“Yes!” says Roan with a bounce.
Reggie nods vigorously. “Obviously, I mean, if I can join my own PC.” That’s player character.
Abraham, finally getting into the spirit of things, nods once and says, “Fork yeah.”
“Excellent,” I say. “In that case, Ambient, open the sealed envelope in your character packet and read it. It contains your quest’s instructions. Your adventure is about to begin.”
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CHAPTER 27
LESH TUNGSTEN
I’m sitting in my usual spot, watching the lunch line for Svetlana.
Svetlana. I’ll say it one more time. Svetlana.
Sitting here, I sort of lip-synch it. Not quite a whisper—something quieter. And the cafeteria is bedlam, so there’s no danger of anyone hearing me, except maybe the dreggy freshmen who still sit here at the start of week two, I guess not having found anyone they actually know to sit near, or anyone willing to sit near them.
But I do this anyway: mouth the word. I like the feel of my top teeth on my bottom lip when I struggle to find that seductive v at the beginning. I like the way my tongue taps the roof of my mouth and slides to the back of my teeth, gliding into the gorgeous l in the middle. And I like the way it bounces off the roof one more time, as the name settles into its finish with a gentle n.
When I speak to her—when she’s sitting across from me in this lunchroom—I don’t say her name out loud. At all. It’s like how you’re not supposed to say the name of God or something. And I know by now that her friends and family call her Lana. But I can’t help thinking they’re sorely missing out on feeling her real name in their mouths.
She’s reached the cashier, and her tote is up on the runner where she can get at it. When she looks up—not at me, but at the cashier, and then into the cafeteria and still not at me, but at someone else—I realize I’m not the only guy at a table watching the line and waiting for Svetlana.
Fry is back. He’s being more careful than I am. He’s hunched over his lunch, with both elbows on the table and his chin close to his roast. Every few seconds, he risks a quick look up. This time, Svetlana is watching when he looks, and he quickly gets back to forking roast into his maw.
Forking roast, I think. It sounds like Svetlana, angry about dinner.
She’s done now, and walking toward me. Fry’s still watching, and for a moment I’m ready for anything, but he’s back at his roast, and his shoulders are sagging and weak. He just ate a carrot circle. He grimaces and chases it with more forking roast.
Svetlana’s tray is barely loaded: There’s an apple, and she’s watching it carefully, because it hasn’t stayed on its butt and is now rolling around the tray with every step. There’s the little ceramic bowl of vegetables, the ones they use just for the people who want veggies and don’t want any forking roast.
But who cares about her food. I’m lucky that apple won’t behave, because she’s moving slow, in careful little steps, and watching it, so she’s not watching me, so I can watch her. Forgive me for this:
Her skirt is heavy-looking and long. It usually is. This one is cream colored, and the design—in black and red thread, set along the front and left side—is a skull. A freaking skull! It’s got one eye, bloodshot and wrecked, and a snake crawling out of its mouth. It’s the most metal sewing I’ve ever seen. On top, she’s wearing one of those button-up sweaters—this one is orange. But her hair—I saved it for last, because it’s practically silver today as she stutter-steps past the big cafeteria windows and it catches the late-morning light.
She reaches me and puts down the tray. It takes ages, and she doesn’t breathe. The apple survives.
“Hi,” she says, half word, half sigh of relief. She takes off the sweater and drapes it over the back of the chair before sitting down. It’s a terrible match: Svetlana’s body and grace and homemade skirt, and the aluminum and plastic red lightweight chair.
“Your apple’s okay?”
She nods, slow and serious.
“Fry was watching you,” I say. I don’t say, “too.” I don’t say, “I wasn’t sure you’d sit with me.” The french fries on my plate—I’d forgotten about them while watching her walk toward me—are ice-cold and limp.
This was the wrong thing to say. Her playful seriousness—concern over the apple—falls away, and she slumps, crosses her arms on the table in front of her, and leans on her elbows. Her hair drapes over her bare muscular shoulders: her shawl.
