Downcast (19 page)

There was a car in the driveway, parked behind our Prius. It was a sleek silver Jaguar sports car. It looked almost predatory behind our busy beaver of car.

Just the fact that there was someone other than Mom or myself in the house put me on high alert. When was the last time I'd ever seen anyone else in our house? I literally couldn't remember.

Loud voices spoke in muffled booms from inside. Despite being anxious, I couldn’t help but feel a little Super Spy as I carefully edged around the house to where the voices grew louder.

The voices now came clearly from the kitchen.

"It’s over. You do realize that, don’t you?"

My eyes nearly popped out of my head as I heard the voice of Katie Jones.

"Even if you try and…get out of town like you usually do," she continued. "It won’t work. They know what to look for now, and they won’t stop until they find you again."

“This is your fault,” Mom snapped. “You need to fix this. You need to make it work.”

“You know I can’t. That’s just the way things are.”

“I will not accept that! Ever! Nobody is going to take what is rightfully mine!”

I shivered at the deadly heat in Mom's voice. It was like the voice of a stranger.

"I told you from the start that this was a bad idea," Katie Jones added.

"Remember whom you are speaking to!" Mom's voice was like a whip, and I flinched.

"I'm not likely to forget. Look, I came to warn you that it’s really, truly over now. My advice is let things be, let it happen. You have other obligations and duties, and you’ve been coasting on those for a long time now. Maybe it’s time to focus on that going forward."

"Get out."

I needed to get out of sight, so I slipped around the side of the house and hid behind some bushes in total Super Spy style. My head was spinning, and my heart was about to burst out of my chest, it was pounding so hard. Katie Jones stepped through the front door and paused for a moment. She turned and looked at the bush I was hiding behind and smiled sadly. I watched as she got in her car, revved the engine and drove off.

I went inside to find an eerily cheerful Mom, fixing dinner for me. The whole night was weirdly peaceful, and Mom let me drive off with Helen the next morning without a word.

***

After watching Haley walk away from Jordan, I noticed that my breath came out in a light white puff of air. It had been cold outside, and I now realized it was shockingly cold in the building, and students were running back to their lockers for hats, jackets, scarves and gloves.

At first, I had thought it was just because it was frigid outside with heavy, dark clouds promising snow...or something, because it couldn't really snow again in September, could it? I huddled in my thin jacket—having picked it over my heavier winter coat because for crying out loud, it was still technically summer—and shivered my way up the stairs to European History.

In the classroom, Rob was sitting in the seat next to mine.

His face lit up in a smile when he saw me. I blinked hard, trying to reconcile the fact that this was the second day in a row that Rob Furlong had started by smiling at me, and I couldn't help but smile in return.

"Hey, Stephanie," he said. "Crazy morning, right?"

"Yeah, what's going on with the cold?" I asked, trying not to read anything into the fact that he was actually talking to me.

"Boiler's broken is what I heard," he answered. "Don't know why they don't send us home."

"Think they will if it gets worse?"

"Probably not. They don't want to use up a snow day when it's not even snowing."

"Oh." Silence fell between us.

"I'm so sorry about yesterday," he said softly.

I looked up at him to find warm brown eyes riveted on me.

"Sorry?" I echoed, confused.

"Yeah," Rob said shyly. "Those guys in the parking lot. I should have been there to stop them."

"Oh!" Well, hell, what to say to that? "That's really sweet of you, but I'm glad you weren't...I wouldn't want you getting your arm hurt even more."

He grimaced. "If my arm had been okay, I would have beat their asses into the ground for what they said."

I couldn't help the warm fuzzies that fluttered inside me, though I was more surprised than anything.

"Um, that's really kind of you to say," I replied awkwardly. "But seriously, don't worry about it. It's not the first time. They've been jerks since Red Rover in first grade."

"I remember you in first grade," he said in a sudden rush of words. "You were the quietest girl. You watched everyone with your big eyes. I was a little afraid of you."

He paused and grinned, then added, "Still am."

Haley walked in with Jordan hot on his heels. He saw where Rob was sitting and gave him a glare that made me feel like the temperature in the room had dropped another ten degrees.

