Chapter Nine Keely
Chapter Nine
Keely
Blue.
Max’s little prank had turned her hands Smurf-skin blue.
She’d figured out pretty quickly someone had switched the glucose at her station with dry benzoyl peroxide.
It was the only thing that explained the corresponding explosion.
The blue coating on everything—her hair, her lab coat, her hands, which had gotten the worst of it—was from the methylene blue.
At first, she thought either she or Lori had made an honest mistake, though Keely’s lab notes were meticulous, and she simply didn’t make mistakes.
But they put the pieces together—first with Lori, who rushed in right after Keely screamed, and Zoey, who mentioned later that Zane Smith from Rutherford showed up late but his name had already been marked off.
“What did he look like?” Keely had pressed, hands under the hot water in the bathroom with Zoey sprinkling baking soda over them. Lori squirted dish soap.
“Tall. Curly brown hair. A really smug expression, even though I could tell he didn’t belong here.”
Keely had run through the likely suspects in her head until she hit a brick wall. Her blood froze. “Was he wearing athletic clothes? And a green backpack?”
Zoey had caught Keely’s eye in the mirror, eyebrows rocketing toward the ceiling. She’d nodded.
And Keely had cursed.
This had Max’s name written all over it.
But Keely couldn’t publicly claim her experiment had been tampered with, not when she’d organized the event. Admitting a problem would all but ensure AMU wouldn’t host again. It would discredit the hard work she and Zoey had put in, and it was no one’s fault but Max’s.
The good thing about the Olympiad, about science in general, was that failed experiments were simply viewed as opportunities to learn. And because it was a scrimmage, it didn’t count toward or against AMU’s overall ranking for the year.
She’d apologized to Zoey profusely no less than seven times when she’d entered the lab and caught Keely quite literally blue-handed, but her best friend did what any best friend would do: grabbed a pair of blue latex cleaning gloves, made a joke about them matching while trying to keep a straight face, and got to work on clean-up.
Besides, Keely thought wryly as she parked in the animal shelter lot the next day, dogs didn’t care what color the hands that fed them were.
Last week, Max had shown up after Keely, but he was here bright and early now, perched on the corner of Tricia’s desk. Not a care in the world.
Keely kept her back to them as she hung her coat on the hook. Dreaded the moment when someone would ask—
“I heard through the grapevine that you had a little. . . accident yesterday.” Innocence blanketed Max’s snide tone, even as his gaze dropped pointedly to her hands. The corner of his mouth twitched before it smoothed away. “Keeping those gloves on?”
She wanted to shove said gloves down his throat. With her fists still in them. “I have a hangnail.”
“On all ten fingers?”
She turned. An emerald-green AMU hoodie and black joggers hugged his body. He was somehow devoid of the dog hair floating through the air in clumps.
That made the most sense out of anything, when she thought about it. Keely didn’t imagine anything would want to cling to Max Simmons.
She crossed her arms. “I’m also a little cold.”
Tricia made a noise of dissent, shaking her head. “The dogs will tear those to shreds. Better ditch ’em. I’ll crank the temperature up a few notches.”
Keely’s stomach sank.
“I’m sure once you get moving,” Max offered, “you won’t even feel it.” His tone was neutral now, but there was a shift to his eyebrow, maybe the angle of his mouth, that let her know he meant the exact opposite.
She didn’t want to do this. It would invite endless teasing, and she’d got enough of it from Zoey at home last night. But Max and Tricia were staring, waiting, expectant.
Inhaling a breath and holding it, she peeled off her gloves, one at a time, then stowed them deep inside her bag.
Tricia’s eyes shone with mirth. “Oh! Poor blue—you,” she corrected, then busied herself with her computer.
Max morphed his chuckle into a cough, and Keely turned away from his glee when her cheeks started to burn.
Out in the dog pen, Keely tried to sweep the kennel floor, but it was a lost cause. Half the dogs followed her around wherever she went, and the other half stopped her in her tracks, muddy and dusty paws on her knees, nipping at the broom.
“Down,” she said, but her voice was meek, and didn’t carry over the barking or the clatter of nails on concrete or the whoosh of tails. One of the larger breeds—she only knew a few of the dogs’ names so far—jumped, putting its front paws directly into her stomach, and she buckled.
The dog lathed her hands with its tongue, and while the sensation wasn’t unpleasant, the odor coming from its mouth was enough to have Keely’s breakfast threatening to reappear.
“Down, Lottie.”
Max appeared over Keely’s shoulder, grabbing the broom.
