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Piper thinks there are a lot of fucked up things about the boarding school her father dropped her off to in the middle of fuck-off nowhere.
It’s in the middle of fuck-off nowhere, for one. The desert in Nevada is vast, as infinite as the ocean. At night, when Piper stares out the window of her jail cell—or dorm room, rather—she’s met with nothing but an empty black void that spans for miles and miles, and she has the brief thought that this is what the passengers on the Titanic saw moments before their imminent death—absolutely fucking nothing.
What Piper wouldn’t do to be near the actual ocean again, or to even just have it rain for a day. The sun out here is unrelenting and the locals say there’s been a drought since mid-June.
It’s essentially a juvenile detention center, for two. Jane, her father’s assistant, reassured Piper that it was a rehabilitation school of sorts, where troubled kids like her could work on their problems while receiving extra support with their education, but Piper’s not stupid. She’s seen the movie Holes. The middle of the desert is the perfect place to exploit “troubled” children who nobody gives a shit about otherwise.
Among these, Piper believes the most vile, sick and twisted thing about Nevada’s Wilderness School is Saturday morning detention. She almost failed civics class at her old school because of how often she skipped, but she’s positive it’s against the 8th Amendment. Forget the punishment being cruel and unusual—it’s downright medieval.
The punishment doesn’t fit the crime, either. She received the detention on her first day for telling an upperclassman that was relentlessly hitting on her to kick rocks. The detention wasn’t for her response, but rather for the rock that shattered a first story window when the kid actually did what she said, then proceeded to point his finger at her and claim she had ‘savage’ anger issues.
Whatever defiance she previously possessed when telling off the upperclassman died in her throat as she watched the Headmaster write a Saturday detention slip not even halfway through her first official day.
“Not off to a very admirable start, are we, Miss McLean?”
Piper bit her tongue, grabbed the paper and marched out of his office. She wanted to tell him where he could shove his stupid detention slip, but she had a feeling her newfound…persuasiveness would only get her into more trouble. This is her fifth school in the past five years; she can’t get into any more trouble under any circumstance. Her father would probably disown her in the press.
Which is why she shows up to detention at eight o’clock sharp Saturday morning. Or at least, what she thinks is detention. The room number written down on her slip is located in the main building of the school, where all of her classes besides gym take place. It brings her to the third floor, to the very last classroom in the hallway closest to the staircase.
The door’s been left unlocked, but the room is otherwise empty aside from some kid sitting in a desk next to the casement-style window. One of his legs are folded under himself in the seat, and briefly Piper thinks sitting like that in a combo desk should be pretty uncomfortable . If he is feeling discomfort, he’s too preoccupied to acknowledge it. He’s engrossed with furiously scribbling something on a sheet of paper. He doesn’t even notice Piper walk into the room.
Piper awkwardly clears her throat, but not even that gets his attention. She smothers a flare of irritation in her chest and tries her voice instead. “Hey.”
The boy jumps, rattling the entire desk with him and banging his knee on the underside of it. The number two pencil flies out of his hand and clatters onto the floor a few feet away.
“Oh, sorry,” Piper says. Maybe she was louder than she meant to be.
If he hadn’t been sitting in the direct light of the window, Piper would’ve missed the way the tips of his pointed ears tinge red. At Piper’s apology, he sheepishly rubs the back of his neck with one hand. The fingers on his other hand adopt an unrhythmic tap against the desk. He clearly doesn’t know what to do with his hands without the pencil. “Nah, you’re good.”
Piper bends down for his pencil and walks over to hand it back to him. Up close, she can tell that he’s Latino—he has brown skin, a few shades darker than her own, and curly, dark hair with eyes to match. He has a boyish face—his round cheeks growing steadily pinker with every second that Piper stares.
“Sorry, again,” she says, handing him the pencil. He mutters a meek thanks, but he never looks away from Piper, his dark eyes wide and calculating. Piper feels like her skin is bare under the blazing Nevadan sun. It’s kind of unnerving.
Piper looks around the room, uncomfortable. “Um, are we early or something?”
