Supernormal

by Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

  Ashley tried to relax. At least she tried to not tense. She had to work her way down, muscle by muscle.

  “You’re bleeding,” Brody said quietly as Cam and Meg mopped up the shards and soda.

  She was. A sliver of glass gleamed up from the red pooling in her hand.

  “Is it bad?” The next second Cam had taken her hand in both of his, stretching it open so he could examine the palm. Brody kept his hand on her shoulder, in case Ashley moved. She didn’t. She barely let herself breath. “Looks like a tricky one, too. Anybody have any tweezers?”

  “I have some in my purse,” Meg said, her voice low, her eyes on Ashley.

  “Stay away from me,” Ashley choked, but Cam kept his hands on her, flicked his blue eyes up to hers.

  “You’re not going to do anything,” he said.

  “I said stay away from me,” and she jerked her hand back, ripped the shard out, and took the stairs four at a time.

  She seriously considered just climbing out the window and staying away ‘til they left.

  She heard them downstairs. The swik, swik, swik of Meg slicing vegetables. Brody’s questions to Cam—the ones everybody asked when someone new moved into town. How are you liking it here? and shit like that. The soft whumpf and the scent of gas when Meg turned on the oven. The comfortable teasing between Brody and Meg.

  Ashley tugged on a dry pair of shorts and her favorite T-shirt, realizing for the first time how worn and faded it looked. There was a hole in the shoulder she hadn’t noticed before, where the seam was pulling apart.

  Footsteps, and then a knock on the door. It swung open easily—Brody didn’t believe in locks, just privacy—and Cam held up Band-Aids and a bottle of peroxide.

  “I’m fine,” she said, but he came in and settled on the floor next to her. And, when he reached for her hand, “Don’t touch me.” Ashley forced herself to take a breath. “I don’t like to be touched.” Not after the years of lab coats and rubber gloves.

  Cam held out the peroxide for her. “That was a nasty cut.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “Don’t you want a Ninja Turtles Band-Aid?” He shook the box. “They’re glow-in-the-dark.”

  She watched him for a moment, and then uncurled her hand to show him. The wound was already a faint pink line.

  Cam took it in, his gaze traveling up to her elbow, following the thin scar that circled her wrist and cut straight down the middle of her arm. “So that’s what I felt.” She must have looked confused, because he explained, “This afternoon, on the beach. Felt like a seam.”

  Ashley snatched her arm back, tucking it against her body.

  He gave her a measured look. “It’s not going to go away if we close our eyes and pretend it never happened. Trust me, I know.”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “All right, then, don’t. It’s still true. C’mon.” He got to his feet. “Pizzas are almost ready.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Which was a lie. She was always hungry.

  “Coward.”

  “Yes,” she said savagely. “You would be, too.”

  Cam regarded her, his eyes searching her face. “Yes, I would.” He held out his hand. She heard Meg tip the oven open, felt the heat blossom up from below-stairs, and her room filled the savory scent of cheese and baking bread. Ashley took a hard breath, and then pushed herself past Cam and down the stairs.

  Ch. 8

  After dinner, Meg and Brody settled in the living room with a couple of beers to watch TV. The actual program didn’t matter, though Ashley knew Meg liked the ones about secret agents and military action heroes because the inaccuracies set Brody’s teeth on edge. What mattered was the faded old couch, so worn it seemed to sink around Brody and Meg, rather than the other way around, and the way they talked, and the way they didn’t have to talk, not always. Ashley liked to sit in sometimes, to watch them, and let the ebb and flow of conversation wash over her, and pretend to be a part of it. But tonight had been a little too much. So she escaped to the back porch.

  It was a nice night. Sugar Beach saw a lot of nice nights, full of soft air and moonlight. It gleamed along the white crests of waves. The night was never completely silent, not with her hearing, but it was quiet. Plus the dark was easier on her eyes. She’d grown to like nights here. She hadn’t thought she would. She didn’t want to. It would make it harder when she had to go back.

  Ashley heard his footsteps in the hallway. Then there was a pause, and the screen door creaked open. Cam crossed to her, a bowl in each hand. “Dessert?”

