walk signal appears, counting down in white digits from thirty seconds.
âYou donât âcatchâ a genetic disease,â I say. âThatâs the point.â He shades his eyes from the sun with one hand, just surveying me, while the walk signal drops down to twenty seconds. Of course, he knows you donât catch a genetic disease. âI mean, obviously. Well, you were kidding. Okay, Iâm shutting up now.â Nice one, Rose.
But he just laughs again, the shoulders going, and somehow I feel sort of okay being the biggest dork on the planet. Like I donât have to pretend Iâm anything but.
âOkay, HD. Well, in that case, please donât experience the effects of epigenetics and have a mechanism in your present environment effect changes to your genetic expression. Better?â
Now Iâm grinning. âBetter.â He grins back, then turns to jog across the street before the light changes again.
Six
âSo? Details, please. The date. Tell me everything.â Lena leans across her desk to whisper in my face when we sit down for AP Calculus first period Monday morning. She looks like a proud mother whoâs about to ship her kid off to college.
âAlso, what do you think happens if a guy with the gene for sickle cell and a girl with the gene for Huntingtonâs make babies?â Lena muses. âDo you think those gene mutations would magically cancel each other out and youâd have perfectly healthy children?â
I roll my eyes at her. âOkay, first of all, youâre incorrigible. Second of all, he doesnât have sickle cell, his sisters do, and anyway, that is a totally scientifically unsound theory. And third of all, it wasnât a date. It was ice cream and conversation. Very civilized. You should try it.â
At the front of the room, Mr. Petrilli is writing out some warm-up problems involving standard deviation on the white board. I like Petrilli; we all do. Heâs been teaching here forever. Bowling ball head, thick Boston accent, and he takes three days off every April to go down to Red Sox spring training. That, and heâs known for using Mrs. Petrilliâs baked goods in class from time to time. I still donât understand how Rice Krispies treats are related to the derivative, but it doesnât really matter.
âCome on, give me a clue,â Lena whispers, leaning a little closer as she opens to a clean page in her notebook.
I start jotting down Petrilliâs warm-up problems. âHe goes to Barrow.â
Lenaâs face contorts instantly, like sheâs just bitten into a sour gummy. âSeriously? Ick!â
âNo, heâs cool. He made a joke about it. Heâs funny. And smart.â
âFunny and smart,â Lena says triumphantly, nodding. âLike you.â She gives me one of her huge toothy fake grins. Lena acts like a goof a lot of the time, and she can sometimes sound ditzy, but sheâs actually one of those effortlessly smart girls who gets Aâs on everything without even trying that hard. Iâd probably hate her if she hadnât been my best friend since forever.
Petrilli clears his throat and launches into todayâs lesson: âAh-right, letâs talk about stand-ahd deviation.â I relax a little at the excuse to stop thinking about Caleb and set my eyes on the board.
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But then I have no choice but to think about him, because he disappears. No text messages, no IMs or Facebook chats. He doesnât even respond to the Teens with Bad Genes link I send over. By the middle of week two with no sign of him, Iâm convinced that heâs vanished because heâs realized that he made a massive mistake by hanging out with me.
âMaybe he thinks I thought ice cream was a date-date? And now he feels awkward about it?â I ask Lena over the phone when I should be finishing my English reading.
âIf thatâs true, heâs super