When our lips were so close, I stole enough energy to Feed, and that put me over the dream threshold.
I shot up and backed away until I was in the far corner of the room. “I’m so sorry. I never should have… I should go.”
“No. No more running away, Becks.” He held his hands out in front of him, palms down. His calm voice couldn’t mask his confusion. “What was that?”
“Um… I’m so sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. Just talk.”
“Okay, but you stay over there.”
He nodded, as if he weren’t even considering coming any closer to me.
“I don’t know where to start.” I hugged my knees into my chest and rested my chin on top. “I think of the words I would have to use to explain everything, and I don’t believe them myself.”
“I’ll be straight with you. Up until that kiss, I thought it was drugs. Now I don’t know. So try me.”
I took a deep breath. “That kiss felt different?”
“Yeah.”
“Good different?”
He paused. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. I know exactly how you feel, because I felt it too my first time.” When Cole fed off me. I couldn’t believe I’d just done the same thing to Jack. How did I let it come to this?
“Your first time?” He grabbed his glasses off the nightstand and wiped them with the sleeve of his shirt. “Then start there. Tell me what happened.”
“I’ll try. You remember leaving for football camp?”
“Yeah.” Jack rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands and put his glasses on. “It was the last time I talked to you. You were standing with Cole. Is that when you started to hang out with him?”
“Yes. Going to concerts. Stuff like that.” I bit my lip. “Look, I’m just going to try to keep talking, and it may not make sense at first, but if I stop, I won’t be able to start again.” Jack nodded. “Cole took me rafting one day, with the rest of the band. They wanted to shoot the Tube, and they invited me.”
Jack shook his head. “Shooting the Tube after the spring runoff?”
“I know. Not the smartest move.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. “We hit a rock and I fell out.”
He drew in a sharp breath. “He never should have taken you. You’re not big enough. Were you hurt?”
“The current dragged me under, and as I kicked to the surface, my leg caught on a branch or rock or something. I couldn’t get it free. I practically had to rip my leg off to get to the surface again, and when I did I was bleeding. A lot.”
I closed my eyes, remembering strong hands pulling me to the bank of the river. “Hang on, Nik. You’ll be okay,” Cole said.
“Keep talking. What happened next?” Jack said.
I opened my eyes. “I was lying on the bank. Pressing on the gash.” Red liquid had seeped between my fingers.
“I can make it go away,” Cole said. “Do you want me to take the pain away?”
Jack placed his hand on my ankle and urged my leg straight. He pushed the hem of my jeans up. The raised skin of my scar twisted from my shin around to the back of my calf in a jagged line.
“Oh,” Jack said. He lightly touched the scar and traced the line. “It’s deep.”
I nodded and watched his hand on my leg, his callused fingers on my skin. Goose bumps appeared and I shivered.
“Are you cold?”
I shook my head and tucked my leg back in, pulling my jeans leg down in the process.
“What happened next?”
“Cole said he could make it feel better. And I let him.”
LAST YEAR
The shore of the rapids. One week before the Feed.
The shivers were violent enough that my teeth bit into my tongue several times. I could taste blood. But I didn’t care, because all I could think about was the pain in my leg. It was so bad, I wondered if the leg was still attached, or if it had been ripped off and was floating down the river somewhere.
“She’s in shock,” a voice said above me.
“My leg,” I said. Speaking made me choke. There had to be some river water down my throat. I coughed, throwing up water.
Strong hands helped turn me over, so I wouldn’t puke lying on my back.
“You’re okay, Nik.” Cole’s voice.
I needed someone to tell me if I still had my leg. I tried to point to my leg, but my arms flailed about.
“Whoa. Settle down.” His voice was soothing. “You’re fine.”
“Dude, it’s gushing blood.”
“Shut it, Gavin,” Cole growled. “Take off your jacket.”
I heard fabric tearing and felt pressure on my leg. “This might hurt a little,” Cole said.
Then the real pain hit. Like a hot poker jabbing through the skin and muscle of my leg, burning as it tore its way to my bone.
I screamed. I had to get away from the poker. I thrashed and twisted, trying to free myself.
“Nik! Stay still.”
I screamed again and shook my head. Two hands clenched my shoulders, and I heard Cole’s voice.
“Nik. Open your eyes.” I did. Cole’s face was inches from mine. “Do you want me to take the pain away?”
“Cole!” Maxwell said from somewhere behind him.
Cole kept his eyes on me, but he shook his head. “It’s not your decision, Max.”
“But the exposure,” Max said.
“Enough!” Cole growled. “It’ll work out.”
Maxwell didn’t say anything else. I could barely keep my eyes open; the pain in my leg was making everything else blurry, but Cole wouldn’t let me move.
“Do you, Nik? Do you want me to help with the pain?”
I nodded, keeping my mouth shut so I wouldn’t scream again.
“Tell me. Tell me what you want.”
“Please,” I said, and then I gasped and tried to grab my leg, but Cole had me pinned. “Make it go away.”
