Chapter 27. In Which I Am Trapped in a Classroom with My Enemy, Who I Accidentally Kissed, and Am Now Gnawing at the Bar
IN WHICH I AM TRAPPED IN A CLASSROOM WITH MY ENEMY, WHO I ACCIDENTALLY KISSED, AND AM NOW GNAWING AT THE BARS OF MY ENCLOSURE TO ESCAPE
“Our mentor committee leader, Jameson, filed a report that you two were out past quiet hours last night,” Dr. Gupta says, lowering the note and setting it on her desk. Her tone is stern. One that a teacher has never used toward me in my life.
I stand still, the blood in my veins replaced with liquid fear.
I’m getting in trouble. With a teacher.
At my side, Luca doesn’t respond, either. He hasn’t spoken since we both awkwardly walked up here after the test while everyone else filed out.
Dr. Gupta sighs. She takes off her reading glasses, letting them hang from their beaded chain. “I’m not here to enforce rules. I’m just here on my sabbatical. But this note says to administer a required punishment.”
My heartbeat rattles through me. They’re going to call Mom and Dad and tell them that I’m a failure. They may report this to outlets.
I clench my fists, digging my fingernails into the palms of my hands to fight off the anxious voices swirling in my head. They’d been gone for so long, I almost started to believe they’d never come back. How brainless of me.
Dr. Gupta gestures at the lab stretching behind us. “This place is a mess. Clean it up.”
I blink at her. Over my shoulder, at the lab. Her again. “That’s it?”
“I don’t think you understand. I want the chemical-synthesis reactors spotless.
The electron microscopes need to be dusted with the compressed air blowers.
” Dr. Gupta rises out of her chair and walks toward a closet at the corner of the room.
From it, she pulls out a broom and mop. “And the floors are disgusting.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Luca says. It’s the first thing I’ve heard him say all day. His voice is hoarse, almost raw.
It hurts, knowing why.
I swallow the lump in my throat. “Yeah.”
Dr. Gupta passes the broom and dustpan to me, and then the mop to Luca. “Correct response. I have proposals to grade. I’ll return in two hours, expecting results.”
My soul deflates.
Two hours. Alone with Luca. So much for keeping a polite distance from him.
Dr. Gupta collects her purse and leaves. As the door closes behind her, Luca and I remain motionless, as if making the first move will be as painful as ripping off a bandage.
The longer we wait, the longer it hurts.
I take a deep breath. Then I face him as confidently as I can. “You can hand me the mop. I’ll take care of the floors.”
Luca stares back, softly and attentively.
It makes my heart simultaneously melt and race.
He’s trying to read my thoughts and pick them apart, the way he’s so eerily talented at doing.
For a moment, I fear he’ll bring up last night and the way I abandoned him without explanation.
He might even be angry. He’d have every right to be.
Gradually, though, he smiles. A little tired, a little sad. “Thanks.”
It hurts more than any insult.
We clean in silence, the hum of the fluorescent lights filling the air.
Every time my brain drifts back to the stress of the imminent test results, Luca makes a small noise on the other side of the room as he bustles around, startling me.
I look up, hoping it’s Luca about to initiate conversation, but it never is.
I clean every inch of the floors with the broom and mop until there’s only one space left—where Luca is bent over one of the electron microscopes, wiping dust off the body with a cloth.
I gesture with the mop to the ground below his sneakers. “Sorry, I have to…”
Luca straightens so abruptly that he knocks over a bottle of lens-cleaning solution with his elbow. He fumbles for it twice and catches it. “No worries.”
As I shove the mop beneath the table, I can feel Luca studying me under his analytical gaze.
Why isn’t he bringing up last night?
“Rory?” Luca finally says behind me.
I tense and glance over my shoulder.
He’s pointing at the tile floor where I’ve been mopping. “You’ve been working on the same spot for over a minute.”
I look down. A sudsy puddle has formed beneath my feet, drowning my suede loafers and socks. Where did my brain just go?
Spending time with Luca is unbearable. Impossible.
“Why are you so quiet?” I ask, slapping the mop back into the bucket wringer. I turn around to face him, crossing my arms.
Luca’s eyes bulge wide. He glances around the lab. “You want me to sing along to my cleaning like Snow White?”
“No, I—” I grip my forehead. “Aren’t you mad?”
“Mad about what?”
“Last night. I ditched you.”
“Well, you were right that we should’ve gone back to the cabins earlier.” He gestures at the mop. “Otherwise, your feet wouldn’t be wet now.”
I step forward. “I don’t care about my wet feet—”
My loafer slips with a squeak, and my balance leaves this planetary plane, sending me slamming into Luca. His feet fling out from under him, and we both hit the soaking-wet floor, him on his back and me on his solid chest.
