“Then I’m asking you, as an adult, to trust me. I’m not able to tell you the whole story. I’m asking you to trust my judgment.”
I blinked again. “Okay.”
He smiled tightly. “Good. Just forget any of this ever happened. Don’t go around these people again. If they keep bothering you, call me.”
“But what about those bug things?” I asked.
“Those bug things aren’t going to hurt you.”
I scoffed. Was he serious? Alien bug creatures were following me all over the Peninsula, and I was supposed to believe that they weren’t going to snatch me up and put me on their probulator?
But then again, none of them had actually bothered me so far. They’d been around me, but when I really thought about it, it was the Bayview cheerleaders they seemed to be after, not me specifically. What was up with that?
My dad opened the gym’s side door and held it open for the dark-haired girl just coming in. He stared past her blankly, but she gawked at him, then me. It was Shailene. My face burned, and I looked resolutely down at my feet as she went by. I could feel her trying to meet my gaze, sense her unspoken questions—or demands, knowing her—but with my dad there, she just smiled tightly and headed toward the locker room.
“Oh, and Laura,” Dad said, still holding the door open. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Shailene pause, pretending to tie her shoe so she could listen. I looked up at him, hoping that my face wasn’t as red as it felt. “Don’t tell your mom about this, okay? She’s stressed out enough with all the company. She doesn’t need more on her plate right now.”
“Sure,” I said, brushing past him. He let go of the door, heading blithely toward the parking lot.
I glanced over my shoulder, watching Shailene disappear as the door swung shut.
Dinner went by in a blur of yelling, the clatter of dishes loaded with prepackaged food, and a generous helping of lies.
The yelling came from the Deltas, who were more than a little bit miffed that I hadn’t come back to the house after disappearing to “retrieve my wallet.”
“You’d literally just finished saying, ‘I hope they don’t start going after sorority girls,’ and then you vanish,” Natalia scolded around a mouthful of ramen noodles. “What were we supposed to think?”
The lies, on the other hand, were all me.
“I already told you, I got distracted,” I said, peeling back the lid on my container of Easy Mac and turning on the faucet. “I bumped into one of the guys from my public speaking class, and he wanted to practice our presentations for next week.” That would have been a much better way to spend the afternoon, honestly. As much as I hated public speaking, anything resembling normality seemed infinitely more appealing than this alternate universe I was living in now.
“You could have answered one of our texts. We were about ready to call the cops,” said Makeisha, elbowing her way in front of me to stick her Hot Pocket in the microwave.
I sighed, setting my still-cold and now-soggy macaroni down on the counter to await my turn. I, for one, couldn’t wait for kitchen service to start again. This feeding oneself thing was highly overrated. “I lost my phone.”
“Losing everything,” Natalia groaned, though with all the noodles dripping out of her mouth, it came out more like “mooshing merving.” She swallowed and clucked her tongue. “Your wallet, your phone… You’d better be careful, chickie, or next up you’ll lose your head.”
“Sure thing, Mom,” I muttered under my breath. The microwave beeped, and I darted forward to yank Makeisha’s pizza roll out and shove my macaroni in before anyone else could usurp me. Then I leaned against the small kitchenette counter and folded my arms. “Where’s my big at?”
“Date night,” Makeisha replied with a waggle of her eyebrows.
My jaw dropped involuntarily. “What? Who with?”
“Some guy from Beta, I think. We had a mixer with them last weekend after you left for Everett.”
I tried to keep from making a face. Betas were okay, I guess, as far as fraternity guys go. But I couldn’t believe Ana hadn’t told me she had a date. We usually told each other everything.
The microwave beeped, and I yanked my mac and cheese out, trudging into the mostly-empty dining room and parking it at one of the long wooden tables. It seemed like the whole damn world had turned upside-down in the last twenty-four hours. I supposed I didn’t really have room to complain, considering how evasive I’d been toward Ana last night. But the fact that she’d kept this from me stung worse than I would have expected.
