The Watcher (5 page)

Soon we were back at Fiona’s old Honda Civic, parked in the shade of a huge maple, and Michael lowered me onto the car’s hood. The cold metal pulled the skin on my legs into goose bumps, and I was suddenly aware of how warm I’d been pressed against him. Then, holding my hips, he gently guided me down to my feet. Our eyes locked–there was such light in his –and the air grew warm between us. In that moment, nothing else existed: just that light in his eyes and the touch of his hands on my hips. If I were more experienced with guys, I might have known how to flirt with him. But I didn’t. All I could do was hold my breath and lean in ever so slightly, willing him to come closer.

It didn’t work. Letting out his own breath, Michael dropped his hands and swept his gaze to my feet.

“How’s your ankle?” He took half a step back.

My foot was swelling inside my boot, but the pain was completely manageable. I put weight on it and didn’t cringe. Not having to walk back must have helped. “It’s good. Thank you—for everything.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Michael, that was awesome of you!” Fiona cut in, still a little short of breath from the hike.

Oblivious to the moment we’d just had, she praised and thanked Michael a few times, and then reassured him that she and Heather would take me to the hospital to get checked. I thanked him again too, but only once. Fiona’s profuse attention made me uncomfortable for all three of us.

Once we were inside the car and Michael was well out of earshot, Fiona gushed, “Oh my God, he’s
so hot
—
celestial
hot. You’re so lucky!” She sighed for emphasis, putting the car into drive. “He didn’t even break a sweat when he carried you. And did you
see
that body? Like an Olympic swimmer.”

Heather made a face. “Fiona, Mia had a serious fall and may have broken her foot. That’s hardly lucky.”

Fiona backpedaled. “Of course not lucky to have fallen…but lucky he was there.”

“It was nice of him to stay,” Heather said, studying me for a reaction.

I schooled my expression to a neutral one so she wouldn’t notice my rush of excitement from thinking about him. With my luck, she’d analyze my feelings, try to set me up on a date, and I’d embarrassed myself around this guy enough already, thanks
.
Whatever I felt would be best kept secret for now. “Yeah, it was nice, I guess.”

“You
guess
?” Fiona turned her head to look at me in the back seat. Then remembering she was driving, she turned back to the road. “The way he carried you was so romantic. If he’d carried me like that—”

Heather began to laugh. “I think we have a pretty good picture of what you’d do, Fiona.”

I laughed too, grateful for Heather’s injection of humor. The strange sensations and pain coursing through my body after the fall were overwhelming enough, not to mention all the strong feelings I’d had around Michael, or the strange things I’d seen. I didn’t need to add Fiona’s fantasies about him to the mix.

***

Luckily for us, the Emergency Room wasn’t too busy. Heather walked me in while Fiona went foraging for something to eat.

The nurse at the administration desk paged my mom and asked me to take a seat in the waiting area. Mom came down a few minutes later wearing the lilac-colored nurse’s uniform we’d picked out together last spring. It brought out her green eyes and softened the gray streak in her hair. After greeting Heather, she drilled me about the accident. Between her crazy hospital schedule and my starting the school year, I hadn’t had much time to spend with her since I’d returned from Denver. I had to admit, getting injured was a strange way to do it.

I told her about the log bridge and that some noise had startled me, for lack of a better explanation. I didn’t want to talk about the likelihood of seeing the same dog again, not with Heather present. If it were real,
surely
someone else would have seen it.

“Eight feet,” she said coolly. She was never one for big emotional scenes, not when it came to injuries. “It could have been a lot worse. How did you get back?”

Mom was far too smart sometimes.

This was where Heather chimed in. “A boy from school came by. He knew some first aid and helped us get Mia out.”

Mom squinted at me suspiciously. “Were there boys on this hike?”

“No, Mom.” It was silly to have to apologize for a boy helping us out. Mom could be so overprotective.

“It’s a popular trail,” Heather added.

Fiona joined us, carrying a large box of pizza in one hand and the slice she was eating in the other. She greeted my mom and plunked herself into the empty seat beside us.

“Hi, Fiona. Heather and Mia were just telling me about the accident.”

