Warped (Maurissa Guibord)

Explain yourself."
    Tessa just stared at him for a moment. His imperious tone seemed so formal, and completely at odds with his modern clothes, his shaggy, unkempt hair. He looked like a hot surfer and sounded like King Arthur.
    "Well," she sighed. "We need to come up with a plan. For instance, where are you going to go? Where will you stay? What do we do with the tapestry, and the book?"
    "Very well," said Will, nodding agreement. "But first I have something to ask you."
    Tessa's eyes fastened on his briefly; then she looked away. Nope. Not again. Do not go there . His odd reaction at the waterfront was still vivid. She wasn't about to get lured in by the charm only to be squashed like a plague-ridden bug. If bugs got the plague. Maybe that was only rats.
    "Hmm?" she replied. She pushed F9 for two Smash Mouth songs. Exactly what she needed right now for distraction. Something upbeat and friendly but cool.
    "Is Tessa short for something?" he asked. When she hesitated, he narrowed his eyes. "Your name. Surely that's not all of it. I'm afraid if you don't tell me, I shall have to guess."
    Silence.
    "Very well. Is it Theresa?"
    "No."
    "Elizabeth?"
    "Stop."
    "Contessa," he said with a knowing nod.
    Tessa laughed. "God. Please. You'll never guess." Did she really have to do this? She huffed. "I suppose I'll have to tell you sometime. But it's a secret. A deep, dark secret."
    "Really? I'm honored." Will leaned forward. "Should we whisper, perhaps?"
    Tessa folded her arms across her chest. "My full name is Tesseract Margaret Brody."
    "Tesseract," Will repeated. At least he didn't laugh. But he really did look confused, thought Tessa, with his eyebrows pulled together like that and the full, firm band of his lower lip slightly ... Cut it out .
    She rolled a plastic straw--"a fantastic invention"--between her fingers. "When my mom was growing up," Tessa explained, "she was crazy about this book called A Wrinkle in Time , and she named me after--"
    "A player in the story?" Will tugged the straw from her fingers.
    "Sort of." Tessa sighed. "Margaret is the girl's name in the story. Meg for short. But my first name is ..." How to explain it? "More like a mathematical idea from the book. A theoretical construct." At Will's puzzled expression, she went on, "My mom was artistic. Not just about her painting, about everything, about life. Unfortunately, that included baby names. A tesseract is"--she recited from long practice--"the fourth-dimensional analog of a cube. A shape formed from two cubes with all their corners connected. Like this."
    She took a pencil from her bag, sketched a design on a napkin and showed him.
    "Fascinating," said Will. But his eyes were on her, not the paper. "Tesseract. Do you know, in the Greek your name means 'four rays of light'?"
    Tessa stared at Will. She was caught, tangled up in his eyes again.
    In the Greek? Who was he? She realized her mouth was hanging open. She shut it with a snap. "So now you know my secret," she said lightly. "I'm an imaginary mathematical oddity."
    "You seem real enough to me." Will reached forward as if to brush a lock of hair from her cheek but checked the motion and dropped his hand.
    Tessa let out her breath. He hadn't touched her, but she felt a whisper of warmth on her skin as if he had. Will de Chaucy, she thought. What had ever given her the idea that she knew him? She didn't understand anything about him. He was the almost-perfect stranger.

Chapter 21

Will and Tessa walked in silence from the pizza parlor. As they neared the bookstore, Tessa ducked into the alley that skirted the building.
    "This way," she told Will. "You can't stay in my room. My dad would be ... upset if he knew." Amazing. She had never realized how fluent she was in Understatement.
    "Of course," Will replied.
    Tessa took a ring of keys from her bag and flipped to one she hadn't used in a long time. "Follow me."
    "Where are we going?"
    Tessa pointed up. "Top floor. Technically my dad owns the whole building. But we don't usually use this back entrance." They walked in and climbed the set of creaky stairs covered with cracked linoleum. On the top floor Tessa stopped at a closed door. She hesitated for a moment, weighing the small key in her palm, then put the key in the lock, opened it and stepped in. Memories tugged at her like grasping fingers as she walked into her mother's art studio and flicked on the light.
    The large, bare-floored open space sprawled around them, lined with canvases propped