“I guess I won’t show you the tattoo I got last weekend then.”
“When did you have time? If I have to sit through another beach movie this Friday, I’m going to tattoo my eyes shut.”
“That might be a hard look to pull off, but if anyone can do it, you can. You’re not looking forward to the Bette Midler movie? Maybe you’ll remember some swim stuff you have to do.”
“Maybe. Maybe I could make you dinner.”
I grimaced. “Yeah. You can show me how it’s done. Linguine with eel heads and raw clam soup.”
He stepped forward, close enough that I stumbled back, feeling the locker behind me. His eyes were astonishingly blue, his body massive and impenetrable, blocking out the rest of the world.
“How do you do that?” I asked, shamelessly staring at him.
“I don’t. Eel heads aren’t in my repertoire. I would actually make a dinner that you would appreciate. That is the purpose of gifts, isn’t it?”
“I mean block out everything else,” I said, ignoring his jab as I held my plastic container of cookies between us. “Even my obsession isn’t noticeable when you’re so close. Do you think it has something to do with your immunity to…” I didn’t say the kiss of madness because someone might have been listening to us. Not that it would mean anything to anyone, but it would be weird. Not like me baking cookies for Sean wasn’t weird, or me and Sean standing so close… Anyway. No need to be weirder than necessary.
“Do I?” As he frowned down at me, I realized he was looking at my mouth. Of course it was because I said something about his immunity, but it felt like he was actually thinking about my lips, something about me and kissing. My breathing got a little bit shallow as he leaned closer.
“Dinner sounds great,” I said in a slightly hysterical loud voice that made him step away from me.
“Good. Then you can meet my dad. You can wear something nice if you’d like.”
Okay. What did that mean? In Flop’s opinion it meant that Sean was really serious about me. That couldn’t be it, but wearing something nice would be okay.
Flop’s cousin had a skirt, long from when she’d gone through her goth stage that I wore with a turtleneck. Flop told me that I looked ‘nice’, which was good, and this time I wouldn’t have to worry about plunging necklines.
I’d let my dad think I was at Flop’s for movie night, so when Sean picked me up he wouldn’t try to arm wrestle him or something fun like that.
When Sean pulled up, I was waiting inside the door so I could rush outside then climb into his car, giving him a nervous smile. “Hey, baby. You’re looking hot.”
He gave me a flat look with his chilling blue eyes that made me want to giggle, just to see how cold his eyes could possibly get.
“You’re looking rather warm yourself.”
I felt ridiculous in my turtleneck and parka while he sat there, letting the engine idle while we stared at each other. He had a jacket on over his button up, which only emphasized his shoulders. Not that his shoulders weren’t prominent no matter what he wore.
He turned his focus on the road and pulled out, sending me against the back of the seat.
“Nice jacket.”
He made some sound that might have meant anything.
“So, what’s for dinner? Not eels, right?”
He gave another non-answer. Wow. This conversation was amazing.
“Can I ask your dad about the lake and the monster?” I was sure that would get a reaction out of him, but he only shrugged.
“If you’d like.”
“Are there any topics that I shouldn’t discuss?”
“You’re welcome to talk about anything, except…” He gave me a frown that made him look like one of those soap opera doctors right before they tell you that someone died. Also the same look they used to tell you that someone came back to life.
“No gills. I already promised.”
He made that noise of non-communication, and I wished I dared turn on his radio, but if I messed up his music, I would never forgive myself.
We pulled into the driveway of the architectural wonder protruding from the hills, geometric glass walls jutting into the sky like a drawing. I stared at it while we waited for the garage door to open.
“I have this feeling,” I said as I tugged on the suddenly too tight neck of my borrowed sweater.
“How fascinating. What feeling, exactly?”
We pulled in, letting the garage close behind us. He hadn’t moved yet, staring at me like we were having a really deep conversation. “He’s not going to like me.”
He shook his head as he got out. I quickly followed suit.
“And why would you care?” he asked, shutting his door with a solid thump.
Why did I care? I made my own noncommittal noise as I followed him through the garage door that led into a hall right off the living room.
The pool looked weird without anyone in it. The whole place felt empty.
“Sean.” The voice was warm, the man who came down the stairs the embodiment of graceful down-to-earth goodness with his sandy blond hair and warm blue eyes. He held out his hand to me and shook it warmly, glancing at Sean before smiling at me. “Hello. I don’t remember seeing you at any of the swim meets. I’m Reeve Fielding.”
It struck me as an accusation, although how I got that, when he sounded so warm and the words weren’t particularly insulting, I didn’t know. I stammered about how I didn’t make it to meets because of work and choir, but felt more idiotic than usual. He had all of Sean’s chiseled perfection, but his smile was more accessible and charming, like Oliver.
“This is Genevieve Castle,” Sean said putting a hand on my shoulder. I thought I saw a slight frown flicker on Sean’s dad face as he saw that slight physical contact. “We’ve been dating for some time now.”
“Genevieve Castle,” Sean’s dad murmured while the grip on my hand he still held tightened. “Let me look at the remarkable girl who managed to turn my son’s head.”
