He looked up at her and wondered when they’d moved on to chemistry. Or when it had become nearly two o’clock in the afternoon.
“Do you want to be sent away?” she asked him pointedly as the whispers started up.
Ippy shook his head. No, he didn’t want Samson to be mad at him. But it was so hard to focus without Hannah there. If she’d been there, he was sure he could have paid attention. He’d never had this much trouble before she’d graduated. Why did she have to be so much older than him? Two years wasn’t all that much. And pretty soon he’d be graduating too and then she, Caelum and Ippy could go start their adventure together. But where would they live? Caelum was in Ireland and Hannah had a passport, but Ippy didn’t because his parents said he didn’t need one. They’d told him that when he’d asked for one right after meeting Caelum. They said he’d never be leaving the states and couldn’t survive in another country on his own. But he wouldn’t be on his own because he’d have Hannah there and she’d always been there to take care of him and then Caelum could, too. They’d be there for each other.
People were getting up around him and Ippy looked at them. He wondered why they were packing up their things and why the teacher was getting her purse and putting away her books. Were they leaving early?
He got up from his chair and went to her with his notebook ready. He asked if they were already done then showed her the notebook.
She shook her head at him. “You missed out on an entire afternoon of class. You might as well have not even come back from lunch. You’re getting a zero for participation today.”
His face fell and he shook his head, quickly writing that he didn’t know why he couldn’t pay attention.
“Maybe because you were too focused on your girlfriend. I don’t care who you kids date as long as it doesn’t affect your schoolwork. But Phillip, you’ve been barely present for the past week. You’ve been physically here, but I can tell that you aren’t paying attention. I’ll be calling your parents to let them know what’s going on. Maybe they can stop this. I thought maybe you were coming down with something, but after another student caught your little display in the driveway, I’m convinced that I know what the problem is.” She moved away from him while he was still writing down a question to see if there was any homework that he hadn’t heard about.
As he left the room and stepped onto the driveway to wait for Hannah, he heard laughing over his shoulder and turned to see Sara and her friends smiling at him. He watched them while he waited, wondering why she was still smiling at him until she walked up to him and put each of her arms over his shoulders. He stepped back instantly, not liking to be touched by most people. Hannah and Caelum were the only people that could touch him when they wanted to, and Sara was nowhere near that top of the list. She came with him though, her long fingernails curling into his shoulders until he couldn’t move back without having pain. She was smiling, but her eyes weren’t. Hannah had taught him that, to look for the creases around someone’s eyes to see if they meant it or not. It wasn’t a big deal to her, he knew this because she’d said so, but because he didn’t like when people were lying, she’d taught him that so that he could know when it was happening to him.
He tried to pull his phone from his pocket to ask her what she was doing, but she pressed up against him. It wasn’t comfortable at all and he brought his hands up to push her away on her shoulders. Ippy heard a car door open and close while Sara was leaning toward him, but then she was yanked back and Ippy found Hannah’s braided brown hair in front of him as Hannah twisted Sara around. They were yelling, Ippy knew this because his ears started to hurt, but he was paying attention to the bright purple tie and bit of ribbon Hannah had braided into her hair. It hadn’t been like that before and he found that he liked the sight of it blowing in the breeze. Samson, Christopher, and a few of the other adults came out toward them. They were running and Ippy ducked his head as Samson’s wolf caught sight of him. Submission was respect and respect was required. The yelling stopped abruptly and Ippy tucked his hands into the back of Hannah’s shirt. She reached behind herself, showing him her palms. People were talking, but he didn’t care as he put his fingers against her palms. She didn’t close her hands around his fingers and he’d stopped being afraid that she would. Instead she kept her hands flat and he looked at her braided hair going down her back.
