by E. Van Lowe
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Bait!” Alexia exclaimed at the top of her lungs. “Oh, Alan, how could you? How could you?”
We were once again in the Dupree living room. Roxanne was seated on the sofa filing her nails. Alexia stood in the middle of the room, performing.
“Alexia, Sweetie, it’s a good plan,” said Alan, trying to reason with her. “There’s no way we’ll let you get hurt. You’ll have me, Josh, Petros and Rive, all there to protect you.”
“I’ll have you,” she said, lasering me with angry eyes. “They don’t care about me.”
My turn.
“Alexia, we can’t lure the creature up to the school without you. He won’t follow us, but he will follow your scent. Without you, there’s no reason for him to follow me and Alan up there. If he doesn’t follow us, he stays in the pool, biding his time until he can attack you and your mother and kill you both.” I let the thought of being creature food sink in for a beat. “Once the creature arrives at school, you can leave.”
“Tell Alan you don’t care about me,” she said, her tone turning accusatory.
“That’s got nothing to do with this.”
“It’s got everything to do with this,” she squawked. “Tell him!
I swallowed hard. I could not allow Alexia to seize control of the moment. Alan was firmly behind the plan. The last thing I needed was for her to mess things up with a selfish tantrum.
“Alexia, we both care,” I started, but could feel my voice faltering. There was no way I could complete the sentence about you, without sounding totally fake. She was right. I didn’t care about her one bit.
“Oh, Alan, I thought at least you cared about me,” she said. Tears began streaming from her eyes. It was as if someone had turned on a sprinkler system—a truly masterful performance.
“Of course I care about you,” Alan replied weakly, and I got the feeling if I let her go on, I’d lose him.
“Don’t you care about him?” I said, finding my voice. “He’s risking his life for you. At least with this plan the odds of us surviving are in our favor.”
“Alan, your friend is mean. So, so mean. How can you let him talk to me that way?”
I turned to Roxanne, my eyes appealing. She pretended not to notice I was staring daggers at her. Roxanne’s attention was on her finger nails.
“If you really cared for Alan, you’d want to be sure he came back alive,” I said, turning my wrath back on Alexia.
“If he really cared for me, he wouldn’t ask me to do something so dangerous,” she shrieked.
She was behaving like a spoiled child. It was obvious how one-sided their relationship was, and on just whose side all the weight rested. I thought knowing that Alexia was willing to let him die would open Alan’s eyes to how things really were with them. I was so, so wrong.
“Alexia, I do care. I lo… love you,” Alan stammered.
Alexia threw the wadded up chewing gum wrapper she’d been holding at him, and ran off down the hall crying out: “Nobody loves me! NOBODY!”
“I can’t let you say bad things about my woman.”
I looked over at Alan. His face had gone beet red. His hands were knotted into fists. I turned to Roxanne who looked on blank-faced. We’d finally gotten her attention, if that’s what you want to call it. She stared at us if she were watching a cricket match.
Roxanne Dupree was a mystery to me. She wouldn’t move back up to the Applegate fortress because she didn’t want her daughter to be influenced by Eudora, yet she wouldn’t lift a finger to stop her daughter from running roughshod over everyone around her. I gave up on Roxanne, and faced my friend.
“I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my voice. “But a girl who sends her boyfriend off to die is not your woman.”
“Maybe we need to rethink this friendship,” Alan replied through tight lips.
His words stunned me. Despite what he’d told me about the importance having a hot chick, and knowing that this particular hot chick had him under her spell, I was still caught off guard. To be quite honest, I was hurt. Perhaps it was because our friendship meant so much to me, more than I realized until that very moment.
“You want to throw our friendship away for Alexia Dupree?” I asked, the words scraping up my throat.
We stood gazing at each other, five years of friendship hanging in the balance. We’d been there for one another since we were twelve years-old, through thick and thin, good and bad. Somehow that friendship was fast approaching the finish line.
Just then, Alexia stomped back into the room. “Here!” she said, throwing a pillow into Alan’s face. “I sleep on that pillow every night. It smells just like me.”
Alan pulled the pillow from his face and eyed me hopefully. “Her scent is all over it,” he said.
I nodded. “You and me are going back over to your place and have a conversation by the pool. After that, this thing is in motion. We can’t stop it. Got it?”
He nodded.
The end of our friendship had been narrowly averted… for now.
Alan and I went next door and stood by his pool talking about how lucky we were to be taking Alexia and Lara to an intimate summer dance at Beverly Hills High the following evening. Two tasty Nereid in the same place at the same time. After that, I went home to have dinner with my family, aware that it could very well be the last meal we shared.
Because I could not stop for death,
He kindly stopped for me.
Wearing a suit and tie on one of the hottest nights of the summer is a wardrobe choice destined to call attention to a young man, especially when said young man lives in a community where hopping from pool party to pool party is the norm on a hot summer’s night. Sneaking up to Beverly Hills high school dressed for the spring dance—not so normal.
