Spark

by Rachael Craw

  “Wait a minute–”

  “We should get back.” How far are we from the house? When did I lose sense of the tether? My recklessness appalls me. Barb was right, distractions are dangerous.

  “You don’t understand–” He steps towards me, palm out.

  “I’m not comfortable being away from Kitty so long.” Convenient and true.

  His hand falls at his side and he looks troubled. “Of course, but, Everton–”

  “Let’s run.”

  He sighs. “After you.”

  I take off, running for my life.

  GIRLFRIEND

  It’s getting late and I’m wiped out, thanks to another whole day of Miriam’s sadistic training regime, but I don’t want to go to sleep and open the door of horrors. As if the almost-kiss had invoked bad juju, last night I dreamed I was the Stray, choking Kitty, power in my arms, fragile bones beneath my hands. It can’t be normal, these sorts of dreams. It terrifies me that I might be some kind of danger to her. But who can I ask? Not Jamie, he’d be appalled. Not Miriam, it would mean talking to her in private and I’m not ready for that. The memory prickles beneath my skin. I lean back on the kitchen counter, waiting for it to pass and my stomach growls a ferocious, gurgling reminder of my hopped up metabolism. I can’t keep up with my appetite this side of Sparking.

  I turn to the refrigerator. Jamie strolls in, and I duck behind the refrigerator door, swearing silently at the leftover chicken. After keeping my distance all day, avoiding eye contact through dinner and conversation afterwards (by going upstairs to “get my books ready” for school, which really meant getting Kitty to help me pick my outfit), now my luck has dried up.

  He sets the kettle on the stove while I grab what I need and work hastily at the counter, throwing my sandwich together.

  “Would you like some hot chocolate?”

  I almost slice through my finger, unable to scramble a gracious no. “Um, sure. You want some of this?” Why did I feel compelled to reciprocate? Thankfully, he shakes his head, but it takes me by surprise. I pause over the squeezable cheese and blurt, “Why don’t you eat like a horse?”

  “I do.”

  “Not like this glutton-fest.”

  “Still more than most.”

  “So I’m not just a pig?”

  “It’s very normal. Part of early development, the high-octane metabolism.” He digs out mugs and waits for the kettle. In his khaki pants and black T-shirt he balances one bare foot on top of the other, leaning by the stove. While his back is turned, I torture myself with looking. When he brings the steaming mugs to the counter it seems rude to march off, and that would only provoke a reaction which might lead to a conversation, one I can’t face. I grit my teeth and pull up a stool.

  “School tomorrow,” he says.

  I nod as though the idea doesn’t completely terrify me.

  “I think you’ll enjoy Gainsborough. The setting’s very picturesque.”

  I chew, keeping my eyes on my plate, not even tasting the food. I will him to let me eat in peace and for a moment or two it looks like I might get my wish.

  “How are you coping?”

  My head snaps up. There ought to be a law against eyes like his. It isn’t fair. Barb’s warning flashes in my mind and I look down. “I dunno. It’s like one long panic attack.” Please, let Kitty come downstairs. She’s probably at her desk scribbling in that damn journal. “You think Kitty’s okay?”

  Jamie’s expression grows weary. “Okay as she can be, I suppose.”

  “She writes a lot. You think that’s healthy?”

  “Probably better than keeping everything in her head.”

  “I don’t like it.” I take a massive bite so it’s obvious I have nothing more to say.

  “Training’s coming along,” Jamie says.

  He’s not going to let up. I shrug and chew.

  “Scrapes are healing well. You look … good.”

  I look up and he looks down, blowing over the lip of his mug.

  Careful. I pick up the hot chocolate. “Might finish this upstairs.” I almost make it to the door, resisting the urge to bolt, when he speaks again.

  “Evie?”

  Deflector shields up, I turn.

  Elbows on the counter, he leans, head tilted, lips pursed. “So, we’re not going to talk about it then?”

