Intrepid (11 page)

We had a strange father-daughter relationship, I had to admit, when I compared it to anyone else’s. It went beyond the fact that I didn’t call him Dad. He never acted like those overprotective, twinkle-in-their-eyes, scaring-off-boys with shotguns kind of father. And when I began eighth grade, he sat me down at the table and said, “I’ve raised you to know right from wrong, and now you need to learn independence. From here on out, there will be no more punishments from me because life will have its own consequences when you make mistakes. I’m here for advice, but advice is only good if you are truthful with me and talk to me before you make big decisions. Honesty is all I ask in this arrangement.” But really, this conversation was a little too late. We were already basically roommates by then, with lives that orbited each others. But we talked about nearly everything—everything except how my feelings for my best friend were shifting within me. I wasn’t quite sure how to bring up that conversation.
 

But this letter didn’t fit. I pulled out my phone, bypassed all the text messages from Lindsay and Sully, and sent one to Ringo:
When will you B home?

The questions only triggered another headache. The Excedrin was failing to equalize the pain roaring through my ears. I tacked the stupid letter back up on the fridge, and tapped my fingers on the counter. It was a nervous habit I picked up from Ringo, and the clicking of fingernails on the hard surface sometimes slowed my brain down enough to think. Maybe a shower would wash it all away. I made my way towards the bathroom and stripped down, but I couldn’t breath until the warm water wandered its way down my hot skin.
 
“When the world’s about to explode, count to ten,” I whispered. So I did. I counted to ten. I blocked out the sound of the water, the hum of the heat moving through pipes, and the dripping down the drain until the world only consisted of a tiny box called a shower. I zipped the pendant back and forth on the chain and let the movement of sound calm me.
 

Zip. Zip. Zip.
 

Drip. Drip. Drip.
 

My hand stilled so I could examine the pendant. The blues in it reminded me of the swirling purples in my eyes, and as another wave of pain hit me, I pressed it to my chest.
 

I couldn’t freak out. That would help nothing.
 

“Ringo, what the hell was that letter?” I whispered. There had to be an explanation. Trust S.O.? How could Sullivan Oliverez help me? And with what?
 

What a stupid, stupid letter to leave behind.
 

I got out and patted my body dry with a towel, then grabbed my soccer shorts and sports bra from where I left them hanging on the towel rack this morning. It was my usual sleepwear of choice because no matter what the weather was, sleep always made me burn, and with the headaches, I couldn’t imagine being trapped in an oversized shirt. I rubbed a towel against my hair as I stepped out of the bathroom and walked towards my room. When I opened the door and turned on the lamp, it took me a minute to see the shape sitting on my bed. The sight of it was as familiar as it was unfamiliar. “Sully?”
 

He looked ragged, with dark circles around his darkening eyes. Just an hour ago, he was making jokes and doing water-sprinkler dances, but the way he looked at me when I walked in scared me. I’d never seen him look so tired.
 

I stopped moving my hair between the folds of the towel and shut the door behind me in case Ringo came home. It was a little late for a boy, even if it was only Sully, to be in my room. But worrying about Ringo coming home only made me wish he’d do it right then and there so he could explain that dumb-ass letter I found on the fridge.
 

“You’re getting headaches?” Sully asked.
 

“Nothing to worry about,” I lied. I looked at the fraying edges of my shorts and noted how the colors faded in and out of old. I tightened my arms around my stomach, painfully aware of my lack of shirt and the way wet ringlets left water stains around my shoulders and on my bra.
 

He stood up and faced me. I could tell by his face that he had something to say, and it already felt heavy and painful. “Have they been happening about every twenty minutes?”
 

“I… um…” His question triggered an answer to a question I hadn’t bothered to ask myself yet. They
had
been happening about every twenty minutes. “How’d you know?”
 

“And Iago? Did he see it tonight?”
 

