“He thought I might be right, especially when I referred to your singing the lead in ‘Must Be Santa.’ It would sound better with just you singing the questions.”
“Oh, so you really have been studying music. Is that your favorite subject?”
“I don’t think of it as a subject. Music, art, poetry are ways to extend yourself, grow bigger and touch stars.”
“Touch stars?” I asked, smiling.
“I would have thought you knew that yourself, Sage.”
“I’m surprised you know my name.”
“A little bird whispered it in my ear,” he said, and reached for my hand and touched my ring. “Interesting ring. Those are dragons, right?”
“Yes. You know what it’s supposed to mean?”
He studied the ring, still holding my hand. “I believe one is supposed to be the dragon of the east, the messenger of heavenly law, facing the dragon of the west, keeper of earth knowledge.”
“How do you know that?”
“Didn’t you see it? That same bird whispered in my ear.”
“Very funny.”
He shrugged. “I’m into that spiritual stuff. I guess you are, too, if you’re wearing this ring.”
I finally took my hand back. “My uncle gave it to me. He bought it in an antiques shop in Budapest.”
“Oh. Well, it’s a beaut,” he said. He was looking at me so intently I had to shift my gaze away.
“Got to move on,” I said.
“We have history now, right?” he asked.
“Right,” I said, and started down the hallway. He was right beside me.
“You haven’t been here that long, either, correct?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t.”
I tried to hide my smile, but I was pleased he had taken such interest in me, enough to ask others about me. I wondered if it was just me or if he had asked about any other girls who had captured his early attention.
“Why did you transfer from your old school? Did you get into some sort of trouble? I don’t imagine you did poorly in your grades, and from what I understand, this school’s not much closer to your home. You’re a pretty good student, right?”
I stopped walking and turned to him. “You know where I live, too?”
“It’s not—”
“Rocket science. I know. Since you’re asking so many questions about me, why were you homeschooled?” I fired back, hoping Kay’s information was correct.
He shrugged. “We traveled a lot. It was just easier.”
“Why did you travel a lot?”
His eyes lit with laughter. “We were being chased.”
“What?”
He widened his smile. “We’re all being pursued by something, aren’t we?”
“Very funny. Where did you live before you came here? Why did you come here to this particular town in Massachusetts?”
“Why, why, why. You didn’t get a job on the school newspaper and get assigned to interview new students or something, did you?” he asked.
“You’re the one who sounded that way first,” I replied, my face heating up.
The testier I was with him, however, the more he seemed to enjoy it. His eyes brightened again, and his smile deepened. His teeth were as perfect as mine, his skin just as smooth and blemish-free. Any stranger looking at the two of us could think we were citizens of a future world, a world without illness and disease, a world in which people never lost their youth. I could imagine us paired to have perfect children, our sex the ultimate, the sweetest any man and woman could enjoy. We each would have the power to bring the other into those instant and delicious climaxes the girls were always joking about, assuring our world that we would produce children with flawless genes.
These thoughts changed the surge of heat in my cheeks to a blush accompanied by a tingling around my breasts. I raised my books higher, as if I had been caught half naked. Now I was the one feeling nervous in the presence of a boy, and for the first time, too.
“We’ll have to postpone the interview. I don’t want to be late,” I said, turning sharply away from him and walking faster.
I thought he didn’t like the abrupt way I had shut him down and deliberately lingered behind me, but he caught up when we were just about at the classroom door and gently put his hand on my left elbow so we would enter like a bride and groom at the altar.
“Touchy, touchy,” he said, bringing his lips so close to my ear I felt as if he had kissed me.
We were the last two to enter the classroom. Everyone was looking at us. The bell rang for class, so I hurried to my desk, forgetting until I sat that Cassie Marlowe had sat across from me in this class. Summer slipped into her seat, glanced at me with those exasperating laughing eyes, and opened his textbook to the exact page we had left off on yesterday, as if he had always been there.
Talk about a new student being prepared from the get-go, I thought. Again, I had the feeling that he could hear my thoughts. He leaned toward me, his eyes fixed on the front of the room as he tapped the page and said, “Peter Murphy clued me in.”
I looked back at Peter. He was his usual oblivious self, already reading ahead before the class even began. When did he talk to Peter? I wondered. Peter and Danny weren’t part of the group of older boys I saw Summer talking with at lunch or in the hallways between classes. Someone must have told him that Peter was the brightest student in our class. At least he cared about his schoolwork. He wasn’t all glamour and flash and another one of those boys who saw school mainly as a playing field for sex and romance.
I desperately wanted to be less obvious about my interest in him and fought to find a comfortable indifference, but I couldn’t help looking at him when he looked away. It was impossible to deny it. Yes, he was very good-looking and sexy, musically inclined, and apparently a good student all wrapped into one new boy. He was almost too good to be true, and that alone warned me to remain cautious.
My gaze drifted to Darlene and then to Ginny and Mia, who hid their infatuation with him as badly as they could hide their frustrations. They were all looking at me as if I had done something terrible to them, their eyes sending tiny darts toward me.
