Chapter Eighteen Keely
Chapter Eighteen
Keely
Your essay is flawless. . . one of the best I’ve ever read.
It was all Keely had wanted to hear since the semester started. Longer, probably.
Only, Dr. Goff wasn’t talking to Keely.
She peeked through the door again.
And yes, that was one Max Simmons sitting in the guest chair.
Did he have to be good at everything?
Keely hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. She hadn’t had this little detour on her to-do list at all today, but Dr. Goff had emailed this morning to let her know she’d finished marking up Keely’s essay, and Keely wanted to grab it before campus shut down for spring break.
She’d already informed her parents this would be a working vacation. She hadn’t received a response.
She’d known Max’s essay was decent—Dr. Goff wouldn’t have suggested she read it otherwise.
But from this glowing review, it carried Max’s application.
They were still well matched in extracurriculars (for now; if Max had ratted her out to Tricia like Keely suspected, she hadn’t been disciplined for it yet) and as the counselor sang the praises of the tutoring center, Keely inferred she still had him beat in grades.
So they were basically even.
Which was not good.
Basically even meant she couldn’t control the outcome. It would be in the hands of the selection committee instead of Keely’s white-knuckled grip.
This was a problem Keely couldn’t fix.
She either needed Max to stop being the school’s track star—his sculpted uniform-clad body popped up in her mind and she wrote that off as highly unlikely—or she needed to get her essay on par with his.
If you have the chance, you should ask to read Max Simmons’s essay, Dr. Goff had said, probably thinking Keely would do just that: ask.
Keely would rather have a hangover for a week than admit to Max’s face that his essay was better than hers. Honestly, she was half tempted to call up Zoey’s MIT brother again, have him swipe the essay from the cloud or wherever else it resided besides Max’s laptop.
Keely’s head tilted.
Now there was an idea.
One she could implement right now, if she was careful.
She wouldn’t steal the laptop, of course. Just the essay. To see how he’d organized it, note where he was finding passion she wasn’t.
In the office, a chair scraped the ground, and Keely ducked behind the corner. She caught the word practice.
Of course. She could follow him there, wait for him to change and head to the field, duck into the locker room with the all-access card Zoey had bequeathed to her for occasions such as these, email herself the essay, and sneak out unseen.
Easy as Pi.
She had too much to do today to have any other option. She was catching an early afternoon bus home. Her car had started making a weird noise on the way back from the shelter on Sunday, and she didn’t trust it to carry her three hundred miles without stranding her on a lonesome mountain highway.
She checked the calendar on her phone one final time, slotted ML into the empty space (for Max’s laptop), and tucked it in the side pocket of her backpack before slinking after him.
Keely trailed Max across campus at a respectable and unassuming distance, a familiar tickle forming at the base of her throat.
The weather was turning, which for Keely meant she had maybe one more good week before springtime allergies decimated her ability to breathe through her nose.
She added a note on her mental to-do list to preemptively start taking Claritin in addition to her vitamins.
Max scanned into the building, and she waited behind a large ash tree outside for thirty minutes to make sure the locker room had emptied.
Get in, email the essay, get out.
The halls weren’t empty, but she didn’t recognize any faces. It didn’t stop her from holding her breath as she turned each corner, fully expecting Max to have somehow read her intentions and catch her in the act once again.
But she made it unseen and ducked her head into the locker room. The door squeaked on the hinges, and she winced.
“Hello?” she whispered. No answer, but maybe she should try speaking at a volume someone could realistically hear. “Hello?” she called, a little louder.
The coast was clear.
She padded to Max’s locker on silent feet. She’d expected him to put a padlock on it after the uniform shrinking, but it was thankfully still unlocked. His backpack hung from one of the built-in hooks. Seriously, why were these lockers so spacious? She pulled it down and unzipped it.
A change of clothes and spare socks, loose papers and one unlabeled notebook.
Did he—a shudder rolled down her spine—use the same one for every subject?
And she didn’t see a planner anywhere, just crumpled protein bar wrappers and an empty (but thankfully clean) shaker bottle, eerily similar to the one that had tumbled over her laptop.
She pulled his computer from the insulated pocket and shoved the backpack onto the shelf at the top where more clothes rested. What was he wearing right now?
