Hunted

by Dean Murray

  I couldn't blame Dad at the way he frowned when he received the text. They were supposed to leave on their camping trip tomorrow and Mom was leaving him to do all of the packing by himself. It wasn't a very promising start to the vacation that he was hoping would save their marriage.

  Chapter 18

  The sound of Mom and Dad packing pulled me out of bed almost two hours before I'd originally planned on getting up. Cindi didn't even stir when I left our room. Apparently she and Mom had been out really late.

  Things weren't pretty when I got out to the living room. The pile of camping gear that Dad had spent the evening putting together had mostly disappeared into two large blue backpacks, but Mom was sitting bleary-eyed at the table while Dad finished up the last of the packing.

  "Honestly, John, there isn't any reason to be such a jerk about things. It wouldn't have hurt you to let me sleep for a couple more hours before we left."

  Dad didn't look up from his packing. "We can discuss it on the road."

  "No, I want to discuss it now. I'm tired of you trying to dictate to me."

  "Fine, you want to discuss it, let's discuss it. I'm tired of trying to keep the girls from seeing just how much of a child you've become over the last couple of years. I thought maybe we should spare Adri another fight, but if you want to force a confrontation I'll be more than happy to give you one."

  Mom opened her mouth, probably to snap back at him, but Dad didn't give her a chance.

  "We're leaving right now because that is when we agreed to leave. I didn't dictate that, we jointly agreed that we wanted to get an early start so that we could finish the first leg of our trip and get the tent set up before dark. I woke you up because I'm tired of your incessant tendency to disregard things like this and then expect me and the girls to pick up the pieces."

  "That's not fair!"

  "You're right, it's not fair. It's not fair for you to spend money we don't have and then expect me to come up with it rather than chipping in yourself. It's not fair that you haven't cooked a dinner in months, instead expecting the girls or I to do all of the cooking while you selfishly pursue your hobby to our detriment."

  "That's not what I meant, and you know it. You're so high-and-mighty, always treating me like a child. Well, I'm tired of that. Do you realize how many guys expressed an interest in me at my last gallery showing, a showing that you didn't even bother attending?"

  My dad's knuckles went white on the backpack's frame, but Mom apparently didn't see the warning signs—that or she just didn't care, just wanted to goad him into the most excessive retort she could manage.

  "I would point out that I didn't go to your show because you scheduled it the same night as Adri's first cheerleading game, but I somehow suspect that you wouldn't actually care about that. Please tell me, Nichole, how many guys propositioned you?"

  I could tell that Mom was surprised. She'd expected Dad to lose it. I'd never really seen him mad, but something there hinted at the fact that he must have had a temper at some point.

  "Do you not even care?"

  "The number is immaterial, Nikki. You're a beautiful woman, that isn't the first time that you've had guys express interest in you. The real question is how you responded to them. If you returned their interest then it doesn't really matter whether it was one or a hundred."

  "I haven't called any of them back."

  Dad stood up, and for the first time I realized just how much bigger he was than Mom. "You gave them your number?"

  "Some of them were buyers or gallery owners."

  He nodded, but it was like he was nodding at something else, like he'd made a decision of some kind.

  "So our marriage is even further gone than I thought. Fine. Your gear is all packed. I'll be out in the car and I'm leaving in fifteen minutes, which is forty-five minutes after the time we agreed to last week. Frankly right now I don't particularly care whether you're in the car when I leave, but if you're not, then when I get back I'll file for divorce. And I'll make sure I take half of your photography gear as part of the settlement."

  Dad stood, his backpack in one hand, and walked out the door before Mom could say anything else. I just stood there in shock, unable to process everything that had just happened. Mom looked at me and her lips shrank down into a thin line. She obviously wasn't happy to have had an audience for this particular fight, but after a couple of seconds she stood up from the table and carried her bowl over to the sink.

  "I want you and Cindi to behave and get along while we are gone. We'll be back on Saturday."

  **

  I sat around in shock for most of the rest of the morning. Cindi didn't get up until after noon, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the day on the landline talking to her friends about her party plans. I hadn't exactly forgotten about the upcoming bash, but I'd managed to put it out of my mind.

  Sometimes I was good at ignoring things I couldn't change—not usually, but sometimes. I was glad that this had been one of the things that I'd been able to leave alone rather than picking at it incessantly.

  I'd had a fuzzy idea that the party was going to happen on Friday night after the next game, but it turned out that we had Wednesday off from school because of some kind of teacher prep day, so Cindi had scheduled the party for Tuesday night.

  For the most part Cindi ignored me as she went about locking down all of the final details. I felt like it should have bothered me more than it did, but the truth was that I was feeling less guilty and more mad about everything that had happened recently.

  She had been the one who had pushed for me to join the team. I hadn't set out to upstage her, and I resented the fact that she hadn't even acted sad when the other girls had pranked me and ruined my hair. She still hadn't said anything to me about it. Instead she'd gone on some kind of super-secret combination shopping trip and night on the town with Mom. It was obviously supposed to be a secret, but she hadn't done a very good job hiding the bags they'd brought back with them. I saw them over in one corner of our closet when I came back from the shower to get dressed.

