Bruchac stepped in front of me. “Show everyone what happens when acid makes contact with human skin, Ms. O’Neill.”
I huffed a little. Was he serious?
Apparently. He wouldn’t let me pass.
Unfolding my arms, I held up the left wrist. People in the front row leaned forward over their stations. Those behind goosenecked a view. I wanted to tell them there was nothing to see besides me incinerating up here.
“Tell us how it feels,” Bruchac said.
“Pretty good,” I quipped. “Great, if you’re into self-mutilation.”
People chuckled. Did they?
Bruchac snarled, “I cannot stress enough that safety is our number one concern. Be careful. Be focused. Be vigilant.”
“Be all that you can be,” I added.
That raised a chorus of sniggers. Beside me, I felt Bruchac bristle. His quills could’ve drawn blood. I skittered down the aisle, like the scared rabbit I was. People were smiling at me. Not in a mocking way. More ... amused, entertained.
Bruchac said, “Everyone take out a clean sheet of paper. You’ve just earned yourselves a quiz.”
Communal groaning. As I slid onto my stool, Chris muttered, “Off the A.B.S.”
No kidding. Thank God the quiz wasn’t hard or I’d be off everyone’s A.B.S. There were two questions about the freezing and boiling points from our earlier lab. The chemical formula for sulfuric acid, H2SO4. Now etched permanently in my brain.
As I finished up, I caught a glimpse of Chris’s paper. It was mostly blank. I think he answered number one, then bailed mentally.
“Hey, Regan.” He caught up with me in the hall after class. “What about Saturday night?”
I stopped dead. Saturday night? How could he know about Saturday night?
Chris must’ve interpreted my slack jaw as cluelessness. Which it was. “The rave?” he said.
The rave. Oh my God. It wasn’t a hallucination. He had asked me, right before I tripped out on acid.
Someone barreled into us from behind and Chris steered me over to the wall. He brushed the hair back from his face, looking deeply into my eyes with both of his. “So?”
“So.” I licked my dry lips. Opened my mouth. Closed it. Saturday night. Why did it have to be on Saturday night? Luna was so psyched about shopping. She’d stayed in my room until dawn trying on outfits appropriate for a mall crawl. She couldn’t stop talking about shopping. If that didn’t prove she was a girl, what did?
No, this meant too much to Luna. To Liam. He’d been waiting his whole life to go shopping with me.
“I can’t Saturday night,” I told Chris. “I’m going shopping with my ... um, sister.”
His face changed. Fell? “Okay.” His eyes drifted back over his shoulder. Was he disappointed? Mad?
He said coolly, “Guess I’ll see you around, then.”
What did that mean? I’d see him tomorrow. He retreated and vanished into the crowd.
“Damn you, Liam.” I wheeled around and kicked the wall. Then cursed myself because I think I broke a toe.
Chapter 10
Chris never showed in chemistry the next day. Bruchac said he had our quizzes graded and would hand them out during lab, adding, “They are way below my expectations.”
Expectations. Why was everything about expectations?
Bruchac paused in front of my station. “How’s your arm?” he asked.
“It’ll live,” I muttered. “I mean, I will.”
“Good.” He smiled and slid my quiz across the countertop. “I guess experience is the best teacher. Too bad some teaching moments have to be painful.”
I glanced down at my paper. One hundred percent.
“I see your partner in crime isn’t with us today,” Bruchac said. “Would you tell him to come see me after school?” He slipped Chris’s quiz to the bottom of the stack, but not before I saw his score. Zero. Zero percent.
In all my life I’d never gotten a zero percent. How did that feel?
As Bruchac trundled away, I debated whether or not to deliver his message to Chris. Not, I decided. Today was Friday. By Monday it’d be ancient history.
For some reason I felt responsible for Chris’s failure. I was responsible. He wouldn’t have had to take the freaking quiz if I hadn’t spilled acid all over myself. By the storm raging around me, everyone else had figured this out, too. I was going to need new batteries for that invisibility shield.
