by Amy Garvey
He can’t fight it, even though I can tell he wants to. He doesn’t even have to sleep anymore, just as he doesn’t need to eat or breathe. But when I tell him something like this, when I give him a direct command, he can’t help himself.
I didn’t know the spell would work like this, but I’m glad it does. Danny would never hurt me, would never really push himself on me, but there are too many things I can’t explain to him now. When he backs me into a corner, this is the easiest way to get around him.
He’s frowning, just a little, his brows drawn up in an unhappy question mark, but he doesn’t move after a moment. His body relaxes inch by inch, his shoulders softening as they slump against the mattress, his head listing to one side. The hand that had tightened into a fist on his thigh loosens, and I touch the bare, knobby knuckles with one fingertip.
He doesn’t stir.
Commands don’t last forever. At some point, when I’ve been away from him too long, I think, he’ll wake up.
If I close my eyes, I can see the look on his face in that moment, disappointment and resignation setting his jaw tight. I know because I’ve seen it when I leave him awake, and it never stops hurting.
This is easier. For me, anyway. This way, I can pretend it’s months ago, the first few days after school had ended for the year, and we were curled together in his bed while his mom was at work. It was early summer, the air soft and warm and slightly damp, and he had fallen asleep after … well, after.
It was one of the first times I got to watch him sleep, and it was so strange, having him right there but somehow not. The way he sort of melted into the sheets, boneless and completely comfortable, his hair stuck to his forehead in two places, and a thin sheen of sweat on his collarbone. After a while his eyes had started to move beneath his lids as he dreamed, and he suddenly smiled, a startling flare of happiness before his mouth softened again.
That never happens now, no matter how long I watch him. And like everything else, I know that’s my fault, too.
CHAPTER SIX
I MANAGE TO AVOID TALKING TO GABRIEL, OR pretty much anyone, until lunch the next day. I walk into the cafeteria starved, since I forgot my lunch this morning, knowing Jess is here somewhere. We only have lunch and gym together this year.
It smells like sauerkraut and dust and sweat, and I grab a yogurt and a PB&J from the end of the line. If I eat quickly, I can probably manage to sneak off to the library without seeing her, not that I imagine she’s looking for me. When Jess gets her mad on, it usually stays put for a while.
But it’s not Jess I bump into when I turn around, the pitted plastic tray wobbling in my hands. It’s Gabriel, taking a bite of an apple with his head tilted sideways, as if I’m some science experiment he’s not sure he executed right.
“God, what?” The words are out of my mouth before I can think twice, and he just gives me this amused smile.
“Thought you might want some company,” he says with a shrug.
“You thought wrong,” I tell him, and head for the tables at the far end of the room. It’s the size of the gym, and just as noisy, and the mostly empty table I’m aiming for seems miles away.
Especially since Gabriel follows right behind me, as if I haven’t spoken at all, as if I haven’t been shooting him “keep away” vibes all day. I think Stalker at him, really loud, but when I glance over my shoulder, he only looks sort of confused.
“God, go away,” I hiss at him as I set my tray down. The two freshmen at the other end of the table look up, startled, and I roll my eyes. “Not you.”
Gabriel pulls out the chair across from mine and sits down, but before I can say anything else, he holds a hand up. “Look, I get it. I shouldn’t have … I didn’t mean to make this weird. But I wanted to say sorry. Okay? It’s no big deal. I mean, it is, but … I’m not going to say anything.”
My heart is pounding again, and I’m so tired of it. It’s exhausting, all that adrenaline and whatever it is that makes me the way I am, tingling in my veins like some biological red alert.
I stare at Gabriel for a second, and his cool gray eyes are serious. I know he’s not teasing me, even though that would probably be easier to deal with. I flick my gaze to the two girls at the other end of the table. They’ve stopped eating, mom-made sandwiches still clutched in their hands, and I glare. They grab their paper bags and half-eaten carrot sticks and take off.
