Unearthly u-1

by Cynthia Hand

Then he stands to one side while Mr. Erikson reads off the court for prom queen, and that’s when I start to get nervous. Of course I’m not named. I wasn’t even nominated.

  I’m Bozo the Clown. But every single one of the girls in the queen’s court is Kay’s friend. Which can only mean.

  “And now the prom queen,” says Mr. Erikson. “Kay Patterson.”

  The room reverberates with the thunderous applause of the students who voted for her. Kay approaches the stage with infinite grace and poise. She takes the bouquet of white roses under her arm, and leans down as Mr. Erikson replaces her little silver laurel with a big gold one.

  “Now, as is customary, the king and queen will share a dance,” says Mr. Erikson.

  A string of very un-angelic curse words come to mind.

  Kay looks at Christian expectantly. He glances down as if deciding something, then looks up and smiles again. As the music starts to play he walks over to Kay and takes her hand. She puts her other arm on his shoulder. They start to dance.

  Everybody around me begins to chatter excitedly, watching them move so beautifully together to the music. Christian and Kay, together again.

  I feel like I’ve slipped into the hell dimension.

  “Hey, Carrots,” says a voice.

  I cringe. “Not now, Tucker. I can’t deal with you right now.”

  “Dance with me,” he says.

  “No.”

  “C’mon, you look pathetic standing here watching your date dance with someone else.”

  I turn and glower at him. But one thing I will say for him: He cleans up nice. The white shirt against his neck sets off his tan. In the tux his shoulders look broad and strong. His short tawny hair is combed and styled. His blue eyes blaze under the lights. I even smell cologne.

  “Fine,” I say.

  He holds out his hand, and I take it, then stalk over to the edge of the dance floor with him and put my arms around his neck. He doesn’t say anything, just moves his feet from side to side, looking at my face. All the anger drains out of me. He’s doing me a favor, or so it seems. I scan the ceiling for the telltale bucket of pig’s blood he’s about to douse me with.

  “Where’s your date?” I ask.

  “Well, that’s a complicated question. Depends on what you mean.”

  “Who did you come with tonight?”

  “Her,” says Tucker, gesturing with his head to the redheaded girl standing over by the punch table.

  “And her,” he says, looking over toward the DJ where a brunette I don’t know, a senior I presume, is putting in a request.

  “And her,” he says finally, and points to a blonde who’s dancing very close to the second runner-up for prom king.

  “You came with three girls?”

  “They’re on the rodeo team,” he says as if that explains it. “None of them had dates, and I figured I was the only one man enough to handle the three of them.”

  “You’re unbelievable.”

  “And you came with Christian Prescott,” he says. “Your dream come true.”

  At the moment it seems like more of a nightmare. I cast a look at Christian and Kay over my shoulder. Predictably, Kay is crying. She’s clinging to Christian’s shoulders and sobbing.

  Tucker turns to follow my gaze.

  Christian leans closer to Kay and whispers something. Whatever it is, she does not take it well. She starts crying even harder.

  “Man, you couldn’t pay me to be in his shoes right now,” says Tucker.

  I glare at him.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’ll shut up.”

  “You do that.”

  He stifles a smile, and we finish out the song wordlessly.

  “Thanks for the dance,” he says.

  “Thanks for asking,” I say, still looking at Christian. He has his arms around Kay. Her face is buried in his chest. I don’t know what to do. I just stand there watching him.

  He pulls back from Kay and says something to her gently, then leads her over to a table and pulls a chair out for her to sit down. He even goes to get her some punch, but she waves it away. Lines of mascara are drying on her face. She looks exhausted. At first I thought this might be a ploy, an act like her slutty rogue routine, but seeing her slumped in that chair it’s impossible not to believe that she is genuinely devastated.

  Christian walks over to me, clearly flustered.

  “I am so sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know this would happen.”

  “I know,” I say quietly. “It’s all right. Where’s Kay’s date?”

  Let him comfort her, I think.

  “He left,” says Christian.

  “He left,” I repeat incredulously.

  “So I was thinking,” says Christian, red in the face now, “that I should take Kay home.”

  I stare at him, stunned.

  “I’ll come right back and get you,” he says quickly. “I thought I’d get her home safe and then I’d take you home.”

  “I’ll take Clara home,” says Tucker, who’s been standing next to me the whole time.

  “No, it’ll only take a minute,” protests Christian, standing up straighter.

  “The dance will be over in ten minutes,” says Tucker. “You expect her to wait for you in the parking lot?”

  I feel like Cinderella sitting in the middle of the road with a pumpkin and a couple of mice, while Prince Charming charges off to rescue some other chick.