After dinner, I went upstairs to my giant, empty room. It was Friday night, but I didn’t feel much like going out after the day—hell, week—I’d had. I opened my laptop up with the intention of working on my English paper, but mostly I just stared at the blank screen and zoned out, listening absently to the noise and squeals of the few girls who were here getting ready for a night on the town.
Around nine o’clock, Natalia stuck her head in the doorway. “Chickie, we’re going down to the crawl. Unless you want to come? We could skip the bars and look for a house party if you want.”
I smiled tightly. “It’s okay. I’m partied out after the wedding.”
She winked. “I know the feeling. See you tomorrow.”
I tried to concentrate on writing, but my brain felt like it was mired down in quicksand. After an hour passed and I’d only written half a page, I gave up and closed my laptop, standing and stretching. There was too much else on my mind. When I wasn’t thinking about the absolute lunacy that had been this afternoon, I was wondering what time Ana was getting home, and whether I should tell her what was going on and risk sounding like a raving maniac, and if this Beta guy she was going out with was good enough for her, and why she hadn’t told me about him.
I moved over to the window, resting my forehead against the cool glass and focusing on nothing in particular as I gazed out over the courtyard. Then a glimmer of movement caught my eye and I snapped alert. There was a figure in the courtyard, their form shrouded in fog. For a heart-stopping moment I was sure it was the man in the black trenchcoat, whoever he was. Then the mist swirled away on an updraft and I recognized her.
As I stood in the window, gawking in surprise, she lifted her face toward the light and our eyes met.
I turned away from the window, taking a few deep breaths. Then I pulled the blinds down and went downstairs.
I slipped out into the courtyard, my breath coming out in puffs that swirled into the heavy fog. I found her sitting on the wrought iron bench. I hesitated a moment, thinking about how wet my butt was going to get, before shrugging and sitting down beside her.
I watched her for a minute while she avoided my eyes. “So,” I said finally, when it became clear that she wasn’t planning on being the first one to speak, “mind telling me what you’re doing here creeping outside my house?”
Shailene reached into her pocket, withdrawing something and handing it to me, still not looking at me. My phone.
“Janice didn’t get a chance to give you that back before… whatever. So I told her I’d take care of it.”
I quirked an eyebrow. “That was nice of you.”
She shrugged. Her gaze was fixed on the letters mounted on the brick wall. “You don’t seem like you’d be a sorority girl.”
I opened my mouth to give her my go-to speech about how Gam-Lam is a multicultural sorority, not a social one, but the words died on my lips. Somehow I didn’t think Shailene would care about the distinction. So I just said, “Well, you don’t seem like you’d be a cheerleader.”
She smirked, and I knew I’d said the right thing. “Touché.” She hunched forward, leaning her elbows on her knees, and finally looked at me sidelong. “Listen, Laura,” she said, “I know I’ve been kind of an asshole to you.”
I snorted, trying to ignore the way my stomach flip-flopped when she looked at me like that. “That’s one way to put it.”
She pursed her lips, a gesture that on her
came off more elegant than petulant. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. But look at it from my point of view. You turn up out of nowhere, and all of a sudden my friends start going missing. More than just my friends, my—my teammates.” Her face had that pained expression on it again, and I realized that these girls were more to her than just fellow cheerleaders. That might have seemed strange to me if not for the fact that I was in a sorority. I knew, even without her saying it, how much things can change when you spend so much time together. I wondered how I would react if something happened to my big.
Shailene leaned back against the bench. She felt warm beside me, a respite from the chill in the air around us. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. Yeah, the Anesidorans had us all once. But when the I.G.A. gets you out, that’s supposed to be it. They’re not supposed to get you again. Especially not if you’re on our level. If you’re a Striker. Sentries are slow and dumb. They’ve never been able to catch up… before.”
“So what changed?” I asked.
She let her breath out in a long, heavy sigh. “I don’t know. The whole world’s gone crazy. Something happened the day you turned up.”
