01 Unearthly

by Cynthia Hand

  I’ve stumbled into the land of pretty people. And here I thought I’d come from the land of pretty people. You know how sometimes on TV they’ll show you a picture of a celebrity from high school, and that person looks perfectly normal, not really any more attractive than anyone else? And you think, what happened? Why is Jennifer Garner so hot now? I’ll tell you: money happened. Facials, fancy haircuts, designer clothes, and personal trainers happened. And the kids at Jackson Hole High had that celebrity polish, except for the few here and there who looked like genuine cowboys, complete with Stetsons, pearl buttons on their western-style plaid shirts, too-tight Wranglers, and scuffed cowboy boots.

  Plus, the curriculum is fancy. Sure, you can take an art class, if you feel like learning to draw, but you can also take AP Studio Art, which prepares you to enter Jackson Hole’s lively art scene. There’s a class called Power Sports, which teaches you how to tune up your motorcycle, ATV, or snowmobile. You can learn how to start your own business, draft your dream house, develop your passion for French cuisine, or take your first steps toward becoming an engineer. Just in case you want to get your pilot’s license, the school offers a couple courses in aerodynamics. The world is your oyster at Jackson Hole High.

  It’s definitely going to take some getting used to.

  I thought the other students would be excited to see me, or curious at the very least. I’m fresh meat, after all, and from California, and maybe I have some big-city wisdom to offer the natives. Wrong again. For the most part, they completely ignore me. After I make it through three periods (trigonometry, French III, College Prep Chemistry) where nobody even bothers with a simple howdy, I’m ready to dash for my car and drive straight back to California, where I’ve known everybody for forever and they’ve known me, where right this minute my friends and I would be dishing about our holidays and comparing schedules, and I’d be pretty and popular. Where life is ordinary.

  But then I see him.

  He’s standing with his back to me near my locker. A surge of electricity zings through me as I recognize his shoulders, his hair, the shape of his head. In a flash I’m in the vision, seeing him both in the black fleece jacket among the trees and for real, just down the hall simultaneously, like the vision is a thin veil laid on top of reality.

  I take a step toward him, my mouth opening to call his name. Then I remember that I don’t know it. Like always, it’s as if he hears me anyway and starts to turn, and my heart skips a beat when I don’t wake up but see his face now, his mouth curling up in a half smile as he jokes with the guy next to him.

  He glances up and his eyes meet mine. The hallway melts away. It’s only him and me now, in the forest. The vision comes from behind him, the fire on the hillside roaring toward us, faster than it could ever possibly happen.

  I have to save him, I think.

  That’s when I faint.

  I wake to a girl with long, golden brown hair sitting on the floor next to me, her hand on my forehead, talking in a low voice like she’s trying to calm an animal.

  “What happened?” I look around for the boy, but he’s gone. Something hard pokes into my back, and I realize I’m lying on my chemistry book.

  “You fell,” says the girl, as if that isn’t obvious. “Do you have epilepsy or something? It looked like you were having some kind of seizure.”

  People are staring. I feel the heat rising in my cheeks.

  “I’m okay,” I say, sitting up.

  “Easy.” The girl jumps up and reaches down to help me. I take her hand and let her haul me to my feet.

  “I’m kind of a klutz,” I say, like that explains it.

  “She’s okay. Go to class,” the girl says to the kids who are still gawking. “Did you eat this morning?” she asks me.

  “What?”

  “Could be a blood sugar thing.” She puts her arm around me and steers me down the hallway. “What’s your name?”

  “Clara.”

  “Wendy,” she says in response.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The nurse.”

  “No,” I object, breaking free of her arm. I straighten and attempt to smile. “I’m fine, really.”

  The bell rings. Suddenly the hallway’s deserted. Then from around the corner bustles a plump, yellow-haired woman wearing blue nursing scrubs, walking fast. Behind her is the boy. My boy.

  “There she goes again,” Wendy says as I wobble into her.

  “Christian,” orders the nurse quickly as they rush toward me.

