This Is My Brain on Boys (16 page)

“Of course,” she said, though, if she were being honest, she was far from certain. “But we can't submit both of our projects. Athenian Committee rules state that each school is permitted to submit only one.”

Mr. Foy beamed. “Of that I am fully aware.”

Nothing more was said; he'd said it all.

It was either her. Or Dex. And she could not afford to lose.

First and foremost, the intent of the Academy's discipline system is to educate students and treat them justly when rules are violated. Please note that the Academy is a private school and therefore not obligated to adhere to the same rules as public schools; our discipline system is not a “trial,” as one might encounter in a court system; nor do the rules of evidence apply . . .

MAJOR OFFENSES

A student may be expelled from the Academy at any time for committing or attempting to commit any of the following offenses, including when it is a first offense:

1. Hazing other students. Hazing is defined as
harassing, intimidating, bullying, or coercing another student with the purpose or result of embarrassment, disturbance, or humiliation.

2. Dishonest acts of any kind, including academic dishonesty. Academic dishonesty may include plagiarism, cheating, and theft and/or sabotage of another student's work product with the intent of harming said student and/or improving one's academic standing. Such acts are cause for immediate dismissal without delay.

—from the Academy 355 Handbook of Student Academic Policies and Standards

Kris closed out of the student handbook and let out a big breath. So that made two offenses, ironically one committed
against
and the other committed
for
the same girl.

“You're an idiot, Condos!” He pounded his desk once.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It was like he was hardwired to self-destruct. Case in point, Nepal and China last summer. Spent six weeks volunteering to do backbreaking labor removing rubble, rebuilding a school, and digging wells in a country where he knew no one, got sick, slept on a stranger's mattress, and took a shower twice, only to come home, raise funds for the organization, and drop out of Andover because he couldn't handle the phonies.

You know, you just could have sucked it up.
If he had, he'd be starting his senior year now instead of second semester junior year. And why was he behind? Because after begging and pleading his way into the Academy, he again flipped the destroy switch and exploded the week before finals.

And now, the day Foy praised him for working hard and making amends for past transgressions, he decided that the wise thing to do would be commit another “major offense.”

Self-destructive. Absolutely. Maybe he should get help.

He got up and turned out the light, anything to make his closet of a room cooler. When he got to the Academy, he found his regular room in Jay Hall had been taken over by two summer students, so he had a choice: a janitor's room in the basement next to the boiler, or a former maid's room in the attic. He chose the attic to avoid spiders. Big mistake. He should have known that a ten-by-ten space under the eaves of a fifty-year-old clapboard building would be a virtual sauna. Except most people didn't sleep in a sauna unless they had a death wish.

The grounds crew had taken pity on him and brought in a plastic fan to fit in the small window. This was definitely progress, as they'd shunned him those first days on the job because he was a prep boy. Or, rumor had it, a
spoiled, rich prep boy who'd defaced the wall of a lab to get back at some girl.

Thankfully, Don, a security guard who shared cigarettes with Buster, set them straight during the lunch break yesterday.

“Nah, he wasn't the one who wrote the graffiti; he was the one trying to cover it up,” Don had said, gesturing at Kris with his lighter. “I caught him red-handed with the black spray paint, going over the words. Tried to get him to stop, but he insisted on finishing, said he didn't want anyone to see what they wrote. Still, I had to do my job, so . . .”

Having decided that Kris had been manipulated by a girl (a partial truth), the crew gradually came around, even offering him a smoke—which he declined. And then they surprised him with the fan. It was sweet.

Maybe it would have been sweeter if the fan actually cooled the air instead of pushing more hot air into the room, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

“I'll tell you what, Condos,” his supervisor, Robert (never Bob), said to him just this afternoon while he was signing out, “you keep up the hard work and I'll personally write you a recommendation to the trustees. That hornet business alone earned you a gold star.”

A recommendation that would be tarnished as soon as his latest crime was discovered, which, considering
Dexter's elevated IQ and vengeful mind, would be simply a matter of hours. Whereupon Kris predicted he'd be booted off campus and sent directly to the all-boys military academy in Colorado without passing
go
or collecting two hundred dollars.

