The New Kid (20 page)

She was smiling so wide Will thought her face might break and he was starting to get all emotional himself. Whether he liked it or not, whether it was planned or not, this was one of those important milestones in one’s life—even if he was wearing slacks, which he loathed.

With April wiping away tears and waving, Will went out and got in his EVO and drove over to pick up Natalie. Parking his car, he honked his horn; he couldn’t bear the thought of meeting her dad and enduring the ritual pre-date grilling. As Natalie came out her father, a muscular bald man with a goatee, glared out after her, no doubt wondering who this lout was who wouldn’t even come to the front door. Will noted the beer already open in one hand, and a second can held in the other.
Big drinker
, Will thought. It reminded him of Gerald. Then Natalie’s mother, a chunky woman wearing Capri pants and a tube top and smoking a cigarette, began arguing with Natalie’s father, the two of them putting on a silent Punch-and-Judy show for nobody’s benefit but their own. Will winced, but turned on a smile as Natalie got in the car. She was wearing a sleeveless white cotton dress with a tiny red rose pattern and brown leather boots, and she looked so sexy Will had a hard time keeping his eyes off her. He closed his eyes for a moment as he caught a whiff of her perfume. Lavender. It knocked his socks off. Instead of a tiny purse she had a large leather backpack slung over her shoulder and she tossed it into the backseat. Then she looked over at her bickering parents and blushed with shame.

“Sorry about that. They keep threatening to get a divorce.” Natalie blinked away a tear. “Emily’s disappearance . . . her kidnapping, it was really hard on them.”

Will gave a slow nod of sympathy and started up the car.

“Sure. Of course. It had to be.” He didn’t want to get into it. He was an expert on dysfunctional families, knew the pain all too well.

“If they’re going to do it, get a divorce I mean, I wish they’d just hurry up and do it. They sure don’t have to stay together for my sake.” Then Natalie actually looked at Will, and closed her mouth. He looked incredibly handsome, and he was blushing as he held out a corsage.

“Um, my mom went out and bought this.”

“It’s beautiful. And thank you. I mean, tell your mom thank you.”

Natalie slipped the white rose on her wrist as they drove toward Harrisburg High. It was the first formal dance either of them had ever attended. Natalie could feel in her bones that it was going to be a night she remembered for the rest of her life. She just hoped the reason had more to do with the person sitting beside her and less to do with demons.

A
pale silver moon hung in the sky over the high school as Will and Natalie drove up and parked. A light gray mist was rolling in off the ocean and Will awkwardly offered his arm as they walked across the parking lot and went inside. The theme of the fall dance was “Cupid’s Ball,” much to Will and Natalie’s chagrin, and the gym was decorated with balloon bouquets and crepe paper streamers and aluminum stars, plus the mandatory dorky-looking Cupids hanging everywhere, bows drawn ready to strike with their love-poisoned arrows. The band on stage was doing a retro ’80s disco thing at first—maybe to match the decorations—and then when no one was biting they slowed it down and the dance floor gradually began to fill up with couples who’d been reluctant to be the first to show off. The whole scene was as innocent as a Norman Rockwell painting—until Will looked across the dance floor and saw
them
.

Beside him, Natalie drew in a sharp breath, seeing Jason dressed to the nines in a black blazer, T-shirt, and slacks. She yanked on Will’s sleeve and saw that Will was already gazing at him, too.

“Will, his neck . . . his fingers . . . I saw what you did to him, how can he even be alive, let alone walking? And look, there’s not even a scar.”

“They can regenerate themselves if you don’t kill them properly, don’t finish them off,” said Will calmly.

“Okay, good to know,” replied Natalie, suddenly feeling a little lightheaded.

“They can also appear perfectly normal until the Dark Lord calls upon them to do his bidding. The infection is like a dormant virus. There aren’t any symptoms until it’s triggered, and then it can make them really sick really fast,” Will added.

Recalling what she’d seen in the sewer tunnel Natalie felt even woozier and her body swayed slightly. Will put his arm around her waist to steady her and the moment he touched her she felt hot and hyperaware of how close they were standing. Since they hadn’t exactly been labeled a couple or anything they were getting plenty of looks from Natalie’s girlfriends who gazed at her with outright envy.

