I scan down the list. “This is a terrible idea.”
“Who says I even want to be Homecoming King?” Quinn says, closing the locker door. “It’s sexist.”
“Then who better to be crowned than our favorite nonbinary Overlord?”
Annie has a good point, one that I don’t really like, but Quinn seems to have taken the bait. “Overlord, you say?”
“And you get a crown.”
“I always did like overthrowing the patriarchy,” they muse. “Okay, I’m in. This calls for a trip to the library, I believe.”
Annie nods gravely. “We need the help of Space Dad.”
I grimace and shove Twilight and my calculus book into my bookbag. “Why do we need my dad’s help? And can you please stop calling him that? It’s weird,” I add as we melt into the steady stream of students leaving the school.
“Look,” Annie says, putting a hand on my shoulder, “he’s so beautiful that his beauty is out of this world, so thus—”
“Space Dad,” Quinn agrees. “Besides, he loves those trashy sci-fi books so it fits.”
I sigh. “I’m never going to win this, am I?”
“Nope,” both Quinn and Annie reply in unison.
Of course not. I toss my keys into the air and catch them. “Okay, library it is. Only until four, though. I have a date with a few hundred books after that.”
“And Vance Reigns,” Quinn replies with a wiggle of their eyebrows.
My cheeks warm, but before either of them can notice, I push open the door to the school courtyard. Students slowly trickle out of the breezeway toward their cars in the almost-empty parking lot. I can hear the sound of some sportsball playing in the field behind the school, followed by the out-of-tune howl of the trombones over on the marching band field.
Someone bumps into my shoulder, muttering, “I can’t believe Garrett’s taking you.”
I glance back, but whoever it was gets lost in the crowd of students behind us. That was odd. It’s not like I want Garrett to take me. I told him no, after all.
But that makes me think of something more concerning—how many people think that? That I’m stealing Garrett Taylor away from them? I mean, Garrett is popular, but it’s only because he has a few hundred thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel and everyone wants to have their five seconds of fame. Do they think I’m looking for five seconds of fame? Suddenly, it feels like everyone is looking at me even though I know—I know—they can’t all be.
Maybe just most of them.
Some of them.
Enough for me to hurry up my pace. If Annie and Quinn notice, they don’t say anything. When we get to my car, they toss their backpacks into the back, and Quinn calls shotgun. I slide into the driver’s seat and mutter a prayer to my car.
I turn the key and the engine squeals.
“Not today,” I say to it. “Please not today—”
Old Betsy sputters to life. Quinn and Annie throw their hands up in a cheer.
“To the library!” Annie cries. “Space Dad calls to us!”
No, no he does not, but I’d rather not fan the flames, so I crank up the stereo—the only part of my car that has never once failed me—and we sing our way to the library where my dad works. It’s about a ten-minute ride from the high school, down the main road on the other side of town.
For the record, everything in this town is no more than ten minutes away.
I’ve lived in this small town for my entire life. It isn’t tiny—we have a movie theater and a (slightly dilapidated) shopping mall and a few big-chain grocery stores and a Walmart. It sits on the side of a lake, along with three other towns, so it attracts an array of millionaires to the area looking for a quiet, reserved place to plant their roots. Before I was born, Dad and Mom moved here, and he stayed at home with me while Mom went to work at a nuclear site about an hour away. She was smart in ways I can never be. She could spin numbers as if they were magic, but what she loved most of all were words. She loved reading them, collecting them, coveting them. When she died a year ago, the medical and funeral costs ate up most of our savings. We had to sell the house on the lake, and Dad’s favorite Fender guitar, and finally—tragically—the collection of Starfield novels she loved so much.
After that, Dad and I hopped from apartment to apartment. He took a job at the county library as the head Youth Services coordinator. He’s been there ever since, and Quinn, Annie, and I have spent more time in the library than anywhere else in the world. We know every nook and cranny, and almost all of the patrons—most of whom are older and walk from the retirement facility across the street—know our names.
Dad’s sitting on the edge of the Youth Services desk when we come in, flipping through a new picture book for the stacks. He glances up over his Harry Potter–esque glasses and smiles at us.
“There are my troublemakers!” he announces, standing up. “Annie, you won’t believe your luck!”
She gasps. “It came in?!”
He rustles around under the counter and then triumphantly holds up a golden tome. “It came in!”
“Yes!” she crows, throwing her hands into the air. She’s been waiting for the last book in that trashy fantasy series for the better half of two months, and honestly both Quinn and I are happy that she can stop bugging us about “evading spoilers” now. “You are the greatest gift to mankind, Space Dad.”
“I try,” Dad replies, playing along, because God forbid he puts a stop to this madness. Then he snaps his fingers and points to Quinn. “Speaking of which! I think I found a book for you, too.”
“Spare me the agony,” they deadpan in reply.
He laughs, pushing his chair over toward the computer, and rustles around under a stack of papers. He pulls out a book. “It’s about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. I know you like stuff like that.”
Quinn’s eyes go wide. “You are amazing.”
“I try,” he replies pleasantly.
Annie opens her golden tome and inhales heavily. “Ah, the sweet, sweet smell of germs and page rot and smut. But I cannot be derailed!” She closes her book and shoves it under her arm. “Space Dad, we have a question.”
“A few questions,” Quinn agrees.
“Too many questions—you don’t have to answer them all,” I add, pleading, as Annie presents him with the plan and the now notorious list. He reads through it, scratching at the stubble on his chin.
When he gets to number ten, he hands the list back and says, “I think it’s doable.”