“Then I’d better get to class,” Buffy said, turning and heading for the door. She had less than a minute before the second bell would ring.
As she dashed through the hall, she was intercepted by Principal Flutie. The pudgy, black-haired man was wearing a suit with the latest in a series of hideous ties that would’ve made great ads for awful Father’s Day presents. “You were there, you saw Dr. Gregory, didn’t you?” he asked without preamble.
Since Flutie had been standing right there—mostly whining—while Buffy, Cordelia, Willow, Xander, and the kitchen staff all gave their statements to the police, this struck Buffy as an odd question. “You mean yesterday in the cafeteria, when we found him—”
“Don’t say dead,” Flutie interrupted. “Or decapitated. Or decomposing. I would stay away from D words altogether. But you witnessed the event, so this way please,” he said, indicating the opposite direction from Science 109.
“Well, no, I’m gonna be late for biology.”
“Extremely late,” Flutie agreed, leading her down the hallway. “You have to see a counselor. Everyone who saw the body has to see a crisis counselor.”
If Buffy saw a crisis counselor every time she came across a dead body, the counselor would have to move into her house. “I really don’t need—”
“We all need help with our feelings,” Flutie babbled on, “otherwise we bottle them up and before you know it, powerful laxatives are involved. I really believe that if we all reach out to one another, we can beat this thing. I’m always here if you need a hug—but not a real hug, because there’s no touching in this school, we’re sensitive to wrong touching.”
He led her to a bench outside what was usually the school nurse’s office, which Buffy refused to sit on. From inside, she could hear someone’s voice droning on.
“But I really really—”
“No,” Flutie interrupted again. “You have to talk to a counselor and start the healing. You have to heal.”
“But Mr. Flutie, I—”
“Heal!” he barked, pointing to the bench.
Defeated, Buffy sank into the seat.
Just my luck, I’m stuck with the touchy-feely principal. Well, feely, anyhow, since we’re so “sensitive to wrong touching.”
Buffy leaned back and hoped that Willow would notice if Ms. French did anything weird. Normally, she’d include Xander in that, but he was obviously besotted.
“Besotted”? I’ve been hanging around Giles way too long.
She finally noticed that the droning voice belonged to Cordelia.
“I don’t know what to say,” she was saying, which was obviously not true. “It was really . . . I mean, one minute, you’re in your normal life, and then, ‘who’s in the fridge?’ It really gets to you, a thing like that. It was—let’s just say I haven’t been able to eat a thing since yesterday. I think I lost like seven-and-a-half ounces—way swifter than the so-called diet that quack put me on. Oh,” she added quickly, “I’m not saying that we should kill a teacher every day just so I can lose weight, I’m just saying, when tragedy strikes, you have to look on the bright side. You know, like how even a used Mercedes still has leather seats.”
Okay, Buffy thought, it’s official. I’m in hell.
Cordelia finally tired of hearing herself talk and exited. Upon seeing Buffy, she said, “You’ll probably need a couple of hours in there. I mean hey, why turn down the free therapy, right?”
Buffy ignored her and went in. She answered all the counselor’s questions—is it my imagination, or is he relieved to get a word in edgewise?—with simple answers. She had gone through this at Hemery High after she burned down the gymnasium, right before they decided to kick her out. It was impossible for the counselor to do her any good because she couldn’t give the counselor the real reason for any of her problems. So she kept her answers simple and was out of there in five minutes.
She ran to bio class only to see that the students were all hunched over tests. “Oh great,” she muttered. “A pop quiz.”
Two things grabbed her attention immediately after that. One was that her lab table was completely empty. Blayne also missed class.
The other was that Ms. French was standing with her back to the door.
This, in and of itself, wasn’t unusual, but she turned her head around to look toward Buffy.
All the way around. Without pivoting the rest of her body at all.
At the last second, Buffy moved from out of sight of the bio class door.
This, she decided, is just too weird.
After school, she caught Willow up on her day, ending with Ms. French’s little neck trick.
