“Youknewhim?”
A torrent flowed—they’d met in Orientation Week and had taken two science classes together. They’d aced a joint project with a spectrophotometer.
“That’s Chemistry?” I asked.
“Peter’s favorite. The labs, anyway. Not so much the book part.”
I remembered the rumors. “You think he was into drugs? Like, cooking meth in the Chem wing at night?”
Jayden laughed. “If Peter made anything in the lab, it’d be a flamethrower.”
“A flamethrower.”
“Yeah. One time he cooked up rocket candy. That’s potassium nitrate and sugar—homemade propellant. But that’s kid stuff. Once we made salts out of nitric acid and copper. Peter kept telling me how we were, like, three steps from TNT!”
Rockets. TNT. A spectacle.
“He sounds kind of unstable. Some people are saying he might have jumped.”
“No way. He wanted todostuff.”
I put on an encouraging smile. “Like what?”
“Explore the world. Save the animals. Escape his family.”
Escape his family—the family he’d tried so hard to make proud on the parapet of Dewitt.
Jess, I have to come back up.
“Poor guy,” I said.
“I know the feeling. My sisters both got into Stanford.” Jayden raised his beer. “Families get crazy when you don’t meet their expectations.”
“Families,” I said.
“My sisters did the whole résumé thing—volunteer work, soccer. I was too busy with my band for that shit.”
It was almost time to leave. The sun was setting, and my night would be busy.
Somewhere on this campus was a spectacle in waiting. Some gaudy, unstable device—a rocket, a bomb—covered with Peter’s fingerprints and his very Morton DNA.
I felt a flash of annoyance at Sebastian, who would’ve started with Peter’s friends and classmates, all smiles and handshakes, and arrived here quicker. He’d let Peter drift into the Lindqvists’ orbit, but left the cleanup to me.
When Jayden tried to pay, I waved him off, putting it on the family tab.
“Um,” he said. “If I came here without you, you think they’d let me in?”
“Not a chance.”
“Yeah,” he said.Nowas the answer he was accustomed to.
This unimpressive boy had been close to Peter—a kinship between two misfits. In a small and repellent way, Jayden was his family’s version of Peter.
Which made me wonder. “Who’s your roommate?”
“A guy called Rishabh. Why?”
“Nothing,” I said.