Unearthly (18 page)

“I'll come right back and get you,” he says quickly. “I thought I'd get her home safe and then I'd take you home.”

“I'll take Clara home,” says Tucker, who's been standing next to me the whole time.

“No, it'll only take a minute,” protests Christian, standing up straighter.

“The dance will be over in ten minutes,” says Tucker. “You expect her to wait for you in the parking lot?”

I feel like Cinderella sitting in the middle of the road with a pumpkin and a couple of mice, while Prince Charming charges off to rescue some other chick.

Christian looks sick with guilt.

“Go ahead and take Kay home,” I say, practically choking on the words. “I'll ride home with Tucker.”

“That's all right with you?”

“Sure. I have to be home by midnight, remember?”

“I'll make it up to you,” he says.

I swear I see Tucker roll his eyes.

“Okay.” I look at Tucker. “Can we go now?”

“You bet.”

After I find Wendy and Angela and say good-bye, I wait at the door as Tucker rounds up his other dates. They look at me with something like pity, and for a moment I actually hate Christian Prescott. We ride crammed together in Tucker's rusty pickup, four girls in formal wear, squeezed into the cab. He drops off the blonde first, because she lives in Jackson. Then the redhead. Then the brunette.

“Bye, Fry,” she says as she gets out of the truck.

Now it's just him and me in the cab. It's quiet as he drives out to Spring Creek Road.

“So . . . Fry, huh?” I tease after a while, unable to stand the silence. “What's that about?”

“Yeah,” he says, shaking his head as if he still can't understand it. “In junior high they called me Friar Tuck. Now it's just Fry. But my good friends call me Tuck.”

When we pull into my driveway, I'm already fifteen minutes past my curfew. I open the door, then stop and look at him. “Can you . . . not mention this whole fiasco to anybody else at school?”

“They already know,” he says. “One thing about Jackson Hole High, everybody is in everybody's business.”

I sigh.

“Don't worry about it,” he says.

“Yeah, they'll forget by Monday, right?”

“Right,” he says. I can't tell if he's mocking me or not.

“Thanks for the ride,” I say. “Fry.”

He groans, then grins. “My pleasure.”

He's such a strange guy. Stranger by the minute.

“See you.” I jump down from the truck, slam the door shut, and make for the house.

“Hey, Carrots,” he calls suddenly.

I turn back to him. “You and I will probably get along better if you stop calling me that.”

“You like it.”

“I don't.”

“What do you see in a guy like Christian Prescott?” he asks.

“I don't know,” I say wearily. “Anything else you want?”

His dimple appears. “Nope,” he says.

“Good night, then.”

“Night,” he says, and drives off into the dark.

The porch light comes on as I creep up the steps. Mom stands in the doorway.

“That wasn't Christian,” she says.

“Brilliant observation, Mother.”

“What happened?”

“He's in love with another girl,” I say, and pull the silver laurel out of my hair.

Later, in the darkest time of night, my vision turns into a nightmare. I'm in the forest. I'm being watched. I feel the amber eyes of the Black Wing. Then he's holding me down, pressing me into the cold ground beneath, his body blotting out the light. Pine needles stab into my back. I scream and flail. One hand strikes his wing and I pull out a fistful of black feathers. In my fingers they evaporate. I keep pulling at the angel's wings, each feather a piece of his evil, until he suddenly dissolves into a heavy cloud of smoke, leaving me coughing and panting in the dirt.

I jolt awake, tangled in my blankets. Someone's standing over my bed. I suck in a breath to start screaming again, but his hand comes over my mouth.

“Clara, it's me,” Jeffrey says. He removes his hand and sits down at the edge of the bed. “I heard you screaming. Bad dream, huh?”

My heart's pounding so hard I hear it like a war drum. I nod.

“Want me to get Mom?”

“No. I'm fine.”

“What was it about?”

He still doesn't know about Black Wings. If I tell him, he'll be more vulnerable to them, Mom said. I swallow.

“Prom didn't exactly go as planned.”

His eyebrows bunch together and he frowns. “You had a nightmare about prom?”

“Yeah, well, it was that kind of night.”

He looks over at me like he doesn't believe me, but I'm too tired to explain how my life seems to be coming apart at the seams.

Chapter 13
Goth Tinker Bell

My cell phone chirps. I take it out of my pocket, look at it, click
IGNORE,
and then put it back into my pocket. Across the dining room table, Mom raises her eyebrows at me.

“Christian again?”

I cut a bite of French toast and put it in my mouth. I can hardly taste it, I'm that mad. Which makes me madder still. Normally I love French toast.

“Maybe you should talk to him. Give him a chance to make it right,” she says.

I put my fork down.

“The only possible way for him to make it right is if he builds a time machine, goes back to last night, and . . .” My voice fades. And what? And turns his back on Kay while she's falling apart? And takes me home instead? And kisses me on the doorstep? “I just need to be mad for a little while, okay? I know it might not be the most mature thing, but there it is.”

The phone in the kitchen starts to ring. We look at each other.

