Lock and Key(92)
Author: Sarah Dessen

“—you never would have made the KeyChains and seen them be so successful,” I finished. “Or been able to enjoy my company, and this conversation, right now.”

She made a face at me, then walked back over and hopped up on her stool, opening up the laptop she’d recently bought to keep up with her Web site stuff. “Look. I know in a perfect, utterly romantic world, I’d go out with Reggie and we’d live happily ever after,” she said, hitting the power button. “But sometimes you just have to follow your instincts, and mine say this would not be a good thing for me. All right?”

I nodded. Really, considering everything I’d just gone through, Harriet was someone I should be trying to emulate, not convince otherwise.

I moved back to the rings, reorganizing them the way I had originally, in order of size and color. I was just doing another quick pass with the duster when I heard Harriet say, “Huh. This is weird.”

“What is?”

“I’m just checking into my account, and my balance is kind of off,” she said. “I know I had a couple of debits out, but not for this much.”

“Maybe the site’s just delayed,” I said.

“I knew I shouldn’t have signed on for this new system with Blake. I just feel better when I sign every check myself, you know?” She sighed, then picked up her phone and dialed. After a moment, she closed it. “Voice mail. Of course. Do you know Nate’s number, offhand?”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t.”

“Well, when you see him, tell him I need to talk to him. Like, soon. Okay?”

I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t be seeing him, much less delivering messages. But she was already back on the computer, scrolling down.

Harriet wasn’t the only one not resting assured, or so I found out when I got home and found Cora in the foyer, wiping up the floor with a paper towel. Roscoe, who usually could not be prevented from greeting me with a full body attack, was conspicuously absent.

“No way,” I said, dropping my bag on the floor. “He’s mastered the dog door.”

“We lock it when we’re not here,” she told me, pushing herself to her feet. “Which is usually no problem, but someone didn’t bother to show up to walk him today.”

“Really?” I said. “Are you sure? Nate’s usually really dependable.”

“Well, not today,” she replied. “Clearly.”

It was weird. So much so that I wondered if maybe Nate had taken off or something, as that seemed to be the only explanation for him just blowing off things he usually did like clockwork. That night, though, his lights were on, just like always, as were the ones in the pool. It was only when I really looked closely, around midnight, that I saw something out of the ordinary: a figure cutting through the water. Moving back and forth, with steady strokes, dark against all that blue light. I watched him for a long time, but even when I finally turned out the light, he was still swimming.

Chapter Seventeen

That weekend, there was only one thing I should have been thinking about: calculus. The test that pretty much would decide the entire fate of both my GPA and my future was on Monday, and according to Gervais—whose method was proven—it was time to shift into what he called “Zen mode.”

“I’m sorry?” I’d said the day before, Friday, when he’d announced this.

“It’s part of my technique,” he explained, taking a sip of his chocolate milk, one of two he drank each lunch period. “First, we did an overview of everything you were supposed to learn so far this year. Then, we homed in on your weaknesses therein, pinpointing and attacking them one by one. Now, we move into Zen mode.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Admitting that you are powerless over your fate, on this test and otherwise. You have to throw out everything that you’ve learned.”

I just looked at him. Olivia, who was checking her UMe page on her phone, said, “Actually, that is a very basic part of Eastern cinema tradition. The warrior, once taught, must now, in the face of his greatest challenge, rely wholly on instinct.”

“Why have I spent weeks studying if I’m now supposed to forget everything I’ve learned? ” I said. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Olivia shrugged. “The man says his method is proven.”

Man? I thought.

Gervais said, “The idea isn’t to forget everything. It’s that by now, you should know all this well enough that you don’t have to actively think about it. You see a problem, you know the solution. It’s instinct.”

I looked down at the practice sheet he’d given me, problems lined up across it. As usual, with just one glance I felt my heart sink, my brain going fuzzy around the edges. If this was my instinct talking, I didn’t want to hear what it was saying.

“Zen mode,” Gervais said. “Clear your head, accept the uncertainty, and the solutions appear. Just trust me.”

I was not convinced, and even less so when he presented me with his instructions for my last weekend of studying. (Which, incidentally, were bullet-pointed and divided into headings and subheadings. The kid was nothing if not professional. ) Saturday morning, I was supposed to do a final overview, followed in the afternoon by a short series of problems he’d selected that covered the formulas I had most trouble with. Sunday, the last full day before the test, I wasn’t supposed to study at all. Which seemed, frankly, insane. Then again, if the goal was to forget everything by Monday morning, this did seem like the way to do it.

Early the next morning, I sat down on my bed and started my overview, trying to focus. More and more, though, I found myself distracted, thinking about Nate, as I had been pretty much nonstop—occasional calculus obsessions aside—since I’d seen him swimming a couple of nights earlier. In the end, both Harriet and Cora had heard from Mr. Cross, who was wildly apologetic, crediting Harriet’s account and offering Cora a free week’s worth of walks to compensate. But in the days since, whenever I’d seen Nate across the green or in the halls at school, I couldn’t help but notice a change in him. Like even with the distance between us, something about him—in his face or the way he carried himself—was suddenly familiar in a way I hadn’t felt before, although how, exactly, I couldn’t say.

After two hours of studying, I felt so overwhelmed that I decided to take a break and quickly run over to get my paycheck from Harriet. As soon as I stepped off the greenway, I saw people everywhere—lined up on the curb that ran alongside the mall, gathered in the parking lot, crowded at the base of a stage set up by the movie theater.