Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn (6 page)

"Hey," Gid says, once again going for that intangible tone, interested but not desperate. "Why were you so
concerned with what I was eating?"

Then there is a sound of hard plastic wheels scraping concrete, and Gideon feels a rush of air at his arm and
shoulder. He jumps to the side, terrified, then ashamed to see the object of his terror, a ten-year-old on a
skateboard.

"That's little Cockweed," Nicholas explains. "Tim." Up ahead, Tim Cockweed stares at them with dead brown
eyes. He looks like something off a horror movie poster. "It's okay if he scared you. He scares me."

That Nicholas gets scared sometimes is the most reassuring thing Gid has heard all day. "But what I was
asking," he says, feeling more at ease now, "was why you cared what I was eating."

Nicholas nods. "Well, first of all, I care about the planet, which, and I really feel this goes without saying, is
rapidly disintegrating before our eyes."

Gid nods wearily. Eco-freaks. They had these people at his old school too. For selfish reasons, he's glad
Nicholas is part of this movement. There's at least a corner of his personality that Gideon can dismiss.

"But more important, you and I start our workouts tomorrow, and you need a healthier diet."

"But I don't want to work out," Gideon says. Up ahead, Tim Cockweed is going down a set of stairs on his skateboard. The focus of his eyes and set of his jaw is indeed demonic. "I'm not very athletic,
so..."

Nicholas puts his hand on Gid's arm, effectively shushing him. He says, "I have three things to tell you. One,
Liam Wu drinks cranberry juice because when he has too much sex, like he did this afternoon as soon as he got
back here and saw his girlfriend, Jordan, he gets a bladder infection
—like a fucking girl. Second, you want to use the
word
gorgeous
very, very sparingly around here. Especially in your position. Third, I am going to make you athletic, or
you will never, ever get laid, except by fucking accident, which is in some ways worse than never." He fixes his cool
blue eyes on Gid's warm brown ones.

When Nicholas goes into his evil honesty mode, he has Scary Husky Eyes.

"Wait," Gideon says. "Don't you want me to not work out, because what if I get this really great body? Then I'll
get laid fast, and you'll lose."

Nicholas laughs. I don't blame him. Gideon could certainly improve his level of fitness, but he's hardly in danger of becoming an Adonis. "Yes, I want to win the bet, but I mean, every single interaction I have with you can't be about
the bet. I want someone to work out with. Cullen won't. So I'll do it with you."

Not exactly a declaration of friendship. But not nothing either.

sneaking out

It's well past lights-out, and it just so happens that when Gideon is awake, I'm awake too. It's so quiet right now, and I
can almost see his thoughts arcing through the darkness. Like most girls, I have spent so much of my life dreaming
what it would be like to be close, really close, to a boy. And here I am, closer than I've ever been, and I'm not actually
even there. I'm sure there's a lesson in there, but I'm not yet sure what it is.

Gid's thinking about Danielle. Not in a longing-for-her way. He realizes his story got only so far as his accident
with the thong and never back to how it ended up in his possession in the first place. How, when Danielle said
good-bye, she got herself looking all sexy in cutoffs and a little T-shirt and said things like, "Maybe you're too numb
to cry," while Gid said things like, "Yeah." When all he could think of was climbing into the Silverado and peeling out
down Christmas Park Circle, never to be heard from again, Danielle knelt down and fumbled in a black corduroy
handbag (yuck) as Gideon (why not, one last time) looked down her shirt. Danielle stood up and handed Gid the
brown bag.

"Don't open this until you get to school," she said.

It's not that Gid doesn't like Danielle. He does. And it's not that he's just not romantic. In fact, what I'm getting at
is that he's very romantic. That's his whole problem. He suspects that there is someone out there who's way better for him than Danielle Rogal. He's even thinking that there's someone out there better for her than he is. So in the
darkened quiet clarity of Room 302, Proctor Dormitory, he's cold not out of coldness but out of respect for the real
thing.

Danielle really was a nice girl. But how did he know what was waiting for him out there? It wasn't as if he'd ever
been anywhere. Well, except Florida.

He's still smarting from the twin bombs, the "doable" and "in your league" comments. In Gid's fantasies,
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue models fall in love with him because they have some transcendent mutual understanding.
The bet has made official what he's always feared. Love is not about love. Love is a game. There are winners and
losers.

Of course, he reminds himself, if he were definitively a loser, there would be no bet. No one would even pay
attention to him.

This thought is comforting enough to put him, and thus me as well, to sleep.

A scant three hours later, he's being shaken awake. He's so far behind a wall of sleep that just the simple act
of opening his eyes feels like crawling through packed earth. Cullen towers over him.

