image [https://i.postimg.cc/HLz06fj6/05.png]
A few years ago, Dad had been driving me somewhere, and we got swept up in a storm with sheets of rain so thick they blotted out anything more than a car’s length away. We take it for granted, I think, that traveling in vehicles means hurtling dozens of miles per second through space in metal monstrosities far more durable than our skin and bones. I know I did.
I don’t remember where we had been or where we were going, but I remember the sound of drums as tens of thousands of droplets broke themselves upon the car. I remember the lurch of the vehicle unexpectedly hydroplaning. I remember the feeling when he lost all control, when I didn’t know if he would get it back or if he would only for us to run headlong into something anyway.
It’s impossible to express just how terrifying it was to hear the words, “Ervin, honey, it’s time to get up!” when I woke up on August 27th for the fourth time, but if I were to try… I would think of the fear I felt when I thought we might be hurtling towards a death I couldn’t see coming.
Waking up enough to remember my ‘plan’ (If it could even be so called, half-baked as it was) helped a bit, but not nearly enough. It was entirely too possible I didn’t understand the loop’s code like I thought I did, and I had made a terrible, awful choice to go to sleep last night. But if Roslyn wasn’t going to take care of the situation herself, then what choice did I have but to try my idea?
The VCR struggled as ever to inform me the time was 7:16 as I tugged myself up out of the jaws of the couch and checked nearby for my tablet. Gone, which was expected, but the immediate sense of powerlessness that instilled in me was not so easily written off. If the next stage of my little plan hadn’t involved regaining a modicum of control, I don’t know that I could have compelled myself to stand, pad into the kitchen, and get some pen and paper from the junk drawer.
“Oh!” Mom turned to grab something from one of the cabinets and jerked away in surprise, wild-eyed. Apparently she had been distracted enough with the bacon and eggs that hadn’t heard me approach, much less sneaking around her. “Oh goodness, you startled me!”
I gave her a big, theatrical wince as I started scratching out a message.
“You don’t have to be sorry!” she said, immediately catching on. “Just warn— Oh, um, right…”
I saved her from further focus on her accidental faux pas by holding up my message, [Morning! Can’t wait to get to school for my first day today!]
I really didn’t like manipulating her, but I couldn’t let the dice fall where they may, not when breaking the loop was on the line. I didn’t know if priming her to take advantage of the Mandela effect would work or not, but it cost me nothing but a bit of discomfort to try.
Mom’s eyebrows shot up her forehead as she read my message. “You… are?”
Was it working? I gave her the most cheerful nod I could muster, which was less of a lie. If I was right… Well, I certainly would be more than happy to get to school.
“Well that’s great!” she said, confusion giving way to cautious enthusiasm. “I’d been debating whether it was better to wait until after our meeting with the principal tonight to have you go, but if you really want to go, then that’s that.”
She returned her attention to the bacon before it could start to burn, and I slipped into the garage to get clothes out of the suitcase in the corner, breathing a sigh of relief behind the safety of a closed door. It had worked. Or it certainly seemed to have, anyway. If nothing else, I had subverted the possibility that she might have kept me home again.
The rest of the morning played out uneventfully. The kind of morning that should have happened that first day, that would have happened if I hadn’t been a coward and too clever for my own good. The four of us ate eggs and bacon, the chatter somewhat stilted by my inability to participate, but otherwise completely normal. I showered and got dressed, and Mom ooh’d and aah’d over the clothes I had picked, just like I thought she would the second day before I discovered the 27th was repeating itself. Everything went swimmingly… So naturally, it was right when I went to grab my book bag out of my room so I could leave for the bus stop that I was finally hit by a curveball straight out of left field.
God forbid things be easy.
I knocked on the door to my room, not wanting to walk in on Dad in the middle of changing or something else equally embarrassing, and he opened it a few seconds later, dressed for work and confused, a lit cigarette in the hand not on the doorknob.
“Ervin? What’s wrong, kiddo?” I pantomimed pulling my bag onto my back, but he just stared, uncomprehending. Unsure, I repeated myself, over exaggerating the act, and it finally clicked. “Oh, your bag. Right, right. Where is—? Right. Right, never mind, just— Come on in and grab it.”