Tentatively, he opened the email that had been forwarded from his mother with the subject line: Please Read, Important!

Your father and I agree that this is the best school for you at this stage in your life. While we admire your resolve to pay for your mistakes back at the Academy, there is no substitute for a fresh start and good old-fashioned discipline!

Love, Mom

P.S. Wish you were on the Cape. The weather is perfect!

This was followed by several photos of his sisters lying on the beach, riding the waves, and eating lobster, sunburned and smiling, at a picnic table overlooking the ocean.

Thanks for the morale boost, Mom.

Kris wiped sweat from his forehead and continued to the message she'd forwarded. It was from his would-be advisor at the military academy, reminding him that course registration would begin in two weeks and that,
in preparation for his anticipated matriculation, it would behoove him to read up on school policies. Handbook attached.

Why even bother? He'd just violate that, too.

Unable to sleep, he went down one floor to the bathroom and took as cold a shower as he could handle before his muscles cramped. On the way back to his attic prison cell, he ran into Ed in his underwear coming down the stairs.

“Tess needs to talk to you.” Ed handed him his phone. “It's an emergency.”

Immediately, he thought, Addie.

“Sorry to wake you, Kris, but can you get over here?” Tess said, sounding panicked. “I need your help,
desperately
.”

Kris took the stairs two at a time, Ed on his heels. “I just need to get dressed and I'll be over. What's wrong?”

“I'll tell you when you get here. Come to the front door of Wren. It's right by my room. Hurry!”

He turned off the phone and threw it to Ed, slipping his key card in the door. “You have any idea what the problem is?” He stepped into a pair of shorts and grabbed a T-shirt from a pile on the floor.

Ed stood in the door, half awake. “I dunno. She should have apologized to me, though. I was the one she woke.”

Aside from the lights illuminating the walkways, the campus was pitch-black and dead quiet. The ocean roared
beyond the breakers with a steady rhythm of crashing and sighing that was both haunting and eternal. Perhaps because there were no other distractions, the smell of salty sea air was particularly strong, and by the time he reached Wren, his face was damp from the fog.

He buzzed the door and was instantly greeted by a short girl in pink PJs who looked not much older than a child. “In there.” She gestured to a door on the left that was half open.

The dorm room was twice as large as his and fully decorated with wall hangings, a funky multicolored standing light, a pink shag rug, enough pillows for a sheikh's harem, and gauzy curtains that matched the gauzy bedspread, on which sat a cross-legged Tess, Mindy and Fiona, and . . . Addie.

Addie smiled at him briefly and then dropped her gaze to the cup of tea in her hands.

“Thanks, Shreya,” Tess said, motioning for her to close the door before the girl's curious inspection was complete. “Kris, you might want to grab that chair. This could be awhile.”

Kris sat backward on the chair facing the girls.

Tess said, “I'm so sorry to get you out of bed . . .”

“It's okay. I wasn't sleeping.” He snuck a glance at Addie, who seemed fixated on that cup of tea. “Crazy hot in my room.”

“Oh, that's good. Well, we have a kind of crisis and
we need your translation skills.” Tess took Mindy's hand. “We went to Harvard today on a field trip and Mindy saw her boyfriend from back home. . . .”

A big tear rolled down Mindy's cheek.

“And, um, it didn't go well. She's devastated.”

“After all she did for him!” Fiona blurted.

In Mandarin, he asked Mindy what happened. She answered too fast, and he had to take her hand and gently request she slow down so he'd get the gist.

She pushed strands of hair off her face, revealing eyes swollen from crying. “He told me that he wished I hadn't followed him from China, that when we got home, he didn't want to see me ever again.” This was punctuated by an almost silent sob. “He said I was an embarrassment.”

Kris translated this for the group.

Tess threw herself back on one of the cushions. “That's disgusting. He cooked up the plan to come here and for them to meet up, you know,” she said, as if for some miraculous reason Kris would.

“Mindy's and David's parents have forbidden them from seeing each other back home,” Addie said, finally making eye contact.

