“Did you like him?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Mark Watson.”
“We only went out for two weeks before he got expelled,” she said. “I didn’t get to know him very well, but he was funny. He made me feel special.”
I pictured Mark Watson — tall, athletic, golden-haired — swimming madly across the pond toward Ellie. He could have run around the pond, but he didn’t.
“I’d swim it,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m just saying, it’s not like Mark Watson was that special. I’d swim the pond right now.”
“It’s frozen.”
“Just around the edges,” I said. “Dare me to go swimming?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Ellie looked at me, perplexed. “Because it’s too cold. No one would go swimming now.”
“I would.”
“Whatever.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “Cold water doesn’t bother me. I’m like a dolphin. I can lower my heart rate and control my breathing so it doesn’t feel cold.”
Ellie scoffed.
“I’ll prove it,” I said, throwing off my jacket. Goose bumps prickled my arms.
“Don’t be stupid.”
“You should try it.” I kicked off my shoes and socks. My bare feet snapped through the ice around the edge. “It feels good.”
“Quit joking.”
“I’m not joking. Dare me?”
“No.” Ellie started to walk away. Her legs seemed fragile and childish in her heavy winter boots.
“Come on, dare me.”
She didn’t stop. I had to do something to get her attention — something no one else would do — so I pulled off my shirt and jumped in.
Lightning flashes filled my head as soon as I hit the water. All I could manage was to dunk myself once and clamber out. My skin stung from the cold as I hopped around in my wet jeans to shake the water off.
“Hey!” I called, but Ellie kept walking.
I tried shouting her name, only my teeth were chattering too much. She didn’t even look back to see if I was okay. I couldn’t believe she was still ignoring me.
My jaw shivered uncontrollably and my hands weren’t working very well as I struggled to pull on my socks and shoes. Then my chest and arms started to shake. The shivers grew worse, becoming whole-body convulsions.
By the time I managed to get my second shoe on, the convulsions passed, leaving me pleasantly tired. I didn’t feel cold anymore. Sitting shirtless on the snow, I gazed across the pond. Ellie had gone inside, and I couldn’t see anyone else out. Not a single person. A few snowflakes glistened in the orange lights of the dorms, while stars shimmered in the crisp black sky.
The dorms looked far away and flat, like a painting of a campus. I wanted to be part of it — to be inside among the people, laughing in the warm light — but it seemed too distant and unreal.
After a while, my eyelids grew heavy. I lay on my coat and looked at the stars, thinking about how they were so far away they could have vanished a thousand years before their light ever reached us.
THE THIEF LEANED OVER ME, beautiful against the winter sky. “Wake up, James,” she said. “You have to wake up!”
But I didn’t want to wake. Sleep pulled at me, as if I were sinking into honey. I wanted to drown in my dreams.
Later, someone shined a light in my eyes. I squinted into the brightness. Two figures knelt beside me where the Thief had been.
At first, I thought it was Nick and Kiana. They both wore dark uniforms, and their faces looked pale. The woman had her hand on my neck. “Careful not to jolt him,” she said.
One of them kept shining a flashlight in my face. I tried to tell him to quit it and let me sleep, but I couldn’t get my jaw to move. My mouth tasted terrible — stale whiskey and stomach acid. Walkie-talkies beeped, filling the silence with staticky chatter while the two figures slid me onto a stretcher and placed something heavy on my chest.
The sting of it woke me up.
Whatever they’d put on me burned like crazy. I pushed it away, but they strapped me down and put it on me again. My skin felt as if it were blistering off my body.
“Relax,” the woman said. “The blanket’s not hot. It’s barely even warm.”
My eyes focused on her uniform, illuminated by the red and blue flash of ambulance lights. It sounded as if a crowd of people had gathered nearby, but I couldn’t look because my head was fixed into a foam-rubber block.
They lifted me and carried me across the field toward the square, where the ambulance waited. I was like a baby — all swaddled up and ready to be carted somewhere. It was beyond embarrassing.