“That wasn’t nice,” Gabriel says, but he’s grinning. Slouched across from me in faded navy cords and a plain gray pullover, he actually looks a little too comfortable.
“Freshman girls are the only people I can actually push around, so I have to take advantage sometimes.” I fold my arms across my chest and sit back. “What exactly is no big deal? You know, that you’re so generously not going to tell everyone.”
It’s a dangerous move—I don’t actually want him to spell it out, especially not here in the cafeteria, but I have to know what he knows.
It’s like the first rule of Fight Club. Whatever it is that the women in my family can do, you don’t talk about it. Not even with each other, if my mom’s anyone to go by.
I know we’re not the only people with something to hide. Everyone keeps secrets—I’m not stupid. No one is, not really. I mean, it only took two weeks in seventh grade for everyone to figure out that when Kayla Schmidt said she was having dinner with her dad once a week, she was really going to a shrink, because she weighed about eighty pounds and sat through every lunch period nibbling a single stalk of celery.
And most everyone knows that Janine French has only slept with three guys, but it’s easier to pretend she regularly beds down with the whole football team because that way she’s the one being called a slut. Same way it’s easier to pretend that no one knows Peter Brannigan’s dad hits his mom, because that way there are no awkward conversations, and no reason to feel like you’re supposed to be doing something to help.
So yeah, everyone has something to hide, and sometimes it’s Very Special Episode stuff and sometimes it’s just stupid, like acne all over your back. But as far as I can tell, none of it is going to get you hunted down and burned at the stake.
Okay, that’s a little extreme, I know, but I did bring my dead boyfriend back to life. Of a kind, anyway. That’s not exactly pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
Gabriel’s watching me, and he puts his apple core down on the table before he speaks. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he says, so low I have to lean forward a little bit. “I can’t hear your thoughts, not word for word, not unless I really try, and even then it’s not really accurate. You were trying to tell me something before, right? I don’t know what it was, but I could feel you sort of … poking at me.”
Oh. That’s … unexpected.
I must make a face, because he shrugs. “It’s more that sensations sort of come at me? Sometimes images. Like, say someone’s across from me on the bus, thinking really hard about her sister. I might get the feeling of worn cotton, or certain colors, or a scent first, and then maybe a memory of them hiding together under the covers, looking at a book, or fighting over the last pancake or whatever, so I know it’s her sister and not her mother she’s thinking of. See?”
“Sort of.” It’s like a window, I guess, maybe a distorted one, but still a view right into someone’s head. Into someone’s heart.
I wonder if he’s seen me and Danny, curled up together on my bed before he died, if he can smell Danny’s soap, the one he used to use, the way his hands feel on me now, cold and firm.
“It’s mostly just plain old clairvoyance,” he says, like clairvoyance is just an everyday thing, and I roll my eyes. “I can’t see the future, not usually anyway, but I can sometimes see the past. And with most people, what I get, unless I tune it out, is a sort of low-level hum, like feedback. But with you…” He stops, tilts his head again, and the weight of his gaze is so heavy, pinning me to my seat. “It’s different. Louder, more intense. It’s energy, and I know what it means, because my grandmother was like you.�
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“Like me?” My voice sounds far away, thin and small.
“The power you have.” He leans closer, whispering now. “What you can do.”
And there it is, cards on the table. I swallow hard, imagining him saying something awful next, something that can’t be taken back. Something like plain old witchcraft. I don’t think of it like that, not even when I do think about people burning me at the stake. It sounds wrong, bad. Dangerous.
And what’s more dangerous than bringing the dead to life? the voice in my head whispers, too sweet, like sugar icing on a poison cookie.
“And why did you think I would be happy you could sense that?” I whisper back. My arms are folded so tightly across my chest, the muscles are beginning to twitch, and I can almost see the flare of panic snapping in the air around me, hot blue fingers pointing the way to run.
“Because I’m different, too.” He sounds so urgent, so honest. “How do you think people feel when they realize I know what they’re feeling, if not what they’re thinking exactly? When I can reach in and find the memory of them wetting their sleeping bag at a sleepover in third grade? Or getting blown off by the guy they like? Or seeing the creepy uncle who touched them the wrong way?”
