Nightlight (2 page)

“Um, sure,” he said, wanting me. He made small talk on the way about how he was abandoned as a child and will only rest easy once he is avenged. His name was Tom. I could tell people passing by were listening in, hoping that I would reveal the mystery of my past.

“So what’s Phoenix like?” he beseeched.

“It’s hot there. And sunny all the time.”

“Really? Wow.”

“You sound surprised. You must be surprised by how fair-skinned I am, coming from such a hot climate.”

“Hmm. I suppose you are pale.”

“Yeah—I’m half dead,” I joked, very humorously. He didn’t laugh. I should have known no one would get my sense of humor in Switchblade. It was like no one here had ever told a sarcasm before.

“Here’s your class,” he said when we reached the Trigonometry classroom. “Good luck!”

“Thanks. Maybe we’ll have another class together,” I said, giving him something to live for.

Trigonometry was all blah-blah formulas that we’d just save on our calculators anyway and Government was all blah-blah tomorrow we’re crossing the border to attack Canada. Nothing I hadn’t done at my old school.

One girl walked with me to the cafeteria for lunch. She had brown bushy hair in a ponytail that was more like a squirrel tail in the context of her beady squirrel eyes. I thought I recognized her from somewhere, but I couldn’t place it.

“Hi,” she said. “I think I’m in all your classes.” So
that’s
why I recognized her. She reminded me of a squirrel I hung out with in Phoenix.

“I’m Belle.”

“I know. We’ve introduced ourselves already. Like, four times.”

“Oh, sorry. I have a hard time remembering things that won’t be useful to me later.”

She told me her name again. Lululu? Zagraziea? It was one of those forgettable names. She asked if I wanted to eat with her. I stopped in the hallway, opened up my date book, and looked at Monday, 12:00.

“Blank!” I exclaimed. I penciled in “Lunch with classmate” then checked it off while we stood in line. This was the year I would become organized.

We sat at a table with Tom and some other ordinaries. They kept asking me probing questions about what my
interests were. I gently explained that that was between me and my potential friends.

It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all? Even odder, he hadn’t noticed me, Belle Goose, future Academy Award winner.

A computer sat before him on the table. He stared intently at the screen, narrowing his eyes into slits and concentrating those slits on the screen as if the only thing that mattered to him was physically dominating that screen. He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms. He had reddish, blonde-brown hair that was groomed heterosexually. He looked older than the other boys in the room—maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman’s idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man.

“What is that?” I asked, knowing that whatever it was it wasn’t avian.

“That’s Edwart Mullen,” Lululu said.

Edwart. I had never met a boy named Edwart before. Actually, I had never met any human named Edwart before. It was a funny sounding name.
Much
funnier than Edward.

As we sat there, gazing at him for what seemed like
hours but couldn’t have been more than the entire lunch period, his eyes suddenly flicked towards me, slithering over my face and boring into my heart like fangs. Then in a flash they went back to glowering at that screen.

“He moved here two years ago from Alaska,” she said.

So not only was he pale like me, but he was also an outsider from a state that begins with an “A.” I felt a surge of empathy. I had never felt a connection like this before.

“That boy’s not worth your time,” she said, wrongly. “Edwart doesn’t date.”

I smirked inwardly and snorted outwardly, tucking the soda-mucous that flew out into my pocket. So, I would be his first girlfriend.

She got up to leave. “Coming to Bio, Belle?”

“Duh, Lululu,” I said.

“Lucy. My name is Lucy—As in
I Love Lucy.”

“All right. Lucy—As in
I Love Edwart.”
Maybe I’m special, but I’ve always had a knack for remembering mnemonics. “Trash to the left,” I bellowed, throwing out my leftovers—a
half
-eaten cake. I looked back at Edwart to see if he had noticed that I, too, am a disciplined eater. But strangely, he was gone. In the ten minutes since I had last looked at him, he had vanished into thin air.

I turned around just in time to see that I’d missed the trashcan by a lot, and my
half
-eaten cake was flying towardss the back of a girl sitting at a nearby table.

