Furious - By Jill Wolfson Page 0,52

He never knows when to stop pushing. For the next half hour I pretend to do homework while he practices violin. Usually I don’t mind listening to him play. Usually I like it. But he’s been going over and over the same few measures, stopping and starting, speeding it up and slowing it down. It’s driving me nuts.

“Enough!” I toss aside my physics book. “Are you trying to torture me?”

“Not so good, huh?”

“What is it?”

“Opus number something by yours truly.”

He plays it again, and I offer an honest critique: “It’s awful. Chuck it and compose something else.”

He looks at the bow like there’s something wrong with it, like that’s the problem. “I tried, but the tune is a mind worm. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll move past these few measures eventually.”

Before I go back to my problem, I say, “You better.”

* * *

Western Civ class. We’re in our project group, circled in the back of the room. Ambrosia passes around pictures of the Furies that she copied from books and the Internet. I try looking through them, but Alix, who’s sitting on my left, distracts me with her low, irritated muttering. We follow the jut of her chin. “Him. Gnat. Makes me sick. I can’t stand that he’s walking around untouched. I hate his face. His arms. Ears. Brain.”

“What brain?” Stephanie asks.

“Put him on the to-do,” Ambrosia suggests with a toss of her hair. She has another new style, this one a mass of long sausage curls that tumbles down her back.

Alix squeezes her fist. “We should take him down, give him a message he won’t forget.”

Raymond looks up from the pictures he’s been studying. “Excuse me, but what’s your name?”

“What do you mean, what’s my name? What are you talking about?” Alix responds.

“I was thinking that your name is Dirty Harry. Listen to yourself: Take him down? A message he won’t forget? I thought you girls were Team Justice, not a vigilante squad.”

Ambrosia, patting the air: “Simmer down, Raymond. You’re losing your calm. You sound positively furious.”

Raymond takes a slow inhale and exhale, hands in prayer, overdoing a monk imitation. “Attention please. I’m going to quote Benjamin Franklin.”

Ambrosia shoots a hard look in his direction. “Of course you are.”

“‘Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.’”

Ambrosia explodes into tinkling laughter, like that’s the silliest thing she ever heard, the ramblings of a child. “Raymond, chill. It’s just the girls toying with semantics. Look around at the better world they’ve already created. You have to admit that life is a little more peaceful here at our Hunter High. A lot less mean-girl antics by the twins formerly known by their breast size. Pox and Bubonic aren’t totally groveling anymore, but they aren’t bullying anyone either.”

We survey the room, admiring our work. I swell with pride. No one can deny that things are better. Pox, for example, has abandoned the Plagues to work on his project with the Danish foreign exchange student and the dorky president of the Future Leaders of America. Boy, he must feel really guilty about something he did to them.

Ambrosia addresses Alix. “It makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?”

She is chewing on a pen, takes it out of her mouth to respond. “Think about what?”

“With the track record you’ve racked up, why limit yourself? Gnat? Natch. But why stop there? Why not all of them, all that smug surf royalty? Give them a taste.”

I am definitely with her on Gnat. He’s a nasty little bug who needs a complete personality makeover. The world would be better for it. But the all part? All as in all? Every single one of that crowd? That includes Brendon. What if we change him when he doesn’t really need to change? What if we turn him into someone completely different and that person isn’t Brendon anymore, at least not the Brendon who makes my heart thump every time I think about him?

I squirm uneasily and realize too late that I just blurted, “Not all.”

Ambrosia frowns. “Excuse me?”

“Maybe not all of them.”

Her frown deepens. “Who among that lot doesn’t deserve it? Who would you leave just the way he is?”

I pretend to be thinking hard. Then I try to sound casual, completely random. “Gee, maybe … maybe Brendon?”

“Brendon?”

“I’m just saying,” I fumble. “I just happen to notice that he’s not so bad. So why waste our energy on him?”

“Energy, huh?” Ambrosia asks. “This is about energy?”

I go with that explanation. “Yes, energy conservation. A very good thing. Ask Stephanie.”

I’m