  I mimic his head tilting and lip pursing. “Ah, nope.” I push the door open with my foot and march through the dining room, aggravated by the thump in my chest. I make it halfway up the stairs when Jamie appears beside me, hands in his pockets. I ignore him. On the landing, I veer right, but he catches me gently by the elbow.

  “What?”

  He blinks at the snap in my voice and removes his hand. “Come on, Everton.”

  So we’re back to last names. “Come on what? Gallagher.”

  He smirks. “I actually quite like it when you use my last name.”

  “What do you want then, Jamie?”

  It only inspires a long slow smile that reminds me of his smug former self. “I like it better when you say my first name.”

  Infuriated, I step past him.

  He cuts me off. “You really want to act like nothing happened?”

  “Keep your voice down.” I dart a look back at the family wing then nod towards my room. Unfazed, he follows me in. I put my mug on the dresser and close the door, crackling in my skin. “Do you mind?”

  Jamie sits on the couch, elbows on his knees, hands in a loose clasp as he watches me. Aware of being alone with him in the bedroom, I have painful visions of Barb walking in and a cold sweat needles the back of my neck.

  “Why so twitchy?” he says.

  I picture flinging my mug at his head.

  “I’m not sorry.” He leans back, stretching his long legs out, crossing his feet. “I wanted to kiss you.”

  My pulse may have stopped for a second, hearing that, but I steel myself, determined to stay cool. I talk to the floor with my hands on my hips because I don’t know what else to do with them. “You have a girlfriend, which means you’re kind of an asshole. Worse still, I knew and nearly let it happen anyway, which makes me a traitor to the sisterhood.”

  He sits up, all traces of humour gone. “I see.” He frowns at the floorboards and I fold my arms around my waist. “Helena and I–”

  The blue-eyed girl’s name is Helena. I don’t want to hear “Helena and I.” It opens the prison to my heart so the cold hand can reattach itself.

  “We’re not together in the way that you think.”

  I shift my weight from one leg to the other, squeezing myself. “You know what, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  Jamie hangs his head, running his hands up into his hair. “Affinity matched us for … a research assignment about a year ago. We lived together a few months while I was in Berlin. Look, it’s complicated and I can’t really explain the ins and outs of it all, but we’re not ‘together’. Well, we are together, but not together, together.”

  I do not want to know. It’s hard to believe that Barb and Leonard would have approved of their then seventeen-year-old son shacking up with a girl in Berlin. “What exactly are you saying?”

  “Helena and I are not attached but I still have an obligation to Affinity and Helena is part of that obligation.”

  “So, you and me, it’s extracurricular.”

  “No!” He gets to his feet. “It isn’t.” He steps towards me. I step back and he frowns. “Everton, I’m not trying to mess you around.”

  “Whatever.” I shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me.” He balls his fists. “So, it’s not an uncomplicated scenario, but I’m not being ‘unfaithful’ and I’m certainly not trying to take advantage of you on my ‘downtime’.” He relaxes his hands onto his hips, casting about for the right way forwards.

  “Affinity would be okay with you and me?” I don’t even blush.

  He looks down. “Technically, no.”

  At least he�
��s being honest. “Right.”

  “It’s not easy losing the freedom to choose in certain situations.” His eyes fix on mine. “Especially when you want something in particular.”

  My heart leaves the building, soaring up in the stratosphere like a little red comet. I rein it in and draw a shaky breath. “And what would Helena say?”

  He doesn’t hesitate. “She would understand.”

  “Would she?”

  He doesn’t falter. “She would.”

  “What exactly have you got in mind, Jamie? Any scenario where we were … involved–” it’s hard to speak, “there’s an inevitable ending where you’re called up to render your services for the Affinity Project and you’re back with Helena.”

  “That’s not quite the sales pitch I would have offered.” He runs his hands over his face. “Since you’ve been going through all this, I’m sure you’ve become aware that the issue of fairness, and the total lack of it, is part and parcel. Nothing about what we are, what we are compelled to do, is fair. I can let that eat me up, or I can live in the present the best way I know how.”

  It’s too hard to look at him. I turn to the dresser and run my finger along the fringe of the lamp. “So, this is your like it or lump it speech?”

