“Enough!” Cody’s mom snaps. “Kate, if you can’t keep this nonsense to yourself, you’ll be the one I kick out.”
Kate reels backward as if Cody’s mom just slapped her. “Well, I was hoping I could make you see clearly, but obviously when it comes to this girl you’re as foolish as your son. Did you know that he won’t even hang out with Brent and my Nathan anymore? They’ve been friends since they were four, but this girl comes along and the both of you take up with her, no questions asked, and the rest of us are supposed to what? Just go along with it?”
Cody was friends with Brent, the boy who pulled the fire alarm at school? He never mentioned it in all the times we talked about his friends. My stomach turns over. I’ve been so wrapped up in how much I’ve been through, how much I lost to be here with Cody, that I never stopped to think about what our relationship has cost him.
“The boys say that they walk around school humming and holding hands. One of them almost attacked Brent during a fire drill.”
“No, that’s not true,” I say. But she talks right over me.
“They’re dangerous. All of them. Have you forgotten already that Robert and Lyle almost died when her people shot them during the raid? How can you take her in, knowing that she was part of that?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before she starts gathering up her coat and purse. She heads for the door, but then stops, turns around, and points her finger at me.
“You don’t fool me, girl. If it was up to me and a lot of other people, you and your whole bunch would be banned from this town.”
“What’s going on?” The sheriff is leaning against the doorframe, frowning at Kate. She pushes past him without answering and throws open the door, letting a cold blast of air inside. Bows and ornaments skitter across the table and fall onto the floor.
“We’re watching you,” Kate says to me. “You tell your people that. We won’t let any of you hurt this town.”
In spite of how upsetting her speech just was, I almost let out a hysterical laugh. Here we were afraid of them all that time, and now it looks as if they’re just as afraid of us!
The sheriff shuts the door behind Kate, and the other ladies get busy gathering the fallen ornaments and bows.
“Don’t let her bother you, honey,” the lady closest to me says as she sits back down. “She doesn’t speak for all of us. We’re glad you’re here. We know you don’t belong to that group anymore.”
I smile at her, but I can’t help wondering how many other people she does speak for and if her understanding is only reserved for me, not the Community.
“Ahem.” Taylor clears her throat dramatically. “Lyla? Ready for your date?”
Cody edges into the room and comes to stand next to Taylor. His hands are tucked behind him and his face is beet red.
“What’re you hiding back there?” I ask.
Cody sighs heavily and brings his hand up. He’s holding the strangest bouquet that I have ever seen. It’s made out of socks. They’re rolled up and taped into rosettes and attached to green pipe-cleaner stems. There’s a giant red velvety bow tied around them to keep it together. Cody pushes them at me. He looks ready to run from the room.
“Taylor’s idea,” he mumbles.
“Heck yes, it was my idea! I even Googled how to make it for you.” Taylor steps into the room and holds her phone out, takes a picture. “Ha! They turned out better than I thought they would.”
I look from her to Cody to the sock bouquet. I don’t get it and apparently none of the other ladies do either. We’re all just staring, openmouthed.
“The socks are a clue to where my little bro’s taking you,” Taylor says impatiently. “Oh, for the love of—you’re going bowling.” She takes a step backward and pulls her arm behind her, then swings it forward.
I nod and pretend to know what she’s doing, but it still doesn’t make any sense. The other women start grinning so wide that I have to fight not to laugh.
“You have to borrow special shoes there, so you need socks.” Taylor shakes her head sadly. “My best ideas are always wasted on people who can’t possibly appreciate them. I would die if a guy did something creative like this for me.”
“Seriously. You’d die for a sock bouquet?” the sheriff asks, one eyebrow arched.
“Maybe,” Taylor says, and then she’s blushing as hard as Cody is. After a moment she starts to crack up laughing. “Okay, maybe it’s a little weird.”
I smile at her and then at Cody. “It’s a very cool idea, you guys, thanks.”