  I wanted to scream when I saw them. I probably would have gotten into an epic fight with Cindi right then and there if she'd been in the room when I first saw the evidence. It was the single most selfish thing she could have done. She'd heard Mom and Dad yelling at each other over the fact that we were out of money. Given that, letting Mom take her shopping was pretty much just coming right out and saying that she thought having cute clothes was more important than their marriage.

  Dad obviously hadn't noticed anything before they'd left, but I kept thinking about how Mom was going into their trip in bad faith. He was trying to save their marriage and she'd just finished doubling down by spending hundreds of dollars more that we didn't have to spend.

  There was always a chance that I was wrong, that Mom had purchased Cindi's clothes with her photography money, but in some ways that was just as bad. The idea that Mom would spend that much on Cindi, who already had more nice clothes than she could possibly wear, and not spend a dime on me, was like a knife to the heart. I'd always known that Mom liked Cindi the most, but she'd never been this obvious about things.

  I managed to get control of myself by the time I saw Cindi again, and by all appearances she never even realized that I knew what she'd been up to with Mom. She just continued to talk to her friends with a kind of smug self-assurance that made me want to punch her in the face.

  It was dinner time before Cindi actually deigned to talk to me.

  "Have you invited Jackson to the party yet, Adri?"

  "No."

  My terse answer didn't discourage her in the slightest.

  "You should. This party is happening despite how badly you wish it wasn't. You can either cower inside of our room while it's going on, or you can try to make the best of it by making sure that there is at least one person there who will talk to you."

  Half a dozen different nasty things were on the tip of my tongue, ready to be said, but I swallowed the
m down for the simple fact that she was right. I either needed to leave the house entirely and risk my stuff all getting trashed, or I needed Jackson there. The alternative, sitting in my room by myself for hours, was too terrible to contemplate.

  "I'll invite him."

  "You'd better, Adri. Don't think that I haven't seen the way you've been making doe eyes at Tristan."

  "I'm not interested in Tristan and I've told him that. I told him he should ask you out."

  "And yet the star quarterback, who just led the team to two wins, has decided not to go after any of the girls who actually want to date him and instead is spending every minute he can with you. Yeah, right."

  I was beyond pissed at Cindi. I was nearly to the point of saying all of the things I'd been thinking in the back of my mind, things that I knew she would never forgive.

  "You know what, Cindi, I don't care. You can believe what you want, but I've done nothing but try and have your back where Tristan is concerned. If you don't believe me then maybe I should stop trying and just date him like he wants me to."

  I slammed the door to our bedroom and then climbed into bed. None of this was fair. I had some kind of supernatural creepy-crawly guy after me, I shouldn't have to deal with all of the normal, stupid teen drama too. I was used to dealing with this kind of crap at school, but this was the first time I'd had it follow me home like this.

  Cindi was my sister, she wasn't supposed to be my worst enemy too.

  Chapter 19

  Monday passed in a blur. I didn't remember having any unusual dreams, but I was as tired as if I'd spent the whole night dream walking. I was pretty sure that it was just the normal result of not sleeping well due to all of my worries. As poorly as I'd eaten on Sunday, I was pretty sure I would have been skin and bones if I'd actually dream walked Sunday night.

  The cheerleaders were nasty to me, but they had all matched up their schedules with each other and I hadn't, so I didn't have any classes with them. That meant that the harassment was primarily either in the halls or by non-cheerleaders in my classes. My having put that one guy on the ground after he'd tried to grope me meant that nobody was willing to escalate things too far, which was nice. I couldn't have taken it if things had gone beyond nasty rumors and whispered insults.

  The teachers seemed to have clued in, at least a little, towards the end of the day, but there was only so much they could do since they were outnumbered by the students and couldn't be everywhere at once. I told myself that this didn't really matter, that it was a temporary problem, but it still took a toll on me. By the time Jackson met up with me to go to my last class, I had a headache and just wanted to curl up in a corner somewhere and rock myself to sleep.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah."

  "And by 'yeah' you mean not really?"

  I shrugged, but Jackson didn't seem like he was going to let me get away with avoiding the question.

  "Yeah, not really, but there isn't much that can be done about it, so I'll just have to deal with the fact that everyone in the school now hates me."

  "Not everyone."

  "You're right, you seem strangely immune to the mind-control powers exhibited by Missy and the rest of the girls."

  As feeble as my joke was, it still earned me a smile, which lifted my spirits more than I would have said was possible. Just being around Jackson washed away some of the exhaustion of dealing with everyone else all day.

  "I was actually thinking of Tristan, but you're right, I don't hate you."

  "Jealous, Jackson?"

  "Hardly. It's just been a long time since I told someone to get lost and they didn't obey. Tristan doesn't make sense on a lot of levels and I don't like things I can't explain."

  "Well, I wish he had left. My sister is convinced that I'm tricking him into liking me, but the truth is that I wish he'd chase her. I think they deserve each other."