Will could feel the awkwardness closing in around them.

“Um, do you see Rudy anywhere?” he asked and Natalie suddenly remembered that the whole reason they were at the dance was to look for Rudy, not to have fun. It wasn’t like it was a real date or anything. She made herself straighten her shoulders as she scanned the faces in the gym.

“No, I . . . I’ve been looking but I haven’t seen him since we came in.”

“I hope he’s alright. I should have known something was up the other night. I wasn’t paying attention. I should have been paying closer attention,” Will said, his face filled with guilt.

“Will, you can’t watch out for everybody, be everyone’s protector all the time,” said Natalie.

“If I don’t, then who will?”

Not for the first time, Natalie wondered what she’d gotten herself into with this New Kid. He felt like he was responsible for saving the
whole world and she loved that about him, that he wanted to. But no matter how strong he was, no matter how many weird and wonderful powers he had, he couldn’t save everybody. He couldn’t do everything by himself.

As if he could read her mind Will looked at her a little sadly. But then he dug down and brought up a smile.

“Do you want to dance or something?” Will asked, feeling like the biggest dork in the Western Hemisphere. Duh, it was a dance, they were supposed to dance.

“I guess we probably should. To make it look good and everything,” said Natalie.

He guided her onto the dance floor and they did a slow sort of shambling dance with Will leading the way. As they settled into a comfortable rhythm dancing, getting somewhat used to the electric current zapping back and forth between them, Natalie let go of her worries and focused instead on how incredible Will was. She even liked his ear lobes.

“Hey, about your parents, it’s no big deal, you know,” said Will after a few minutes.

“I know. Lots of kids have parents who get divorced. I hear that all the time. But you never think it will happen to you.” She let him pull her a little closer. “The thing is, they’ve always been so . . . I don’t know, distant. I don’t think they ever really wanted Emily and me, that’s for sure. My dad’s always been way more interested in his beer and the TV than us, and my mom, she’s so drugged out that half the time I don’t think she even gets that we’re alive. Emily and I kind of raised each other, you know?”

“That’s tough. I’m sorry. I guess I know why you want to find her so badly.”

“And we’re going to, right?”

“Right.”

Something in his voice must have made her pause because she looked up at him and said, “Will, will you promise me?”

“I promise you.”

They danced a bit longer. And then Will spoke again.

“I always thought for sure my mom and dad would stay together forever. But I should have known better.”

“It wasn’t either of their faults that he was kidnapped by that . . . thing. If it hadn’t. . . .”

“Do you believe in pre-birth dreams?” asked Will.

“After the last few days hangin’ with you, I’m ready to believe anything.”

“Well, you know how some people dream about past lives? I had this dream about my mother and father, about a night that happened before I was even born. It was like I was there, even though I could-n’t have been, I hadn’t even been conceived yet. But the dream is so real, and I keep having it, over and over. . . .”

 

Edward and April were living in Tucson and it was one of those nights when the desert heat lay close and mean to the ground, making everyone edgy and miserable. In Will’s dream he was asleep in his bed, wearing his Scooby-Doo pajamas and sweating on his Star Wars sheets, when he heard a crash that woke him up. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and wandered to the stairs where he began to descend but stopped cold when he saw his mother. She looked different than he’d ever seen her. She usually had her hair up in a ponytail but tonight it hung down in long reckless curls. And instead of her usual modest earth-toned attire she was wearing a tight red dress with a plunging neckline. Young Will didn’t know what a cleavage even was, he just knew he’d never seen his mom’s before. She’d been drinking whiskey and she and Edward were arguing.

He was trying to get her to stop drinking but she’d have none of it and when he grabbed her elbow as she headed for the front door she whirled and slapped him across the face. The blow rocked him back on his heels and Will felt it as though it had connected with his own flesh. He saw the pain in his father’s eyes and heard the door
slam as his mother left in a cloud of anger. Then he heard a car start up and tires squealing.

