by Cynthia Hand
Figures, I realize, plural. Two dark figures. He’s fighting them two to one.
Stand up, I tell myself. Stand up and help him.
I jump to my feet, my knees shamefully wobbly.
“No,” Christian yells. “Get out of here. Find a way out!”
There’s no way out without you, I think, but I don’t have time to form the words because, without warning, somebody else yells, “Look out!” and I’m back on the sidewalk at Stanford, where I’m about to crash my bicycle.
There’s no avoiding it. I swerve wildly but hit the half wall of a brick bicycle ramp. My bike stops. I keep going, soaring over the ramp, hitting the ground hard, bouncing off the pavement, then sliding on my back across the sidewalk and into a juniper bush.
Ouch.
I lie there for a minute with my eyes closed, sending a silent, sarcastic thank you so much for that in the skyward direction.
“Are you all right?”
I open my eyes, and there’s a guy kneeling over me. I recognize him from my happiness class, a tall guy with shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, glasses. My scrambled brain reaches for his name.
Thomas.
Excellent. I’ve biffed it big time in front of Doubting Thomas.
He helps me crawl out of the juniper bush.
“Whoa, you really bit it there. Do you need me to call an ambulance?” he asks.
“No, I think I’m okay.”
“You should really watch where you’re going,” he says.
He’s so nice, too.
“Yeah, I’ll try that next time.”
“You have a cut.” He points to my cheek. I touch the spot gingerly, come away with a smear of blood. I must have hit hard. I don’t typically bleed.
“I have to go,” I say quickly, getting to my feet. My jeans are a mess, split at the knee, a raw-looking scrape showing through on one side. I should get out of here now, before my wounds miraculously heal themselves right in front of this guy and I have some serious explaining to do.
“Are you sure you’re okay? I can take you to Vaden,” he offers.
“No, I’m fine. It probably looks worse than it is. I need to go home.” I grab my bike from where it’s fallen, the front wheel still spinning. When I set it upright, I discover that the frame is badly bent.
Crap.
“Here, let me help you,” Thomas says, and nothing I say works to get rid of him. I limp along, mostly because I know I should be limping, and he walks beside me, carrying my bicycle on one shoulder and my backpack on the other. It takes us forever to get to Roble, and by the time we arrive, I’m pretty sure both the cut on my face and the scrape on my knee have mended. I hope he’s not terribly observant.
“Well, this is me,” I say lamely. “Thanks.” I grab my backpack from him, stick the bike on the rack, not bothering to lock it, and turn to go into the building.
“Hey, wait,” Thomas calls after me. I stop. Turn back.
“Do you want to …” He hesitates.
“I don’t need to go to the health center, really,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I was going to say, do you want to go out with me tonight? There’s this party at the Kappa house. If you’re feeling up to it.”
Sheesh. There’s no discouraging this guy. I must look better right now than I think I do.
He stuffs his hands in his pockets but maintains eye contact. “I’ve been trying to ask you all semester. So here’s my opportunity, right? Now that I’ve officially rescued you.”
“Oh, wow. No,” I blurt out.
“Oh. You have a boyfriend, right?” he asks. “Of course you do.”
“No, not really … I mean I … My life is complicated right now … I can’t … I’m sure you’re great, but …,” I somehow manage to get out. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, can’t hurt to ask, right?” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a business card. He hands it to me. Thomas A. Lynch, it reads. Physics major at Stanford University. Tutor in math and sciences. Then it lists his cell number.
“If you change your mind about the party, call me, or just show up,” he says, and without another word he turns and walks away.
Wan Chen is playing Farmville on Facebook, her great weakness. She glances up from her laptop when I come in, her eyebrows drawing together in a little befuddled frown as she takes in the pieces of juniper bush in my hair, my dirt-and-blood-stained jacket, my torn jeans.
“It’s been that kind of day,” I say before she can get the question out. I go to the sink and start washing the blood and gunk off my face.
