It doesn’t help that it rained the whole week before. The churned-up earth is a sea of mud. Within minutes, sludge coats every one of us from head to foot, until I can hardly tell friend from foe.
August Prieto was voted Freshman Captain. He’s a Brazilian Heir from a narco family. He’s popular in our year because he’s handsome and athletic. I think the Freshmen hoped he’d be our version of Leo Gallo. It quickly becomes clear that August does not possess the requisite leadership skills. He takes the fastest and strongest Freshman through the course with impressive speed, but abandons the rest of us to struggle along on our own, an impossible feat when several of the obstacles can’t be completed without help.
By contrast, Leo stays at the back of his group ensuring that no stragglers are left behind. When he sees a bottleneck, he coordinates his strongest teammates to help the weaker ones, so that someone like Matteo Ragusa is bodily lifted and flung over the wall by Silas Gray.
I do my best to keep up. As layer after layer of mud coats my body, I can barely lift my arms and legs. I’m falling behind, and I can see that plenty of students have finished the course while I’m only halfway through.
It’s humiliating. I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m the very last one to finish. I could lose the challenge for the entire Freshmen team.
As I try to crawl across a long, flat stretch of mud with barbed wire strung overhead I get a nasty shock—literally. The wire is charged. Every time it touches my bare skin, a jolt of electricity rips through my body, making my teeth slam together.
This is worse for the bulkier students who can’t avoid touching the wires. I’m at least small enough to slip under most of them without making contact. One beefy Freshman is practically in tears as he’s jolted again and again and again.
I think that’s the worst part until I come to the juggernaut, a maze of swinging pendulums and rolling logs and tilting platforms designed to knock us off into the sea of sludge below. Every time we’re punted into the mud, we have to start the section over again. I’m knocked in three, four, five times, until I can barely muster the strength to crawl out of the mire.
Only a dozen students remain behind me. Wiping the mud from my eyes, I swear to myself I’ll make it through. I try to stop focusing on one bit of the juggernaut at a time, and instead see the overall pattern of movement. There’s a rhythm to it, a regular motion.
Hands raw, my entire body throbbing like one giant bruise, I run and duck and jump and slide, until I make it to the other side. I could cry with relief.
The last wall is twenty feet high. No ropes, no footholds. No way to get over without help.
Anna and Zoe help the last of the Sophomores over.
“Cat!” Anna shouts. “This way!”
She’s on top of the wall, reaching down one pale, mud-streaked arm to me.
I run and jump as high as I can, but my fingers fall short far below hers.
“Hold on!” she says.
She climbs back over the wall, dropping down on my side.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m not even on your team.”
“Who gives a shit,” she says. “Get up on my shoulders.”
She boosts me up and Zoe helps haul me over.
I run with them all the way to the end.
The Freshmen finish last and are eliminated from the competition. At least it’s not my fault—eight others lagged behind me.
The Sophomores come in second place after the Seniors. The Juniors finish third, safe from elimination, a result that seems to annoy Miles and Ozzy since it means they’ll have to keep competing in the next round. They don’t buy into the ferocious hype around the Quartum Bellum, especially not when it involves getting this dirty.
“I’m gonna be picking mud out of my teeth for a week,” Miles says bitterly, spitting on the grass.
“I can’t believe they made me participate when I’m still a cripple!” Ozzy complains, looking at his poor bandaged arm, two inches thick with mud.
“Isn’t mud supposed to be good for your skin?” Chay says, pretending to massage the dirt into her cheeks with her fingertips.
“Good point,” Ozzy says. “You want that rubbed anywhere else?”
“I wish you could help me,” Chay says, pretending to pout. “But as you said, you’re barely functional . . .”
“I think you know that isn’t true,” Ozzy growls, making a grab for her with his good arm.
Chay laughs and slips his grip, dancing away from him, but not too far.
My sister told me that Chay is still refusing to date Ozzy. On the other hand, she’s been disappearing for suspicious amounts of time, coming back to the dorms flushed and messy, refusing to say where she’s been.
I have no romantic prospects on the horizon, and I’m certainly not looking for any.
However, I’m pleased that my relationship with my roommate Rakel has progressed all the way to entire conversations.
It all started when I asked to borrow her graphic novel.
This was a bold foray on my part, since up to that point, I was pretty sure that Rakel wouldn’t lend me her carbon dioxide, let alone her favorite book.
I’d been reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography as part of my Leaders, Rulers, and Dictators class when I came upon this quote:
Having heard that a rival legislator had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting that he would do me the favor of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I returned it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favor. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.
It seemed paradoxical that asking someone for a favor would make them like you more, but Franklin said, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
I thought old Ben probably knew what he was talking about.
So I asked Rakel to borrow the graphic novel, the one I’d seen her reading our very first day of school and plenty of times after.
She stared at me, her dark eyes sharp and suspicious, her pointed nails drumming irritably on the bed.
Then, to my surprise, she dug the book out of her nightstand and thrust it into my hands.
“Don’t crease the pages,” she said.
I read through the whole thing that night. It sucked me in instantly. It was about a bunch of superheroes called The Watchmen. They weren’t really heroes. Actually, most of them were complete assholes. And the villain had a plan that was, if not totally reasonable, at least intended for the greater good.
The next morning, Rakel said, “What did you think?”
We talked about it for over an hour, all the way down to the dining hall where we ate breakfast together for the very first time.
The next day she asked if I wanted to borrow her Walking Dead comics.
Talking about graphic novels has turned into talking about movies and music.
I ask Rakel about her death metal, confused how that chaotic sound could actually be enjoyable.
“It’s not death metal, it’s black metal,” she says. “There’s a difference. And it’s not just music, it’s a religion to me. It’s about mysticism, mortality and immortality . . . The concerts can be hours long, with candles and incense and ceremonial offerings. We call it the Ulfsmessa, the Wolf’s Mass.”