GEMMA WAS ABSOLUTELY SURE THAT something would go wrong. Kristina would know something was the matter and refuse to go to her board meeting. Perv would show up at nine and the truth would come out and Gemma would be locked in her room until menopause.
She was a nervous wreck. She couldn’t imagine how thieves and murderers kept their cool. She could barely sneak out without her stomach liquefying.
But her mom just kissed Gemma’s cheek, as she always did, and promised to be home later for another Whole Foods and reality TV marathon. One good thing about being relatively friendless and a total Goody Two-shoes: no one ever expected you to do anything wrong. Gemma was suspicion-proof.
She packed her bag, unpacked it, realized she’d packed all the wrong things and far too many of them, and repacked. She was too nervous to sit at her laptop, although she did pull up the Haven Files again on her phone and swipe through the maps section, partially to reassure herself of its existence.
Perv showed up punctually, driving the same eggplant-colored minivan. This time, Rufus hauled himself to the door but let out only three restrained barks of welcome.
“Bye, Roo.” Gemma knelt down to hug her dog, taking comfort in his familiar smell. She knew she was being ridiculous—she was only going to be gone for a few days, maybe less if her mom got really aggressive and decided to fly down to Florida to get her—but she couldn’t help but feel she was leaving forever. And she was, in a sense. She was leaving her old self behind. She would no longer be Gemma-who-did-everything-right, who-listened-to-her-parents, Fragile Gemma of the Broken Body. She was Gemma-who-rode-with-strange-boys, Gemma-who-investigated-mysteries, Gemma-who-defied-parents-and-lied-to-best-friends.
Ninja Gemma.
“Ready to rock?” Perv asked, when she came outside with her backpack slung over one shoulder. Today he was wearing a green T-shirt that made his hair look even blonder and a pair of striped Bermuda shorts.
“Sure.” Gemma let Perv take the bag from her, though it wasn’t heavy, and sling it in the trunk. “How long is the drive, anyway?”
“Normally? Nine hours. When I’m behind the wheel?” Perv opened the door for her before she could do it for herself. He didn’t just talk quickly. He did everything quickly. If he were a comic book character, there would be little zoom-y lines drawn behind him. “A record eight hours and forty-five minutes. That’s with a standard three pee breaks. Fine. Four,” he said, when Gemma looked at him. “But don’t blame me if it throws our timing way off.”
All morning, Gemma waited for Perv to run out of things to say. She soon realized that it was a lost cause, as were her attempts to ignore him. Trying to ignore Perv was like standing in the middle of a highway, trying to ignore the eighteen-wheeler about to turn your brains into pancake batter.
A typical conversation with Perv went like this:
“Hey, check it out. A Hostess truck. Can you imagine pulling a heist on a cupcake truck? That’d be the most delicious crime ever. You’d be a national hero. One time when I was little I tried to make cupcakes by pouring pancake batter into actual cups—my mom’s china, to be exact. Turns out, interestingly, that china doesn’t do very well at high heat. You know what else doesn’t do well at high heat? Cell phones. Remind me to tell you about the time I accidentally microwaved my phone. . . .”
And on and on and on. Occasionally, he paused expectantly and waited for Gemma to say uh-huh or no way, or fired a series of rapid questions her way in an attempt to draw her out. For the most part, she responded in as few words as possible. She was too nervous to have a normal conversation, especially with Perv. She’d never been good with strangers and she had zero experience with boys, so the combination—boy and almost stranger—meant that her tongue felt as if it was wrestling itself every time she tried to speak. She was hoping he might take the hint and suggest they listen to music, or just leave her in peace.
No such luck.
“So your dad’s some big pharma guy, right?”
“Used to be.”
“I love saying the word pharma. Pharma. It sounds like a type of plant. Say it.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes. I’m driving. You’re here for my amusement. Humor me.”
“Pharma.”
“See? Totally a type of plant.”
They stopped just after noon at a rest stop in South Carolina that featured a Panera and a McDonald’s. As they were getting out of the car, Gemma made the mistake of calling Perv Perv—out loud.
“Seriously?” He made a face.
“Sorry.” Gemma felt immediately guilty. Perv was nice, and secretly she’d been flattered when April caught him staring at Gemma in the cafeteria, even if it was probably only because he had dirt in his eye or something. Nobody ever stared at her except in a horrified kind of way, as if her face was a graphic image of a car accident. And Pete was cute—in a very messy boy kind of way, but still, undeniably cute. And he was giving her a ride.