When his father looked up at him, he scampered back to bed where he pulled the covers over his head and waited, hardly breathing, his heart beating really fast. In a few moments his father came in and without any explanation scooped Will up into his arms and carried him out to a Volvo station wagon. Will’s mother had taken their other, sportier car, a Mustang. Edward strapped Will into a car seat and Will knew better than to complain; the situation was clearly grave.

They drove around town for hours, stopping intermittently at bars and taverns and dance halls, Edward searching the parking lots for the Mustang. They found plenty of Mustangs, but none the right color, and finally Edward gave up. He drove them both home and put Will to bed.

When Will awakened again it was to muffled sounds, sounds he’d never heard before and didn’t recognize. He was afraid to get out of his bed but his bladder finally got the best of him. He crawled out and rushed into the bathroom and peed, then ventured slowly downstairs and saw his father asleep in the chair. The house was dark but Will could make out a large figure of a man lumbering out of his mother’s bedroom. The dark shape paused and stared down at Will for a moment, then exited as swiftly as a gust of wind. Will walked down the hallway and peered into his mother’s room. Her red dress was on the floor, torn and tattered. Her body was sprawled on the bed, splayed and spent, her limbs tangled in the sheets. Her eyes were bloodshot slits. She stared at the ceiling uncomprehendingly. When Will called her name she didn’t budge. Tears flowed silently from her eyes. Will’s father appeared and pulled him up into his arms from behind and took him upstairs and tucked him into bed.

Will dreamt that in the morning he was terrified to come down to breakfast, petrified that his childhood universe had been ripped
asunder. But his mother and father had evidently worked through whatever had happened the night before because she was her usual smiling self. She rushed and swept him into her arms and hugged him and kissed him until he squirmed out of her hold and she put him back down. The family ate breakfast together. Then the dream ended with the doors and windows of the house being blasted open by a wall of flames.

 

“Man, that is some dream,” said Natalie. When she saw the anguish on Will’s face she hastened to comfort him. “It’s just a dream, though. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Then why do I keep having it?”

“Who knows why anybody dreams anything?” said Natalie.

“The weird thing is, some part of me is convinced that it happened. I mean, I know I wasn’t there, but I also feel like, aside from that, everything in the dream was real, it all happened. Which would mean Mom—” Will broke off, in obvious pain from the dreamt incident.

“Well, even if it did, everybody makes mistakes,” said Natalie.

“I know, you just don’t expect it to be your own mother.”

Just then Sharon Mitchell made a spectacular entrance flanked by several of her cheerleader acolytes, confused but still loyal. Gone was Sharon’s freshly scrubbed girl-next-door persona, replaced now with a style sense that Natalie would have called trampy, but only if she had been feeling charitable. The other cheerleaders just looked bewildered. Natalie shook her head slowly in disgust.

Sharon went right out on the dance floor and was joined by Jason and Duncan, who sandwiched her as the music changed abruptly. Will and Natalie hadn’t even noticed that the retro band had exited the stage, replaced by a hardcore-looking band of gangsta killer wannabees, a tribute band for Blood Eyes.

The drummer hammered away and the lights in the gym changed as the band erupted in a cacophony of discordant guitar
and synthesizer riffs intended to rattle nerves. The lead singer was Jimmy King, the skinny captain of the volleyball team. He was a poor excuse for the real lead singer for Blood Eyes, Correl Shames, but he threw himself into the song, screeching away like a wounded bird. More and more kids like Jason, Sharon, Duncan, and Todd bled onto the dance floor and the clothing colors shifted from pastels to mostly black. Then kids Natalie had never seen before, kids obviously from other schools in the area, began to show up, all wearing similar togs: mixtures of black and leather and spiked hair and tattoos. It was no big deal, they were just crashing the dance, but it felt like an invasion.

The song grew louder and more jarring, the dancing more aggressive in tone. The speakers erupted with feedback as the microphone was dropped. Then the gym went abruptly silent, all eyes turning to the front as a figure strolled confidently onto the stage. Jimmy King picked up the mike and smiled broadly, now really feeling like a star because he was announcing something big, something totally huge.