by Rian Kelley
The thought is a little depressing and Genny completely understands when her father talks about the frustrations of the human body, how limiting it can be. Shouldn’t they, now in the twenty-first century of intelligent life, be able to fly? Most other creatures evolve at a greater rate.
She’s so wrapped up in her thoughts, she doesn’t look before she steps into the crosswalk. Again. She doesn’t hear the spin of tires on the wet pavement, coming fast, until it’s too late. She turns her head: blue car; Mercedes; man behind the wheel; skidding—the rear of the car fish-tails. Then she’s airborne, but tangled, like a kite in the branches of a tree, and too soon back to earth. The breath leaves her lungs in a gasp. Someone is under her: a hard body, muscles shifting under her hands. She pushes to her knees, breathless. Wonders what happened to the sound because the world is suddenly mute. Then she pushes back on her heels and looks up. Into his golden face. His brown eyes are wide and angry. And familiar.
Last night, take two, she thinks and cringes. She has never been so helpless.
Then he’s talking and his lips are peeled back. She thinks it’s possible he’s canine. She peers closer at his teeth, but they’re perfectly reasonable incisors.
Genny can’t hear him. She tries to tell him that.
The world around them is still a blur, too. All but his face, which is too hard, too pissed-off for it also to be beautiful, but it is.
“What?”
His voice breaks through the haze. It’s as harsh as a trumpet blast in her ears, but at least his face softens. He goes from ready to strangle her to concern in less than a second.
“Did you hit your head?” He pushes to his knees and leans forward, staring into her eyes. “You don’t look concussed.”
“I’m not concussed,” she snaps, feeling light headed. The air is thicker, harder to breathe when he’s so close. She presses her hands against her legs to stop their trembling. “I’m shocked. What did you do, tackle me?”
His face morphs back into his mad mask. His lips thin into a firm frown.
“Yeah, I tackled you. That’s one way to put it. Another would be that I saved your life. Twice.”
And he mutters something under his breath, something she almost doesn’t hear:
“I didn’t see this one coming. At all.”
Genny wonders about that. His voice seems to free float, buoyed by surprise.
Maybe because most people would have learned from last night’s near-miss.
That, or the guy thinks he’s a gypsy-mind-reader.
There’s a kid at Fraser who believes, absolutely, in x-ray vision.
Of course, that kid is on his way to MIT early admittance, she reminds herself.
Impossible. No one can actually read another person’s mind, can they?
Genny shakes her head, trying to loosen herself from her jumbled thoughts. She grabs at a chance to regain some composure.
“I think I would have survived last night,” she grumbles. “The car swerved.”
The comment doesn’t make him look any happier or less handsome. He stands up and offers slowly, each word clipped painfully short, “Can I help you up?” He extends his hand but the air around it is charged. She can feel it, warm and sharp, like the nipping of a dog on her fingertips, and pulls her hand back.
Her breath builds up in her throat. She stands up using her own steam and tries to look at anything but him. Something about this guy screws with her balance. Really. It’s like some kind of scientific anomaly. And probably why she’s making so many mistakes, she thinks.
Then she’s at the center of a crowd of screaming teenagers. They’re like a wave washing up on shore. Everyone is asking her if she’s all right. A few kids reach out and touch her tentatively, like she might howl in pain if they’re too rough. She hears a whistle blow. Supervision. Mrs. Stanley. She saw what happened and is pushing through the kids. And behind her, a man. The man. The one who nearly plowed Genny down.
But he’s gone. Her savior. She rolls to her tiptoes and looks beyond the crowd; she catches a glimpse of his dark head as he climbs the stairs and then slips into the school.
“Are you OK, Genny?” Mrs. Stanley is asking. She’s shaking her head and tskks a few times. “Good thing Truman was close by. He just about flew across the street to get to you.”
Genny nods. “Yes. Good thing.”
The man, the driver, is apologizing profusely, but Genny ignores him, especially when he starts questioning her eye sight.
She tries to free herself from Mrs. Stanley’s arms, but the woman moves with her.
“You need to watch what you’re doing,” Mrs. Stanley advises and urges her toward the building. “That’s not like you, Genny, stepping out into a busy street like that.”
No, it’s not. Her mind was too wrapped up with dreams of immortality. The irony makes her lips twist, which must pass for a grimace because Mrs. Stanley is back to clucking at her.
“We’ll get you right to the nurse. She’ll need to clean up those hands.”
Genny turns her palms up and looks at them. Scraped, with small pieces of gravel embedded in the skin. She’s bleeding, too. Not a whole lot, but enough she’s going to need a few Band-Aids. No avoiding the nurse. Great. Now she’ll be late to class, which will make her U.S. history teacher thrilled—she bombed yesterday’s surprise quiz because she stayed late at Hunter’s the night before, listening to him write a new song which was definitely for her—he called Genny his Eve—and she didn’t study.
“Maybe have your knee looked at, too,” Mrs. Stanley is saying as she maneuvers Genny into the building and past the front office. “You really gave that man a fright. He thought for sure he got a piece of you. ‘No one moves that fast,’ he said. I hope that new boy tries out for the track team. . .”
