Infinity Lost by S. Harrison

teachers’ chaperone raffle. Miss Cole likes to dress like a pinup from the 1950s, complete with perfect, shiny, loose brunette curls and neckerchief. She glides around school with Margaux and her friends like she’s one of them. Her outfits are great, but her student-teacher relationships are very unprofessional.
    And really quite creepy when I think about it.
    Speaking of creepy, Brent Fairchild over there is Margaux’s on-and-off boyfriend and captain of the lacrosse team. Brent “led” the Bethlem Breakers to victory in the interschool lacrosse tournament and got himself a seat on the bus, but I don’t really think you can call it a tournament when only two schools participate and the other school’s team, the Deerfield Stags, is not so secretly sponsored by Brent’s dad, who also owns the land their school is built on. Deerfield has conveniently lost every match that Brent has played in since he joined the team. Coincidence? I don’t think so. See what I mean? Dubious strings. The only reason Brent even goes here and not to Deerfield is because Bethlem is four times more expensive.
    Sitting next to him is his best friend and teammate, Brody Sharp. Brody is on the bus because he saved a year-nine student from a chemical fire in the science lab. Normally I would say, high grades or not, every hero deserves a reward. But what nobody realizes is that Bit found cam footage from a lab computer showing that Brody started the fire in the first place. Why don’t we tell? Because it’s not worth the trouble those two morons would cause us if they found out that we did. I’m not afraid of them, but Bit is terrified, and I’m sure the footage will be much more satisfying to release when Brody’s family blackmails him a path toward a high-powered political career, just like his mother’s.
    The two boys don’t really look the same, but I always thought they looked like they were cut from the same cloth. Brody is a little bigger, stockier, and definitely dimmer, and even though Brody’s hair is shorn close to his head and Brent’s is carefully brushed into a floppy fringe, they’re both sandy blond with brown eyes, both arrogant, both immature, and both a waste of my time. Brent and Brody. Sounds like a bad comedy show. I’m definitely not laughing.
    Most of the others deserve to be here. Karla Bassano is a biology whiz, Jennifer Cheng and Sherrie Polito are physics prodigies, and Dean McCarthy understands math almost as well as I do.
    Anyway, despite the few rotten apples, I’m gonna try and make the most of this field trip. That could be tough considering that I honestly couldn’t be more nervous.
    My father, as I’ve always been reminded, is a genius, but the revered admiration in the eyes and words of everyone who talks about his achievements are nothing but thorns in my side. I know what he’s done. Everyone does. I want to know who he really is. The net doesn’t offer up anything of any real use to me, and when it comes to asking Jonah or subtly interrogating our staff, I’ve always been told so little. Coming here and seeing this for the first time goes to show just how little I know about his life. So while the other kids might be out-of-their-minds deliriously happy to be here, I’m churning with mixed emotions. Nervous, angry, hopeful, a little frightened—there’s a whirlwind in my head and a typhoon in my stomach. I decide to focus on something else instead. Or maybe that should be someone else.
    The new kid. Ryan Forrester.
    He started at Bethlem Academy yesterday. Principal Ross chose Karla Bassano to show him around the school, and he’s on the trip today as a “Welcome to Bethlem” gesture. Actually, what really happened was when Principal Ross asked if anyone would be gracious enough to be Ryan’s school tour guide and field-trip buddy, the number of swooning girls’ hands that shot up was a truly pathetic testament to our society’s obsession with good-looking people.
    Karla is