"What the fuck are you doing? It's 1:10." Gid could count on one hand the number of times he's been up after
11:30.

"Now it's 1:11, make a wish," Cullen says. If he notices Gideon's surprising tone of insubordination, he doesn't
say so. "Here's mine. Fifteen minutes from now, I will be sitting in a girl's dorm with my good buddy Nicholas and my we-shall-see-how-he-works-out Gideon Rayburn, high as a kite and drinking expensive wine."

Outside their window is a sugar maple with a fat, straight, sturdy branch. Gideon watches as Nicholas
crouches on the ledge. Holding on to the window frame for support, he extends one leg to the branch and anchors it there. Then, with one quick movement, he transfers all his weight out the window, setting down his other foot and
grabbing another small branch, this one a little thin for Gid's taste, with his other hand.

Gid weighs the misery of a broken leg against chickening out. The campus looks beautiful at night, the buildings
still and regal, the lawns and trees deep green even in the dark. Tingling with desire and fear, he eases himself onto
the ledge and, with Nicholas's movements running through his mind, copies them exactly.

White is remarkably close. Plus the way the campus lights are set up, there's a dark patch of lawn from one corner of Proctor to a tree between them. A door on the back side of White has been left open.

Prep school has a lot of rules. But it has many more wily, horny, substance-abusing students who learn how to
get around them.

They tiptoe through the halls. Cullen motions for him to crouch. "Mrs. Geller's apartment," he whispers. Mrs.
Geller. She's the headmaster's assistant. Her name is on all his correspondence. It's incredible that she's a real
person, with a dried flower wreath on her door.

In the boys' dorms, the doors are bare, or just carved up with words like
prick, blow me,
and so on. The girls'
doors are covered, not an inch of wood remaining, with Polaroid photos, memo pads with messages like "I luv you,"
and magazine cutouts of hot young actors. Gid recognizes a guy from
The O.C.
and, weirdly, Mel Gibson. Cullen and
Nicholas are as handsome as actors. I am normal, Gid thinks, I am regular.

Cullen taps lightly on a door marked 13. The door opens, revealing Madison Sprague, who is, in Gid's
estimation, about nine hundred times as hot as her phone voice.

Madison is maybe three inches taller than Gideon, and she's wearing jeans tight enough to make her look
taller, low across her hips, secured with a brass buckle that reads RIDE ME. Her white wife-beatertank top clings to
braless, medium-sized breasts. She's not exactly stacked, but she probably should be wearing a bra. That's my
opinion, of course. Not Gid's, though he does manage to force his eyes upward to settle on her shoulders, sparkling
under some iridescent lotion. Gid doesn't know about iridescent lotion, so he just thinks she's touched with magic.
Her hair, short and dark, is glossy and tight against her head, like a perfect little hat. There's a dark curl hanging over
her forehead, and she shifts her hazel eyes upward and blows it out of the way.

She cocks her head to the side, and Cullen kisses her cheek. Nicholas allows his cheek to be kissed but does
not kiss her back. Gideon just stands there. He can't look at Madison anymore so he looks past her, into the room.
It's not as nice as the boys' room, really just a rectangle with white walls and that lentil-soup brown carpet. Erica sits
on a bed covered with a shiny green quilt; the wall behind her is a riot of clippings, medals, and pictures of girls
playing soccer. Next to her is another blonde girl. "Hi," she says. "I'm Mija." Mija, despite her glorious name, is the
least intriguing of the three. She's small and blonde, and full of European restraint. She has a tidy air about her and pink, pensive lips. She's not hot like Madison and she doesn't seem like she could break you in half, like Erica (Gid finds this attractive), but she's definitely cute. "Get in here," Madison says, her tone impatient. "My God." Gid takes a step, and then, afraid to venture much farther, deposits himself on the floor, right against the wall.

Cullen stretches out on Madison's bed, his head in her lap. Nicholas, whose sole purpose in life seems to be
to prove that man is indeed an island, lies on the floor. He refuses offers of wine and stares at the ceiling.

"I can't believe you guys get out of your room by leaping off a fire escape and grabbing a tree branch,"
Madison says. "I would be so scared." Gid wants to tell her how, when they were jumping, he pretended he was in
The Matrix,
that he said to himself, "There is no branch, there is no tree." Instead, he says, as Madison goes to pour
him some more wine, "You have the shiniest hair I have ever seen."

"Holy crap," says Cullen.

"You see?" Nicholas sits up. "This is what I mean. June, and not a minute sooner."