How long have they been planning this? At lunch Cody made it seem like a casual thing, spur of the moment. But he must have had the socks before today. I’m a little surprised that Taylor helped him, but then again, she did something similar when Cody and I first met. She arranged a special meeting for us at the hospital while I was there before the raid. I guess technically that could be considered our actual first date, which would make this one a second date, but I’m still counting this date as the first. I was part of the Community back then.
Taylor, her mom, and the other ladies in the room all have their phones out now. They hold them up in near-perfect unison and start snapping our picture, and despite what happened with Kate just a few minutes before, I start to feel excited, nervous all over again.
I’m about to go on a date. For real.
“Ready?” Cody asks. He puts his hand on my back and starts pushing me toward the door.
“As I’ll ever be,” I say.
The bowling alley is a rambling one-story building completely covered in neon signs. The biggest one says BALLS AND PINS over the front door, glowing a sickly green. It’s noisy and dark inside and smells of frying oil and beer. Cody gets us these really awful shoes and then shows me how to toss a heavy ball down this long aisle so I can try to knock down a bunch of pins. It takes a few tries before I get the hang of it, but once I do, I like it. A lot. And I’m good at it too, which is a total surprise.
“How can you be better than me in less than half an hour?” Cody shakes his head as he looks at the scoreboard above us. Music blares in the background. He’s shouting so I can hear him.
“Because I’m awesome. But you knew that already,” I joke as I bring the ball up by my face and take the three steps forward to the edge of the lane. I throw the ball and it rockets down the lane, straight through the center. All but two pins fall down. I look over my shoulder at Cody and grin. All at once I feel strange.
Light.
Confident.
Blissed out.
I can’t remember feeling this way before, even in Mandrodage Meadows. My happiness there seems muted compared to this. This is happy times ten. Pioneer’s not watching and neither is the Community. I feel free.
“You are definitely awesome.” Cody comes up behind me and pulls me into his arms, kisses the top of my head before he leans over and grabs his bowling ball. “But the game’s not over yet.”
He throws the ball. It rolls down the lane, lists to the left halfway down, and drops into the gutter half a second before it reaches the pins. He hangs his head and groans.
“Ha! I think it might be now,” I giggle. I do a silly little dance, so unlike me, but then again so is being better at something than the person I’m with.
Cody takes his ball and faces the lane one last time. He has no chance of winning now. I have one more turn, but he doesn’t. He looks up at me just as he reaches the edge of the lane. “I’m not going to win, but I say we place a bet on this throw.”
“What are the stakes?” I ask, grinning.
“If I get a spare, you have to go with me to the Winter Festival.”
“And if you don’t?”
“You have to go with me to the Winter Festival,” he says, his lips curling up on one side in the most adorable way.
“Um, sounds like you win either way.” I don’t mention that really I’m the one who’s winning. I’ve wanted him to officially ask me ever since his mom mentioned it the first time. Manning the sk
ating rink together didn’t count. I wanted it to be a date the way tonight is. And now it will be.
Cody chuckles. “Hey, I have to win something tonight.”
“Okay, you have yourself a bet.”
Cody doesn’t get a spare. I take my last turn and end up guttering the ball twice because Cody keeps trying to distract me by jumping up behind me and tickling my waist.
“Hungry?” Cody asks when the game’s over. He puts his arm around my shoulders and steers me away from our lane. “I hope so, ’cause I’m starving.”
“I could eat,” I say casually—just as my stomach lets out an enormous growl.
“Sounds like it.” Cody laughs and I do too. I’ve decided dates are awesome.
There’s a restaurant attached to the bowling alley at the far end. We turn in our bowling shoes, then head over there, Cody’s arm still around me and my head resting on his shoulder. The school day and the unpleasantness with Kate feel very far away now, like it all happened weeks ago. There are other students here, ones I recognize from the hallways or some of my classes, but it’s like they don’t realize who I am now that I’m not with the others.