Saturday morning as I was leaving for the Materas’, Alyson clomped down the basement stairs. “It’s snowing. It’s gorgeous out,” she said to Liam, who was bent over a printout, studying code. “Let’s drive to the mountains and go tubing.” She yanked back his head by his hair and stared upside down into his eyes. “Please? We never go anywhere.”
“I can’t,” he told her in a strangled voice. “I have to finish this, then assemble two systems today.”
Yeah, right. The only thing he’d be assembling was an outfit for tonight.
“You want to go, Regan?” she asked.
“I have to work.”
“Shit.” Aly flopped onto the sofa. “Another boring Saturday down under in Geeksville. My life is one serious drag.”
Get a job, I thought. Go shopping. Take Liam out for a hair weave. That was pretty funny. I wish I could’ve said that to Aly. Instead, I mumbled, “Sorry.”
My day at the Materas’ was anything but dull. Between playing games with the kids and watching movies and entertaining Tyler and fixing lunch and letting Mirelle style my hair with scrunchies and barrettes, it was six before I’d even looked at the clock.
And almost seven by the time I got home.
Liam ambushed me at the front door. “You’re late,” he said. “You were supposed to be here by six.”
“Give me a break.” I peeled his claws off my arm. “I said six, maybe. David and Elise got stuck behind a jackknifed semi on their way back from the slopes. It’s blizzarding, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Liam lifted his canvas duffel off the foyer floor and jingled his keys.
“Can I go to the bathroom first?” Brushing by him, I hurried down the hall. The bathroom door was closed, apparently in use. As I made a U-turn for the basement, the toilet flushed and Dad emerged.
He glanced from me to Liam in the foyer, Liam’s hand on the doorknob. “You’re not going out in this weather, are you?” Dad said.
“It’s not that bad,” I answered, slipping in behind Dad and shutting the door. I gagged at having to put the toilet seat down. It made me thankful for Liam’s restroom etiquette — not that I knew the personal and private details of what he did on the toilet, or ever wanted to.
When I exited the bathroom, Dad was in the kitchen hanging up the phone. Liam shot me eye daggers and mouthed, Come on.
“Your mother is working late again with Handy Andy,” Dad grumbled. Handy Andy. Good one, Dad. If he meant it as a joke, it wasn’t evident in his face. Dad whirled on us. “You kids are staying home.”
“Dad —” Liam and I protested in unison. Liam looked to me to finish.
“We’re just going to the Y,” I lied. “It’ll be less crowded tonight.”
Dad arched his eyebrows. “Yeah? I’ll come with you.”
Crap. That was not the intended response.
Liam jumped in. “I need to do this alone, Dad. You understand.”
Dad opened his mouth, then shut it. You understand? Liam had never spoken those two words to Dad before. Dad looked shell-shocked. “All right,” he said. “Just be careful out there.”
“Will do.” Liam hitched his chin at me toward the door.
Before Dad figured out what it was he apparently understood — because I sure had no clue — we bailed.
Liam chose the West Meadows Mall about half an hour from our house — on a good day. With the streets paved in black ice and gale force winds impeding every inch of progress, it took us close to an hour to get there. We were lucky to arrive alive.
“Not too many peop
le out tonight,” Liam noted as he created a parking space in the deepening snow near the pillared mall entrance.
“Yeah, well, they lock the dangerously insane up at night,” I muttered. The lot was practically empty. I opened my door and got blasted with pellets of sleet. As I stood and twisted to slam the door behind me, I noticed Liam hadn’t budged. He was just sitting, staring out the frosted window.
I blew back inside. “What?”
“I can’t do this.”
“Liam.”
Mechanically, his head shook from side to side. “I can’t.”
Damn him! I smacked the dash with the palm of my hand. Ow. Add a broken wrist to the toe and acid burn. What were we doing here in the middle of a blizzard on a Saturday night when I could be out with Chris, rowing down the river of love?
“Come on, Liam. It won’t be that bad.”
He just looked at me.
Okay, I couldn’t know.
A thin smile parted his lips. “Teri Lynn likes the name I chose — Luna. She thinks it sounds mystical and mysterious.”
