Page 69 of Rules for Rule Breaking
“Cheater!” he yelled as he tried to shake her off like a wet dog.
“You’re so sweaty!” Winter exclaimed, wiping her hand on Bobby’s shirt.
He responded by shaking his hair in her face. She leapt off his back and beat him to the door of the museum. She opened it for him this time. When she followed, it was like walking into a freezer. She took a deep breath. She always liked the smell of cold air.
The museum was full of families checking out each of the displays, which were mostly taxidermic animals and dinosaur bones in glass cases. Winter was momentarily distracted by a forty-two-foot-long Kronosaurus, which didn’t look unlike a Pokémon.
She glided through several rooms, her eyes scanning each one, looking for the passenger pigeon exhibit. She’d read about Martha, the last passenger pigeon, in an article about endlings once. Passenger pigeons used to be one of the most ubiquitous species of birds in North America, but they were hunted to extinction. Winter liked reading about lonely animals. They’d probably been around for thousands of years and were the product of natural selection, gods in their own right. But they couldn’t adapt to the changes humans made, so they simply died off, and most people didn’t even know about them to eulogize them. Martha was her favorite because she was the last of her kind, like Superman, only no one cared because she was a pigeon. Winter didn’t know what it said about her that she identified so much with a stuffed dead bird.
Winter found the exhibit, and Bobby was already standing in front of it. She’d lost again.
“This dead bird is creepy,” Bobby said. “Why did you choose it?”
Winter grasped her bubble tea tighter. “Before the last of them, Martha, died, there was a thousand-dollar reward to find her a mate. That was, like, twenty-five thousand dollars at the time, andeven with the world looking, no one found her one, and she died—taking the entire species with her.”
“That’s profoundly depressing.”
“Maybe, or maybe she didn’t want a mate.”
“You at least know she didn’t want to be alone.”
“She wasn’t. She had thousands of fans who came to see her. More than a hundred years later, she still does.”
Bobby raised his tea in Winter’s direction. “To Martha.”
They touched their plastic cups together and chugged down their three seconds together.
“This is so much better. How does yours taste?” Winter asked, chewing on the jumbo straw.
“Purple,” Bobby said with a smile as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Winter returned the smile.
Bobby Bae
32. WE WILL NOT DO ANYTHING ILLEGAL
Winter had chosen the amphitheater outside of the famous Stata Center at MIT. The building looked like it’d been planned as it was being constructed. There were odd colors and shapes jutting out at bizarre angles and shiny chrome-like fixtures. It was one of the messiest building designs he’d ever seen, but that didn’t stop him from appreciating it. It was lovely in its own way.
Winter was sitting on the step below him, looking out over the campus.
“Don’t you want to try to see more?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know. I think I’m fine here,” Winter said. “If I’m being perfectly honest with you, I was always going to go to MIT if I got in, regardless of whether I liked the campus or not.”
Bobby laughed. “Then why did you come all this way?”
Winter bit her lip. “I wanted to hang out with you. Hasn’t it been obvious all along?”
“Shut up,” Bobby said, yanking on her braid. She laughed. He enjoyed making her laugh. “Tell the truth.”
“I don’t know. I guess I was just anxious about it. I was doubting my decision, but being here now, I feel like I could do this. That is, if they’ll have me.”
Of all the cities they’d visited, this felt the most comfortable to Bobby. He liked the accents, the wide array of restaurants Winterwould no doubt explore, and the sheer number of intellectuals walking around. There were at least thirty colleges in the Boston area alone. He could see her here, but he wasn’t sure about himself. He wasn’t sure about anything anymore.
“I don’t know how you can be so decisive and so sure of everything,” Bobby said, leaning back against the step behind him.
“I’m not so sure about everything,” Winter said.