He stepped back and to the side, and I shimmied past, forced to lean away from the glowing orange tip Dad hadn’t noticed was still too close. The awkwardness was palpable, a cloying sense of embarrassment that urged me to move quicker and get out. I nearly yanked the folding door of the closet off its rack by accident in my hurry and forced myself to slow down—to calm down—as I grabbed it from where it was crammed into the corner of the closet.
“Oh right, before I forget, you need these, right?” Dad unexpectedly said, and when I turned to look, I nearly died on the spot from spontaneous combustion, a heart attack, or both.
Dad was holding my box. The box I kept hidden under the bed, the box I didn’t want anyone in the family to know about, was in his hands.
For a moment, I was convinced I had broken time in a completely new way because time absolutely seemed to stop as I floundered for something to say—to do.
“For PE?” he added, sounding less sure of himself by the second. My ill-advised, straight from the hip lie had come back to haunt me across repetitions. “You— I swear you told me you needed these for PE, so I dug them out from under the bed.”
I nodded with far more fervor than was necessary, snatched the box out of his hands before he got any ideas about opening it to look at my ‘sneakers,’ and shoved the box into my book bag as deep as it could go. Which wasn’t far at all, and nothing in my life had ever felt more unfair in that moment than that bag being a perfectly normal depth when I wanted nothing more than to shove that box so far out of Dad’s sight that he forgot it had ever existed.
Of course, Dad hadn’t had reason to be suspicious before, not until I reacted like that. I saw it in his eyes, the moment doubt crept in and took hold. The sudden squint of his eyes and tilt just so of his head, as if considering me from a new angle. There was no time to think or plan or do anything other than misdirect like I had never misdirected before…
… which is how I found myself throwing my arms around him in the biggest hug I could ever remember giving him.
Even now, looking back on that moment with all the clarity hindsight affords, I can only hazard a guess as to just what I had been thinking. I believe I was going for an, ‘I absolutely did need these and would have been in for a bad time had I forgotten them, so thank you thank you thank you for reminding me,’ sort of approach. If so? Well, it worked like a charm.
Dad clapped his hand on my shoulders and ruffled my hair with a, “Hey, no worries,” that made it clear he felt just as awkward being hugged as I did hugging him. “Now go on. And you do good at school… okay?”
I didn’t need to be told twice to get out of there and beat a hasty retreat.
----------------------------------------
I had been expecting, and dreading, needing to ride the bus to school before getting my tablet. Well, okay, I didn’t really care for the prospect of riding the bus in the first place, but I was already an outcast, and not having a way to communicate was going to compound the awfulness. I neither had nor wanted a gaming console, so I categorically did not fit in with the gamers. Spending any amount of time with the insular, religious clique everyone called the Thachers just didn’t appeal. I absolutely did not fit in with the popular kids, and I didn’t care for the music or style of scene kids either.
And the couple of gay kids who always rode at the very back of the bus…? I was terrified of being around them.
So yeah, the poor kid with his face constantly buried in books unsurprisingly didn’t have many social circles to be around, which usually meant one of two things. Either I retreated into a personal bubble and desperately hoped nobody I didn’t want to be around took the other half of the seat, or else I hung with the band kids.
“Hiya, Erv!”
And fortunately for me, one Dani Skeates was waiting for me by the stop sign at the end of the block, casually swishing the hem of her pretty, pastel pink skort back and forth while fiddling idly with the handle of the long, black trombone case she had balanced on the ground beside her.
I gave the girl the best wave I could muster (which, to be clear, was exceptionally poor indeed). I was happy to see her, since she made riding the bus more tolerable, but seeing her waiting for me… Had she been doing that all week? I didn’t know what to make of it. We had often walked to the bus stop together in the past, but usually that had been incidental, company of circumstance situations. But then, I suppose it was technically our first day of high school from her perspective. Maybe she had been nervous and willing to wait for want of company.
The thought that she had been waiting three mornings in a row for me only to eventually have to leave alone… It upset me far more than I was prepared for.
“Ready for school?” she asked as she grabbed the handle of her trombone case and joined me in crossing the street. If she noticed me paying extra careful attention to whether cars were coming, she didn’t comment on it.
I shrugged as expressively as I could to make sure she saw and started preparing myself to explain that I could no longer speak.
“I am!” she chirped, the long black case of her instrument swinging back and forth in opposite time to the hand playing with her skirt. “I can’t wait until band class this afternoon! I practiced every day this summer, and I even got to start private lessons with Dr. Thackford! He teaches at Johns Hopkins, and he’s so good at playing trombone, but he’s actually a music industry professor, so can you — even — imagine how good the lady who’s the trombone professor is??”