Now Cullen gives Nicholas a cautioning look. Gid feels a little flattered. The bet might embarrass him, but it's a
big, powerful secret, a bond.

Erica, in the true spirit of a competitive athlete, is under-whelmed by the boys' escape tactics. "I went on NOLS
last summer," she says. "We had to jump off stuff a lot higher than that." Well, good for you, little Heidi scholar
athlete.

"What's NOLS?" Gid asks.

Mija smiles at him cautiously. "It's National Outdoor Leadership School," she says. "It teaches you how to
survive the wilderness." Gid can't imagine why any one of them would need this skill. But he smiles politely.

Madison flips onto her stomach, pokes underneath her bed, and comes up with another bottle of wine.

"I'm wasted," Cullen says.

"Good," Madison says. "That's the whole point." Then she turns to Gideon: "Did you know that Cullen and I are
cousins?"

"No," Gideon says, "I had no idea." He looks to Cullen for confirmation. Cullen nods.

"Her mother is my dad's cousin," Cullen says.

Gid immediately launches into a fantasy that he is older, twenty-five or so, and he is tall, taller than Madison,
and that the two of them and Cullen are standing on a dock drinking champagne and laughing into the pink light of a
setting sun. But he wonders, Is Madison too fashiony, too indoorsy, to enjoy the sunset? He emerges from this to
see Mija watching him. He wonders, Is this some kind of setup? She is the least pretty of the three, and he
concludes, with no real gloom but a calm understanding of his limitations, that she has been set aside for him.

Mija gets off her bed and settles herself next to Erica, who, following an unspoken directive, begins to braid
Mija's blonde hair. "They're in their little cuddly pseudo-lesbian phase," Cullen observes.

"They're like blonde Care Bears," Madison agrees.

Teenage girls are always grooming each other, like sexy little monkeys.

"Why don't you tell us about your summer?" Cullen says to Nicholas.

Nicholas says nothing.

Madison gestures at Nicholas with the wine. "This should make you ease up a little bit," she says.

"Fat chance," says Cullen. "He still doesn't drink." So he wasn't just not drinking earlier. He doesn't drink at all.
I'd say it was an affectation, but let's see if he sticks to it.

"More for us," Cullen says, producing a Swiss army knife and uncorking the wine. He takes a sip from the
bottle and passes it to Madison, who then passes it to Gid, who, while staring at Madison's mouth, takes a sip.

"That's good," he exclaims.

"It should be," says Madison. "Considering what I went through to get it."

Mija takes a sip. "It's very good," she says formally. She puts the bottle to Erica's mouth.

"I have double sessions tomorrow," Erica says, shaking her stubborn little blonde head. "No drinking."

"Oh, but you'll smoke pot!" Cullen laughs.

"Pot's natural," Erica insists. "Wine has all sorts of chemicals in it, and we only get organic pot."

"You sound just like Nicholas," Gideon says to Erica. "You two are made for each other."

"You're not the only one who thinks so," Madison says.

Nicholas twitches and frowns. Suddenly, Erica's face reddens. Cullen and Mija look slightly embarrassed.

Madison, however, has a watchful smirk on her face and seems to be having the time of her life. Gideon tries to
glance furtively at her, but she proves too captivating for such self-control. She catches him looking and stares right
back. He can tell that even though she thinks he's kind of a dork, she doesn't have disdain for him, which, for a girl
like her, is a huge compliment.

"Madison," Erica says, jumping up, abruptly dropping Mija's half-braided hair. "I need to talk to you for a
second."

Madison checks the peephole, then she and Erica step outside.

"Jesus," Nicholas groans at the ceiling.

"Jesus is right," Cullen says.

"What's going on?" Gideon demands. "Did I say something wrong?"

Cullen leaps up, an unlit joint between his teeth. "You said something stupid, but it wasn't your fault. Madison
said something mean."

"What a surprise," Nicholas says. He rolls over onto his stomach and starts to do push-ups. "All that rock star
attention is making Madison a little too C-U-next-Tuesday-ish
—even for my tastes."

Cullen places his hands on his knees and bends over, putting his face right next to Nicholas's. "And whose
fault is all this, anyway?"

Nicholas is still doing pushups when Erica and Madison come back into the room. Erica appears to have been
crying but also appears to have washed her face.

"We're going to go smoke this organic joint," Cullen says, wrapping his arms around Madison's shoulders. She
squeals.

Gid loved the squeal. I thought it was a little unnecessary. But in order to ignore a squealing, pretty girl,
especially wearing a belt that says
Ride Me,
Gid would have to be so sophisticated that I'm not sure I would like him
as much.