I tensed. This was not a time for Fiona to talk about the glorious attributes of Michael Fontaine—or his swimmer’s body. I didn’t need my mom prying about him, or worse trying to play matchmaker.

Fortunately, all she said was, “Yeah, it was really scary.”

The topic of Michael didn’t come up again. Instead, Mom shared a pizza slice with us and asked about our first week of school. I settled in with my pizza, hungrier than I expected, and let my mind wander.

Behind the administration desk, the paramedics rolled in a girl on a stretcher with tubes in her arms. A poppy-red blood stain pooled through the blanket on her chest. Doctors and triage nurses swarmed her, and the previously quiet ER erupted like an upturned anthill. As they wheeled the patient behind a room divider for privacy, I noticed a tall figure standing in the doorway bathed in a soft golden light. Michael. What was he doing here?

I raised a hand to wave at him as a nurse in surgical scrubs walked by, but by the time she passed, he was gone. Why didn’t he stay? Staring at the empty doorway, I wondered if my eyes had deceived me. I wished I could get up and follow him, to find out if he was real, but with my ankle not working right, he’d be a block away by the time I hobbled to the door.

A few moments later, Heather and Fiona left and I was led into a semi-private examination room with pale yellow curtains for walls. After checking me for injuries and applying a tensor bandage, the doctor said I had a mild sprain and recommended ice, over-the-counter painkillers, and rest.

Mom drove me home and set me up on the couch with a cold pack and some movies before she went back to finish her shift. I couldn’t focus on them. My mind kept wandering back to that house I’d imagined. Thinking I might have seen it in a book somewhere, I hobbled to my room and rifled through my books on ancient civilizations.

Sitting on my bed, I scanned for pictures and descriptions to see if anything jogged my memory. As I worked through ancient Greece, my mind played over the morning’s events. Had I been imagining the dreamlike images, the strange flashing lights, the shadows in the bushes? None of these things made any sense, no matter how much I wanted them to. Perhaps I had a concussion.

But the doctor had checked me for any head injuries. I was, by all accounts, perfectly fine.

Chapter Six

Tuesday morning before English class, a copy of the
Westmont High School Gazette
landed on my desk, startling me.

“What’s this?” Michael demanded.

I marveled at how he could still be gorgeous when he was scowling. His lips tightened into a hard line, he pointed to an article at the top of the page. The headline read:
Local Girl Makes a Big Splash
.

“Oh no!” I read the first few lines, which gave some vague details about my fall into the creek and then expounded on Michael’s prowess in rescuing me. The article made me out to be some kind of loser while he looked like a superhero. “Who wrote it?”

He pointed to the byline. “Elaine.”

Of course!
“How did
she
hear about it?” I asked quietly.

“She wouldn’t say—something about journalistic ethics.”

“There’s irony for you.” Had Elaine overhead Fiona gushing about it somewhere? It was entirely possible. I’d have to watch what I said around Fiona, too.

He sighed, tore the paper in half, and tossed it into the recycling bin. I heard him mutter “Just what I need” before sitting down and ignoring me for the rest of class. As if it was
my
fault. On Monday he had almost been friendly. Now I was some sort of pariah he couldn’t be seen talking to—never mind helping. Several rows back, Elaine watched our interaction with a smug look on her face.

In class, we were reading Act 1 Scene 2 of
Hamlet
and Michael was asked to read the lead part. With his slight accent, the lines rolled off his tongue naturally. He was the perfect Hamlet. Judging from the faces of all the girls in class—even Heather’s—I wasn’t the only one affected by the sound of his voice. Hamlet’s grief-stricken first soliloquy—
O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt
—blazed through the room, melting a few of us in its wake. As he breathed new life into my favorite Shakespearean character, I felt like he was reading the words right to me.

The rest of the week, the teachers doubled everyone’s homework. I was assigned a six-page Gov/Econ report, pages and pages of math problems, and a quiz for Latin. Elaine had a permanent smirk, no doubt pleased by how much her article had humiliated me. Kids I barely knew whispered in the halls and gave each other looks as I walked by. Some of them asked me if the story in the
Gazette
was true, and a few junior girls asked me about being carried by Michael Fontaine—as if I needed reminding!