Perv—Pete—shook his head. He didn’t look mad. Just surprised and a bit disappointed. “You really think I’d steal underwear from Chloe?”
Gemma tried to make a joke out of it. “Are you saying you’d steal it from someone else?”
She was relieved when Pete—she would only think of him as Pete from now on—cracked a smile. “Maybe,” he said, “under the right circumstances. Like, for the good of social justice.”
“Why would stealing underwear be good for social justice?” she asked.
“Politics are complex, Gemma,” he answered solemnly, and she couldn’t help but laugh.
They agreed to meet back in the car—or rather, Pete decided they should have a race to see who could get back to the car soonest, claiming he had once ordered a McDonald’s meal, peed, and purchased several plastic figurines from one of the twenty-five-cent machines that always cluttered the rest stops, all within a record four minutes.
Gemma didn’t like to eat in front of strangers, ever since the time in seventh grade when Chloe had made pig-snorting noises when she’d carried her tray at lunch, and half the class had joined in. Instead she followed Pete into the rest stop and scarfed a granola bar while peeing in a stall, feeling pathetic and stupid but still too embarrassed to buy what she wanted, which was a Happy Meal. She didn’t feel so much like Ninja Gemma sitting with her pants around her ankles and granola bar crumbs on her bare thighs.
She made it back to the car first, and Pete emerged about thirty seconds later at a sprint, holding an enormous bag from McDonald’s. He stopped when he saw her and threw up his hands dramatically, nearly losing his soda cup.
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “You beat me.” Then, unlocking the car and seeing she was empty-handed, he said, “You’re not hungry?”
“Not really,” Gemma said, even though she was. She turned away so he wouldn’t see her cheeks burning.
When they climbed into the car, he plopped the McDonald’s bag in her lap. She could smell the fries. They smelled like grease and salt and heaven.
“Share mine,” he said. “I don’t want you to starve to death. It would be awkward to explain to your parents.”
“I doubt I’m in danger of starving anytime soon,” she said. She wasn’t sure if he was making fun of her—compared to some of the girls at her school, she was a massive balloon that floated over the crowd at big parades—but it didn’t seem that way. The idea of her parents made her stomach turn a little. She checked her phone. One o’clock. Her mom would be home any second, would discover Gemma was missing, and would send out an Amber Alert.
“Fine. But you’re in danger of turning into a walking toothpick, like Chloe. Every time I see her, I feel like I have something in my teeth.”
She liked him a hundred times more for saying it, even if it wasn’t true. She couldn’t help it. Chloe looked like pretty girls were supposed to look, at least according to every fashion magazine and blog. And Gemma looked like the girl who’d swallowed the pretty girl.
She dug her hand in the bag and popped fries in her mouth. They were delicious. She didn’t care that when she leaned forward her stomach rolled a little over her waistband. Pete wasn’t even looking at her. He was busy scarfing his own burger. Gemma decided she liked the way he ate—with total attention, like the food was a complex math problem he had to solve.
“So you really didn’t steal Chloe’s underwear?” she asked after a moment.
“’Course not,” he said, although since his mouth was full it came out cough noff. He made a big show of swallowing. “Want to know my theory? My theory,” he said, without waiting for her to respond, “is that Chloe DeWitt was and is hopelessly in love with me, and when I didn’t steal her underwear, it drove her crazy. She had to pretend that I did.”
Gemma stared at him. There was a little bit of sauce at the corner of his mouth and she had the momentary urge to reach out and wipe it off. “You’re insane. Do you know that? You actually might be certifiable.”
He shook his head. His expression turned serious. “Those girls are clones, Gemma. They lack brains.”
She turned toward the window so she would stop noticing things about him—how nice and long his hands were, with freckles sprinkled across the knuckles. His funny Adam’s apple, which rioted up and down his throat when he spoke. Even if he was nice, he was still a cute boy, and cute boys did not go for girls like Gemma. She’d seen enough romantic comedies to know it.
“Clones have brains,” she said. “You’re thinking of zombies.”
“Zombie clones, then,” he said, and put the car in drive.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. to read Chapter 6 of Lyra’s story.