planetarium, which is ridiculous considering how inferior it is to Hayden.”
“Huh.” Sometimes I wondered exactly what it might take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere.
x.
HAD ANYONE EVER FELT so lonely? Back at the Barbours’, amidst the clamor and plenitude of a family that wasn’t mine, I now felt even more alone than usual—especially since, as the end of the school year neared, it wasn’t clear to me (or Andy either, for that matter) if I would be accompanying them to their summer house in Maine. Mrs. Barbour, with her characteristic delicacy, managed to skirt the topic even in the midst of the cardboard boxes and open suitcases that were appearing all over the house; Mr. Barbour and the younger siblings all seemed excited but Andy regarded the prospect with frank horror. “Sun and fun,” he said contemptuously, pushing his glasses (like mine, only a lot thicker) up on the bridge of his nose. “At least with your grandparents you’ll be on dry land. With hot water. An Internet connection.”
“I don’t feel sorry for you.”
“Well, if you do have to go with us, see how you like it. It’s like Kidnapped. The part where they sell him into slavery on that boat.”
“What about the part where he has to go to his creepy relative in the middle of nowhere that he doesn’t even know?”
“Yes, I was thinking that,” said Andy seriously, turning in his desk chair to look at me. “Although at least they aren’t scheming to kill you—it’s not as if there’s an inheritance at stake.”
“No, there’s certainly not.”
“Do you know what my advice to you is?”
“No, what?”
“My advice,” said Andy, scratching his nose with the eraser of his pencil, “is to work as hard as you possibly can when you get to your new school in Maryland. You’ve got an advantage—you’re ahead a year. That means you’ll graduate when you’re seventeen. If you apply yourself, you can be out of there in four years, maybe even three, with a scholarship anywhere you want to go.”
“My grades aren’t that good.”
“No,” said Andy seriously, “but only because you don’t work. Also I think it fair to assume that your new school, wherever it is, won’t be quite as demanding.”
“I pray to God not.”
“I mean—public school,” said Andy. “Maryland. No disrespect to Maryland. I mean, they do have the Applied Physics Laboratory and the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins, to say nothing of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Definitely it’s a state with some serious NASA commitment. You tested in what percentile back in junior high?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me. My point is, you can finish with good marks when you’re seventeen—maybe sixteen, if you bear down hard—and then you can go to college wherever you want.”
“Three years is a long time.”
“It is to us. But in the scheme of things—not at all. I mean,” said Andy reasonably, “look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest fucking Longstreet.”
“Those people aren’t poor. I saw Villiers’s father on the cover of the Economist.”
“No, but they’re as dumb as a set of sofa cushions. I mean—Sabine can barely put one foot in front of the other. If her family didn’t have money and she had to manage on her own, she’d have to be, I don’t know, a prostitute. Longstreet—he’d probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed.”
“You’re depressing me.”
“All I’m saying is—you’re smart. And grownups like you.”
“What?” I said doubtfully.
“Sure,” said Andy, in his wan, irritating voice. “You remember names, do the eye-contact stuff, shake hands when you’re supposed to. At school they all tie themselves in knots for you.”
“Yeah, but—” I didn’t want to say it was because my mother was dead.
“Don’t be stupid. You get away with murder. You’re smart enough to figure it out on your own.”
“Why haven’t you figured out this sailing business then?”
“Oh, I’ve figured it out, all right,” said Andy grimly, returning to his hiragana workbook. “I’ve figured that I have four summers of Hell, at absolute worst. Three if Daddy lets me go to early college when I’m sixteen. Two if I bite the bullet junior year and go to that summer program at the Mountain School and learn organic farming. And after that, I’m never setting foot on a boat again.”
xi.
“IT’S DIFFICULT