We crossed without issue and started walking. The bus stop was two blocks down on the main road, and the road up to it was slightly uphill, making it a bit onerous. But as usually Dani, even lugging a heavy instrument, didn’t seem to notice it one bit, plowing on ahead. “Dr. Thackford let me try some of his specialty trombones too! I had no idea there were other kinds, but apparently my trombone is a ‘tenor’ trombone, and there’s the alto, the bass, the soprano, the contrabass. All kinds! The contra one had a double slide, but I couldn’t play that one; it was bigger than me and way too heavy. Oh! And there was one with valves, like a trumpet! Except it used a trombone mouthpiece and is in the same key as my tenor. The soprano trombone used a trumpet mouthpiece though! It was so teeny tiny, I thought I was gonna break it if I wasn’t careful!”
I mostly just nodded along, not really committing much of what she said to memory. It wasn’t that I didn’t care or anything. Honestly, it was kind of interesting to know there were a bunch of different types of trombones. I just thought there was the trombone trombone. But Dani had a habit of saying a lot all at once, especially about music, and that made it tough to retain everything she said.
“But it’s just so much nicer to play in a group, you know? I can play lots of notes, but I can’t play all the notes! Sometimes you need a flute tweet-tweeting, or a saxophone honking like a duck, and all the rest of the band bits! And the high school band does special concerts like playing Christmas carols and jazz and graduation music, so hopefully I get to play even more than I did before.”
Dani started humming along with a band that only existed in her head, the melody sounding festive, though I couldn’t place it exactly. We walked the rest of the stretch to the left turn onto the main road, and as we rounded the corner, Dani turned to look at me quizzically, her jaunty hum pausing long enough for her to ask, “Did you read any good books this summer?”
I nodded in reply, biting my lip. I knew I was going to have to tell her. Everyone was going to find out. It wasn’t like I could keep it secret that I couldn’t speak, but… I was just nervous to be doing it for the first time, I reasoned. And I didn’t even have my tablet, so of course that made it more daunting.
“Cool. What all did you read?”
I drew a shaky breath in, struggling to grab the pen and pad of paper in my pocket. Writing while walking was a challenge, so it took me until we had nearly gotten to the bus stop to finish. [A bunch. My favorites were an old series called Incarnations of Immortality. I’m trying to get through The Art of War right now, but I don’t know that I like it.]
“Why are you still reading it then?”
I blinked, bemused as we reached our destination and I, having finished writing, finally noticed who was there. I didn’t know what was more surprising: That Dani hadn’t asked what I was doing or that Haven Atteberry of all people was waiting at our bus stop. The lithely muscled boy veritably towered over us, his dirty blond hair tousled by the wind, somehow not only managing to look good still but perhaps even better than it might have been purposefully styled. Haven rode our bus, but he, like all the Thachers, lived on the far side of the neighborhood by Tower Hill Church of the Holy. Tower Hill was practically the first stop on the route, from what I knew, so why was he here, at the very end of the route?
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Hello!” Dani chirped, giving Haven a cheerful wave, who regarded her with cool indifference before turning to look towards where the bus would be coming from. She set her trombone down on its round bottom, her newly free hand jerking back and forth, bending at the wrist. “Didn’t expect to see you here!”
For reasons unbeknownst to me and to my immediate, excruciating embarrassment, I thought it a good idea to add my own greeting to hers by giving him a stupid little wave barely any better than the one it gave Dani just a few minutes prior.
“… hi,” he eventually replied, sounding almost physically pained to be speaking to us. He didn’t turn from his vigil, eyes still fixed on the hump of the hill the bus would be cresting any minute.
Dani gave him a firm nod then returned her attention to me, the flicking motion she had been making with her hand slowing down somewhat. “You didn’t tell me why you’re still reading The Art of War.”
It was far easier to write, now that Dani and I weren’t walking anymore, but it was no less frustrating. The sooner we got to the school and I got my tablet, the better. [It’s a classic, so I’m trying to give it a chance.]
I looked up from my writing, turning the pad for Dani to see, and froze like a deer in the headlights when I noticed Haven had turned back around, eyes alternately staring at the pad in my hand and at me.
“I’d rather not,” Dani said, seemingly missing my abrupt discomfort. “I only want to read books I like, thanks!”