Both of us groan like we’ve been shot.
“Okay,” I grumble, weakly lifting my head. “Maybe I should’ve cared.”
Luca blinks up at me as he regains full consciousness. His long curls scatter messily across his forehead, and the back of his T-shirt is definitely absorbing gross mop juice.
A laugh leaves him, quiet and light, yet still quirky with all those little high notes sprinkled throughout. The way it always is.
My face flushes. His laugh is familiar.
Luca is familiar.
So is the way his body feels pressed against mine.
“Do I have soap on my face?” Luca asks, a corner of his lip hitching.
I blink a few times, snapping myself out of my very not-appropriate, awful, borderline-criminal thoughts. My heart thumps harder than should be anatomically possible. “No. You’re just—” I sit up straight to get farther away from his face. Much farther. “Nope.”
Luca, however, is undeterred. He has a playful glint in his eyes. “That’s where you’ve decided to move?”
I glance down. I’m not just on top of Luca now. I’m straddling him like he’s a horse.
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” I roll off until my back hits the floor, and I don’t even care when my own shirt squelches wetly against the puddle, too. “I’m so sorry.”
Luca rolls onto his side, propping his cheek with a fist. A single curl drapes over his forehead. I think of a word I’ve overheard plenty of people call him.
Cute. Luca is cute.
“Look at you,” he says. “The ever-impressive and perfectly presentable Prince Kid, lying in a puddle of dirt juice with me. It’s an honor.”
Despite running away last night, I want to stay on the floor. Even though my clothes are ruined and I can practically feel my image falling apart. On the floor right now, I feel free.
I feel free with Luca.
I care about Luca. I can’t deny that any longer, no matter how much the Seven Deadly Distractions warn me against it.
And Luca says he likes me. But the truth is that these last three years, he fell for a version of me that I molded to please the world. A fake version of me that I molded more at brAIN to please him.
I’ve messed up worse than ever before.
Luca watches me carefully, searching for an answer to an unspoken question on my face. His focus falls to my lips, reminding me of last night and making my stomach clench.
A muffled yell cuts through the laboratory.
Our eyes blow out wide, and we scramble to our feet and look to the door. Still closed. It must have come from another nearby lab.
Stepping around the puddle in our soaked clothes, we run into the hallway. The door to the Shared Instrumentation Facility is wide open.
Benedict stands by the sample-storage cabinets that stretch along the left side of the room. He stares, frozen as if in shock, at a séance of shattered glass and liquids that lie beneath an open cabinet. The top shelf is completely empty. Its contents, conceivably, make up the mess on the ground.
“Are you okay?” I ask from the doorway.
Benedict’s mouth opens, but it shuts once his attention lands on Luca beside me.
A sharp glint passes through his gaze. One I fail to understand.
“My samples. Someone came in and—I’m not sure, but—” He’s so thrown that he doesn’t acknowledge that we both look like we took headfirst dives into Lake River. “They—”
“You didn’t break the samples?” I ask.
“No. They were like this when I got here,” he responds. “For the contest, I’ve been considering shifting my research to liquid robotics. But someone came in and destroyed it all.”
Of course. The official results of today’s test haven’t been released yet, but we turned in our test so quickly that the odds point to us winning. Anyone who assumed they lost today could have done it out of spite.
Or someone who thought they might compete with us for the Medal could have been looking for a head start.
Maybe someone from our own cabin.
My heart sinks. Today, my cabinmates worked together seamlessly, like I always wanted. Could the Medal come in between us that quickly?
“We’ll figure out who did this,” I say through gritted teeth. “I expected something like this might happen, but that doesn’t make it fair.”
Luca’s brow is pinched. At first, I assume he’s as appalled as I am at the liquid mess at our feet, but then I realize it’s being directed at me. “What do you mean, you expected it?”
“Everyone at camp has been sabotaging one another since the moment we got here. Like, the bunk bed on the roof that”—that you put there—“that hit Cabin Delta on the first day. And the bucket of water in Cabin Iota.”
“But those were just pranks.” Luca looks to Benedict like he’ll find more clarification from him. “This is almost as cruel as my cabin being set on fire. This is screwed up.”
“Pranks?” I repeat, ignoring the guilt as I’m reminded of what happened to his cabin.
“Everyone was just messing with one another. For fun. You know?”
Fun.
No. Not possible. These weren’t pranks. They were calculated acts of sabotage. brAIN is called the brAIN Wars for a reason. It’s infamously competitive.
Yet I shift my weight before him uncomfortably.
I don’t believe what Luca says. But if it’s true, why would someone do this to us?
“We should head back to our cabin,” I tell Benedict, a bad feeling sinking through me the longer we stand at the crime scene. “Christiana or Jade may have also been targeted.”