“Do you think I had something to do with it?” I was almost afraid to hear the answer.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Something about it’s different. But… I don’t believe you mean to have anything to do with it, even if you do.”
“Thanks, I guess.” I looked down at my hands, light-brown and ordinary, short nails covered in peeling nail decals and chipped polish. I didn’t feel any different. But I was. I must have been. If I was a part of this weird other world, did it mean I had powers, too? How had I not noticed them before?
“Shailene,” I said, “if I was… modified… and no one told me… How would I know?”
She frowned. “If you’d been abducted, you’d know it. There’s no forgetting that.”
“But what if it was someone in my family? One of my parents?”
Shailene glanced down at her own hands. “It’s possible. It’s happened before, albeit rarely. The I.G.A. has done its best to keep track of all the families of lab rats that we have records of. But there are a few who have slipped through, especially if the ancestor was one of the early experiments. Sometimes the modified traits become recessive genes, not turning up until generations later.”
“And what happens to those people?”
“Usually it starts with them seeing things that aren’t there. Hearing voices that no one else can hear. In the old days, they’d get locked in an asylum. It can be hard to tell the difference between someone with a medical condition like schizophrenia and someone who can actually see more than they should.”
I shivered, only partly from the cold.
“Anesidorans are good at disguising themselves,” Shailene said. “But the experiments can see past their cloaking devices, hear the sounds that carry at that frequency. It’s like everyone around you is blind, and you’re the only one with a working pair of glasses or something. That’s usually the first sign that someone’s different. We perceive. It’s the hardest power to control, to shut out. The other traits we have—speed, strength—they have to be developed. You usually can’t tap into them unless you consciously try. You usually don’t know you can do it… until you actually do.”
Again with the cryptic stuff. I sighed. “What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”
She looked uncomfortable. “Let’s just say, you don’t want to make a repressed experiment angry.”
I winced. “Let me guess: Hulk smash?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
We sat there quietly for a long moment, tendrils of fog snaking around me, freezing my ears and my fingers and my toes.
“Shailene,” I said at last, so softly I could barely hear myself, “I… I want to help you. I know what my dad said, but I also know that whatever’s going on, I’m a part of it. I can’t just do nothing.” I turned toward her as I spoke, my bare knee lightly brushing against hers. At the contact, that same sharp pain came back, stabbing between my eyes. In my ears, a girl’s laugh echoed, familiar and foreign all at once. My fingers tingled with the memory of a warm hand entwined with mine.
I gasped, and next to me I felt Shailene recoil.
“You feel that, too?” she hissed between clenched teeth.
I nodded, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand. “Every time…” I trailed off, my face hot.
“Every time we touch,” Shailene finished quietly. I could feel the telltale blush on my cheeks, and I wondered if she noticed my disappointment at the confirmation of my suspicion. Getting a migraine every time you touch is not exactly helpful if you’re trying to put the moves on someone—which I definitely hadn’t been planning on, regardless. Obviously.
But it was still damned inconvenient.
Shailene stood, pulling her letterman jacket tighter around her shoulders. “You’re right,” she said. “Something is going on here. You are a part of this. Everything that’s happened in the past two days has proved that. And I can’t get rid of this feeling that I know you, but every time I try to reach for it…” She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. “But whatever it is, it’s something we’re not supposed to know. Something that could get us in trouble.”
She was pulling away from me, retreating into her shell. I could feel her putting a wall up between us. It was like she was cutting me off from her in a way I hadn’t even realized existed until it was removed. I wondered if this was what she’d meant by perception.
“Wait, so that’s just it?” I spluttered. “You have a feeling that we know each other, but we’re not supposed to question how or why neither of us can remember it, because you have another feeling that we shouldn’t?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s more than that.”
“Really? Then please elaborate. Because I think we both have a right to know what’s going on here.”
