“You’re a crazy motherfucker, you know that?” Miller said to me, still laughing.
“So I’m told.”
“You could have been in with them, you know? The popular kids.”
“Why would I do that when fucking with them is so much more fun?”
“Fun,” Ronan said, his eyes on the roaring flames. “Is that what that shit with Frankie was about? Fun?”
“I did it to throw him off guard,” I lied. “That’s all.”
They wore twin expressions of doubt and concern, but they let it alone and I understood that giving each other space was one of the key tenets of their friendship.
“Where are you from?” Miller asked after a while.
“The Pits of Hell. Seattle,” I clarified. “Not that Seattle is hell, only my parents’ house. I live with my aunt and uncle now. They have a vacation home here in the Seabright neighborhood and are living in it year-round while I finish school.”
“Why even bother with school at all?” Miller asked. “With an IQ like yours, shouldn’t you be curing cancer or building robots at MIT?”
“Medicine takes discipline. I have none.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Be a writer,” I said, rubbing my ink-stained fingers. “Don’t know that I’ll be any good at it.”
“Why not? You’re smart enough.”
“A giant IQ means I have facility with language and words, but it doesn’t guarantee those words will have heart.” I turned to Miller. “Like your music. That was all heart. When I write like you play, my friend, I’ll call myself a writer.”
He seemed stunned by the compliment and didn’t know what to do with it. But I knew the rules here and I didn’t push it.
Like I should’ve done with River.
“You had only one more year of high school,” Miller said finally. “Why leave?”
“Not up to me. After my sophomore year, my father arranged for me to take a little detour into the wilderness.”
“You mean like a camp?”
“Sure,” I said, bitterness flooding my mouth. “A camp. And that camp necessitated that I spend a year in Switzerland. At the Sanitarium du lac Léman. That’s Lake Geneva, to you and me.”
“Sanitarium…?”
“Loony bin. Crazy house. Mental institution. Take your pick.”
He looked away. “Jesus.”
“There was no Jesus as far as I could see,” I said ruefully. “Believe me. I looked.”
Another few moments of silence fell, and I worried I was too much for a night like this. Then Ronan, who’d been quiet for a while, made the fire flare by shooting an arc of lighter fluid at it.
“That must’ve been one helluva wilderness camp.”
I stared as the warmth flooded back, bringing more laughter. “Is this guy for real?”
“One hundred fucking percent.” Miller tapped his juice to my beer. “To you for surviving the camp. And Switzerland.”
I swallowed sudden tears. “To Ronan, you magnificent bastard,” I said gruffly and reached to clink bottles with him. “For being one hundred percent fucking real.”
Ronan dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small black device. “To Frankie, the stupid fucker who didn’t notice I swiped his police Taser.”
The earth stood still for a split second and then we laughed. We laughed until I wanted to cry, sure this strange happiness wouldn’t last. Eventually, I’d mess it up. Miller and Ronan would get sick of my shit, or my lack of filter would cross a line, and they’d decide I wasn’t worth knowing.
But in the meantime, I was here, and that was more than I could have hoped for.
It was everything.
Chapter Five
“I’m going to start by giving your summer-addled minds a wake-up call,” Mr. Reynolds said. The congenial math teacher with a bristly mustache and thick glasses drew x and y axes on the white board in blue marker. “We’ll start with a refresher on the connection between differentiability and continuity.”
I sighed with relief. After all the crazy shit that went down at Chance’s party on Saturday, I’d spent the entire weekend trying not to think about my two minutes in the closet with Holden Parish. I already had too many mixed emotions and confusion in my life; I didn’t need more. Math was solid. Exact. It had unbreakable rules.
Until that night, I thought my life did too.
Morning light spilled in through the window as the entire AP Calculus class—only about twelve of us, since it was optional—pulled out their pencils and opened notebooks. As I shook out of my letterman jacket, my pencil rolled off my desk and went behind me. Harris Reed, a thin, wiry guy I knew from last year’s Algebra II, snatched it up and handed it back with a nervous smile.
“Here you go.”
I gave him my friendliest smile in return. “Thanks, man.”
The guys in my group would label Harris a geek or nerd, if they thought about him at all. But I’d vowed never to make anyone feel like shit for no reason. Besides, I probably had more to talk about with Harris than any guy on the football team.
“Oh, and congrats,” Harris added.
“For what?”
He gave a confused smile. “For being made Homecoming King. This morning?”
“Oh right,” I said with laugh. “Thanks.”
Earlier at a pep rally in the gym, Violet McNamara and I had been named Homecoming Queen and King. It was out of my mind ten minutes after the rally ended.
Pencil retrieved, I turned back around and nearly dropped it again. Holden Parish lounged in the doorway.
Goddamn…
He leaned his tall frame
