Silent Symmetry (The Embodied trilogy Book 1)

by JB Dutton

  * * * * *

  The next day ended with Spanish class. Aranara wasn’t there. This was the one course that Cruz excelled in and he usually sat alone in a semi-walled-off section of the room with computer screens and headsets, enjoying Latino movies and TV shows while the rest of us struggled.

  I was pretty good at Spanish but nevertheless had somehow gotten the idea in my head to ask Cruz if he would help me out with a conversation session a couple of evenings a week. I waited till everyone else had left the language lab and poked my head around the half-wall that separated the regular desks from the multimedia section.

  Cruz was engrossed in a movie. No idea what it was. My brain was in some kind of cloud when I knocked on the back of his chair like it was a door. He snapped out of his tunnel vision and yanked off his headphones.

  “Hey, Kari.”

  “Hey. Cómo está?” I ventured, proud of my effort.

  He smiled, waited a second, then corrected me. “You mean, ‘Cómo estás?’”

  “Oh,” I responded, crestfallen.

  “’Cause we’re close. I mean... you know me, so, like, you gotta use the familiar part of the verb,” he explained, pushing his chair back and pausing the movie.

  “Right...” I nodded. I actually thought I was going to impress him. Fat chance. I rolled my eyes, annoyed with myself. I decided to focus on my shoes while I gathered the courage to ask him. “So... I’m, like, totally into Spanish and, you know, I thought it might be fun to, like, study together? I mean, just talk, chat or whatever. Hang out and, like, shoot the breeze...in... Spanish. One evening. Sometime.”

  Oh. Em. Gee. I was barely able to string a couple of sentences together in English, let alone Spanish.

  I looked up at him. Only then did I realize that even though he had seemed to be watching the movie, he had a pencil in his hand and a sketch pad on the desk.

  He put the pencil down and responded, “Yeah, I’m down with that.”

  “Awesome!” I beamed back at him.

  “I gotta get some shit done at home tonight, but sure – maybe tomorrow?”

  The pencil he’d been using was rolling toward the edge of his desk. He didn’t notice its movement and it completed five or six rotations almost in slow motion before plummeting to the floor. Cruz saw the pencil out the corner of his eye as it fell. He made a lunge for it, but was just too late. As he jerked forward, the back of his chair pushed the sketch pad off the desk too. It fell open at a drawing, and he froze. Even upside-down I could tell that the image was a likeness of me. Not just me, but a ridiculously perfect version of my face. Like the doodles pinned up inside Cruz’s locker, the sketch was incredibly symmetrical. Disturbingly so.

  He scrambled to pick up the pad, but he knew that I’d seen it. And I knew that he knew that I’d seen it. Regaining his cool, he bent down and closed the pad. He placed it back on the desk and leaned back in his chair, somehow expectant.

  My heart sped up and I felt a warm rush of blood move through me from head to toe. I’d kissed a boy before, but this was different. What was it? It felt so good. Cruz’s eyes met mine for an instant and I held them. Heat coursed through my veins and my lower stomach tightened and tingled, kinda like nerves, but not. Come on, I said to myself, he’s hot, he’s all yours, he wants you. Then there was only one, totally overpowering thought in my mind: kiss him. Kiss him, Kari.

  So I did, and the rest of the world melted away. His lips were warm and they parted ever so slightly. I parted mine too. Shivers ran down my spine at the wetness I felt inside my mouth. Completely electric. His lips were warm and soft. Time stopped completely. I was lost in the moment and the moment was lost in our kiss. No idea whether it was seconds or minutes, but eventually I pulled away and our eyes opened. His pupils were a midnight blanket. We were still entranced by the rush of magic we’d felt. Our faces were inches apart, mine slightly above his as he leaned back in his chair. My hair fell around my face, the ends brushing against his chest.

  A first kiss is always special, but this was beyond believable. It was as though my brain turned off and I was floating. I looked down at my hand, still gripping Cruz’s forearm. Suddenly there was a noise – a chair scraping floor tiles – and I moved away, the current running between us interrupted.

  “I have to go,” I said, flustered.

  He nodded and looked down at his running shoes again. I didn’t really have to go, but this was all I could think of to say. The moment was already overwhelming but I needed to leave before it became unbearable.

  I stumbled past a couple of chairs, back into the main part of the classroom. No one was there. I swear I’d heard something. Not only was there no one, but I now felt like a different person. The spell had been broken, dropped on the floor and stomped on. Reality hit me like a cold shower. I heard Cruz get up from his chair behind the half-wall and knew that I had to get out of there.

  I ran out of the language lab and into the hallway. In fact, I think I probably sprinted all the way out of the building. I wasn’t sure what had come over me, but as the chill late-afternoon air hit me, I shook my head and blinked. I had exited through the side entrance into the almost-empty parking lot and looked around trying to get my bearings. A light caught my eye. Two, in fact – the brake lights of a sedan leaving the lot. My thoughts instantly jumped to Aranara. But as the car turned into the street I could see that it wasn’t her father’s prowling limo. In fact it was a silver SUV. And a streetlight caught the person in the passenger seat before it joined the traffic flow. It was Noon. How could I be so sure? Because even from the car, his gaze pierced through the night and buried itself in my consciousness, even from a hundred yards away.

  I stopped in my tracks. Was this a coincidence? There was literally no one else around. My mind returned to Cruz. Already the feeling that I’d had in the language lab felt like a foreign country. The boys back in Lancaster were drab at best. I’d kissed one or two in third grade but it was nothing like this. Nothing like the brain-numbing surge of hormones that I’d felt a few minutes ago. I guessed that that was the explanation – the out-of-body experience I’d had was all down to chemicals, right? I mean, I suppose love must be real, but Mom had brought me up to apply logic and scientific analysis to any unexpected situation. So that’s exactly what I did. I hardly even knew Cruz, but did that matter? Love is blind, and that’s how I felt when I was kissing him. I don’t even know what I was seeing while my eyes were closed and our lips were pressed together. Stars? Sparks? All the colors of the rainbow? It just sounded soooo cheesy, and as I pulled my fall jacket around me, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the whole thing was just a dream.

  I marched swiftly into the street from the parking lot with my head down against the cold October wind and the brown leaves blowing around my ankles. Maybe I was over-thinking the whole thing? Maybe I should just go with it. What was the problem here anyway? Kissing a good-looking boy was what girls my age should be doing, right? But that wasn’t the issue. It was something else, and as I walked home an unpleasant sensation kept bugging me: I knew deep down inside that during those few minutes I was with Cruz in the language lab, I wasn’t myself. I literally wasn’t myself. Something, or someone, had been directing my thoughts and actions. And when I’d seen Noon in that SUV, there had a been a flash of insight. Somehow I knew that he was involved. My logical side kicked in. I decided then and there that I had to confront him and find out what was going on.