Ignoring the yelling, even Hannah’s, was hard. But he’d gotten better at it. His mom and dad told him that he couldn’t freak out whenever he wanted to. Hannah had been there. They were at a store and the loudspeaker was broken. It hurt his ears whenever it skipped and garbled the words and he didn’t remember much, but Hannah had told him later that night that he’d gone to the floor and started crying out. His parents hadn’t been happy. That’d been a year ago and he was trying to get better. His mom told him that he was an embarrassment. He knew that was a bad thing and didn’t want to be that for them or for Hannah. He pushed himself into wrapping his hands around her fingers. She didn’t move, but he could see her shoulders shaking.
Then Sara pushed her back and she ran into Ippy. Suddenly it was as if all the noise in the world was coming at him at once and he screamed to make it stop. He covered his ears and bent down at the waist, trying to be as small as possible as all that noise grabbed at him. There were prickly words, sour words, hot words and all those words coming at him all the time. Then there was Hannah kneeling in front of him with her brown eyes, so pretty, always so pretty, looking up at him from her position below him. But that wasn’t right either. She couldn’t be under him. She was higher than he was in the pack. She shouldn’t have been kneeling in front of him.
Ippy saw her mouth moving when she turned away from him and he looked over to see Sara yelling at her. At least he thought that she was yelling from how red her face was and how big her mouth was getting. Her dad showed up while she was still yelling and then Samson was pointing wildly. Hannah touched his nose and Ippy looked back at her. She smiled at him and he started to drop his hands, hoping the sounds were over now, but she shook her head and added her hands over his own. He smiled back at her and left his hands where they were. Ippy didn’t think about how long they knelt like that in Samson’s driveway.
He only focused on her hair, her smile, the fact that she smelled like fish tacos and lime juice just like the kind she got from her favorite Mexican restaurant, and how warm her hands were as they covered his. Not many people could touch him. He could name them all on one hand. But he didn’t ever mind when she did, and sometimes he even liked it. He’d been liking her touch a lot more lately. Her hands were soft, her nails short so that they didn’t dig into his skin when they held hands and she’d painted her nails sometime in the afternoon. Now they were a rainbow of colors. She’d put on gold eyeshadow too. He didn’t like that so much. She looked prettier without make up on.
Hannah pulled her hands away from his head and he started to drop his hands too, after looking to her for confirmation. She nodded and he put his hands on the driveway between them. Her nails were really pretty. Maybe she could do his, too. Maybe even in rainbows, too. He thought he’d probably like that. They didn’t look messy or cheap, which was what his mom said sometimes when she saw the colors Hannah did to her nails, but never to Hannah’s face. He thought Hannah never looked cheap or messy. She was classy like Audrey Hepburn. Ippy liked when he and Hannah watched movies with her in them. Ever since her dad, Liam, had introduced them to the classic movies they’d been seeing a lot fewer of the more recent movies. Except for the horror movies. They’d seen all the classic horror movies first.
Hannah got to her feet and Ippy went with her. He stood beside her as Samson and Christopher spoke. Liam was there, along with Hannah’s other dad, Travis, and Ippy wondered when they’d come. And why Hannah wasn’t standing with them. Your dads are here, he told her, in case she’d missed them standing a few yards away. They kept looking back at Hannah and Ippy. He wondered why.
She
nodded. “Yep. I saw them. Thanks though.”
Why aren’t you with them? he asked. There was nothing stopping her from going to them, no barrier that he could see. Only a bit of driveway, and even that wasn’t all that much.
Hannah turned and gave him a little shrug. “No reason. Guess I just wanted to stay over here. I like it on this side.”
Why? There was nothing special about this side of the driveway. The sun wasn’t even at the right position to give them a bit of a view on the few flowers that grew wild along the edge of the woods.
She turned away and he thought she might not answer him. But then she did. “Because you’re over here.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, but he tried anyway and hoped it was the right thing to say to her. I like that you’re over here, too. And I like your nails.
Hannah turned back to him and smiled. “Thanks. I was just messing around. Daddy Liam was going on and on and then sent me upstairs to come back with a balanced budget worksheet for the pack. Then I saw my nail polish bag and well, long story short, I’m in a bit of trouble for getting distracted.”
