“So that’s it?” Greg says. “One strike, you’re out?”
I cough a little. “I guess, when you’re grounded already and your dad is a high school dropout”—I drop my voice an octave—“who wants better for you.”
“Jesus, man,” Greg says. “How much have you been playing? I don’t see you on that often. You definitely play less than I do.”
The little white-light man appears on the sign across the street, and we’re walking again.
“I’m also not a natural at math,” I say, figuring a little flattery might deflect this a little, “like you are. If I don’t work a lot, it shows pretty quick.”
He nods slowly, wisely, sagely, et cetera. “That’s for sure,” he says.
I cough, just to fill the silence and hear the dryness of my throat, as we reach the opposite curb. Central High looms from the hill in front of us as we walk around the high fence toward the main entrance. We don’t speak for a while. We just listen to the music coming from my headphones and watch the cars at the corner, as they slowly take the turn onto Marshall, to see which will stop and let out classmates.
A girl on a lady’s old-fashioned bike—with a basket on the handlebars and everything—rolls across Lexington as we reach the corner and the light changes. Her dress hangs down and flutters gently in the breeze. A few yards ahead, she drops her feet to stop, pulls off her helmet, and then twists to watch us approach.
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CHAPTER 32
SVETLANA ALLEGHENY
This is a bad idea.
I watch Lesh and his babyfaced friend—the boys in black—approach.
Smile! I try, but it’s weak and it freezes, and I feel like a moron. I’m standing over my bike, with one hand on the fork and the other on my helmet, waiting for Lesh, wishing I’d just waited till lunch, like a normal person, but I wanted to see him, to see what’s on his mind and why he was so weird in front of that girl, and when I saw him loping up—he lopes; he doesn’t walk, he doesn’t stroll, and he doesn’t stagger, except that one time—I couldn’t resist. I should have. My smile isn’t weak anymore, because his lope is amusing. He walks like an emperor penguin. I should buy him a white T-shirt to wear under his trench coat. That would make the disguise complete.
“Hey!” I call out, as if they haven’t seen me already, standing here gaping at them.
Lesh raises his hand and maybe smiles. I’m probably imagining that, since he very rarely does, and the light at this hour can play tricks this late in the year. Also, my wool leggings are starting to itch, and I desperately want to get inside. Drop-off kids are pulling up and climbing out of SUVs and coupes by the dozen now, and they’re all looking at me. I don’t like it. But something on Lesh’s face changes, just for an instant. I’m sure of it. His typical glower—a look he has in common with his short friend and probably seventy percent of the boys at Central—seems to vanish, and I am taking that to be his friendly face.
They’re much closer now, and babyface’s smile is plainly real, in that it is a physical smile and not a trick of the early-morning light, but not real, in that it is tighter, bigger, and obviously sarcastic, so I watch Lesh again instead.
“So,” I say, patting my tote bag—full of notebooks, pencils, and my DM screen: all the goodness that awaits him this afternoon when we begin to chip away at his exoskeleton and bring out the gamer within—“still planning to join us today?”
He drops his head and his cheeks go a little pink. I wouldn’t have thought him capable, and for this guy? For this mini baby Lesh at his side?
Yup, definitely a bad idea.
“For what?” the little one says. He looks at Lesh, and I know what he’s thinking. I knew this was a bad idea, but I wasn’t sure why until now. This boy has never heard of me. He doesn’t know Lesh and I eat lunch together every day. He doesn’t know his best friend—a no doubt lifelong boy in black—is friends with a freaky nerdgirl like me.
I wait, watching Lesh, seeing if maybe he’ll speak up. I grip the fork a little tighter, swivel the post back and forth, desperately wanting to pedal off, right now. Lesh doesn’t speak. He just finally lifts his head and looks at me. You tell him, he seems to say.
“Um,” I say, but I know my face says more. Disbelief. Disappointment. Dysentery. My hair falls over my face, a thin yellow shield. “I’m a dungeon master,” I say. “The tabletop Gaming Club meets after school today.” I’m answering the little one, but I’m still watching Lesh. He could jump in any minute now.
