by Stacey Jay
It was supposed to be great, if my mom’s romance novels were to believed, so I tried to let the greatness happen. But after a second or two I couldn’t deny that I just wasn’t feeling the mind-numbing passion, or whatever it was, I was supposed to be feeling. It was definitely interesting, tingly, wonderful in its way, but there was something wrong. I was too distracted, too knotted up in my head to relax into what was going on with my body.
And maybe I would always be that way. Maybe I would always be the weird girl who freaked out when her boyfriends tried to get to second base, and I would die alone and childless—because it’s a known fact that baby making involves much touching and running of bases—but I couldn’t worry about that right now. Just like I couldn’t make myself go somewhere I wasn’t ready to go just because I thought I should.
“Stop,” I said, gently pushing at Ethan’s arm.
“Megan, I—”
“Please, stop.” I pushed a little harder, but he still didn’t move his hand, which made my heart beat even faster and a sour taste rise in my mouth. He wasn’t Aaron. I shouldn’t be feeling so anxious, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted my space, and I wanted it now.
“I have stopped,” he said, hand still firmly in place. “I just want—”
“Get your hands off of me!” I yelled, losing my cool. I shoved Ethan’s now-eagerly departing hand away and backed against the car door—my heart racing, feeling angry with Ethan and myself and Aaron for getting me started down this spaz-attack path.
“Fine,” he said, his expression a crushing mix of shock and hurt and irritation. “Just say something next time, will you?”
“I did say something.”
Ethan sighed. “Yeah, you did, but not until—”
“Not until what?”
“Never mind.” He started the car with sharp, abrupt movements that left no doubt he was angry. “Where am I taking you? Back to school?”
“Home. I need to find the paperwork my mom is hiding, and she should be leaving for work right about now.”
“Home it is,” he said, pulling back onto the road and turning the car toward my house. “Though you know your parents are going to get a call from the office if you skip this much school.”
You didn’t seem too worried about that a second ago, I thought. Aloud I said, “Hopefully it won’t take me too long and I can be back to school by lunch hour. But now that we’re pretty sure whoever is sicking these zombies on me is using the living, I can’t waste anymore time. I don’t want to risk hurting innocent people while I’m trying to keep them from hurting innocent people.”
“You’re right. I’ll follow up on a few other things while you’re busy at your house,” he said, his words perfectly nice but his tone telling me there had been serious damage done.
“Okay. Thanks.”
“No problem. Anything to help.” We both spent the rest of the ride in silence. I was trying not to cry, and I guess Ethan was just mad. He kind of looked mad. Or maybe he was trying not to cry too. I shouldn’t be sexist and assume he was too tough to cry just because he was a boy.
After all, if a wretched girlfriend like me couldn’t bring a guy to tears, what could?
CHAPTER 17
The good thing about leading a double life is that there are times when you’re just too busy to stress out.
By the time I ransacked our house thankfully finding the file without too much trouble, raced back to school just in time to join the seniors returning from lunch, finished class, changed into my dance clothes and practiced for an hour and a half, and showered and changed into the ice-skating clothes I’d snagged from the house during my ransacking earlier, I had managed to not think about my dire situation for six whole hours.
Or at least not think about it that much. The coma zombies, my weird blood, the psycho who was trying to kill or frame me, and the chance I could go to jail forever for a crime I didn’t commit were never too far from my mind.
The unread paperwork from my house was like a lead weight in my purse dragging me down to the bottom of an ocean of psychosis. I was jittery and paranoid all day long, torn between the urge to wait for a semi-private moment to read the file and just ripping the darn thing open in the girls’ bathroom in between classes and putting an end to the horrible suspense.
In the end, I decided I would have to break down and read the thing in public as soon as I got the chance. I didn’t have any more time to waste. On my way out of practice, I noticed that my normal beige SA tail had been replaced by a sleek black SUV with tinted windows exactly like the one Kitty drove. It followed me at a discreet distance as I jogged the five blocks over to where we were holding the sweetheart skate. The SUV turned off a few streets before the gravel road leading to the pond, but I wasn’t fooled.
I expected to be snatched off the street and taken into SA custody any second. In fact, when that skin-prickling “watched” feeling started up again seconds after I’d grabbed a spot on the bleachers and begun to tug on my skates, my first thought was that it was Kitty and that I should get ready to run if I wasn’t prepared to rot in a jail cell.
I peeked through the hair falling around my face, scanning the edge of the pond, but there wasn’t a sign of Kitty or anyone from Settlers’ Affairs. Finally, I spotted the source of the prickles—a zombie lurking in the woods on the other side.
It was Cliff. Even concealed by the winter wonderland of twinkling lights strung in the trees, I could tell it was him, but I didn’t make any move to acknowledge his presence, no matter how thrilled I was to see him. I couldn’t risk him being spotted by my Settler tail. Just the fact that he was here, still lurking, watching out for me, was a great sign.
Besides, I had a feeling he would be losing it big-time if he were forced to sit next to me while I laced my skates and Aaron tried his best to look up my skirt.
“Those are really cool skates,” Aaron said, eyes still glued to my hemline. The boy had deliberately chosen the seat two below mine and wasn’t overly subtle in his attempts to get a peek under my red and white kilt.
“Thanks. They’re vintage from the eighties.” I couldn’t freak on him. I still needed my backpack with my parents’ medical records inside and should have known better than to wear a skirt to ice-skate in anyway.
