by Tracy Wolff
Turning away from him, I forcibly yank my attention back to the conversation at hand, just in time to hear Luca say, “Hey, now. How was I supposed to know Angie was a soul-sucking demon?”
“Ummm, because we told you so?” Mekhi answers.
“Yeah, but I thought you were biased. You didn’t like her from the start.”
“Because she was a soul-sucking demon,” Liam repeats. “What part of that are you not getting?”
“What can I say?” Luca gives a careless shrug. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
“Until what the heart wants tries to kill you,” Rafael teases.
“Sometimes even then.” The words are quiet, spoken from the haunted-looking guy sitting to Macy’s right.
“Seriously, Byron?” Mekhi grouses. “Why you always got to shut the conversation down?”
“I was just making an observation.”
“Yeah, a depressing observation. You need to lighten up, man.”
Byron just stares at him, lips twisted in a tiny little smile that makes him look like a modern-day embodiment of his poet namesake.
Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
The famous quote from Lady Caroline Lamb goes through my mind. But I’m not focused on Byron’s wavy black hair and dimples when I think about her words. No, in my head, they’re all about Jaxon, with his scarred face and cold eyes and smile that borders on cruel at least half the time.
Definitely bad. Definitely dangerous. As for mad…I don’t know yet, but something tells me I’m going to find out.
When I think of him like that, I wonder what the hell I’m doing even contemplating feeling the way I do. After all, in San Diego, dark and dangerous wasn’t exactly my type. Then again, maybe that’s because I never ran into the genuine article back home. Here in Alaska… Well, all I’m saying is, there’s a reason half the girls in the school are swooning over Jaxon.
Besides, there’s more to him than meets the eye. No matter how angry he is, he’s never been anything but gentle with me. Even that first day, when he was so obnoxious, he still never did anything that made me uncomfortable. And he’s certainly never hurt me. To everyone else, he might be as dangerous as Macy warns. But to me, he seems more misunderstood than malicious, more broken than bad.
Besides, Byron called it when he implied the heart wants what the heart wants, even when it’s bad. And no matter how many warnings I get about Jaxon, I’m pretty sure he’s what my heart wants.
Suddenly, a weird kind of chiming sound cuts through Dvořák’s “The Noonday Witch” (if I’m not mistaken) that’s currently playing over the cafeteria’s loudspeakers. “What is that?” I ask, looking around to see if we’re suddenly being invaded by a bunch of triangle-playing guerrillas.
“The bell,” Macy says. They’re the first two words she’s managed to choke out since the Order took up residence next to us, and all seven of us turn to her in surprise. Which just makes her flash a small little smile before shoving half a Pop-Tart in her mouth.
“You still didn’t eat,” Jaxon says. And then he picks a Pop-Tart and hands it to me.
“Seriously?” I take it, because I know he’s just going to stand there holding it until I do. But I’m still going to call him on it. Because I’m smart enough to know that if I let him get away with the small things, he’ll try his best to steamroll me with everything else, too. “I’m pretty sure I can figure out for myself if I’m hungry or not.”
He shrugs. “A girl’s got to eat.”
“A girl can decide that for herself. Especially since the guy sitting next to her didn’t eat anything, either.”
Mekhi lets out a little whoop. “That’s right, Grace. Make sure he doesn’t walk all over you.”
Jaxon gives him a look that sends a chill right through me, but Mekhi just rolls his eyes, although I notice that he does shut his mouth for pretty much the first time since he sat down. Not that I blame him. If Jaxon looked at me like that, I think I might run for the hills.
“What classroom are you going to?” Jaxon asks as we maneuver our way through the suddenly bustling cafeteria. It’s easier than it should be, considering the mad stampede toward the doors that is currently going on. But as long as Jaxon is in the lead, the sea of students does more than just part. It pretty much leaps out of the way.
I fumble for my schedule again, but before I can so much as pull it out, Mekhi answers, “A246,” right before he disappears into the crowd.
“Apparently, A246,” I repeat, tongue firmly in cheek.
“Apparently.” He moves slightly ahead of me to push open the door. As he holds it for me, not one person darts through. Instead, they all wait patiently as I walk through, and I have the fleeting thought that this is more than just popularity, more than just fear.
This must be what royalty feels like.
It seems absurd to even think something so bizarre, but I make it through the door and down the hall without another body—besides Jaxon’s—coming within five feet of me. And I don’t care whether I’m in an elite boarding school in Alaska or a crowded public high school in San Diego, that is not normal.
I also realize that the same thing happened yesterday before the snowball fight. No matter how crowded the hall got or how much jostling went on, no one so much as touched Jaxon—or Macy and me, as long as he was standing with us. “So what do you do to deserve all this?” I ask as we move toward the staircase.
“Deserve all what?”
I roll my eyes at him, figuring he’s messing with me. But the blank look he gives me says otherwise. “Come on, Jaxon. How do you not see what’s going on here?”
He glances around, clearly mystified. “What’s going on?”