I couldn’t bring myself to write a reply, pinned as I was like a butterfly by Haven’s unerring stare. After ten seconds or so of silence, Dani resumed humming, the tune different from before and the movement of her hand in sync with its melody.
Never before had I wanted to see the grimy yellow of the bus peek over the hill so badly as I did right then. Not even that time it was pouring rain in the seventh grade, and the wind tore my umbrella away as I reached the bus stop, leaving me to get soaked to the bone.
Eventually Haven asked the question I had expected from Dani but she had yet to ask, “Why… aren’t you speaking?”
There was something about the way he voiced that question that made it so much worse. Like I had spit in his face, and he was trying desperately to be the bigger person and not kick my face in. It made an already unpleasant question unnerving to boot.
With an unsteady hand and burning cheeks, I wrote, [I can’t anymore. Medical condition.]
I don’t know what reaction I expected from Haven, exactly, not after the tone he had used to ask that question, but I most certainly had not expected him to pale so dramatically. He looked like he had seen a ghost, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with that.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Dani said, cutting straight through the tension like it wasn’t even there. “I hope you feel better, but if you don’t, then you should know that I had a nonspeaking friend when I was younger. He was pretty amazing, and you can be too, if you want!”
The bus finally appearing over the hill saved me from needing to address Haven’s harrowing reaction, and when it arrived, he all but sprinted aboard, leaving Dani and I to follow at a more sedate pace. The mystery of what in the world was going on with Haven only compounded when I climbed in after Dani and saw Haven hadn’t moved to sit with the other Thachers at the front of the bus, instead moving halfway down and cramming himself over into the window in a free seat. Just as strange, most of the Thachers watched him like a hawk as he got there, one or two with leers that were upsetting to look at.
And maybe it was because I had just witnessed them all staring at Haven, but I swore their eyes were on me too as I quietly followed in Dani’s shadow. And not just them; it felt like everyone’s eyes were on me as I scurried down the aisle, eyes low as the two of us found a seat together by some of the other band kids.
The bus started moving as we went, and once we were settled with me next to the window and her in the aisle, I tapped Dani’s shoulder and passed her one more message, [Thank you.]
“You’re welcome!”
The ride to school wasn’t quite so bad with Dani at my side.
----------------------------------------
James E. Meckle High School, or JEM as everyone in town called it, was an aging relic that had long since lost the battle with modernity being kept afloat with periodic infusions of renovations that kept it shambling along well past its expiration date. Its red brick exterior was littered with patchy touch-ups where individual issues had been rectified while leaving the whole to fend for itself. The excessively tall windows fogged over with decades of accumulated grime made it clear that JEM, like many old buildings on the east coast, had been built at a time when ceilings were much higher than was necessary or advisable. Lining those windows were the sort of architectural flourishes whose name I didn’t know but nevertheless was aware could only be found on historical buildings from the mid to late 1700’s.
Another antiquated aspect of JEM was its traffic loop, the long road with two lanes that ran past the front entrance of the school and encircled its parking lot. It might seem sensible at first blush, having one lane dedicated to the buses and the other for car riders. The problem was, there were only two ways to enter that loop, and the main one, which all the buses and car riders were required to use, ran right past the only elementary school in town. The idea, I think, was that making traffic flow in one loop past both schools meant all the kids in a neighborhood, regardless of age, could ride the same bus to school, simplifying logistics to be, Kids in neighborhood? Send a bus. I can even imagine that it might really have worked well, back when there were less kids in town. Nowadays, the loop was a twice-daily traffic jam straight from hell that only the older high school students and JEM staff could avoid by using the second entrance, which only required crossing the loop on the exit side to enter the parking lot.
Now that I was on the high schooler side of things, I could understand why some of the upperclassmen called it the ‘deathloop’ and exited at the elementary school, walking over to the high school instead of waiting. The sidewalk was relatively level, so the walk wouldn’t be too bad and might genuinely be quicker than waiting. But if Dani was bothered by the snail’s pace at all, I couldn’t tell. If anything, her excitement to start our freshman careers seemed to be mounting.
“I forgot to ask, what’s your class schedule, Erv? I’ve got Intro to Computers, English 9, and Earth Science on A-Days; German, World History I, and Geometry on B-Days; and Band and PE at the end of every day.”