The boy blinks, her question seemingly breaking him out of a spell. Piper swears she sees the twinkle of something mischievous in his eyes as he responds. “For Robotics Club? Nah, you’re right on time! Zeke and Carl are always late. Man, I can’t believe a girl is interested in joining this year. A real girl! First time in Wilderness School Robotics Club History!”
A frown paints Piper’s face. “Wait, huh?”
He holds her eye contact for one, two seconds before bursting into laughter. “Man, your face! I’m just messing with you. Don’t worry, you’re right on time for your date with detention.”
He doesn’t even allow Piper the time to be confused or unimpressed by his joke at the speed he offers her information. He speaks like he gets paid per punchline.
“Oh,” she says dumbly. He snickers to himself again and Piper’s frown deepens.
It only took ten seconds for him to lose interest in her. He’s gone back to scribbling, pencil flying across the sheet of paper in quick strokes. This close, Piper realizes what he’s doing is less scribbling and more so.. sketching. Neat and calculated. And the scribbles in question are in fact impressive blueprints of… an airplane. An airplane with a head of a dragon where the cockpit should be.
Interesting.
“Where’s the teacher on duty?” Piper dares to ask. At least if he tries to make a fool of her again there won’t be any witnesses to see her throttle him.
“Oh, that guy?” He snorts, erasing a line that went astray. “He had a. . . workplace accident.”
He points to the front of the room, where a cushioned rolling chair lies in a pile of disassembled parts on the ground.
“He’ll be back soon—hopefully not for long if I have anything to do with it.”
Piper doesn’t grace that very ominous statement with a response. She puts an end to the conversation by plopping herself in a desk closer to the front of the room, a safe distance away from airplane kid. Piper’s not the best at reading people, but she doesn’t have to be a master of social cues to know that he’s an absolute Looney Tune. He may as well have a flashing sign above his head that says BEWARE: NUTJOB.
She mentally starts making an Avoid at ALL Costs list for students at this godforsaken school. Airplane kid is going on it, right underneath the rock punter with anger issues. If she abides by it, she’ll manage to avoid unnecessary trouble, thereby avoiding getting into it further with her dad and being disowned.
She’ll also finish the semester with her sanity in check, so that’s a plus.
“ALLLLLRIGHT, CUPCAKES!”
Behind her, airplane kid swears, and Piper would laugh at the sound of the pencil hitting the floor again if she hadn’t also just experienced her soul leaving her body.
The gym teacher, Coach Hedge, swings the classroom door open will all the might of that cartoon sailor guy after he eats a can of spinach. He must be the teacher on duty, if the way he stares beadily in contempt at airplane kid is anything to go by. He firmly sets down a new rolling chair next to the broken one on the floor, and folds his muscly arms across an equally buff chest.
Airplane kid muffles a snicker into the crook of his elbow. Piper deduces he definitely has something to do with why the first rolling chair has seen its final day.
“McLean,” Coach Hedge regards her, pulling his baseball cap down snugly onto his forehead. “Wish I could say I didn’t expect to see you here, but I’d be lying.”
Piper doesn’t expect that to sting the way it does. “Good morning, Coach.”
Piper doesn’t know what to make of Coach Hedge. When she attended gym class her very first day, she immediately thought he was weird. He was overly muscular and abrasive, but he wasn’t taller than five feet, so Piper assumed he was some League 1 reject for a popular sport who spent his days projecting his crushed athletic dreams on troubled high school kids, like most gym teachers. But when he made the class run laps for the duration of the entire period, it was clear he cared less for the fundamentals of exercise and more for the preparation of some catastrophic event.
“Let’s go, McLean! Is that how you’re gonna run when Armageddon arrives? You don’t gotta run the fastest, just faster than these daisies. Move it!”
Clearly, Coach Hedge knows something that everybody else doesn’t, and Piper has no interest in finding out what it is. She would add him to her Avoid at ALL Costs list if she could figure out how to weasel herself out of his Mad Max style gym classes.
“Valdez!” Hedge barks. He points a stubby finger at the desk directly next to Piper. “Right here, where I can see you.”
