Jim pouted. “Aw, you’re just not cool.” He spotted Adrian at the end of the corridor and yelled, “Hey, Adrian, whatcha think, man?”
Adrian fixed a polite smile on his face. “Well, rap serves an important societal purpose—”
Jim blew a raspberry. “Shit. You don’t have an ounce of cool in your body, man.” He swiveled and ran down the hall, whooping like an air raid siren. “Nerd alert! Nerd alert!”
Behind him, Mira rolled her eyes. Adrian kept the smile, now slightly stiff, steady on his face. He didn’t want to lose this job. His life depended on it.
Elisa
Sumiko was waiting at Elisa’s locker the next morning. “So, how’d it go?”
Elisa pulled out her physics book. Fluorescent light from the ceiling fixture flashed across the glossy binding and she tipped the book back and forth, admiring the patterns. “How’d what go?”
“Your date! With Adrian!”
“Not exactly a date. We read a play together.”
Sumiko wedged her arm on the wall in front of Elisa’s nose. “What did you talk about?”
“We read a lot of cool lines from Othello. Did you know that many of our everyday expressions came from there? Like ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’? And—Ow!” She rubbed her side where Sumiko had poked her hard in the ribs.
“No, you idiot, I mean what did you talk about. You can’t just have nerded on about some play for the whole time—not even you would do that.”
“The play was the whole point of getting together!”
“You didn’t talk about anything personal?”
“Not really.” Elisa slammed her locker shut. “Well—I did lick his fingers.”
“You what?” Sumiko’s jaw dropped. “You are going to tell me everything, right now!”
“He texted me this morning. He wants to take me to the Fall Festival Fair next Saturday.”
The bell rang then, so she avoided the rest of Sumiko’s interrogation. By the time lunch period rolled around she was starving. It was too wet and rainy to eat outside, so everyone crammed themselves into the cafeteria. Why that place always reeked of overcooked gym socks and old vomit Elisa still hadn’t figured out. Maybe they marinated the socks in those tall vats in the back.
“Uh oh,” said Chloe, “I hope Mario and Ben don’t get into it in here.”
Elisa dumped her books on the table. At the far end of the cafeteria, Ben faced off with a tall, brawny kid.
“That would make Ben’s third fight in a month. He’ll get suspended again for sure.”
“Who’s the other guy?” Elisa squinted. They were too far away for her to see clearly. She was a little nearsighted, but her mother said they couldn’t afford glasses. She’d gotten a pair last year through a free program, but she’d stupidly lost them and wouldn’t be eligible for another until next year.
“Mario Fonseca. He and Ben have it in for each other, as usual.” Sumiko shook her head. “Boys.”
“I hope Ben doesn’t get hurt.”
Sumiko grunted. “Don’t worry. As many fights as he gets into, he’s got a cast-iron head.”
Elisa got in the cafeteria line. As she handed her lunch ticket to the cashier, Adrian came up behind her. “May I carry your tray, Elisa?”
She almost dropped her entire lunch. No one had ever said anything like that to her before. “Carry—? Sure!”
Adrian moved in quickly and managed to snag it before it fell from her hands. Milk sloshed over the rim of her glass, pooling along the edge of the tray and dissolving the blobs of ketchup she’d already spilled. “Sorry!”
“No problem,” Adrian said. He tugged a couple of extra napkins from the dispenser and mopped up the spill with a single swipe. He lobbed the red- and white-smeared napkins into the compost. Her tray gleamed shiny and new. “Where are you sitting?” His gaze roamed over the crowd and settled on Sumiko and Chloe in animated discussion.
“Don’t you usually sit with your friends?” Elisa asked.
“I can do what I want,” Adrian replied, indifferent. He held both trays with one hand and lightly steered her elbow with the other. A tingling jolted her where his fingers made contact with her skin. His grip was unexpectedly warm and firm. “Besides, I needed to know if you got my text.”
“I’m sorry. The bell rang before I could answer.” What an idiotic excuse.
