Maps (5 page)

A gentle knock.

Maps stood up and went to his door, assuming his mother had come to tell him to go to sleep or turn off his bedside lamp. But when he opened the door, no one was there. Dumbfounded, Maps looked around his room again. There it was again—a gentle
tap tap tap
.

His window.

Maps plastered himself against the far wall. His window was covered by curtains, and if there was a monster or a bird on the other side, well, it could bloody well stay out there.

“Little pig, little pig,” someone on the other side of the window whispered, “let me in.”

What. The. Shit.

Maybe it was just Benji, for some reason or another, playing a trick on him in the middle of the night. Or maybe it was just a dream. Maps pinched his arm.

Nope, not a dream.

Like the true soldier of bravery he was, Maps walked to the window and pulled back one of the curtains. On the other side of the window—the second story window—somehow, was Lane.

“Open up,” Lane whispered. “It’s freezing.”

Maps pulled open the curtains and unlatched the hinge on the side of the window then slid it open. He had no idea what Lane was doing outside his window or how he got there, but the last thing he wanted was to let the guy freeze.

Lane slipped inside and shook himself like a dog just in from the rain. Then he looked at Maps and smiled.

Maps swallowed hard. Then remembered something.

“Did you just call me a pig?” Maps huffed, folding his arms over his chest.

Lane laughed quietly. “Yeah, sorry. I thought it would be funny.”

“How did you get up here?”

“I climbed the lattice.”

“Okay. Why?”

“To get into your room without anyone seeing me.” Lane shrugged.

“Well, yeah. I mean, why are you in my room, especially at—” Maps looked at the clock on his desk—“almost one in the morning?”

“I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to talk to you. Then I looked over and saw that your light was on and thought you were still awake.”

Lane gave Maps a once-over, starting at his toes and ending at Maps’ obviously disheveled hair. Lane grinned wider.

“What?” Maps demanded.

“Nice pajamas.”

Maps looked down. “They’re robots. My mom bought them for me for Christmas.”

“Uh huh,” Lane replied. He started unzipping his hoodie.

“Yeah, well, nice, uh…”

Maps watched Lane unzip his hoodie and toss it to the ground. Lane was wearing gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt underneath.

Lane didn’t look right in Maps’ bedroom. Lane was too… something. He was obviously much too large for most of Maps’ furniture. Maps figured that Lane could probably take up the entirety of Maps’ bed if he star-fished out his limbs. Maps found himself blinking rapidly at that thought.

Just as Maps was about to tell Lane to Spiderman his way back over to his own room, Lane moved past him, further away from the window. Lane walked up the far wall and stared. Maps went over and stood next to him.

“What is all this?” Lane whispered.

Maps looked up at the wall Lane was facing.

Often enough, Maps forgot they were even there—they, being hundreds of taped, tacked, and glued pieces of paper, each exploring a different experiment, diagram, graph, chart, or map. He’d started when he was younger; he’d rip pages out of his mother’s cookbooks and scribble his ideas all over them. Not wanting to forget his genius ideas from one minute to the next, Maps would tape the experiment outline on his wall. But then he’d need another piece of paper to write down supplies, and another for the subjects and factors affecting each experiment. He’d need maps of the places he found tools for each experiment, or where each experiment took place. Some were city maps that had lazy red circles and scribbles all over them, some were much older ones drawn in crayon of Maps’ own backyard. There were etchings and drawings of findings, experiments gone right, and experiments gone oh-so wrong.

But something else caught Lane’s eye, because he walked over to Maps’ bed, crawled up on it, and kneeled in front of the wall the headboard was against.

“Wow,” Lane said, and for some reason that warmed Maps in his chest.

Above his bed was a gigantic collection of papers, color-coded and sectioned. It was a visual of all of the experiments Maps’ had ever done. Just his findings, his finals. Blue meant it was successful, red, not so much. Green meant he’d have to reevaluate at a later date, and black meant it was too dangerous, or so his mother said, to continue to work on that experiment.

Maps crawled up on his bed and knelt right next to Lane, looking at the wall. “I know I use the term
experiment
a little loosely, or so Benji constantly tells me. They’re more just ideas, things that get trapped in my head until I let them out.”