Because I still can’t decide if he’s playing with me or if he really is this obtuse, I just shake my head and say, “Never mind.” Then plow ahead and pretend that I don’t notice everyone staring at me even as they scramble to get out of my way.
So yeah, that whole blending-in plan I hatched in San Diego? Officially dead on arrival.
28
“To Be or Not to Be”
Is a Question,
Not a Pickup Line
Jaxon walks me right up to my classroom door—which we get to in what I’m guessing is record time, considering there’s no one else in the room, not even the teacher.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” I ask as we step inside.
“Yes.”
“How do you know?” I glance at the clock. Class should start in less than three minutes, and still nobody’s here. “Maybe we should check if it got—”
“They’re waiting for me to either sit down or leave, Grace. Once one of those things happens, they’ll come in.”
“Sit down or—” I goggle at him. “So you were just messing with me in the hallway? You do notice how people treat you?”
“I’m not blind. And even if I was, it would still be hard to miss.”
“It’s madness!”
He nods. “It is.”
“That’s all you’ve got to say about it? If you know how bizarre it is, why don’t you do something to stop it?”
“Like what?” He gives me that obnoxious smirk from the first day, the one that made me want to punch him. Or kiss him. Just the thought has my stomach spinning and has me taking a cautious step back.
He doesn’t like the added distance, at least not if his narrowed eyes can be believed. And the way he takes two steps toward me before continuing. “Stand up at the pep rally and reassure everyone that I’m not going to eat them if they get too close? Somehow I don’t think they’ll believe me.”
“Personally, I think they’re more worried about being thrown in high school jail than getting eaten—”
The smirk is back. “You might be surprised.”
“Well, then, you should reassure them. Be frien
dly. You know, show them that you’re harmless.”
I feel ridiculous even before that left eyebrow of his goes up. “Is that what you think? That I’m harmless?”
Jaxon doesn’t sound insulted so much as astonished, and really, I can’t blame him. Because I’ve never met anyone less harmless in my life. Just looking at him feels perilous. Standing next to him feels like walking a hundred-foot-high tightrope without a net. And wanting him the way I do…wanting him feels like opening a vein just to watch myself bleed.
“I think you’re just as dangerous as everyone gives you credit for. I also think—”
“Yo, Jaxon, at some point, class does need to start,” Mekhi interrupts as he saunters into the room—apparently the only one in this class who isn’t afraid of Jaxon. “You going to take off, or are you going to keep everyone standing around watching you try to woo this girl?”
Jaxon whips his head around to glare at Mekhi, who raises his arms defensively and takes a big step back. And that’s before Jaxon’s voice drops a full octave as he growls, “I’ll leave when I’m ready.”
“I think you should probably go now,” I tell him, even though I’m as reluctant to see him go as he apparently is to leave. “The teacher needs to start class. Besides, aren’t you the one who told me to keep my head down and not draw attention to myself?”
“That was the old plan.”
“The old plan?” I stare at him, bemused. “When did we get a new plan?”
He smiles at me. “Two nights ago. I told you it wasn’t going to be easy.”
“Wait a minute.” My stomach drops. “Are you telling me the cafeteria, the walk to class… This was all because of Flint?” Just the thought makes me feel awful.
“Flint who?” he deadpans.
“Jaxon.”
“It was all because of you,” he tells me.
I’m not sure I believe him, but before I can probe any more, he reaches out and takes hold of one of my curls in that way he does. He rubs it between his fingers for a couple of seconds as he watches me with those unfathomable eyes of his. “I love the way your hair smells.” Then he stretches out the curl before letting it go so it can boing back into place.
“You need to go,” I tell him again, though the words are a lot more breathless this time around.
He doesn’t look happy, but I stare him down.
It takes a few seconds, but eventually Jaxon nods. He steps back, a grudging look on his face, and it’s only as he moves away that I realize my heart is beating like a heavy-metal drummer.
“Text me a pic of your schedule,” he says as he moves toward the door.
“Why?”
“So I know where to meet you later.” His face melts into a grin, and the butterflies I always feel when he’s around take flight in my stomach.
“I have AP Physics right now, so I’m out in the physics lab and won’t make it back before you have to go to your second period. But I’ll catch up with you later. If I can’t, I’ll have one of the others walk you to class.”
Yeah, because that will help me blend in. “You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s not a problem, Grace.”
I sigh. “What I mean is I don’t want you to do that. I just want to get to class like everyone else. On my own.”
“I get that. I do,” he continues when I give him a disbelieving look. “But I meant it when I said you aren’t safe here. At least let me watch out for you for a few days, until you learn the ropes.”
“Jaxon—”
“Please, Grace.”
It’s the please that gets me, considering I’m pretty positive Jaxon isn’t the kind of guy to ask for something when he can order it. And though I think he’s overreacting, he seems really worried, and if this will set his mind at ease, I guess I can handle it for a few days.
A very few days.
“Fine.” I tell him, giving in as gracefully as I can. “But only until the end of the week, okay? After that, I’m on my own.”
