“You wanna dance?” Finn asked me flatly.
“Are you asking me?” I couldn’t tell if he wanted to know if I liked dancing in general or if I wanted to dance with him, but either way, at that moment, that answer to both those questions was no.
“Yeah,” Finn shrugged.
“Yeah?” I shrugged sarcastically. “You really know how to sweet talk a girl.” His mouth crept up in his hint of a smile, and that officially won me over, the way it always did. I would’ve said yes to anything he said when he smiled at me, and I hated myself for it.
“Fair enough.” Finn stood up and extended his hand to me. “Would you, Wendy Everly, care to dance with me?”
“Sure.” I placed my hand in his, trying to ignore how soft and warm his skin felt and the rapid beating of my own heart, and got to my feet.
Naturally, the band had just started playing “If You Leave” by OMD, making me feel like I had walked into a perfect movie moment. Finn led me to the dance floor, and he placed his hand on the small of my back. I put one hand on his shoulder, and he held my other hand. I was so close to him, I could feel the delicious heat radiating from his body. His eyes were the darkest eyes I had ever seen, and they were looking at only me. For one unspoiled minute, everything in life felt perfect in a way that it never had before. Like there should be a spotlight on us and we were the only two people in the world.
Then something changed in Finn’s expression, something I couldn’t read, but it definitely got darker.
“You’re not a very good dancer,” Finn commented in that emotionless way he did.
“Thanks?” I said unsurely. We were mostly just swaying in a small circle, and I wasn’t really sure how I could screw that up, and we seemed to be dancing the exact same way as everyone else. Maybe he was joking, so I tried to sound playful when I said, “You’re not that great yourself.”
“I’m a wonderful dancer,” Finn replied matter-of-factly. “I just need a better partner.”
“Okay.” I stopped looking up at him and started straight ahead over his shoulder. I didn’t understand what was happening at all. “I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Why do you need to say anything to that? It’s not necessary for you to speak incessantly. Although, I’m not sure you’ve realized that yet.” Finn’s tone had gotten downright icy, and I was still dancing with him because I couldn’t come up with enough sense to walk away.
“I’ve barely said anything. I’ve just been dancing with you.” I swallowed hard and didn’t appreciate how crushed I was starting to feel. “And you asked me to dance! It’s not like you’re doing me a favor.”
“Oh come on,” Finn disparaged me with an exaggerated eye roll. “The desperation was coming off you in waves. You were all but begging to dance with me. I am doing you a favor.”
“Wow.” I stepped back from him, feeling confused tears threatening and this awful pain growing inside of me. “I don’t know what I did to you!” His expression softened, but it was too late.
“Wendy-”
“No!” I cut him off. I had started shouting, and everyone around us had stopped dancing and had started staring at us, but I didn’t care. “You are a total dick!”
“Wendy!” Finn repeated, but I turned and hurried through the crowd.
There was nothing in the world I wanted more than to get out of there.
Patrick was standing by the punch bowl, talking to some kid very animatedly about something, but when he saw me, he stopped and grew concerned. My shoes were on the other side of the gym, but I had no intention of going across the dance floor to get them.
“I want to leave. Now,” I hissed at Patrick.
“What-” Before he could ask what happened, Finn appeared at my side.
“Look, Wendy, I’m sorry,” Finn apologized sincerely, which only pissed me off. If he was sorry, then why had he even said that stuff in the first place? It was like he had been going out of his way to hurt my feelings.
“I don’t wanna hear anything from you!” I snapped and refused to look at him. Patrick looked back and forth between the two of us, trying to decipher what was going on.
“Wendy,” Finn floundered. “I didn’t mean-”
“I said I don’t want to hear it!” I glared at him, but only for a second
“Wen, maybe you should let the guy apologize,” Patrick suggested gently. “I don’t know what happened, but it never hurts to listen.”
“Yes it does!” Then, like a small child, I stomped my foot. “I want to go!”
