The Veil (14 page)

“I’m not a Jedi,” he informed me, the corners of his mouth turning up. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that. Come on. Today might be a little tough, but by tomorrow everyone will be over us and on to the next thing. Okay?”

Trying to remind myself that my life was quite possibly at stake here, I strode boldly into precalc beside my fake boyfriend.

——

Luc lingered by my desk, waiting until just before the bell rang to take his regularly assigned seat . . . which, unfortunately, was right next to Emily.

She did not look over at him once during the whole period; I know this because I sat and watched her the entire time, sneaking bites of my pumpkin cookie and not paying attention to a single word that came out of Ms. Fetterly-Dinsmore’s mouth.

I wondered if Emily had been sad yesterday, or if Lucas (arrgghh!
Luc
!) was right, and only her ego had been bruised by the abrupt dumping. I wondered if she’d avoided her locker this morning, afraid she might bump into one of us.

It was then the rational part of my brain, the same part that had so nastily pointed out this morning that Luc was only pretending to be interested in me, chimed in with the equally rational truth about Emily:
It took her two whole months to realize that your locker was close to hers, and if she’d just stolen your boyfriend, she probably wouldn’t be giving you a second thought right now.

Well, rational truth or not, I still felt rotten about the entire situation.

Luckily, I would not have to feel that way for much longer.

Precalc finally ground its way to a halt. Luc swung around, without glancing at Emily, to pick me up. With Olivia distracting me that morning, I hadn’t gotten a chance to grab my Spanish book. I knew I couldn’t count on Señora Castigo uncharacteristically pardoning the same transgression two class periods in a row. I was going to have to go to my locker and get my book; there were no two ways about it.

And that’s where we saw Emily. She must have literally sprinted out of class in order to beat us to the lockers with plenty of time to spare, because by the time Luc and I got there, she was already squashed up against the front of her locker with her lips, both arms, and one leg wrapped around the tall, blonde, statuelike body of none other than
Paul Green
.

I had two thoughts:

   1.
My God,
she works fast; and

   2. Any second now, Karinda Walsh is going to come barreling around the corner with a machete, ready to hack up Emily and any part of Paul she refused to let go of.

Every single drop of guilt I had about “stealing” Luc away from Emily melted into the ground right there and then. A weight had been lifted off of my chest.

I grabbed my Spanish book out of my locker as fast as I could, stealing glances over at Luc as I did, trying to figure out what he was thinking. Was he angry with Emily? Hurt?

He didn’t look like he was feeling either of these things; in fact, he looked vaguely amused as we began the long trek to Señora Castigo’s room. “See?” he said. “I told you not to worry about her.”

“You’re not upset?” I asked, somewhat hesitantly.

He shook his head. “I told you, Addy, Emily and I were all business.”

Just like you and me
, I couldn’t help adding in my head.

“Speaking of which,” he continued, “You’re on your own in Spanish. I’ll meet you outside as soon as class is over though, okay?”

I was a little bit surprised at this. “Is that allowed?”

He chuckled. “I’ll be two classrooms over. Yell if you need anything, but do me a favor and don’t freak out if Sonya comes wandering through your classroom. I think you sort of hurt her feelings last time.”

“Sonya?” He’d totally lost me.

“That’s what I named the cougar,” he explained. “If you see her again, instead of screaming, try scratching her behind the ears. She likes it.”

I threw him a
you’re ridiculous
look as we reached the door of Spanish class.

“See you after.” He smiled that irresistibly charming smile of his and walked two doors down to his French class.

We were supposed to spend the first fifteen minutes of class chatting with our speaking partners, in Spanish, about our respective weekends. As I suffered through Rodney Harris’s halting attempt to tell me about his sister’s field hockey tournament, I realized the other conversations I heard around me all fell into one of two categories: Emily and Paul, or Luc and me. Just like in precalc, I felt an uncharacteristic number of eyes on me for the entire period.

I tried not to slump down in my seat, but I felt like the weight of all those eyeballs was pulling me down. I was not used to being the focus of gossip, and the constant staring made me shifty and nervous. Or maybe it was because I’d basically chugged my morning coffee instead of sipping it.

