The Chaos of Stars
Page 38

Sirus follows her. “Duty calls. You know what they say: the family that naps together . . . ummm . . .”
“Gets the clap together?” Scott offers.
Sirus glares. “Do I need to ban you from my innocent baby sister?”
“No, sir! I meant, uh, gets to clap together. To. Not the.”
With a stern nod, Sirus leaves. I scoot into his spot, but the work here is almost done anyway, and we can’t do anything else until these dry and we test whether it’s better to insert them and then paint the boards, or paint the boards and then insert them.
“So, are you going to school here in the fall?” Scott asks, finishing his pile, then painting a long streak on Tyler’s pale-white arm. She keeps at her work, not even looking up.
“No, I already have my GED.”
“You graduated early? Or, wait, is that a normal time to graduate in Egypt?” He puts a curlicue on Tyler’s long, skinny bicep.
“I didn’t go to normal school. Homeschool, I guess, though I was mostly in charge of myself.” After I stopped wanting to learn the history of the gods, I set up my own course of study. I was quite rigid—I never wanted to be behind once I got out of my parents’ house.
“Ah. Boring! No wonder you’re willing to be friends with us. You don’t know any better.”
“I wish I’d been homeschooled,” Ry says, leaning back and stretching his face toward the sun with his eyes closed.
“Why?” Tyler keeps painting, though Scott has now started playing tic-tac-toe with messy black streaks on her bare calf.
Ry rubs the back of his neck, not looking at us. “Oh, you know. School can be . . . weird.”
“How so?” All I know about American high schools is what I’ve seen in movies, and I doubt it’s very accurate. Too many spontaneous, choreographed dances for real life. That or the American education system is seriously screwed up.
“Do you want me to finish yours?” Ry grabs for the rest of Tyler’s nearly gone pile.
“Don’t change the subject. How is it weird?”
“It’s kind of embarrassing.”
Tyler finally stops, leaning forward, the motion messing up Scott’s attempt at an x.
“You made me lose!” He paints an angry streak through the tic-tac-toe game.
“Shut up. Ry is telling an embarrassing story.”
“It’s not a big deal. There was just this girl, who got kind of . . . aggressive?”
“You got beat up by a girl?” Scott’s eyes light up with wonder and delight.
“No! She thought—do I have to tell this? We dated for a little while and then broke up, but she was really upset about it. It got so awkward I ended up eating lunch in the boys’ bathroom every day for the last two months of school to avoid her.”
“Oh, that’s so sad!” Tyler says.
“Was she ugly?” Scott asks, writing his name beneath the tic-tac-toe board.
“No, just not my type. She was pretty enough. Kinda short. Blond. Very . . . orange.”
Tyler finishes her last piece. “Fish-belly white is the new tan. But what is your type, if it isn’t short and fake-baked?”
He smiles, not looking at me in a way I swear is so deliberate it feels like he is staring right at me. He turns toward Tyler while he leans in closer to me, his shoulder almost brushing mine. “It’s a very, very specific type. And does not include the color orange.”
Scott brings his paintbrush up to Tyler’s face, tracing it along her jawline. “What’s your type, Tyler?”
“Half-Taiwanese, obnoxious, and soaking wet.” With a roar she grabs Scott under his arms, dragging him toward the pool. He stands and they wrestle back and forth until they both trip over the edge and fall in with a massive splash.
I watch them and laugh, loopy with fatigue and grateful that the tarp is far enough away from the edge that they didn’t get it wet. Tyler and Scott scream, pushing each other under the water. “We’ll have to have a pool party or something when we finish this,” I muse, mostly to myself. I want to buy strings of lanterns to give Deena and Sirus as a thank-you gift. They’d light this area up so pretty at night.
“So, we’re done here, right?” Ry asks.
I nod. “Thanks. You can go home. I’ll call you when we’re ready to paint more.”
“Who said I wanted to go home?”
I notice the twist in his smile too late. With a roar of his own, far deeper than Tyler’s, he throws me over his shoulder, runs, and leaps into the pool. I push him away, surfacing with an angry splutter as my hair funnels streams of water right into my eyes. Ry jumps up next to me, laughing as he shakes his head and sprinkles me more.
“You jackal! Why did you do that?”
He stops laughing and looks at me with utter sincerity. “You looked really hot. I thought this would help. It didn’t.”
“Ha. Ha.” I hook my foot around his ankle, yank it out from under him, and shove his head under. When I finally let him up, Scott jumps on my back, screaming, “Boys against girls!”
Tyler jumps on Scott on my back and we all go under, Scott with a death-grip on my tank top. I finally wriggle away, surfacing for air with a gasp. The last time I was stuck underwater . . . I remember. The dream. But it wasn’t a dream.
Isis had taken me to the banks of the Nile like she did most days. I was playing in the sand while she searched for whatever she needed to collect for our spells. A shadow blocked the sun and I looked up to see tall, tall Anubis.