  Christian looks sick with guilt.

  “Go ahead and take Kay home,” I say, practically choking on the words. “I’ll ride home with Tucker.”

  “That’s all right with you?”

  “Sure. I have to be home by midnight, remember?”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” he says.

  I swear I see Tucker roll his eyes.

  “Okay.” I look at Tucker. “Can we go now?”

  “You bet.”

  After I find Wendy and Angela and say good-bye, I wait at the door as Tucker rounds up his other dates. They look at me with something like pity, and for a moment I actually hate Christian Prescott. We ride crammed together in Tucker’s rusty pickup, four girls in formal wear, squeezed into the cab. He drops off the blonde first, because she lives in Jackson. Then the redhead. Then the brunette.

  “Bye, Fry,” she says as she gets out of the truck.

  Now it’s just him and me in the cab. It’s quiet as he drives out to Spring Creek Road.

  “So. Fry, huh?” I tease after a while, unable to stand the silence. “What’s that about?”

  “Yeah,” he says, shaking his head as if he still can’t understand it. “In junior high they called me Friar Tuck. Now it’s just Fry. But my good friends call me Tuck.”

  When we pull into my driveway, I’m already fifteen minutes past my curfew. I open the door, then stop and look at him. “Can you. not mention this whole fiasco to anybody else at school?”

  “They already know,” he says. “One thing about Jackson Hole High, everybody is in everybody’s business.”

  I sigh.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says.

  “Yeah, they’ll forget by Monday, right?”

  “Right,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s mocking me or not.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I say. “Fry.”

  He groans, then grins. “My pleasure.”

  He’s such a strange guy. Stranger by the minute.

  “See you.” I jump down from the truck, slam the door shut, and make for the house.

  “Hey, Carrots,” he calls suddenly.

  I turn back to him. “You and I will probably get along better if you stop calling me that.”

  “You like it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “What do you see in a guy like Christian Prescott?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say wearily. “Anything else you want?”

  His dimple appears. “Nope,” he says.

  “Good night, then.”

  “Night,” he says, and drives off into
the dark.

  The porch light comes on as I creep up the steps. Mom stands in the doorway.

  “That wasn’t Christian,” she says.

  “Brilliant observation, Mother.”

  “What happened?”

  “He’s in love with another girl,” I say, and pull the silver laurel out of my hair.

  * * *

  Later, in the darkest time of night, my vision turns into a nightmare. I’m in the forest.

  I’m being watched. I feel the amber eyes of the Black Wing. Then he’s holding me down. He’s touching me, his icy hands sucking the warmth from my body. Pine needles stab into my back. His fingers twist over the top button of my jeans. I scream and flail. One hand strikes his wing and I pull out a fistful of black feathers. In my fingers they evaporate. I keep pulling at the angel’s wings, each feather a piece of his evil, until he suddenly dissolves into a heavy cloud of smoke, leaving me coughing and panting in the dirt.

  I jolt awake, tangled in my blankets. Someone’s standing over my bed. I suck in a breath to start screaming again, but his hand comes over my mouth.

  “Clara, it’s me,” Jeffrey says. He removes his hand and sits down at the edge of the bed. “I heard you screaming. Bad dream, huh?”

  My heart’s pounding so hard I hear it like a war drum. I nod.

  “Want me to get Mom?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “What was it about?”

  He still doesn’t know about Black Wings. If I tell him, he’ll be more vulnerable to them, Mom said. I swallow.

  “Prom didn’t exactly go as planned.”

  His eyebrows bunch together and he frowns. “You had a nightmare about prom?”

  “Yeah, well, it was that kind of night.”

  He looks over at me like he doesn’t believe me, but I’m too tired to explain how my life seems to be coming apart at the seams.

  Chapter 13

  Goth Tinker Bell

  My cell phone chirps. I take it out of my pocket, look at it, click IGNORE, and then put it back into my pocket. Across the dining room table, Mom raises her eyebrows at me.

  “Christian again?”

  I cut a bite of French toast and put it in my mouth. I can hardly taste it, I’m that mad.

  Which makes me madder still. Normally I love French toast.

  “Maybe you should talk to him. Give him a chance to make it right,” she says.

  I put my fork down.

  “The only possible way for him to make it right is if he builds a time machine, goes back to last night, and. ” My voice fades. And what? And turns his back on Kay while she’s falling apart? And takes me home instead? And kisses me on the doorstep? “I just need to be mad for a little while, okay? I know it might not be the most mature thing, but there it is.”

  The phone in the kitchen starts to ring. We look at each other.

  “I’ll get it,” she says, and slides out of her chair to grab the phone off the wall.