Silver Priestess Shawl of Sunlight (+10 spirit)
“He sent me flowers.”
“Wow,” I say, because I’m a genius at conversation.
It’s good enough, and she nods, this time mournfully. “I’m not sure what to do about it. I mean, I was pretty clear, right?” She proceeds to tell me about his forlorn visit to her home and her bedroom—which makes me a bit queasy—and her in-no-uncertain-terms rebuff (her word). “Obviously I wasn’t clear enough.”
“Has he talked to you today?”
She shakes her head, just a little. Her shawl of sunlight is undisturbed. Her face shifts a bit as she sets her eyes on mine—I think for the first time since she sat down. Her mouth is twisted. Her eyes are suspicious slits.
“I’m not a hundred percent certain they were from him,” she says.
I lean in for more, and then lean way back. “Whoa,” I say. “They’re not from me.”
She cocks her head.
“That’s what you meant, right?” I say. “You meant they could be from me?”
“It occurred to me,” she says in a secret voice, an admittance. “But that would be ridiculous.”
“Totally,” I say. “I don’t even know where you live.” That’s not entirely true.
“And you’re not a creepy stalker.”
Also not entirely true. Internet stalking is a type of stalking.
“And we don’t have a history in the rain,” she says.
“The rain?” I say, and she leans back. Her hair falls from her shoulders. This is a shame, because I was loving the silver shawl effect, but it’s also quite nice, because her amazing shoulders are bare again, and they’re nice too. She shivers.
“The card with the flowers,” she says. “It wasn’t signed, but it said something about us—the sender and me, I guess—in the rain.”
“Ah.”
“And Fry and I were in the rain the weekend before last,” she goes on.
“Why?”
A glare. “I would rather not explain that,” she says, and it’ll have to be good enough, but my insides are twisting and I’d like to puke. Do these two have a real history? Did they have some kind of biblical hookup in the rain?
I’m thinking about Svetlana in the rain now, under the moon. Her hair is wet and clings to her bare shoulders. Her heavy skirt weighs a ton when it’s soaked, so she pulls it off and lets him lower her to the grass. The grass is tall and emerald green, and they’re under the canopy of a colossal tree, and not far off are the dandelion-colored pigs and sable young tigers of the starting zone.
I might have the wrong Svetlana. One v. Two v’s. My head swims. There’s no more blood in it.
“It’s nothing major,” she says. “Just embarrassing.”
She doesn’t know embarrassing. Embarrassing is that I can’t get up from this table because I’ve been fantasizing about a seven-foot-tall imaginary silver-haired priestess getting buck-wild with a senior boy whose name means “submerge in boiling oil.”
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CHAPTER 28
SVETLANA ALLEGHENY
What is wrong with me?
That’s a rhetorical question for now. I’ll put it t
o Roan eventually, once I tell her what’s been going on. I don’t know why I’ve been so slow to do that.
Of course I do. I know exactly why. I have lunch on my own this semester. I expected to spend the time sketching, writing encounters, developing new and more fearsome monsters and demons and warring enemies. Instead I’ve spent my lunches thus far sitting across from the very same boy in black who sent me tumbling from my bike only a handful of days ago, and at the same time sent my favorite gaming spiral notebook into the gutter.
And now I’m letting him believe some very horrible things. I’m implying that Fry and I have some kind of sordid past—which oh my gosh we very definitely do not—because … what? I want to make him jealous? Who have I become? If you’d asked me a week ago what I think about the miscreant across the table, I would have said just that: he’s a miscreant. But this weekend—was it the flowers?—something shifted. I believed he had feelings for me, if only for an instant, and now they’ve grown in my heart, and flipped around, and here I am, doing my best not to stare, while his face goes red.
I once thought his face, too old for his age, was an affront. Now I find it adorable. I once thought his black gear and his sullen temperament were indicative of his outlook, a predetermined hatred of every situation and every person. Now I see them as a shield—a wall that is practically begging for a girl to tear it down, brick by brick. Is this the most nauseating thing you’ve ever heard?