Still, Alan and I were trekking up Olympic Boulevard, each wearing our three piece suits, dressed as if we were headed to a dress-up affair. If the suits weren’t bad enough, Alan had insisted on wearing the ankle length duster he bought during his The Matrix period, when he swore he was Neo incarnate. Ah, the eighth grade. He was also carrying the pillow with Alexia’s scent all over it. Needless to say, we stuck out like a pair of Eskimos at a beach party.
“I’m beginning to think this is a bad idea,” I mumbled under my breath as we crossed Elm.
“It’s not,” Alan said. “So far, none of our classmates have seen us. No one has asked us where we’re going. And if someone does, we lie.”
Alan was hopped up from the sendoff Alexia had given him, all touchy-feely and smoochy, with just the right amount of tears. She acted as if Alan were a soldier heading off to war. I knew Alexia could care less if Alan came back alive. All she cared about was making the creature go bye-bye.
I cared. My objective was for both of us to come out of this unharmed.
“If someone spots a couple of fifteen year-olds wearing suits lurking around the school, it’ll be pretty easy for the police to figure out who it is. It’ll take about five minutes of investigating for them to narrow it down to us—the only two guys in three piece suits on a summer night.”
“So what? By the time that happens, the creature will be captured.”
“Right,” I replied, not wanting to poke anymore holes in my own plan. “I’d still like to graduate without a criminal record, Alan. I imagine you would, too.”
He was silent for a few minutes. I guess he hadn’t thought of that.
“As long as Conner handles his end, nothing can go wrong,” he said with the supreme confidence of a fool.
“Right,” I replied a second time.
Once we crossed Camden Drive the streets became dark and deserted. There were far fewer pedestrians, far less chance of someone we knew spotting us.
“Hey, man, thanks for… umm, what you did at Winnie’s last night.”
You mean, rescuing Great Aunt Winsome from the creature while you quaked in your boots?
“What do you mean?” I asked, playing dumb.
“No problem,” I said.
“Cause you know if I’da had my throwing stars with me, I would have—”
“It’s over, bro,” I said, interrupting what we both knew was a bunch of bull. “Besides, we both saved Winnie.”
“Yeah, we did, didn’t we?” he said, still trying to convince himself he was every bit the action hero Alexia wanted him to be.
As we neared campus, we both ran out of things to say. Our footsteps slowed as neither of us was in any hurry to discover our fate. A poem from Lara’s leather bound book came to mind:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
It was a beautiful poem. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I loved the way it rolled off my tongue, the way it resonated in my mind. The poem seemed to be saying that the writer had been going through life almost as if he were asleep, devoid of any common human fears until something woke him up.
I didn’t know if that’s what Wordsworth meant, but that’s what it meant to me. The way I interpreted it, I’d been living in my tiny Beverly Hills teenage bubble with no knowledge or understanding of true love, or sacrifice. Then Lara came along, awakening me from my slumber with her love. Because of that love, I was about to undertake an act I would have deemed far too risky just a week ago—sacrificing myself to help out a friend.
While I knew Petros and Rive would be there to do the dirty work, there was a clear danger involved in our part. Anything could go wrong. We both knew it. We both dreaded it, and if not for my recent awakening, or the spell Alexia had placed on Alan, neither of us would have been here. Despite Alan’s desire to show off his expertise with throwing stars, we both knew we were geeks, not heroes.
We arrived on campus, and moved into the shadows that lined the gymnasium wall. As we slid along the wall, staying out of the light, I began getting a creepy feeling. The campus seemed unusually quiet. While it wasn’t unusual for the campus to be deserted on an August night, this quiet seemed to cry out that something was wrong.
We’d said barely a word to one another since we crossed Camden Dive, and now as we approached the side gym door that faced the parking lot, Alan said. “This is it.” His voice was scratchy.
“Yeah,” I replied, only to discover that my voice was equally scratchy. The same trepidation bubbling in his belly was bubbling in mine.
“Maybe he couldn’t pull it off,” I said, with an air of hope. If Conner wasn’t able to accomplish his end of the plan, it wouldn’t be our fault if we were unable to carry out our end.
Maybe,” Alan replied. We reached the side gym door. He rapped on it with his knuckles.
We stood in silence, both holding our breaths, both ready to admit defeat. Would defeat be so bad? We’d go back home and explain to Alexia that Conner didn’t show, so we were unable to get in. She’d stomp her feet and call Alan a fool for ever trusting me, adding fuel to the flame that was already consuming our friendship. And maybe our friendship would be over, and maybe it wouldn’t, but one thing would be certain—we’d still be alive.
It was then we heard footsteps approaching on the other side of the door. I don’t know about Alan, but my heart began to sink. A few moments later, the door pushed open.
“Hey, Guys,” Conner said. “You made it.”