by Gregory Ashe
The redhead was the same guy who’d blown up Becca’s car. And he was hanging out with Emmett, part of his gaggle of morons.
And then they were gone.
The sharks that had gathered for a feeding frenzy looked at each other in disappointment. The static buzz in the air began to dissipate. A whiff of cedar and tobacco reached me, and a moment later, Austin pushed through a giggling gaggle of sophomores who were picking me apart with their eyes.
“Which one of them?”
“What?”
“Was it Jack?”
“Nothing happened.”
“All right.” Austin turned to the girls. “Who called my boyfriend a faggot?”
“Will you drop it?”
The girls had dried up; they quivered, trembling against each other and staring at Austin.
“Who. Was. It.”
“Leave them alone. Hey, you girls. Go to class. Boo.” I clapped my hands, and they took off like I’d announced a Lululemon giveaway in the next room. One of them screamed.
“It was Jack. I know it was Jack.”
“It wasn’t anything. It was Emmett being a prick. Putting on a show for his friends.”
“Fine. It doesn’t matter. I’ll find Jack later.”
I took handfuls of his shirt and pulled him toward me. He was getting too big for his britches. Literally. The button-up was ready to pop when I tugged on it. It did, however, make him look damn fine.
“First, I’ve got to decide if we’re having a fight.”
“What?” Those turquoise eyes blinked sleepily. “We talked about this last night. We’re not—”
“That was before I knew that you conspired with Emmett on some insane plan to make me a better psychic.”
“The bell’s going to ring.”
“I’ll take the tardy.”
“Mr. Lynch is going to write you up.”
“Unlike you, I’ve had detention before. I’ll survive.”
“But Mr. Lynch might not.”
“Start talking.”
“Conspired. That’s a big word for a guy with all those muscles.” He was leering at me now, taking me in, and then he leaned toward me for a kiss.
I planted a hand on his chest. “I’m practicing for the ACT. If you try to change the subject again, we really will be in a fight.”
“Come on, Vie. You already know all of it. What do you want me to say?”
The bell chimed.
“I want you to tell the truth.”
“Emmett came up to me one day in the weight room. Just showed up out of nowhere. He’s never down there, not unless he’s—”
“Not unless he’s what?”
Austin eyed the rapidly emptying hallway. He looked like he was trying to decide if he could outrun me.
“Not unless he’s what, Austin?”
“Not unless he’s selling.”
“What? Like, he’s got a job?”
“Not a legal one.”
It took a minute. I loosed the wrinkled bunches of fabric that I’d been gripping. “You’re telling me Emmett is selling drugs? What? Weed?”
“He came down to the weight room, like I was saying, and he moved right behind the bench, grabbed the bar, and told me we had to talk.”
“Hold on. Back up. You can’t just skip over that. Who told you this?”
“A lot of guys.”
“So give me a name. Give me a lot of names.”
“It doesn’t matter, all right?”
“Yeah, it matters. I know Emmett. He’s not selling drugs. And whoever’s saying that—”
Red stained Austin’s cheeks. He jabbed a finger in the direction Emmett had gone. “Him? That piece of shit that just walked past you? You don’t know him. Come on, Vie. You’re so smart most of the time. And you don’t trust anybody. You thought that fireman, the one who was collecting change in the intersection, you thought he was running a scam. And last month, when we went to Billings, I saw you eyeing that nun.”
“She was suspicious—”
“She was selling apple pies outside a convent, for Christ’s sake. Just listen, ok? You won’t turn around when you have your shirt off because you think somehow I’m going to forget what’s on your back. You can’t sleep half the time I’m in bed with you—”
My face caught fire. “Dude.”
“—no, don’t try to tell me you’re sleeping. I know what you sound like when you’re sleeping. Sometimes you’re awake, Vie. But sometimes you’re dreaming and you scream. You’re terrified. And it’s not just the sleep, you know? You’ve got a backup plan every time I promise to do something because you’re convinced one day I’m not going to show up. And you won’t tell me what’s wrong, what’s really wrong. With us. Or with me. Or with you.”