“This place—Bo’s—is my all-time favorite.” Cody looks at the double doors ahead of us. I can’t see inside because the doors have curtains on them—blue ones with a pattern made out of keyhole silhouettes. “Last summer I worked here part-time … that is, until my dad decided he wanted me to work at the station instead.” He doesn’t sound angry exactly, just frustrated. “A few more years and it won’t matter; I’ll be in California and there’s no way I can answer his phones then.”
Cody has always said that he’s heading off to California when he’s done with high school. It’s still a long way off, but this kind of talk makes me wonder where I’ll be when he does. Will I be heading to California too—off to some art school there? Or will I still be living in Culver Creek? I still can’t seem to dream more than a few weeks into the future, because I’m not used to the idea that there’ll be more time than that for me.
When we walk through the door, I understand why Cody likes the restaurant so much. The entire place is wallpapered in movie memorabilia. The booths are oversized, cut into strange shapes, and covered in giant stripes.
“Bo is a huge Tim Burton fan,” Cody says like this explains it. The restaurant seems to be straight out of a dream, or a nightmare, or maybe both. I try to imagine the rest of the Community here and can’t. Anything this different they would definitely see as evil.
“Interesting,” I manage to say. We slide into a booth by the window facing the parking lot. Cody passes me a menu. I’ve never actually eaten at a restaurant, at least not since I was very small. I’ve been staying close to Cody’s house since I moved in, keeping a low profile, so to speak. The sheriff’s gone a lot at dinnertime and the rest of the family seems content with takeout and TV trays on the nights that Cody’s mom doesn’t make dinner. So far I’ve had pizza and pork fried rice and sub sandwiches, but I’ve never ordered anything by myself. Cody’s mom or Cody has done it for me. There are way too many choices here and all of them have weird names. In the end I close my eyes and poke my finger at the middle of the menu where the entrees are listed. I order the one closest to where it lands and then Cody laughs and orders the same thing—a Big Fish sandwich with a side of Oompa Loompa onion rings.
“Bo—the guy who runs this place—was the first person around here to really get what I want to do with my life.” Cody leans over the table and grabs my hand after we’ve ordered. “He let me hang out here a lot on weekends the past few years so I could work on my creature stuff in his back rooms before my mom convinced my dad to let me use the basement. You see that over there? I made that one.” It’s a life-sized model of a pale-looking guy with wild black hair and fingers made of knives, but instead of looking frightening, he looks sad … lonely. He looks the way I felt back in Mandrodage Meadows toward the end, how I feel sometimes even now.
“It’s Edward Scissorhands, one of Burton’s best characters. He kind of reminds me of you, actually,” Cody says like he’s somehow reading my mind. “I mean, you don’t look like him or anything.” His cheeks flush. “What I mean is that he was hidden away from the world for a long time too. And when he finally gets out and discovers it, there’s this great wondering, happy look that he gets sometimes when he discovers something that he loves … and you get it too, like just now when you were bowling.”
“Really?” It’s weird to hear him talk about me this way. And the way he’s looking at me makes me fidget. “So does he ever get used to everything?” I ask, mostly because I feel this overwhelming need to keep the conversation going so I don’t start giggling out of embarrassment. “Edward, I mean?”
“Kind of—I’m not sure if I should tell you—in case we watch it. I’ll spoil it.”
“No, tell me, you won’t spoil it, promise. I’m curious,” I say. I look over at the Edward statue, at his hands. From the looks of him, he had a much rougher road to go than I do.
“Well, at first he does okay and starts using his scissors to prune people’s bushes and then he starts cutting their hair. But then he makes a couple of mistakes and accidentally hurts someone and people run him out of town and he ends up …” His voice trails off. “Maybe this isn’t a movie you should watch.”
The moment goes from light and fun to serious.
“Is it true that you were friends with Brent before? Before I came along, I mean?” I ask.
Cody’s eyes widen. “Where did you hear that?”