“All you have to do is say yes now,” he murmured in her ear. His breath tickled her skin, and he tightened his hold on her arm. “Please?”
Several girls at a nearby table gaped at them, whispering. She wondered if they thought he was hot. Sumiko would never let her live it down if she said no. Besides, the way he said please was kind of irresistible. “Y-yes,” she squeaked.
He released her and a brilliant smile spread over his face. His eyes crinkled, and she felt like she did when the bakery oven opened and that rich cookie smell poured out. It made up for feeling a little cornered.
Besides, maybe it would be fun.
“What’s up, ladies?” Adrian asked as they approached the table.
Sumiko gestured in welcome at the empty seats. “Be my guest, Adrian. How was the drama club meeting?”
He grinned. “Elisa’s pretty talented.”
Elisa blushed and took a bite of meat. She chewed it thoughtfully, momentarily distracted from the conversation as she tried to figure out what kind of meat it was. Could it be buffalo? She’d heard it was becoming a common source of protein in some areas. She imagined what life must have been like when herds of buffalo roamed the plains, so numerous that they were the main source of meat for humans.
A hard jab in the shins brought her back to the lunch table. Sumiko scowled.
“Yes?” Elisa hazarded, giving the bright smile she often used to cover such moments of inattention.
“I was asking what you thought of the other club members.”
She avoided glancing at Adrian. “Actually, it seems Adrian and I are the only members.”
“What?” asked Chloe. “How can it be a club with only two members?” She snorted. “Sounds more like a date to me.”
Adrian chuckled. “Elisa and I were the only ones who passed the entrance exam.”
“A drama club with an entrance exam?” asked Sumiko. “That’s weird.”
The commotion on the other side of the room got louder. The fight between Mario and Ben, averted earlier, had re-started.
Mario knocked Ben to the floor and said something with a sneer. Ben, his face red, leapt up and decked Mario. Elisa stopped eating, her eyes on the fight. Everyone else was watching, too, except Adrian, who continued to eat his lunch.
“Adrian, are you really going to ignore those guys?” asked Chloe.
He shrugged. “Displays of brute force don’t interest me.”
Elisa blushed and averted her eyes from the fight. Ben and Mario were kind of brutish, punching each other that way. She snuck a glance at one of Adrian’s long, slender hands, and couldn’t imagine it balled into a fist. No, a hand like that was made for something else, something far more graceful. She could imagine him playing the piano, running his fingers over a stringed instrument… or a woman’s skin. She imagined those hands stroking her cheeks, sliding down to caress her throat, fingers resting gently on her pulse point. She swallowed, closed her eyes, and those long, delicate fingers slipped around her neck, pressing her against the wall. She gasped and met his dark eyes inches from hers, something unspeakable in their depths. His hands tightened around her throat. She tried to pull his fingers away, but they were so strong. She couldn’t breathe. His eyes bored into hers, his expression suddenly full of regret and sadness. Her vision started to darken.
She shook herself and focused on the table in front of her. Why would she have such an odd little daydream about a nerd like Adrian? Crazy.
Adrian was still talking. “Deadly force is far more effective when used subtly and with finesse.”
Elisa blinked, and the other girls nodded.
What had just happened?
4
Elisa
HER MOTHER WOULD have spent a full hour insulting Elisa about her preparations for her night out with Adrian if she hadn’t been at her retreat. Although she had finally given permission for Elisa to date this year, it wasn’t without plenty of snide remarks about shameful behavior.
Elisa smoothed a flowered skirt over tan stockings. She had topped her black silk blouse with a fitted red sweater since it was chilly—plus the sweater hid the small mended patch on one shoulder.
She didn’t have spare money for clothes; her mother’s spotty income covered food and rent and not much more. But she’d discovered that if she took the bus to the Goodwill in the wealthy suburbs to the north of town, she could find plenty of inexpensive, quality clothing. The rich didn’t seem to mind getting rid of clothes as soon as they got tired of them, well before they wore out.
