Reject High (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 1) (18 page)

“You’re not the first guy to choke, Jason. I’ve been down this road before.”

If she’s talking about me physically choking, that’s the pepper’s fault. “What road?”

“Someone who’s seen it is going to tell her, and then she’ll make us break up.”

“Debra’s not like that. I’m not ashamed of you, if that’s what you think. Here, I’ll prove it?”

“Umm. . .”

Before Sasha could protest, I held her hand and marched up to Debra with her in tow.

Debra was at the table, sipping on her own glass of water. “Are you alright? Did I miss something?”

“Sasha got kicked out of North. . .” Sasha put her other hand over my mouth, but I maneuvered out of it. “. . .because the guy she was dating taped them having sex and put it on the internet.” 

My stepmom spit out her water.
“What?”

“But, she regrets it.
Don’t you?”

Sasha squeezed the circulation out of my hand. “I regret a lot of things right now.”

I stared at Debra, waiting for more of a reaction than her hiding her face in her hands.
“You
said we’re Christians. Aren’t we supposed to forgive and forget and throw our sins somewhere in the sea, or something?”

Alright, so I don’t pay attention in church. Our pastor is older, and all he does is talk about how terrible my generation is. A Sunday where I zone out until after the altar call is a good service to me.

Debra blotted the water she sprayed onto the table. “Something like that. Listen, Jason. . .”

“We’re not doing anything, I promise.” For effect, I grabbed her study Bible from the sofa arm and placed my left hand on it. “Swear.”

“Never,” Sasha said.

Really,
never?
I knew she’d said not now, but
never?
She didn’t say another
word. For a light-skinned Black girl, she blushed a pretty bright shade of red.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Brown, about
all
of this. But it’s true. I didn’t know he did that.”

Even with all of my massive screw-ups, Debra had been so forgiving in the past.
Please let her say something like that to this girl.

She bit into her meatball sub, then glanced at Zachary, who had made a mess of his dinner. But the kid tilted his cup in the air without concern for us.

I waited for the other shoe to drop – for her to tell me that I couldn’t date Sasha, like she had with girlfriend number two. Both girls had a reputation around school. Debra had said back then that she didn’t care whether or not the rumors were true. I was going to date Sasha, whether my stepmom liked it or not. But my life would be easier with one less thing to hide from my legal guardian.

Still no answer from her. Sasha and I looked at each other, asking with our eyes
what do we do?

Debra continued eating. We sat at the table and did the same, chewing silently. My sandwich tasted like sawdust with mustard. I imagined Sasha’s seafood tasted the same. Inside I wondered if my new girlfriend was waiting until we took her home to dump me. 

CHAPTER TWENTY

I get busted

While Debra cleaned up Zachary’s mess, we left the apartment to take a walk. It was about eight o’ clock, the sun had just gone down and the scent of freshly-cut grass filled the air.

I watched Sasha carefully, thinking she might split in two and club me to death for ‘fessing up her secret. Instead, she tangled her arms around mine during our walk. Girls confuse me
all the time.

“Nobody’s ever done
that
before,” Sasha admitted. “I could’ve used a little warning.”

People always tell me there are consequences for lying. They leave out the part where stuff happens when you tell the truth, too. It’s not always good stuff, either. “I’m
really
sorry. Are you gonna break up with me now?”

As we rounded the back of my apartment building, where the lighting wasn’t as good, she pulled in closer to me. We stopped and briefly kissed, then continued walking at a slower pace.

Sasha playfully bit her bottom lip. “One thing’s for sure –
I
don’t embarrass
you.”

I couldn’t say the same about me to her, so I brushed it off. “What can I say?”

“You promise not to do anything like that
again.”

I laughed. “Deal. Did you really mean
never?
”

Though I couldn’t see much of her eyes, I got the feeling when she said, “never,” it was more for Debra’s benefit more than my own. My stepmom’s silence was the closest thing I’d get to her blessing, but it wasn’t like Sasha and I were getting married. We’re only fifteen.

We stopped again. “What are you thinking about?” she asked me.

Lots of things. Selby could be hiding. Had he sped off to Mexico?  We couldn’t be that lucky. Every part of me wanted to pound on him. He’d pushed Rhapsody to the limits of her powers, beyond what she knew how to handle. What if she had gotten hurt or worse?

“I didn’t love him, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was cute, in his own way.”

“N-no, that’s not it at all.” But the thought was reassuring. Otherwise, I’d have questions about her taste in boys. “It must have been terrible, for you.”

I glimpsed the sadness in her face as we passed a ray of light from an overhead lamp. “If a boy talks to me, I never know if he likes me for me, or because he thinks I’ll do it with him, too. That’s why I put it out there to you, to see what you wanted. If you had gone for it, I wouldn’t have messed with you.”

The topic made me uncomfortable, but changing the subject might make her mad. “What was it about
him
, anyway?”

“It wasn’t about him, it was about
me.
He’s not that bad of a guy.
”

Not
that bad
of a guy? I slithered out of her arms and lost it. “After what he did to you? He stabbed me, you know that, right? If I didn’t have powers, he would’ve killed me. You think I’m the first kid he’s tried to cut?”

Sasha’s anger equaled my own. “He makes mistakes, Jason. I
made a mistake. He might make more than you do, but he’s not all bad. . .nobody is.”

Whether Sasha had a point or not, she was defending him like she
did
have feelings for him. “Whatever.” I threw up my hand. “You know him better than I do.”