“I think you should calm down first,” Patrick said, and I could tell he wasn’t ready to change his mind. Like me, he had envisioned some magical spark between Finn and I that clearly didn’t exist, but since he hadn’t heard what Finn had said to me, he wasn’t quite as willing to give up on the dream as I was. “The night is still really early, and you shouldn’t go home mad. So why don’t you just hear what Finn has to say.”
Finn stood just to the side of us, watching me intently, and part of me really, really wanted to listen to Patrick. If I stayed there, I knew I would let Finn say whatever he wanted to me, and like an idiot, I would probably believe him. And I didn’t want that. I wasn’t going to let him make a fool of me again.
I clenched my fists and looked at Patrick directly in his eyes. I kept chanting what I wanted over and over in my head. I want to go home, just take me home, please, please, just take me home. I can’t be here anymore. Patrick just stared at me encouragingly, as if he could will me into talking to Finn. Then his hopeful expression started to change. His face relaxed and got faraway. Blinking, he just started blankly at me for a minute.
“I think I should just take you home,” Patrick said groggily.
“What did you just do?” Finn demanded, almost frantically. I turned to look at him, and Patrick shook his head tiredly. “Wendy, what the hell did you do?”
“Nothing!” I snapped and looked back at Patrick. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No!” Finn stepped in between Patrick and I, blocking my attempt to escape. “Do you even know what you just did?”
“I didn’t do anything!” I repeated, growing irritated. “I just wanna go!”
“Yeah, I know you do!” Finn’s eyes were wide and startled, and his reaction was confusing me. I really hadn’t done anything, and I didn’t know what he was freaking out about.
“Good! Cause I’m gonna go.” I tried to step around him, but he grabbed my wrist, gripping it with the same iron grasp he did when I had punched Tegan. “Let me go!”
“I need to talk to you,” Finn maintained. “In private.”
“Why should I-” I wanted to argue with him, but he was looking at me too insistently.
“I’ll be right back,” Finn assured Patrick, but he just nodded dazedly at us.
Still hanging onto my wrist, Finn dragged me away. We went through the side doors into a small, empty alcove. Once in there, Finn let go of my wrist and glanced out the windows on the doors, as if we might have been followed.
As soon as he turned to look back at me, I slapped him as hard as I could across his face. He took a step back and stared at the floor.
“I told you if you ever drug me anywhere again, I would punch you,” I told him and crossed my arms over my chest.
“That you did,” Finn acknowledged, still rubbing his face. His cheek had already started to redden, and I felt a dim satisfaction from that. He totally deserved it.
“You’re lucky that I slapped you instead.”
“I believe it.” He stretched his jaw and then looked at me, putting it behind him. “What did you do out there? With Patrick?”
“I didn’t do anything with Patrick.” I shook my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You really don’t?” Finn eyed me suspiciously, unable to decide if he believed me or not. “You didn’t notice the way Patrick acted?”
“He acted like Patrick,” I shrugged.
“No, he didn
’t,” Finn persisted. “When you went up to him and said you wanted to go home, he said no. And then you kept staring at him, and he looked foggy and dazed. Then suddenly, he said he would take you home like you wanted.”
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I stumbled.
A chill ran over me and I started feeling vaguely nauseous. I had noticed the change in Patrick’s expression, and it wasn’t the first time I had seen something like that. Just the other day, Maggie had reacted the same way when I had tried to convince her not to see my mom anymore. There had been times before that, too, but I never thought anything of them. And I didn’t want to right now either.
“Yeah, you do.” Finn nodded solemnly. “You just don’t know what it is.”
“I’m just very… persuasive,” I said without any real conviction.
That is what I had always thought it was, whenever I bothered to think about it. I was rather pretty, and over the years, I had managed to get boys to do things with the right smile. And if that didn’t work, I hadn’t been afraid to kick some ass to get what I wanted. Recently, things had started to get even easier, where I just had to look at people, without the coy smile or the threat to bodily harm. But I thought it was because I had just gotten really good at it.