“HEY!” she said, as the cake made impact. “Who did that?”

“Let’s go,” I said to Lucy, grabbing her arm and running out of the cafeteria as the food fight began.

When Lucy and I got to class she went to sit with her lab partner and I looked around for an empty seat. There were two left: one near the front of the room and one next to Edwart. Since the front chair had a wobbly leg after I walked past and kicked it in, there was no choice. I had to sit next to the hottest boy in the room.

I walked towards the seat, circling my hips and raising my eyebrows rhythmically like an attractive person. Suddenly I was falling forwards, sliding down the aisle from the momentous force of my plunge. Luckily, a computer wire wrapped around my ankle and stopped me from slamming into Mr. Franklin’s desk. I quickly pulled it from the wall to untangle myself, stood up, and looked around casually to see if anyone had seen. The whole class was looking at me, but probably for a different reason—I had a hologram patch on my backpack. From one angle it was an eggplant, from another it was an aubergine.

Edwart was looking at me, too. Maybe it was the fluorescent lighting, but his eyes seemed darker—soulless. He was seething furiously. His computer was open in front of him, and the synthesized melody from before had ceased. He raised his fist at me in anger.

I wiped the chemical dust off my clothes and sat down. Without looking at Edwart, I pulled out my textbook and notepad. Then, without looking at Edwart, I looked at the board and wrote down the terms Mr. Franklin had written. I
don’t think other people in my situation could do quite so many things without looking at Edwart.

Facing straight ahead, I let my eyes sort of slide to the side and study him peripherally, which doesn’t count as looking. He had moved his computer to his lap and resumed playing his game. We were sitting side by side at the lab counter, yet he hadn’t started a conversation with me. It was as though I hadn’t applied deodorant or something when in reality I had applied deodorant, perfume, and Febreze. Was my lip gloss smudged or something? I took out my compact mirror to check. Nope, but I did have a few developing pimples up by the hairline. I picked up a pencil on Edwart’s desk and pressed it against the soft, supple flesh of my face. They were the projectile kind. Satisfaction attained.

I turned to thank him kindly for the use of his pencil, but he was looking at me in horror, his mouth agape, an open invitation to all sorts of airborne organisms like birds. He grabbed the pencil and started wiping his hands with baby-wipes and rubbing the pencil with Purell. Then he drew a circle around himself in chalk and returned to copying notes from the board, singing this jingle amiably to himself:

“Germs contagious. Contagion alert. But Edwart and Purell are stronger than dirt.”

I reached out to borrow the pencil again for my notes, but the moment my hand breached the chalk line he screamed. It was an unnaturally high pitch for a boy. The right pitch for a superhero, though.

Mr. Franklin was talking about flow cytometry, immunorecipitation and DNA microarrays, but I already knew that stuff from the audiotape I listened to in my truck that morning on my way to school. I moved my eyes in circles, like they were on a Ferris wheel. This is the best way I know of to keep myself from falling asleep. Every time my eyes moved towards the right, though, they kind of hovered there for a little bit. I couldn’t help it—they wanted to see Edwart. Then my eyes would go to the top of the sockets towards the ceiling and stop because, hey, nice view.

Edwart continued to jab at his computer. With each pounding finger I could see the blood surging through the bulging veins on his forearms to his biceps, straining against the tight-fitted, white Oxford shirt pushed cavalierly to his elbows as though he had a lot of manual labor to do. Why was he typing so loudly? Was he trying to tell me something? Was he trying to prove how easy it would be for him to fling me up into the sky and then catch me tightly in his arms, whispering that he would never share me with anyone else in the entire world? I shuddered and smiled coyly, terrified.

When the bell rang I stole another glance at him and shrank into a deeper sense of worthlessness. He was now staring furiously up at the bell, shaking all the muscles in his fist at it, glowering at it with his dark, heated eyes and loathing lashes. He clenched his hair in exasperation, clinging to the tussled tufts as he raised his head to the ceiling. Then he slowly turned to me. Looking into his eyes I felt waves of electricity, currents of electrons charging towards
me. Was this how it felt to be in love, I wondered, for robots? Caught in his ionized hypnosis, the old adage came to mind:
Beautiful enough to kill, gut, stuff, and frame above your fireplace
.