Now I’m desperate to talk to Roan about this, though I know she’ll have no great experience to draw upon, because she is one of those great observer types. You’ve no doubt met some, though you might not know it. These people see everything, and they record everything, and they have insight into the motives of people they’ve never spoken a word to. That is Roan’s secret power. She hides it well, bouncing all over her chair, shuttling around the school’s hallways, her tiny frame lost in the sea of taller, older students, only revealed as a beautiful Brillo of orange, sometimes accented with a handful of green barrettes.
I can only now imagine the goings-on inside Lesh’s brain as he fumbles with the vagary I have just dropped in his lap. He doesn’t speak. He can hardly look at me. He shrugs and stabs his plate of meatballs with a plastic fork.
“So,” I say in as casual a manner as I can manage, “I want to ask a favor.”
“Really?” he says, and he pops the little ball of pork and beef extra parts, sautéed in a creamy gravy and doused in something like berry sauce, into his mouth. He chews, one cheek much bigger than the other.
I nod once, and then launch into a speech that I might have prepared to some degree last night and then again this morning on the ride to school to the point of distraction. “There are a couple things I know to be true about metalheads.”
“Careful,” he says.
“They wear a lot of black,” I say, which he cannot deny. “Also, they seem to be into skeletons and the undead generally, and on a related note, swordplay and dragons, et cetera.”
“We could probably debate that as a generality,” he says, “but go on.” And he pops another meatball.
“And you didn’t seem completely put off by the sundry scribblings in my notebook the other day.”
“Right … ,” he says, and I read the slightest hint of Backing away slowly in his tone.
I’ve gotten through the crux of my spiel without quite the vigorous reaction I’d counted on, so I skip ahead a bit in the face of his growing animosity and drop the favor: “Come to a Gaming Club meeting after school tomorrow.”
“Gaming Club?” he says, leaning back in his chair, like it’s some major affront to even be invited.
“Um, should I take your obvious offense as a no?” I say, and I push my tray of cold steamed vegetables an inch or so away from me toward the middle of the table between us.
“I’m not offended,” he says, and he gets all shuffley in his chair, a move I haven’t seen him do before. He sweeps one of the two remaining meatballs across the plate in a vain attempt to scoop up as much of the remaining gravy and berry sauce as possible. He’s not touching the fries, so I snag one and bite its head off. “I’m just a little surprised.”
“Why?”
He cuts the last meatball in half, setting himself up to test Zeno’s paradox: if he keeps cutting the remaining meatball quantity in half, he will never run out of meatball. “Because that’s your thing.”
“Right …”
“And I don’t think I’d fit in with those …” He stops and chomps the half ball, then goes back and cuts the remaining half ball in half, as I predicted. We could be here a very long time, so I hope the mood improves.
“Those what?”
“People.”
“Ah,” I say, and I lean back and cross my arms. “You were going to say ‘people.’”
“What did you think I was going to say?”
I look at the ceiling, like I have to think about it. “I don’t know … nerds? Wonks? Geeks? Dweebs?”
“Come on, Svetlana,” he says, and I think it’s the first time he’s said my name out loud, and the first time I’ve heard anyone say my full first name in forever, outside of the occasional teacher or sub on their first day meeting me. Those aren’t exactly flutter-inducing. This is. “I don’t think that about you. You have to know that.”
And I do. “Okay, so what do you mean?”
“I mean they’re probably smart,” he says, slipping the tiny speck of meatball into his mouth and leaning over his plate, considering the remaining speck and its divisibility. “They’re probably already your best friends. They’re probably … happy.”
I think of Roan—she is—and Reggie—he’s not— and Abraham—he’s just angry about something. Heaven knows what.
“Yeah, they’re my friends,” I admit. “But you are too.”
He doesn’t look up, but he does smile, and he does poke the last speck with one tine and he does eat it, abandoning Zeno like every decent philosopher since Zeno. “All right then.”