At the hospital, the doctor said I had hypothermia. I tried to explain that I was just tired and needed to sleep, but they wouldn’t leave me alone. They put a mask over my mouth with a hose connected to this machine that made the air warm and humid. Then they drew some blood and stuck a hot IV into my veins, so it wasn’t just my skin that burned. Every joint in my body ached. After a while, the convulsions started again, causing my teeth to chatter uncontrollably.
A nurse kept checking my temperature and fiddling with the dials on the blanket and hot-air thingy. Every time it stopped burning, she’d turn it up a notch and the hurt would come back.
Apparently, they had to be careful that I didn’t warm too quickly. During one of her visits, the nurse told me this story about these sailors who’d been shipwrecked in the Arctic and were left floating in icy water for almost forty minutes before a boat came and rescued them. Everyone thought it was a miracle that they were alive. Then the captain had them go down to the hold to drink some hot coffee so they could warm up, and ten minutes later all the rescued sailors died — something to do with shock and a low core body temperature.
“The only thing worse than hypothermia and caffeine is hypothermia and alcohol.” The nurse smirked at me, and I knew I was busted.
My parents arrived at the hospital a little while later. Moms hovered about my bed, tucking the blanket in and feeling my forehead with the back of her hand, as if she had some supermom ability to tell my exact temperature by touch.
“My poor baby,” she said. “What were you thinking?”
She acted especially concerned when the doctor came to check on me. “Are you sure he’s going to be okay?” she asked for the third or fourth time.
The doctor, a thirtysomething, surprisingly tall man, stifled a yawn. “Hypothermia is very treatable.”
“But what if no one had found him?”
“Things might have been more difficult then,” the doctor said. “However, the human body can come back from extreme cold, given proper treatment. There’ve even been cases where hypothermia victims were thought DOA, only to regain consciousness in the morgue. No one’s dead until they’re warm and dead.” He patted my shoulder, as if this thought should comfort me.
“Doctor, thank you for saving my boy,” Moms said.
The doctor cleared his throat and fidgeted with his clipboard. Dad stood off to the side, hands in his pockets, jangling change.
I lay between them, wishing this whole ridiculous exchange would take place without me. Moms was acting like a character in a soap opera, but I knew if I questioned her about it, she’d roll her eyes and say I wouldn’t know politeness if it bit me.
The doctor checked his beeper. “I’m afraid there’s another patient I have to see.” He patted my shoulder again. “The next time you want to swim, son, wait for summer. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, even though his condescending manner pissed me off.
Moms started in on me again after that. “Did you hear what the doctor said? You could have frozen to death. Honestly, James, what were you thinking? If your girlfriend hadn’t called security . . .”
“Who?”
“The girl that found you.” Moms looked to my dad for help remembering her name. “Ella? Ellen?”
“Ellie,” I said. “And s
he’s not my girlfriend.”
“She’s very nice,” Moms replied, glancing from me to my dad. “Wasn’t she nice?”
“Very nice,” Dad said.
I was too tired to tell them how wrong they were.
The nurses didn’t waste any time shooing me out once I got back to a normal temperature. It was two in the morning, but they didn’t seem to care. To them, I guess it was just another workday. The halls bustled with people, and the hospital lights were as bright as ever.
I had to wear some flimsy mint-green hospital scrubs home since my pants were wet and the paramedics hadn’t thought to grab the jacket or T-shirt I’d left by the pond. My dad signed the discharge papers while Moms busied herself talking with Hassert in the waiting room — just my luck that he’d been on duty. I guess he’d accompanied my parents to the hospital. He nodded at something Moms said, looking very serious.
“Your parents are going to drive you home,” he said to me. “The administration will meet tomorrow to discuss what’s best for you.” He gave Moms a concerned RC look and added, “I’ll do what I can.”
I nearly choked. Without a doubt, Hassert would do what he could to get me expelled. He’d probably already gotten a copy of my blood alcohol level to use as evidence against me.