Willow was, perhaps understandably, having problems with the concept. “She craned her neck?”
“No, I’m not saying she craned her neck,” Buffy said, exasperated as they entered the library. “We are talking full-on Exorcist twist.”
“Ouch.”
“Which reminds me,” Buffy said, remembering the other odd thing in class, “how come Blayne—who worked with her ‘one on one’ yesterday—isn’t here today?”
“Inquiring minds want to know,” Willow said, and immediately went for the computer.
Buffy went to Giles, who sat at the main desk, poring over a book. “Any luck?”
“Um, I’ve not found any creature as yet that strikes terror in a vampire’s heart.”
“Try looking under ‘Things that Can Turn Their Heads All the Way Around.’ ”
“Nothing human can do that,” Giles said.
“No, nothing human.” Buffy then had a thought, as parts of chapters six through eight came back to her. “But there are some insects that can. Whatever she is, I’m gonna be ready for her.”
With that, she went up the stairs to the stacks.
“What are you going to do?” Giles asked.
Grinning, Buffy said, “My homework.” And she went into the stacks.
After wandering around for several seconds, she came back out. “Where are the books on bugs?” she asked Giles.
The moment has come, Xander thought triumphantly. He barely slept the night before, and when he did, he dreamed of her. Bio class couldn’t come soon enough. When it did, the pop quiz was like a bucket of ice water in the face. Still, he soldiered through it. He was heartened by the fact that Blayne never turned up. Probably got worn out by a real woman. Well, we Harrises are made of sterner stuff.
The test was something of a challenge, especially since Xander had barely cracked the bio textbook all year, and then mainly to draw moustaches on the pictures of cells.
But it was worth it for one moment.
“Keep your eyes straight ahead,” Ms. French had said, “on your own test.” Then she walked up behind Xander and put a hand on his shoulder. His heart stopped. In a whisper that he doubted even Willow heard, she said, “I think you meant ‘pollination' for number fourteen.” He gave her a grateful look and changed the answer. She added, “I’ll see you here after school.”
He didn’t breathe slowly for the rest of the day.
Now he was set for the one on one.
He walked in as the sub was preparing a sandwich of some kind. “Hi!” he said, grateful that he could manage one-syllable words, at least, in her presence.
“Oh, hi. I was just grabbing a snack. Can I get you something?”
Several answers came to mind, but Xander simply said, “No, thanks, I never eat when I’m making egg sacs.” He looked down at a model she had already made. “Wow, if these were real, the bugs’d be—”
“Big as you,” she finished.
“Yeah. So,” he said, not wanting to dwell on that mental image, “where do we start?”
“Oh, Xander, I’ve done something really stupid. I hope you can forgive me.”
She could have told him that she was responsible for starting a world war and he would have forgiven her. “Oh, Forgiveness is my middle name. Actually it’s LaVelle, and I’d appreciate it if you’d guard that secret with your life.”
Xander realized this had to be true love. He’d never told anyone his middle name before. Not even Willow or Jesse or Buffy.
“I have a teacher’s conference in half an hour and I left the paint and the papier mâché at home. I don't suppose you'd like to come to my place tonight to work on it there?”
“Come to, uh—your place?”
Up until this point, Xander’s love life had primarily consisted of girls laughing hysterically at him when he expressed any kind of romantic interest in them. So to have the most perfect woman in the world invite him to her place at night came as something of a shock.
A good shock, of course, but a shock, nonetheless.
“It’d just be the two of us,” she said, adding to both the shock and the joy. “I’d feel more comfortable there, you know, about letting my hair down.”
“Right, that’s important,” he stammered, “ ’cause when you hair’s not down, it’s—up.” We’re wallowing in lameness again.
Oh, who cares? She’s invited me to her house.
“It’s a date, then,” she said, rooting around the desk for a piece of paper. “Seven-thirty,” she added, handing him the paper. “Here’s my address. I’ll see you tonight.”
She said “date.”