  Christian. His name.

  His arm comes under my knees, and he lifts me. My arm is around his shoulder, my fingers inches away from the spot where his neck meets his hair. His smell, a mixture of Ivory soap and some wonderful, spicy cologne, washes over me. I look up into his green eyes, so close that I can see flecks of gold in them.

  “Hi,” he says.

  Heaven help me, I think as he smiles. It’s just too much.

  “Hi,” I murmur, looking away, flushing to the roots of my loose, very-orange hair.

  “Hold on to me,” he says, and then he’s carrying me down the hall. Over his shoulder I see Wendy watching me, before she turns and walks the other way.

  When we reach the nurse’s office he puts me down gently onto a cot. I do my best not to gape at him.

  “Thank you,” I stammer.

  “No problem.” He smiles again in a way that makes me glad I’m sitting down. “You’re pretty light.”

  My jumbled brain tries to make sense of these three words and put them in order, with little success.

  “Thank you,” I say again, lamely.

  “Yes, thank you, Mr. Prescott,” says the nurse. “Now get to class.”

  Christian Prescott. His name is Christian Prescott.

  “See ya,” he says, and just like that, he’s walking away.

  I wave as he rounds the corner, then feel like an idiot.

  “Now,” says the nurse, turning to me.

  “Really,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  She looks unconvinced.

  “I could do jumping jacks—that’s how fine I am,” I say, and I can’t wipe the stupid smile off my face.

  Thus I arrive at Honors English late. The students have pulled their chairs into a circle. The teacher, an older man with a short, white beard, motions for me to come in.

  “Pull up a chair. Miss Gardner, I presume?”

  “Yes.” I feel the whole class staring directly at me as I grab a desk from the back of the room and drag it toward the circle. I recognize Wendy, the girl who helped me in the hall. She scoots her desk over to make room for me.

  “I’m Mr. Phibbs,” says the teacher. “We’re in the middle of an exercise that’s largely for your benefit, so I’m glad you could join us. Everyone must give three unique facts about themselves. If anyone else in the circle has one in common, they raise their hand, and the person whose turn it is has to choose something else. We’re currently on Shawn, who was finishing up by claiming that he has the most . . . rocking snowboard in Teton County. . . .” Mr. Phibbs raises his bushy eyebrows. “Which Jason here contested.”

  “I ride the beautiful pink lady,” brags the boy who I assume is Shawn.

  “No one can argue that’s unique,” says Mr. Phibbs with a cough. “So now we’re on to Kay. And say your name, please, for the new girl.”

  Everyone looks to a petite brunette with large brown eyes. She smiles as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for her to be the center of attention.

  “I’m Kay Patterson,” she says. “My parents own the oldest fudge shop in Jackson. I’ve met Harrison Ford lots of times,” she adds as her second thing, “because our fudge is his favorite. He said that I look like Carrie Fisher from Star Wars.”

  So she’s vain, I think. Although if you dressed her up in a white gown and put the cinnamon-roll buns on either side of her head, she really could pass for Princess Leia. She’s very attractive, definitely one of the pretty people, with a peaches-and-cream
complexion and brown hair that falls past her shoulders in perfect curls, so shiny that it almost doesn’t look like hair.

  “And,” Kay adds as her final touch, “Christian Prescott is my boyfriend.”

  I dislike her already.

  “Very good, Kay,” says Mr. Phibbs.

  Next is Wendy. She’s blushing, obviously mortified to be speaking in front of the entire class about herself.

  “I’m Wendy Avery,” she says with a shrug. “My family manages a ranch outside Wilson. I don’t know what else is that unique about me. I want to be a veterinarian, not a big surprise because I love horses. And I’ve made my own clothes since I was six years old.”

  “Thank you, Wendy,” says Mr. Phibbs. She rocks back with a small sigh of relief. From the desk next to hers, Kay stifles a yawn. It’s a small, ladylike gesture, but it makes me dislike her even more.

  Silence.

  Oh crap, I realize, they’re waiting for me.

