He still didn’t look at her. She couldn’t think of anything to say. After a while, he walked away, into the boys’ bathroom; she dashed into the girls’, waiting impatiently for the line to clear, and came back out to find him nowhere in sight.

Oh, crap.

But when she went back to the lecture hall he was sitting right where he’d been, this time with his iPod earbuds in place.

She didn’t say anything. Neither did he.

It was the longest lecture, and the least enjoyable, that Claire could remember.

Physics was in the same building; if Monica was waiting out in the wilting sun on the Quad, she’d be getting a really good tan. Shane sat like a statue, if a statue wore headphones and radiated angry coiled tension that made hair stand up on a person’s arms. She felt like she was sitting next to an unexploded bomb, and given all of the physics she’d had, she understood exactly what that meant. Talk about potential energy….

Physics crawled slowly by. Shane broke out water and Twinkies, and shared. Chemistry was in the next building, but Claire made sure that they went out the side entrance, not through the Quad. No sign of Monica. She suffered through another hour and a half of chemistry and tension. Shane gradually unwound to the point that her nerves didn’t jangle like sleigh bells every time he moved, and ended up playing on his PSP through most of the class. Killing zombies, she hoped. That seemed to put him in a good mood.

In fact, he was positively cheerful during chem lab, interested in the experiment and asking so many questions that the teaching assistant, who’d never had to come to Claire’s table before, wandered over and stared at Shane as if trying to figure out what he was doing there.

“Hey, man,” Shane said, and stuck out his hand. “Shane Collins. I’m—what’s the word I’m looking for? Auditing. Auditing the class. With my friend here. Claire.”

“Oh,” said the TA, whose name Claire had never learned. “Right. Okay, then. Just—follow along.”

Shane gave him a thumbs-up and a goofy grin. “Hey,” he said in an undertone, leaning close to Claire. “Any of this stuff blow up?”

“What? Um…yeah, if you do it wrong, I guess.”

“I’m thinking about practical applications. Bombs. Things like that.”