Realm Keepers 01 - Realm Keepers

Miles,” I told him reassuringly. “Not on biology, anyway.”
    Miles grinned. Miles has an amazing smile. He’s really tall, black, and has the body of a long distance runner. He’s not as big as the guys on the football team, and not as muscular as the guys who play basketball, but he’s really physically fit. And he’s got this great personality that makes it impossible not to be friends with him. He was one of my favorite students I tutored. In fact, I was thinking about waiting an extra year before going to college, just so I could be available to finish our tutoring. He was working really hard to set up his future, and I wanted to help him as much as I could.
    “I talked to Principal Jones,” I told him. “I think you’re going to be fine. They’re going to set you up with a new test, and if you pass it, the whole thing should die out.”
    “I hope so,” Miles said. “I need every bit of help I can get if I want to get into USC.”
    “They’ll probably let you in on your running alone.” I was a little envious. Unlike Miles, I didn’t have anything but my mind to help me get where I wanted to go. “But right now, you need to learn the difference between Baghdad and Bahrain,” I said, plopping down in the seat next to him. “Come on, let’s crack some books.”
    “Are you going to stay here in detention with me?” he asked, shocked.
    “Of course,” I told him. “How else are you going to catch up?”
    “Man, Sarah,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know how to thank you. Remind me to buy you a car when I’m big and famous.”
    “I will,” I told him. “Now get your books.”
    As Miles went digging through his backpack for the textbooks he needed, I looked around the room. Raven was sitting in the back corner of the room, texting on her phone until whichever teacher showed up who was responsible for detention that day. Blade was in the other back corner of the room; no surprise.
    What was a surprise was seeing the same shy girl who had wished me good luck in the election earlier that day. She was in the front row, staring down at her desk, but there was no book there for her to read. I wondered what she’d done to end up in detention. She seemed so shy, so far from a troublemaker.
    The door swung open behind me, and I heard a familiar voice.
    “Sweet sabers, Sarah, what are you doing in detention?”
    I tried not to groan as I turned around. It’s possible I didn’t totally succeed. There in the doorway, grinning below his mane of curly red hair, was my cousin Calvin.
    “Hi Calvin,” I said.
    Calvin wasn’t even fourteen yet, but he was a sophomore in high school already. That’s because he was crazy smart. But not crazy smart in a normal way, crazy smart in a mad scientist kind of way. He loved experimenting, and it seemed like he always had different science projects going on. Sometimes those projects got mixed up in alarmingly explosive ways.
    On top of that, he was a super geek. If Calvin were a superhero, that would be his name: Super Geek. If it wasn’t Star Trek, or Lord of the Rings, or ninjas, Calvin wasn’t interested. That day he was wearing a shirt with a picture of Darth Vader on it that said, “WHO’S YOUR DADDY?” Sometimes I thought Calvin’s science experiments were just an attempt to give himself super powers.
    “What the frack are you doing in here?” he asked, still smiling.
    “Calvin!” I said, shocked and looking around.
    “Relax. I said ‘frack.’ It’s from a show you’ve probably never heard of. They use it instead of the other word. But answer my question. What are you doing here? I can’t believe you’d be elected student body president and get detention on the same day.”
    “I didn’t,” I told him testily. “I’m tutoring.” I gestured at Miles and the book he was now poring through.
    Calvin’s face fell. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.” I couldn’t help thinking he would have been happier if I was in trouble.
    “What about you?” I countered. “What are you doing here?”
    Calvin scoffed and waved his hand dismissively. “It’s not even that big of a deal,” he started. “I may or may not have dipped my teacher’s stapler into a vat of liquid nitrogen, shattered it and then glued it back together.”
    “What do you mean, you may or may not have?” I asked.
    “It’s possible my teacher is unclear as to what actually happened to his stapler,” Calvin said with a