“I'll get it,” she says, and slides out of her chair to grab the phone off the wall.

“Hello?” she says. “I'm afraid she doesn't want to talk you.”

I slump at the table. My French toast is cold. I pick up my plate and go into the kitchen, where Mom leans against the counter, nodding as she listens to whatever he's saying. Like she's totally taking his side.

She puts her hand over the receiver. “I really think you should talk to him.”

I slide my French toast into the trash, then casually rinse my plate in the sink, put it in the dishwasher, and dry my hands on a kitchen towel. I hold out a hand for the phone. Surprised, she gives it to me. I put it to my ear.

“Clara?” Christian says hopefully.

“Take the hint,” I say into the phone, then hang up.

I hand the phone back to Mom. She's smart enough not to say anything as I stalk past her and up the stairs toward my bedroom. I shut the door behind me and throw myself onto my bed. I want to scream into my pillow.

I won't be that girl who lets the guy treat her like crap and still fawns all over him. I went to prom with Christian Prescott. It wasn't supposed to be magical, I tell myself. It wasn't supposed to be romantic. It's my job, pretty much. But it wasn't supposed to end with me being dumped out of Tucker's truck at the end of the night.

So that's it, I decide. From now on, this Christian thing is strictly business. You go to the forest, fly him out of there, apparently, drop him wherever he needs to go, and that's that. No need to be his friend, or anything else. No hand-holding. No staring rapturously into his eyes. At the memory of the vision, the vividness of it, my chest gets tight. His hot hand against my cheek. I close my eyes. I curse the warmth that floods my belly. I curse the vision for, I don't know, leading me on.

My cell phone rings. It's Angela. I answer it.

“Don't say anything,” I say.

There's silence on the other end.

“Are you there?”

“You told me not to say anything.”

“I meant about last night.”

“Okay. Let's see. My mom has decided to run
Oklahoma!
this fall at the Garter. I am trying to talk her out of it. Whoever heard of
Oklahoma!
in Wyoming?”

“Was everybody talking about it?” I ask. “After we left?”

She pauses for a minute, then dutifully changes the subject. “Nice weather we're having today. Almost like summer.”

“Angela.”

She sighs.

“Yes,” she admits.

I groan. “Do they think I'm a total dork?”

“Well, I can only speak for myself.” I can actually hear her grinning. I start to smile in spite of myself. “Come over for dinner,” she says. “My mom's making fettuccine Alfredo. I'll find something for you to punch.”

I literally go limp with relief. God bless Angela. I'd never be able to make it through the day in the house with the constant ringing of the phone, and Mom breathing down my neck. “When can I come over?”

“How soon can you get here?” she says.

Angela and I see a double feature at the Teton Theatre, a horror movie and an action movie, sheer mindless fun, just what the doctor ordered. Afterward we hang out on the empty stage at the Garter. I'm beginning to love this place. It feels like it's Angela's and mine, a secret hideout where nobody else can find us. And Angela's good at distraction.

“Here's something that will cheer you up,” she says as we sit on the edge of the stage with our feet dangling into the orchestra pit. She stands up and summons her wings. She closes her eyes. A fly falls onto my shoulder. I quickly shake it off. The flies in the theater creep me out. They're always flying up into the lights and getting their wings singed, and then they drop out of the air and buzz around on the stage, alive. I look back at Angela. Nothing's different.

“Am I supposed to see something?” I ask after a minute.

She frowns. “Wait for it.”

For a minute nothing happens. Then her wings begin to shimmer, the way the air does over concrete on a hot summer day. Slowly, they start to change form, smoothing out, curving into a different shape. Angela opens her eyes. Her wings look like a huge moth's, still pristinely white but smoother, segmented, dotted with small white scales like what you would see on a butterfly's if you looked real close.

My mouth drops open. “How did you do that?”

She smiles. “I can't change the color,” she says. “I thought it would be so cool to have purple wings, but it didn't work. But I can make them look like pretty much anything if I try hard enough.”

“What do they feel like when they're like that?” I ask, watching the gigantic butterfly wings open and close behind her, back and forth, such a different movement from our feathered wings. She looks like a Goth Tinker Bell.

“More fragile. And I don't think they would fly the same way. I don't even know if I could fly like this. But that's a limitation of my brain. I think our wings can be whatever we want. We see feathered wings because they are iconic of angels. But really they're only a tool. We choose the form.”

I stare at her. It would never have occurred to me in a million years to try to change the form of my wings.

“Wow,” I say, pretty much speechless.

“I know, right?”

“What do you mean, they're only a tool? They feel real to me,” I say, thinking about the heaviness of my wings on my shoulder blades, the mass of muscle and feather and bone.

“Have you ever wondered where our wings go when we don't have them out?”

I blink at her.

“No.”

“I think they might exist between dimensions.” She brushes sawdust off her pants. “Watch this.”

She closes her eyes again. The butterfly wings dissolve, becoming a misty cloud that hovers around her head and shoulders.