“Hey, did you hear that your friend Angela is hooking up with the PHE?” Wan Chen calls out to me.
Sigh. I so cannot wait until Tuesday.
As soon as I finish cleaning myself up, I call Angela. No answer.
“Angela Zerbino, don’t make me hunt you down, because I will,” I say into the phone. “Call. Me. Back.”
I’m busy, she texts a few minutes later. Chill. I’ll catch up with you later.
I wait an hour, then head down to second-floor A wing and knock on Angela’s door. Robin answers. “Oh, hey, Clara,” she says cheerfully. She’s wearing a blue-and-white zebra-print strapless polyester top over a short white mini; her hair is curled big and parted down the middle. She looks like she’s ready to hit the town, back in 1978 or so.
“I’m looking for Angela,” I tell her.
Robin shakes her head. “I haven’t seen her since this morning.” She looks around, then leans toward me and whispers conspiratorially. “She spent the night with Pierce.”
“Yeah, I heard,” I say, irritated. “You probably should stop with the rumor spreading, since you don’t know squat about Angela.”
Robin immediately flushes. “Sorry,” she says, and seems so genuinely ashamed of herself that I feel bad for putting the smackdown on her.
“You look like Farrah Fawcett,” I observe. She recovers somewhat and manages a smile.
“We’re all going over to a seventies party at the Kappa house tonight,” she explains. “Do you want to come?”
This is the party Thomas invited me to, and he’s going to be there, and if I show up he’ll probably think I’m interested. But then I think about my options: (a) staying in my room on a Saturday night slogging away on a paper about T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which will be impossible because I will be distracted because I can’t stop thinking about Dad and Tucker and Jeffrey and Angela and Pierce and Christian and my vision, and (b) … who am I kidding? No way I’m going to do that. I need to get out.
“Sure,” I say to Robin. “Let me find my platform shoes.”
7
RUM AND COKE
The party’s in full swing when I arrive with Robin, one Bee Gees song after another blasting out from the windows, strobe lights going back and forth in the living room, and I’m pretty sure I spot a disco ball over the dining room table.
This is going to be fun. And loud. And maybe exactly what I need.
“Hey, gorgeous!” says the frat boy who opens the door. “Where have you been all my life?”
He makes us put our keys into a huge pickle jar by the front door and introduces us to a guy in a Vegas-style white Elvis Presley costume who, should we wish to leave, will be the judge of whether or not we’re fit to drive.
“Nice outfit,” I tell him, although I’m not sure how it relates to the theme of the party, except that I think Elvis died in the seventies.
“Why, thank you. Thank you very much,” he drawls.
Somehow I knew he was going to say that.
Of course almost the first person I spot in there is Thomas, swaying under the disco ball, wearing a flowered satin button-down shirt that shows his spotty chest hair. He brightens when he sees me, waves me over. So I go.
“You changed your mind,” he says.
“Yep. So here I am,” I say. “Thanks for helping me out before.”
“You don’t look like you needed it,” he says, his eyes search
ing my face for the scratches and scrapes that were there last time he saw me, like two hours ago.
Whoops. I forgot about that.
“I told you it wasn’t bad,” I try to explain. “I have a few bumps and bruises on my legs is all, nothing serious. Nothing that a little makeup can’t hide.”
“You look great,” he says, his eyes now roaming down my body, stopping on my legs.
“Thanks,” I say, uncomfortable. It was hard to go full-blown seventies on such short notice, but fortunately Robin had a bright orange polyester halter dress as a backup to the blue zebra-print. It’s mildly itchy.
“Do you want to dance?” Thomas asks.
That’s when I discover that I don’t really know how to dance to disco. We get some laughs out of it, anyway, trying to do the John Travolta thing.
“So what’s your major?” he asks me, the college equivalent of “what’s your sign?”
“Biology,” I answer. I already know that his is physics.