I get distracted a lot too, Ippy told her, knowing all about getting in trouble for that fault.
“Yeah, but you’ve got a good excuse. I was just bored.” She shrugged and stuffed her hands into her pockets as the men came toward them. Ippy mimicked her, putting his own hands into his pockets as he waited for them to come up.
Chapter Two
Samson wasted no time yelling at them as soon as he’d pulled them into his office. Christopher stood beside him and Hannah’s dads were behind Ippy and Hannah as they sat in chairs that were far too big for them across the large desk from their alpha. Ippy shrank back, trying to become small in the room full of wolves far more dominant than he. He looked over to Hannah and was surprised to see her looking angry when she should be small too. Like he was.
“It was all her fault!” Hannah shouted.
Ippy gasped and simply stared at her. She rarely yelled, especially not around him, and doing so to their alpha was just wrong. He quickly got out his notebook, intending to write something that would defend his best friend. But he couldn’t think of anything. Saying that she hadn’t meant to would be a lie. And Sara had started it, but he didn’t know what she’d actually been doing, so he couldn’t exactly explain that part either. So instead of coming up with an excuse he simply asked Samson not to be mad at her. He held up the paper for his alpha to see and averted his eyes.
Samson sighed loudly and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why not, Phillip?”
Ippy wasn’t expecting to get a response and so it took him a moment to figure one out. Finally he chose honesty, because that was the only option for him. Because he loved her. He showed the paper to his alpha and didn’t know why Samson’s eyes got really big and his mouth opened as he looked between Ippy and Hannah.
“You love her?” he asked Ippy.
He nodded. Why did Samson look confused? Of course he loved her. Hannah was his best friend and had been so for most of his life. He reached his hand out to her, wanting her touch, and she held her hand out for him, letting him touch her as much as he wanted to, but not demanding to touch him. He smiled at her and she smiled back at him. Her cheeks were a dark pink. He was about to squeeze her hand, but then she looked away when her dads came up beside her.
Liam crossed his arms over his chest and Travis rocked back on his heels. “All right, Hannah, tell us why you were fighting with that girl,” Liam demanded.
Ippy tried to keep holding her hand, but she pulled it out of his as she turned away. Rejected, he put his hands on his lap and looked down at them.
“She was touching Ippy,” Hannah snapped, sounding angry.
Ippy nodded without looking up. She was touching him. And he hadn’t liked it at all.
Samson leaned forward. “Hannah, I know you like helping Phillip, but you can’t just jump in whenever you want. He’s got to learn to stand up for himself sometimes.”
Ippy pressed his lips together. He could have done that, if she’d let him get out his phone. He wrote that down and held it up, but no one was looking at him.
“But he can’t,” Hannah countered, her voice sounding strained.
Ippy shook his head. She was wrong. He could do some things for himself. He wasn’t helpless. He liked that she was here, liked that she was always around. But he could do some stuff too. And suddenly everyone was looking at him strangely, some with worried looks, some looking annoyed. Their eyes got closer together and their mouths did that funny line thing when they were annoyed with him. Hannah had taught him that. Hannah was looking upset, but he didn’t know why. Until she spoke.
“Ippy, you’re screaming,” she told him. Only it was just her lips moving and he read them because he couldn’t hear her words until he realized that the awful noise he was hearing was himself.
He took a deep breath and tried to calm down, like she’d shown him. It worked. It took a few minutes to kick in, but it did work. That might have been progress. He wasn’t sure. His parents had stopped tracking his outbursts in the last year. They said that he just had too many of them for them to keep up. He didn’t think he was really all that bad. But maybe he was.
Love you, Ippy told her once he was calmer.
She smiled at him, but it looked tight. Like her face was too dry to smile fully. Like how she was supposed to smile at him.
You love me too. Say you love me too, he demanded.