“Yeah, you are,” Finn admitted. “But you can’t do that. Not like this.”
“Do what?” I feigned innocence. “I didn’t do anything! And even if I did, who are you to try and stop me?” Something else flashed in my mind, and I looked at him. “Can you even stop me?”
“Stop you from what?” Finn took a step closer to me. “What do you think happened? What do you think you did to Patrick?”
“I just… glared at him,” I answered uncertainly.
“You did more than glare. You used persuasion,” Finn said emphatically, as if that were somehow much different than what I had been saying. “I guess that’s a kind of slang you don’t understand. Technically, it would be called psychokinesis.”
“I don’t know what that means, but I can assure you that I’m not psychic by any definition of the word.” I was starting to find it disturbing how matter-of-factly he was talking about all of this, as if we were talking about biology homework instead of the possibility that I possessed some kind of paranormal ability.
“Not yet,” Finn allowed. “Persuasion is when you want something from somebody, and just by thinking about it, you can get them to do it. It’s a form of mind control.”
“Whoa!” I put up my hands and took a step back. “I did not use mind control on Patrick! Or anyone ever! If I could, I would be using it on you now to get you to stop being such a freak.”
“You can’t use it on me now.” Finn shook his head absently, but he was too nervous or excited to really pay attention to how weirded out I was getting. “It’s really not that major, especially the way you’re using it. But you already have some mastery of it, and you didn’t even know you had it.” His brow furrowed and he stared off into space for a minute. “You really didn’t know that’s what you were doing?”
“I’m not doing anything!” I insisted.
Confused and frightened, I wanted to run away. Finn was saying things that sounded completely insane and impossible, but they also sounded kind of true. Even as I started questioning everything about myself, in the back of my mind, I suspected that this might just be another twisted trick. Finn obviously got off on confusing and hurting me, and this was all just part of his game.
“Wendy, calm down, okay?” Finn reached out to me at some poor attempt at being comforting, but I jerked back from him. The last thing in the world I wanted was him to touch me right now. Well, maybe not the last thing, but I was not ready to calm down. “You just need to stop and think for a minute.”
“No! I want to go home! And maybe I can’t ‘persuade’ you or whatever the hell it is you call it, but Patrick’s all ready to go and waiting for me.” I reeled and grabbed the door, preparing to escape before I actually started crying or throwing up or whatever it was I ended up doing.
“Wendy!” Finn grabbed my arm to stop me, and I yanked it back from him.
“Don’t touch me!” I yelled, and he flinched but let go.
Patrick was still by the punch bowl, but when he saw me running towards him, he didn’t argue with me. He just put his arm around me and ushered me out of the gymnasium. He tried to ask me what had happened with Finn, but I refused to talk about it. It wasn’t even so much that I wanted to keep it a secret from him. I was too afraid that I might cry if I even mentioned it. He drove around for awhile so I was reasonably calm by the time I went home.
Matt and Maggie were waiting by the door for me, but I barely said a word to them. That freaked out Matt, who started threatening to kill Patrick and every other boy at the dance, but I managed to reassure him that I was fine and nothing bad had happened. Finally, he let me go up to my room, where I proceeded to throw myself onto the bed and not cry. Maggie knocked on the door a little way later and offered to talk, but there was nothing I could really say to her, so I sent her away.
The night swirled in my head like some bizarre dream. There was all the excitement and nerves about seeing Finn, and then that glorious moment where we danced together, before he completely shattered it. Even now, after the way he’d treated me, I couldn’t shake how wonderful it had felt being in his arms like that. In general, I never liked being touched or being close to people, but I loved the way I had felt with him. His hand strong and warm pressing on the small of my back and the soft heat that flowed from him. When he had looked at me then, so sincerely, I had thought…
I don’t know what I thought, but it turned out to be a lie. After he freaked out on me about psychokinesis, I could suddenly explain all his odd behavior; he was completely insane. That had to be it. His random mood changes. His flat affect.