“What?” I mouthed.
They all looked away instantly.
Summer turned to me. I thought he had seen it all, but it was actually more than that. He seemed to understand not only how they felt but also how I felt, how troubled and wounded I was. I didn’t want to lose my new friends for any reason, and certainly not over him. He shrugged and whispered, “Don’t let them bother you. They’ll get over it.”
I felt my heart stop and start. How could he be so tuned in to everything that happened around him, but more important, perhaps, everything that happened to me? His words of assurance and caution also implied that annoying self-confidence of his again. He had instantly concluded that they were upset because I was getting his attention instead of any one of them. Arrogance could use him to sell conceit to humble monks, I thought.
The fear I had sensed when I had first seen him returned in waves. That confidence I had when confronting any other boy in this school was under siege. Where was that maturity, that balance and responsibility, that caused my new girlfriends to accuse me of being too old, more like a chaperone? For the first time, I felt vulnerable. Like anyone else, I could be manipulated, tempted, and drawn into doing things I shouldn’t do. My parents’ warnings now sounded like go-to-your-bomb-shelter alarms.
Get hold of yourself, Sage Healy, I ordered myself. Don’t fall head over heels the first time you get a little attracted to someone. A little? I nearly laughed aloud at the voice of caution within me. I think this is already more than a little. Can’t you feel the way your body trembles when you’re near him? Can’t you sense the rising tide of your own sexuality, making those erogenous places on your body tingle and demand the satisfaction that used to come only in fantasies? I was drifting deeper and deeper into that part of me that defined me as an adult woman. I could sense nothing else. I actual
ly forgot where I was, which almost got me in trouble for the first time.
My teachers were quite fond of me, because I was truly one of the most attentive students in their classes. When they needed someone to provide the answer to a question that would get us moving faster into the assignment, they always called on me. I could sense it was coming, and I was always prepared. So I was genuinely surprised and shocked suddenly to see everyone looking at me, big smiles on their faces, especially the girls who always wanted me to stumble and be what they called “human.”
“Miss Healy,” Mr. Leshner was obviously repeating, perhaps for a third or fourth time. “Are you among the living today?”
The whole class laughed, except for Summer. He just smiled, but then he grew quickly serious, his eyes urging me to recuperate quickly.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Leshner. That was the Treaty of Versailles, ending the First World War on June 28, 1919, which ironically was exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Leshner said. “Exactly the answer I was hoping to get.”
Gleeful smiles fell like late-autumn leaves around me.
That is, except for the smile that blossomed on Summer’s face. As if he was responsible for it, he seemed to be taking more pride in my quick and successful recuperation than I was. I looked down at my notebook and didn’t raise my head again until the bell rang to end the class. Everyone rose almost before it had stopped ringing, just as they did every day at the end of the last class, to hurry out to after-school activities or their rides home. Our principal, Mrs. Greene, called it “something akin to rats deserting a sinking ship.”
Summer didn’t even stand. He sat there, leaning back in his seat and looking forward, as if there was something still happening in the front of the room, something only he could see. After his long pensive moment, he tapped his pen, put it in his shirt pocket, and closed his book. I hadn’t moved. He wasn’t surprised.
“You all right?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
He raised his hands in defense. “Just an innocent question.”
“Something tells me nothing you say, ask, or do is really innocent,” I replied.
It brought that pleased smile to his face. The harder I resisted, the more he thought he was conquering me, I decided. “Need a ride home?” he asked me.
“No, thank you. My mother picks me up every day.” I immediately regretted mentioning my mother, knowing he had lost his.
“Well, maybe some other time when she’s too busy or there’s a conflict. I have a car.” He stood up.
“You have a driver’s license?”
“A car wouldn’t be much good to me without it,” he said, grinning.
“How old are you?” I asked, also standing.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “Because of my birthdate, the school I did attend once, before the homeschooling, wouldn’t admit me to first grade when I should have been. That put me a year behind, and then, because I was out of the country for a number of years, I didn’t get the credits I needed to march along with others about my age.”
“So? How old are you?”
He shook his head at my persistence. “I’m seventeen,” he said. “But keep it a secret.”
“I don’t think anything about you will be a secret too much longer,” I told him, and started out.
He walked alongside me. “What about you?” he asked in the doorway.
“What about me?”
“Are all your secrets known?”
“I don’t have any secrets.”
“Oh, you do,” he said. “You do. See you tomorrow, Sage Healy,” he added, with that know-it-all smile blossoming on his face again.
I watched him walk off to catch up with Jason and Ward, who had just turned into the corridor. They patted him on the shoulders, and they continued on like the Three Musketeers. He made friends as easily as changing from one jacket to another, I thought.
When I reached the school exit to the parking lot, I saw my knot of friends waiting for me, looking like they were ready to pounce on me and pull out my hair strand by strand.
“Well?” Ginny asked first.
“Well, what?”
“Did he ask you out or anything?” Mia demanded.
