Then a blond girl in the front row raised her hand and said, “Hades and Persephone.”
I couldn’t help flipping forward in the textbook to the story. I didn’t know why it would be anybody’s favorite. According to myth, Hades, the god of the Underworld, fell in love with Persephone, kidnapped her, and tried to make her his queen. When he tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds, she was bound to the Underworld for six months out of every year.
Kidnapping and imprisonment. It was a horrible myth. I wondered where her hero had been.
Jack’s leg bounced up and down, distracting me. I wanted to reach over and put my hand on his knee and tell him everything would be okay.
But that was impossible. I stared harder at my paper and tried not to think about Jack’s leg.
The bell to end class startled me, and I dropped my pencil. It bounced on the floor, toward Jack’s desk. I froze. Maybe he hadn’t noticed. I’d wait and get it when the rest of the class left. I stayed perfectly still. The room cleared out, but I couldn’t sense any movement from the desk next to mine.
Before I could stop myself, I looked up.
He was there, motionless, holding my pencil in his hand, watching me. My eyes drank in the sight of him, even as my body fought the urge to bolt. His hair was the same rich brown color, but it was longer and shaggier than before. And his face had lost any signs of baby fat, making me think his mom had stopped forcing meatball sandwiches down his throat like she used to during football season.
His eyes were exactly as I’d remembered, exactly as I’d pictured every day for the past hundred years. Chocolate. But there was one difference: a single steel post pierced one of his eyebrows.
It wouldn’t have belonged on his face a year ago, but it somehow fit the face looking at me now. This face was edgier. This face had been through something.
He was beautiful.
I started to tremble. It took all of my strength, which wasn’t very much, not to run out the door.
He’d obviously waited for me to look at him. Like his voice, his face held no easily identifiable emotion to pinpoint. No love, no hate. He held out my pencil for me.
I reached over and grabbed it, my fingers brushing lightly against the palm of his hand. I could hear my own intake of breath. He didn’t flinch in the slightest. He didn’t draw his hand back.
“Mr. Caputo? Miss Beckett?” Mrs. Stone called from the front of the classroom. “Are you waiting for something?”
“No, Mrs. Stone,” Jack said, keeping his curious eyes on mine. “Just saying hi to an old … friend.”
I gathered up my books and tried not to think about how it used to be.
LAST YEAR
September. Six months before the Feed.
Six months before I went under.
“Hey, Becks!” Jules, my best friend, called out to me from the end of the hallway. Most of the students clearing their lockers for the day turned to look. Jules had a way of grabbing attention. “You going to the game tonight?”
I was about to answer, but another voice rang out from just behind me.
“She’d better,” Jack said as he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me back against him. I could smell the fresh leather on his letterman jacket as I crunched against it.
“Why is that?” I asked, smiling and instantly warm in his arms. I still couldn’t get over the fact that Jack Caputo and I were … together. It was hard to think the word. We had been friends for so long. To be honest, he had been friends with me and I had been secretly pining for him since … well, since forever.
But now he was here. It was my waist he held. It didn’t seem real.
“I can’t carry the team to victory without you,” he said. “You’re my rabbit’s foot.”
I craned my neck around to look at him. “I’ve always dreamed of some guy saying that to me.”
He pressed his lips to the base of my neck, and heat rushed to my cheeks. “I love making you turn red,” he whispered.
“It doesn’t take much. We’re in the middle of the hallway.”
“You want to know what else I love?” His tone was playful.
“No,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. He took his fingers and lightly trailed them up my spine, to the back of my neck. Instant goose bumps sprang up all over my body, and I shuddered.
“That.”
I could feel his smile against my ear. Jack was always smiling. It was what made him so likable.
By this time, Jules had snaked her way through the throng of students. “Hello, Jack. I was in the middle of a conversation with Becks. Do you mind?” she said with a smirk.
Right then a bunch of Jack’s teammates rounded the corner at the end of the hallway, stampeding toward us.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
Jack pushed me safely aside just before they tackled him, and Jules and I watched as what seemed like the entire football team heaped on top of their starting quarterback.
“Dating Jack Caputo just might kill you one day.” Jules laughed. “You sure it’s worth it?”
I didn’t answer, but I was sure. In the weeks following my mother’s death, I had spent nearly every morning sitting at her grave. Whispering to her, telling her about my day, like I used to each morning before she died. Jack came with me to the cemetery most days. He’d bring a book and read under a tree several headstones away, waiting quietly, as if what I was doing was totally normal.
We hadn’t even been together then.
It had been only five months since my mom died. Five months since a drunk driver hit her during her evening jog. Five months since the one person who knew all my dreams disappeared forever. Jack was the reason I was still standing.
Yeah, I was sure he was worth it. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was why he was with me.
TWO
NOW
Lunch. Five and a half months left.
At lunchtime, my lunch sack and knitting needles in hand, I tried to weave my way through the crowded halls as fast as I could, searching for a quiet place to eat.