“And Teri Lynn is...?”
“The T-girl I met online.”
T-girl. Trans girl. Right.
“She’s nice,” Liam said. “She told me all about her first time being out, trying to pass. She was seventeen, too, but she didn’t have a car. She had to ride the bus. So she takes this bus to the library because she knows there’s a unisex bathroom there where she can change. She lives in Seattle.” Liam paused and blinked at me. “Washington?”
“I’ve heard of it. This is really fascinating.” I stifled a yawn. “But what does it have to do —”
“She chose this sundress with a jacket,” Liam went on, “and opentoe sandals. All she owned at the time was a really bad Halloween wig, like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.”
“Oh God.” I winced. “You’re kidding.”
Liam chuckled a little. “So she walks across the park to a City Market and the first people she encounters are a mom and her two kids. Teri Lynn knows they’re looking at her. Staring. She almost chickens out. But she keeps on walking, holding her head high. She thinks she’s done it, that she’s past them, when one of the kids goes, ‘Mommy, why is that man wearing a dress?’”
My eyes closed involuntarily.
“I know,” Liam said. “Teri Lynn just about had a coronary. Before her electrolysis, her beard was really dark. All the foundation in the world wasn’t going to cover it.” Liam smiled to himself and dropped his head.
I exhaled a long breath. “So what happened next?”
He traced an index finger across the lower arc of the steering wheel. “The mom was sympathetic. Extremely kind. She apologized to Teri Lynn and scolded her little girl. Teri Lynn was pretty traumatized, she said, but it’d taken her so long to get to this point, to build up the courage to dress as herself, that she wasn’t going back. She said she’d die if she ever had to go back.” Liam’s chest rose and fell.
“So . . . ,” I cocked my head at him, “I guess she lived.”
His eyes found mine.
“You can do this,” I told him. “You can.”
A long moment passed. Then an expression I’d never seen before seized Liam’s face. Determination? Resolve? His jaw set. He nodded once and opened his door.
Chapter 11
I stood guard outside the women’s restroom on the second floor of Sears. Sears. Why did it have to be Sears? I didn’t expect to see any of Dad’s old cronies, since this was a new store, but it was Dad’s territory. He didn’t work the store floors much after Corporate transferred him to Human Resources, where he’d had to issue his own pink slip.
It felt creepy being here. I shivered in my parka. The door inched open and Luna’s hand extended, yanking me inside.
“Okay, how do I look?” She posed in front of me, trembling.
“Not bad.”
Her face collapsed.
“No, I mean good. Really good.” Surprisingly good. She’d chosen a pair of Levi hipsters, a little tighter than I would’ve worn, and a cornflower blue sweater with a pale yellow blouse underneath. Black ankle boots. Stylish. “You look ... ordinary.”
She beamed. She must’ve scoured all the thrift shops in town for stuff this good. Next time she was taking me with her. “And your wig definitely does not scream Mistress of the Dark.”
Luna smiled. She feathered her auburn bangs in the mirror. It was a flattering color for her pale skin and freckles. What was I saying? This wasn’t Cosmo girl.
“You think anyone will read me?” Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “Tell me the truth.”
The truth was, I thought she’d stand out. Not because she looked like a guy. She was tall, and more attractive than most GG’s our age. GG’s — Genetic Girls. That’s what Liam called us, as opposed to TG’s or T-girls. “You look gorgeous, Luna,” I told her, repositioning the collar on the blouse to mask her Adam’s apple.
“Teri Lynn had hers shaved.” Luna stretched her neck in the mirror. “She says you can hardly see it now.”
“Can we go?” The thought of her throat under a knife made me queasy. Not to mention, once Luna began preening in the mirror we’d be here for days.
She exhaled a shallow breath. Looping her purse strap over her shoulder, she hefted her duffel off the counter and said, “They have lockers down this hall where I can stash my bag.”
How’d she know that? Had she been here to scope out the territory? Probably. It’d be like Liam. Paranoid, prepared.