In class, Michael kept to himself. By the end of the week, it was like the incident in the forest had never happened. I wanted to ask him if he’d been at the hospital that Saturday, but he was even less approachable than usual. I’d hoped to see him at lunch or catch him alone in the halls, but outside of class he practically disappeared.

***

On the weekend, my brother Bill came up for a short visit. Mom took Saturday off and the three of us went sightseeing around the waterfront and Pike Place Market. My ankle was almost healed, so I could walk normally again. We even had a mini heat wave.

Sunday afternoon, Bill took me to the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History, so we could see an exhibit on ancient Egypt. He and I had been talking about it all summer and he’d promised to go with me. Though I’d first heard of ancient civilizations in grade school, Bill got me a book on Mesopotamia for my fourteenth birthday. I’d thought it was a joke at first, because it had
mia
—my name—in it. But since then, I’d been fascinated by the prehistoric civilizations, especially around the Mediterranean and Fertile Crescent.

The entrance to the exhibit was designed to resemble the temple at Luxor, with its high columns and hieroglyph-inscribed stone. If I squinted, I could pretend I was actually there. The main room opened up to be much larger than I expected, big enough to accommodate the crowd. The walls surrounding the glass cases were painted faux sandstone, and each case was labeled with the era it came from—Pre-Dynastic and Early Dynastic, and the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. Inside the glass cases were artifacts ranging from bronze and iron weapons to jewelry, hand mirrors, and cosmetics cases. On one side of the exhibit were replicas of paintings from inside a step-shaped pyramid; on the other side were mummies, mummy cases, and tombs. Bill and I saw a few items together, some scarabs and clay pots, but when I took my time reading everything, soaking it all in, Bill wandered off to look at things on his own.

I was inside a full-sized stone replica of the tomb of Kitines, examining an ornately painted mummy case, when Bill sneaked up behind me and grabbed my shoulders.

“Ahh!” I shrieked and stumbled backward into him.

Laughing, he caught me. “Gotcha.”

“Jerk!”

I punched his arm but he dodged it, heading toward the tomb’s exit. “You gotta admit this stuff is pretty creepy.”

“It’s not. It’s cool how advanced they were.”

Outside the tomb was a case of mummified animals that had served as pets in ancient times, mostly cats, but there was also a hawk and a tiny crocodile.

“Still want to be an archaeologist when you grow up?” Bill asked.

“When I
grow up
? I’m not five!”

“You know what I mean. You’re going to study this stuff next year, right?”

“I hope so.”

I stopped to admire a reproduction of a painting from the tomb of Menna, a man spear fishing in the Nile with his wife and family. The animals and marshes were captured in meticulous albeit stylistic detail, and the caption explained that the painting’s fertile environment symbolized the Egyptian belief in rejuvenation and eternal life.

“Any idea where?” Bill persisted.

“Not yet.” It depended on what Mom and I could afford, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask Dad for the money. But I didn’t want to get into that with Bill. Dad had paid for his education. I seriously doubted he’d pay for mine.

Near the end of the exhibit was a section on weaving. The caption outlined the evolution of fabric and Egypt’s history of working with linen and flax. When I saw it, some invisible string tugged at my insides, pulling me there.

“Saw that already,” Bill said behind me. “I’ll meet you outside.”

I nodded, my attention fixed on the display. Beside a case of fabric fragments, heddle jacks, and loom weights was a small replica of a loom that took up to four women to operate. I’d hoped something might click, but I’d seen these things in books before. They were nothing like what had come to me that day in the woods.

After the museum, Bill and I decided to go for coffee in the nearby U District. We found a small bohemian-style café with comfortable-looking chairs and dark wood walls. The place was surprisingly crowded for such a nice day, so I pounced on some red velvet armchairs and saved us a spot while Bill stood in line.

No sooner had Bill brought me a vanilla latté than something caught his attention; he did a double-take and almost spilled his cappuccino. A girl with honey-blond hair walked into the café. With her striking golden eyes and long legs, she belonged on a runway.