  “Ice cream?”

  “Gelato.”

  Ice cream. Ashley took it, careful not to touch. She expected him to head back inside, but he didn’t. Instead he crossed to the deck railing to look out at the ocean.

  Ashley tried not to look at him. She forced herself to focus on hammy dialogue and dramatic music coming from the TV, on the ice cream, the way it tasted cold and sweet and smooth on her tongue.

  He didn’t try to talk. Thank god. Too many people tried to talk, and she was too exhausted to fake normal.

  But he was paying attention, even though he pretended not to, because as soon as she set her bowl aside he came over and handed her his. She hesitated for a second, then thought, Fuck it, and took the bowl.

  “Can I ask why you did it?”

  Ashley swallowed, and let the spoon rattle into the bowl. She wasn’t hungry anymore. “No.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, but he didn’t say anything. As if that were enough. She said no, and he didn’t. It made her feel a little unsteady.

  “More?” He nodded at her bowl.

  “It startled me.” She startled herself, saying it. “I didn’t mean to. It bolted and I was…on edge. I react—I don’t react well—it’s a long story.”

  Cam snagged the deck chair next to her. “Do you ever take off your sunglasses?”

  “No,” Ashley said. Which was a lie. She did in the house, usually, after the sun went down. Brody could be counted on to keep the lights off, and she got sick of seeing the world through scratched lenses. “The light hurts my eyes.”

  He raised an eyebrow. The only light in the house was the dim flicker of the TV through the window, and the few candles Brody lit for company’s sake.

  “My eyes are sensitive,” she explained.

  “Sensitive enough to need sunglasses at night. More surgery?”

  Ashley went very still.

  He didn’t look at her, just kept staring out across the beach. “The scars on your arms. They’re too clean to be by accident.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “There’s a shocker. Do you want to take a walk?” he asked suddenly. “It’s darker out there.”

  “No.” It burst out of her, sharpened by surprise.

  Cam waited a moment. “‘No, you don’t want to take a walk?’ Or, ‘No, it’s not darker out there?’”

  “No,” Ashley said, and Cam nodded. Just accepting it. Again. “We didn’t do too well on the beach last time.”

  “No,” Cam agreed.

  But his eyes were so blue, even through her sunglasses. And she did like to walk the beach at night, every now and again when Brody let her. Liked the way the sand slipped through her toes like silk. So she said, “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Cam said, then nodded at the back door. “We should tell them.”

  “Brody knows.” He would have stopped her by now if he thought it was a bad idea.

  She headed down the steps to the beach, and Cam went with her.

  They picked their way through the dunes, down to the open beach. A breeze was coming off the water, cool enough to prickle her skin. Brody lived on a quiet part of the island, set back from other houses, which meant the beach here was abandoned by this time of night.

  Or should have been. Ashley held back when Cam made to head north. “Can we go this way?” she asked, nodding in the opposite direction. “There’s people back there.” Ashley saw him rak
ing his eyes over the sand. “They’re down a bit. I can hear them,” she confessed. His eyebrows rose, and she added, “And smell them.”

  She expected…well, no, she hadn’t expected jokes, actually. She didn’t know him, at all, really, but he didn’t seem the type. So she wasn’t surprised when he simply turned around and strolled the other way.

  They walked in silence at first. Ashley took care to keep a safe distance between them; she probably overestimated a bit, but best to play it safe, and if Cam noticed anything he didn’t say. It felt strange to walk on the beach, slow enough that she could feel the fine grains of sand against her feet. Cam had an easy, long-legged stride, and she had to concentrate to keep pace with him.

  She checked to make sure he wasn’t looking, twice. Then slipped off her sunglasses.

  It took her a second to work her eyelids open. The world gleamed silver in the moonlight, so bright and clear that even with the moon half behind a cloud her eyes watered. She blinked rapidly until her eyes adjusted. Every time, it still amazed her. It was like she had been blind before. Ashley glanced at Cam, and the moonlight made his hair look like fire, made the freckles on his skin stand out. She hadn’t realized there were so many of them.