“We’ll call you once a decision has been reached,” he said to Moms.
She thanked him for all his kindness. Fortunately, Dad led me out before I lost it.
Dad had stayed pretty quiet at the hospital, but on the drive back, he droned on and on about medical bills, making sure I knew how much everything had cost. “Eight hundred dollars for the ambulance. A hundred and twenty dollars in blood tests. Probably over a thousand for the hospital care. They really gouge you,” he said. Never mind that insurance would cover most of it. “That’s one expensive drink,” Dad joked.
Moms scowled at him and said it wasn’t funny.
After that, Dad didn’t say anything. He turned onto the highway, and the road began to hum beneath us. I rested my head against the car door, pretending to sleep for most of the ride home. The cool ridge of the door edge creased my cheek. Despite all the pain of warming up — the burning and aching — I still felt numb. I pushed my thumbnail into the tips of my fingers and pinched the soft skin on the underside of my arms. It hurt, but only vaguely, as if I hadn’t come all the way back. “Deadened.” That’s what the doctor had said. “Some nerves might be deadened.”
PRINCIPAL DURN CALLED MY PARENTS the next day to inform them that I was suspended for the rest of the semester, which was only five days. I listened in from the phone in my bedroom. The administration saw the incident as my third strike, after the cafeteria stunt and the “profanity” I’d scrawled on my forehead. According to Principal Durn, I was lucky not to be expelled. As he put it, I now “hung by a thread,” with “my continued enrollment being contingent upon my academic performance.” In other words, if I didn’t ace my finals, I’d get the boot.
My suspension spanned finals week, so I had to arrange for alternate times to take my exams. Ironically, this meant that my study-break swim had actually earned me an extra week to prepare.
The administration agreed to let me drop by campus on Monday to turn in assignments and pick up my books. Hassert assigned a security guard to accompany me. He made it very clear that I couldn’t talk with any students while I went around arranging things with the teachers. People stared at me like they were seeing a condemned man walking to the gallows.
I passed Dickie in the commons. “You’re coming back, right?” he called, ignoring the security guard’s glare.
“Who knows?” I said, trying to sound stoic. “Depends if I’m good.”
At home, I was trapped. I didn’t have a car, and there wasn’t anything to do in my town. There wasn’t even anyone to talk to. I tried calling Jess, but she didn’t respond to my messages, and whenever I checked online for ghost44, she wasn’t logged on.
My parents pestered me constantly about staying in my room all day. Anytime Moms asked me to go shopping with her, or Dad called for me to give him a hand with something in the basement, I shouted back that I needed to study and they left me alone. I actually did try to study, too, but I could barely get my eyes to focus on my books. Instead, I slept.
With the curtains closed and the door jammed shut by a chair, I managed to take two or three naps a day. My dreams seemed more interesting and real than anything going on in my normal life. Awake, I was clumsy and sluggish and barely able to find a reason to get out of bed, but when I dreamed, I could move quick as thought. I even learned to fly.
The first time I attempted it, I was terrified. The guides convinced me to step off a building, and immediately I began to fall so fast that the air whistled past my ears. Then I closed my eyes and focused on bending things, the way Nick had told me to do, so instead of falling down, I’d fall out. That’s the secret to flight — it’s falling in a different direction. I couldn’t go as fast or as high as I wanted to, but the rush of air around me as I swooped between buildings felt incredible.
Flying helped me to find more demons. Most were weak, mangy ones that I had little trouble binding. Some were even ones I’d fought before. Nick explained that as long as one demon was free, others would get loose.
I spent hours soaring over the deserted streets, perfecting my skills on the strays I spotted. The more time I spent in the city, the stronger I became.
Kiana commented on the shift after a few nights. “You’re more here now,” she said, squeezing my arm. “You’re more focused and in control. You can win this war if . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“If what?” I asked.
“You know what has to be done,” Nick said. “You can’t hide here forever.”