“But they don’t have to know,” I hiss at him. “You just don’t tell them, and that’s the end of it. If anyone catches me…” I let the words trail off, hanging there in the sour air of the cafeteria between us, heavy enough to crash.
He doesn’t even blink, and his gaze is so steady, so calm, I let it soothe me a little. “I’m not going to say anything, I promise. And we don’t … I mean, it’s not like I’m holding it over your head. It just surprised me. It was cool to find someone else who was sort of like me.”
“Freaks of a feather, you mean?” I say, raising an eyebrow, and he rolls his eyes.
“You’re really a glass-half-empty person, aren’t you?”
“For now I just want to keep my glass to myself,” I tell him, but I’m smiling. I can’t help it. He looks relieved, like he just stopped short of falling off a cliff.
Or driving his car into a tree, that same voice in my head whispers, and with a bang, it all comes back. Danny’s still in Mrs. Petrelli’s garage loft, and I’m still the only thing he has in the world.
I haven’t even eaten my yogurt or my sandwich, but I push my tray across the table to Gabriel. I’m not hungry anymore.
“Save it for later,” he says, and hands me back the sandwich. “Dorsey’s class will probably be better with a snack.”
I snort, but I stuff it in my bag. The period’s almost over anyway, and Gabriel grabs my tray when we stand up. I let him, and I let him walk out of the cafeteria with me, too. It’s not a big deal—we’re just walking together, not even touching.
Except when we go through the double doors into the hallway, there’s Jess, sitting on the window ledge that overlooks the courtyard. David Starger is sitting next to her like the adoring puppy he is when she’s around, and Alicia Ferris is venting about something to do with the yearbook—she’s the photographer this year, which means that every other page will feature pictures of her.
Jess doesn’t look happy. She looks shocked. Even worse, she looks betrayed.
And despite the way my heart sinks, for just a second I feel like telling her to get used to it.
By the time I get to World Lit, all I can think about is damage control. Jess might be a lost cause, but Darcia doesn’t deserve to be hurt, not any more than she already has been, anyway. And I know Jess will have told her I was with Gabriel at lunch, when I haven’t even been eating with her.
I used to be the one Jess came to when someone had done something outrageous or horrible, like Melissa Schine sleeping with Geoff Dormer before he’d even broken up with Sophie Mathis, or Sketch Harris trashing the music room piano one day when he’d gotten some bad coke.
Jess’s sense of justice is pretty bulletproof. For her, there are certain rules everyone is supposed to follow, and they’re all unbreakable.
According to Jess’s code, I’m pretty sure someone who’s still grieving over her dead boyfriend isn’t supposed to be walking around school with the new meat, especially when he’s as good-looking as Gabriel is. And really especially when she’s apparently too depressed to hang out with her best friends.
I slide into my seat next to Darcia, who’s already got her notebook out and a pencil between her teeth as she highlights her notes with a bright pink marker. She gives me a sideways glance and something that wants to be a smile but doesn’t quite make it.
“Hey,” I say, dropping my backpack on the floor and stretching across the aisle to toe at her leg with one foot. My Doc looks huge and ugly against her faded jeans. “What are you doing after school?”
She blinks twice, and when her mouth opens the pencil falls out, clattering against the desk and into her lap. “Um, what?”
“I am speaking English, right?” I tease her, going for light and joking, the way we’ve talked to each other forever, until this summer.
But it’s too late—her eyes flash confusion at me, like I haven’t been her best friend for the last ten years. And it hurts.
“I just thought you might want to come downtown with me, maybe go to the café and hang out for a while,” I say, pulling my foot back and sitting up straight. “You wanted to yesterday, so…”
It takes her a minute to understand that I’m not kidding, I guess, which hurts even more, and when she smiles, that hurts the most. For a second I wish I could throw my arms around her and tell her I’m sorry, for not being around, for ignoring the fact that she needs me as much as I need her, for everything.