“Yeah?” I say, no doubt visibly pleased. “I am so glad.”
He nods one time, pleased to have pleased me, I think, and I—like a moron—add, “If we don’t get a fifth member soon, we lose our club status.”
“Ah,” he says, dropping his fork on his plate.
“Oh no!” I say, doing my best to recover. “I would have invited you anyway! It’s just that it’s an emergency now.”
“No, it’s fine,” he says with a little one-shoulder shrug and a smile that looks as real as the veneer on this cafeteria table. “I’ll be there. I’ll be the club savior, right?”
I smile back, and mine’s real, but it’s not the smile of pleasure I had a moment ago. Instead I feel like I miss him, like he was with me a second ago, and now he’s backed off again, behind his brick black wall. In a few minutes the bell will ring, and Lesh will nod at me as he gets up and pulls up his headphones, and I’ll spend the night and the morning wondering again if he’ll show up for lunch.
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CHAPTER 29
LESH TUNGSTEN
The last bell has rung, so I head for the exit to find Greg for the walk home. I step into the front hall, still obsessing over whether Svetlana wants me to join this club of hers or just needs any warm body to fill a chair, and when I look up from my shoes, Jelly’s walking right at me.
The hall is nearly empty, and she’s walking right at me, and her hips are amazing and her jeans are low and her hair is spiked and up. Her goddamn navel—pierced with a fang-shaped silver stud I’ve done my best not to stare at a hundred times—is exposed and amazing. And she’s smiling at me … I think. I can’t quite look at her directly, after a quick nod of acknowledgment, because it’s like staring at the sun. She’s the hottest girl offline and instead of nodding back, or waving, or saying “hey�
� and taking the first turn off the front hall that becomes available, she is still coming right at me.
This is something I’ve always wanted to see. We’ve never been close, me and Jelly, though we have been hanging out in the same general circle for the last year and half. And god knows I’ve stared at her plenty. She’s caught me more than once.
Maybe I’m taller now. Maybe looking eighteen at sixteen has its advantages, because this (in the movie in my head) slow-mo walk toward me, with hips swinging and hair bouncing and lips pouting and stomach bare, wouldn’t have happened last year. I know this because it didn’t happen last year.
“Lesh,” she says, and she’s running at me now, like a complete nut, with her booted feet slamming into the ground with each step, shaking the whole of the earth like a charging orc. “Lesh. Lesh. Lesh,” she says, repeating my name with every thump of her boot on the hallway floor, and then she leaps and lands in front of me, claps a hand on each of my arms. “Lesh!”
“Hi, Jelly,” I say, and she says it back in a super-low voice, like I’m Chef from South Park: Hi, Jelly. So I sneer at her, because licking her throat would probably not be okay. She spins halfway so she’s next to me now, and she hooks her hand around the inside of my elbow.
“Walk and talk,” she says. “Walk and talk.”
“Where are we going?”
She shrugs. “Join me for a smoke in front?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
She leads me the rest of the way down the hall and into the sunlight in front and down the hundred steps, and then around to the low wall that runs along the short steps down to the pool entrance. “Help me,” she says, and she puts out her arms like she needs help getting her (amazing) butt up onto the wall, which is total bull, but I oblige, mainly because I don’t hate the idea of slipping my hands between her arms and her chest, and also I’m a little afraid of her. “Thanks,” she says when she’s up there, and she swings her bag onto her lap and digs out a cigarette. “Want one?”
“No,” I say, and she shrugs as she flicks a Bic and lights hers. She drags on it and blows the smoke out of the far corner of her mouth. There’s something about the way she does that—she doesn’t try for feminine; she doesn’t let the smoke out through her nose while giving me a long look; she doesn’t exhale in a narrow stream from puckered cherry-red lips. She does it without interest, without motive. She just does it, in the most natural, utilitarian way possible. It’s as Jelly as Jelly gets. Unless she needs you for something, right now, she might as well be alone.
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