Slowly, not trusting himself to walk steadily without major mental effort, Xander turned and left Science 109.
As soon as the door closed behind him, he threw out his arms and cried, “Ooh, yes!”
Buffy came running out to the railing that looked out over the main part of the library. She held a text on praying mantises in her hands. “Dig this,” she said excitedly. “ ‘The praying mantis can rotate its head a hundred and eighty degrees while waiting for its next meal to walk by.’ Hah!” she finished, closing the book with a flourish.
When Giles and Willow refused to react, Buffy said, “Well, c’mon guys. Hah?”
Willow brushed her brown hair behind her ear the way she did when she was about to say something she figured people didn’t want to hear. “Well, Ms. French is sort of big. For a bug,” she added helpfully.
“She is, by and large, woman shaped,” Giles added.
Buffy would not be defeated. As she walked down the stairs, she ticked off factoids. “Okay, factoid one: only the praying mantis can rotate its head like that. Factoid two: a pretty whacked-out vampire is scared to death of her. Factoid three: her fashion sense screams predator.”
That seemed to convince Willow. “The shoulder pads.”
“Exactly,” Buffy said, triumphantly.
Giles started fiddling with his pen. “If you’re right, she’d have to be a shapeshifter, or perception distorter. Well, now, half a mo’,” he said, looking like a light bulb went off over his head. “I had a chum at Oxford, Carlyle, with advanced degrees in entomology and mythology.”
“Entoma-who?” Buffy asked.
“Bugs and fairy tales,” Giles translated dryly.
Buffy nodded. “I knew that,” she lied.
“If I recall correctly, poor old Carlyle—just before he went mad—claimed there was some beast—”
Willow interrupted. “Buffy, nine-one-one! Blayne’s mom called the school. He never came home last night.”
As Buffy walked around the table to join Willow at the computer, Giles asked, “The boy who worked with Ms. French yesterday?”
“Yeah,” Willow said. “If Ms. French is responsible for—Xander’s supposed to be helping her right now. He’s got a crush on a giant insect!”
Willow sounded frantic. Quickly, Buffy said, “Okay, don’t panic. I’ll warn him. But I need you to hack into the coroner’s office for me.”
“What are we looking for?” Willow asked.
Buffy suppressed a smile. Willow had a crush of her own: on Xander. Her feelings were patently obvious to everyone except Xander himself, whose obliviousness would have been cute if it didn’t hurt Willow so much.
Still, right now Buffy needed Willow to be focused, not worried. Distracting her with some computer nerdity was just the thing to keep her mind off Xander.
“Autopsy on Dr. Gregory. I’ve been trying to figure out these marks I saw on his corpse. I’m thinking they were teeth.” She pointed to a picture in the mantis book. “And these cuddlies should definitely be brushing after every meal.” She turned back to Giles. “And you were saying something about a beast?”
Giles had his faraway look on. “Oh, uh, yes, I just need to make one transatlantic telephone call.” He headed for his office, then stopped and turned around. “This computer invasion that Willow’s performing on the coroner’s office—one assumes it is entirely legal?”
“Of course,” Buffy said with all the sincerity she could cram into two words.
“Entirely,” Willow said at the same time.
Giles obviously didn’t buy it for a second. “Right,” he said. “Wasn’t here, didn’t see it, couldn’t have stopped you.”
“Good idea,” Buffy said with more sincere sincerity.
As the librarian disappeared into his office, Buffy grabbed her new leather jacket (Angel . . .) and went off in search of Xander, leaving Willow to her hack work.
It took several minutes to find him. He wasn’t in the bio classroom, nor the student lounge or cafeteria, and he obviously wasn’t in the library, which exhausted his usual haunts. She checked outside, finally finding him walking near the quad.
“Hey,” she said as she caught up to him.
He said, “Hey,” back.
“So how’d it go with Ms. French?”
Xander shrugged. “Well, it’s a bit demanding being her absolute favorite guy in the universe, but I’ll muddle through.”
Oh great, he’s completely bereft of anything like a clue. “Xander,” she said, “she’s not what she seems.”