“A woman from your mom’s festival committee said that you and Brent and her son Nathan were friends before I showed up. Is that true?”
He lets out a sigh. “We hung out, but mostly during baseball season. We’ve been on the same teams since elementary school. But I wouldn’t call them my best friends or anything. They can be real tools sometimes. I knew that even before you came along … you just gave me a good excuse to distance myself.”
I pick at my napkin, rip tiny pieces from one corner. “Still, I don’t want my being around to cause problems for you.”
Cody moves from his side of the booth to mine and takes my face in his hands. “Let me worry about that stuff, okay? I like having you around.”
“Maybe, but what happens if more people start to feel the way that Brent and his mom and the others feel? Do you really want a girlfriend who has nightmares all the time and has to go to counseling once a week? Sometimes I miss it—the Community. Because I still don’t belong here, Cody. Not yet, not completely … and maybe not ever. What if I can’t be normal?”
Cody puts his hand under my chin, guides it up gently until I’m looking into his eyes. “I happen to think being normal is highly overrated.” He rubs his thumb along my bottom lip before he bends his head to mine and starts to kiss me—right there in the restaurant in front of all the other customers, as if to prove what he’s just said is true.
We’ve kissed before—lots actually—but no matter how many times we do, my stomach always seems to do somersaults and every nerve in my body goes on high alert. I bring my hand up to his face and pull him closer.
“All right, you two, here’s your check.” Our waiter is standing over us. He drops the check on the table and shoots us a “time to leave” look.
Cody lets me go and the waiter rolls his eyes and heads for the table next to ours. I look out the window while Cody gets his money out and pays. Most of the parking lot is shrouded in shadows, all but the first few cars, which are directly under the neon signs outside. I lean in closer to the glass. My heart stutters. There’s a white van parked in the spot facing the restaurant. There are two people sitting inside. Watching me watch them. Were they there the whole time we’ve been in the restaurant? Taking pictures for my parents’ creepy photo album? They saw us kissing just now. I back up into Cody, practically knocking him out of the booth.
The van pulls out of its parking space and slowly drives by the window, close enough
that I can see Mr. Brown in the passenger seat. Jonathan is driving. Both men stare at me, their eyes hard and accusing.
“The Brethren expect you to be pure. They are watching always.” Pioneer’s words fill my head as if the two men have somehow managed to put them there just by staring at me. This shouldn’t matter to me anymore, I’m out of the Community now, but somehow it does, somehow the words still steal away the moment, begin to make it feel wrong.
And just like that, my first date is officially over.
I was brought up in your world. I know very well how depraved it is.
—Pioneer
FIFTEEN
When we open the door to Cody’s house, the first thing I hear is Pioneer’s voice—for real this time. The sheriff and Cody’s mom are sitting on the sofa in front of the TV, and Pioneer is on the screen. I suck in a breath. He’s completely bald. His head is shiny and pale—smooth. He looks old and harder than before. He’s sitting at a table, his wrists shackled and his arms stretched out in front of him. I can’t help noticing that his hands are pressed together palm to palm like he’s getting ready to pray. Across from him is a man in a suit. I recognize him. He’s the same person that interviewed Julie at the hospital.
“Lyla, Cody.” Cody’s mom attempts to get up from the sofa. The wreath she was working on starts to slide off her lap and she has to sit back down to keep it from falling. “Stan, shut it off.”
“No, it’s okay, leave it,” I say. I look back at the screen and we all go quiet so we can hear what Pioneer will say next.
“Mr. Cross. Thank you for agreeing to speak with us today,” the interviewer begins.
Pioneer’s lips curl into his warmest smile, but now that he’s so thin, it’s not nearly as endearing as it used to be. His skin stretches over his cheekbones, sinks in underneath them, and his teeth seem much too big for his mouth. “I’d prefer it if you’d call me Pioneer. I don’t go by that other name anymore.”
Astray (Gated Sequel) Page 13