“Is this why everyone calls you Maps?” Lane asked.

Maps shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much. Benji and I grew up together. The first day he came into my bedroom and saw all the papers on the walls. After that, he just started calling me Maps. Which is better than Scribbles, I guess.”

“Listen,” Lane said, turning to Maps.

Maps noticed the close proximity and mentally began to sweat. Okay, maybe a little physically, too.

“I wanted to say thanks,” Lane said. “And sorry about earlier today in Mr. Rogers’ class. I kind of freaked, and well, what you did was real cool.”

Maps just shrugged. He and his robot pajamas didn’t know what else to say to Lane and his gapped front teeth and his Ken-doll hair.

“I mean it,” Lane went on. “It meant a lot. I shouldn’t have let you take the fall. I couldn’t sleep at all tonight thinking about it. I’m going to go to Mr. Rogers tomorrow and tell him that I switched our tests.”

“No,” Maps squeaked. Then, recollecting himself, cleared his throat. “I mean, no. It’s all right. I was actually thinking that if you wanted—I mean, if you didn’t mind—or if you thought it would help, I could maybe tutor you or something. I’m good with math, so I just thought… you know, whatever.”

Maps, right at that moment, was dying of humiliation. He kept trying to avoid all forms of eye contact.

He lied. He hadn’t been thinking that at all, and it just came out of him like verbal vomit. He had no idea why on earth his stupid brain had decided to vomit all over Lane.

Lane grinned at him—that big, honest, dolt of a grin, and Maps knew why his brain had told his mouth to puke words on Lane. He was definitely puke-worthy.

“Are you sure?” Lane asked, sounding excited. “Because that would be amazing. I fell behind the past few years and never caught up, and honestly, was a little embarrassed to ask for help.”

“Yeah, of course. No problem. The least I could do for kidnapping your sister and trying to eat her corn-brother.”

“She still carries that thing around with her, you know.”

“She started it. She asked me where babies come from.”

Lane looked over at the clock on Maps’ desk. “I’d better go and try to get some sleep.”

Maps nodded.

For some reason or another, Maps thought it was the chivalrous thing to do to walk Lane back over to the window and see that he didn’t break his neck on the climb down. Just before crawling out of the window, Lane looked back at Maps. He had an odd expression on his face—a mixture of seriousness with a hint of curiosity and reserve. That slightly pained expression, the one that Maps had seen all too often in his short life, could mean only one thing—Lane wanted to punch him.

Right in the face.

Maps took a step back, and that seemed to do the trick. Lane shook out of his punch-craving stupor and smiled. Maps didn’t know what he’d done to warrant an almost-punch in the face, but it wasn’t like it was an uncommon occurrence. His mother said he just had a way about him that seemed to get on people’s nerves.

Lane climbed his way back down the lattice on the side of the house, pausing when he flopped into the small snow bank at the bottom. Maps watched him from the sill of his window.

With one hand over his heart and the other up in the air pointed toward Maps, Lane started to speak. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”

Maps instantly slammed the window closed, latched it up tight, and drew back the curtains. Lane was obviously crazy—absolutely bonkers, actually. Still, Maps peeked out through the curtain to watch Lane climb back up the side of his house and plop himself into his room.

Maps only watched because it was the polite thing to do.

Really.

“So, this number is the injured jerk, right?” Lane looked over at Maps. Maps wanted nothing more than to go play in traffic on the freeway. Tutoring Lane was hard. No, wait. Running up three flights of stairs backwards without looking behind you was hard. Helping Lane was impossible.

“It’s not an injured jerk,” Maps said. “It’s an
integer
.”

Lane blinked at Maps.

“In-teh-jur,” Maps went on. “It means a whole number.”

“As opposed to what?”

“A fraction. Any number without a decimal is an integer.”

“Isn’t it kind of dumb to have a word specifically for a whole number? Why not just call it a whole number?”

Maps sighed, his forehead falling to the tabletop. “I don’t know, Lane. I didn’t make the rules.”

“I’m getting on your nerves, aren’t I?” Lane asked sheepishly.

“What?” Maps lifted his head. “You’re not.”

He was.

But it wasn’t an annoyance at Lane so much as him for not asking for help with the basics years ago.

