“What?” I was even more baffled and sank down in the guest chair next to Dad’s desk. “I don’t understand.”
“Just as your father believed that you are distantly related to Dr. Henry Jekyll, my grandfather insisted that I am a direct descendant of the ‘evil Mr. Hyde,’ to use your own words.”
Tristen was one of the most articulate people I’d ever met, and he enunciated clearly, in his very precise British accent . . . but I still didn’t quite follow. “So you’re saying we’re, like, related? Because Dad said Henry Jekyll didn’t have any children. That’s one of the reasons we ended up with the old papers . . .”
Tristen smiled, but it was a joyless, bitter grin. “No, Jill, we’re not related. Don’t ever wish that upon yourself!”
I must have still looked very confused, because Tristen lost the smile and tried to explain more seriously. “If you’ve read the book, you know that Dr. Jekyll believed he altered his very soul when he drank the formula. That he created in Hyde a new being—a ‘new life,’ Stevenson called it.”
“Yes. I read the book,” I said. “But—”
“This new life,” Tristen continued, “was completely different, even in size and stature, from its creator. And it was this being, this beast, that procreated, beginning my family.”
I studied Tristen’s handsome face, thinking he was about as far, physically at least, from a “beast” as I could imagine. What he was saying, it was laughable. A weird joke. “You can’t be telling me that you’re descended from a . . . monster?” I asked.
“Yes, that is exactly what I’m saying.” Tristen tapped a finger against the novel. “Grandfather gave me this on his deathbed. He called it both ‘our hellish genealogy’ and ‘the horrible map of our future.’”
I drew back slightly, not liking what he said or the ominous tone of his voice. He clearly wasn’t joking. “Why a map, Tristen? What does that mean?”
“According to my grandfather, all of the Hyde men—down through the generations—are corrupted by the formula that your ancestor first drank, creating my lineage. Grandfather swore that we all—just like the first Mr. Hyde—eventually succumb to our darker natures and commit terrible acts.” His brown eyes clouded over. “At first we aren’t even aware of what we do. But eventually, try as we might to control the beast inside . . .”
As Tristen trailed off, I felt my eyes widening and fought the urge to stand up and run away. It was crazy. Tristen . . . He couldn’t be evil. He’d held me, comforted me. We’d just shared that moment . . . And his eyes. They were so warm and beautiful. I didn’t want him to be evil. Or crazy. But I found my gaze drifting to the dark mark under his left eye. “You don’t really think you . . . ?”
“Yes,” Tristen confirmed. “What happened with Todd—that wasn’t me. And I’ve started to dream, as Grandfather promised. Nightmares, which are growing more vivid.”
“Nightmares.” I kept staring at the bruise under his eye and my voice sounded squeaky as I asked, “What kind of nightmares?”
All at once Tristen was no longer explaining; he was confessing. Spilling secrets that I think he just couldn’t bear anymore. His eyes were miserable. “I . . . this thing inside of me,” he said. “In my dreams it attempts to kill a girl . . . and likes it. Relishes the slaughter.”
I jumped out of the chair, terrified. “Tristen!” I had to get away. He was crazy. But he caught my wrist, and I stared down at his hand. “Let go . . . please!”
“Jill,” he said quietly, soothing me. “I won’t hurt you. I promise. It’s not you that the beast I harbor wants. The dream is very specific.”
My eyes were still locked on Tristen’s hand, but I sat back down, not sure what else I could do. He was too strong to break away from. “What do you want from me?” I asked, voice still shaky. Although I already guessed the answer, I asked again, “Why are you here?”
“I want to perform the experiments documented in this box.” He nodded to the desk, still clasping my wrist. His grip was strong, but not harsh. “And I want you to help me. You are the only person I would trust to be in the lab when I start drinking the solutions. You would know how to counteract toxins if necessary.”
I shook my head, too horrified and petrified to be flattered. “You can’t drink the formulas . . .”
Tristen raised the novel, which he still held in one hand. “The book is very clear. The formula both creates—and banishes—the beast. That is how Jekyll changed back and forth—by drinking it.”