“How about, we renegotiate at the end of the week and see—”
“Jaxon!”
“Okay, okay!” He puts his hands up. “Whatever you say, Grace.”
“Yeah, right. That’s a bunch of—” I break off because he’s gone again. Because of course he is. Because that’s the story of our lives. He disappears, and I get disappeared on.
One of these days, I’m going to turn the tables.
He’s right, though. As soon as he leaves, the classroom floods with people. I try to stand to the side, waiting to see where there might be an empty seat, but Mekhi nods me over to the desk next to him in the second row.
I go, even though I don’t know if a person normally sits there, because it’s nice to have someone in this class to talk to. Especially since he’s grinning at me while everyone else is doing the same old stare-and-glare.
The teacher—Ms. Maclean—bustles in after everyone has taken their seats. She’s dressed in a flowing purple caftan, her wild red hair piled atop her head in a haphazard bun that looks like it’s going to fall down at any second. She’s not young, but she’s not old, either—maybe forty or so—and she’s got a huge smile on her face as she tells everyone to open their copies of Hamlet to Act II.
Half the class has books and the other half has laptops, so I pull out my phone and start looking for a public-domain copy, since I left my book in California. But I’ve barely typed “Hamlet” in the search bar before Ms. Maclean drops a dog-eared copy on my desk.
“Hello, Grace,” she murmurs in a low voice. “You can borrow one of mine until you can find one of your own online. And since you look like the shy type—despite your association with Katmere’s most notorious student—I won’t make you stand up and introduce yourself to the class. But know that you’re welcome here, and if you need anything, feel free to stop by my office hours. They’re posted by the door.”
“Thanks.” I duck my head as my cheeks start to get warm. “I appreciate it.”
“No worries.” She gives my shoulder a comforting squeeze as she heads back to the front of the room. “We’re excited to have you here.”
Mekhi leans over as I pick up the book and says, “Act two, scene two.”
Thanks, I mouth back just as Ms. Maclean claps her hands.
Then, in true drama queen–style, she throws her arms wide and says in a booming but perfect iambic pentameter:
“Something have you heard
Of Hamlet’s transformation; so call it,
Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was.”
We spend the rest of the class discussing Hamlet’s shift from perfect prince to total downer. With Ms. Maclean doing her drama thing in the front of the room and Mekhi making sly comments in my ear every couple of minutes, it’s a lot more fun than it sounds. Mekhi may look intimidating, but he’s way more chill than Jaxon—and also really funny. It’s easy to be around him, and I end up enjoying class a lot more than I expected to, especially considering I’ve already read the play once this year.
In fact, I enjoy it so much that I’m a little disappointed when the bell rings, at least until I remember that I’ve got art next. Art’s been my favorite class pretty much since elementary school, and I’m excited to see what it’s like here. But it means heading out to the art studio, and that means a detour to my room, where I can put on at least a couple more layers to protect myself from the cold.
It’s only a ten-minute walk to the studio, so I don’t need to put on everything I did the last two times I went outside. But I do need a heavy sweatshirt and a long coat—plus gloves and a hat—if I don’t have any plans to get frostbite. Which I definitely don’t.
I just hope I have enough time to make it to my room and out to the art studio before the next bell rings. Just in case, I speed up a little, hoping to make it to the mai
n staircase before the masses.
“Hey! What’s your rush, New Girl?”
I glance over at Flint with a grin as he comes up on my left side. “I have a name, you know.”
“Oh, right.” He pretends to think. “What is it again?”
“Bite me.”
“That’s an interesting first name…and a phrase you might want to be careful saying around here.”
“And why is that exactly?” I lift a brow at him as we weave our way through the halls. Unlike earlier with Jaxon, the whole parting of the halls thing is currently nowhere in effect. In fact, traversing the school with Flint is an awful lot like playing this old video game my dad used to like, where you have to race to get the frog across the street before one of the eight million cars going by splats it on the pavement.
In other words, it’s a normal high school hallway. I can feel myself relaxing a little more with each near-collision.
“You’re actually going to pretend you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Flint studies me, then shakes his head when I look back at him, brows raised in a definite WTF. “My mistake. Never mind.”
There’s something about the way he says it that has an uneasy feeling sliding through me. It’s the same feeling I got when I saw Jaxon and Lia outside without a jacket yesterday.
The same feeling I got when Flint fell out of that tree and walked away with only a few bruises.
The same feeling I got when Lia was chanting in tongues in the library, even though she had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned several of the Alaskan languages.
“I’m not dense, you know. I am aware that something isn’t quite right here, even if I don’t know what it is yet.”
It’s the first time I’ve acknowledged my suspicions even to myself, and it feels good to give voice to it all, instead of letting the thoughts fester below the surface.
“Are you?” Suddenly Flint is right up in my face, his whole body only inches away from mine. “Are you really?”
I don’t back down, despite the sudden desperation in his voice. “I am. Now, do you want to tell me what it is?”
