Going Long by Ginger Scott

left
him. With the girls’ help, I drafted a text to send to him from our table.
     
    I’m sorry I walked away from
you. You’re only trying to include me, and I love you because of it. Maybe we
can get together and really talk about everything sooner? I promise to have an
open mind.
     
    I didn’t think a text was a good
place to elude about having to talk about other things , so I just left
it at that. It took three of us to perfect the pathetic four sentences I did
send.
    We finished eating, and I walked
back to my dorm from the café where we met. It had been an hour since I sent my
text, and I still hadn’t heard from Reed. I was getting a little anxious on top
of the heavy worry that had already permanently moved into my conscience.
    To distract myself, I pulled out
the latest spreadsheets from the testing trials for the IQ project. I loaded a
few of them up on my computer and then went through my emails to see the others
that my group members had sent, which only made my stress shoot through the
roof. Nothing was right!
    Exasperated, I flopped back on
my bed and stared at the ceiling. It was going to take me hours to sort through
the results and put things in the right order just so I could merge everything
together. “I HATE GROUP PROJECTS!” I thought.
    I rolled sideways to glance at
my phone once again and there still was no message from Reed. Happy to have
something new to worry about—something I at least had some power
over—I pulled my laptop cord from the wall, gathered up my pages of
notes, stuffed a pencil in my hair and grabbed my keys to go upstairs.
    When I knocked on Gavin’s door,
one floor up, it slowly slid open since it wasn’t really latched. Gavin was
sitting on his floor in front of his laptop with notes spread all around and
his hands on top of his head. I started to giggle, realizing he was probably
coming to the same conclusion I just had.
    I could tell he had headphones
in and I didn’t want to scare him, so I reached over and knocked a little
louder on his now-open door. He turned around quickly and pulled an ear bud
from one of his ears.
    “Nolan! Thank God!” he sprang to
his feet, carefully stepping through his maze of papers and Monster Drink cans.
He was trying to clean up a little as I walked all the way into his room.
    “Hey,” I just smiled, sitting at
his desk chair and putting my computer down. “So, I take it you saw the data
from the dingle twins?”
    Gavin started laughing, putting
his hands on his hips and nodding a little. He had given them that nickname
during our last class when they had completely blown an IQ test attempt.
“Seriously, what is wrong with those two?” he asked, grabbing a hat from his bed
and sliding it over his chin-length hair.
    Gavin was the complete opposite
of Reed—artistic, tall and thin. He had black-rimmed glasses that he wore
all of the time and longer hair that he usually kept pulled back or hidden
under a hat. Both of his arms were covered in tattoos, and his wardrobe
consisted of nothing but old concert T-shirts—most of them from shows
he’d actually seen. Like Reed, though, Gavin was smart, ridiculously smart.
We’d talked about the stress of attending school on scholarships during our
classes, and I’d found out Gavin was a Mensa Scholar. He was a bona fide
genius, which was good, because I was going to need one to survive the dingle
twins .
    “I think we can fix it, but it’s
going to take us a few hours,” I said, blowing the loose hairs from my face.
    Gavin just stood at his doorway
and put his hands in his pockets, shrugging his shoulders. “I got nowhere else
to be, so let’s do it,” he said, scooping up his papers and sitting down on the
floor with his legs stretched out to hold up his laptop.
     
    My estimate wasn’t even close.
Gavin and I worked until midnight finishing up the data and running our
results. It was worth it, though, because not only did we come up with some
killer findings and draw some