“This is over.” I knocked into Austin with my shoulder.
Digging fingers into my shirt, he spun me back around. He was stronger. God, he was so much stronger than he’d been a few months ago. “You’re so smart. You’re so careful. You’re so fucking suspicious about everyone and everything, even me, but you trust Emmett Bradley. Well, here’s the truth. He is a drug dealer. Colton told me. And Kaden told me. And Harry Cash. And Dan Williams. And JJ Whaley bought a goddamn dime of weed off him while I watched, ok, so I know it’s true.”
I shrugged him off. I had a whole plan to storm down the hall, but my legs weren’t working. My heart was pumping blood somewhere, but it wasn’t my legs.
“Right there in the weight room, he sat down, and he told me you needed to start getting ready. And he’s right. And we agreed we’d start working on it after school got out. So I was going to tell you. Don’t make that face like I lied to you or hid something from you. I knew how you’d react. The first time I said his name, you were going to go flying out to his house and see if he was ok. So I waited. And then Emmett did what he always does: exactly what he wanted. He showed up without telling me. And he fucked with your head, just like he always does. And you know what? When we’d finished talking about you,” Austin’s finger jabbed toward my chest. “When we’d finished worrying about you.” It jabbed toward me again, not touching but coming close. “Because we’re always worrying about you.” Again. “He tried to sell me steroids right there on the goddamn weight bench.” All the fight went out of Austin; his shoulders slumped, and he sighed. “Get a clue, Vie.”
SCHOOL DRAGGED BY. A few times, I thought I saw the clock moving backward.
It was Friday, which should have meant I was looking forward to the weekend: work at Bighorn Burger, time with Austin, and a chance to feel semi-normal. Instead, though, all I did was think about that day and the night before. I had fucked up with the two boys I was in love with; I never should have acted that way toward Austin; I never should have done that psychic stuff to Emmett, even if he was being a hurtful piece of shit by refusing to talk to me about how he’d been doing.
My distraction wasn’t even, not really, about Emmett’s second reaction the night before, the way his pupils blasted open with arousal, that bulge under wet denim, although there were a couple of times in gym class when I got distracted, and once Austin had to punch my arm and tell me school was strictly PG-13 and maybe I’d better go take a shower, a cold one. He didn’t smile. He didn’t give me a peck on the cheek. He just shook his head again and I felt like I’d shot his dog or something like that. Austin’s warning didn’t really help, though; later, a kickball whammed me in the back of the head, and when I looked behind me, Colton, with his stupid faux hawk done up, was miming a really impressive jerk-off session. After that, I decided I should stay a little more focused.
No, what really distracted me was the fact that both boys had been right. Austin had been right that I trusted Emmett. I still trusted him, even if I shouldn’t. And Emmett had been right too. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that. He wasn’t right about everything. But he was right about enough. He was right that I’d been avoiding my abilities, avoi
ding learning about them and mastering them and controlling them. And he was right that, deep down, I was a selfish chickenshit. Sure, I bitched and moaned and whined about everybody watching out for me. But I still let them do it. And if I’d learned anything from Emmett the night before, it was two things: one, I could be killed very, very easily; and two, I was a danger to the people I cared about the most.
With those kinds of thoughts, it was hard to pay attention to anything, and the school day rushed by in a blur. Austin, who was in most of my classes, noticed, but he was obviously still angry with me, and aside from a lot of watchful glances—angry, watchful glances—he seemed content to wait.
The only new thing that day was in science. After Mr. Warbrath had been murdered, and after his psychotic replacement, Mrs. Troutt, had disappeared in the massive fight at Belshazzar’s Feast, we’d had a carousel of substitutes in chemistry. None of them really seemed to know where we were at in the course, what we were supposed to be doing, or, for that matter, anything about chemistry. It was probably no surprise that it was the only class I had an A in.
