“Lots of people go here. But that’s a pretty weird name.”
At the top of the hill she pointed to a building with a flag sticking out of the top. It was big and metal with a lot of windows.
“That’s where the Econ Department is. Your brother’s class should be there.” She handed the paper back to me. “Second floor.”
I thanked her and told her to stay cool, and we dabbed and she added a move to the dab, where she pulled her hand away after our fists touched and made the sound of an explosion.
* * *
I ran up the stairs of the building to the second floor and walked down the hall and read the numbers by the doors, which were very small. Inside the rooms the students all had their pencils in their hands and were using them to do battle with the sheets of paper in front of them. Many of them had the calculators that Gert used.
This told me that I was in the correct building.
The door to the classroom on the sheet of paper had a small window in it. I could not see Gert, and the window was not big enough for me to see the entire room, which looked like a movie theater, with students sitting in chairs and a Professor standing at the bottom. A computer shot pictures up on a screen at the front.
The screen had numbers and things on it that I did not understand.
I put my ear to the glass of the door so I could listen to the teacher at the front of the room, who was talking very loudly.
“The image projected will correspond to question seventeen,” she was saying.
The projector changed pictures and showed another one that was even more confusing.
“This is the time,” I told myself. Closing my eyes, I pushed the door and it made a loud metal sound as it opened.
The teacher stopped talking at the front of the class. The students in their chairs all turned to look at me too. All of them got really quiet, like instead of dropping a bomb that exploded I dropped one that sucked up all of the sound.
“Can I help you?” the teacher said.
I took out Gert’s schedule and read the name under MACROECONOMICS. Dr. Gillroy was the name of the professor who was teaching Gert’s class.
“Is your name Dr. Gillroy?” I called to the woman.
The students sitting down started whispering to each other and laughing.
The woman was older, with gray hair that was crimpy and stuck out. When I asked her for her name the second time, the students turned back to her to see what she was going to say. People pointed their phones at me.
“I am, and you’re interrupting my exam.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“I am trying to find my brother,” I said. “He is in this class. I need to give him this.” I opened my bag and took out Gert’s special calculator. “For his exam.”
She opened her arms and said to the class, “Does anyone here know this young woman?”
I made my eyes jog across the classroom, looking for Gert. I said his name aloud. Nobody put up their hand to say they were Gert.
“Does anyone here know a Gert?” she said.
That was when a hand went up. It did not belong to my brother. It belonged to a girl who was sitting in the last row, with blond hair that was pulled back in a ponytail. She had glasses and skinny arms.
She said, “I think I know who she’s talking about.”
“And?” the Professor said.
“May I be excused?” she asked the Professor, who looked at the clock.
“The exam’s already late to start.”
The student asked if she could come up and talk to the Professor. She came down the stairs of the classroom and to the front. The girl and Dr. Gillroy talked quietly, and then the girl walked up the steps to me and said that she knew Gert and that we should probably talk outside of the class, since we were disrupting everyone else.
* * *
We went to the cafeteria. She said that her name was Jenny and that she knew Gert, only she said it in a weird way and then asked me how he was doing.
“Good,” I said. “We should try to find him if he is not in his exam. Maybe he got lost.”
“Somehow I don’t think so.” Jenny smiled. “You two look a lot alike. I can see the resemblance.”
“I need more tattoos.”
And Jenny laughed and said that was true. She picked at her fingernail. “So you’re looking for him, and he told you he was in this class.”
“And that he has an exam.”
“We did know each other,” Jenny said. “I mean, we weren’t best friends or anything. But we hung out outside of class.” She chewed on her nail again.
I asked if that meant they had sex. Her face got red. Most of the girls who knew Gert had had sex with him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Gert has sex with a lot of people.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I got that impression.”
She told me they had been part of the same study group for their Economics class, the one with the big test. I told her that he had gone to the study group last night.
“Last night,” she said.
“He came home very late and was drunk. Sometimes he likes to go out and have beers after studying, even though he knows I do not like when he gets drunk.”
For some reason she did not want our eyes to meet. Usually people do that when they know something and they do not want to tell you.
So I gave her THE LOOK that AK47 taught me, staring right into her face and her eyes.
Jenny sighed. “Okay, it’s probably none of my business, but I don’t think he’s doing well in class.”
I frowned. “He hasn’t said anything.”
She said that Gert had not been coming to class for a while, and that this was not the first time he had missed a test. “Gert missed his Stats test too. And I haven’t seen him in class for weeks.”
That was impossible, I said. Gert had been studying and going to class. “He is not a person who lies,” I said. “He is not dishonorable like that. And we do not lie to people in our tribe. That is a big rule.”
Jenny saw someone walking with a tray of food and called him over. “Karl, can you come here for a minute?”
Karl was short and shaped like a ball, with a big stomach. He also had red hair, just like Carrot from the Community Center. He sat in the free chair, putting his tray down. He had soup and a tuna fish sandwich on it.
“What’s going on?” he asked, and then he looked at me and back at Jenny.
“This is Gert’s sister, Zelda,” Jenny said.
“Hey,” he said, and we did a funny handshake. “Cool. Where the hell’s he been? I’m almost out of hash.” Karl unwrapped his tuna sandwich, pulling all the plastic off. “It’s been dry as shit on campus.”
Jenny made a noise with her throat.
“What?” Karl said. When Karl talked I could see the food in his mouth. Then he looked at me and put his hands over his mouth and apologized.
“What does Gert have to do with being out of hash?” I asked. “And what is hash?”
Karl looked at Jenny. “Oh. Well, he’s sort of—”
He stopped and bit more of his sandwich.
Jenny said, “Zelda came all the way here to bring Gert his graphing calculator, for Econ.”