Because I couldn’t really “persuade” people. It wouldn’t be possible to just look at Patrick to get him to do what I wanted. He had just been able to see how distraught I was and changed his mind. And even if I did do that, how come nobody had noticed before? How did Finn even notice? He had said that
“persuasion” was a slang term, too, implying that a group of people used it in place of psychokinesis. They used it so frequently they had their own terminology.
What it came down to is that I knew nothing about Finn. I could barely tell when he was mocking me and when he was being sincere. Sometimes I thought he was into me, and other times he obviously hated me. He could just as easily be insane as he could be telling the truth. There wasn’t anything I knew about him for sure. Except that despite everything, I still really liked him.
Sometime in the night, after I had changed into sweats and a tank top, and after I had spent a very long time tossing and turning, I must’ve finally fallen asleep. When I woke up, it was still dark out, and I had drying tears on my cheeks. I had been crying in my sleep, which seemed unfair since I never let myself cry when I was awake. I rolled over and glanced at the alarm clock. It’s angry numbers declared it was a little after three in the morning, and I wasn’t sure why I was awake. I flicked on my bedside lamp, casting everything in a warm glow, and I saw something that scared me so badly, my heart stopped.
6
A figure was crouched out my window, my second story window. Admittedly, there’s a small roof right outside of it, but that’s still not exactly the thing you except to see. On top of that, it wasn’t just anybody. It was Finn Holmes, looking hopeful, but not at all ashamed or frightened at having been caught peeping into my room. In fact, he knocked gently at the glass, and belatedly, I realized that’s what had woken me up. He hadn’t been peeping intentionally; he’d been trying to sneak into my room. So that was slightly less creepy, I supposed.
For some reason, I got up and went over to the window. I caught sight of myself in my mirror, and I did not look good. My pajamas were of the sad, comfy variety, and not the sexy negligee type I would’ve liked to wear for a midnight r
endezvous. My hair was a total mess, and my eyes were red and puffy. On top of that, I knew I shouldn’t even let Finn in my room. He was clearly psychotic and probably a sociopath, and he didn’t make me feel good about myself. Besides, Matt would kill us both if he caught him in here.
So, I stood in front of the window, my arms crossed, and glared at him.
I was pissed off and hurt, and I wanted him to know it. Normally, I prided myself on not getting hurt, let alone telling people if they had hurt me. But this time, I thought it would be better if he knew that he was a dick.
“I’m sorry!” Finn talked loudly so his voice would carry through the glass, and his eyes echoed the sentiment. He looked genuinely remorseful, but I wasn’t ready to accept his apology yet. Maybe I never would.
“What do you want?” I demanded as loudly as I could without Matt hearing me.
“To apologize. And to talk to you.” Finn looked earnestly at me. “It’s important.” I chewed my lip, debating between what I knew I should do and what I really wanted to do. This was the first time anyone had ever snuck up to my window or apologized to me after I had slapped them. “Please.”
Against my better judgment, I opened the window. I left the screen in so he could mess with that, and took a step back so I was sitting on the end of my bed. Finn pulled the screen out easily, and I wondered how much experience he had with sneaking in girls’ windows. Carefully, he climbed into my room, shutting the window behind him. He glanced over my room, making me feel self-conscious. It was rather messy, with clothes and books strewn about. My computer was on my desk in the corner, buried beneath water bottles and other random garbage. I had posters on my wall for Labyrinth and the Cure, but the rest of my stuff sat in two large cardboard boxes and a trunk on one side of my room.
“So what did you want?” I said as curtly as I could, trying to drag his attention back to me instead of inspecting my disarray.
“I’m sorry,” Finn repeated, with that same sincerity he had outside.
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