  All the things I’ve been considering fly out of my brain. Instead I think of all the things I can’t tell them, like I can speak any language on Earth fluently. I have wings that appear when I ask them to, and I’m supposed to be able to fly, but I suck at it. I’m a natural blonde. I have an impeccable sense of direction, which I think is supposed to help with the flying thing, but it doesn’t. Oh, and I’m here on a mission to save Kay’s boyfriend.

  I clear my throat. “So I’m Clara Gardner, and I moved here from California.”

  The other students snicker as a guy across the circle raises his hand.

  “That’s one of Mr. Lovett’s unique facts,” says Mr. Phibbs, “only you weren’t here when he said it. You’ll find that there are quite a few students here who have migrated from the Golden State.”

  “Okay, well, let me try again.” Specificity is obviously the key here. “I moved here from California about a week ago, because I heard such great things about the fudge.”

  The class laughs, even Kay, who seems pleased. I suddenly feel like a stand-up comedian who’s just told the opening bit. But anything’s better than being known as the redheaded dorkina who passed out in the middle of the hall after third period. So jokes it will be.

  “Birds are weirdly attracted to me,” I continue. “They kind of stalk me wherever I go.” This is true. My current theory about this is because they smell my feathers, although it’s impossible to know for sure.

  “Are you raising your hand, Angela?” asks Mr. Phibbs.

  Startled, I glance to my right, where a raven-haired girl in a violet-colored tunic dress over black leggings is quickly lowering her hand.

  “No, just stretching,” she says casually, looking at me with grave amber eyes. “I like the bird thing, though. That’s funny.”

  But nobody’s laughing this time. They’re staring at me. I swallow.

  “Okay, one more, right?” I say a little desperately. “My mom is a computer programmer, and my dad is a physics professor at NYU, which probably means that I should be good at math.” I make a pained face. The idea that I can’t do math is bogus of course. I’m good at math. It’s a language after all, which is why Mom understands the way computers talk to one another without having to work at it. And probably why she was attracted to Dad to begin with, who’s like a human calculator even without a drop of angel blood running through his veins. Jeffrey and I both find it ridiculously easy.

  This doesn’t get a laugh, either, just a pity chuckle from Wendy. I’m apparently not cut out to be a stand-up comedian.

  “Thank you, Clara,” says Mr. Phibbs.

  The last student to name her three things is the black-haired girl who looked at me so attentively when I mentioned the weird thing with the birds. Her name, she says, is Angela Zerbino. She tucks her side-swept bangs behind her ear and lists her three unique things quickly.

  “My mother owns the Pink Garter. I’ve never met my father. And I’m a poet.”

  Another awkward silence. She looks around the circle like she’s daring someone to challenge her. Nobody meets her eyes.

  “Good,” says Mr. Phibbs, clearing his throat. He peruses his notes. “Now we know each other better. But how do people really get to know each other? Is it with facts, the specifics about ourselves that distinguish us from the other six and a half billion people on this planet? Is it our brains that make us different, the way each person is like a computer programmed with a different mix of software, memories, habits, and genetic makeup? Is it what we do, the actions we take? What would your three things have been, I wonder, if I’d told you to name the most defining actions you have taken in your life?”

  I see a flash of the fire in my mind’s eye.

  “This spring we’ll be spending a lot of time discussing what it is to be unique,” continues Mr. Phibbs. He stands and hobbles over to the small table at the back of the room, where he picks up a stack of books and begins to pass them out.

  “Our first book of the semester,” he says.

  Frankenstein.

  “It’s alive!” yells the guy with the pink lady on his snowboard, holding up his book as if he expects it to be struck by lightning. Kay Patterson rolls her eyes.

  “Ah, you’re channeling Dr. Frankenstein already.” Mr. Phibbs turns to the whiteboard and writes the name Mary Shelley in black marker, along with the year 1817. “This book was written by a woman not much older than you are now, who was reflecting on the battle between science and the natural world.”