He gave me a look that seemed to pass through all the layers of me, stripping me to the basically ordinary, except in my extraordinary idiocy, girl who would never match his own brilliant, perfect son. I felt like time stopped as I shriveled up under his gaze.
Sean put a hand around my arm. “Dinner smells done. Genevieve, would you help me…”
“Son,” Mr. Fielding said, pulling me away from Sean. “You wouldn’t ask a guest to serve herself. I’ll give young Miss Castle a tour while you worry about dinner.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Mr. Fielding tucked my hand into his arm and led me up the stairs, back in the direction he’d come from. My backwards look at Sean showed him at the bottom of the stairs, frowning up at me.
Mr. Fielding lectured me about the art hanging on the walls, about the architect who’d built the house from that vantage point, about the difficulties of finding really capable housekeepers, and he talked about Sean. Sean went to museums and had picked out most of the brilliant pieces. Sean had a wonderful eye for design and architecture. Sean was going to design the most brilliant machinery ever imagined someday. I nodded in agreement but every word pressed home the point: I wasn’t good enough for Sean. I wasn’t brilliant. I wasn’t an artist. I wasn’t the captain of the swim team that the whole school respected. I wasn’t going to be Valedictorian. I wasn’t going to the college of my choice because of my perfect grades and all around brilliant accomplishments. I wasn’t only a mere human; I was a lousy one at that.
I wasn’t sure how he did it because his words were nothing but positive about Sean, and that was fine, but all the same, I felt smaller and smaller until by the time I heard Sean’s low voice calling us for dinner, I was ready to run as far away from both of them as I could. Mr. Fielding dragged me to the dining room. Okay, he didn’t drag me, I walked, but it took all of my notoriously small will not to bite his hand and make a run for it.
I stared at Sean, pleading wordlessly for him to end the pain, to give me foo
d poisoning as quickly as possible so that I could leave. Unfortunately we hadn’t worked very much on silent communication. He only raised his eyebrow as his father, perfect gentleman that he was, emphasis on perfect, held out my chair for me.
Dinner was beautiful, the glass plates and glasses a beautiful echo of the mirrored walls and the glass wall that was the opposite side of the aquarium I’d seen from the pool room. The food would have been better if I hadn’t taken the wrong fork for my salad and had Sean’s dad gently correct me with that wonderfully warm smile. It was like eating inside of a fishbowl beside two sharks with movement all around me, water, glass, it was enough to bring back some of my old water issues.
“Miss Castle, I’ve been trying to think,” Sean’s dad said with that smile. “What you have in common with my son.”
I took a break from stirring the gorgeous noodles in exquisite white sauce around my plate to stare at him. What did I have in common with Sean? He was better in every way. Even when it came to music, which I considered my thing, he knew cooler and more obscure stuff than I did. It was time to get on with things. This pretending that Sean and I were actually together had to end. Sean had said that I could ask.
I shrugged. “Water. Sean fished me out of the pool the same way Oliver dragged me out of the lake. I find myself constantly drawn to liquid. The really weird thing isn’t the way water sucks me in though, it’s the monster I saw in Stinky Lake. Sean said you might know something about it.”
He blinked, but the smile didn’t twitch from his mouth. “You say that you saw a monster?”
“It was night, but the moon was out. It was like a big blob with fangs. Have you ever heard about anything like that before? It hissed and its eyes were enormous, but something about them reminded me of seal’s eyes. You know how there’s something human about them?”
Sean’s dad wasn’t smiling anymore, but the look that replaced his smile wasn’t any better.
“You’re saying that there’s something in the lake where your mother was killed?”
I blinked. He was the second person who acted like her death was intentional, and he knew enough about me to know about her.
“Oliver thought there was something there. To humor him, I had the lake dragged. There was nothing. There is nothing,” he said stressing every syllable. Then gave me a gentle smile. “Maybe whatever you thought you saw was something perfectly ordinary, but if you’d been drinking or were overtired…”
“It left a vicious gash on her friend’s arm,” Sean said in a cold voice that was refreshing compared to his father’s. “It would be difficult for Genevieve to imagine that.”
Sean’s father frowned in concern. “We’ll have to look into that then. I hope you’re all right.”
And that was it. We ate in silence for a few minutes while I felt stupid for asking him. Obviously, he wasn’t going to tell me what he knew, if he knew anything, and in the meantime I’d gone from being an idiotic piece of trash to being a dangerous idiotic piece of trash.
When he asked me where I planned to go to college, I shook my head.
“You’re not planning on college?”
“No, I’m just a junior. I have another year to think about it.”
He blinked at me. “I see.”
The two words didn’t say much, but his tone said everything. I was even less motivated and more of a loser than he’d expected.
That was all the talking I did. I’d expected to get something out of him, either surprise, horror, or something, but that gentle concern and reassurance, ‘we’ll have to look into that,’ stopped me dead. I didn’t belong in that perfect house with those perfect men, both using their knives with amazing dexterity. Of course, the fact that they were such beautiful specimens of humanity when they weren’t even human was hardly fair.