I turned a corner and a small group of cheerleaders broke out into some random rally song. The noise ricocheted off the metal lockers and rang in my ears and in my brain.
I ducked into an empty classroom and took a few deep breaths. It was hard for me to believe I had ever gone to school every day. How could anyone survive so many people in one place? Everything here was loud.
Even in this room, electric morsels of energy reached me, triggering my hunger, reminding me of where I’d been and how much of my own energy had been stolen. I closed my eyes and allowed myself a moment to wish that I had my own emotions back, that I wasn’t so empty.
I realized how much had changed. On the other side of a century, I had wanted to feel less, not more. Maybe most teenagers wouldn’t think like that, but when the drunk driver killed my mom, I wanted more than to stop feeling sad. I wanted to stop feeling. Period. I wanted it so bad that when Cole offered to make it happen, I went to the Everneath with him. Willingly.
Now I knew what really happened when emotions were gone. Cole bought himself another hundred years of life by draining me, and in the abyss left over there was no peace. Only an emptiness that made me ache as if my insides had been scraped out.
I peeked out into the hallway again. The crowds had thinned, but not enough. I wanted to go home. Or at least someplace quiet. But I’d promised my dad I would finish out the day.
Last year, I’d left my dad in the heat of an argument. I threw despicable words at him and then walked out and never came back. This time, I was determined to do things better. I would not leave him, alone in a room, with echoes of the things I never should’ve said frozen in the air. I didn’t have control over much during my Return, but I could control how I would leave the people I loved.
He asked me to stay in school, and so I stayed.
When my heartbeat had regulated, I ventured out of the classroom and found the corner of the darkest hallway on the second
floor. I wedged myself in the nook between a drinking fountain and the brick wall.
Homecoming euphoria wafted through the halls. I could taste it.
I focused on the wall beside the fountain. Blocked out everything else. The paint was peeling away. It had come loose in one large patch, perfectly intact, and was just hanging there.
I wanted to rip it off, but I didn’t. If I left it alone, maybe it could somehow fall back into place without cracking.
Last year, I’d counted down the days to the homecoming football game, crossing off the squares on my calendar. But last year was over a century ago.
This year, I wouldn’t be wishing away time.
I stared at the peeled paint. Nobody noticed me here. I’d found my spot.
LAST YEAR
Homecoming. Five months before the Feed.
The clock counted down from thirty, and the student section chanted each number. Park City and Wasatch had been in-state football rivals for decades, and this year, with Jack at the helm, the Park City Miners had the chance to take the “Boulder” home for the first time in ten years.
The Boulder was a piece of granite, brought down from the summit of nearby Mount Olympus, and it held more significance than any state trophy. Once, Kasey Wellington, the Park City tight end, had stolen the Boulder. His parents let him rot in jail for three days for shame. The only way to get the rock is to earn it.
When the clock reached ten seconds, Jules grabbed my hand. “This is it!” she shouted over the roar of the crowd. Jack’s older brother, Will, was on the other side of me. He reached for my other hand, a proud smile on his face for his little brother. Then he offered me a swig of the silver flask he’d started carrying around in his coat ever since he’d turned twenty-one.
I gave him a disapproving look, and he shrugged good-naturedly, took a sip, then shoved it back in his pocket.
I wondered if Jack’s mom knew how much her other son was drinking.
Seven seconds. In big moments like this, each of the five senses becomes more acute. I knew the smell of mowed grass and mud, and the chill of the icy rain on my skin, and the sound of Jules screaming in my ear, would be grafted onto my soul and become part of the irremovable things about me. The stuff that memories are made of.
I breathed in.
Three … two … one … The bleachers shook as hundreds of fans jumped. It was so loud I had to cover my ears. Then the mass exodus from the stands started. Jules and I joined the rest of the school, scaling the wall that divided the fans from the field. Throwing my legs over the top of the barrier, I turned around and started to lower myself to the turf below. Two strong hands grabbed my sides, lifting me off the wall.
My feet didn’t even touch the ground. With his hands at my waist, Jack flipped me around so I was facing him and pulled me tight, my head above his, our noses inches from each other.
His smile was dazzling. It always had been, but before, I was just admiring it from afar as he flashed it toward Lacey Greene or one of his other girlfriends.
Tonight it was for me.
“We did it, Becks!” He spun me around.
“Congra—” I couldn’t get anything else out, because his lips were on mine. His mouth tasted faintly of salt. The eye black on his cheeks was no doubt smearing onto my face, but I didn’t care. We had this moment together, and I knew it would be over too quickly.
After all, he was the hero. Soon his teammates would be carrying Jack off the field on their shoulders. I knew if I wanted to date the quarterback, I’d have to share him on a night like this.
NOW
My lunch nook.
My knitting needles darted back and forth as they worked. My lunch sack sat untouched on the hard tile floor beside me. The drinking fountain next to my shoulder shuddered to life, cooling the water.
I liked the white noise and solitude my nook gave me.
“Nikki?”
I paused the frantic knitting, but I didn’t look up. Maybe whoever it was didn’t mean me.
