Dangerous Boy (9 page)

He meets my eyes in the mirror. They look so different than they did on Friday. They’re a warm chocolate shade, filled with such strong emotion it’s hard to imagine him as the cruel boy from the basement, eyes as dark as the storm clouds outside his house. “Yes, I do,” he says, his voice strangled,
wrong.
Like it’s hard to say the words.

I shake my head, my hair slipping into my eyes. “Then why haven’t I seen him at school?”

His shoulders deflate. “Daemon was expelled from Cedar Cove. We all decided it would be better for him if he were homeschooled.”

Daemon.
A name he’s never spoken. How could he have kept this hidden from me? I swallow. “What did he do?”

“Will you just face me, please?” He wraps his hand around my shoulder, and I turn away from him, away from the sink. We’re only a foot apart as I look up, take in the pain in his eyes. I could get lost in them…in it. He swallows. “A lot of things. We might look alike, but…we’re completely different people.
He’s not a very nice person. He’s angry all the time, and bitter. I never wanted you to meet him. I didn’t think you needed to.”

I can’t believe this. I can’t believe he’d lie to me this way. Not just once, but over and over and over again.

“So it was him at your house?”

He nods. “Yeah. God, I am so sorry. I know what he’s like, and when we first got together, I kind of talked myself into thinking you didn’t need to know about him. I had no idea you’d come over on Friday. I was with my uncle, and Daemon didn’t say anything to me when I got home.”

“That’s why you never wanted me over at your house.” Anger, frustration, hurt…it all boils together in my stomach. “And you just thought…what?” I say, my voice rising, echoing off the tall ceiling. “That you’d just keep hiding it? For how long, Logan? How was that going to work?”

“I don’t know,” he says, his voice low and dejected. “I knew it wouldn’t. But the more I cared for you, the harder it became.”

“Do you even know how much he scared me on Friday? How could you lie to me like this?” I blink, my eyes stinging.

“I’m sorry.” Logan falls silent again, looking away as he chews his bottom lip. “I should have told you about him before, but I was so desperate to not be defined by him, to not have people look at me with these pitying looks just because of him. Because of the trouble he causes. This was supposed to be my fresh start. And maybe you can’t understand that, but I had to try.”

I feel sorry for him and infuriated at the same time. For now, though, my disappointment wins out. “What am I supposed
to do, Logan? Pretend you didn’t lie? Be relieved that the guy in the basement wasn’t my boyfriend after all?”

“I don’t know. But you
deserve
the truth. And there it is. I have a twin brother and I wish you’d never met him.”

I nod, in a noncommittal sort of way, still trying to process it all as I run my hands under my eyes to wipe away the tears that have managed to escape, desperate to look normal and not like I’m actually having a meltdown.

“I think that I was just so confused after my parents’ deaths. You know, they were so recent—just like a year and a half ago for my dad and a couple months ago for my mom—I think I kind of felt like I didn’t have any family left. But…” His voice trails off.

“But?”

“But that’s not true. I have Daemon.” There’s an air of finality to Logan’s voice, as if he’s just reached an epiphany from which there’s no going back.

I turn away from him, staring downward at the sink, ignoring his reflection in the mirror. “And your uncle?” I add.

“Yeah, and my uncle.” He pauses. “Though we still haven’t really connected and he’s away on business a lot. That’s actually one of the reasons I feel like you get me so much…because we’re kind of in the same boat family-wise.”

My heart breaks at that one. I do know how it is. I know
exactly
how it feels, to spend days and days alone, wondering if anyone would really care if you just disappeared.

He looks at me longingly, his eagerness to erase the events of Friday night visible on his face. “Can you forgive me?”

“I don’t know,” I say, my voice so low it’s barely audible.

“Please?” he whispers. “I should have told you. I know I should have told you.”

“I said I don’t know.” My answer comes automatically. I grip the countertop so hard my fingers ache. Then, feeling him still standing there behind me, I add, more earnestly this time, “Really, Logan, I don’t.”

“Fair enough.”

I don’t look up as he leaves the bathroom. A moment later, I shut the sink off and go back to the hall, heading toward my locker before I walk back to class. I have some face powder in there, and I want to at least apply a little to get rid of the pale and blotchy look I have from fighting away tears.

I’m spacing out a little as I do the combo, so it takes me two tries. When I finally pop it open, a long-stemmed rose swings toward me, and I barely manage to keep it from falling on the dirty hall floor.

I grab the flower, feeling melancholy about it, so different from the joy I’d felt over the first one. He must have put it in my locker this morning, before he found out what Daemon did on Friday.

I’m about to toss it into a nearby garbage can when I see the ribbon tied around the stem in a little bow, a small scrap of paper slipped underneath.

I slide it out and unfold the note.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

I bet you didn’t know

I’ve been watching you

I
gasp, feel like I’m choking on nothing, dropping the note as I cover my mouth with my hands. I glance over my shoulder, looking for someone
literally
watching me, but I’m alone in the hallway.

I turn back to my locker and start digging through the wrinkled homework and discarded candy wrappers until I find it. A note Logan and I had been passing in class just a week ago.

I smooth it out against my locker door and reach down to grab the poem. I hold it up next to the note from the rose, studying the writing.

It doesn’t match. Logan’s writing is upright, neat. Meanwhile, the writing on the note is slanted, darker, more scribbly. Almost as if the person who wrote it was manic.

I shove both papers into my locker and slam the door.

It’s not my boyfriend leaving me the roses after all.

