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Anna believed in being first in everything. First in classes, first across the finish line, first to get to the office in the morning. Sure, it was tough getting herself out of bed at six-fifty every morning, but that only showed her dedication. The other patrollers were already beginning to notice how well she got everything done: she'd make junior commish next year, no problem.
In her opinion, you achieved success by making sure you didn't let anyone get in front of you. Which was why she was so shocked to see someone else's scooter (unregistered, too--completely against regulations) propped up against the door to the safety patroller's office. She peeked in, hoping to size up what looked like her competition--but the other guy wasn't a safety patroller at all. And he was sitting on top of her desk, fingering her nameplate. The nerve.
She cleared her throat. "Halt! You're trespassing."
The boy turned his head towards her. "Patroller's office is a public area."
"Not before school hours it's not. I could have you demerited for that."
A snort. "Sure you could. Say, you ever thought of easing up a little? You don't have to do everything by the book."
"You're not encouraging me to be lenient, you know," she said. She was not going to deal with some delinquent's lip first thing in the morning.
"Cool your jets, sister. I was just leaving." He hopped off the desk. "I'm out of your reach now, anyway. Just wanted to see this place one last time."
"What," she said, "are you getting nostalgic about all the times you were held in the detention center?"
He just grinned wider. "Try the other side of the handcuffs."
But that meant--
"You were a safety patroller?"
"Only the best in the business. Like I said. Might benefit you to loosen up a little." He flicked at one of her pigtails. She hissed and struck out at him--
--but he was speeding down the hall already, his frame bent around the scooter. He was clearly getting too big for it, she thought. Hadn't all the high school kids given up scootering, anyway?
She could have followed him, gotten the last word, but on second thought, maybe it was best that none of her colleagues found out about this little encounter.
***
"'What is your name?'"
"¿Cómo te llamas?" he said, tonelessly. His accent was probably awful. Ingrid sighed quietly--he couldn't see her from where he was lying on the bed, but he could imagine the disapproving purse of her lips pretty well. She loved languages. She loved a lot of things, apparently. He'd never have pagged her as that type back when they were on the safety patrol, but then, things were different now. Just like they all liked to tell him.
"You could try caring about this for a minute," she said. "Or at least pretend. Fillmore."
He shrugged, then realized she couldn't see it. "'Fraid I can't."
"Seriously, Fillmore. What's gotten into you? You weren't like this last year."
The thing about Ingrid was she'd never learned some cans of worms just weren't meant to be opened. He changed the topic. "I went back to X this morning. The old X."
She was silent for a moment. "Of course you did," she said softly. Probably thinking he couldn't hear her. "What did you find?"
"Just a girl. Sixth grader, by the looks of it--she didn't know me, I didn't know her. She was a real by the book type--I'd guess she's got a major chip on her shoulder, by the way she acted."
"Sometimes the younger ones are like that. They usually grow out of it, though...."
He looked up at the ceiling, at one of those glow-in-the-dark stars. His dad had put them up when Fillmore was eight. Hadn't been able to get them down since. "They gave her my desk," he said.
That sigh again. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her turn around. He kept on looking straight up. "They had to give it to someone," she said.
"I know that. It's just weird, I guess."
"Life goes on." She paused. "Fillmore, you knew safety patrol would end with middle school. Are you seriously still wallowing about it?"
He whipped his head around to look at her. "Excuse me if we aren't all masters of adjustment like you, Ingrid. Are we done with the Spanish?"
"You obviously are." She stood up. He couldn't see her face anymore, but the image of those green eyes--too wide, too concerned--stuck with him. He wasn't going to be pitied by anyone, not even her. "Come on," she said. "It's getting warm in here. Let's take a walk."
At least he'd gotten her to quit the studying thing.
***
In theory, there shouldn't have been anything complicated about the transition from middle to high. Same people, same routine, in this case same name, even. Just in a different setting. In theory.
The problem was that when it came down to it, Fillmore wasn't good at much. He wasn't a bad student, but he wasn't going to be making any teachers starry-eyed any time soon--that was Ingrid's job--and he had better things to do with his time than sit around and fill out worksheets and crossword puzzles all day long. He did okay at sports, he just wasn't going to be good enough to get on any teams. He didn't have any causes or pet interests he could join or start a club for. He could solve mysteries, he could get himself out of a tough spot, he could banter with the best of them--but at the end of the day, all that didn't add up to much. It had once, but it didn't now.