Suddenly, he jerked out of his daze and sprinted for the door. As he ran, I noticed how tall he was, his long legs leaping in strides the size of my entire body, his arms so firm the impact didn’t make a ripple. My eyes welled. I hadn’t seen something this beautiful since I was a kid and the Skittles in my sweaty fist turned my hand rainbow. His shoulder blades jutted against his shirt as he ran. They looked like white wings beating majestically before takeoff. Demonic white wings.

“Wait!” I called after him. He had left his computer at his seat. “Game Over,” the screen read. Game over, indeed, I thought, using a metaphor.

“Can I copy your notes?” asked a regular human male. I looked up and saw a boy of medium height, with dark hair and a lean but muscular frame. I felt drawn to him. He smiled at me. I lost interest.

“Sure, whatever,” I said, handing him my notepad and suddenly noticing that I had doodled a picture of Edwart. In the drawing he had fangs, dripping with a dark substance. Soy sauce.

“I’m going to need that back,” I said. That drawing was going on my wall.

“Thanks, Lindsey,” he said, mistaking me for Lindsey Lohan. He smiled again. What a nice boy. He had nice neat
hair and nice clear eyes. We were going to be great friends. Great Just Friends.

“Walk me to the administration office,” I said. We all had gym next, but I needed my wheelchair. I have a condition which makes my legs become paralyzed every time I think about gyms.

“Okay,” he said, letting me put my weight on him. “I’m Adam, by the way. I think I saw you in my English class. That’ll be great! As long as one of us takes notes, the other one—me—doesn’t have to go to class.” He was getting kind of out of breath as he dragged me along. Being close to me makes some guys nervous.

“Did you notice anything funny about Edwart in class? I think I love him,” I said nonchalantly.

“Well, he did look kind of angry when you fell and disconnected his computer charger.”

So it wasn’t all in my mind; others had noticed Edwart’s awareness of me. There was something about me that evoked very strong feelings in Edwart.

“Hmm,” I said scientifically. “How interesting.”

“Here we are.” After propping me upright against the wall, Adam staggered backwards, huffing and puffing.

I dismissed him and stepped inside the office.

“I’m paralyzed for the next hour,” I announced to the secretary.

“Go sit in your car, dear,” she said, looking up from her copy of
Daylight
.

I skipped outside to my car, trying to daydream about
its powers as king of the cars, but I was too disturbed. First of all, if I had gotten my car for free, that meant that everyone else had paid
more
money for
tinier
cars. Secondly, I was pretty sure there was something supernatural about Edwart—something beyond rational speculation.

So I stopped speculating about him and watched a procession of ants go by. Life would be much easier if I could carry things twenty times my body weight.

THE NEXT DAY WAS WONDERFUL … AND TERRIBLE
. So, overall, I guess it was okay.

It was wonderful because it was raining less. It was terrible because Tom hit me with his car.

“I’m so sorry—I didn’t see you!” he said, driving away to find a parking space before the lot filled up. I picked myself up and smiled knowingly. Tom’s constant attempts to get my attention were flattering and sometimes surprising.

Adam sat next to me in English again. I began to worry that this would become a pattern, that he would expect to occupy the seat next to me
forever
, even when I was just eating breakfast at home with my Dad. Mr. Schwartz called on him and he mumbled something—I think that the sombrero I was wearing was both alluring and practical for the weather—but my mind had drifted. I was thinking about
Edwart. I took out the list I made of rational reasons he wouldn’t talk to me:

I was about to start a new list, Places I’d Like to Visit, when I heard someone saying my name.

I looked up. It was Adam.

“Class is over,” he said, and walked out. I wasn’t used to all this attention from boys.

“Yeah,” I called after him. “I knew the whole time!” He didn’t respond. I sighed. I should have known no one would get my sense of humor in English class.