•   •   •

I find myself thinking about Logan and the scary note in equal measure for the rest of the day, including the half hour I spend in the library avoiding him during lunch. By the time I make it to agricultural mechanics—ag mech, my final class of the day—I’m just happy to have Bick to distract me.

I go to my cubby to fish out my rubber hairband—required for this class—and safety goggles. Also required. Also very ugly. I’m no fashionista, but even I have standards.

“Hey DQ, you done with your gate hook yet?” Bick asks as I step into the shop, his safety glasses resting crookedly on top of his head.

I swallow, dismissing the image of another hook, and fake a smile. “I got the loop done,” I say, holding up a twisted chunk of metal that used to be straight. “Just not the…hook at the other end.”

“Ah. Plenty of time.”

I shrug and follow him deeper into the shop. We each grab a thick leather apron and then cross the expansive space, sparks flying through the air around us. I dodge a hammer and then glare at the kid who had tossed it to his buddy with no regard for my precious head.

There’s something comforting about this class. A chance to be myself. Which is funny, really, since I’m the only girl in this class. Allie might be adventurous, but she’d never dream of taking a welding class.

For an hour every day, I hang out with Bick, and no one cares if I’m not wearing makeup.

“You okay?” Bick asks, his eyes concerned as he looks down at me. “We missed you during lunch.”

I slip on a pair of leather gloves and pick up a set of tongs, using them to grip the hook as I slide it into the glowing forge, more slowly than necessary. Even through the thick leather, I can feel the heat on my hands. Then I play with the temperature, even though I know the dial’s already at its proper place.

But then I’m out of ways to stall. “Eh. Sorta.”

“Something wrong?”

I just stand there, a little too warm in the gloves and apron. I lean in closer to check the forge but my hook is just beginning to glow, a deep, dark red. “Apparently, Logan has a brother I didn’t know about.”

“Oh.”

“A
twin
brother.”

“
Oh
,” Bick says, his blue eyes wide. They’re almost comical behind his safety goggles.

“Yeah. And he’s not so nice.”

“What did he do exactly?” Bick asks, his expression no longer so light and goofy. His eyes sweep over me, like he’s trying to actually
see
what happened. “Are you okay?”

“He decided to pretend that he was Logan on Friday night.”

“Oh.” His voice falls. He purses his lips and stares into the forge, his shoulders rigid. “That’s not cool.”

“Yeah, and he did a bunch of stuff that totally freaked me out. And since I had no idea he wasn’t really my boyfriend, I spent all weekend upset about it.”

“Well, that sucks.” He frowns as he turns the dial on the forge. “You should have called me. Are you okay now?”

“I guess…” I’m surprised by Bick’s offer to call him. We’ve been friends for years, but we almost never hang out without Allie and Adam, except in this class.

“You guess?” His eyes flicker over at me. The genuine concern I see echoed in his eyes actually comforts me.

“Yeah,” I say, and in that moment I realize that I kind of am. “It just threw me for a loop when Logan sprung this twin thing on me this morning. That’s why I skipped lunch—I just needed time to process it.”

“Oh. That explains why he looked so miserable.” Bick grabs his own set of tongs and takes his hook from the forge, moving to the anvil to pound on the red-hot metal a few times before looking up at me. “What are you going to do?”

I grab my own tong and pull my project out, holding it away from my body as the disconfigured steel glows hot. I hold it carefully with the tong as I pick up the hammer and hit it several times, watching the metal bend around the curved tip of the anvil. When the red-hot glow cools to a burgundy shade, I go back to the forge and toss it in. “I don’t know.”

Bick tosses his hook back on top of mine and then turns to me. “Do you want me to talk to him?”

I shrug. “I mean, I don’t even know what you’d say.”

Bick steps closer, shoving his safety goggles up on his head. “I can tell him to find a new lunch table for starters.”

I stare into the forge, my face growing warm, both from the heat of it and from embarrassment. I’m not the sort of girl
who is used to being rescued. “No, it’s fine. I have to talk to him sooner or later.”

We work for a bit in silence, hammering away, putting our hooks back into the forge, hammering again.

“You gonna forgive him?” Bick asks, a few minutes later.

I stare into the heat of the forge, unblinking. “I think so.”

“Really?”

I cross my arms and turn around to face him. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I guess I get it. Why he didn’t tell me about Daemon. I mean, I met the guy. I don’t think I’d claim him as my brother either.”

“Fair enough.” Bick nods, but his eyes are somewhere else, like he’s lost on another planet. He drops his hook into a bucket of water, and it hisses as it sinks to the bottom. He shuts off the forge as I drop my own hook into the bucket, and then we cross the room and hang up our leather aprons and gloves.

The final bell of the day rings, and the relief is swift. It’s been such a long, up-and-down sort of day. We step through the roll-up shop door and head to the gravel parking lot where all the juniors park, taking the back sidewalks, a shortcut. It still drizzles, but it’s nothing like the storm of last weekend.

I’m looking down to adjust my backpack straps when Bick stops so abruptly I ram into his back. “Whoops,” I say, stumbling to a stop. “Sorry.”

Bick doesn’t speak, just stares out at the lot. I follow his line of sight, freezing at the image of a bloody hand on Bick’s driver’s side window.

“Oh my God,” I say, my hand covering my mouth. “Is that—”

“I don’t know,” he says.

I turn and look at the car parked next to it, and it’s the same thing—a bloody handprint on the driver’s side glass. I spin around and take in the other cars nearby.

It’s all the same. Up and down the sidewalk, students stop, stare at their cars, murmur to one another. A few students are already pulling out of the lot despite the red handprints that obscure their faces.