He tried out that banter on a few of his teachers and got dirty looks from them and admiration from the back rows of the classroom: the slackers and shady dealers of X High. They looked interested, but he didn't want a thing to do with them. They were the criminal element of the school, and say what you would about how he'd been holding up these last few weeks, but Cornelius Fillmore was staying clean.
It left him without a crowd to hang with, though. He still got invited to things by the old safety patrollers from time to time, and Vallejo made it a point to catch up with him once in a while, see how he was doing--but they were all finding new friends, that was obvious. Vallejo was always talking about the gaming club and his fantasy football league, Anza had gone out for chess boxing and everyone was expecting him to make varsity by next year, O'Farrell carried a beret and a large pair of scissors and talked Yoko Ono out in front of the school with the performance art society. Tehama, unbelievably, had fallen in with the straight shooters, the grinders of the school: she'd decided that as much as she loved solving cases, she loved making cases more. "I'm thinking law school," she said. "And, well, you know how competitive they are these days. I figure it's best to start early." Only Ingrid was a constant presence at his side. She'd walk him to class, never saying much--it just wasn't their way, to fill up a silence with chatter and jokes. Still, she stuck to him like glue, even though her friends--sharp-nosed boys in black, mousy girls clutching notebooks--called out to her, and those bright green eyes always seemed to be trained on him.
There was something probing behind her gaze, but he tried to shrug that off. She worried about him, he knew, but it was pointless. She'd be better off worrying about herself.
***
"I'm pretty sure this isn't actually possible."
Ingrid's eyes slid over from her book to his. "No, it is," she said, after only a moment. Photographic memory again, probably. "You just have to move all the terms over to one side, then separate the expression into its component factors."
He blinked. "I'm sorry," he said blandly. "I don't think I speak Chinese."
She laughed. "No, really. Once you learn the trick, it's not actually that hard. Here, I'll show you." She held out her hand for his paper.
He didn't give it to her right away. "You're already done with your work." It wasn't a question; she hadn't so much as picked up her pencil in twenty minutes, and that couldn't all be because she was watching him instead.
"Mostly, yes. I don't see what the--"
"The point is that you could be outside. Or with your friends. What are you doing here?"
"I'm here helping you with your homework, and you're complaining?" But she was looking away from him, down at her book. Her hands.
"No one's forcing you to be here. It's not like this is some kind of project." He looked at her. "Is it?"
Her eyes snapped up. "Fine," she snapped. "I'm here because you're my friend. And I'm here because when you're not being an asshole, you're actually kind of fun to hang around. Good enough for you?"
He opened his mouth. Shut it again when no words were forthcoming. Opened it again. "I don't think I'm that much fun to be around right now."
She sighed. "You know," she said, "you were the first person I really thought of as a friend."
Oh.
"I figured that," he said, because he had--but it's still strange to hear her say it like that.
"I mean it." And she's carefully not looking at him again, choosing to face the wall instead. "Before, I was always moving from school to school. I never stayed long enough to get to know anyone until I got to X. I never had a clue how to make or keep a friend. You and the rest of the safety patrol--you were the ones who taught me that. So if you think I'm leaving you behind--that I'm some bubbly socialite and you're not--you're wrong. This isn't easy for me either."
"I never said I thought--"
"I can read between the lines, Fillmore."
And when it came down to it, he really couldn't argue with that. "You seem like you're doing just fine, though," he said.
"Maybe. I don't know. Sometimes I think--" She broke off. Her hand was twisting the beaded bracelet on the opposite wrist. "Never mind, that's not the point. The point is, you're not the only one who doesn't know what to do with yourself sometimes. But at least I haven't given up."
He opens his mouth to protest--given up?--but then it dawns on him: she's right.
***
He would never have expected to run into the former Alexis Bixbee, of all people, in the halls--she'd always been one of the popular kids, and he wasn't anybody, not anymore--but there she was, bending down to take a drink at the water fountain, ignoring the 3:30 bell. And she looked like Alexis in that cheerleader's uniform, even though her hair color was natural again. "Officer Fillmore," she said as she saw him, looking as surprised as he did. "I haven't seen you--well, since that whole Electric Haircut business. How are you?"
She seemed to realize her mistake as soon as she said it, by the way she startled, but she didn't say anything. After all this time, it was strange, jarring to hear someone call him Officer again. It just wasn't the way things were anymore.
The way things were. He didn't think he liked it.
"I'm doing just fine," he said, to forestall any self-correcting she might do. "Settling in, you know. How about you?"