The baby in black twists his pudgy face in judgment. “Tabletop … okay …”
Lesh coughs and elbows him, just a little. “Yeah, I think so,” he says, never catching my eyes. “I mean, yeah, I think I’ll try to make it.”
I stand there and watch the boys in black for a too-long moment. I wish I’d never sat down with Lesh, never let him see my notebook over lunch, never wondered what his hands felt like, never imagined him lying next to me under the canopy over my bed. These aren’t my friends, so Lesh isn’t my friend. These were strangers—dark, cynical, judgmental strangers.
“Listen, don’t worry about it,” I say. “I gotta go. Just forget it.”
“Okay,” Lesh says quickly. It was the out he wanted, I realize, and I turn around and press hard on the pedals, and hope the boys in black will be in the school and far from the front doors by the time I get my bike chained up and make it inside. When I reach the bike rack around the side of the school, I shoulder my bag—it gets heavier every day—and lift out the cloth-wrapped heavy-duty chain at the bottom of the basket. I bend down to close the padlock, and as I stand I spot Roan’s family car—a wine-colored Volvo sedan from before her parents were born—pulling up out front. A comrade in arms will do me good, so I dally a minute, and time my approach to the front doors to coincide with Roan’s.
“Hi, Red,” I say. Roan actually means “red.” In fact, every given name in her family means “red.” Even “garnet” means “red.”
“Hey, Svet,” she says, full of optimism. She slips a hand into the crook of my elbow and pulls me along, up the huge set of steps, at a good clip. We walk into the dry, hot light of the front hall of Central High.
“What are you doing at ten forty-five?” I say as we weave together through the morning crowds, chattering and touching and screaming and shoving in the wide entrance. “Wanna have lunch with me?”
“I can’t,” she says. “I’m meeting with Grimmish in the library today. It’s Tuesday. Independent project.”
Of course. Roan is doing her graduate thesis on the residual effects of Nordic and Welsh mythology on modern children through fairy tales, children’s books, and blockbuster films, and the only exaggeration in that explanation is “graduate thesis.” Anyway I nod, glumly, so she’ll ask why I’m nodding glumly. Even so, when she does ask, I can hardly answer, because we both have to hurry off to our respective first classes.
“Get to room 3212 a little early, Svet,” she says, backing quickly away as we move past the south stairwell, where we have to say good-bye. “Tell me before it starts.”
“If it starts,” I mutter, because it might not, because there’s a good chance the fifth member I’d invited and who’d accepted, thereby guaranteeing our faculty adviser, meeting space, and credit, has just jumped at the chance for an out, which I might have just given him.
I’ll be early to Gaming Club, I decide. Quite early, and I’ll find Roan and catch her up completely. The dungeon master needs some help with this campaign.
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CHAPTER 33
LESH TUNGSTEN
I’m an asshole. I know this.
Lunch can’t
come quickly enough today, because I have to beg Svetlana to forgive me for acting like a tremendous douche to her this morning, with Greg standing there, letting her squirm. I only hope I can explain, but when I walk into the cafeteria as the bell to start skej A lunch sounds through the labyrinthine halls of Central High, I can’t even explain it to myself.
She’s not here yet, so I skip the line, grab a bag of corn chips and a little carton of chocolate milk, and fall into my usual seat to watch the line. From where I sit, I can also see that criminally obnoxious friend of hers, Fry. He’s watching the line too, and he’s watching me, and I can already see where this is going: I can’t believe he still hasn’t learned his lesson, after that whole brouhaha on Wednesday morning, but he looks ready to pick a fight.
I’m popping chips like mad, and I have to force myself not to stare at Fry or the line. She’s not here. I’d see her come in, anyway. I’d probably smell her cucumber-strawberry essence mingling with the steam-table rankness. The mouth spout on the tiny chocolate milk doesn’t open right; its glue is too strong and the paper or cardboard too wet and weak. I have to finagle a tiny hole and force a straw in before I can get a sip, and then it’s gone. It’s about five ounces to begin with. It was never going to last.