She’d take it back in a second. But first, she walked to the trough sink across the room and scrubbed fiercely at her hands. She’d done this twenty times in the last twenty-four hours, but maybe the soap here was stronger.
She should use a paint stripper and be done with it. Her cells would regenerate in a few weeks, anyway.
Cleaned of drool—but still not dye—Keely marched back to where Max was using the broom to play with Lottie and grabbed it from him.
He grabbed it back. “I’ve got this. Go organize the front desk or something.”
She pulled, but he held firm. Damn muscles. Why did he have so many? Weren’t runners supposed to be beanpoles? “I had it first.”
“Reverting to kindergarten playground tactics?” His smirk made Keely’s eye twitch. “I thought we’d grown up by now. Must have only been me.”
She snorted, letting her hands fall away.
“Yes, it’s so mature to sneak in somewhere, lie about your identity, and sabotage an important science experiment.
That just screams ‘I’m a fully-fledged adult.
’ ” Biscuit bumped her palm with his nose, and she crouched to scratch behind his ear. “Don’t you think, Biscuit?”
He barked, and she looked back up at Max, head tilted to the side. “Exactly.”
Max blew laughter through his nose. “You’re so. . .”
“So what?” Her lungs burned. “Finish that thought, I beg you.”
His eyes flashed. “Do a lot of begging, Keely? Down on your knees?”
“No,” she quipped, fire sparking along her tongue and lashing out at him. She stood. “But you would.”
His chest expanded on a deep inhale as Lottie and another German shepherd bounded right through the pile of hair Max had swept up.
She jerked her chin at it. “You missed a spot.”
· · · · ·
Play time became “try to eat Keely’s hand” time, so she was relegated to the front desk after all.
She hadn’t been there five minutes when the door to the lobby opened, and a harrowed-looking guy with a baseball hat pulled low over his eyes carried a box inside.
Surely, she could accept a package. She smiled brightly. “Delivery?”
“Sort of,” he said, looking away.
The box barked.
Keely stifled a gasp as the visitor pried the box open. A fluffy white head popped out.
“Puppies,” Keely said faintly, trying not to squeal.
“Four of them,” the guy said, handing the box over.
One of the puppies stuck out its snout and let out a yowl. Zoey made that same noise when she was hungry.
“Are you surrendering them?” Keely asked, catching the box as it nearly toppled from the weight.
“They’re not mine,” the guy insisted. He held his hands up, like he was preparing to shove the box away if Keely refused it. No worries there. She wasn’t letting him lay a finger on it again.
He inched toward the door. “I found them.”
Keely tilted her head. “Where?”
“By that Valero near the highway?” He wouldn’t meet her eyes, and now it wasn’t the shelter’s cats making her nose tickle but the pungent, lingering scent of tobacco.
She propped the box on the desk so she could grab a notepad and pen. “Have you fed them anything?”
“No,” he gruffed. He pulled his cap down further over his brow. “Look, is that all? The internet said this was a rescue. So—” he threw a hand with yellowing fingernails in the direction of the noisy, shifting box “—rescue them.”
Keely leaned her hip against it to keep it from sliding off the desk. The puppies climbed all over each other, heads popping out of the box like whack-a-mole. She tried to pet them all. “Yes, but I’d love to get some more—”
The word information was swallowed up by the ding of the bell over the door as he slipped back outside, sans the four puppies he’d come with.
Naturally, that was when Max and Tricia found her.
“We have some new friends,” Keely said weakly. One of the puppies licked her hand. Another gnawed on her sleeve. A third popped its head over the side of the box and used it as a vault, half crawling, half jumping onto her chest and settling into her arms.
Max and Tricia stared. She was used to attention, but not this kind, where her skin crawled with fear that she’d do or say something wrong.
Like when she went home this past Thanksgiving and the word divorce was passed alongside the mashed potatoes and gravy.
The last puppy sat on the desk, milk teeth trying to embed into the flesh of Keely’s thumb. “I don’t understand why this keeps happening.”
“Dogs see blue better than any other color.” Max was practically giddy. “It’s why they’ve been all over you today.”
She pursed her lips. Of course he’d know that.
Tricia gave her a weary smile as she walked around the desk, gently prying the dogs from the various parts of Keely’s body and placing them back in the box. “Why don’t we stick you in the back room for the afternoon? We had a lot of deliveries this morning.”
Keely’s mouth popped open. “But who’s going to take care of the puppies?”
“Max can handle it,” Tricia said, trying to smile again. A concerning vein popped out in her forehead.
Over Tricia’s shoulder, Max was extra smug.
Which Keely took very, very personally.