  We were nearly to the gym when I remembered the dreaded party. I bit my lip. I'd never actually asked a guy out to anything, let alone to an unsupervised party, but the only thing I could think of that was more terrifying than spending Tuesday night alone was the prospect of the old man or the Native American finding me in real life.

  "Cindi is throwing a small party tomorrow night while my parents are away. Will you come so I have someone there who doesn't hate me?"

  I pushed the words all out in a rush so that I wouldn't lose my nerve and chicken out partway through inviting him. That would have been bad enough all by itself, but I also put my hand on his arm as I said it.

  He practically turned to stone at my touch.

  "I would really like to come, but I'm not sure whether or not I'll be able to make it. My…mom has some stuff planned for us that night and it might be late before I can sneak away."

  It was like being punched in the stomach. I knew a polite refusal when I heard one, I just didn't understand why he was turning me down. The only logical explanation was that I'd somehow misread the signals I thought I'd been getting from him.

  "Okay, well, I'm sure it will go for hours, so if you end up able to come a bit later you should drop by."

  "That sounds good, I'll do that."

  I plastered a fake smile across my face and ducked into the girls' locker room before he could say anything else. My mind retreated into a kind of white noise as I changed into my workout clothes. I could still respond when someone talked directly to me, I still hit my marks during practice, but all of the other stuff happening around me faded out into unimportance.

  I think that Cindi and I walked home together, but I couldn't have said for sure. Once practice was over I simply picked up my stuff and started towards the road. As I went to bed that night I idly wondered whether or not I'd snap out of my current state.

  Part of me felt like I should be worried, that this was dangerous, but mostly I was just relieved that I didn't have to worry any more. Maybe I'd always had this capacity to tune everything else out and just never exercised it fully. Maybe that was why I'd never been as concerned as Cindi about fitting in.

  Even the prospect of dying when the old man eventually found me didn't really seem to matter now.

  Chapter 20

  I made it all the way to Tuesday afternoon before something managed to crack the artificial bubble of calm that I'd layered around myself. I'd somehow gotten up on time, gotten ready and made it to school out of nothing more than habit. Somewhere along the way I'd apparently eaten breakfast and lunch too because I didn't have that hollow, ravenous feeling that was my near-constant companion lately.

  Despite all of those hours of class, I couldn't remember a single bad thing that anyone had said to or about me, and I liked that. Part of me resented Miss Winters when she pulled me aside just before practice and thereby tore my sanctuary away from me.

  "Adri, are you okay?"

  "Yes, Miss Winters, why?"

  I could tell that she didn't believe me, but she wasn't quite sure how much to say.

  "Adri, you've continued to lose weight. I'm glad that you have a desire to take care of yourself and that you've slimmed down from where you used to be, but you're approaching the lower end of what could possibly be considered healthy. I don't care how badly you want to cheer or fly, or what guy you think will like you if you're just a little skinnier than you are now, it's not worth it."

  It took a second for her words to sink in.

  "Oh, you think I have some kind of eating disorder. I don't. I hate being hungry, so I rarely miss a meal. At lunch I usually have pizza and French fries because I've been trying to make sure that my calorie intake keeps up with my expenditures."

  "Calories in don't count if they don't stay down, Adri."

  I was suddenly tired. Actually that was odd, had I not been tired before? I was usually tired these days.

  "I'm not throwing it all back up. I'm not throwing any of it back up. I'm not even trying to lose weight. I'm just exercising with the squad a lot more than I ever used to."

  "How much exercisi
ng are you doing outside of practice then, Adri? I've seen a lot of different ways that girls abuse their bodies in my time. Compulsively exercising to the point where your body can't keep up with the punishment you're doing to it isn't much better than starving yourself."

  "I don't really exercise outside of practice."

  "Is it stress then? Something isn't adding up between what you're telling me and what I'm seeing. The kind of calories you're saying you eat each day don't just disappear, they have to go somewhere."

  Saying yes, that it was stress that was causing me to slim down despite how much I was eating was a tempting option. It seemed like an easy out, but even as I opened my mouth to tell her that was the cause I realized I couldn't say that, not if I wanted to stay on the team.

  Miss Winters was a good person, one who cared about us girls as individuals, not just as cogs in a machine that she hoped would win her trophies at the regional cheer competitions. If I told her that stress was causing me to lose weight beyond the point where she thought I could still be healthy, then she'd kick me off the team. She'd let me down as gently as she could while still encouraging me to get some kind of professional help, but she wouldn't have any other choice.

  "It's not stress. I've been more stressed than this before and I didn't lose weight like this. I promise that I'm not doing anything bad. If you don't believe me you can ask Cindi. She's constantly telling me that I can't eat the way I am and still hope to stay skinny on a long-term basis."

  "You're sure that cheerleading isn't causing you too much stress?"

  I wanted to say yes so badly. When you stacked all of the cheerleading fallout up against the fact that someone with powers I couldn't even guess at was trying to kill me, it was pretty small change. Even so, eliminating even that small amount of drama from my life would go a long way towards clearing my head enough to think about possible ways to deal with the Native American and all of the other people who might be trying to hunt me down.