The “monster.” The “beast.” It was insane. What Tristen was saying was completely insane. “I won’t help you,” I said. “I can’t.” My gaze darted to the box. “I won’t let you have the papers. You need counseling . . .”
“I am the son of the world’s best psychotherapist,” Tristen advised me, boring into my eyes. “I don’t need to lie on a couch. I need to work in a lab. We need to work. Together.”
“Tristen, no.” How could his gaze seem so clear when he was obviously delusional?
“Jill.” He locked his eyes to mine. His compelling, warm, intelligent, seemingly sane eyes. “The nightmares are coming more frequently and vividly. I fear the monster inside of me is gaining power. I’ve already lost control to it too many times.”
My eyes snapped wider. “What? Not just with Todd?”
Tristen closed off to me then. The confession was over. But I’d seen the flash of surprise and self-reproach in his eyes and knew that he’d revealed more than he’d intended. “I am still in control,” he said, ignoring my question. “But I don’t know for how long. The dream about the girl—I awake sometimes not sure if it was real. What if the beast inside of me finally wrests control not only of my brain but of my body, and makes the nightmare reality?”
“Tristen . . .” I twisted against his grip. “Please. This is crazy.”
He squeezed my wrist more tightly, but it was a strangely calming touch, as if he was trying to focus me and force me to listen carefully when he announced, very clearly and gravely, “If you don’t help me, Jill, and if I can’t cure myself, I will kill myself before the beast acts upon its nastiest impulses.”
Tristen released my wrist then, like he knew that I wouldn’t run away . . . which I didn’t do. I just sat there, staring at him. And shaking.
I didn’t know if I believed any of what he had just said about a beast lurking inside of him thanks to a formula created over one hundred years ago. But looking into his eyes, meeting his unwavering gaze, I did believe in that moment that he would commit suicide before he really hurt someone else. Me, or somebody like Todd Flick, or the girl in his dream, whoever she was.
Still, I found myself saying, “Tristen . . . I don’t think so.”
He thumped his novel down next to my family’s box of documents, putting them close together and turning from me to observe them both. “Your father and my grandfather believed the same thing,” he said quietly. Ominously. “The past and the future for me—they seem to be commingling here, Jill.”
When he looked to me again, his gaze was commanding but his voice was imploring. “I am asking you to help me. And in return I will help you develop a contest entry. Do my best to see that you walk away with a thirty thousand dollar scholarship. All of it yours. I don’t care about the cash.”
I stared at him, in doubt about . . . everything. “I . . . I . . .”
I had no idea what I was about to say and no chance to say it because, suddenly, downstairs, I heard my mom enter the kitchen. We’d completely lost track of time.
“You have to go, Tristen! My mom is home!” I searched the room, desperate. We were on the second floor, and the only closet was tiny. “You have to hide somewhere!” I cried, eyes darting everywhere. “And I have to get out of here!”
Tristen didn’t seem to share my concern. He calmly packed up the box, replaced it on the shelf, stuck the novel into his messenger bag, and walked to a window, which he unlatched and opened with one powerful shove. He paused and looked to me as I h
eard my mother’s footsteps coming up the stairs.
“Go, Tristen! Please.”
“Think about what I’ve offered, Jill,” he said, stepping over the sill. “It’s a good bargain.”
Then Tristen Hyde slipped out the window and pulled it shut behind him. I heard his footsteps cross the porch roof and disappear, leaving me to turn and face my mother, who stood in the doorway looking very tired and very, very unhappy.
Chapter 19
Jill
“MOM . . . I WAS JUST . . .”
What was I doing? My eyes darted around the room again, to the box and the window that Tristen had just shut, and the photograph of me with my parents. “I just remembered this, and I really wanted it,” I lied, snatching the picture off the desk.
“You’re not to be in here, Jill,” Mom said, through gritted teeth. “I’ve told you!”