Cole leaned even closer, and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to turn away. His lips didn’t touch me, though. He closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath, and with that, the sharpest edges of the pain in my leg dissipated.
He took in several more deep breaths, and each one made the pain less and less, as if I’d been bitten by a snake and he was sucking the venom out. I could finally breathe without wincing, and when Cole asked me if I was okay, all I could answer was, “Keep going.”
NOW
Jack’s bedroom.
“So, what, he had drugs or something?”
I shook my head. “The drugs were just a rumor. He…” I couldn’t finish. Putting it into words was harder than I thought it would be, and it was only a fraction of the whole story. I wanted to give up.
“Tell me, Becks. Just keep going.”
“He sort of kissed me, and he was right. He took the pain away.” I skipped the part about the century underground. I had to see how Jack would react to this small piece of the puzzle. “And now I can sort of do the same thing. But I don’t need to. I can survive without it.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes. I couldn’t look Jack in the face, even though it was dark in his room, so I looked out the window. There were no stars tonight, or maybe the clouds were blocking all of them.
“Is this some sort of metaphor? Are you messing with me?”
“No.”
“Show me,” Jack said.
I jerked my head around to look at him. “Show you what?”
“Kiss me.”
“No.” I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I let it out. “I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it will help me understand. If I hadn’t felt it before, I wouldn’t have believed a word. Do it again, so I know it wasn’t all some weird dream.”
I shook my head, but I could feel myself giving in. I wanted to give in. “I won’t kiss you.”
&
nbsp; “But—”
I held my hand up. “I can show you without kissing you. I think.”
This seemed to satisfy him. “Okay.”
I thought about how much time I’d been back. How much I had replenished my soul. It was nowhere near full, but there had to be enough that when I sampled Jack, I wouldn’t lose control. Jack made a move to close the distance between us.
“Don’t,” I said. He froze. “Just stay still.”
“Why are you so worried, Becks?”
“Because we need to be able to stop. It will feel good to you. It’ll feel like suddenly everything you’re worried about disappears.”
“What will it feel like to you?”
Like a starving person eating a feast. But I didn’t tell him that. “Close your eyes and hold still.”
“Okay.”
I scooted toward him and leaned forward, moving as slowly as possible. Jack remained perfectly still. When my lips were a couple of inches away from his mouth, I breathed in. And focused on taking the energy that was in front of me and pulling it inside. It was as if warm, charged air were coating my throat, replacing the cold emptiness inside me.
His eyes popped open. We watched each other for a few long seconds as I continued to taste his emotions. Residual pain, mostly. Heartache at first. These were at the surface. The negative ones always were. That’s why Forfeits kept coming back for more. In the beginning, it felt like a release.
The well inside me received its first drops of moisture from someone else. Jack leaned in even closer, and I scrambled back until I was against the wall once more.
“Did you feel it?” I asked.
Jack pressed his lips together and nodded once.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this can’t possibly make any sense to you.”
He looked at the floor. “What are you, Nikki?”
Nikki? He hadn’t called me that for so long. “I don’t know.” I winced. Being truthful with Jack wasn’t working. I could feel it in the space between us. I was losing him.
Still looking down, he said, “I think you should go now.”
Jack was scared of me.
I walked over to the window and climbed out.
NINETEEN
NOW
Home. Two months, one week left.
When I got into my own bed, I dreamed I was standing in the aisle of the Shop-n-Go and my feet started to sink into the ground. I tried to step out, but the floor was like quicksand. I grabbed the stand with the chocolate doughnuts and it toppled onto me, pushing me even farther under. And when I opened my mouth to scream, several arms came out of the floor, covered my mouth, and dragged me the rest of the way under.
The ability to dream again was highly overrated.
Frantic knocking on my bedroom door woke me up after what seemed like only moments. “Nikki?” It was Tommy’s voice. “Nikki? Are you awake?”
“Yeah, bud. C’mon in.”
Tommy poked his head in, his brown hair scruffy with sleep. “You’re in the paper.”
“What?” I sat up in bed.
“Dad says you’re in the paper. He’s kinda mad.”
I threw the covers back and grabbed my robe on the way out of my room. How in the world was I in the paper?
My dad was sitting at the kitchen table, forking a breakfast ham. He didn’t look up.
“Dad? What’s going on?”
He pushed the paper over toward the empty chair across from him. I sat down and scanned the headlines. At the bottom of the front page, I found it. MAYOR’S DAUGHTER AT CENTER OF CHRISTMAS DANCE BRAWL. Beneath the headline was a fuzzy picture of me just after Jack and I had been knocked down. It looked like it’d been taken by a camera phone, and it looked ten times worse than it was.
I shoved the paper aside without reading further. “I didn’t start it, Dad.”
He took a long sip from his mug of coffee, his eyes still focused on the paper. “It doesn’t matter, Nikki. What matters is how it looks.”
“But it’s not the truth.”