Her gaze flicked to her dads and then to Samson and Christopher before coming back to him. “Ippy, I…I can’t. You know I care about Caelum. And you’re my friend. I can’t have both. That wouldn’t be fair to either of you and—”
He was out of his chair and running down the driveway before any of them could stop him. He didn’t care that he was screaming or that Hannah was yelling after him, telling him to slow down. He ran home as fast as he could and when he got there and his dad grabbed him by the arms he kept screaming. His mom yelled at him too but it didn’t get through his screams and then his dad shook him and he was dragged up to his room and put in something called a time out. He didn’t know what they were but his parents had been using them for years. He ran to his bed and curled up in a bright patch of sunlight.
“Hey.”
Ippy hadn’t realized that he’d fallen asleep, but the rocky coast he found himself on was the same one that Hannah had often described to him when Caelum came to visit her in her dreams. He sat up and saw Caelum across from him. The boy had grown in the years since Ippy had seen him. Not just up, now he was bigger too. More filled out. Ippy gave him a little wave.
Caelum stretched out on the lush green grass and Ippy copied him, getting comfortable as well so that he could see the boy with the shiny black eyes, too. They were only a few feet apart and it nearly felt like Caelum was right there with him. No wonder Hannah looked forward to her dreams.
“Hannah said you were having trouble,” Caelum told him. Ippy searched his pockets for his phone or a notebook and, finding neither, wanted to cry as he buried his face in his forearms that were crossed in front of him. His shoulders shook and Caelum was suddenly closer and putting his arm around Ippy’s shoulders. “Hey, what’s wrong?” He sounded so sweet, so caring. No wonder Hannah liked him so much. Ippy did, too. It was hard not to like Caelum. Even after having not seen him for years, being this close to him, even if it was just a dream, felt good to Ippy. Like he was supposed to be here with Caelum. He only wished that Hannah was there, too. She was supposed to be. It should have been the three of them. Like Hannah had promised him.
He shook his head. He couldn’t tell Caelum what was wrong. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t speak. But then he remembered something critical. He could mind speak with Caelum. He only could with two people and he hadn’t seen Caelum in so long that he’d actually forgotten that he could with the other boy. “Hi,” he spoke into Caelum’s mind as
he lifted his head.
Only his word came out of his mouth and he was speaking. He shut his mouth tightly, afraid of the new noise. Caelum smiled at him. “Mind speak doesn’t really work here. I don’t know why, but I asked my cousin about it and he said that it comes out like words. Maybe because there’s no one else around that you’d have to worry about hearing our conversation, so there’s no point in using mind speak.”
Only that was the whole point for Ippy, his only way to talk without his phone or a notebook. At least it had been. He tried again, this time speaking with his mouth the way everyone else did, but still using his mind speak. It felt funny, but if it worked he wasn’t about to argue with the results. “Caelum?” His eyes got big and he covered his hands over his mouth as surprise coursed through him.
“Yes, Ippy?” Caelum said, leaning closer to him.
He dropped his hands away from his face. “Is that…” he licked his lips. “Is that my voice?”
Caelum shrugged. “Don’t know. I’ve never heard you talk outside of my mind. But it sounds close enough to what I heard inside my head when we were together. So…maybe.”
Ippy nodded and smiled, feeling excited. He had a voice, a real voice, for the first time. He could hear what he sounded like now. He could “Wait. How’d you know about Hannah and me? I was just with her and then I was here and asleep.”
“She’s nearly perfected being able to fall asleep to come see me. I can feel when she’s asleep. Something switches on in me and I pop into her dreams. Really simple. Normally we spend a few hours talking. But she said I had to come see you. I didn’t know that you even wanted to hang out with me, or else I’d have come sooner. Sorry about that. And I thought I was going to have to wait for a while to come talk to you, but you were asleep when I came out of her dream, so I came to see you. Like doorways. It’s easier than you’d think.” Caelum turned over and Ippy lay on his back as well as they looked up at the clouds.
Irish Melody Page 2