I hadn’t ‘spoken’ the entire bus ride, content to listen to Dani catching up with her band friends, so it took me a moment to fish out the pen and paper. [A - Intro to Computers, English 9, Earth Science. B - Spanish, Comparative Cultures, Algebra. Creative writing and PE every day.]
“Creative writing? That’s nifty!” she remarked as she looked over my message. “We’ve got mostly the same classes A-Days; maybe we have the same teachers too! Why Spanish though? I would think you’d want to take ASL?”
[ASL?] I asked, [What’s that?]
“That’s the language deaf people use to speak, isn’t it? If you can’t speak anymore, wouldn’t that be useful to learn?”
That did sound useful, but before I could comment, one of the band kids sitting behind us leaned forward directly into the space between us and asked far too loudly, “Wait, what? Ervin, you can’t speak?”
Everyone nearby started whispering, and I cursed my luck. The bus had just pulled up to the drop-off. I was nearly free! And of course, and a few seats in front of us on the opposite side of the bus, none other than Craig Stark turned around with a laugh of disbelief. “Can’t talk? You a mute now, Scervins?”
Craig was a sophomore who had always been a nasty thing in my opinion, only interested in making fun of other people and loudly boasting about his kill/death ratio in whatever was the latest shooter game of the season. It wasn’t the first time he had targeted me, but it cut deeper than it ever had before, having him laugh at my inability to talk. I looked out the window, pretending I couldn’t hear him because I was focused on the students on the sidewalk outside, but it was a flimsy excuse and only served to give Craig more ammo.
“Hey Scervins, I’m talking to you!” He sneered, the expression ice cold. “What, you deaf and dumb too?”
The ‘joke’ shocked a couple of awkward giggles out of some of the kids around us, though to my relief, there were maybe as many who spoke up, calling him out for the rude comment.
“Don’t be rude, Craig Stark!” Dani protested, her words stilted but heartfelt, but it was a different, unexpected rebuke that pulled the eyes off of me.
“Listen not to the braggart who bleats as the lamb upon the altar.”
It was Haven Atteberry who had spoken up from where he had been quietly sitting alone, folded over with his head resting against the seat in front of him. I had thought he was asleep or perhaps praying to whatever god the Thachers worshiped, and maybe he had been. He wasn’t anymore. Slowly, he rose to his full height, towering over Craig as he spoke with exacting precision, each syllable overflowing with a cold, righteous fire.
“To be silent is to be holy, for God speaks between words.”
The bus came to a stop, the driver twisting around to call out, “Okay, kids, time to get off! Have a good first day!”
“Was that a threat, you creep?” Craig hissed, not moving as the students nearby scurried down the aisle away from the confrontation.
Dani was quietly whining, hands whipping back and forth as she alternately eyed Craig and Haven. For a minute, I thought for sure a fight was about to break out, but then Haven turned down the aisle and left, backpack slung over his shoulder. Craig glowered after him, turned to give me one last leer, then gathered his own things and left. I had no idea what on earth I had just witnessed, but I had bigger fish to fry right then.
My stomach full of butterflies, I followed Dani to the front of the bus. I was right, I told myself. I had to be right. There was nothing else it could be. But all my self-assurance withered away with each step down the aisle, faith dwindling the closer I got to the front. I was there. I was there, and it hadn’t happened. I was wrong.
I don’t think I could have kept going, if Dani hadn’t been with me. She didn’t know, but… it helped.
It happened when we stepped off the bus, when my foot touched the concrete landing pad. A quiet warmth that had been nestled within me since Monday evening faded away, a feeling I hadn’t had a name for.
It was done.
----------------------------------------
“Ervin?” Roslyn (or Ms. Yorran, as she was right then) called out over the bustle after the bell rang for the end of class. “C’mon up here before you go, would ya?”
“That’s unexpected,” Dani remarked from the seat next to mine as she packed away her tablet. “Want me to stay?”
I shook my head, waving for her to go.
Dani gave me a jaunty wave farewell as she stood and left. A lot of our classmates were openly staring at me, and I had zero doubt that it was just because I’d been asked to stay after class.
For roll call that morning, Roslyn had asked us to (and I quote), “Raise the roof when I call your name!” Needless to say, most folks had settled on a simple ‘here’ or ‘present’ when called, but enough people had been taken with her quirky, manic energy to actually throw their hands up while cheering or whooping that I was able to slide under the radar by sarcastically pumping my fist in the air a single time once she got to me. She had not, however, changed tack from her original first day plans as relayed by Dani Monday evening—the true Monday. After distributing tablets to everyone and giving us time to use the internet, she had called on us all one by one to tell the class something interesting about computers we wanted to know more about.