“Haven’t you learned anything? It’s not necessarily about the truth. It’s about how people perceive a thing that makes it damaging. What does it really matter where you were for six months, when people are going to think what they want to think? In the absence of proof, all that matters is perception.” He picked up the paper, and I realized this was about more than just the photo. “I can’t fight this. The article says I have no comment, because the only choice you’ve given me is to hope that it goes away. And in an election, nothing goes away.”
“But what I do shouldn’t make a difference,” I mumbled.
“You know better than that. Tomorrow’s headlines will read something like, ‘How Can the Mayor Run the City When He Can’t Even Run His Household?’ What am I supposed to do with you? Do I have to hire a nanny for my seventeen-year-old daughter? Do I have to stay home from the office? Send you to a private school? Tell me.”
“No, Dad. It won’t happen again.” I got up to leave. “But it wasn’t my fault.”
“That may be true. But pictures”—he held up the paper— “drown out everything else. My denials will be like … a whisper at a rock concert. No one will hear it.”
“So you’re not mad about what really happened.” I smacked the paper on the table. “You’re just mad about the picture.”
He stared at me and breathed through his nose. “You may have cost me the election.” He cut off a large chunk of ham and shoved it in his mouth. “Maybe I should’ve sent you to live with Aunt Grace. Or even to a boarding school.”
I looked away.
“Mrs. Ellingson is on her way over.”
“Okay.” Time to pee in a cup. At least I knew I couldn’t mess that up.
The next week passed in the flap of a bird’s wing. Jack was avoiding me, I still hadn’t seen Mary, and I’d damaged my dad’s bid for reelection. All in all, not what I’d intended for my Return.
The chance to make things right with my dad came the last week of Christmas vacation, when his latest campaign flyers arrived. I promised him I would help distribute them. The volunteers were to meet at campaign headquarters on Apple Blossom Road.
Today the sun was reflecting off the latest layer of snow in the town, making it seem a lot warmer than it actually was. When I got to the office, my dad was at a desk near the back, talking to a tall man with thick dark hair. He motioned me back.
I walked toward them and stood awkwardly while my dad finished his conversation. The man was talking about labor unions. He had an accent. I hoped my dad wouldn’t include me in the conversation, because he had a tendency to provide English-to-English translation for me. As if I were too young to understand someone with an accent. It was always embarrassing.
Before my dad could speak to me, however, the front door rattled, and Jack and Jules walked in. Jack shoved his hands deep in his jacket pockets, as if to warm them. He kept his eyes down. My breath stopped in my chest. We hadn’t spoken since that night in his room.
What are you, Nikki?
I shook my head, trying to clear the memory. Jules spotted me and waved.
I’d started to walk toward them when Percy Jones, my dad’s campaign manager, called everyone to attention near the front door to organize the distribution of flyers and maps.
Jack grabbed a stack and Jules picked a route map, and then they came to me in the back.
“Hey,” Jules said.
Jack kept his gaze on the wall with the posters and didn’t look up when I said hi. “Percy called me,” Jules said. “I guess I signed the volunteer list … a while ago.”
“Oh. That’s nice of you.”
We stood silent for a moment before Jules held up the map she had gotten from Percy. “We have the block north of Maplehurst. It’s big. You want to come with us?”
I glanced at my dad, who was still talking to the man with the accent. He caught my eye and waved me away.
“Sure,” I said, turning back to them.
Jack divvied up the pile. His fingers brushed mine as he handed me several flyers, and then he handed Jules the rest and shoved his hands in his pockets again.
We walked out into the cold, and I remembered something in my bag. I reached inside and pulled out a pair of gloves I had knitted—with Jack’s hands in mind—days ago, and held them out to him without a word.
Jack stopped. He looked at the gloves in my hand, then at my face, and his lips twitched a little bit before he reached out to take them. He put them on. They were a little big. The fingertips of the one on his left hand flopped around a bit. He looked like he was wearing two doilies.
I shrugged.
Jules turned away and pretended to study the map. She pointed up a hill. “We’re supposed to start this way.”
The three of us started walking the map, Jules in the middle. After a few failed attempts at conversation, we stopped trying to talk altogether. Our route took us near the soup kitchen, and as we went by, the side door opened and Christopher appeared. He spotted me and waved, and I stopped.
“Hey, Nikki. How’s it going?” He turned a key in the door to lock it, and then walked toward us.
Jules and Jack stopped too.
“Hi,” I said. “We’re just delivering stuff. For my dad.”
Christopher glanced at Jules and Jack and stuck his hand out toward Jack. “I’m Christopher. I work with Nikki at the kitchen.”
Jack took his hand. Christopher stared at the homemade glove.
“I’m Jack. I didn’t know she worked there.”
Christopher shook Jules’s hand next. “Yeah. Every Saturday. You know, we’re always looking for more help if either of you would like to do some good.”
I smiled. “Always recruiting.”
“Always,” Christopher said. “I have openings Saturdays—”
I interrupted Christopher before he could go on. “Oh, these guys have…” I stopped, not sure how to finish that sentence or why I’d interrupted in the first place.
Jules broke the silence. “Thanks, Christopher, but I work at the mall Saturdays.”
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