In the last few weeks Sean had become an extension of my life, more than an acquaintance or someone I liked to irritate, a friend. There at the table, he seemed like an alien. No, I was the alien. I felt like the one who didn’t belong, the one who didn’t fit and should leave before I put ripples in his world that messed up the perfection.
Sean’s dad kept conversation going as I stirred the noodles on my plate. I felt smaller and smaller and smaller until at some point I was sure that I would disappear completely. It couldn’t happen soon enough. By the time dinner was over, and we left Sean’s dad to do the dishes, I was ready to drown myself in the pool.
“Do you want to do something?” Sean asked as we stood in the living room, by the beautiful blue water. Who had a pool in their living room? Oh, right. Gill people.
“I have this headache and this big thing I have to do. You should just take me home.”
“Yeah?” He stood beside me with his arms crossed over his chest while he studied the pool as carefully as I did. “I thought you were spending the night at Flop’s.”
I blinked at him then looked away. “Um, yeah. Right. I’ll do the thing with her.”
“Gen,” he said, grabbing my hand.
I had to look up at him, which was a mistake because he was so perfect for someone else.
“You could do the thing with me. Come on.”
Did his eyes look slightly less icy than usual? My heart thumped as he squeezed my hand then dropped it. I followed him back into the garage. He opened his car door for me like we were on a real date, which was pretty weird, but whatever, and then he got in and turned on the engine.
Out in the night, he took his time driving. When he should have taken a right turn, he drove straight instead.
“Where are we going?” I asked, frowning at him.
“The lake. You were going to sneak out tonight, weren’t you?”
I blinked at him. Was I? I hadn’t thought that far, but honestly, yeah, I probably would somehow have found myself out there.
“No. Of course not. There’s a dangerous monster in the lake.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you really care about that? You’re compelled to go there. The lake, the monster, something has a hold on you. It’s not stupidity that drags you there, it’s something else.”
I scowled. It was my lake, my obsession, who was he to analyze it? “Awesome, so I’m a lake addict? You’ll be my, what do they call it, enabler?”
“You shouldn’t go there alone.”
“What do you know about it? You’ve never seemed curious before. Oliver didn’t see anything, there was no proof, but he still had your dad drag the lake.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “You may not have noticed, but I’m not exactly like Oliver.”
“If you don’t care about whether it’s real, why do you want to come with me?”
“To keep you safe.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “You make no sense. Why would you care? Oh, that’s right, because I’m the most broken thing you’ve seen and you’re trying to fix me.”
His jaw tightened, but he was still smiling. “Whatever you say. This is your compulsion, I’m only along for the ride.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I was breathing hard and gripped the seat as tightly as I could.
“It means we’re here. I’m here. With you.”
He braked the car with a jerk. His smile never quivered no matter how much I glared at him. I folded my arms over my chest. I hadn’t told him I wanted to go to the lake. I did though. I could feel it eating at me around the edges of my mind. I had to sing. I had to get rid of the pain.
I stared ahead at where the headlights lit the weeds poking up from the white drifts of snow. I didn’t have to sing if I didn’t want to. Sean was wrong. So why was my hand inching towards the handle?
“Speaking of Oliver, did you have a nice vacation with all those gill people?”
“It was instructive.”
“Could you be less specific, please? All those details kill me.”
His smile tightened a notch then the headlights flickered off and I was left in the shadowy car with nothing but Sean and the
wind as it whistled around us.
“It’s not your world to understand.”
I flinched. “No, it’s not. So, the lake is my world. You don’t belong here.”
“I’m the one with gills.”
“And I’m the one with the compulsion.”
“Do you really want me to leave you out here in the dark, in the snow, without a bike or a car to get you home?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“If you think I’m leaving you here by yourself, you don’t know me very well.”
“Is that an invitation? Fine, Sean. Tell me all about yourself. What makes you tick? Oh, right. You can’t, because it’s none of my business. I don’t belong in your world, human or otherwise, and I certainly don’t belong with you.” I was out of the car, stumbling up the bank in the dark without a clue where I was going, but it didn’t matter so long as it was away from him.
The lake tugged at me, guiding my feet in the dark before a beam of light shone in front of me as Sean came behind me with a flashlight. I didn’t say anything, because he’d made it clear that talking didn’t make a difference. Maybe I’d shove him off the rock into the lake so I could sing in peace while he swam to shore. We crunched over the two inches of snow and frozen weeds to the water’s edge. I stood there staring as Sean shone his flashlight on the surface of the slick, iced over water.
My stomach twisted as I closed my eyes. It wasn’t my lake when it was frozen. I needed it, needed to sing, to forget about being too human for Sean and not human enough for the rest of the world. I needed the water to move, to sing back to me, to tell me all the things I had no words for, but instead there was nothing but ice.
I stepped out onto the slick surface while the wind whistled around me. I didn’t feel the cold, not unless it was the cold inside of me. Sean’s voice was carried away from me by the wind as I walked. I forgot about him, not caring if he followed me or if the ice was solid enough for my weight. My sob surprised me. I had no business crying over ice. I forced words out of my throat instead, a song about betrayal, loneliness, misery and pain. My voice came strong, loud, drowning out the wind until a sound like a gunshot cracked through the air.
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