There was one last, tense moment when my fingers curled around the handle and Luna pressed the restroom door shut. She’s going to chicken out, I thought. She can’t do it.
She dropped her hand, licked her lips, and pronounced, “I’m ready.”
The first person we ran into was an appliance salesman. He barreled down on us like he was on a search-and-destroy mission. Luna clamped a tourniquet over my arm with her hand and whimpered.
“Just keep walking,” I said.
A few feet away the salesman called, “Hey, Ralph. Did you get my overtime report for January?” He rushed by us like we were display racks.
Luna steadied herself against a refrigerator. She pressed a hand to her chest and wheezed, “Oh goddess. I’m having a seizure.”
“No, you’re not.” I was. My heart was breaking ribs. “He didn’t even see us,” I told her. “Luna. You passed.”
She blinked down on me. A slow smile radiated across her face. “I did, didn’t I?” Her eyes illuminated. “I did.”
The aisles were devoid of humanoids tonight — thank the weather goddess. One cashier eyed us suspiciously, but I think she saw us as juvie d’s out to lift a little merch. After every encounter, I found myself glancing back over my shoulder to check out people’s reactions. Only one person did a double take, a bored clerk at the camera counter, and it appeared to me he was checking Luna out.
“Nobody’s reading me,” Luna said as we crossed the Sears entrance into the main mall corridor. “This is such a rush.”
Yeah, I was flush with excitement. Quit it, Regan, I chided myself. This is hard for her.
We sauntered past the Hallmark and the Williams Sonoma, Luna clutching her purse so tightly against her side I thought she’d rupture her spleen. “Don’t do that.” I loosened her grip. “You look like a terrorist.”
“Okay, thanks.” She cast me a nervous smile.
She was stiff, taut, and wired. She kept walking faster and faster. “Slow down.” I caught up with her at The Gap. “Look, we’re just two sisters out slumming the mall on a Saturday night. Losers,” I added, “or why else would we be here?”
“Speak for yourself,” Luna said. “We’re here to hit on guys.”
I snorted. Yeah, right. “You’re kidding, right?”
She was kidding. She wasn’t kidding!
“Relax.” She bumped my shoulder. “It seems early in the season to have all the spring fashions out. Does it to you? What do you think of that mock-neck shi
rt?” Her finger grazed my nose as it rose to point through the open entrance to The Gap.
“I don’t know. Let’s go look.”
She grabbed my arm. “You mean, inside?”
“No, out here in the mall. You did bring binoculars, didn’t you?”
She didn’t respond.
I added, “Unless you want to come back in August when the shirts go on sale.”
She swallowed hard, gazing into the depths of the store. The belly of the monster.
Maybe it was too soon. “We don’t have to —”
“No,” she cut in, dropping her hand. “We do. We do have to.” She took the first step, but I still had to practically prod her over the threshold. The saleslady was helping the only other deranged person to be out on a night like this, so it gave us freedom to browse. I sensed Luna relaxing a little.
“Is this me?” She unfolded a pink tee and held it up to her.
“It’s all over you,” I said.
“Hi.”
We both jumped. Oh, great. Another clerk had been lying in wait. “Can I help you?”
Luna looked from me to her. “Do you have this in teal?” she asked.
I died.
The clerk said, “No, just what you see here.”
“Darn.”
The saleslady shrugged at Luna. Then it happened. Her eyes expanded, took Luna in. She stepped back, away, and began to blink real fast.
I felt Luna shrinking in place, shriveling. I reached for her hand. It was trembling, cold.
“They don’t have your color,” I said. “Let’s go.” I tugged her out into the mall.
Hurtling away from The Gap, my heart in my throat, I croaked, “Have you had enough? Can we go home now?”
No answer. I turned to her.
“Not yet,” she said. “We just got here.”
Yeah, a year ago. I’d had enough. That clerk’s reaction made me feel like crawling into a hole. “Dad’s going to kill us. Or ground us for life. He’ll probably call the Y and figure out you were bullshitting him. We should go. Have you seen a phone? I better call him and check in. Breathe heavy in the background so it sounds like you’re working up a sweat.”
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