Today, we had another substitute. She was tiny—short and thin, and she probably wouldn’t have come up past my chest. Her dark skin made her a rarity in Vehpese; the only people of color were the Crow on the nearby reservation and immigrants from Latin America, who worked the ranches and some of the wage jobs in town. She announced that she had taken a long-term position with the school, and that made me very, very suspicious. I had a sinking feeling that my science teacher was going to try to kill me. Again.
Her name was Ms. Meehan, and she was wearing a t-shirt that said God Loves Black Nerds and on the back Too Bad They Don’t Believe in Him. If she recognized me, if she were already planning my murder, she didn’t give any sign of it. She just read the roll, told us we would get assigned seats the next day, and handed out instructions for a lab that we would be doing tomorrow.
When class ended, she stood at the door, practicing students’ names and wishing everyone a good day. As I passed her, I saw that she was older than I had first realized. Maybe even middle-aged, although she was so small and thin that it seemed shocking she could be that old. She nodded at me, smiled, and said, “I recognize you.”
Austin clapped me on the shoulder, bumped me toward the door, and said, “Gotta go, Ms. Meehan.”
“You were out running yesterday. Both of you.”
“It’s a small town,” Austin said, giving her his best boy-next-door grin as he hustled me into the hall.
“Have a nice day,” she called after us.
“What was that all about?” I said, shrugging off Austin as we plunged into the chaos of passing period.
He didn’t answer; he cut off to the right and the crowd swallowed me, and I ate lunch alone. On the other side of the room, Emmett was holding court. Rachel Emmenthal was touching his lip and fussing over him. The other girls were staring at her, obviously waiting for her to make a mistake so they could drag her down. The boys were laughing at whatever Emmett was saying. My fingers pinched the white bread in my hands so hard that jelly squirted over my fingers. Fine. They could laugh at his jokes. The girls could bat their eyelashes. He could sit there, thinking he was king of the school. But whose room had he been in last night? Who had he begged, goddamn begged, to—
Rachel darted in and kissed Emmett.
I threw my half-eaten sandwich into the trash and spent the rest of lunch on a toilet seat, my feet holding the stall door shut.
After lunch, I had Mr. Spencer’s English class. Things had been weird with Mr. Spencer. Part of it was the fact that he had spooned me. Naked. He did it to keep me from freezing to death, but still, all the important parts had been there, and it had been a very, very difficult memory to set aside. Part of it had to do with the fact that when I’d felt my absolute shittiest, I had kissed him. That, too, was hard to forget. But a lot of it had to do with the fact that, ever since the day at Belshazzar’s Feast when I’d seen Jim Spencer turn into the Human Torch and burn down an entire ranch, he’d been trying to pretend he had no idea who I was.
Like today. He was blond. He was beautiful. He dressed like he’d just walked out of a J. Crew catalogue. And today, he smiled at me, nodded at me, and his eyes never left a spot on the wall behind my head. He could have been a goddamn greeter at Walmart.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“Sure, Vie. I stay after school Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I’ve got one of your papers that I’d like you to—”
“No. Today. Right now, maybe.”
He was still staring at that damn spot behind me. He was looking through me. He wasn’t even seeing me, and I knew he never, ever wanted to see me again. “Gotta start class. Give me a few minutes to get everyone working, and then we can look at your—”
I grabbed his arm. Even through the poplin shirt, I could feel the supernatural heat that he radiated. “Now. Not about some goddamn paper. There’s a new teacher—”
Heat flashed under my hand, and I yelped and snatched my fingers back. Wisps of smoke curled up from the cotton, and a pair of brown singe marks showed where my fingers had rested. When I looked up, the copper in Jim’s blond hair was brighter, and cinders swirled at the back of his eyes.
“Don’t ever grab me again, Vie.”
He couldn’t have sounded more serious with a gun to my head.
Then he went into the classroom, said something, and everybody laughed. It took me a minute. I walked to the end of the hallway and came back. Then I went into the classroom, ignoring Mr. Spencer calling out, “That’s a tardy, Vie.” I found my seat. I didn’t kick the desk. I just bumped it. On accident.