“Do you think I could do that?” I stand up and summon my wings awkwardly. I can't help my sudden flash of jealousy. She's so much stronger than I am. So much smarter about everything. She has twice the angel blood.

“I don't know,” she muses. “I guess I could have inherited the shape-shifting thing. But it makes more sense if we all could do it.”

I close my eyes.

“Butterfly,” I whisper.

I open my eyes again. Still feathers.

“You have to free your mind,” says Angela.

“You sound like Yoda.”

“Free your mind, you must,” she says in her best Yoda voice.

She raises her arms over her head and stretches. Her wings disappear.

“That was unbelievably cool,” I tell her.

“I know.”

At that moment another fly drops right down the front of my shirt, and between the shrieking and digging around to get it out, and the hysterical laughing afterward, I'm so grateful that I have a friend like Angela, who always reminds me of how cool it is to be angel-blood when I'm feeling like a freak of nature. Who can make me forget about Christian Prescott, even for a minute.

Christian's sitting on the front step when I get home. The porch light casts a halo of soft glow around him, like a spotlight. He has a mug of what I can only guess is my mom's raspberry tea in his hand, which he instantly puts down on the porch. He jumps to his feet. I fervently wish I could fly away.

“I'm sorry,” he says earnestly. “I was dumb. I was stupid. I was an idiot.”

I have to admit, he does look adorable standing there all moony-eyed telling me how stupid he is. Not fair.

I sigh.

“How long have you been sitting here?” I ask.

“Not long,” he says. “Like three hours.” He points to the mug. “The free refills made it only seem like two.”

I refuse to smile at his joke and push past him into the house, where my mom suddenly jumps up from the couch and heads for her office without a word. For that I'm grateful.

“Come in,” I call to him, as it's clear he's not going to go away any time soon.

He follows me into the kitchen.

“Okay,” I say. “Here's the deal. We will not discuss prom, ever, ever again.”

His eyes flash with relief. I grab his mug and put it next to the sink. I take a moment to steady myself against the counter.

“Let's start over,” I say, my back to him.

That'd be nice, I think, to start over. No visions, no expectations, no humiliation. Just boy meets girl. Him and me.

“Okay.”

“I'm Clara.” I turn to face him and hold out my hand.

The corner of his mouth lifts in a suppressed smile. “I'm Christian,” he murmurs, taking my hand in his and squeezing it gently.

“Nice to meet you, Christian,” I say like he's a normal guy. Like when I close my eyes I don't see him standing in the middle of a forest fire. Like him touching me right now doesn't send a pang of yearning and recognition rippling through me.

“Totally.”

We go back out to the front porch. I make more tea and get a blanket for him and a blanket for me and we sit on the front step, looking at the diamond-studded sky.

“Stars were never this bright in California,” he says.

I was thinking the same thing.

By the time my mom comes out of her office and politely (and ecstatically, I think) informs us that it's late and it's a school night and Christian had better get himself home, I know so much more about him. I know that he lives with his uncle, who owns the Bank of Jackson Hole and a couple of real estate offices in town. Where his parents are, he doesn't really go into, although I get the distinct impression that they're dead, and have been for a long time. He's super attached to their housekeeper, Marta, who's been around since he was ten years old. He loves Mexican food, and skiing of course, and playing the guitar.

“Enough about me,” he says after a while. “Let's talk about you. Why did you come here?” he asks.

“Oh, uh—” I search my brain for my rehearsed answer. “My mom. She wanted to get out of California, move somewhere that's not so crowded, get some fresh air. She thought it'd be good for us.”

“And was it? Good for you, I mean?”

“Sort of. I mean, school hasn't exactly been easy, trying to make friends and all that.” I blush and glance away, wondering if he's thinking about the nickname Hot Bozo that's so popular among his buddies. “But I like it. . . . I feel like I belong here.”

“I know what that's like,” he says.

“What?”

Now it's his turn to look embarrassed. “I just mean, when I moved here, it was hard for a while. I didn't fit in.”

“Weren't you, like, five?”

“Yeah, I was five, but even then. This is a weird place to move to, on a lot of levels, especially from California. I remember that first snowstorm—I thought the sky was falling down.”

I laugh and shift slightly, and our shoulders touch. Zap. Even through our clothes. I move away.
Business, Clara, business
, I tell myself.
Don't lose it over this guy now
. I clear my throat lightly.

“But you feel like you belong now, right?”

He nods. “Yeah, of course. There's no doubt in my mind that this is where I belong.”

Then he tells me that he's thinking about going to New York for the summer, on some kind of business school internship for high school students.

“I'm not stoked at the idea of the internship, but summer in New York City sounds like an adventure,” he says. “I'll probably go.”

“All summer?” I ask, a little stricken.
But the fire,
I want to say.
You can't go.

“My uncle,” he says, and then he's quiet for a moment. “He wants me to get a business degree and take over at the bank someday. He's got expectations, you know, things he thinks I should do to prepare myself and all that mumbo jumbo. I don't know what I want to do.”