“Becks?”
Maybe not. Two feet appeared next to my lunch sack. How had she tracked me down?
I looked up. The girl looking down at me hadn’t changed at all. She was still beautiful, her round face as cherubic as ever, her long blond hair falling in curling cascades over her shoulders. That hair always looked like a snapshot of a waterfall, as if it should be moving.
She was uneasy. I could sense it.
“Hi, Jules—Julianna,” I said.
She smiled sympathetically and sank to the ground so she was facing me. I set my knitting down.
“Jules,” she corrected. “You call me Jules.”
I tapped the floor with my fingers, closing my eyes for a long blink. I felt one of the knitting needles being placed back in my hand, and when I opened my eyes, Jules set the ball of yarn in my lap. She fingered the flowers on the hat I’d nearly finished.
“This is gorgeous, Becks,” she said. My nickname felt like warm coffee traveling down my throat, heating my insides. “When did you learn to knit?”
“Two weeks ago.” My fingers automatically began their work again.
“You always were a quick study.”
I smiled. She used to hate the fact that school came easy to me.
Right then the bell rang, ending the lunch hour. I shot up to my feet, startling Jules. I couldn’t help it. Everything seemed louder here.
“Whoa, Becks. We still have five minutes,” she said.
“Sorry. I just…” I didn’t know how to finish.
Jules squeezed my hand. “It’s okay. I can only imagine what you’ve been through.”
She didn’t say it, but it sounded like she believed the rumors that I’d run away and ended up in rehab. At least she wasn’t asking me for the full story. I’d rather people believed the rumors than have to try to explain that I’d been in some version of the Underworld for a hundred years. I didn’t need everyone thinking I was crazy, too.
I didn’t speak to anyone else for the rest of the day.
When I got home from school, my dad was in the living room with a woman in a gray suit he introduced as Mrs. Ellingson. She said she was there as my friend. I told her I didn’t need friends.
She asked me to pee in a cup.
Later that night my dad called me into his study. I knew whatever he wanted was serious, because the study was where all of our serious talks took place.
He was finishing up an email when I went in, so I sat quietly and looked around. The room smelled like leather. The dark wood walls of the study were covered with pictures of his accomplishments. His graduation ceremony from law school. His inauguration as mayor of Park City. Cutting the ribbon for the renovation project at the Egyptian Theater on Main Street.
There was only one family picture in the study, taken for our Christmas cards two years ago. My mom and dad sitting on a couch holding hands, me and my now ten-year-old brother, Tommy, standing behind them.
Poor Tommy. He was happy I was back, but he didn’t know what to do with me. It took him a full week to realize I was in no condition to throw the baseball with him like I used to. He always seemed to be waiting for me to say something. Anything. And then he’d leave disappointed. I loved him, but I didn’t know how to fix all of the things that were broken in our family.
My dad’s desk was scattered with papers, many of which showed bar graphs of the latest polling numbers for his reelection campaign. I wondered if the mess surrounding me affected those numbers, but I was afraid to ask.
“How’s the campaign?” I said.
He held up one finger, eyes still on the monitor. “Just … one … minute … and send.” He shut the laptop, and then clasped his hands together and placed them on his desk. “The campaign’s fine. It’s in Percy’s good hands. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
I didn’t think so.
He shifted in his chair, and the taste in the air only confirmed what his body language was telling me. My dad was nervous
.
“Now that you’re back, I thought we could discuss expectations. Specifically, what I expect from you, and what you expect from me.”
It couldn’t be a coincidence that the first time we talked like this came after a visit from Mrs. Ellingson. She’d probably given him a pamphlet titled “Defining Expectations: How to Reconnect with Your Strung-Out Teenage Daughter” or something like that. But I’d promised myself to make things easier on my dad, and if this was what he needed…
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Good. Here is what I expect from you. Number one: you will attend school, every day, and you will keep up on your studies. Agreed?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Number two: you will submit to random … testing from Mrs. Ellingson. Agreed?”
It sounded like he was hesitant to use the actual word drug. Maybe if he didn’t say it, it couldn’t be true. “Agreed.”
“Number three: I’ve arranged for you to do community service at the Road Home Soup Kitchen, starting next week. You will serve one lunch hour for every day you were gone. Clear?”
“Clear,” I said.
“The Trib is sending a photographer.”
A photographer? To cover me slopping soup? Percy Jones, my dad’s campaign manager, had probably arranged it. “Okay,” I said.
“Now your turn. What do you expect from me?”
I smiled and answered as honestly as I could. “Nothing.”
Apparently, that option wasn’t in the handbook, because my dad looked a little flustered. Before he could recover, I went over and kissed his head. “Good night.”
As I walked away, I decided I would try to do everything I could to appease my dad in the little time I had left. I wished my mom were still alive. She would know how to comfort him now, and after I was gone.
The lights in Tommy’s bedroom were off, so I crept down the hall to my room. I opened my door as quietly as I could and shut it behind me without turning on the light.
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