I was still on edge at the end of the period and very nearly jumped out of my skin when I found Luc waiting for me outside, his hand resting casually atop the head of the gigantic silver cougar I’d last seen jumping through the window in precalc.

Sonya.

I panicked for about two seconds and then realized Sonya was invisible to everyone except Luc and me.

“I thought of a solution to the classes we have apart,” Luc explained, nonchalantly scratching Sonya behind the ears. Immediately, there was a thunderous rumbling sound, and the ground beneath my feet trembled slightly as the big cat began to purr. “Sonya says she’ll keep an eye on you during those periods, as long as you promise not to scream at her again.”

I think it was at that moment I realized, fully, and for the first time, that my life had most definitely taken a turn toward the absurd.

After break, where I tried and failed to catch sight of Nate, Sonya accompanied me to ceramics. She sat in the aisle beside me as I brushed a light blue glaze onto the bowl I’d finished last Friday, and which had successfully survived the firing process over the weekend. Sonya remained perfectly still for the entire period—ears alert and tail curled majestically over her front paws. Midway through class, I gave an enormous fake yawn, stretched my right hand out and scratched her behind both ears.

She didn’t purr for me; apparently she only felt the need to be charming around Luc. Or maybe she was still miffed about my screaming at her.

Miffed or not, Sonya stayed resolutely by my side until the end of the period, when Luc met us at the door. He nodded gravely to the cat, who nuzzled his hand and then trotted off toward the cafeteria.

I had next period with Luc. Advanced Placement U.S. History was just the same as always; Mr. Gatsby (no relation to “the Great”) spent most of the period telling us which subjects he was predicting would be on this year’s AP test and then assigned us a mountain of reading. There was a fair amount of blatant staring at Luc and me and enough whispering behind hands to make me relieved when the bell rang. At least the next hour was lunch; even though I was
pretty sure the unwanted attention would only increase, since there would be nothing like teachers or pesky schoolwork to distract my peers, at least I wouldn’t be trapped inside a cramped classroom with all of the stares.

I led Luc toward the stone table in the corner of the quad that Nate, Olivia, and I had claimed as our lunch spot midway through freshman year and never relinquished. Nate was already sitting there, his brown bag lunch in front of him on the table, completely untouched.

“I’m going to buy a soda,” Luc said casually when we were still some distance from the table. “I’ll be right back.”

“What?” I asked as he changed course and started walking toward the cafeteria.

Luc looked pointedly at Nate, waved at me, then disappeared inside.

As though there had been some kind of invisible handoff, Sonya appeared at my side and walked with me the rest of the way to the lunch table. Once there, she curled up on the ground in a nearby patch of sun, her watchful eyes scanning the quad.

I sat on the stone bench across from Nate and deposited my lunch on the table. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said back. “Olivia has an extra rehearsal today during lunch, so it’ll just be us. Unless Lucas . . .” he trailed off.

“He’s getting a soda,” I said, and Nate nodded.

There was a moment of silence, during which Sonya yawned tremendously and stretched out her front paws, unsheathing her lethal-looking claws and scraping them against the concrete. I winced at the earsplitting sound, but Nate didn’t seem to hear anything strange.

“Is this weird?” I asked him finally, trying to put the cougar out of my mind.

“A little.” He shifted around uncomfortably. “It’s different. But I’ll get used to it, I promise. I like Lucas. He seems like an okay guy.”

“He is.”

“It’s just funny, you know?
Everyone
is talking about you today. Everyone is asking me things.”

“What kind of things?” I frowned. It hadn’t occurred to me anyone else would be inconvenienced by the gossip frenzy. I didn’t like knowing Nate had spent his entire morning being hassled.

“You know—how you guys got together, how long it’s been going on, that kind of thing.” He looked down at the ground between the table and the bench, adding quietly, “I’d sort of like to know too.”

“You
do
know,” I reminded him. “You saw us leave the rally together on Saturday.”