I’d walked a few steps before realizing Sasha wasn’t beside me anymore. I turned around.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” 

She’d
had a relationship with him, no matter how short it was, and knew things about him that I didn’t. I hadn’t said what I meant, or what she thought I meant. That’s another lesson Ray taught me early on about communicating with girls.

“What they think you mean and what you actually said can be completely different things,” he’d said to me.

There was no way to save myself this time, so I fell on the grenade. “It means it bothers me, but I’m willing to get past it, if you are. I promise, I’ll never watch it.” 

Silence surrounded us. Shadows cast by the trees partially blocked her face.
Did I do the right thing or kill my short relationship?
She stepped forward under the bike path light and met me, but she didn’t kiss me or hold my hand. “You can’t keep a promise like that. Believe me.”

“Yeah. I can” I admit that the possibility of me taking a peek increased about five hundred million times after swearing I wouldn’t.

“Will you take me home?” she asked innocently. 

“Sure. My stepmom’s ready to go by now, anyway.”

“Send her a text. Say, ‘Joyce’s coming to get Sasha, but she can’t stay to meet you’. And then, can
you
take me home?”

I smiled and did what she asked me to do.

On the way back, I passed below a helicopter. Being that close to chopping blades pulled my concentration away. By the time the spotlight shined anywhere close to where I’d been, I’d crash landed with a
thud
in the fields behind the apartment.

It didn’t hurt – whenever my powers are on, I don’t feel pain. My reactions seem to be what I
think
they should be. When I got to my feet, I struggled to breathe. Not because the impact knocked the wind out of me. It didn’t. But I
thought
it should have, so the gasping was real. 

I made sure to wipe the mud from my feet in the grass before going back upstairs. Debra was particular about the condition of the doormat even though people are supposed to wipe their feet on it. My stepmom sat on the sofa, cradling a fussy Zachary and feeding him a bottle. “Hey.”

“Joyce just picked her up? Good.”

She had an opinion about my girlfriend, and I had to know what it was. “Well?” 

“When the two of you weren’t looking, I took some candid pictures.” Her face never wandered from my little brother, who gulped down his nighttime bottle. “I printed them. They’re on the table.”

Our printer used two expensive ink cartridges. She barely used it. To be honest, I don’t even remember seeing a flash or her camera with the fancy, close-up lens. She might not have needed it, because we were standing under light. I got closer, and saw a splash of four dark, glossy pictures on the dining room table.

They were of us alright – all taken from the back deck.

One showed us kissing. In another, I was sending the fake text about Sasha’s mom coming. The third featured Sasha holding onto me, and in the last, we were in the air – blurry, but too high off of the ground to explain away as something normal.

When I turned around, she stood behind me with Zachary over her shoulder.
“How?”

Nothing I came up with made sense – not even the truth. I wished I’d prepared for this.
What do I say?

“That’s
how you got out, isn’t it. You
were
in the car accident with me. You saved me.”

Only someone with my luck could have a
temporary
amnesiac for a guardian.

Debra grabbed me around the waist with her free arm and squeezed. I’d saved her life. She knew that now.

But was it enough for her to keep my secret?

I didn’t even want to hope it could happen. Every adult I’d ever known had let me down. Why shouldn’t she? It gave her another opportunity to do something rotten to me, like send me to Vivienne Coker, or worse – to Ray for two months.

She did owe me her life, though. On television and in the movies, the person who gets saved usually does something for the saver, right?

Debra loosened her grip on me when Zachary shifted. “Okay then,” she sniffed.

I took the opportunity to go into my room and shut the door behind me. It was almost nine o’ clock, and my little brother’s bedtime had come and gone. Lying down on my bed, I listened to the sounds of the water running in the bathtub and his squealing as he splashed. If life were that simple again! Soon the lights in the bathroom switched off. He’d be asleep in a few minutes.

The next thing I knew, Debra was knocking at my door. I wanted some alone time, but seeing as she pays all of the bills here, I didn’t have much of a choice. “Yeah?”

She twisted the doorknob and entered, dodging my piles of dirty clothes on the floor. Usually, she’d bring this up and we’d fight, but she had bigger fish to fry tonight. Her stepson was a superhuman and she wanted to know his story. “So?” She eased down to sit by my feet.

I knew what she wanted to know, but I wanted her to ask it so that I could give her the least amount of information possible. “Yes?”

“How long have you. . .been like this?”

“A few days.”

She repeated my answer to herself. “And you can. . .
fly?”

“Jump,” I corrected her.

“Is that all?”

“I’m strong,” I admitted. She would never have hit me – otherwise, I’d mention the invulnerability, too.

Her eyes widened.
“How?”

“I’m not really sure.” That was the truth. The prisms had something to do with it. But we didn’t know where they came from, or how they worked, besides feeding off of our emotions. Sasha thought they might be made up of some sort of “symbiotic mineral,” whatever that means. Neither of us said anything for a long time. “What now?” I asked her.

She leaned over closer to me. “I don’t know. I had a tough time raising you when you
weren’t
a superhero.” She laughed, and so did I. “There’s nothing in the parenting manual for this type of thing.”

“There’s a ‘parenting manual’?” Of course there isn’t, but it
sounded
real, for once.

“Yes, Jason, there is. It’s called, you do something. If you screw up, you figure it out and
fix it.
You don’t beat yourself up about your mistakes every day. That’s being a parent.”  

I kissed Debra on the cheek. Things between us were unresolved and messy. At the moment, I didn’t know if she’d get the cops on me, or commit me to a mental institution. Knowing I could break free at any moment gave me peace. But, besides that, I saw something in my stepmom that I hadn’t seen in a while. She looked like she thought I’d made things better for once instead of fouling them up. It was a nice change.