“I know,” he said dreamily, “she’s so much more.”
Arrrrrgh. “Okay, um, I’m gonna have to tell you something about her,” she said slowly, “and I’m gonna need you to really listen, okay?”
“Okay,” Xander said, sounding like he meant it.
Here goes. “I don’t think she’s human.”
Xander smirked. “I see. So, she’s not human, she’s . . . ?”
“Technically, a big bug.” As Xander’s smirk grew into a grin, Buffy added quickly, “This sounds really weird, I’m aware, but—”
“It doesn’t sound weird at all,” Xander said in the most condescending voice she’d ever heard him use. “I completely understand. I’ve met someone, and you’re jealous.”
Buffy gathered every bit of willpower she possessed and did not break Xander’s neck. “What?”
“Look, there’s nothing I could do about it. There’s just a certain chemical thing between Ms. French and me.”
“I know, I read all about it. It’s called, uh, a pheromone. It’s a chemical attractant insects give off.”
“She’s not an insect, she’s a woman, okay?” Now Xander sounded exasperated. “Hard as it may be for you to conceive, an actual woman finds me attractive. I realize it’s no mystery guy handing out leather jackets. And while we’re on the subject, what kind of a girly-name is Angel anyway?”
“What does that have to do with—”
“Nothing,” Xander said. “It just kinda bugs me.”
Buffy looked into her friend’s eyes and saw that there would be no convincing him. He hadn’t paid attention to a thing she said, hadn’t considered the possibility that she might be right. That was so wildly out of character—and, at the same time, completely in character under the circumstances—that Buffy knew it would be pointless to keep arguing.
“I really gotta . . .” Xander trailed off and left.
Sighing to herself, Buffy headed back to the library. We’ve got to find a way to stop her before Xander does something stupid. She thought a moment, then amended the thought: stupider.
CHAPTER 5
Xander had thought he would never see a sight as glorious as Natalie French when he first s
aw her walking down the quad.
He was wrong.
That honor had to go to Natalie French when she answered the door the night of his one-on-one egg sac-making session.
She wore—well, not a lot, really. It was a one-piece black dress, cut high on the leg and cut very low on the neck.
“Hi,” she said with that light-up-the-room smile, “come on in.” He entered slowly, his eyes transfixed on the dress’s plunging neckline. “Should I change?” she asked. “Is this too—?”
“No, no,” Xander said quickly, wanting to get any idea of her changing out of her head as fast as possible. “It’s the most beautiful chest—dress I’ve ever seen.” Oh, good one there, Freudian Slip Boy.
“Thank you, that’s sweet.” She picked up a pair of long-stemmed glasses and offered him one. “Martini?”
He hesitated. Many guys his age drank at least beer at parties, but Xander didn’t get invited to those kinds of parties—mainly because he generally didn’t get invited to parties, period. His experiences with alcohol were limited to the occasional glass of wine with dinner at his grandmother’s house. “It’s only a little,” she’d say, “it won’t hurt him.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, noticing his hesitation. “Would you like something else?”
Xander quickly took the glass and sat on one end of the small, but very comfortable couch. She sat on the other end.
“I just need to relax a little,” she said. “I’m kind of nervous around you. You’re probably cool as a cucumber.”
“I like cucumbers. Like in that Greek salad thing with the yogurt. You like Greek food? I’m exempting schwarma, of course. What is that all about, big meat hive?” Good God, Harris, stop before you make an even bigger fool of yourself. He drained the martini in one gulp.
A strange fuzzy feeling formed in the base of his throat, leaped around throughout his body for several seconds, then finally settled down in his head.
“Hel-lo.”
Ms. French smiled and clinked his empty glass in a toast. “Cheers.” She took a sip of her martini—Oh, okay, you’re supposed to sip it. Duh—then said, “Can I ask you a personal question?” She slid closer to him. “Have you ever been with a woman before?”
THE XANDER YEARS, Vol. 1 Page 4