Monster (Gone 7)

“So, you’re a straight girl trapped in the body of a gay boy? Walk me through it.” Shade deliberately shifted the conversation back to Cruz, and she was amused and gratified to see that Cruz knew exactly what she was doing.

Smart, Shade thought. Too smart? Just smart enough?

“I am e), all of the above, trapped in a true-false quiz,” Cruz said. “You can quote me on that.”

“Pronouns?”

Cruz shrugged. “More ‘she’ than ‘he.’ I don’t get bitchy about it, but, you know, if you can . . .” Now it was Cruz’s turn to shift the topic. “You read a lot.”

“Yes, but I only do it to make myself popular.” The line was delivered flat, and Shade could see that Cruz was momentarily at a loss, not sure if this was the truth, before realizing it was just a wry joke.

It took Cruz maybe a second, a second and a half, to process, Shade noted. Slower than Shade would have been, slower than Malik, but not stupid slow, not at all. Just not genius quick.

“I’ll call us in sick,” Shade said, and pressed her thumb to her phone.

“I don’t think you can do that.”

“Please.” Shade dialed, waited, said, “Hello, this is Shade Darby, senior. I’m feeling a little off today, and I’m also calling in sick for—” She covered the phone and asked, “What’s your legal name?”

“Hugo Cruz Martinez Rojas.”

“Hugo Rojas. Yeah, she’s hurt. A couple of our star football players roughed her up. Yes. No. Uh-huh.” Shade hung up. “See? No problem. The school is already dealing with the swastika incident. They don’t want any more bad publicity.”

“Swastika incident?”

“Spray paint on the side of the temporary building, the one they use for music. A swastika and the usual hate stuff, half of it misspelled. It’s two ‘g’s,’ not one. One ‘g’ and it’s a country in Africa. Sad times when someone does that, sadder still when they can’t even spell it.”

Cruz had removed most of the blood from her face and neck, but Shade went to her, took a tissue, and leaned in to wipe a fugitive blood smear from the corner of her mouth.

The gesture embarrassed Cruz, who turned her attention again to the bookshelf beside her. “Veronica Rossi. Andrew Smith. Lindsay Cummings. Dashner. Marie Lu. Daniel Kraus.” Reading the authors’ names from the spines. “And Dostoyevsky? Faulkner? Gertrude Stein? David Foster Wallace? Virginia Woolf?”

“I have eclectic tastes,” Shade said. She waited to see what Cruz made of the rest of her collection.

“The Science of the Perdido Beach Anomaly.” Cruz frowned. “Powers and Possibilities: The Meaning of the Perdido Beach Anomaly. That sounds dramatic. The Physics of the Perdido Beach Anomaly. Way too math-y for me. Our Story: Surviving the FAYZ. I read that one myself—I guess everyone did. I didn’t like the movie, though—they obviously toned it way down.”

“Mmmm.”

“You’re very into the Perdido Beach thing.”

Shade nodded. “Some would say obsessed.”

Some. Like Malik.

“And you like science.”

“My father is a professor at Northwestern, head of astrophysics. It runs in the family.”

“And your mom?”

“She’s dead.” Shade cursed herself silently. Four years of saying those words and she still couldn’t get them out without a catch in her voice.

“I’m sorry,” Cruz said, her brow wrinkling in a frown.

“Thank you,” Shade said levelly. She had the ability to place a big, giant “full stop” on the end of subjects she did not want to pursue, and Cruz got the hint.

“My father is a plumbing contractor,” Cruz said. “We used to live in Skokie but, well, I had problems at the school. It was a Catholic school and I guess they like their students to be either male or female but not all-of-the-above, or neither, or, you know, multiple-choice. I started out wearing the boys’ uniform, and they didn’t like it when I switched to a skirt.”

“No?”