The doorbell rang. Adrian, all in black, leaned against the wall, eyes half-lidded, hair tousled. He held a bouquet of deep red roses. Something about his movements made her think of the YouTube documentary on panthers she’d seen last week.
“Elisa, you look stunning.”
“Hi!” she said, blushing and trying to cover it up by acting cheerful. “Oh my God, they’re gorgeous! Thanks!” She took the flowers and breathed in deeply. “Mmm, they smell wonderful! I love flowers, but no one’s ever given me roses before. Thank you so much!” A slow smile curled Adrian’s lips. “Please come on in.”
She left him in the living room and banged open cabinet doors in the kitchen, searching for a vase to put the flowers in. She imagined how he would see her apartment: beige walls streaked with water stains from the leaking toilet upstairs, utilitarian brown curtains covering tiny windows, a vinyl-upholstered armchair patched with duct tape. Her mother didn’t care much about decorating, although Elisa tried to keep everything as clean as she could.
“Who else lives here?” Adrian propped his elbows on the kitchen counter. She hadn’t noticed him entering the room.
“My mother,” she said. “She’s at a retreat right now. My dad left a few years ago. My brother used to live with us until he ran away.”
Adrian’s voice was gentle. “I’m so sorry. Oh.” He tapped one of the rose leaves. “My apologies are needed here as well.” He cupped a hand around a petal.
“What?”
He tilted his hand to show her a spider crawling on his palm. “I didn’t see him there. Please forgive me for bringing unwanted visitors into your home.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, but he had already returned to the living room. He unlatched the window and laid the back of his hand flat against the sill. The spider scurried off his palm and onto the outer sill. He waited until it had vanished into the darkness, then quietly closed and latched the window.
“There. All taken care of.”
“Thanks! That was nice of you.” Wow. He wouldn’t even kill a spider? She’d never known a guy like that. Even Carlos swatted any bugs that got into their house.
“Is that your brother over there?” Carlos’ photos were arranged on a side table.
Her nails bit into her palms. The more she thought about Carlos, the more she heard his warning voice. He collected stupid old-fashioned sayings, maybe from the old ladies at church. “Going on a date? Remember, he won’t buy the cow if he gets the milk for free.”
Adrian squatted in front of Carlos’s photos. Elisa followed reluctantly. She hadn’t ever had a guy inside the apartment. But surely Carlos would have approved of someone like Adrian.
“He looks like you.”
She followed Adrian’s gaze to the picture. That wasn’t what people usually said. “His hair is a different color.”
Adrian straightened. “No. I mean his eyes are kind, like yours.”
She ducked her head so her hair fell over her face. “He was kind. Very good to me.”
Adrian must have noticed her discomfort. “Come,” he said, holding out his hand. “Let’s go.”
They walked downstairs together. Adrian bent to open the passenger door of a low-slung, bright yellow car.
She hung back. They were going to ride in that tiny thing? “What kind of car is that?” she asked. What a stupid question.
“It’s a Lotus Elan. If gods lived on earth, it’s what they would drive.” He smiled.
She had to squat to slide into the seat. Adrian closed the door with a soft click. It didn’t even sound like a regular car door. The seats were upholstered in supple tan leather. She ran her fingers over them—luxuriously soft. A faint smell of gasoline tickled her nose.
Adrian got in the driver’s side and started the engine. The smell of gasoline intensified, and the engine reverberated.
“Aren’t sports cars expensive?”
“Not this one. It’s a 1969 model that I bought for nothing at a junkyard auction. A friend of mine restored it for me.” He ran his fingers lovingly over the polished wood dashboard.
She had never ridden with someone who drove like Adrian. He wove in and out of traffic, accelerating and decelerating rapidly. She felt like she was sitting about two inches above the road, and the car registered every bump. She squeezed the handgrip so hard her knuckles went white.
Adrian asked, “What’s wrong?” He nearly sideswiped a Honda and slipped into a miniscule gap between a BMW and a beat-up SUV.
She gulped at the truck towering over them. “Nothing.”
