Shot Through the Heart by Niki Burnham

He might risk a bad shot.”
     
    “Great news for you and Josh.” Not so much for Joe. “Thanks for the warning.”
     
    “I’m nothing if not chivalrous.” Connor pulls aside the lace curtain covering the thin row of windows alongside the front door, studies the yard for a few seconds, then lets the fabric drop back into place. “All I can say is that he’d better not hit my mom when she gets home from work or he’s going to regret it.” He gestures toward his bedroom. “Come on up. I’ve been going through my notes. I think I have everything.”
     
    I kick off my shoes before following him upstairs. His walls are a light gray, almost blue, and the decor is different than I remember. I haven’t been in his room since I was in fourth grade, when Tessa, Josh, and I stayed with the Strabinowskis for a long weekend while our parents were out of town. Tessa was on the phone with her friends all weekend while Josh, Connor, and I built a tent out of sheets in his bedroom. The walls were a sage-y green then. Where there used to be a giant Red Sox team poster over the desk, there’s now a bulletin board and calendar listing all his soccer practices and games, homework projects, and school events. There are autographed Tim Wakefield and Jon Lester baseball cards under glass on a narrow display shelf over his bed, but otherwise, the room is pretty spartan. Everything’s put away. The dresser and desk aren’t cluttered up with photos, trophies, or knick knacks the way Josh’s are, and there’s no sign of granola bar wrappers or pretzel carnage. The navy bedspread is completely smooth, as if no one has sat on it all day, and it’s neatly folded over at the top, right where it meets the pillows, the way you see in photos of nice hotels.
     
    Does he always keeps he room like this?
     
    Connor crosses to his desk, waving for me to take a seat on the bed. As much as I want to look around to see what other changes he’s made to the room, I keep my focus on the papers Connor’s flipping through in a large black binder.
     
    “How far have you gotten?” he asks.
     
    I envision the atomic sketches on Mrs. Wheeler’s whiteboard today. “We just started the unit on chemical bonding. Today we covered the differences between ionic and covalent bonds.”
     
    He flips backward through his notes, then sticks a paper clip on the edge of a page and hands me the entire binder. “Marked it. My guess is that she’ll cover everything in the same order as last year. The syllabus she gave us is at the front, so you can check. How’d you do on the atomic theory and structures exam? You’ve already had it, right?”
     
    I glance at the notebook page he clipped, then scan the pages immediately before it, which contain the information we’ve already covered. His notes on atomic theory might be better than mine, which is saying something. “I got an A…barely. I studied really hard, but the test was tougher than I expected.”
     
    To my surprise, he looks impressed. “If you got an A on that, you’re in good shape. It’s one of the hardest all year. There’s one on thermodynamics that’s killer. I think it’s in April or May. I got a low B, even though I studied for days.”
     
    “Ouch.”
     
    “Lucky for me, I had high enough scores on my other work to balance it out. It screwed up a ton of people’s grades that quarter.”
     
    He sits beside me on the bed and reaches for the binder, opening it across both our laps. He turns to the back section and pulls out a set of stapled pages covered in red ink. “Here it is. I have all the corrections on it, so that should help when you’re studying. Maybe you can avoid making some of the mistakes I made.”
     
    I look over the exam, partially in dread—it looks impossibly complicated—and partially in admiration. There’s tremendous detail in the notes down the side of the page. Best of all, the handwriting is legible. “This is amazing, Connor. I can’t believe you