  “Couldn’t we just try to be normal?”

  I would laugh except that it might verge on hysteria. Could we be normal? An ache of longing grips me for my old life, its predictable dynamics. I have no energy to play games. The reality is that if he had any clue about what went through my mind when I slept, he’d hate me. I swallow my grief and take the easy way out. “Your mom gave me the hard word to steer clear.”

  He jerks his head back. “She what?”

  I feel the need to defend Barb. “Well, she doesn’t want me off my game. I should be focusing on Kitty.”

  “That woman,” he mutters and moves closer. “Take my hand.”

  I back away. “I will not.”

  “It’s important.” His expression remains serious and his tone businesslike. “Please, Everton, take my hand.”

  The emotional whiplash makes it hard to keep up. I give him a warning look before slipping my hand into his open palm. The immediate tingling spreads from my fingers, through my arm, to meet the hum in my spine.

  He raises his eyebrow. “Can you feel that?”

  “I always feel like that.” It sounds less desperate than the whole truth. Only Jamie can produce that type of tingling.

  “I don’t.” He rubs his thumb across the back of my hand. “Only with you.”

  I have no idea how to respond. Dumbly, I stare at our linked hands, feeling my pulse in my head.

  “You remember what I said about you making me faster? At first I thought it was just having something to pursue. That generally produces better results. But then I thought about what it feels like when I’m close to you, the pins and needles …”

  “Is it supposed to mean something?”

  “I think we may be Syngerists. It’s extremely rare. Synergist coding occurs only when complimentary signals meet and resonate at a particular frequency. The signals sync and form a bond which intensifies frequency sensitivity and increases the production of adrenaline, accelerating the development of the synthetic gene. Basically, if we were together, we’d become faster, stronger and more sensitive to the bandwidth.”

  I look at my hand in his then up into his eyes. “You’re serious?”

  He nods and knits his fingers through mine, sending a hypnotising surge of tingling up my arm. The incident with the crossbow – the instinct to protect Jamie – it wasn’t bad wiring. Relief pours through me, raising hope for Kitty and hope for an antidote to the thing that lurks in my nights. Behind all of it stirs my Jamie-specific longing, and I can’t help myself, the technicolour memory of our almost-kiss replays in my mind. His expression glazes for a couple of seconds and he draws a sharp breath at my involuntary KMT. I blush. “Sorry. I didn’t mean–”

  He steps closer. “Yeah, you did.”

  “Your mom–”

  “I’ll deal with her.” He takes my waist and draws me against him. Heat, electricity, the intimacy of shared space, the strangeness and the wonder of it. Do something. I swallow, then slide my hands over his arms, something I have imagined doing so many times. Anticipation closes my eyes, lifts my chin and parts my lips. The kiss. Warm, sweet, restrained and full of ruin. What hope do I have of keeping my promise to Barb after this?

  He pulls back, dazed and short of breath. “I mean, that’s definitely something.”

  I can’t even pretend I want to stop and push up on my toes to reach him.

  I’m no expert. Aside from Jamie, I’ve kissed only one other boy in my life, on summer camp when I was fifteen, and mostly because I was determined to eradicate the memory of the first kiss beneath the willow – which had taken on mythic proportions in my mind. The awkward camp kiss featured clashing teeth, too much slobber and a pimply chinned boy with spaghetti hands. Now, back in Jamie’s arms, it’s effortless and I am unhesitating. Perfect non-verbal communication. Not even fear and uncertainty, wringing their hands in the wings, can ruin it.

  Dizziness, on the other hand, might.

  Pressed close, the scent of his skin, the thrill in mine – the whole sensory overload – makes my pulse race, not just in a swoony, soundtrack-and-fireworks way, but actual palpitations, like “oh crap, I think I’m having a cardiac arrest”.

  “Jamie,” I gasp against him, trying to clear my head, but he only holds me tighter, knotting his fingers in my hair. My eyes roll back and the grey fog rolls in.

