
Or would that be over one hundred years away?
Me, Tristen, and that box . . . The one I’d been warned never, ever to touch.
And certainly never to open.
Forget it, Jill, I told myself, shouldering my backpack and abandoning the idea almost as quickly as it had crossed my mind. I’d been told to leave the box alone, and I would follow my parents’ rules.
At least that’s what I thought I’d do until two nights later, when my mom called me to a family meeting—convening what little was left of our family—and confided a nasty little secret that she’d been hiding specifically from me.
Chapter 3
Tristen
“HEY, TRISTEN.”
I looked first to my arm—surprised and more than a little unhappy to discover a hand resting there—and then shifted my eyes to learn that it was Darcy Gray who dared to touch me, uninvited, as I shoved books into my open locker.
“About that chemistry scholarship,” Darcy said without removing her hand. “I’ve been rethinking working alone.”
My mouth began to twitch with amusement, and I arched my eyebrows. “Really, Darcy? Have you?”
Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to advise Darcy that I had not rethought anything related to the contest—including the partnership that she was about to suggest—because we were both interrupted by yet another hand very unwisely clamping down on my shoulder.
I turned slowly to see Todd Flick’s narrow, suspicious, simian eyes glaring up at me as he demanded, “Why the hell are you touching my girlfriend, Hyde?”
Forgetting Darcy entirely, I turned my head to stare pointedly at Flick’s knuckles. “Take your hand away,” I advised. “Now.”
Although I’d heard much of quarterbacks being the smartest players on American football teams, Flick wasn’t bright enough to do as I said. Instead he issued an ultimatum, snarling, “You have two seconds to explain, Hyde—or I’m gonna kick your ass.”
After that, just as my grandfather had predicted, I forgot pretty much everything. Again.
Chapter 4
Tristen
IN HIS REMARKABLE Symphony No. 5 Ludwig van Beethoven required only four notes—three rapid Gs and a long E-flat—to evoke in generations of listeners a sense of impending doom.
Sitting in a Pennsylvania diner, my father, the preeminent psychoanalyst Dr. Frederick Hyde, managed—of course—to best even the great German composer, with a grim, one-note, growling sigh that caused the blood to run cold in my veins.
“Rrrrrrrrr . . .” Dad shook his head as he sliced neatly into a thick slab of rare prime rib. “I hardly know what to say, Tristen.”
“Sorry, sir,” I apologized yet again, picking up a french fry and dredging it through a puddle of ketchup. “I know you’re disappointed.”
“‘Disappointed’ is hardly the word,” Dad said, glancing up at me. “You pummeled a classmate, Tristen. Sent him to the hospital with a broken arm that will end his football season. I am far, far beyond ‘disappointed.’”
“Yes, sir.” I slouched lower in the booth. “Sorry.”
“Sit up, please, Tristen,” my father directed, using his knife to point at the french fry in my fingers. “And use utensils. This may not be The Ivy, but it’s still a step above a kennel. There’s no excuse for eating like an animal.”
“Sorry,” I said again, straightening my spine and abandoning my food entirely.
My father dabbed a napkin against his impeccably trimmed, tribute-to-Freud beard, then resumed eating his dinner in a profound silence that managed to speak volumes about me while I stared out the window, watching the people of Supplee Mill as they went about their business on Market Street. A few blocks away Todd Flick was probably just leaving Mercy Hospital with a freshly set bone. I reached up and pressed my fingers against my own bruised face, wincing.
Dammit.
Yet things could