“He asked me if I needed a ride home,” I confessed.
“I just knew it would be you,” Kay said. “I watched him all day. Every chance he got, he looked at you.”
“What else did you find out about him?” Darlene asked.
“Not much. Just that he’s traveled a lot. You all know he’s going to be the choral accompanist, right?”
“We heard,” Ginny said, the corners of her mouth dipping. “Serves me right for not practicing do-re-mi.”
“With Sage around, it wouldn’t have helped you,” Kay said, her voice dripping with envy.
“I have no idea whether his offering me a ride home means anything. Don’t jump to conclusions,” I said. “I’m probably not his type.” I couldn’t believe I was trying to make them feel better by putting myself down. How had it come to this so fast?
“Please,” Mia said. “If you’re going to play anything in this drama, don’t play the innocent one. At least, not with us. He might like that, I guess, but it doesn’t work with us.”
“You’re making too much of this—and of him,” I said, now feeling some anger. “If you want to learn a lesson from all this, it’s don’t be so obvious, and don’t let any boy know how much you like him too quickly.”
Where those words came from, I did not know, but they all dropped their jaws and widened their eyes.
“Advice to the lovelorn from Miss Perfect,” Kay muttered.
“I’m hardly Miss Perfect. Gotta go. My mother’s waiting,” I said. “Talk to you later.”
I hurried out. My mother was there watching for me with the usual look of expectation on her face, anticipating something new, something she feared to learn or had foreseen. I debated whether I should mention Summer Dante so soon, but he settled that question for me when he drove by on his way out of the parking lot. He beeped his horn and waved, a gleeful smile hoisted like a flag of victory on his face.
My mother turned and watched him go. “Who was that?” she asked immediately when I got into the car.
“A new student. He’s a very talented pianist and is going to be the accompanist for our chorus.”
“Was this his first day?”
“Yes.”
She started out of the parking lot. “Do you like him?”
“He’s a little annoying,” I said.
“Why?”
“He comes off as arrogant at times, but he is very intelligent.”
“What grade is he in?”
“Ours.”
“And he’s driving?”
“It’s a long story,” I replied, hoping she would end the interrogation. For some reason, answering questions about him was irritating me now. Perhaps it was because of what I had just gone through with my girlfriends, who were so awash in jealousy they could have torn me apart. In far less civilized times, females probably did tear one another apart over a chosen male. Kay did tell me we were all always in competition. I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
“ ‘It’s a long story?’ People always use that expression when they don’t want to tell you something,” my mother said.
“I don’t know everything about him, Mother. He told me a little. He was denied admission to first grade because of his birthdate, and then, because of his family traveling and his attending foreign schools and then being homeschooled, our school placed him in our class.”
“Traveling and attending foreign schools? What do his parents do?”
“He has only his father, who’s apparently a romance novelist.” I hesitated about saying his nom de plume. Something told me to wait on that, that it would stir up some deeper inquisition and more warnings, and despite how I had reacted to him at the end of the day, I didn’
t want to be told he was off-limits.
“What happened to his mother? Divorce?”
“I don’t know for sure.”
“How old is he?”
“Seventeen.”
“Seventeen in the tenth grade? That’s awkward. I feel sorry for him,” she said.
“Believe me, Mother, if there’s one thing Summer Dante doesn’t need or want, it’s anyone’s pity.”
“Summer Dante? That’s his name?”
“Yes.”
She was thoughtful for most of the ride home, and when we pulled into our driveway, she turned to me and said, “Be careful. He sounds like he’s far too sophisticated for you and your girlfriends.”
“I know. But I don’t think he’s that sophisticated. I think he is really desperate.”
She turned and actually smiled at me. “Desperate? Why desperate?”
“I think he hasn’t had a chance to have any real friends. He’d hate me for saying it, but I think he’s lonely.”
She watched the garage door go up and then nodded. “Even more reason to be careful,” she muttered.
“You’ll have me trembling with fear every time I meet someone who’s not perfect in your eyes,” I replied with unusual terseness.
She looked at me in annoyance but said nothing. However, I knew the topic would come up as soon as my father came home. When I came down to help with dinner, they were both sitting in the kitchen and looked up quickly.
“Hey, Sage,” he began. “Hear you might be fond of a new boy?”
“I didn’t say I was fond of him. I said he was very talented musically and very intelligent.”
“And lonely,” my mother reminded me.
“That’s just a feeling about him. Maybe I’m wrong. He just entered our school, Dad.”
“Good-looking? As good-looking as I am?” he asked, smiling.
“Yes,” I said, so quickly and so firmly his smile froze.
“And what does he think about you?”
“He thinks I’m too touchy, too sensitive, too inquisitive, and maybe even spoiled.”
“Sounds like a perfect beginning to a relationship,” he joked, but my mother didn’t smile.
“Let’s get started on dinner,” she told me.
At dinner, my father talked about Uncle Alexis and Aunt Suzume’s arrival on Saturday. “Aunt Suzume is very interested in getting to know you,” he said.
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