“It wasn’t what it looked like.” I’d heard that phrase in so many movies, but to say it in real life felt beyond ridiculous. Not that I had anything to justify, not even to Sully. No matter what rumors were already floating around, did I really need to explain it to anyone?
 

Sully’s face was painted in pictures of pain, and a new thought hit. Did he think there was something going on between Iago and me? Did the idea of it hurt him that much? He had to have known how I felt about him, but I didn’t know how to say that he was the one I wanted to be with. It was a feeling that I didn’t want to admit to anyone, not even myself, but that was the truth. I opened my mouth to be honest, but the words became needles in my mouth and too painful to push out.
 

 
Before I could even really try, he said, “I knew it was you. I just didn’t want to believe it.”
 

“What?”

“You never gave any clues that you knew. You’ve hidden it well.” He let out a gargled laugh that bordered on being a sob. It startled me so that I let go of my stomach, dropping the towel into a damp heap on the floor, and grabbed his hands. “How could you keep this from me? I thought you trusted me.”
 

“Sul, what’s wrong?”
 

Water pooled at the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t want it to be this way, but I have to follow the path I was set on.”
 

“You’re speaking gibberish, Sul. You’re not making sense.”
 

The distance and space and air collapsed with the next step he took, so that his chest was millimeters from mine. His entire body blocked out the rest of the room, and lamplit yellows traced the browns of his skin and the broadness of his shoulders. His face hovered above me, and his eyes connected to mine. “You seriously don’t know?”

“Know what?” I whispered the question, because there were all kinds of fear racing through my nerves. The headaches. The swirling eyes. The cryptic letter. Sully’s body so close to mine. His questions. All of it took me into different realms of terror that I couldn’t explain.
 

There are things that bite like snakes, strike like lightning, and hit like a train all at once. Sully’s lips were like that. They met mine before I realized what he was doing, and shivers wavered down every millimeter of my spine. The force of it pushed me back against the door. Painted moulding. A doorknob. The swirls of splinters in the grain of the wood. The wall of books. The posters on the walls. The entire room. None of it existed. The only thing that mattered was the pressure of his lips and the desperate feeling that came from them. He reached his hand up so that it cupped my jaw and his fingers ran behind my ear. Those same fingers gripped in my hair as the kiss grew and grew, and his other hand traced the lines of my neck so that I shuddered under the weight of his mouth. It made my head explode in a different kind of ache. I felt my eyes burst behind their lids, but it was a pleasurable pain, as if they were swimming in a pool of ice water on a hundred degree day.
 

Sully pulled back, nuzzled his forehead against mine, and placed his hands on my hips. His breaths raced marathons. I felt each heated puff of air land on my cheeks, and the warmth of his palms on my bare, shirtless skin. It was like a spark catching paper on fire, and suddenly I didn’t want that to be the end of it. I wanted so much more, and I pulled his face back towards mine. I felt the stretch my toes as I arched my back so that my chest collided into his, and it made him stumble. I didn’t know what to call the boldness that was coming over me, but it existed everywhere within me—in my skin, in my spine, in my fingertips, and in my eyes. I pushed Sully back and back and back until his knees hit the chair near my window so that he collapsed down into it. There were hiccups in my heart and in my breathing, and I stood while he sat, taking in every ounce of energy he was willing to give. I didn’t think anything needed to change, ever again. I could stand there and lean into Sully’s kiss for the entire night and never grow bored with the twittering feeling growing behind my eyelids. But then he stood back up, and I felt weightless as he lifted me and pushed me against the wall without releasing me from his crushing kiss. Each movement he made only made me desperate for more. But, too soon, the urgency in his lips deflated, and he put his palms on my shoulders to still me as he pulled away.
   

The rise and fall of my chest burned, but the smile forming on my lips stretched me into a different kind of happiness. Sully felt the same for me as I did for him, and that was news that was good for my soul.
 
I opened my eyes, aware that, tumor or not, every shade of purple was blooming within them.

