Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love by Maryrose Wood Page A

glance up. The fourth-floor math room is directly underneath the lab, where Matthew communes with his brilliant bunnies. “Upstairs,” I say. “He’ll be here.”
    Randall looks up, too, as if Matthew is going to burst through the plaster. He starts to mumble. “See, it turns out I have, like, a lot of stuff to do today. . . .” His voice trails off.
    “Don’t freak out, Randall,” I say, trying to sound reassuring. “We just have a few really, really personal questions to ask you!” I laugh, to lighten things up, but it doesn’t seem to work. Randall fidgets. There are candy sprinkles scattered all over the table from the donuts. Randall starts to sort them by color into anxious little piles.
    That’s when Matthew arrives (through the door, not the ceiling). My tummy gives its customary Matthew-is-in-the-room lurch, and I uselessly run my hand through my hair to fluff it, Meg Ryan style.
    Matthew’s not alone, though.
    “Yo-YO, it’s the Randinator and his harem! Gimme some skin, O lethal one!” The Randinator high-fives Trip with a pathetic lack of gusto, knocking his neat sprinkle piles everywhere.
    Trip is not your average student at the Pound, not that there is such a thing. Trip’s name is really Harold or Harcourt or some prehistorically old-money family name like that, but whatever it is he’s the third one, so his nickname’s been Trip since he was a babe in his nanny’s hired arms. He’s gone to boarding school in Switzerland, three different private schools uptown, and even (rumor has it) some kind of youth rehab place. Now he’s basically chillin’ at the Pound, technically a freshman but sixteen years old due to his Lost Years.
    “Howdy, pardner!” Matthew gives me a half-smile and an actual who’s-your-buddy? PUNCH on the arm. How romantic. “You will never believe what we just did!”
    “Psychic rabbits, people! Matthew is da man!” Trip seems to be able to talk about one thing with his mouth and say something completely different with his eyes. Right now he’s looking at Kat, and his eyes are talking a mile a minute.
    “Psychic RABBITS?” says Jess. Jess is not even fully convinced that
people
can be psychic. We’ve had long debates about this.
    “Trip concentrated on an image, and the rabbits had to guess which one by pushing a lever,” explains Matthew. “Not all of them showed psychic aptitude, but Frosty, Fluffy, and George scored well above what could be predicted by chance.”
    Trip angles himself toward Kat. “These bunnies were
reading my mind,
” he says to her meaningfully. How cool, Trip, like we’re not all reading your mind right now! Kat scoots her chair back a little and glances at Jess and me for help.
    “Did it work both ways?” I ask innocently. “Did you develop a craving for carrots at any point?”
    “Totally,” laughs Trip. “Now I know exactly what bunnies think about.” He looks at Kat, laying on that rich-boy charm. “And they think about it all the time!”
    “Rabbits actually prefer lettuce,” Matthew says to me.
    An image forms in my mind, of me and Matthew walking down the aisle to the strains of the wedding march.
Ba-dum-de-dum!
Big fat happy rabbits hop around our feet. The rabbits wear bow ties. I am carrying a beautiful bouquet of iceberg lettuce. . . .
    “Listen,” says Randall. Practically invisible, see? I almost forgot he was here. “I have to go. Really sorry, guys.”
    “What about our interview, bud? Won’t take long at all,” says Matthew, who apparently sees nothing unusual in Randall’s demeanor.
    “Yeah, can’t do it. Just so much going on today. Sorry!”
    Matthew looks at me. I shrug. No great loss, in my opinion. “Okay, maybe we can reschedule,” says Matthew affably. “And we have a brief questionnaire, you can fill it out at home. Only takes a few minutes.”
    “Sure, that’s what I’ll do.” It seems to me that Randall might really be blushing now, but he grabs the questionnaire from Matthew and