“You want to be a biologist?”
“No,” I laugh. “I want to be a doctor.”
“Aha,” he says, like he’s figured out something important about me. “Did you know that over half of the incoming freshmen at this school consider themselves premed? But only like seven percent of them end up taking the MCAT.”
“I did not know that.” I must look tense, because Thomas laughs.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to depress you,” he says. “Let me get you a drink.”
I open my mouth to tell him that I’m not twenty-one, but of course he must know that. The only time I’ve ever had alcohol at a party was that summer with Tucker. Ava Peters’s house. He made me a rum and Coke.
“What’s your order?” Thomas asks me. “They have pretty much everything. I bet you’re a martini type of girl, am I right?”
“Uh, rum and Coke,” I say, because I know I was able to handle that okay that night without getting even a little tipsy. I want to be able to drive home.
“Rum and Coke it is,” he says, and away he goes to the kitchen.
I look around. Off in a back room I can hear people chanting somebody’s name. There’s another group around the dining room table, dipping stuff into fondue pots, and dancers going wild under the disco ball, people holding shouted conversations in corners, the occasional couple making out on the stairs and against the wall. I spot Amy on the couch in front of the TV, with a bunch of people playing some sort of drinking game that involves watching That Seventies Show. I wave, and she waves back enthusiastically.
Thomas returns with my drink.
“Cheers.” He knocks his plastic cup dully against mine. “To new adventures with new people.”
“To new adventures.” I take a big drink, which burns all the way down my throat and settles like a pool of lava in my stomach. I cough.
Thomas pats me on the back. “Uh-oh, are you a lightweight?”
“This is rum and Coke? Nothing else?” I ask.
“One part rum, two parts Coke,” he says. “I promise.”
It doesn’t taste anything like the drink I had at the party with Tucker. And now, almost two years later, I realize why. Tucker never put any rum in my rum and Coke.
That little stink.
That overly protective, impossible, infuriating, and utterly sweet little stink.
In that moment I miss him so much my stomach hurts. Or that could be the rum. There’s a loud cheer from the people in the back room.
“Christian! Christian! Christian!” they’re chanting.
I push forward through the crowd until I’m standing in the doorway of the back room, arriving in time to see Christian chug a large glass of dark brown liquid. They cheer again when he’s done, and he grins and wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his white polyester suit.
The girl sitting next to him leans over to whisper something in his ear, and he laughs, nods at her.
My stomach clenches.
Christian looks up and sees me. He stands up.
“Hey, where are you going?” says the girl who’s sitting on the other side of him, pouting prettily. “Christian! Come back here! We still have to get through another round.”
“I’ve had enough,” he says, not quite slurring, but not sounding like himself, either.
I don’t have to touch his mind to know he’s drunk. But underneath the haze of alcohol I can feel that he’s upset about something. Something that’s happened since I saw him this afternoon.
Something he wants to forget.
He brushes his hair out of his eyes and crosses the room to me, walking in a mostly straight line. I back up to let him get through the door, but he puts his hand on my bare arm and pulls me into the corner. His eyes close momentarily as the current of energy passes through us; then he leans toward me until his nose is almost touching mine, his breath surprisingly sweet considering the nasty stuff I watched him drink. I want to be casual about this—it’s a party, after all, drinking happens, and yeah, there were girls in that room fawning all over him, but he’s fire hot, and he’s smart and funny and well-spoken. And he’s not my boyfriend, I remind myself. We’ve never actually been out on a date. We’re not together.
Still, his touch sends a flock of rabid butterflies careening around my stomach.
“I was just thinking about you,” he says, his voice rough, his pupils so big they make his eyes look black. “Dream girl.”
My face is getting hot, both from what he’s saying and what he’s feeling right now. He wants to kiss me. He wants to feel my lips again, so soft, so perfect to him—he wants to carry me out of this stupid noisy house to somewhere where he can kiss me.