Kris might have been mistaken, but Mindy hadn't been the only one crying. Addie had been, too, judging from the red rims around her puffy eyes. Dexter, that jerk. He was the one who'd made her miserable by deep-sixing her
Athenian Award. Man, what he would give for ten minutes alone with him. It made his blood boil.

“They signed up for separate student exchange programs in America just so they'd have a chance to hang out,” Tess said. “Their programs overlapped this week one time—when Mindy came to Boston—and their plan was to meet up. But that can't happen because that would be a total violation of summer school rules and could get both of us in major trouble. Mindy might even be sent straight back to China.”

Kris said, “It's also hella romantic.”

“Not that hella romantic,” Addie said, “if he called her an embarrassment.”

Kris bit his cheek to keep from smiling. “You guys seem to be on top of it, so what am I doing here?”

“I called you because Addie was trying to explain to Mindy about the brain during breakups and how neuro-hormones work and blah, blah, blah. It wasn't getting through, so we thought you could translate and now you're bored and want to go,” Tess said, punctuating this with a pout.

“I'm not bored. But explaining neurohormones is a little beyond my abilities in English,” Kris joked. “In Mandarin? Forget it.”

“Seriously,” Tess agreed. “I don't know which would be harder. Interpreting Mandarin or Addie-speak? I
think I'd choose Mandarin.”

Addie frowned. “My speech is perfectly normal. It's not my fault that you aren't familiar with the common terms of neurology.”

“We're complimenting you, Addie,” Kris said, “in a teasing way. Not all teasing is meant to be mean.”

She arched a brow, doubtful.

“Mindy needs help,” Fiona said, rightly bringing them back to the reason they were there. “She needs . . .”

“Reassurance,” Tess offered.

Addie said, “What I've been trying to tell her is that love is the rush
in
of pleasurable brain chemicals, and breakups are the rush
out
of those same chemicals, like a tide. That's about as simple as I can make it.”

Kris used his phone to Google the Mandarin words not in his vocabulary.
Dàn
ă
o
for brain;
Huàxué zhì
p
Ä­
n
for chemicals. Of course, there were a zillion different types of chemicals, and for all he knew, he was telling this poor girl that her brain was recovering from a loss of nail polish remover.

When he was finished, Mindy turned to Fiona and rattled off a string of sentences with such speed that Kris could barely make out the basics. He heard
meaningless
,
what's she taking about?
,
and
not helping
.

“Mindy needs more explanation,” Fiona said. “She is too heartbroken to understand.”

Tess got up to refill everyone's tea from the electric—and illegal—pot on her desk. “Maybe it would help if you told her about your dating disasters, Addie. You know, to relate.”

Kris said, “Yeah. I'd like to hear that, too.” He grinned, but Addie only blushed.

“I'm not sure that'd help. I haven't been with that many guys.”

His heart melted a little and he understood, maybe, what Ed had been trying to say earlier about the urge to protect Addie and her innocence.

Piping up, she said, “What about you, Tess? You're the one in a rocky relationship.”

Now it was Tess's turn to redden from embarrassment. “Um, discretion?”

“You were the one who is all about being relatable,” Addie retorted. “It was fine to talk about my dating disasters, but not how you're worried that Ed is losing interest in you because he's going to college next month?”

Tess slapped her forehead. “Can we not?”

“Now that I think of it, Mindy,” Addie said, “you and Tess have a lot in common. You both feel like your boyfriends are pushing you away, and Tess's mothers would die if they found out their daughter was head over heels for a pro-military, conservative . . .”

“That's enough!” Tess declared, jumping off the bed.
“Who cares what my mothers or Ed's super-strict parents think? All that matters for Mindy and for me is that we can't help ourselves. We're in love!”

Addie groaned. “Oh, please. For the zillionth time. There is no such thing as love!”

Kris gave her a questioning look. “You really believe that, don't you?”

“I don't
believe
anything. I
know
. Love doesn't exist. Just chemicals.” She returned his gaze steadily, her pale gray eyes intelligent and also hopeful. “Society would be better off if it abandoned amorphous notions of love and recognized the science: the survival of the species hinges on reproduction, and to further that effort, upon entering maturity, our brains enter a phase of increased neurohormone production, otherwise referred to as adolescence.