Mr. Spencer started talking about the Odyssey. He had all sorts of things he wanted to say about it. He wanted to talk about heroes. He wanted to talk about monsters. I wanted to walk up there, grab him by the throat, and shake him. I wanted to make him talk about the real monsters, the ones we’d faced at Belshazzar’s Feast. I wanted to make him talk about everything that had happened to me since moving to this town. I wanted to make him talk about that damn kiss and why I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“Are you sick?” Georgia Dunlap, in the seat next to me, asked. She had hair like a golden retriever; I’d seen her buying the store-brand dye off the discount shelf at the C-Mart.
“I’m fine.”
“You sound like you’re going to throw up.”
“I’m fine.”
That last part came out louder than I intended, and the classroom went silent. Mr. Spencer, chalk in hand, paused. Those eyes swept over me and then past me to an innocuous spot behind my head. He smiled like a cardboard cut-out. “Vie, is something wrong?”
“Sorry.”
“Then maybe you can tell us your definition of a hero.”
“No, thanks.”
“I’m going to ask you again in a minute, so think about it. The Greek heroes had two essential traits: they were doers of deeds and speakers of words. Odysseus, as we’re about to see, meets both of those requirements easily. But Greek heroes also had to deal with conflicting demands placed on them. On the one hand, they were expected to achieve kleos. Glory. And this meant the glory of great deeds on the battlefield. It also meant a glorious death on the battlefield.
“The opposing pull to kleos is nostos. Does anyone recognize that word? What does it sound like? Nostos. Any words in our language that might come from it?”
Crickets.
Mr. Spencer smiled. “Nostalgia. Nostos means the return home, where your glory could be celebrated, where your wife and children could be proud of what you’d achieved and your glory transferred, at least in part, to them. But if you died to achieve the ultimate kleos, you couldn’t have nostos. And if you were too eager for nostos, you might not achieve kleos. Now, Vie, I just bought you a few minutes by rambling, so I hope you’ve got something ready to share for us. What’s a hero?”
I shook my head, face turned down to
the desk. Kleos I could understand. Dying for something, I could understand. But nostos? The desire to go home again? Who wanted that?
“Vie?”
I knew what he wanted. I knew why he was pressing me. I had my own questions I wanted to ask. What’s a hero? Is it a guy who fucks up every good thing in his life? Is it a guy who’s a chickenshit and afraid of himself? Is it a guy who has nightmares, a guy who lets his dad whale on him, a guy who lets his mom burn cigarette tracks up and down his back, a guy who psychically controls Emmett Bradley and runs away from Austin Miller?
“Vie, we’re not moving on until you give us an answer.”
“A hero is somebody too fucking stupid to stay out of trouble.”
There was no dramatic silence. Somebody at the back of the class snickered, and just about everybody shifted in their seats, and the clothing rustled.
“All right,” Mr. Spencer said, shaking his head. “Go on down to Mr. Hillenbrand’s office.”
I gathered my bag and my notebook and I headed out the door.
“What about you, Barbie? What do you think a hero is?”
The door clicked shut behind me.
Turning around, I faced the door, and I stared through the window set into the wood, and I waited. Because he knew I was standing there. He could see me out of the corner of his eye. And he was trying to pretend he couldn’t. He was hoping I’d go to the office. He was hoping I’d let it slide.
Five seconds.
He scrubbed at the board with an eraser.
Ten seconds.
He dusted chalk from his hands.
Fifteen seconds.
His head jerked toward the door. It looked involuntary and painful.
I gave him the finger. And then, speaking loudly and clearly, I said, “Fuck you.”
He heard me. The whole damn class heard me. Jim Spencer took one step toward the door, and then he reined himself in. He pointed in the direction of Hillenbrand’s office. I counted off ten more seconds with my finger up, locking eyes with him. God damn, the copper in his hair was bright. If I stayed long enough, if I pushed the right buttons, maybe he’d light up right here, right in the middle of school, like a Roman candle. And then let him try to pretend I didn’t exist.