Airplane kid makes a show of rolling his eyes, but gets up from his desk without argument and brings his drawing with him to his new assigned seat.
“Welcome to detention, cupcakes! For the next seven hours, it’ll be you, me, and a whole lotta conditioning.” Hedge falls back into the chair he brought in, getting comfy. “First on the agenda: we’re writing a two-page essay on how to win in a fight against a monster of your choosing.”
“Coach,” Piper says. “Sorry if this is out of line, but what does this have to do with our curriculum?”
“This is Wilderness School, McLean!” He exclaims gruffly, waving his finger between her and her detention companion. “Where the kids are the animals. And when you’re an animal, it’s eat or be eaten! Survival of the fittest!”
“So. . . when you say ‘monster’ you really mean animal? Like a predator?”
Coach Hedge shrugs. “Monster, predator, the difference won’t matter when it catches your scent and starts thinking of all of the ways it can have you for dinner, McLean.”
Yeah. He definitely knows something that they don’t.
Beside her, airplane kid sniffs. “Coach, I seem to have misplaced my pencil. Could you perhaps check inside that teacher’s desk for a writing utensil so that I may write this ever so important essay?”
Coach Hedge glares his beady eyes at him, but airplane kid doesn’t even flinch, stare challenging. Piper can see the same mischievous twinkle in his eye from earlier.
That can’t be good.
“First cardinal rule of Wilderness School, Valdez,” says Coach as he rounds the double pedestal desk. “An animal never ventures into the Wilderness unprepared.”
Airplane kid—Valdez—salutes him. “I’ll be sure to bring an extra sharp number two pencil when I’m cast in the next season of Survivor, Coach!
Hedge rolls his eyes, yanking open one of the desk drawers—
—which causes the entire thing to collapse into a heap on the ground.
Coach Hedge stares at the broken desk at his feet, frozen in shock. Valdez, who doesn’t seem shocked at all by the events that just transpired, tuts. “Sheesh, Coach. You’re kind of a klutz this morning. Did you come prepared to the Wilderness with a screwdriver by any chance?”
Coach Hedge’s face turns so red, Piper’s afraid he’s going to start blowing steam out of his ears. “VALDEZ!”
Valdez holds his hands up. “Woah! What happened to innocent until proven guilty, dude?”
In a fit of rage, Coach Hedge kicks a stray desk part and storms out of the room, yelling expletives Piper’s never even heard before all the way down the hall.
He sounds like a bleating goat.
Piper slowly turns in her seat. “Did you—?”
Valdez raises an eyebrow and lifts his previously empty hand, twirling a Phillips screwdriver between his fingers. “Yup.”
Well. Okay.
He better not expect her to be impressed by his vendetta for classroom furniture, because she’s totally not. Even if it is currently getting her out of that ridiculous essay.
She nods wordlessly and faces forward in her seat. Valdez chooses then to get up and retrieve the abandoned pencil he was using off of the ground, whistling Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 to fill the silence that settles over them.
This place is so freaking weird.
The whistling stops soon after he returns to his seat. Piper, feeling ridiculously awkward, pretends to busy herself with unravelling and redoing the braids she haphazardly put in her hair this morning.
“Soooo,” he finally drawls, clearly unable to appreciate a silent moment when it’s granted. “McLean, is it?”
Piper’s face twists into a grimace. Thanks, Coach Hedge. Now number two on her crazy list has half of her government name.
She turns in her desk once more. “Piper McLean, yeah.” What are the odds he landed himself in Wilderness School for identity theft, anyway.
For a few passing seconds, he only stares at her. Piper feels herself start to sweat. Crap, there’s no way he recognizes who her dad is, is there? He’s been in some big movies, but it’s not like he’s a household name or anything like that. He’s a B-lister, at the most.
Besides, airplane kid doesn’t look like a film bro at all. He looks like an airplane kid. Whatever that means.
“What?” She demands, voice terse.
“Yeesh, someone’s not a morning person,” he remarks to an invisible audience.
