Page 73 of Skalterra By Nightmare
“Okay, fine. It’s a challenging field, and I like challenges.”
“Miss Warrender,” Liam said with an air of fake austerity, “how dare you waste the time of an institution as prestigious as ours.”
I shifted my weight to one side, and Liam fell to his knees behind me in an effort to keep the board balanced.
“Watch it,” he laughed.
“You watch it!” I flicked water backwards at him, and he rose back to his feet. “I like challenges. Biochemistry is challenging.”
“No, there’s got to be more to it than that.”
“I like the idea of biochemistry because it would impress my mom. Maybe I could be a doctor, or a research scientist—something she could brag to her author friends about. But that’s it, so if Von Leer wants something more, I’m screwed.”
“Oh.” Liam took several pulls on the paddle before speaking again. “But what do youlike?”
“I like volcanoes.” A gull cried out in the silence that followed. When Liam continued to say nothing, I forced myself to keep talking. “Von Leer has one of the best geophysics programs in the country. How could it not with all the nearby mountains? Not only that, they’re the school closest to my mom that evenhasa volcanology track. But I’m afraid to tell my mom because my dad is a geophysicist, and they haven’t talked since before I was born. I wasn’t even allowed to mention him growing up. I’mstillnot.”
“Volcanoes, huh?” Liam was gracious enough not to linger on the topic of my estranged father.
“I don’t know, I think it’s interesting that a good portion of the world is living within the blast zone of giant explosion machines, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can try to predict when they’ll blow, but ultimately we’re at their mercy. How could Inottry to understand them? How isn’teveryoneobsessed with them?”
“Welcome to Von Leer, Miss Warrender. Our geophysics program will be thrilled to have someone as enthusiastic about giant explosion machines as you are.” Liam pointed the paddle at another purple sea star exploring the rocks below us. “Starfish. That’s two-zero.”
“I didn’t know the sea stars were a competition!” I leaned over the water, scanning for more. “How many points do I get for a crab?”
“Depends. How big is it?”
I watched the orange shell of a Dungeness crab shuffle sideways towards Liam’s sea star.
“Pretty big.”
“Zero points. It’s not a starfish.”
I smiled in spite of myself. Liam wasn’t such bad company, and I was starting to dread when our paddle would come to an end at the cove. I still didn’t understand why he was so nice to me, even now after I’d yelled at him and Sabrina.
Maybe it was because my bad attitude had yet to deter his attempts at friendship, but it had been a long time since anyone had made me feel so comfortable just being myself. Liam had no expectations. He took me as I was, even when I wasn’t sure I even liked myself.
“It was graduation night,” I said before I knew what I was doing. “About three weeks ago.”
“What was?”
“The night in the woods.”
“Wren, you don’t have to—”
“It’s okay,” I said through a tightening throat. “I was really rude to you and Sabrina. I don’t want to make excuses for myself, but you deserve to at least know why, and maybe I’ll feel better if I talk about it. So this is the story about the time I thought I killed Linsey Harper.”
18. Philosophy of Friendship
The paddle dipped into the water beside me, and I took Liam’s silence to be an invitation. Now that I’d committed to telling the story, it demanded to be told. It pressed against my chest, weighing on my lungs, heart, and stomach, and I knew if I could just get the words out, the pain would subside.
“I already told you I got my friend Linsey expelled from Von Leer before she’d even started.” I stared at the bow of the board
“She got herself expelled by cheating on a test,” Liam said.
“But I’m the one who snitched, and everyone knew it. They said I did it because I was mad Linsey got accepted to Von Leer when I was waitlisted.”
“You did it to get the grade you deserved.”