“But Mom . . .” I wanted to defend myself and say that it wasn’t so bad, was it? To be there with Dad’s stuff? But the look on Mom’s face stopped me. She wasn’t just upset. She looked almost beyond anger. Her eyes were getting empty again, like after Dad’s funeral.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, hanging my head with guilt and so I wouldn’t have to look at Mom’s face. Those flashes of vacantness . . . they were scarier than anger. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” I added, cradling the picture against my chest.
“Go to your room, Jill.” Mom stepped back from the door so I could pass. “Now.”
“Yes, Mom.” I stared at the floor as I brushed past her. She smelled like hospital disinfectant, but I caught a faint whiff of staleness, too, like maybe she hadn’t showered that day. “Good night.”
She didn’t answer. As I walked to my room, I heard her slam the office door shut, and the faint click of the lock slipping back into place. I closed my own bedroom door behind myself and stared at the photo I’d taken on impulse. Did I even want it, really? Did I want to look at Dad?
Tucking the picture in a drawer, I put on my pajamas and climbed into bed. I couldn’t sleep, though. I just kept thinking about madness and money and bargains.
Dad had stolen from me . . . Mom seemed to be losing touch again . . . Tristen might kill himself . . . Thirty thousand dollars, all for me . . .
Was it a good bargain?
Yes. No. Maybe?
I tossed and turned for hours, and by the time my alarm went off in the morning, I had made my decision.
Chapter 20
Tristen
I WAS AT MY LAB STATION, rotely completing a very basic experiment, when Jill approached me, face pale and drawn, as if she hadn’t slept the night before.
“I’ll do it, Tristen,” she said, her pink lips crushed into a white line. “I’ll help you if you help me.”
Although it was my deal on the table, I took a long moment to consider Jill’s offer, regretting that I’d told her so many of my secrets—and sorry at the same time that she would enter into this arrangement without knowing all of them. She probably deserved to know everything—even the terrible thing that I feared had happened in London—but she was already too scared. “Are you sure?” I asked, lowering my voice. “Because we will have to work in secret. My way, according to my rules.”
Even through her glasses, I caught the flicker of hesitancy in Jill’s hazel eyes. “Why in secret?” Her voice dropped to the merest whisper, too. “Can’t we at least tell Mr. Messerschmidt?”
“I am the lab rat, here,” I reminded her. “I told you, there will come a point when I begin drinking things. Do you think Messerschmidt will stand by and let me sip from beakers? And more to the point, don’t you think he’d wonder why I was doing it? What would we say?”
She tucked her hair behind her ear. “But—”
“We will enter the contest,” I added. “At the last minute, regardless of what we learn on my behalf. We will record our work, develop a presentation, and have an entry in time to win you thirty thousand dollars.”
Her financial situation must have been desperate, because at the reminder of the money, she hesitated just one more moment, then took a deep breath and actually extended her small hand. “Okay. We’ll do it your way. In secret.”
I took Jill’s hand, clasping her fingers, amused by her attempt to seem mature and businesslike. Amused and somehow touched. “It’s a deal,” I said. “We’ll start tonight. Say, nine?”
She nodded, and although I saw that she was still uncertain, agreed. “Okay. I think my mom will be working then.”
“Meet me behind the school near the cafeteria,” I said, recalling a place where smokers sometimes congregated. “There’s a padlocked metal door, used to bring in kitchen supplies. We can probably get in through there.”
Jill’s fair cheeks blanched, but she kept nodding. “Sure. See you there.”
As she returned to her lab station, I watched her ponytail swinging in time to her steps, and I kept thinking that she was not only smart but also a good person. Genuinely good to help me after the insane, truly insane, things that I’d told her. I was fortunate, indeed, to have her as a partner.
I also couldn’t help but notice that Messerschmidt, Darcy Gray, Todd Flick, and Becca Wright were all trying hard to pretend that they hadn’t just watched what had passed between Jill and myself.
Chapter 21
Jill
“TRISTEN, I DON’T THINK I want to do this,” I whispered, touching his sleeve in a weak attempt to stop his hand and an even weaker attempt to reassure myself that I wasn’t alone in the pitch-black parking lot behind the school. My other arm squeezed tighter around the box I’d taken after sneaking again into Dad’s office.