  For someone who’d made such a big fuss out of this, he was watching her quite casually. “So that’s what you look like.”

  She shrugged, hooking her glasses through a belt loop.

  “I’d wondered. You hide behind them all the time—”

  “I need them—”

  “Because your eyes are sensitive,” he finished. “Hearing, too. You’re wearing earplugs,” he said when she shot a look at him, “and you still managed to pick up on those people down the beach.”

  “You have psychic visions,” she tossed back.

  He nodded, conceding. “So. Hearing, vision. Sense of smell. Speed, strength—”

  “I work out.”

  “—your hand healed—”

  “It was a scratch, I wasn’t—”

  “—you do know people don’t usually have pupils like that?”

  “Stop. Stop it. Don’t try to figure me out,” she snarled, and turned on him. “Why are you even here?”

  “My parents fucked. Same as you.”

  Ashley tripped over her own feet. “No, that’s—that’s not what I meant,” she sputtered.

  “Obviously. Otherwise we’d be siblings.”

  She just said it. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Well, I don’t like to think about it.”

  “Of me,” she demanded.

  Cam quirked an eyebrow. Christ, he looked like Meg when he did that. “No.”

  He said it simply. Like it was simple. She couldn’t breathe. “I hurt you.”

  “Maybe I like it rough.”

  “Maybe you’re an idiot.”

  “No argument there.”

  Ashley choked on a mixture of frustration and anger and what might have been anger. She made herself stop, swallow it down, until she could breathe again. “Cam—I’m sorry. I…have issues.”

  “Yeah, you do.” Which made her laugh. It felt strange in her chest. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. If you’re—if you’re really—”

  “I am.”

  “—then you saw—” He’d seen. Ashley swallowed hard, fighting for calm. Or something like it.

  “I saw what you might do. What you didn’t do.”

  Her hands clenched, so tight her nails cut into her palms. “You have no idea—”

  “Yes, I do. I saw you twice now, and twice now I saw you stop.” He turned his face to the ocean, watching the waves crash in. “I see a lot of ‘almost’s.’ A lot of ‘meant to’s’ and ‘maybe’s’ and ‘want to’s.’ I’ve gotten good at filtering a lot of that out, but still. It’s part of the job. For every choice we make, there’s one we didn’t make. Or two, or ten.” He looked back at her, and his eyes were hard. “So I do know what I’m talking about, Miss Garrett, when I say what we mean to do, or want to do, or think about doing—it doesn’t matter. What matters is what we do.”

  “I did hurt you,” she replied. “I didn’t mean to, and I didn’t want to, and I am sorry, but I did. I’m sorry,” Ashley said again, feeling it in every bone. “It’s…not easy for me to be gentle. It’s easy for me to hurt people.”

  “Get in line.” For the first time, he sounded angry.

  “It’s not the same thing.” It wasn’t. She forced herself to look at his throat again. In the silver light, the makeup stood out even more. It made her angry. She clung to that anger; it was better than fear, better than shame. “You have no idea—”

  “Yes, I do,” he said, and the matter-of-fact way he said it was brutal.

  “I put a man in a coma.” She said it to hurt him. Whatever this truce was that they had going on, he wasn’t supposed to be on her side. “He’s not ever going to wake up, and if he does he’s not ever going to walk again, because I broke his spine. I ran at him too fast, we landed wrong, and… ” And she still heard the snap sometimes in her sleep. “It was easy.”

  “Did he deserve it?”

  That wasn’t what she expected. It hurt more. “No.”

  “Then why?”

  She could’ve told him the story, but she didn’t want to remember. Not tonight, not ever. She shouldn’t have brought it up. So Ashley just told him the truth. “He was in my way.”

