My brain grappled with this for a moment. We were here to compete. Everyone was working with the same base level IQ. Distracting the rest of the teams from that was a solid tactic.
“And,” Leigh said, “I learned two very important things from this experiment. One, John is not a ghost. He has a heartbeat and a distinct lack of ectoplasm. Two, his name is not John. It’s Brandon.” She stuck out her tongue, as though the name was sour in her mouth. “A total failure on the part of his parents. Have you ever seen someone who looks more like a John?”
You look as if your name was Ernest, said my brain. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life.
Great. The Wilde was back. Why couldn’t Beth have repeatedly done a useful show? People who could quote Shakespeare seemed cultured, not possessed.
Leigh’s forehead scrunched into a single painful-looking wrinkle. “There’s a guy coming over here.” She leaned to the side to see around my shoulder. “Do you want me to get another soda to make sure he’s alive?”
I opened my mouth to laugh, but it died in my throat, threw itself a funeral, and dug graves for every ounce of joy that I could ever feel again, the second a plate fell down next to mine. There was a heap of deli meats and cheeses hidden under a tidal wave of ranch dressing. The air congealed with the smell of mango dreadlock wax and an entire can of drugstore cologne.
Run, my brain screamed. Abort mission. Punch everyone who gets between you and the door. Get on the train back home.
“Hey, Ellie,” Isaiah said.
5
In an instant, I was off the bench and lugging my cousin out of the dining hall. His feet staggered and tripped behind me as he attempted to go full deadweight.
“Elliot, Jesus, stop it. People are watching.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” I hissed, digging my fingernails deep into his arm. My heart was slamming in my chest, pushing me forward, deeper into the nightmare.
When we were little, Isaiah and I would get dumped together a lot. We were close in age and only half an hour’s drive away from each other, and our parents never noticed that we didn’t actually like each other. For years, we had to go to each other’s birthday parties and share babysitters. Once, before my dad and Beth got married, we were stuck together for an entire summer vacation. It was months of jelly sandwiches and tattling and generalized punching and pinching each other while Sid watched TV.
I hated spending time with Isaiah so much that I cried when I found out that I was going to have a little brother, because I thought that he might turn out to be as annoying as my cousin.
Which, of course, Ethan wasn’t, because it was literally impossible for anyone to be as annoying as Isaiah.
Now that we were both too old to need a babysitter—although I wouldn’t have been surprised if Aunt Bobbie still had one on call for her precious baby—Isaiah and I only had to suffer through each other’s company for holidays and family reunions.
Except that he was here. At camp. Which was twenty-one days long.
I kicked open the door. I shoved him out first and he stumbled back toward the stairs before straightening to his full height, exactly at eye level with me. He was wearing ratty jean shorts with round white skate shoes.
Skate shoes? Come on. How in the hell were we biologically related?
I dragged the heels of my hands over my eyes. The inside of my head felt muggy and punch-drunk.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I looked out at the empty quad, waiting for an ambush to come dropping down from the skinny trees. “Where’s Sid?”
“At home.” He rubbed at the four crescent-shaped imprints on his arm; his lower lip stuck out. “Aren’t you in L.A.?”
I gestured around wildly. “Keep up, idiot. Obviously, I’m not in L.A. I’m right here. Why are you here?”
Remembering that his pouting had zero effect on me, he switched into Lawrence defense mode: folded arms over a puffed chest and words clipped down into confetti. “I entered the Melee. Between my Stanford–Binet score and my PSATs, I was an obvious choice for the admissions board.”
I refused to give him the satisfaction of asking what a Stanford–Binet was, but I made a mental note to Google it once I was back in my dorm.
“You decided to try to win free admission to Rayevich?” I asked. “Rather than tell your sister that you don’t want to go to the academy next year?”
“And you’re here to what? Learn to fly?” He cocked his head, sending his dreads sliding across his neck. “You lied.”
I folded my arms back at him. He could use the Lawrence voice on me all he wanted. Only one of us had learned to argue from an attorney. My father wasn’t a great lawyer, but he was the king of talking in circles until he found a chink in the armor.
“Sid and Aunt Bobbie know where you are?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t lie to my mom,” he said.
“Yeah, like when you told her about breaking her favorite snow globe? Remember how loud it popped? You got glitter water all over our church shoes. Oh wait. You swore that I did it and Grandma put me in time-out for all of Christmas.”
He shook his head. “I’m grown, Elliot. I’m not six anymore.”
“Tell that to your bottom lip. It’s shaking again.” The offending lip tucked back into a scowl. “And stop calling me that. I’m not Elliot here. I’m Ever Lawrence.”
His eyebrows went up. “You stole my last name?”
“It’s one of my last names, too. It’s on my driver’s license and everything. Not that you’d know what a driver’s license looks like, since your mommy won’t let you take the test until you turn eighteen.”
He wasn’t listening. He scuffed the toe of his offensive shoe against the cement until the rubber bent. “What kind of name is Ever? Like Everett? Did you really pick another dude name? Couldn’t you live with a girl name for once? You could be an Ashley or a Lauren or something normal.”
Embarrassment ratcheted up my spine as I thought about scrolling endlessly through baby names online. Ever had struck me as effortlessly feminine, a breezy giggle of a name. It was the sort of nickname that begged an adorable backstory: My parents used to say, “I love you forever,” and I thought Forever was my name!
Or something less stupid. Whatever.
“Where do Sid and Bobbie think you are?” I asked Isaiah again. “You aren’t even allowed to compete at out-of-state academic decathlon meets.” Family gossip rattled around in my brain, vague information from phone calls with Mom and Grandmother Lawrence that had never been useful before. “Didn’t you miss the finals last year because your mom didn’t want you to go all the way to Nevada alone? She’d never let you leave home without a chaperone.”
“She would for the leadership camp!”
He looked like he wanted to stuff the sentence back into his mouth, but it was too late. Triumph welled in my stomach as he squirmed.