“Just be patient, Jill,” he said. “It’s fine.”
As Tristen picked the lock, I stole a look over my shoulder. My dad had been stabbed to death in a lonely parking lot, and his killer had never been caught . . .
“One more moment,” Tristen said, jiggling the lock. “I’ve almost got it.”
And before I could object again, he drew up to his full six-foot-something height, tugged on the lock, and we were in.
Or not quite in, because I didn’t move.
I stood rooted to the ground behind Tristen—the inky silhouette of Tristen, who held open the door with one long arm, waiting for me to walk past him into even more profound darkness.
If we went inside that empty school, what would happen? We would pick another lock and enter Mr. Messerschmidt’s room, where we’d break into the stores of chemicals, too. Two doors would close behind me. Behind us.
No one knew where I was or who I was with.
“Jill.” Tristen’s voice was low, deep, inviting . . . and tinged with a hint of warning. I knew what he meant just with that single word. You promised. We made a bargain. But Tristen had confided that nightmare to me, too. This thing inside of me attempts to kill a girl . . . Relishes the slaughter.
“I don’t dream of you,” Tristen said softly, like he’d read my thoughts. “I swear, Jill, you’re safe with me.”
I stayed stuck to the spot, throat tight. “Who . . . who is it, Tristen? The girl?”
“No one,” he whispered, still holding the door. “A girl I was with briefly over the summer. Not you. Just come inside.”
He meant to reassure me, but the reminder made me even less willing to join him. Over the summer . . . “No, Tristen.” I backed away, clutching the box. “I don’t want to.”
Then I turned and ran all the way home, leaving him standing alone in the dark doorway without the documents he hoped could save him.
Chapter 22
Jill
IT STARTED TO RAIN while I was running home, and after I locked the door behind me, I went straight to my room. Straight to my mirror, actually. Standing in front of my full-length reflection, I stared at my face; my wet, bedraggled hair; and my shivering body, thinking about Tristen, who I’d left waiting at an open door.
Tristen . . . And Becca.
Becca had mentioned seeing Tristen over the summer
, knew “his type” of girl, and had been salivating to tell me some story about him.
As I studied myself in the mirror, I could practically see my friend’s reflection standing shoulder-to-shoulder with mine, and I envied everything about her. Her thick hair, her gleaming white teeth, and her full lips, always red and glossy. There was a good chance that Tristen had kissed Becca’s lips, or wanted to kiss them, not by accident in a graveyard but on purpose. Because he’d wanted her.
By comparison everything about me seemed dull and washed out. My ordinary brown hair, limp from the rain. My eyes like two greenish mud puddles. My pale lips. I was too thin, too. Almost as skinny as my mom. And why had I ever bought the ugly, white collared shirt I wore? Just like its wearer, the blouse had no style.
I was pretty sure that Tristen dreamed of Becca. Yes, they were bad dreams. But that night I envied my friend for inspiring even nightmares. Would anybody ever dream about me, bad or good?
Downstairs, I heard my mom open the back door, home from the hospital, and I snapped off the light, plunging my reflection into darkness. I was supposed to be in bed already. Taking off my boring shirt, I pulled on a T-shirt and sweats that were even more shapeless, slid the metal box under the bed, and crawled between my blankets, pulling them to my chin.
How did people like Becca literally shine?
I curled up, pretending to sleep and listening for Mom’s footsteps on the stairs.
But Mom didn’t come upstairs, and after about fifteen minutes of complete silence I started wondering what in the world had happened to her. I didn’t even hear her making tea or the sound of the TV. Tossing off the covers, I went to the top of the stairs and listened more closely, getting nervous. “Mom?” I called down.
There was no answer, so I crept downstairs and went into the living room.
And as soon as I saw Mom crumpled on the floor, face buried in her hands, shoulders shaking violently, I knew. That cliff I’d feared she’d been sliding toward . . .
Jekel Loves Hyde Page 7