“Get it together, Keely,” she muttered.
She threw open the laptop lid. Max’s school email was on the page, and she scanned quickly for Dr. Goff’s name, or READ MY ESSAY HERE in bold letters. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy.
She blew out a breath so noisy it rattled the lockers.
Except—the rattling didn’t stop when she did.
It took her a few seconds to register the noise from the hallway. Heavy footsteps coming closer, heading right toward her. Practice wasn’t over already, was it?
Panicked, Keely looked for somewhere to hide. The laundry hamper was big enough, but empty. Not to mention the bacteria. The showers might be safe—emphasis on might—but she was out of time.
Gritting her teeth, she stepped forward into Max’s locker and shut the door behind her.
Noises were somehow both muffled and amplified within this tiny space. She couldn’t distinguish the voices other than that they belonged to two guys fighting about who forgot to grab the foam rollers.
Every footstep made Keely’s pulse jump as they searched and found the sought-after equipment. But eventually they left, heading back to practice, and Keely was alone again.
She pressed forward.
The latch held.
“No,” she gasped, pushing and pounding at the door. “Nonononono. Seriously. Come on.”
She stuck her finger through the hole closest to the lock, but she couldn’t reach the release.
Keely was stuck.
In Max Simmons’s locker.
Her head fell forward, taking up a rhythmic bang-bang-bang against the metal.
Phone. Where was her phone? She tried to grab it from the side pocket of her bag, smushed against the back wall, but her elbow hit the side. She whimpered but persisted, curling her arm farther.
Her fingers gripped the edges of her phone. She tugged up and—
Lightning shot down her arm as her ulnar nerve met a metal wall hook at the exact wrong angle.
Her phone clattered to the bottom of the locker and landed near her foot, which was tingling from the aftershocks of hitting her funny bone.
Keely blew out hot air and rubbed at the tender spot. She could have planned this better.
Or at all.
Her breath turned the cramped space hot and humid.
The holes in the door were big enough that she wasn’t worried about suffocating, but small enough that she was getting mildly claustrophobic.
Her legs cramped, and she lost sensation in her toes for how tightly her knees were locked.
Which was not promising for rescuing her phone.
She persisted, and had worked it up to her ankle by the time the thundering started. This one was much, much louder.
Practice was over.
Dozens of jocks filtered into the room, voices twining and overlapping, shouting, laughing, cursing.
Footsteps drew near, and her throat closed. She shifted, and her head bumped the upper shelf. A panicked yelp slipped free.
The movement outside the locker slowed, shadows shifting like someone had touched the latch.
She bit her bottom lip hard enough that her teeth broke the skin, the metallic tang of iron filling her mouth.
Light flooded her hiding place as the door swung open.
Max stood in front of her.
And Keely was still clutching his laptop to her chest.
For a second, he just blinked at her.
In that second, she saw the full glory of a post-practice Max.
A darkened strand of hair stuck to his forehead with sweat.
It beaded at his hairline, glistened against the exposed skin of his neck, down the fronts of his arms. Even the darkened fabric beneath them didn’t completely disgust her.
His chest heaved slightly. He’d clearly worked hard.
Max tilted his head, his hand curling around the edge of the locker. Her stomach pitched, fingers tightening on the laptop.
He clocked it, his gaze dropping there. She spotted a flash of tongue as he licked his lips.
For some reason, heat flooded her cheeks.
Beyond Max’s shoulders, voices got louder. He stepped closer to block the locker—and her—from view. The door shut a few more inches.
Her ribs constricted around a tight ball of panic. He wasn’t going to leave her in here, was he? Surely that was illegal.
More illegal than sneaking in and stealing the laptop in the first place?
He didn’t pull her out, divulge her breaking and entering or expose her to most-likely-naked men.
Instead, he pushed the door closed another inch.
Keely started to say the word please, but his head jerked in a quick shake.
No, he said without words. She would stay right here until he’d decided how to deal with her.
Right before she lost sight of him, he cocked his head to the side. It was the same playful movement she’d seen a dozen times. At the shelter. Outside the classroom, when her books had been swapped.
It was Max’s challenge face.
Which meant this was very, very bad.
The locker snicked shut.
· · · · ·
Keely was completely at Max’s mercy.