Whoa. I can’t breathe properly. He leans in. “Christian, stop,” I whisper the moment before his mouth touches mine.
He pulls away, breathing heavily. I try to retreat a little, put some space between us, but I run into the wall. He takes a step forward, closing the distance, and I put my hand on the center of his chest to keep him back, for which I get another electric zap, like fireworks going off against a dark sky.
“Let’s go outside,” I suggest breathlessly.
“Lead the way,” he says, and walks behind me, his hand on the small of my back as I head toward the door, burning through the fabric of my dress. We’re about halfway there when we literally bump into Thomas, who I realize I simply walked away from with no explanation the minute I heard Christian’s name.
“I was looking for you,” Thomas says. He looks at Christian and, more importantly, at Christian’s hand, which has moved down to my hip. “Who is—”
“Hey, you’re Doubting Thomas!” Christian says, suddenly jovial.
Thomas looks over at me, startled. “Is that what you call me? Doubting Thomas?”
“It’s affectionate, really,” Christian says, and as Thomas looks, well, doubtful, and hurt, Christian claps him on the shoulder and moves us past him. “You have a nice night.”
Something tells me that Thomas isn’t going to ask me out again.
I’m relieved for the cool air that greets us when we make it outside. There’s a bench on the porch, and I steer Christian over to it. He sits, then abruptly puts his face in his hands. Groans.
“I’m drunk,” he says, his voice muffled. “I’m sorry.”
“What happened to you?” I sit down next to him, reach to put my hand on his shoulder, but he sits up.
“Don’t touch me, okay? I don’t think I can handle it like this.”
I fold my hands in my lap. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
He sighs, runs his palms over his hair. “You know how you said Angela could make herself have the vision by walking in that thing at the church? Well, I did it. I went there.”
“I went there, too,” I gasp. “We must have just missed each other.”
“Did you have the vision?”
“Yes. I mean no, not at the church. But later, I had it.” I swallow. “I saw you with the sword.”
“Fighting?” he asks.
; “Fighting two people.”
He nods grimly. “I think we’re having the same vision. Did you see who I was fighting?”
“It was too dark. I couldn’t tell.”
We take a minute to process this, which is hard with the Bee Gees blaring out at us, “Somebody help me, somebody help me, yeah.”
“That’s not all,” Christian says. “I saw you.”
Hopefully he didn’t see the part where I was cowering against the wall, trying and failing to summon the courage to get up.
He shakes his head. “No, you were …” His voice is raspy, like his throat is dry, and, absurdly, he wishes that he could get another drink.
Dread boils over me. “I was what?”
“You were hurt.”
He puts his hand on my wrist and shows me what he saw. My own face, tearstains on my cheeks, my hair loose and tangled around my shoulders. My lips pale. My eyes glazing over. The front of my shirt covered in blood.
“Oh” is all I can think to say.
He thinks I was dying.
He licks his lips. “I don’t know what to do. I only know that when I’m there, in that room, wherever it is, I have one overwhelming thought. I have to keep you safe.” Something works in his throat. “I would lay down my life to protect you, Clara,” he says. “That’s what I feel. I’d die to protect you.”
We don’t talk as I drive him home. I walk him up the stairs and into his room, past Charlie, who’s sprawled on the futon playing his Xbox. I guide Christian over to his bed.
“You don’t need to take care of me,” he protests as I pull back the covers and sit him down on the mattress. “I was stupid. I just wanted to escape for a minute. I thought—”
“Shut up,” I say gently. I pull his shirt over his head and toss it in the corner, then go to the minifridge and find him a bottle of water. “Drink.” He shakes his head. “Drink.”
He downs almost the entire bottle, then hands it back to me.
“Lie down,” I tell him. He stretches out on the mattress, and I go to work removing his shoes and socks. He stares up at the ceiling for a minute, then groans.
“I think this is the first time I’ve ever had a real headache. I feel like—”