I stare down at the empty carton and the almost empty chips bag. This is what I’d dreaded, on the first day of school, and what she saved me from: sitting alone at the end of a table of assorted social rejects. Staring at my hands, at my meager lunch, feeling the weight of my coat on my shoulders and my headphones on my neck and my skin on my bones, on my own at the loser table. When I look up, the cafeteria is settled, the line is gone, and the little hand on the clock over the exit doors makes it pretty clear: She’s not coming today. She saw me this morning, I was a dick, and she’s done with me, probably for good.
Now Fry is stomping toward me from his little stakeout spot across the room. His jaw is set, his hair is too short to move, his little red eyes are slivered in threat.
“Why isn’t Lana at lunch?” he asks, somehow without moving his mouth. I guess the laughing asshattery becomes scowling asshattery when the lovely Svetlana isn’t around. There’s no joking, no snickering, no hyena face. I have a feeling this is the real Fry, and I nod a little, slowly, to myself, because of course Svetlana would know that. Of course she wouldn’t be the type of girl to fall for a generous and jovial facade with this douche nozzle underneath.
Anyway, I shrug. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her today,” which isn’t one hundred percent true, I suppose, but I don’t feel the need to let Fry in on the particular difficulties between Svetlana and me this morning.
“I saw you talking to her today,” Fry says, and he steps a little closer to the table. He’s across from me now, where Svetlana should be sitting, leaning just a little over the table, his belt pressed up against the back of her chair. I wish she were sitting there, so she could throw an elbow and knock him to the ground, where he could ball up with his hands over his groin, wailing.
“Oh yeah,” I say, and I try to smile: Oops. “I forgot.”
“Right.”
“That’s kind of creepy, anyway,” I say, fiddling with my fingers in the empty chips bag. When I find nothing, I pull out my hand and lick my thumb, then crumple the bag and grab the empty milk as I stand up. “Are you spying on her?”
He leans farther and shoves me with both hands on my shoulders. I wasn’t ready, and I tumble backward into a plastic chair and the freshman boy sitting in it. He’s fine; I lose my footing and fall against the table and then onto my side on the floor. “Are you kidding?” I say as I get to my feet, pushing off the sticky tiles.
“I don’t know who the hell you think you are,” Fry says, stepping around the end of the table, “but you don’t get to just step up here like you know her at all and start talking to me like I’m the weirdo. Like I’m the one who walks around here like the trench coat Mafia.”
“What?”
“I’ve known Lana for a lot longer than you have,” Fry goes on, and he gives me another shove. “So don’t act like I’m just some guy who needs to back off. It’s not like that.”
“Okay,” I say, not meekly, but with a sneer and a glance out the window, and it’s obviously sarcastic and belligerent. I get a shove again. This time, I shove back—hard.
Fry’s butt hits the table behind him and he stumbles, but he doesn’t fall. Then he takes a heavy step toward me. Chairs scrape. Voices rise: “Fight.” And he stops, which is a relief. I’m taller than him, but he’s thickly built and could probably drive through me like a train through a garage wall. Mr. Andestic, the teacher on cafeteria duty, is on his feet and walking toward us. I slip back into my chair and Fry looks at the high ceiling.
“Everything all right, you two?” Andestic says.
“Sure,” says Fry, his eyes still up, disinterested and guilty.
“Lesh?” Andestic says, looking at me.
“No problems,” I say, and I grab my trash from the floor at my side and stand up. “I’m just heading out, actually.”
“Straight to the library,” Andestic says, and I nod.
“See ya, Fry,” I add over my shoulder, and I can practically hear his teeth grinding. He wishes he had my carcass in his hands, and my femur in his jaw, crushing it to reach the sweet, sweet marrow.