Even the most chipper birds would try to peck out their own eyes if they had to sit through what Piper’s sitting through.
“Leo Valdez,” he finally says. He points the tip of his screwdriver at her. “What’re you in for, Piper McLean?”
Piper rolls her eyes. “A misplaced rock into a window pane.”
“Woah, that was you?” He looks her up and down with an impressed brow. “Nice. That totally got me out of a math quiz.”
“I didn’t—” Piper cuts herself off. If she’s going to be forced to suffer the consequence of something she didn’t do, she may as well reap the benefits, too. Maybe he’ll leave her alone if he thinks she’s some violent miscreant.
She sighs, resigned. “Yeah, that was me.”
He considers her for a moment, perplexed by Piper’s lack of conviction. If he doesn’t believe her, he doesn’t voice it. He shrugs. “That’s not what I meant, though. You’re the new sophomore, right?”
Piper gives a hesitant nod. The boy waves his arms around, gesticulating to the general atmosphere.
“What’re you in for? What earned you a one-way ticket to the boondocks?”
Piper officially wishes he’d asked her about her dad instead. She shakes her head, “Doesn’t matter.”
“Course it does!” he says. “Second cardinal rule of Wilderness School: secure your role in the food chain. Eat or be eaten, right? How you got yourself in basically determines if you’re a wounded gazelle or king of the jungle.”
The mental image makes Piper wince. “I’m a vegetarian.”
“Okay, I feel like you’re not understanding the metaphor—”
“I understood the metaphor,” Piper says, rolling her eyes. ”Look, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, anyway. Alright?”
He shrugs, leaning back into his seat. “That’s real presumptuous. I’m partial to a good origin story.”
“This—” Piper waves her hands around, acknowledging the empty classroom and all its broken furniture galore, “—is not my origin story, dude. This is just a bump in the road, alright? I made a mistake.”
Piper is aware she did something wrong, even if the sales guy did technically hand her the key to the BMW when she asked.
Still, she knew what she was doing when she marched into the dealership that day. No matter how convincing Piper is, nobody was going to believe a kid who claimed the salesman handed her the key to a brand new car and watched her drive it off the lot. And she realizes now that she put herself and tons of other people in danger cruising down the highway only after learning the difference between the gas and the break pedals five minutes prior.
She only ever does bad things to get her dad’s attention, and the BMW incident was no different. This time she just took it too far.
(Literally. She still thinks she could’ve gotten away with it if she hadn’t hopped on the interstate.)
Piper’s not proud of it, and she doesn’t want to be judged for it. So, she’d prefer it if the students here just minded their business; that way she can mind hers and stay out of trouble.
She exhales a deep breath. God, these past couple of weeks have made her so emotional. “Sorry to snap. I’m kind of going through a lot. Could you maybe like… lay off?”
Leo Valdez just offers her a placating smile. “Nah, you’re good. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want. I get it.”
Without another word, he picks up his pencil and resumes drawing.
Piper didn’t expect him to drop it that easily. He clearly has no qualms being as annoying as possible to get what he wants, from what she observed this morning.
Was Piper really that persuasive?
“Besides,” his voice suddenly comes back, not a single trace of earnestness from before to be found, “you seem like too much of a goody-two-shoes to have done something that crazy.”
. . . Extraordinary timing on that one, really.
“Excuse me?” Piper says, her tone edging on pissed.
“Yeah, dude,” he doubles down, a smirk on his face. He’s either especially audacious or he’s terrible at social cues. Piper has a feeling it’s both. “You came in here all like ‘Where’s the teacher on duty?’ ‘Good morning, Coach Hedge.’ ’Coach, what does this have to do with our curriculum?’ You’re obviously not the gang banging type.”
The gall of this weirdo, calling Piper a goody-two-shoes because she’d rather not brag about her pending felony charge first thing in the morning.
Piper’s scoff rivals a housewife’s from Beverly Hills. “And I’m supposed to believe you are?”