"You okay?" Rob asked as Haley and Jordan got to their desks. "Warm enough?"

"Yeah, for the moment," I said. "I'll probably be a human popsicle by lunch, though.”

“Key question, though, what color popsicle?”

“Red, of course. It’s the
only
color for popsicles and Skittles.”

Rob laughed, and I giggled a little bit, too. It felt so good to forget about everything, just for a few seconds. Plus, I had made Rob Furlong laugh. It had only taken eleven years, one week and three days.

"I was thinking of taking a year off after high school," Jordan said loudly as she settled into her seat next to Haley. "You know, to travel. Like, to see life and stuff. I'd like to go to Europe. Maybe we could go together, you know? See your family or whatever."

I found myself cringing in embarrassment on her behalf, something I never thought would have been possible. She kept going, blissfully oblivious.

"It's like, so important to get out of the routine, you know? You totally need to go see the world and like, understand what's out there before you go back to school. I'm totally serious about like, studying art in, like, Italy and stuff. I want to go see some of the statues in Greece and like, eat French food in Paris, you know?"

By this point, I was torn between trying not to laugh and dying of shame on her behalf. Rob caught my eye and rolled his eyes, and I couldn't help but snicker a little.

The second bell rang, and Ms. Collins came in.

It got colder and colder in the building during first period, and I couldn't help but shiver every now and then. Rob would look over at me with a sympathetic expression. At the same time, I would feel Haley shift in his seat behind me.

At one point, after I'd been blowing on my hands, Rob reached over and dropped his gloves on my desk, offering up a crooked smile. I could have sworn I heard a growl behind me, and I slowly turned my head, just enough so I could glance back over my shoulder and see Haley's hand on his desk. It was white and still, with him long fingers resting against the laminate surface. I drew in a quick breath when his fingers flexed slightly, and a spider web of cracks bloomed across the surface of the desk.

I jerked around to face front, my heart pounding so hard, I could see it pulsing in my eyes. What the hell was that? What did Haley just do? For the sake of my sanity, I forced myself to push back all my frantic questions. Breaking down in hysterics in class, pointing at Haley, and demanding answers wouldn't get me anywhere. Maybe by lunch I’d be calm enough to confront him.

When the bell rang, I bolted into the hall and was surprised to find Rob easily and purposefully catching up to me. He put his good arm around my shoulders and chafed his hand against my upper arm as if to try and warm me up.

"You're white as a ghost," he said, pulling me close into his side as we walked down the hall to Poetry. "You okay?"

"Just really, really cold," I said. It was mostly the truth, just not all of it.

He nodded and pulled us to a stop in the middle of the hall. Dropping his bag to the floor, he shrugged off his jacket and using his one good arm, he draped it around my shoulders.

"Oh, hey, no!" I protested. "I can't take your coat. It's way too cold for you not to have it."

"I'll take it back at the end of Poetry," he said, sounding pleased with his reasonable compromise that I could hardly refuse. "I'm plenty warm right now, and you need it more than I do."

"Thank you," I said in a small, confused voice, looking up at him. He smiled down at me, and for one wild instant, I thought he was going to kiss me. Rob Furlong, former quarterback and junior year crush, definitely looked like he had kissing on his mind.

A grating squeak broke the moment, and I matched grating squeak for grating squeak as a giant, fat rat ran over Rob’s sneakers. He stumbled back and would have hit the ground hard if I hadn’t caught him by the shirtfront and slowed his fall. As it was, we still ended up in a pile on the floor…a floor where there was a big rat still at large. I jumped up and helped Rob to his feet. He looked pallid and sweaty from the pain, and I let him lean on me as we walked into Poetry.

Everybody was already in their seats, and we slid into ours just as the bell rang and Mr. Brown walked in.

Mr. Brown started writing notes on the whiteboard, and I was focusing on calming my breathing when Rob leaned over, and quick as a blink, kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “Thank you.”

Stunned and bewildered, I looked at him, and he grinned sheepishly at me.

