This was not the strange part.
Celia Hendricks, always on the prowl, materialized next to Miles’s desk. She did that weird hair flip-and-twirl routine, like she’d learned how to flirt from a tween magazine. Miles glared at her.
“What do you want, Hendricks?”
Celia gave him a winning smile. “Hey. I’m having my bonfire soon. We’re going to have a fake scoreboard to graffiti and everything. You should come.”
“Every year I say no. Why should I say yes now?”
“Because, it’ll be fun!” she whined. She tried to put her hand on his arm, but he recoiled. I could have sworn he was about to snarl at her.
“Get off my desk, Celia.”
“Pleeeease, Miles? What can I do to get you to come?” Her voice dropped low and she looked at him through her eyelashes. She leaned over the desk. He snapped the notebook closed before she could look inside. “Anything,” she said. “Name it.”
Miles paused for a long moment. Then he jabbed his thumb over his shoulder and said, “Invite Alex. Then I’ll come.”
Celia’s expression shuffled so quickly I almost didn’t catch it. One second she’d been trying to seduce Miles, the next she glared at me like I should be impaled on a pike, and finally she settled on a sort of confused surprise.
“Oh! Well . . . you promise?” She was right in Miles’s face. Miles leaned back. I had the immediate image of an idiot backing an angry viper into a corner.
“Sure. Promise,” he said venomously.
“Good!” Celia pulled a card from the pocket of her shirt and reached over Miles’s shoulder to give it to me. She was clearly on a mission to get his face in her cleavage. I let him squirm for longer than necessary before I took the card. She hopped off his desk.
“Can’t wait to see you there, Milesie!”
I snorted.
Miles glared at me.
“Milesie?” I said. “Can I call you that?”
“You had better show up,” he said, his gaze flat and cold.
Celia’s bonfire wasn’t until mid-October, on Scoreboard Day. It took me a long time to decide to go, and only after consulting Finnegan’s Magic 8 Ball (Signs point to yes) and much prodding from the rest of the club. Except Miles, of course, who only deemed it necessary to give me one prod. (Days later, he still had a wonderful array of bright red welts on the back of his right hand.)
The fact that the club wanted me to go made it feel like I wasn’t so much using it as an excuse to make my mother and therapist happy, but more like I actually wanted to spend time with. . . .
With friends.
I’d be paranoid as hell while I was there, but my mother was so ecstatic about the idea that I knew there was no way I could back out. She might have even blown a few synapses when I asked her if I could go, because she stood there and stared blankly at me for a minute before asking if I was supposed to take food and how much. She called my therapist with the good news, and my therapist immediately wanted to talk to me and ask why I’d made the decision and how I felt about it.
My mother also said she’d drive me, but I headed her off; Theo had already offered a ride, and I’d accepted. Having my mother and her Firenza drop me off in front of a huge house in one of the richest neighborhoods in town, at a party that I hadn’t really been invited to, was more than enough to make my stomach bottom out.
The Wednesday before the party, Theo put her homework aside to tell me what to expect at the bonfire.
“Don’t eat any of the food,” she said as she handed a customer his hot dog. “Not even joking. Eat before you go. And don’t drink anything.”
Well, that certainly wouldn’t be a problem. I almost thanked Theo for giving me an excuse to be paranoid about the food.
“Why? Does she poison it?”
“There’s no guaranteeing that someone won’t try to slip you a roofie.” Theo turned to refill the popcorn machine. “You’ll be fine. Don’t eat or drink; stay inconspicuous.”
So my normal routine, then.
“Oh, and don’t go upstairs,” Theo added.
“Why would I go upstairs?”
“Just don’t do it, okay?”
“All right, fine.”
“Anyway, everyone only goes to these parties to deface the fake scoreboard and get stories about crazy stuff. Celia’s parties make better stories than Celia does.”
Crazy stuff happening at parties with roofies and questionable upstairs goings-on didn’t make me feel very good about the whole thing, but if I tried to back out now, my mother and my therapist would be on me like hounds. There was pretty much no way I wasn’t going.
“FUCK IT, I’M BORED.”
“Here he comes.” Theo didn’t even look up when Miles rounded the corner and tossed his notebook onto the counter. “I don’t think cursing is going to help,” she told him.
“Maybe it fucking will.” Miles seethed. “I hate everyone in that gym. Pick someone.”
“No, I don’t want to play.”
“It won’t take that long.”
“That’s why I don’t want to play.”
“Can I do one?” I raised my hand. “It might actually take you more than five questions, too.”
Miles quirked his eyebrow. “Oh, you think so?”
“If you get this in five, I’ll be thoroughly impressed.”
He leaned over the counter, looking eager. Weirdly, weirdly eager. Not like he wanted to rub my face into the floor. Not like he knew he was going to beat me. Just . . . excited. “Okay,” he said. “Are you fictional?”
Broad question. He didn’t know me as well as he knew Theo, so it was to be expected.
“No,” I said.
“Are you still alive?”
“No.”
“Are you a leader?”
“Yes.”
“Was your civilization conquered by a European nation?”
“Yes.”
“Are you . . . a leader of the Olmec?”
“How’d you get there?” Theo blurted out, but Miles ignored her.
“No,” I said, trying not to let him see how close he’d come. “And the Olmec weren’t conquered by the Europeans. They died out.”
Miles frowned. “Mayan?”
“No.”
“Incan.”
“No.”
“Aztec.”
“Yes.”
The corners of his lips twisted up, but he said, “Shouldn’t have taken so many guesses for that one.” Then he said, “Did you found the Tlatocan?”