“I’m never going to get this,” Lane said in disbelief.

“Hey,” Maps replied, “yes you will. We’ve been working at this for weeks and you’re getting better already, right? I mean, you did better on your latest test, didn’t you?”

A coy smile splayed itself out on Lane’s face. “Yeah.”

“Do you want to go over problem six again?”

“No. I was thinking we could do something fun. You know, take a break.”

“Uh.” Maps knew his idea of fun was much different from Lane’s. Maps currently had an experiment brewing in the upstairs bathtub that he was excited to go check on, but he doubted that Lane wanted to see what different effects water had on different kinds of dyed potatoes.

“I was thinking we could play catch.” Lane’s gapped teeth made an appearance.

“It’s cold outside. And there’s snow.”

“Not that much. Come on, Maps. Just put on a jacket and some boots. You’ll be fine.”

Against Maps’ better judgment, he agreed.

Lane sprinted over to his house to throw on some more weather appropriate apparel, while Maps rooted through the front closest to find his warmest winter boots.

For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what happened to the right boot of one pair, and the left of another. But they still technically worked, so Maps pulled them up on his feet, tucking his skinny jeans into the bottoms. He had a warm, puffy winter jacket that was probably a size too big for him, and a bright pink scarf with gold pom-poms on the ends. Benji had given it to Maps last Christmas as a joke, but the joke ended up being at his best friend’s expense because Maps absolutely adored the hideous scarf, and not in the ironic sense.

Maps stood at the back door and waited. Lane eventually swung the door open, letting in a gust of cold air with him. He pulled maps outside with him, after eyeballing Maps’ scarf for a few seconds past what Maps thought was polite. Handing off one of the baseball gloves to Maps, Lane jogged away to the other end of the yard.

Lane looked like a pro with his winter bomber jacket and baseball cap on. Maps thought the baseball cap was silly because obviously it wasn’t providing Lane any extra warmth. At least it looked good. Maps looked down at his stupid scarf—that he loved—and his mismatched boots. If he were a different sort of person, he might be embarrassed. Good thing he wasn’t a different sort of person.

“Okay, I’ll toss it underhand, real gentle,” Lane hollered.

Suddenly, like a meteor sent from above, plummeting through space and time to punish the wicked, a gigantic ball flew faster than the speed of light directly at Maps’ face.

He squawked—a very manly squawk, no doubt—and fell to the ground with his catching mitt over his head. The ball landed in front of him with a thud, billowing its way into the snow. Maps carefully stood up and dusted off.

Lane chuckled. “Haven’t you ever played catch before?”

“Uh, no. It feels like a waste of time.”

“Come on. You’ll get the hang of it, then you’ll see how much fun it is. Here,” Lane said, stooping down and picking up a wad of snow. “Catch this. It’s not as hard as a softball, so you shouldn’t be compelled to duck and cover.”

Lane tossed the snowball underhand. Maps watched as it slowly made its descent from above.

He could do this. Lane was right. Snow wasn’t scary, and it definitely couldn’t hurt him. So he reached up with his glove, about where he expected the snowball to land, and waited.

As soon as the snowball fell into Maps’ glove, it exploded like a million little snowflakes were just released for summer vacation. The snow poofed right into Maps’ face.

Again, Lane laughed.

Maps reached down to scoop up a snowball and tossed it at Lane, ignoring the fact that he could barely see anything with snow-covered glasses. He packed the snowball tight, lined up to throw, slipped on a patch of black ice, and face planted into the snow bank next to where he’d been standing.

Lane was howling.

Maps rolled onto his back, brushing the snow off his face with his mittens. Lane came over and crouched down in front of him.

“I lost my glasses.” Maps felt around for them in the snow. “I think they might’ve gotten tossed over there.”

Lane moved away from Maps, looking in the shallow piles of snow for the lost glasses. As quickly and quietly as he could, Maps scooped up a massive wad of snow, rounded it into a lop-sided ball, and hurled it at Lane’s back.

When Lane whipped back around, Maps pretended to look around for his glasses. Lane flopped down beside Maps, handed him his glasses, and smiled.

“You look like a little kid playing in the snow—your crooked glasses, your mismatched boots, and that ridiculous scarf.”