  “Hello?” she says. “I’m afraid she doesn’t want to talk you.”

  I slump at the table. My French toast is cold. I pick up my plate and go into the kitchen, where Mom leans against the counter, nodding as she listens to whatever he’s saying. Like she’s totally taking his side.

  She puts her hand over the receiver. “I really think you should talk to him.”

  I slide my French toast into the trash, then casually rinse my plate in the sink, put it in the dishwasher, and dry my hands on a kitchen towel. I hold out a hand for the phone. Surprised, she gives it to me. I put it to my ear.

  “Clara?” Christian says hopefully.

  “Take the hint,” I say into the phone, then hang up.

  I hand the phone back to Mom. She’s smart enough not to say anything as I stalk past her and up the stairs toward my bedroom. I shut the door behind me and throw myself onto my bed. I want to scream into my pillow.

  I won’t be that girl who lets the guy treat her like crap and still fawns all over him. I went to prom with Christian Prescott. It wasn’t supposed to be magical, I tell myself.

  It wasn’t supposed to be romantic. It’s my job, pretty much. But it wasn’t supposed to end with me being dumped out of Tucker’s truck at the end of the night.

  So that’s it, I decide. From now on, this Christian thing is strictly business. You go to the forest, fly him out of there, apparently, drop him wherever he needs to go, and that’s that. No need to be his friend, or anything else. No hand-holding. No staring rapturously into his eyes. At the memory of the vision, the vividness of it, my chest gets tight. His hot hand against my cheek. I close my eyes. I curse the warmth that floods my belly. I curse the vision for, I don’t know, leading me on.

  My cell phone rings. It’s Angela. I answer it.

  “Don’t say anything,” I say.

  There’s silence on the other end.

  “Are you there?”

  “You told me not to say anything.”

  “I meant about last night.”

  “Okay. Let’s see. My mom has decided to run Oklahoma! this fall at The Garter. I am trying to talk her out of it. Whoever heard of Oklahoma! In Wyoming?”

  “Was everybody talking about it?” I ask. “After we left?”

  She pauses for a minute, then dutifully changes the subject. “Nice weather we’re having today. Almost like summer.”

  “Angela.”

  She sighs.

  “Yes,” she admits.

  I groan. “Do they think I’m a total dork?”

  “Well, I can only speak for myself.” I can actually hear her grinning. I start to smile in spite of myself. “Come over for dinner,” she says. “My mom’s making fettuccine Alfredo. I’ll find something for you to punch.”

  I literally go limp with relief. God bless Angela. I’d never be able to make it through the day in the house with the constant ringing of the phone, and Mom breathing down my neck. “When can I come over?”

  “How soon can you get here?” she says.

  * * *

  Angela and I see a double feature at the Teton Theatre, a horror movie and an action movie, sheer mindless fun, just what the doctor ordered. Afterward we hang out on the empty stage at the Garter. I’m beginning to love this place. It feels like it’s Angela’s and mine, a secret hideout where nobody else can find us. And Angela’s good at distraction.

  “Here’s something that will cheer you up,” she says as we sit on the edge of the stage with our feet dangling into the orchestra pit. She stands up and summons her wings. She closes her eyes. A fly falls onto my shoulder. I quickly shake it off. The flies in the theater creep me out. They’re always flying up into the lights and getting their wings singed, and then they drop out of the air and buzz around on the stage, alive. I look back at Angela. Nothing’s different.

  “Am I supposed to see something?” I ask after a minute.

  She frowns. “Wait for it.”

  For a minute nothing happens. Then her wings begin to shimmer, the way the air does over concrete on a hot summer day. Slowly, they start to change form, smoothing out, curving into a different shape. Angela opens her eyes. Her wings look like a huge moth’s, still pristinely white but smoother, segmented, dotted with small white scales like what you would see on a butterfly’s if you looked real close.

  My mouth drops open. “How did you do that?”

  She smiles. “I can’t change the color,” she says. “I thought it would be so cool to have purple wings, but it didn’t work. But I can make them look like pretty much anything if I try hard enough.”

  “What do they feel like when they’re like that?” I ask, watching the gigantic butterfly wings open and close behind her, back and forth, such a different movement from our feathered wings. She looks like a Goth Tinker Bell.

  “More fragile. And I don’t think they would fly the same way. I don’t even know if I could fly like this. But that’s a limitation of my brain. I think our wings can be whatever we want. We see feathered wings because they are icon
ic of angels. But really they’re only a tool. We choose the form.”

  I stare at her. It would never have occurred to me in a million years to try to change the form of my wings.

  “Wow,” I say, pretty much speechless.

  “I know, right?”