“Laura, look.” She was staring at the letters on the house again, stubbornly avoiding my gaze. “I have orders. We’re not supposed to come around you anymore. Even if I want to find out the truth—and I do—I can’t go against orders.”
“Oh, of course. Your orders. Never mind the fact that someone’s obviously been screwing around in our brains and we don’t know why. Never mind the fact that you just told me two minutes ago that if I have powers—which I know I do—and if I don’t learn to control them, I could accidentally kill someone.”
Her expression cracked, for just a fraction of a second. “It’s not under my control.”
I stood up, too. As predicted, my butt was soaked. I tried not to let it faze me. “Okay, got it. Whatever, Shailene. Follow your orders. But do it for real this time. Actually leave me alone. No more creeping on me outside my sorority house, or stalking me at restaurants.”
Now she did look at me. “I didn’t—”
“No, I don’t want to hear it. I’m leaving now. Goodbye.”
I turned hotly on my heel and stormed back into the house, not caring even if she did see the huge wet splotch on my pajama shorts. I wouldn’t let her see me act self-conscious. The door swung slowly closed behind me, the pneumatic hinge on it preventing me the satisfaction of slamming it. Once it was shut, I leaned back against it, taking several deep breaths, trying to calm down. Trying not to cry.
Back in my room, I stared at the closed window for a long moment. Then I lifted one of the blinds the tiniest fraction, peeking down into the yard.
The courtyard was empty.
So, in the night, I’d reached a few conclusions.
The first was that I was relatively certain that my dad was completely lying to me about not being an abductee. It was the only thing that made sense. I knew I wasn’t an abductee, but he had been involved with the I.G.A. just like all the other rescued lab rats. Out of everyone in my family, my dad was the logical choice.
The second was that there was no way in hell I was just going to stay out of it. Regardless of what Dad said, regardles
s of what Shailene said, even if the Anesidorans weren’t actively trying to harm me, they had definitely been following me since Thursday. I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing until they decided that just watching me was getting dull and decided to fry my brain or something. If I had powers, I needed to learn how to use them. I needed to be able to protect myself.
And the third conclusion I’d reached was that Ana had probably slept with her mystery date last night. She certainly hadn’t come home. I knew this because I couldn’t sleep at all after Shailene had left. I’d stayed up all night, actually finishing my English paper. Every time I’d heard a noise I’d jumped up and looked out the window, but while the rest of the Deltas had staggered in around two A.M., Ana had been a no-show. And this morning when I’d checked her room, her bed had still been neatly made.
Whoever this guy was, he’d better be worth it.
The kitchenette was empty at seven o’clock when I made my way downstairs, so I was able to fry an egg without having to compete with anyone for the hot plate. The big kitchen, with its actual gas stove rather than this pathetic electric burner, would be locked until our house mom got back from vacation tomorrow night. Because apparently we couldn’t be trusted to not burn the house down. I scarfed down the egg with a not-too-stale pandesal roll out of the freezer and some coffee to wake me up. Then I threw on some lip gloss and my ass-kickingest pair of boots and headed out into the cold morning fog.
The first order of business, I’d decided during the night, was to try to get a handle on what powers I might have to begin with. Shailene had neglected to explain whether every abductee—or abductee’s kid, in my case—had the same abilities, or if we were looking at an X-Men-style situation where everyone could do something different. If that was the case, knowing my luck, I’d wind up like Zeitgeist and his acid puke rather than having something cool like weather control or laser beam eyes.
But there was one thing I knew for sure I did have: perception. I could see things I wasn’t supposed to, that much was clear. But I could also feel things, something I hadn’t even realized until last night when Shailene had blocked me. And I remembered what she’d said when the girl in the alley had disappeared—“I can’t sense her anywhere.” If the cheerleaders could sense each other, maybe I could sense them, too. If I could track down the missing girls, maybe it would show Janice Sheldon that she could trust me, regardless of what my dad said. And then I could get to the bottom of what was happening to me, and why.
Cheerleaders From Planet X Page 5