Page 32 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
“Great!” Felix shouts.
Miller smiles, soft and sincere and incredibly convincing, and then says, “Your hair is eating me.”
I’d tell him to go to hell, but it honestly feels like we’re already there.
After we post the photo, we stop for lunch. With Felix’s careful art direction, it turned out better than I’d dared to imagine: my leg hooked over Miller’s on the park bench, his arm looped around me, his fingers in my hair. We’re looking at each other and he’s smiling and it honest-to-god looks like I’m going to kiss him. Obviously, I did not.
Once we’re back in the office, Felix goes to his desk to eat, and Miller and I sit at opposite ends of the giant conference room table. He pulls a textbook out of his backpack the minute Felixleaves the room, and I watch him take careful notes onto a grid-lined pad while he eats.Interpreting Antiquity, the book says along the spine. This boy loves a theme.
“Miller.”
He doesn’t look up, just keeps writing. “Yes?”
“Why Classics?”
His pen stops moving, but he hesitates a moment before responding. “If you’re going to make fun of me, just come out with it.”
“I’m not,” I say, fighting an eye roll.Jesus Christ.“I’m making conversation.”
He looks up, our eyes connecting over the empty length of the table. His hand is still poised over his notebook, pen just lifted from the paper. “Honestly?”
I nod. “Honestly.”
He lets out a slow breath and looks away from me, speaking at the wall of windows. “Sometimes I have trouble making sense of things, how they are now. Why people act certain ways, or why they change. But in these stories, it’s simple: there was war or there was peace. It’s all about honor, vengeance, love.” He looks back at me, and I find his gaze hard to hold. Like he’s telling me something I’m not sure, after all, that I want to hear. “It’s like humans stripped down to their base instincts. No phones, no social media, no apps telling you anything at all. I don’t know.” Miller taps his pen on the page, blinks once. “It feels safe to me.”
I swallow. Miller’s right in front of me, eighteen and unfamiliar and upset with me, probably. But I’m thinking of him as Hermes,laughing as he runs through the woods behind my house, the bright joy in his eyes at nine years old. I can almost hear it: the twigs under his sneakers, the way my name sounded on his voice before we grew up. Suddenly that faraway person feels close to me again, feels present in this room with an immediacy so sharp it makes it hard to breathe.
“Okay,” I tell him, finally. He nods, like I said something more than I did. His eyes stay on mine.
“Okay,” he agrees.
I look away, take a bite of my sandwich just to do anything at all. I’m pretending to read the stupid marketing copy on the to-go bag when Miller says, “Ro.”
He hasn’t moved—his pen’s still there, hovering over his notebook. The wizard on his T-shirt’s half-hidden beneath the table, so it looks like he’s just a decapitated, pointy-hat-wearing head.
“What I said about MASH onRocky Mountain Livewasn’t fair or true,” Miller says. “It’s really impressive, what you did. I shouldn’t have belittled it.”
I could let it go. Accept the apology and look at him when I’m supposed to and reach back in the crowd for his hand and all the rest. It would be easier, maybe, to stay here on the surface. But I’ve always been the idiot of us, so instead I say, “Then why did you?”
Miller blinks. “Because I was angry with you.”
I lift my chin. “I was angry with you, too.”
The door pushes open, and we both look up. Felix tosses a stack of key messaging binders onto the table between us.
“Now that we’ve sorted that out,” he says, “let’s get down to business.”
19
The training lasts a week. Every day after school, Miller drives me to XLR8 in the wood-paneled wagon and we play at loving each other until five o’clock. There are photo shoots, mock interviews, required viewing (romantic comedies that I watch alone in my bed, trying not to think of Miller watching them alone in his). Our public disaster onRocky Mountain Liveended up driving a spike of MASH downloads, which Felix dismissed with a curt “You got lucky, but itcannothappen again.” Every day, he gives us a letter grade. By Friday we’re at a B minus.
“So we pass,” Miller says, and Felix eyes him over the top of his chunky glasses.
“Well, it wouldn’t get you into Brown.”
“No.” Miller stands from the break room couch and pulls his backpack on, white T-shirt collar blinking from beneath his sweater. “My actual grades will do that.”
I roll my eyes and Felix gathers our empty cups from the coffee table, ferrying them to the trash. “What will my B-minus studentsget up to tonight?” he asks. “What are the youths doing with their Fridays these days?”