“That was
seriously
the first time you guys got together?” he asked, his voice heavy with skepticism. “And now it’s Monday, and you’re already a couple? And he’s already met Gran? That seems awfully fast.”

I swallowed. Nate knew me too well. Despite his teasing me on the phone yesterday, I’d suspected it was going to be harder to convince him Luc and I were the genuine article than it had been to convince Olivia, but I hadn’t counted on it being physically painful to lie to him. If only he would stop looking at me like that—like he
knew
I was purposefully keeping him in the dark.

I shrugged, trying to look casual. “Sometimes these things happen fast. What can I say?”

“Come on, Addy.”

“
What?
” I said irritably. “What do you want me to say, Nate? I like Luc. Luc likes me.”

“Oh it’s ‘Luc’ now?”

“Nobody really calls him ‘Lucas,’” I parroted Luc’s words to Olivia.

“
You
did! Up until this morning, anyway.”

I frowned down at my lunch. Sonya turned her head toward Nate and began to study him, clearly trying to determine whether or not he was a threat.

“Did you even
talk
to Emily?” he asked, and I snapped my head up in annoyance.

“I couldn’t. Her face was attached to Paul Green. And you’re one to suddenly be thinking of Emily’s feelings—what happened to the ‘is this the great Emily revenge?’ talk you gave me yesterday morning?”

“I was
kidding
, Addy,
God!
Since when do you not know when I’m kidding and when I’m being serious? You’re not yourself. You’ve been acting weird since Friday. It’s not like you to go after someone else’s boyfriend. It’s not like you to
not tell your best friend
about what’s happening until it’s already a done deal. And now you’re sitting here acting like nothing has changed. Well, it
has,
Addy. It’s weird, and you know it. You’re not being straight with me.”

Sonya straightened up lazily and began to stretch-walk toward Nate. I waved her off, and she sat next to me instead, still watching Nate suspiciously out of the corner of one, silver-rimmed eye.

He looked around the quad; I followed his gaze, and the dozen or so people who had been surreptitiously watching our fight all turned innocently away. Great. We had added fuel to the gossip fest.

“Is it that you
like
all this stuff?” Nate asked quietly, glaring at a nearby group of freshman girls. “That’s it, isn’t it? You
like
being the center of attention all of a sudden. You’re the new Emily Archer—you’ve joined the popular crowd now. How does it feel?”

“Shut up!” I shouted with surprising force. More quietly, I added, “You know that’s not true.”

“Oh, I think it
is
true.” He nodded in a profoundly certain kind of way. “I think that’s exactly what’s happening here.”

“Then you don’t know me like I thought you did.” I was being spectacularly unfair, considering that he was, after all, totally right that everything I’d been doing for the past three days was totally out of character for me. But I no longer cared about hurting his feelings. I was too mad.

“Maybe I don’t know you,” Nate agreed. “Maybe I
never did
.” He stood up from the table and stalked off across the quad.

Sonya leapt to her feet and stared hungrily after Nate. She looked back at me, questioningly; I shook my head slightly. She sat back down, grumbling to herself.

“Hmmmm.”

I jumped as Luc appeared at my side, soda in hand. Had he been there the whole time, invisible, listening? Or did he just walk up quietly behind me? I didn’t feel like asking.

“That didn’t seem like it went very well,” he observed, sitting beside me.

I shook my head miserably. “Nope. Not very well at all.”

——

The period right after lunch—chemistry—passed in a blur, mostly because I was doing my best to block out the chatter all around me. But it was impossible to ignore it completely.

The general consensus seemed to be that not only had Nate and I been dating, but I hadn’t even bothered to dump him before taking up with Luc, and our little show during lunch had been me coldly informing him he’d been replaced. Apparently, Emily had not been alone in thinking Nate and I were more than just best friends.

My misery over the entire situation was lessened just a little bit by a small chunk of Annorasi knowledge I gleaned right after chemistry was over, when Luc and I walked to his locker to pick up his books for our next class together.

As we approached his locker, the light above our heads began to blink violently on and off until it finally made a loud popping sound and fizzled out.