  It took her a moment to realize they’d stopped moving. That she was just standing there, the icy water rolling over her bare feet, trailing wet sand through her toes as it pulled back out. And he was standing there, waiting for her. When she finally managed to look up, to look him in the face, he was watching her. “Go ahead,” she said. “Say it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  It was not what she was expecting. The way he said it, quiet and real, it hooked into her chest and almost brought her to her knees. Ashley blinked and had to swallow, hard. “So am I.” She swallowed again. “It’s…” It’s not the worst thing I’ve done. But she didn’t say that. She barely knew him. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t want to tell him that. “It’s getting late. We should go back.”

  Ch. 9

  Danny had given Cam a complicated merry-go-round of directions, but in the end finding his house was as simple as following Tyler after church. Tyler was carrying a party-sized bag of Tostitos, and a jam jar of…

  “Salsa,” Tyler said, when he caught Cam staring. “My grandma makes it. You’re going to want to take it slow, though, it’s not for beginners. Danny’s cousin Roger blew his eardrums out last Fourth of July.” He nodded a question at the foil-wrapped package Cam was holding.

  “Cookies.”

  Tyler’s eyes went alert. “Meg’s cookies? Chocolate chip cookies?”

  “Yes.”

  The Evans’ house was a stretched-out one-story, in that Spanish-style stucco with the red tile roof that was so popular in Sugar Beach. There was an abandoned girl’s bike in the driveway, and the lawn desperately needed a mow. Danny swung the glass-paneled front door open before they even knocked, diving at Cam with a cry of, “You brought them!” He snatched the package out of Cam’s hands and rushed back inside.

  Tyler raced after him. “No fair! Hey! Hey—those are for sharing!”

  Cam stood there for a moment, feeling like an uninvited vampire. He stepped inside.

  His first thought was that somebody definitely lived here. There was a controlled kind of disorder, the sense of a mess that was barely kept in check: jackets tossed onto chairs, a pile of mail spilling off the hall table, movie magazines sprawled open on the couch, a basket of laundry waiting to be folded. Human touches, too: a calendar, scribbled on, dates circled; photos of Danny in a graduation cap and gown, Danny and a young girl at Disneyland; the same girl and an older woman in matching Christmas sweaters. So many photos. They were hugging in all of them.

  The house even smelled like people. His parents’ house had always smelled like furniture polish and disinfec
tant. The air there had been like a museum’s, so cool and dry it set his eyes itching—

  Cam shook his head. He needed to stop thinking about his parents.

  Tyler and Danny were in the kitchen, hunched over the foil package like wild animals. “Some of those are for Liz,” Cam told them.

  “Liz’s not here,” Tyler said, “she loses out.”

  “They’re, like, soft and crispy at the same time,” Danny managed between bites. “How does she do it? It’s magic. It’s cookie magic.”

  Tyler stared Cam down, but he gave in. “What’s on the line-up, Danny?”

  “We’re doing a Southern Fried Festival for our friend from Georgia.”

  “Kentucky Fried Movie?”

  “Better. Sling Blade. And then To Kill a Mocking Bird, and we end it with Sweet Home, Alabama.”

  “That’s a chick flick.”

  Danny shrugged. “Yeah, so?”

  “You watch chick movies?”

  “Of course. For research. I’m dating a woman, I got to know how women are thinking. I don’t see you dating a woman. You should watch chick movies.”

  “Liz is not a woman,” Tyler said.

  “Uh, I can confirm that she is,” Danny said, swinging his arms. “Because I have seen her naked. Because we have had sex.” Danny grinned and then winked at Cam. “And she is hot.”

  “Oh my god, Danny—” Tyler put his head in his hands.

  “What? You’re a clever boy, you had to have figured it out. Like that one time, when we were late for pizza, and you snarked about how hard was it to find your way in a town of five thousand and then I started snickering ‘cause you used the word ‘hard’? It’s cause we just—”

  “I meant that ‘woman’ implies an adult, okay? Your mom is an adult. Ms. Gowan is an adult. Liz isn’t an adult. And I don’t need to hear this—I mean, Christ, she’s like my sister—”

  “Excuse me,” Cam said.

  “Great, now you scared him away,” Tyler said.

  Cam caught the front door as it swung open, before it crashed into the wall and sent the vase on the hall table to the floor. “Something wrong?”