“Well, I have been in a gang if that’s what you’re asking. Definitely puts me in the same category as a wolf or a hyena or something.” He tries to nonchalantly brush a few stubborn eraser shavings off his shirt sleeve and ends up flinging some back into his face. He quickly slaps them away and clears his throat with a cough. “That’s not what got me shipped off here, though.”
Piper eyes the classroom door with longing, desperately wishing Coach Hedge would come back already with his stupid essay prompts. Fine. She’ll bite. What could Leo Valdez have been capable of, anyway?
“Tell me what you did to end up here, then.”
She doesn’t mean for it to sound so demanding, but that’s how it comes out. But she if she had to guess, she’d say people probably lose their patience with Leo Valdez pretty often.
He shrugs. “Arson and manslaughter.”
Of course. Color Piper unimpressed. He would go with the scariest sounding crimes to make himself look cool. She rolls her eyes. “Right. Is that another one of your jokes?”
He offers her a quizzical look before realization dawns on his face. “Aw man, what the hell! Why did I say that? I usually tell people I freed all the animals from the Denver zoo and unleashed them into the city.”
“Flirted too close to the sun, huh?” Piper smirks at him. She’s expecting for his ears to turn bright red again the way they did earlier, but when his frown only deepens into a pained grimace, it gives Piper pause. “Wait. . . you’re not joking?”
“I mean, I was trying to. I don’t know why I said that.” He shakes his head, and a few eraser shavings finally free themselves from his curls. “Look, my social worker said it wasn’t the arson and manslaughter so much as it was the fleeing and eluding across several different states, but they can’t fool me—it was definitely the arson and manslaughter.”
This conversation is giving Piper the worst whiplash of her life. “Oh, my god, why are you saying arson and manslaughter so casually?”
“‘Cause they dismissed my case,” he responds, like it’s obvious information Piper should have read in the morning paper. “I was, like, eight, and there was no solid evidence that an eight year old would burn a warehouse down with his mother inside, so—”
Piper’s eyebrows nearly fly off of her face. “Wait, what?”
Leo clearly picks up on Piper’s mild horror. “Man, I should can it, huh? That’s my bad, I’m a chatterbox and really bad with social cues. Just forget that I said anything.”
“You burned a building down with your mom—?”
“No,” Leo says sharply, his demeanor taking a turn. His previous languidness straightens into something rigid and hard. For a fleeting moment, his expression is dark. It reminds Piper of the desert at night.
“Look, it was a freak accident, okay? My mom was a mechanic and she ran her own shop out of a warehouse. We were both there late one night, getting ready to leave. She had to go back inside because she forgot something. . .” he trails off, and he turns his face toward the vast stretch of dry, flat land outside of the window. “I dunno what happened, but I woke up in an ambulance. I survived. She didn’t. I got the blame.”
Piper is horrified, and for some reason the only thing she can bring herself to do is apologize. “Leo, I’m so sorry.”
He shrugs, a resigned smile on his lips, like he’s grateful that Piper hasn’t taken off running and screaming at least. “Nah, don’t be. Freak accident, remember?”
And, for some other reason, that makes Piper even more upset. “Just because it was a freak accident doesn’t make it any less sad. Or unfair. And I’m still sorry.”
Piper feels like the biggest jerk on Earth. The whole reason she didn’t want Leo to know about the car is because she doesn’t want to be judged for something she regrets, and here she is doing exactly that to somebody she just met. Somebody who definitely doesn’t deserve to be here, even if he is prejudiced toward classroom furniture.
Leo seems appreciative, if not a little stunned. He averts his gaze down to his abandoned sketch, folding the edges of the paper over into little triangles.
Piper can’t help but think he resembles a first grader’s connect-the-dots art—skinny, unsteady lines and knuckles and knobs, and covered in eraser shavings. He’s gone from one leg under himself to somehow folding his bony legs into a complete pretzel in his combo desk, and the baby fat that lingers in full, flushed cheeks pairs awkwardly with the sparse patches of stubble that pepper his upper lip. The tips of his ears begin to glow pink.
He’s just a kid, like her.
“I. . .” she begins, and Leo looks up at her, eyes keen. Piper fights off her swelling embarrassment. She can’t believe she’s doing this.