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CHAPTER 34
SVETLANA ALLEGHENY
Lunch alone. It’s what I intended anyway, right? When this school year started—it was only recently, though it seems like an eternity of drama and Dannons and vasovagal episodes—I loved one thing about my schedule above all else, with the possible exception of Dr. Serrano’s poetry class and Ms. McBee’s drama elective: lunch by myself.
Schedule A lunch is early. No reasonable human being wants to eat lunch before eleven in the morning. It’s really more like brunch, I guess, than lunch. But I was happy with it, because none of my friends were in it, and I could sit in the seat closest to the window and draw and write encounters and knit to my heart’s content. Then Lesh came along—or actually I came along, seeing as the first time we ate together, I sat down across from him, rather than vice versa. The point is today I get my wish: thirty minutes on my own, in a quiet environment, with my notebooks, three pens, and a cast of PCs ready to exist on paper.
I’m filling in Meridel’s torso, wondering how buxom Roan would like her to be, my mind with the thief on the page, only peripherally aware that I’m even in the library, when someone kicks my foot.
“Excuse me,” I mumble, barely taking my eyes off Meridel, not even stopping my pen from moving. But the kick happens again. This time, I look up, and there’s this black-haired girl—ripped tight jeans, belt made of I-kid-you-not iron spikes and leather, a T-shirt cut off above her belly to expose her piercing and emblazoned with a skeleton’s face with its tongue hanging out. For an instant I have time to consider how a skeleton, whose skin and muscle has rotted away so fully that only clean bone remains, could possibly have a tongue. Then she talks.
“Who the hell are you?” she says.
“What?” I say, because I’m a bit shaken by the question.
“What?” she says back, her mouth all twisted, full-on metal mean girl, mocking me. And I recognize her now. This is the girl Lesh was sitting with yesterday after school, on the wall by the pool entrance, when he started this now-twenty-hour policy of treating me like a leper. He must like her. Not that I can’t see why. She’s like a walking advertisement for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.
“What’s your name?” she says, and she leans down, with her hand right on the table in front of me, and gets right in my face. I try to lean away; the smoky stench of her breath isn’t pleasant. More than that, though, I’m getting fuzzy in the chest. I try to take a deep breath, and instead end up wit
h a big whiff of tobacco and coffee and maybe even booze, but it’s not even eleven and we’re in school. I think it must be coming from her clothes. “Are you deaf or something?”
I shake my head.
“Hey, you can hear!” she says. She’s keeping her voice super quiet, but every word snaps like a gunshot. My face is warm. Tingly sweat is forming in every crease on my body. “Here’s the thing,” she goes on, “whatever your name is: I don’t like you. After today—after this very moment”—she presses her finger into the desk with each word, firmly, like a black-nailed hammer—“I would very much like to never see you again.”
“Why?” I say. It’s almost a whisper. The room is closing in like twilight.
“What?” she says. “Did you say something, you little precious butterfly?”
“I said why?”
“Have you been listening at all?” And she moves her face even closer. I can’t lean back any more or I’ll fall off this chair, and the heat and smell of her breath and her clothes, and her arm across the side of my body, holding her up, stiff-elbowed, so she can lean closer and closer to me, are making my vision fuzzy and dark. The sound in the library cuts out like someone’s hit mute and is replaced with the tinny shriek of fear inside my head. “I don’t like you.”
I try to tighten my fists, pump my legs, keep my blood pressure up, but the strength is gone. The heavy tingle in my chest and my armpits and the sweat on my head all go cold and shimmery. It’s like I’m bathed in light, and the mean girl’s face waves and warps into a field of white, and then gray, and then black. She stands, her face now blank, and she swears and looks around. But she’s out of my face now, and so I lean forward, too late, and I’m gone.
I am running along a narrow, thrashing river. My staff, slung on my back, bangs into the back of my legs, and the pebbles of the shore bounce under my feet and lodge in the ankles of my leather boots. The sun is low to my right, and the sky is already going red and purple and indigo from west to east. In the bushes to my left, a violent rustle follows me as I run. I reach a stream and ford it—in one, two steps—and as I do, I glance left and see the beast exit the undergrowth and bound across the stream.
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