She keeps on like that until she has Genny sitting on the cot in the nurse’s office, and then she reiterates half of what she’s already said to Miss Prudy. The nurse ignores her but does a good enough job with “Hmms” and “Oh, mercies” that Mrs. Stanley feels validated.
“Do you want a pair of loaner pants?” Miss Prudy asks and Genny looks down at her knee.
She has a high threshold for pain, so she didn’t know she shaved a layer of skin off the knobby joint the nurse is gently flexing with her hands. Genny’s jeans are stylishly torn now, but also blood-stained.
“No,” she decides. Even in a school as elite as Fraser, the loaner clothes carry a smell. She pushes her pant leg down and thank the nurse for the attention. She’s almost out the door before Miss Prudy asks whether they should call her mother.
“No,” Genny says. “She’ll worry, and it’s really just a few scrapes.”
“Well, take this home with you.” She hands her a piece of paper that lists her injury and the treatment she received. “We want your mom to know we took good care of you.”
Genny smiles and stuffs the paper in her back pocket. She takes the stairs to the second floor two at a time and sprints to her classroom.
Mr. Cooke is already at his podium. A map of the thirteen colonies is projected onto the white board and he’s using a marker to trace boundaries on the transparency. He doesn’t even look up when Genny slips through the door.
“Glad you could make it, Ms. Vout,” he says, still tracing. “I wasn’t sure, after yesterday’s performance, if you were still interested in our founding fathers.”
A few of her classmates giggle. Genny ignores them and walks to the back of the room. She stops, though, when she realizes that her desk is taken.
“We’re short on desks,” Mr. Cooke explains, “and not knowing if you were coming or not . . .” He looks up, his eyes, behind his thick glasses, magnified to a freakish size. “You wouldn’t mind sitting at the table, would you?”
She does and she doesn’t mind letting it show as she swings her backpack from her shoulder and walks several feet past her desk, and the new kid—Truman Whatever—to the table occupied already by globes and rolled canvas maps
. She’ll have to spend the hour with her notebook on her knees, scribbling notes she doesn’t want to take and probably won’t be able to read.
She’s seated and groping at the bottom of her bag for a pencil when she realizes two things at once: the cool air in the room is reaching under the torn flap of her jeans and stinging her raw flesh; and someone is standing over her, his shadow long and deep.
She doesn’t want to look up. The only thing she hates more than electrocution is standing in the limelight of unwanted attention. She’s sure the whole class is looking at her now, if they weren’t already while Cooke was roasting her.
So far, this morning has been one embarrassment after another and it doesn’t look like it’s going to improve.
“Take my seat, er, your seat,” he invites. His accent makes his voice musical. British or Australian, maybe. South African. Right now, Genny wishes he never reached their shores.
“No, thanks,” she mumbles.
If she doesn’t look at him, doesn’t get caught up in all that perfect anger he has every right to feel, then she has a chance, she decides. Her mind won’t freeze, like it did earlier.
“I insist,” he presses. “I didn’t realize it was taken.”
“It’s OK,” she whispers. “I owe you one.”
He bends toward her and whispers back, “You owe me a lot more than a splintered piece of wood to chafe my backside on.”
She can hear the smile in his voice and hates it. That’s what she tells myself, anyway. She doesn’t like charm. She likes real happiness. The sun-rising kind of happiness that is Hunter.
“Fine,” Genny says. “Just sit down. People are going to stare.”
“They’re already staring,” he informs her, his voice still warm with laughter. “They’ve been staring since you walked into the room. And I’ll sit down as soon as you get out of my seat.”
Genny gathers her things and pushes past him, bumping his shoulder with her own. He staggers backwards a foot and she pauses. She didn’t think she put a lot into the movement, but maybe. . . she glances up at him, and he’s waiting for her. This close, she can see the shards of jade in his brown eyes. Hot and cold.
He smiles and says, “Made you look.” His chest shakes with quiet laughter. “Juvenile, I know,” he admits. “But so was your behavior this morning.”
He takes the seat at the table and Genny’s still standing, her bag clutched to her chest, trying to defrost her brain so it will listen to her, when Mr. Cooke spots her.
“Miss Vout, are you staying?”
She slides into her desk and all the way down in her seat. She would put her coat over her head, but that, too, would be childish.
Chapter Three
She bolts out of her seat and clears the door while the bell is still ringing, then loses herself in the crowd of kids pushing to their next class. All probably unnecessary. She doubts Mr. Australia is following her, or that Mr. Cooke has any more poisonous arrows to shoot her way. All the same, she’s relieved to turn the corner and catch sight of Hunter’s curly mop of hair just feet in front of her. She slips between a group of girls and slides her hand into his. Hunter looks down at her and smiles.
Genny tries not to focus on the fact that today, Hunter’s impact on her seems even less than it was yesterday.
She definitely ignores the streaking image of his smile, and the way it makes her skin feel singed.
“Thanks,” she says. “I needed that.”
“Bad morning?” he squeezes her hand.
Genny rolls her eyes. “You could say that.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
Before she can, he pulls her hand toward his face and peers at her palm.
