Pass/Fail (2012) by David Wellington

and suddenly alarm bells went off in his head, clanging out a million different warnings.
    “My ear?” She stared at him with wide eyes.
    “It’s beautiful,” he said, not knowing how else to explain. “I’ve been thinking that for the last hour. You have a beautiful ear.”
    “You’re unbelievably weird, do you know that?”
    “Yes,” he said, sighing. He turned away from her. “I do. I’ve never been like anybody else.” This was it, he decided. His heart sank in his chest. This was the part where he had to face up to the fact he wasn’t cut out for dating, or at least not for dating someone incredible and well-adjusted like her. “I’m sorry.”
    “Why?” she asked.
    He still couldn’t face her. “I wanted this to be a normal date. I wanted us to be boyfriend and girlfriend. You have to believe me. But I can’t change who I am. I’m weird.” He threw up his hands in resignation. “I’m a nerd. A geek. I’m so sorry. I can’t get through one date without creeping you out. I’ll take you home.”
    She grabbed his chin in her hand and he went rigid as she pulled his face around so she could stare into it.
    “I said you were weird, Jake. I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”
    She grabbed at his hands and pulled him down a narrow alley between two stores. They came out on the side away from the parking lot, a narrow strip of asphalt full of dumpsters and lost shopping carts.
    “Nobody’s ever said anything about my ear before,” she told him, with a laugh. “It makes me feel special, do you understand? Do you know how rare that is?” She didn’t let him answer. She was too busy pushing him back against a rough wall and kissing him deeply.
    He went into shock, a little. He closed his eyes. He opened them again. She was still kissing him. Her tongue was in his mouth. Her hands were on his chest, her short fingernails digging through his shirt.
    It was exactly the wrong time for him to notice that someone had tagged the dumpster behind her. It was the last thing he should have paid attention to. Yet what he saw made his blood run cold, even as other parts of him were starting to warm up. Written in red spray paint were the words:
    DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 17
     

Chapter Eighteen
    DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 17
    Jake read it again, and again.
    He was seventeen. So was Megan, and Cody. Everyone over that age—Mr. Zuraw, the Principal, the police—had turned against him. The message on the dumpster could have just been crude adolescent paranoia, the passing whim of a teenager unable to accept or understand the adult world. Except Jake didn’t think that was it at all.
    Maybe he was reading too much into what was, honestly, a very simple message. Except that—well—he couldn’t be sure. But he thought it was written in exactly the same shade of red spray paint as the string of Ps and Fs he’d found in the ruins behind the school. Which meant that maybe the same person had left both messages.
    Messages meant for him, and him alone.
    DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER 17
    “Megan,” he said, “when’s your birthday?”
    Megan stopped kissing his neck and took a step backwards. “Not until March,” she said. She looked confused.
    “So you’re still seventeen.”
    “I think you’re getting ahead of yourself,” she told him. “It’s not illegal to kiss me. And that’s as far as I planned on going tonight.”
    “Wait—what?”
    The start of a rage was smoldering behind her eyes. What he said next could fan the flames into a conflagration, if he wasn’t careful. “I didn’t mean… what you think I meant,” he said. “I was looking at that.” He pointed at the graffiti on the dumpster.
    She turned to look at it. Her face was a mask of suspicion. “You were reading graffiti while I was trying to make out with you.”
    He could only nod. She was going to be pissed. She had a right to be pissed. He wanted very, very much to rewind his life about thirty seconds but that wasn’t an option.