Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [45]
“Rocks depress me.”
I tried not to feel insulted. “We could find someone who studies paleontology. Or archaeology.”
“Ology ology ology.” Mandarin yawned and stretched, like a cat in a puddle of sun. “It’s all about dead things. What’s with you and the nonliving? What about the people?”
“I thought you hated people.”
“Bullshit. I love people. What do you think I am, a sociopath? I’d never have said that.”
I cleared my throat, deciding not to contradict her. I hadn’t really liked the idea of using rocks, anyway—I wasn’t about to show anybody my collection. That was my secret. “We could, like, paint something. Something that belongs to an old person. A fence.”
“Like Tom Sawyer?” she mocked.
“We could clean out somebody’s barn.…”
She rolled her eyes.
“Well, what service project did you do other years?”
“Nothing. Got my dad to sign the paper that said I did it. He’ll sign anything, if he’s drunk enough.”
“Why didn’t you do that this year?”
Mandarin shrugged. “They’re on to me.”
I was beginning to get the feeling she was playing with me, batting me around like a mouse between her paws. I tapped my pencil against my knee and let a bit of my frustration slip out. “Well, do you have any ideas?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Whatever’s easy.”
“I thought you wanted to get this over with. You’ve got to help me think of something, just a little.”
“I don’t got to do anything.”
“But you said you wanted to graduate.…”
Mandarin rolled onto her side, propping up her head with one arm. All of a sudden, her voice went arctic. “Know what, Grace? You’re fortunate I’m helping you with this project anyways, after what you did.”
“What I did?”
In reply, Mandarin whipped something from underneath her pillow and flung it at me. Dark and glossy, it sliced through the air and landed on the floor by my foot. “Want to explain what that was doing in your bag, Grace? Because it sure ain’t ‘stuff for the service project.’ ”
One of my pamphlets for the All-American Leadership Conference.
She must have stolen it when I wasn’t paying attention. The winds picked up outside the window, and the air inside Mandarin’s room seemed to shift. Ozone, or lack of it. For just a second, my mind seemed to vibrate. I couldn’t pull my eyes from hers. “The conference is just for three weeks,” I said in a small voice. “We can go after—”
“Three weeks,” Mandarin repeated. “Only three weeks! Anything could happen in three weeks. In three weeks I could be dead.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“We all could be dead in three weeks.” I started to babble. “A meteor could fall down and smash us all to pieces. Like the dinosaurs. That’s what happened to them. A stone from space thundered down and changed the weather, and whoosh! Wiped them all out.”
Mandarin was still staring at me, but her expression had changed to one of contempt.
“I swear I was going to tell you, but I only just found out today! Turns out, Peter Shaw cheated.…”
“I just thought the same things were important to the both of us,” she said. “Hell, I should’ve known better, right? I mean, nobody thinks like me. Nobody else in the world. And you? You were just pretending.”
“I wasn’t pretending, I only forgot—”
“You’re right,” she said loudly, cutting me off. “You should forget about it. We both should.”
I rose to my knees. “Mandarin, come on. I don’t even care about the conference. ‘Leadership in the Political Sector’? That doesn’t interest me. I couldn’t care less about the political sector—”
Mandarin slammed her fist into the wall.
I heard the bang, saw the smear of blood where she’d gashed her knuckles. I stumbled away on my weakened knees. It was so sudden, so violent. I thought of the stories about Mandarin’s fights. Sophie Brawls, and the scratches on her neck. I knew Mandarin scared people, but until then I’d never felt frightened.
And yet, I felt even more frightened I’d ruined everything between us.
“Mandarin …”
“Just go,” she said quietly,