I thought of White Blade. I hadn’t descended into the burrows since the night he’d beaten me. The guides seemed to know that I’d needed to build my confidence back up. Now, though, Nick acted agitated, like he thought I was wasting time.
“I’m starting to wonder if we backed the wrong horse,” he said.
“Don’t listen to him.” Kiana bumped her hip playfully against mine. “You won’t let us down. I’m sure of it.”
AFTER FIVE DAYS OF SLEEPING most of the time, I finally agreed to go shopping with Moms.
“It’s not supposed to be a punishment,” she said. “Even if you are suspended. Honestly, James, you need new clothes.” She looked at my faded jeans and torn T-shirt with disgust. My favorite black sport coat had gotten a little ragged around the cuffs from being worn so much. “Honey, the hobo style isn’t in anymore.”
“It never was in,” I said. “That’s the point.”
“Don’t you want new clothes for Christmas?”
I paused. It wasn’t that I didn’t want new clothes. It was that going shopping with Moms never ended up the way I thought it would.
“If you don’t go shopping with me, I’ll buy things for you that you don’t like,” she threatened.
I thought of the pile of bright-colored polo shirts I had in my closet from previous Christmases. “Okay,” I said. “But I’m not getting any shirts with collars. Collars freak me out.”
Moms rolled her eyes and grabbed her purse.
When we got to the mall, she made a beeline for her favorite department store. I’ve always been a bit confused about where I fit in department stores. I mean, there’s the boys’ area, with the Underoos and cartoons and stuff, and the men’s area, with all the three-piece suits and shiny shoes. In between are these weird subgroups, like the sweatpants and sports teams area, or the trying-too-hard-to-be-hip jeans area, or the preppy sweater and polo shirt area. According to department stores, boys are supposed to progress naturally from Underoos, to sweatpants, to jeans, to preppy clothes, to suits. I wanted to mix it up, taking a sport coat from men’s, jeans from the teen area, and a T-shirt with G.I. Joe on it from the kids’ area, only they probably didn’t have any big enough to fit me.
Moms went straight to the
preppy area.
“Hey,” she said, picking out a dark blue V-neck sweater, “try this on.”
“No way,” I replied. “I’m not in the yacht club.”
“Honey, this is what guys are wearing.”
“How do you know what guys are wearing?”
“I have a sense,” she said. “Just put it on.”
I slipped off my coat and pulled the sweater over my head, keeping my back to her so she wouldn’t see the cuts on my arm I’d recently given myself with a compass point. Then I turned and slouched, trying to make the sweater look as bad as possible.
“That’s nice,” she said.
A salesman wandered over — a young guy in a white button-down shirt, blue power tie, and hair so perfectly gelled he looked like a Ken doll.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” Ken offered.
“What do you think?” Moms said to the salesguy. “Does that look good on him?”
The guy cocked his head and stared. I slouched a little more, pulling one arm in while letting the other hang low, like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
“Stand up, honey,” Moms said.
“Very sharp,” the salesguy crooned. “The fit creates clean lines, and the color pulls out his eyes.”
Moms smiled, pleased to have found an ally.
“Pulls out my eyes?” I said, picturing the sweater attempting to gouge my eyes out. Moms and the salesguy gave me odd looks, like I was the weird one.
“I don’t know.” Moms fiddled with the sweater. “The dark blue washes him out, but the cut is good.”
“We have it in maroon,” Ken doll said. “It’s very chic. I bought a maroon one myself the day they came out.”
“I hate maroon,” I said.
“Don’t be so picky,” Moms chided. “Maroon is in.”
Ken burbled something into a walkie-talkie, and a moment later a girl in high heels, white shirt, and short checkered skirt approached. She was cute, with streaked blond hair and a perky figure. At first I thought she must be in college, but as she got closer, I realized she was probably around my age, except she dressed older. Not many girls at ASMA wore high heels.
The Secret to Lying Page 10