She smiled, and he was reminded exactly why Alexis--Gladys--was so popular. "It's been great. I'm not saying there aren't cliques here--you'd have to be blind not to see them--but it's not such a big deal anymore, being a cheerleader who loves computers. I feel like the walls are beginning to break down a little. You know what I mean, right?"
He really, honestly hadn't noticed. "I--think so," he said.
If she noticed something was off about him, she didn't show it. "I didn't realize it would be so different. But I finally feel free to be everything I am." She looked away, and her smile was soft and shy. "Jeff--my boyfriend--is doing robotics and football. No one says anything. I keep expecting them to--and then I remember."
I didn't know you'd broken off with your old boyfriend, he almost said, but that was stupid. He hadn't talked to her in years; obviously things had changed since then.
"He must be pretty busy," he said instead.
She waved a hand. "Oh, you know," she said breezily, "some of us just can't keep still. We have to have a hand in everything."
"Sounds like it." He shifted from one foot to the other. "Uh, see you around. I guess."
He was surprised by how forcefully she nodded at that, but maybe he shouldn't have been. "Definitely. We should talk again sometime. I'm usually in the computer lab Tuesdays and Thursdays--come find me."
She turned to leave, and he stared after her, wondering.
***
"Happy birthday." Ingrid dropped a wrapped package about the size of a desk dictionary in his lap. It turned out to be a copy of the X High extracurricular catalogue.
"Interesting gift. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to tell me something."
"That depends. Are you as tired of the inside of your room as I am?"
He shook his head and flipped the book open. "You know, most people would just ditch me."
"If you're trying to get me to leave, you'll have to be less subtle about it," Ingrid said. She curled up at the corner of the bed, cracking open a small book of her own. "I'm not going home until you finish that, by the way."
***
"Competitive origami?"
"I'm on that team. It's very high stakes." Ingrid turned a page. "Speed is important."
"Really."
"Mm-hmm. Dangerous, too."
He craned his head to look at her. "Okay, now I know you're screwing with me."
She just smiled and raised her hands, palms facing him. "Papercuts," she said.
***
After reading about twelve improv groups, nine modern dance ensembles, fifteen clubs devoted to practicing various kinds of extreme activities, and four rock bands (auditioning new backup singers--thrilling), Fillmore's eyes were beginning to glaze over. "When do people find the time to do all this?""During the time they don't spend moping and playing videogames, I think." By this time, Ingrid was lying face-up on the bed, holding her book--which had a picture of a squid on the cover--above her face.
He raised his eyebrows. "What about the one-handed videogaming club?"
"You make a good point." She put the book down and half-rolled over so that she was facing him. "I think the handball team was trying to fill its roster. You could try there."
"Maybe."
"And then there's always the breakdancing society."
He snorted. "Come on. Can you see me breakdancing?"
"Yes," she said, completely straightfaced.
He gave her a look. She just smiled up at him. "But seriously. Keep going."
Fillmore turned another page, eyes skipping over the words without really reading them. The mentalist practitioners, the milk and cookies club, something called--Mission. He paused; the description stopped him cold.
Time is ticking. Things are going wrong. You have only minutes before life as we know it is destroyed--and you are the only one who can stop it. Or close, at least.
Teams of up to seven confront challenges with both long-term and spontaneous components in a competition setting. Points are given to teams who solve their challenges with greater speed, efficiency, and ingenuity. Creativity and the ability to think quickly on one's feet is a must. We are in need of additional members for some of our teams--contact advisor for details.
***
There was something really silly about this. Especially the costumes, which the catalogue advertisement had conveniently forgotten to mention. But he thought he wouldn't mind coming back next week--they needed another member, after all, and his teammates seemed to appreciate his talent with some of the spontaneous challenges. (Even if they didn't quite appreciate the property damage.)
Besides, it was fun, even if he had a hard time forgetting that no one was actually in any danger.
On his way out he stopped by the science wing of the school. He'd seen the posters advertising the forensics class next semester--a new addition, capped at twenty-one students. Probably the chances he'd get in as a freshman were low, but it couldn't hurt to talk to the teacher--it might have helped a lot, in fact. She seemed to like him. (He could be charming when he wanted to be. Really.)
And, well, there was always next year if that didn't work out.
Ingrid was standing out front, half-leaning against the open doors. "Took you a while."
"I had a few things to take care of." He paused. "Thanks for waiting for me."
"Hey," she said, "anytime."