“I stole a BMW,” she blurts out. “Well, no, I didn’t steal it, I borrowed it. I asked the car salesman to let me take it for a joyride, and he handed over the key. I swear I was planning on bringing it back, but then the police eventually caught me on the interstate, and I panicked, and it turned into this high speed chase kinda thing, which eventually ended with me being spiked stripped live on national news. Which is like, a really fucked up thing to do to a fifteen year old girl, by the way.”
Leo Valdez, for the first time this morning, seems genuinely speechless.
“That’s why I’m here, so. Yeah.” Piper begins fiddling with her braid again. It’s her turn to be uncomfortable with silence. “Are you… are you gonna say anything?”
Leo Valdez beholds her with that same look from earlier when Piper took him by surprise; searing, like he holds a magnifying glass and Piper is a tiny, helpless sugar ant. Except he hasn’t bounced back with a quick-witted comment yet, and Piper wonders why he chooses not to set her aflame.
“Why’d you change your mind?” he finally asks. “About telling me?”
“Because,” Piper mutters, sinking into her seat, still twirling the ends of her hair. “It was only fair. Origin story for origin story.”
A tiny smile appears on his face at her answer.
She sits back up, a wave of confidence surging through her. “If we’re gonna be stuck here, we should at least be able to talk about it without shame. Not like it can get any worse than this, anyway.”
“Right.” Leo gives a firm nod. “The third cardinal rule of Wilderness School: Hakuna Matata.”
For the first time since being shipped off to the desert, Piper bursts out in laughter. And the feeling is almost as good the ocean, or cool rain. “You’re funny, Valdez.”
The lighthearted glimmer returns to his eyes then, and as nice as it is to see, Piper has a feeling that she’s done something terribly wrong. “Gee, thanks! My social worker says my impeccable sense of humor is a trauma response, but she wouldn’t know funny if it hit her over the head with a frying pan. That’s actually happened to me before, believe it or not.”
Piper blinks. “I think we know way too much about each other for people who met half an hour ago.”
“You’re right,” he agrees, suddenly standing up. “We should end this on a high note. Detention’s cancelled! See ya around. Maybe.” He picks up his drawing of the airplane, and considers it for a second before crumpling it up. “Airship was better. Airship was way better.”
“Woah, wait,” Piper manages to stammer out. “You’re leaving?”
“Oh, yeah. Hedge is not coming back. I mess with him every time I have detention. He can’t tolerate me for more than ten minutes.” Leo raises the paper ball above his head like he’s about to shoot a basketball and aims for the metal trash can by the door. He misses terribly. He throws his head back in a groan. “Puta madre. . .”
Piper watches his walk of shame over to the garbage in disbelief before the realization dawns on her. “Wait a minute. You’re telling me I could’ve gotten up and left 20 minutes ago?”
“What was that?” Leo says, cupping a hand around his ear. “I’m actually hard of hearing and you’re like, just so far across the classroom now!”
“I’ll kick your ass across the classroom—”
He points to the casement window. “Flying airship!”
He turns on his feet to bolt and promptly trips over the trash can, stubbing his toe. “God! Really?”
Under Piper’s unwavering glare, he hops around on one foot for a second before limping through the door.
Unbelievable.
“By the way!” Leo reappears in the doorway with a stern finger pointed in Piper’s direction. “You said something about me flirting earlier? I was not flirting with you.”
“Oh, you weren’t?”
“Nope!” He says with all the conviction of a bold-faced liar. At Piper’s subtle raise of an eyebrow, he only doubles down. “If I were flirting with you, you’d totally know it because you wouldn’t be able to resist me. I’m what they call a Casanova. I’ve got moves for days.”
A smirk creeps onto Piper’s face. “Does that trash can move usually work, or. . ?”
She relishes in the way his ears turn red one last time before he turns around and leaves for good.
Piper has changed her mind. Leo Valdez is going on the Avoid at ALL Costs list at number one. There’s not a doubt in her mind that he’s going to be nothing but trouble.