  He launches into a lecture about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the impact his ideas had on art and literature at the time that Mary Shelley was writing. I try not to stare at Kay Patterson. I wonder what kind of girl she is, to snag a guy like Christian. And then, since I don’t know anything about him other than what the back of his head looks like, and that he likes to rescue girls who pass out in the hall, I wonder what kind of guy Christian is.

  I realize that I’m chewing on my pencil eraser. I put my pencil down.

  “Mary Shelley wanted to explore what it is that makes us human,” Mr. Phibbs concludes. He glances over at me, meets my eyes like he knows I haven’t been listening to a thing he’s said for the past ten minutes, then looks away.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” he says as he holds up the book, and then the bell rings.

  “You can sit at my table for lunch, if you want,” Wendy offers as we’re leaving the classroom. “Did you pack your lunch? Or were you planning to go off campus?”

  “No, I thought I’d get something here.”

  “Well, I think today it’s chicken-fried steak.” I make a face. “But you can always get pizza, or a peanut butter sandwich. Those are the JHHS staples.”

  “Healthy.”

  I shuffle through the line to get my food and follow Wendy over to her table, where a bunch of nearly identical-looking girls peer up at me expectantly. Wendy rattles off their names: Lindsey, Emma, and Audrey. They seem friendly enough. Definitely not pretty people, all wearing T-shirts and jeans, braids and ponytails, not a lot of makeup. But nice. Normal.

  “So, you’re like a group?” I ask as I sit down.

  Wendy laughs.

  “We call ourselves the Invisibles.”

  “Oh . . . ,” I say, unsure of whether she’s joking or how to respond.

  “We’re not freaks or geeks,” says Lindsey, Emma, or Audrey, I can’t tell which. “We’re just, well, you know, invisible.”

  “Invisible to—”

  “The popular people,” says Wendy. “They don’t see us.”

  Great. I fit right in with the Invisibles.

  Across the cafeteria I catch a glimpse of Jeffrey sitting with a bunch of guys in letterman jackets. A little blond girl is gazing up at him adoringly. He says something. Everybody at his table laughs.

  Unbelievable. In less than one day, he’s Mr. Popular.

  Someone pulls a chair up next to me. I turn. There is Christian, straddling the chair. For a moment all I can focus on is his green eyes. Maybe I’m not so invisible after all.<
br />
  “So I hear you’re from California,” he says.

  “Yes,” I murmur, hurrying to chew and swallow a bite of peanut butter sandwich. The room is quieter now. The girls at the Invisibles table are gazing at him with wide eyes, as if he’s never crossed into their territory before. As a matter of fact, pretty much everyone in the cafeteria is looking at us, a curious and almost predatory stare.

  I take a quick sip of milk and give him what I hope is a food-free smile.

  “We moved here from Mountain View. That’s south of San Francisco,” I manage.

  “I was born in L.A. We lived there until I was five, although I don’t really remember much.”

  “Nice.” My mind races for the right response to this information, some way to acknowledge this amazing thing we have in common. But I’ve got nothing. The most I can come up with is a nervous giggle. A giggle, for crying out loud.

  “I’m Christian,” he says suavely. “I didn’t get the chance to introduce myself before.”

  “Clara.” I put my hand out to shake, a gesture he seems to find charming. He takes my hand, and it’s like my vision and the real world clap together at this moment. He smiles this stunning, lopsided smile. He’s real. His hand around mine is warm and confident, just the right amount of pressure. I’m instantly dizzy.

  “Nice to meet you, Clara,” he says, shaking my hand.

  “Totally.”

  He smiles again. Hot is really not an adequate enough word for this guy. He is crazy beautiful. And it’s more than his looks—the intentionally messy waves of his dark hair; the strong eyebrows that make his expression a bit serious, even when he smiles; his eyes, which I notice can look emerald in one light and hazel in another; the sweetly sculpted angles of his face; the curve of his full lips. I’ve been seeing him from the front for all of ten minutes total and already I’m obsessing about his lips.