Chapter Three #3
A twinge of jealousy pulsed through me as I fished some trapped orchid petals from the pool grate.
How nice it would have been to have that kind of advantage myself a year or so before, when I’d taken the SAT.
I couldn’t afford the extra prep for the test at Boca Raton High School, much less extra tutoring to help me get to my eventual 1420 combined score.
Foster kids with drug-addicted moms and dads in jail didn’t get advantages like these. We had to earn it on our own.
But still, Lila looked miserable…
“Let’s go through a few more,” the tutor said. “The verb to be again. Second person singular, future perfect tense.”
“Fueris.”
The teacher murmured some praise. “Now first-person plural future perfect.”
“Fuerimos,” Lila responded, and then her eyes caught mine. “Oh, hello.”
“Hello,” I replied, bracing the pool net on the concrete deck as I did so. It was only the second time I’d ever spoken to her. Like her parents, she didn’t seem to be a snob, but I knew girls her age, and they were mostly outright bitches. Maybe Lila would be different. She seemed to be—
The tutor twisted her body in my direction. “And who might you be?”
“I’m Adam. Adam the scholar…um…er…the pool guy.”
And I was. I was that, just a normal, average staffer working on an extraordinary property that served as a reminder of just how far away I stood from the things I wanted, and the places I wanted to be—the places I would be.
“Are you in high school too, Adam?”
“I’m a senior at Boca Raton.” I rubbed the back of my neck, once again self-conscious about how this sounded in comparison to whatever rarefied and exclusive education Lila was receiving. “Hoping to go to Gainesville in the fall.”
“That’s wonderful,” the woman said in a voice with a tone that told me she didn’t think it was wonderful at all. “And have you been accepted to the University of Florida?”
“I have.” I looked down again, hating how this conversation made me feel. Getting into the school hadn’t been a problem. But the thousands in tuition it would take each year to attend certainly was—that scared me. “Just trying to figure out a way to pay for it all.”
“Adam is one of the scholarship finalists,” Lila added. I raised my eyes at the sound of her voice and found her gaze already on me. “For the foundation. He’s working here for the next few months as part of all that, part of the competition.”
“Are you?” The teacher had a snide smile now. “Oh, that is very interesting.”
I narrowed my eyes at Lila’s teacher. No matter what she said, no matter how she said it, she wouldn’t succeed in making me feel small for trying to get what I needed in order to have a decent future.
People had to work for things in life, and I had certainly done that. Screw her and her obvious elitism.
“Adam is very smart,” Lila said. She ripped a fresh sheet of paper from the notebook in front of her and began making tiny folds, first in half, then in fourths, and so on, making the paper smaller with each fold. “I read his application the other night.”
My attention snapped to her face. She had?
Lila cleared her throat, still concentrating on the paper. “He’s also fluent in coding.”
“So are plenty of people,” I mumbled, a hot flash traveling up the back of my neck.
“Well, are they self-taught the way that you are?” Lila tapped her fingers on the table, and I noticed the chipped, bright pink polish covering her chewed nails. “Did they make a 775 on the SAT math section?”
“Some of them probably did. A lot of them.”
“No, not many.” She lifted her head and smiled at me. “You don’t have to be so humble about how intelligent you are.”
I grinned back at her, realizing how much I liked the way she talked to me, and more than that, about me. Lila might be a princess, but she wasn’t a cruel one, and that stood out. It defied what I’d assumed about her when she got home from school the other day.
“What will you study if you get the scholarship?” the tutor asked.
“When he gets it,” Lila said. She folded the paper again. “I read the other applications too, and they aren’t like his. They don’t…make an impression.”
I gulped, my mouth turning dry. People didn’t speak about me this way, they didn’t talk about me in front of my face as if I was someone they wanted to know, someone that impressed them.
They were just as likely to forget me as they were to remember me.
Hearing Lila compliment me made me unbalanced, and I worked hard to never feel that way.
“Uh…ah…M-mechanical engineering. That’s what I plan to study. ”
“Good choice.” The woman turned back to Lila, dismissing me. “Well, we should get back to conjugating these verbs.”
“Okay.” Lila sighed. The paper in her hands was tiny by then, and full of intricate folds. “Mom’s going to ask about it at dinner anyway, so I guess we should.”
“Back to sum. What is its third person, perfect tense conjugation?”
“Fuit.”
“Excellent. And the third person present?”
“Sunt.”
“You’re really getting these verbs. Good work. We can move on to basic greetings soon.”
I almost scoffed—who needed to know basic greetings in a dead language? No one.
Still, the teacher clapped her hands, clearly pleased with how this midafternoon study session had progressed. Lila smiled at her in return, but I noticed a hint of relief in her eyes. Lila’s young, a freshman, but I doubted that innocence of hers would ever go away. I hoped it didn’t.
I turned back to the pool grates and moved on to clean the second one. But when I came around the other side of the deck, closer to Lila now, I allowed myself one more look at her.
And she stared at me too.
“Good work,” I mouthed.
Over the head of her teacher, Lila gave me the slightest nod.
It was a moment shared just between us, the kind of thing that had a strange sort of intimacy in it, a feeling I hadn’t felt before with a girl, not at school, not at work, not in the neighborhood, not anywhere with anyone. Lila was different. She was—
Nothing. The boss’s daughter. Period. We wouldn’t be friends, especially considering her age. I had a scholarship to win, and I couldn’t let anything get in the way of that.
But later that afternoon, as I put away the pool cleaning equipment in the shed near the garage, I found a folded piece of notebook paper tucked into the grate of the locker where I stored an extra shirt, my wallet, and the meager lunch I always brought with me.
I pulled it out, studying it. Was this what Lila had been making?
The origami boat fit into the palm of my hand.
I stared at it a few moments, amazed. How and when had she come into the garage?
And why had she made this for me? Still wondering, I shoved it in my pocket.
I didn’t want anyone else to see it, didn’t want anyone else to know she’d left me this simple gift.
A childlike—albeit thoughtful—gift. We’d never run in the same circles, so I knew not to consider this as anything more than something nice.
Lila Montague was kind and preparing for her guaranteed future. I was desperate, waiting for the moment when I could run away from my past. Yes. I needed to keep away from her. Permanently.
So why did it seem to take so much effort to remind myself of that fact?