Needless to say, everyone but Roslyn had been caught off guard when I used my tablet’s TTS app to tell the class I was interested in learning about advances in TTS technology. Dani hadn’t really been surprised either, but she certainly got very excited by my short little speech, her hands twitching badly enough I thought she might be seizing for a second.
So yes, I was the object of everyone’s attention, but my attention was firmly on Roslyn, as it had been all class. My heel thumped impatiently as I waited for the rest of the class to leave, and when the last of the stragglers started for the door, I slung my book bag over my shoulder, the box inside jostling with the motion. Tablet in hand, I marched up to the front.
Roslyn set her phone on the desk, The Coder open and her sound dampening program no doubt running. Face neutral, she said, “It sure does seem we’re repeating August 27th again. So tell me, what’s the word, hummingbird?”
I frowned. I had written out a message during my classmates’ brief presentations and queued it up, but now I was unsure. I switched to my tablet’s notepad, tapped out a message, and turned it for her to see. [It’s over, isn’t it?]
The corners of her lips quirked, a ghost of a smile. “Oh? What makes you think that?”
I switched back to my TTS app and ran the message I’d pre-written, the device’s soft lilt saying for me, “The time loop was a while-loop or at least something like it. I remembered yesterday what I had been thinking when I wrote the code that made the loop happen. ‘I should have gone to school today.’ I felt the loop end when I got off the bus. Tomorrow should come as usual.”
She broke out into a grin in earnest, lips stretched wide and a laugh bubbling up out of her. “Yes! Exactly so! A+, Ervin, you nailed it!”
I heaved a sigh of relief, a tension that had been slowly building up all class finally released now that I had independent confirmation. Still, I switched to the notepad and type, [You felt it too?]
She shook her head. “Yep! If a spell doesn’t have some aspect that makes it noticeable, then normally only the caster would feel it start or stop, but I keep a spell running to keep an eye on that sort of thing. Good thing too! Would’ve taken me a whole heck of a lot longer to figure out who was looping the area otherwise.”
That did sound useful. [You’ll show me how?]
A student came into the room, eying us curiously. Roslyn tapped her phone, killing the spell. Now that she’d drawn attention to it, I realized I hadn’t felt her magic start or stop at the diner either. “Said I would, didn’t I? I’ll need a bit of time to put together some extra credit, then I’ll let you know. You’ve got class to get to, so go on before you’re late!”
I wanted to complain, to demand she at least make good on her promise to show me code for… for what I’d tried to do in the diner. But another couple of students came in, just driving home that she was right. We couldn’t talk about magic in front of other people. For now, her confirmation that the loop was broken would have to do.
But I was going to make her follow through on that promise.
I slipped out the door, and to my surprise, Dani was waiting just outside the classroom, humming a jaunty little tune, swishing her skort back and forth to the beat. She smiled when she saw me, and I gave her an extra exaggerated look of confusion.
“You said you didn’t want me to stay with you to talk to Ms. Yorran, not that you didn’t want me to wait for you at all. We’re going to the same place, so it’d be silly not to stay!”
I conceded the point by beckoning for her to follow and starting down the hall, consulting the map the guidance counselor had given me that morning along with my new class schedule. My tablet pinged under my arm, and once I was confident we were heading the right direction, I checked it. An email. From Roslyn.
[As promised. I strongly recommend you only study and do not use this until we have a chance to discuss it together… But if you happen to be the rebellious type, then I would at least ask you to be careful where you use it for now.]
Attached was code far beyond what I had tried to cobble together under the table at The Hub & Spoke. Just looking over it took my breath away.
“Whooaa!” I jumped, not having expected Dani to be looking over my shoulder. “That isn’t the extra credit Ms. Yorran was talking to you about, is it? That looks complicated!”
I hesitated for a second before switching to the notepad app. [Something like that.]
I don’t know why I told her even that much, but the sheer awe that elicited in Dani neatly distracted me from my own bad decisions. “Wow! That’s really cool, Erv!”
It was. It was cooler than she knew. My thoughts on the box in my book bag, I started making plans. I was going to use that code tonight.