And Sully was crying.
 

Crying?

I felt my smile slip away. Crying was not what I pictured happening after my first kiss with Sully. “Was the kiss that bad? There’s no reason to cry about it.” I tried to joke, but it landed all wrong, and he didn’t laugh.
 

 
“The Change is coming.” He gulped back another sob. “The mutation caught.” He moved his hands so his fingers were flat on both sides of my neck. His skin on mine took my breathing to an entirely different plane of existence. My lungs wanted to tear themselves out of my body, and the scraping feeling along my irises bloomed into a frenzy. I could only think about the next kiss that was about to happen and not about the strange things he was saying.
 

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” he whispered on repeat, and an expression of agony moved into his eyes. His fingers curled around my neck so that his thumbs pressed against my trachea, and he began to squeeze. The shock of it prevented me from realizing what was happening right away, then I remembered to fight back. I clawed at his hands with mine, but I was trapped between him and the wall. I didn’t have room to move. I tried to pull my leg up to knee him in the groin, but his waist helped pin mine to the wall. The only thing I could do was claw at anything and everything. I attempted to suck in as much air as possible while my face shifted from pink to red to purple.
 

I could feel the world begin to disappear.
 

It faded into black.
 

Into nothing.
 

Chapter Fifteen

 
When my eyes fluttered open, there was a small shiver of weather shifting, and I caught the moon receding into a lesser shape amongst the stars. I reached up to feel my throat, and there was a tightness around it—the cloud of a bad dream.
 

Had it been a dream?

If it was, it had been shatteringly bright and vivid. Slivers of sweat were dew drops on my forehead, and when the chilled breeze connected with them, they became a little too cold.
 

Maybe
this
was the dream?

I was in the same clothes I always slept in, but even in dreamland it was too cold.
 

Dreaming. That was the only logical explanation for how I got here. Or was it the tumor-head making me imagine all kinds of things?
 

I sat up, looked around, and tried to reorient my brain. It took me a moment to realize I was alone, then it took me another moment to realize I was in the middle of a football field. “What the hell!” I whispered as I pushed myself up. I stood between the ten and fifteen yard line, the lights were off, the stands were empty, and the town was quiet. I patted my pockets to see if I had my phone, but I knew the shorts were just as empty as the stands. I tugged at the pendant and zipped it back and forth along the chain. The sound of it zooming across the metal was comforting. “Think,” I whispered. “Think.”
 

It all had to be a dream. Sully? The weird letter from Ringo?
This
? A tumor wouldn’t be this elaborate, right? It had to be a dream then. Maybe if I sat down, the dream would shift into something else. Maybe I just needed to refuse to play along with my own mind. But the wind felt too real to be only in my head. The temperature was dropping exponentially, and I felt it through my limited clothing and my bare, bare feet. I couldn’t risk sitting down to wait it out.
 

I rubbed my arms with my hands and started putting one foot in front of the other. The transition of terrain became painful: from turf-grass to track to concrete to pebbled paths, the bottoms of my feet grew raw. When I got to the gate I pulled the padlock on the fence, and it made the chain-links rattle like dysfunctional wind chimes. There was no way out but to climb, so I did. My toes gripped what they could, but it was my big toes and thin fingers that did most of the work. The fence was wobbly, and it shook more with each shuddering shiver my body went through the higher I got. “What the hell!” I screamed as I pulled my body over the top and the pole grazed my stomach sending new waves of cold through my body.
 

When I landed on the other side, the parking lot gravel dug into pockets of my flesh. “Think. Think, Texi.” I pounded the palm of my hand on my forehead, but that didn’t shake thoughts into my head. I sat down on a bumper guard, and cold concrete pressed into my buttocks. I couldn’t think about how I’d gotten here because I needed to think about how I’d get away from here. Did Sully knock me out and drop me off? Why would he do that? The only thing I could remember was his hands around my throat and the room growing into nothing.