I heard a strange snap behind me, and Jordan's voice exclaim, "Oooh, Haley! You've got ink all over your hands."

Mr. Brown turned around. I heard a desk scrape against the floor, and without warning, Haley was beside me, grabbing me by the arm and yanking me out of my chair.

"Hey!" Rob exclaimed angrily, struggling to his feet.

"Mr. Smith!" Mr. Brown cried. "Sit down!"

"Haley!" Jordan called desperately.

"What are you doing?" I hissed, but it was too late as Haley dragged me from the classroom and out of the building, his ink-stained hands leaving their indelible marks on me.

HE PULLED ME ALONG
until we were outside, crossing the athletic fields toward the woods that ringed the school property. The cold bit my cheeks, and the wind stung my eyes.

The ground was somewhere between frozen and squashy, and my new sneakers were definitely getting broken in. I was wearing one of my new mini-skirts, and my tights were getting soaked with icy mud.

Finally, we reached the shelter of the woods, and Haley spun me around so I was against his body and his arms around my waist. I felt once again how solid he was, despite being so lanky. He was like a sculpture of steel.

His eyes were black fire and bore into mine. I shrank back against his embrace as I looked up into his livid expression. Beautiful menace. Once again, I was struck by the paradox of how lovely and tempting his danger seemed.

"Haley," I said breathlessly. "What are you doing?"

I felt something like a growl rumble in his chest. He caught my chin with one hand.

"You are mine," he whispered. "Don't ever forget it. I belong to you. You belong to me."

The wind was picking up, but it wasn't the cold alone that made me shiver.

"It's meant to be, Stephanie. I want to be in your world."

It took me a second to process the words. It was such a strange way of saying things.

"You don't belong in my world," I said between my chattering teeth. It hurt to say those words. He didn't belong with geeky, dorky me. He belonged to...well, not to stupid Jordan either. He belonged to a bigger existence than Darbyfield.

"Then be part of mine," he challenged back. I looked up into his face. Intensity burned in his eyes, and I wanted to burn with it, so badly.

"That'll never happen," I whispered, blinking back tears that sprung to my eyes. "Not in a million years."

"I've waited longer than that," Haley murmured. "What's another million if I could be sure I'd have you? But I'm not sure. I won't be sure until you say yes."

He released my waist, but slid his hands up until he had one hand cradling my neck and the other cupping my cheek. I existed only in heartbeats.

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming...

I heard the words in my head as I stood still and breathless, trapped by his bottomless gaze and freezing touch. My eyes seemed to be flaring up because suddenly, I could see the cold. I could see its burning icy waves in the air. I could see the utter black of Haley's eyes and the way they spilled into a black universe. I could see edges of darkness and the rotting of trees.

The cold grew sharper, the wind beginning to whistle and shake the trees, its invisible fingers searching through my clothes to touch my skin. The cold combed shivering threads of silver through my veins.

"You frighten me," I whispered, swallowing hard as the wind whipped up the dry, dead leaves and stirred Haley's black hair and my own.

The wind died, and I dizzily took a step back, then another. And another.

Haley stood still, his eyes riveted to me and only the slight rise and fall of his chest revealing him to be flesh and blood, and not ice and steel.

"I am frightening," he said finally, his voice deep and hypnotic, though I heard the precision of rage in his consonants. "All who know me fear me. Yet, am I not the most just? In my passion, am I not constant, chasing the one star that has eluded me for far too long?"

"Yes," he continued, dark flames burning bright in his eyes as he took a step toward me. "I am a terrible creature. I will not yield. I will fight for what I want. A man fights for what he wants."

I stared at him, the fawn caught in the gaze of the panther. In that moment though, fear seemed a flimsy emotion. There was so much more here. There was something elemental and exciting in this fraction of existence, the seconds lengthening and drawing it into a time of its own, away from buildings and blackboards, lockers and lunch.

He came toward me, and it was my turn to stand my ground. I vibrated with nervous energy as he came near. Touch me, don't touch me, touch me, don't touch me.

I had barely taken a breath when Haley was before me, folding me so very gently into his arms.