“Ouch,” he says. “Did you fall?”
She thinks about where to start, what to leave out, and how not to sound like a complete idiot, but every version places her square in the role of moron. So she settles for a simple,
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, babe,” Hunter sympathizes then moves on. “You didn’t bring your guitar?”
Genny frowns. “No. I have to go home right after school,” she tells him. “My mom, the Great Disciplinarian, has decided that walking home from your place, in the dark, requires a consequence.”
Her mother must have brooded about it all night. She was waiting for Genny when she woke up this morning. She actually stayed long enough to eat a boiled egg at the table while Genny feasted on her usual Fruity Pebbles. Her mother stumbled through all the reasons why not seeing Hunter for a day would be good for Genny. Safety topped her list. Also, she’s been dating
Hunter for almost two months and her mom thinks it’s time she
met the ‘in-laws.’
Her mother laughed when she said it, but Genny doesn’t think it’s funny.
And then her mother was wondering why, in the three years Genny has known Hunter, their families never sat down to dinner together. Never shared a celebration—birthday or Thanksgiving—and her answers didn’t please her, “You’re too busy and Hunter’s mom is too anti-social.”
“You’re grounded?” Hunter says now, his voice filled with disbelief.
“Not really. Just for today, anyway. This is her first attempt at follow-through. She usually leaves that up to my dad. So I should be good to go tomorrow.”
“Wow. Grounded.”
“Not really,” Genny stresses, then decides she may as well dive right into the problem. “She wants to meet your mom.”
Hunter’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead and hide behind his curls.
“I know,” Genny says. “I can’t believe it, either.”
“Isn’t that something you do when you’re serious?” he says, then realizes his words don’t sound so good outside his head and tries to make up for it, “I mean, we’ve been dating a few weeks—“
“Seven and a half,” she corrects him.
“OK, but still—she wants to meet my mother?”
Genny nods.
“You don’t even want to meet my mother,” he points out.
“I’ve met her,” she defends herself.
“You said hello.”
“Several times,” Genny points out. “One time I even talked to her for fifteen minutes.” Really, she listened while Hunter’s mother carried on about work—she’s a legal assistant—and how much she doesn’t like it.
“OK,” Hunter allows. “That fifteen minutes was probably more than I talk to her in an entire week.”
“So, what are we going to do?”
“Stall?” Hunter suggests.
Genny shrugs. That’s not the answer she was hoping for. She doesn’t like the idea of her mom and Hunter’s mom meeting and she definitely doesn’t want to be trapped at a dinner table between them for a full hour trying to find something to talk about, but she wishes Hunter wasn’t so freaked out about it.
“Maybe,” she suggests, “we could set something up. Something short and sweet. Like coffee. How long could that last?”
“No.” Hunter is shaking his head. He pulls his hand away and turns so that her back is up against the wall. She realizes that they’ve arrived at her next class. Calculus I. “It’s too soon,” he complains. “Maybe this summer,” but his voice is spongy with doubt, like he doesn’t believe they’ll even get that far. “If we need to.”
“If we need to?” Genny repeats, wanting him to clarify that.
“We could find a way out of it by then.”
He smiles. It should feel like sunshine, but an icy spot blooms on her back, between her shoulder blades.
He drops a kiss on her head and steps back. “See you at lunch.”
Genny pushes away from the wall and slips into the classroom before the bell rings. This time her desk, in the exact center of the room, is vacant. She sits down and lets her back pack fall into her lap. What just happened with Hunter?
It definitely felt like the Great Brush Off. Genny has watched plenty of those play out in the halls or in the cafeteria—high sc
hool is sometimes a stage.
And Hunter kissed her on the head, like she’s a puppy.
A little late, she wonders why the thought of losing him doesn’t devastate her.
Because I’m not Jane Eyre. Or Juliet.
And Hunter was never Romeo material. He’s just too sunny. Too Golden Retrieverish. Even the way he put her off just then—he had a smile on his face and practically bounced down the hall to his class like the world couldn’t be a better place.
It must be nice, living inside a bubble.
Her lips twist as she recognizes the sour grapes in the thought. Hunter is sunshine. She’s always been as moody as a boiling gray sky. Even though she has it so good.
Her thoughts are interrupted before she can get her pity party off the ground. A shadow falls over her. You’d think it would make her feel colder. Nope, heat rises to the surface of her skin and she doesn’t have to look up to know who’s standing over her.
“Were you some kind of butler in Australia?” she snaps. She looks up. And up. Truman is tall. His shoulders block out the overhead lighting.
“Australia?”
“Yes. You know, koalas and kangaroos and boys who hover?”
“Where did you get Australia from?”
She stares at him and offers slowly, as though he might need a little extra processing time, “Your accent.”
“You’re too south.”
That would leave out South Africa, too. “England then,” she says. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I just think you have a problem with—“
“Hovering?” he suggests.
“Yes.”
“You’re cold.” He nods at her, huddled in her seat with her back pack in her lap and continues, “Your clothes are still wet from rolling around in the street.” He slips his leather coat off his shoulders and lays it on her desk. “Where I come from, we do what we can to help.”