“I don’t like other cars getting in my way.” He overtook the SUV, darted back into the lane and accelerated through a yellow light.
“Don’t you get a lot of tickets?” She expected to see flashing lights behind them at any moment.
“No.” He shifted gears smoothly and they shot forward. “I have a radar detector and naturally fast reflexes.”
She clutched the handle more tightly.
He put one hand on her arm. “Trust me. I’ll get you there safely.” He ran a red light and cut off another car. The other driver honked furiously. She stared out the front windshield.
“I can tone it down for you if you want.” His voice held a hint of mockery.
“No,” she said, despite feeling that all her muscles had turned to jelly. “I’m fine.”
She didn’t want to check the speedometer, but couldn’t resist a peek. The little needle was creeping towards eighty-five. And it wasn’t kilometers. A car pulled into their lane and Adrian jammed on the brakes. She was thrown forward into the seat belt.
Like a cross between bumper cars and a roller coaster. The image made her smile. Another driver honked at them. “I think you’re making the other drivers angry.”
“We’ll be out of their way soon enough.”
Despite her fear of imminent death, Elisa felt a secret, shameful thrill. They were breaking all the rules and getting away with it. Her bones felt like they had melted, her lungs expanding with fast, hot breaths, her skin bathed in sparks.
She glanced at Adrian out of the corner of her eye. She’d always thought of him as a model student, polite and dutiful. His profile was serene, dark eyes flicking over the road, one hand resting on the wheel, the other wrapped around the stick shift. There was much more than the harmless nerd inside him, something powerful and almost—deadly. Part of her wanted to run away, but he was starting to fascinate her. To draw her in with the gravitational pull of a black hole.
Keisha
Keisha pored over the stack of reports and scribbled another note on a beat-up yellow pad. Vince was cleaning his pistol, rubbing a silk cloth over the firing pin.
“You still studying for your homework assignment?”
“Shut up,” Keisha said without heat, making another notation. “You know we’ll have to memorize all this background before we go in—it’ll be too dangerous to keep notes around.”
“I’ve already memorized my part. Have you looked at the list of sites where they’ve made Rapture arrests?”
A crease appeared in the middle of Keish
a’s forehead. She pulled out a diagram from the yellow pad. “They keep moving them around, of course, but I plotted everything we’ve got on a map of the city to see if they clustered anywhere. Here.”
Vince bent over the map and whistled. “Good work. I didn’t see that pattern. That would suggest we might want to focus our search on the east side.”
Keisha shrugged. “Maybe.” She tossed a report to him. “Did you see the latest mortality figures from Donald Hospital?”
Vince glanced at the numbers. “Shit. It’s getting worse. A lot worse.”
Elisa
The carnival had transformed the vacant lot in back of the mall into a mass of lights, sounds and smells. Straw lay scattered over the ground and its warm, earthy scent reminded Elisa of a long-ago field trip to a farm just outside of town. People laughed and shouted, and off-key carnival music blared from tinny speakers. The smell of popcorn and cotton candy hung in the night air.
She loved the sensory overload of places like this. Adrian took one of her hands in his, his grip warm. She had never held hands with anyone in public before. How could such a simple touch make her body feel like it was buzzing, her skin sparking all over like the lights on the carnival machines?
She imagined Carlos walking beside her, frowning. “Didn’t I tell you to be good?”
“It’s just holding hands,” she protested.
Adrian’s hold was comforting and secure. Carlos coughed. “I suppose he seems like a gentleman,” he said grudgingly.
They walked along a row of game booths, where chattering groups threw balls at small targets, tried to drop objects in arrays of glasses, or tossed hoops over stuffed animals. When she stopped for the third time to watch, Adrian nudged her.
“Do you want one of those prizes?”
She wasn’t used to having money to play these games, and she assumed Adrian didn’t have much either. “I just like to watch.”
“I’ve got plenty of money tonight,” he said. “I’d like to treat you to whatever you want.”
Play at Soul's Edge Page 4