But I can’t do that here, so instead I let the sudden bloom of my own relief brighten the dull fluorescent lights and smile back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE’S WAITING BY MY LOCKER WHEN I GET there after last period, earbuds in and her ancient iPod clutched in one hand as she scrolls through the menu. For a minute it all feels so familiar—I can’t even count the number of days Darcia or Jess or both of them met me just like this after school, here and in junior high, before we headed off for slices of pizza at Cosimo’s or to crash in one of our bedrooms.
But when Darcia looks up at me, I can see the uncertainty in her eyes, and it hurts just as much as it did earlier.
“It’s a good day for mochas,” I say, fixing my best normal smile to my face. Maybe if I pretend nothing has changed, she’ll start believing it.
“That’s true,” she says, glancing down the hall at the door. It’s gray and windy, and the trees are nearly nude now, shivering as their cast-off leaves swirl along the ground. “I could go for some of Geoff’s carrot cake, too.”
“No, no, you have to try the pumpkin muffins,” I tell her, slamming my locker shut and shouldering my backpack. “He just came up with some new recipe last weekend, and I’m pretty sure they’re illegal, they’re so good.”
She ducks her head when she grins, but she turns off her iPod and pulls out her earbuds as we head outside. Our shoulders bump companionably as we walk, and I hold my breath. This will work, I tell myself. I can do this. I don’t have to disappear out of my own life, not completely.
Well, I don’t want to. I don’t know if that matters very much, but it’s true. And as we make our way to Bliss, just like we have so many other afternoons, I ache. It’s like a limb I hadn’t realized was missing, a really vital one, has suddenly grown back.
The bell over the door jingles when we walk in, and Trevor looks up from his stool behind the counter and grunts a hello. His laptop is open, and he stares at the screen as if it’s personally responsible for everything wrong in the world.
If he ever finishes the novel he’s apparently been working on since, like, birth, I’m not sure I want to read it.
Darcia takes the table by the window while I wander into the back in search of Geoff. He’s taking something out of the oven, and straightens up with streaks of flour like eraser dust on his
dark cheeks.
“Hey there, Birdie.” He slides the tray onto the nearest counter and leans over to kiss my cheek. “You’re not working today.”
“Nope. I’m here with Darcia.” I poke at one hot muffin and bend down to sniff. Pears, I think, and something else I can’t identify, but it smells delicious.
He lifts an eyebrow and dusts off his hands. “Really? You two haven’t hung out in forever.”
“Spare me the drama.” I roll my eyes and snatch a plate of almond cookies off the counter. “Can I make us some mochas or will Trevor have a meltdown?”
“Loverboy’s too busy with chapter whatever the hell it is to do much of anything today but glare at decent paying customers. Go for it.” He winks when I grin, and I can hear him humming something as I walk out front again.
I set the plate of cookies in front of Darcia, who’s hiding behind her hair and her earbuds from Trevor’s suspicious glances. I’ve told her a million times that he’s, well, not nice exactly, just permanently cranky, but she always gives him a pretty wide berth anyway. I’m used to him, since I’ve been working part-time at Bliss for more than a year, and Geoff has taught me every trick in the book for handling him.
“Mocha?” I ask her, removing one earbud.
She bites into a cookie happily and nods. With her feet tucked up beneath her in the window seat, she looks exactly like the Darcia I’ve known for so long, and I feel relief bubble up inside me again. The zydeco coming out of the café’s speakers swells higher for a second, and Trevor looks up and frowns.
I manage to tamp it down and walk behind the counter to start the mochas. The only other customers in the café are two soccer moms who seem to be coordinating some kind of playdate on their BlackBerrys, and a college kid who’s deep into The Riverside Shakespeare and keeps mouthing the dialogue as he reads.
It’s good. It’s right, to be here with Darcia, with Trevor scowling and Geoff baking, and for once I feel like I used to. Normal, or as close to it as I ever get.