  DOUBTS

  For Kitty’s sake, I ride in the back of Jamie’s car, hunched low with my knees jammed to the side. She still has her neck brace to contend with and it’s a forty-minute drive to Gainsborough. I don’t want her to arrive sore and achy on her first day. She sits in the front passenger seat, eerily still, her breathing too fast and shallow. I doubt she’s slept any better than I have.

  Much to my disappointment, not even the after-glow of Jamie’s kisses has kept the horror from my dreams. By four in the morning, I had turned the lamp on just to keep the shadows away. Lying awake had been another form of torment, raking over my suspect list – all the boys from the Governor’s Ball – wondering how many of them shared classes with Kitty. I close my eyes and exhale slowly, wishing I could shake the sick stage fright that liquefies my limbs.

  When I look up, I find Jamie watching me in the rearview mirror. His steady gaze makes me weak for other reasons. I fainted in his arms last night and woke on my bed with him sitting, grinning, beside me. A second and third attempt to settle into a solid make out session ended with the same humiliating results, though he claimed it did wonders for his ego. “You’ll be fine,” he said. But it’s embarrassing and scary, the sort of thing that I desperately want (and want not) to talk to Miriam about. She’d hit the roof. Jamie thinks my body needs time to adjust to new adrenaline levels, like I’m too advanced for my own nervous system. He had a whole speech about the potency of Optimal and how it messes with our chemistry, but I was too busy swooning to take it all in.

  Kitty swivels, awkward in her foam neck support, to look at me.

  I press my lips into a smile I don’t feel. “I am fine.”

  But I have no clue how I’ll pull off “fine” at Gainsborough. My days revolve around preparing for an inevitable conflict where someone will end up dead. Over the last few weeks, I’ve tried to decide what taking someone’s life means to me. I know what it should mean, that I should be repulsed, that the idea should seem horrific, but the memory of the pursuit into the forest and the grim resolve that overtook me is still fresh. Now I’ll have to sit next to kids who are normal and pretend I’m not a genetically engineered freak who spends her time contemplating murder.

  “Really?” she mutters. “You two have been acting weird all morning.”

  My ears get hot. Damn it. I knew we’d been too obvious at breakfast. Jamie’s eyes on me were
like a caress on bare skin, and sitting across from him over my uneaten bowl of Cap’n Crunch had been exquisite torture. He’d rested the side of his knee against mine under the kitchen table, leaned against my shoulder at the sink to rinse his bowl, brushed his knuckles across the back of my neck reaching for an apple from the fruit basket.

  “Everton and I are together,” Jamie says, point blank and unapologetic.

  My eyes widen and I hunch lower. We haven’t talked about going public. He’d promised to deal with his mother, but in my mind the whole “coming out” scenario was further down a fairly indistinct time line. Hearing it aloud makes me feel careless and selfish in the extreme. Breaking the news to Kitty should’ve been my job.

  “Seriously, Jamie?” Outrage hardens her voice. “You couldn’t bloody help yourself!”

  Jamie stiffens. “Excuse me?”

  “You’re completely and utterly predictable!”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You do know he has a girlfriend?” Kitty struggles to turn sufficiently and do justice to her baleful glare.

  My insides twist. “It’s not – they’re not–”

  Kitty turns to her brother. “You just had to have Evie too!”

  Jamie sighs, an aggravated, impatient burst of air. “Helena and I are not together in that way.”

  Helena. I drop my face into my hand.

  “Right,” Kitty says. “Does Helena know that?”

  “Helena-has-a-boyfriend,” Jamie growls through his teeth.

  I look up. “She does?”

  He reddens. “I meant to explain.”

  “Ugh!” Kitty says, disgusted with us both.

  I have rarely seen Jamie so ruffled, and Kitty’s response does not give me hope for how it will go down with the rest of the family, let alone Miriam. I squirm, claustrophobic in the back seat with no available door to throw myself from.

  “This is completely bloody typical. Evie is my Shield-thing.”

  “I am, Kit–”

  “She is,” Jamie says. “Nothing has–”

  “She’s supposed to be looking out for me!”