But I’d been trying to follow Monica’s advice and at least pretend I still cared about normal things. And in my normal life I wouldn’t have been able to resist the lure of my kilt with the matching red sweater. With a white turtleneck and heavy knee-high socks, the outfit was warm enough to wear without a coat and looked great with my mom’s red ice skates. I looked fairly cute for a girl on the verge of a breakdown, and I was certain I’d snag a few couples’ skates before the night was through.
Heck, I already had one buyer, whether I liked it or not.
“You’re going to save me at least one song, right?” Aaron finally lifted his eyes as I finished with my laces and pressed my knees tightly together.
“Won’t Dana kill you?” I smiled, doing my best to be friendly, though I really wanted to tell him to give me my backpack and scram. “I mean, you’re the only boy for sale. I’m sure you’ll be in demand.”
And I was sure he would be. Girls were already roaming around, shooting Aaron “yummy, I want” looks even though it would be at least thirty minutes until the DJ arrived to start spinning the tracks for our little soiree. Hopefully Aaron would find one or two who enjoyed his inappropriate touchy-feelyness and they would all live happily ever after, making certain he never touched me again.
But for now, I gritted my teeth and tried to smile when his hand landed on my knee. “I don’t care what she says. It’s just one skate.”
“Okay, sure. Sounds good.” I vaulted to a standing position before his fingers could creep any closer to the hem of my skirt. “But until then I’d love to look at those records. You said you brought my bag?”
“Yeah, I looked all over school for you this afternoon but couldn’t find you anywhere. G
uess you were hiding from me, huh?” he asked, with a weird giggle.
“Nope, just busy.” I smiled, determined not to give Aaron the “you are a creepy stalker leave me alone” talk until after I retrieved my backpack. “But you have it now?”
“I’ve got it in my car. You want to take a walk with me to the parking lot?”
Did I want to take a walk? Hello? Skates? I gave my feet a pointed look. “Um, walking might be difficult.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “I could give you a piggyback ride.”
“Don’t think that would be a good idea in a skirt.”
“Well, you could just put your shoes back on.” He sounded weirdly frustrated, which made me shuffle a few extra inches away, closer to where I’d left my purse.
“Or you could just go get the backpack,” I said, plucking my purse from the bench.
Aaron smiled, but I didn’t miss the vein bulging at the side of his forehead. “Right. I guess I’ll do that.”
“Okay.” I stared at him for a few awkward seconds, waiting for him to go, before pulling out the paperwork I’d snatched from my mom’s lingerie drawer. The medical files weren’t the only reading material on my list, and it was past time for me to get educated about my own case. “Um . . . all right . . . I’m just going to take a little practice skate and work on some reading for the classes I missed this morning.”
“Reading and skating at the same time?”
“What can I say? I’m a multitasker,” I called out over my shoulder as I eased out onto the frozen pond, grateful to leave Aaron behind me. His crushy weirdness was the last thing I needed right now.
The ice was still a little rough, but the machine London’s dad had brought to condition the surface really made a difference. It was almost like skating at the indoor rink in Little Rock, but ten times as beautiful. There was a dusting of snow falling, and delicate white lights hung in the trees surrounding the skating area. Over to the right, the place where we used to build snowmen when we were kids had been transformed into a mini carnival. There were three tents selling yummy-smelling food and two fire-pit things for roasting marshmallows. Everything had come together perfectly, including the attendance.
Thirty minutes to go time, and there were already a few people on the ice and more trickling in from the parking lot. The advance couple skate sales predicted a large influx of boy-type people in the next two hours. By the end of the night, we were going to make the booster club some serious cash. And we’d know who won the fund-raising competition.
Unfortunately, I sensed I wasn’t going to give a crap about any of that once I finished my required reading. It wasn’t just a lack of time and privacy that made me put off reading the paperwork. A part of me didn’t want to know what my parents had been keeping from me. I had a horrible feeling that what was inside this bland-looking beige folder was going to change my life. Forever. And not in a good way.
So it was no surprise when I felt like I was going to throw up or pass out or both as I flipped open the folder and started to read.
The first page of the report was a brief and relatively unsurprising summary of what I’d been charged with. But the second page—instead of diving straight into the evidence and blood samples and all that as I’d expected—contained a three-paragraph report detailing the findings of a paternity inquest.
“Idiopathic infertility, causation unidentified,” I said aloud, focusing on transforming the clinical words under my dad’s name into something my addled brain could digest.
Infertility, duh, I knew what that meant—can’t make babies. I wasn’t so clear on the definition of “idiopathic,” but it probably didn’t matter. The message here was clear. My dad couldn’t have kids, he had “never fathered a child.”
Never fathered a child.
My throat closed up and my entire body went numb, and I knew I had to get off the ice before I wiped out. Thankfully, my spot on the bleachers was free with Aaron nowhere to be seen. As soon as I caught an opening in the crowd, I darted over.
Struggling to take a deep breath, I snapped the folder shut, squeezing it closed until my fingers turned white, as if I could trap the horrible things I’d read inside. But it was already too late. The truth was squirming around in my brain, like some horrible worm set on devouring my happy past.
Dad wasn’t my dad. I didn’t get my athletic ability from him, I couldn’t really have his thumb, and I wasn’t one-fourth Italian. Or if I was, it wasn’t from his genes.
Somewhere out there was another man, a complete stranger, who was the other half of me. But how could that have happened? Mom and Dad were married for years before I was born. Had mom gone to a sperm bank or something when they learned Dad couldn’t have kids?
“Yeah, right,” I mumbled.
I had messed-up supernatural blood. What were the chances I was the product of a sperm bank? Not good. The most likely story was that my mom had cheated on my dad. She’d gone and banged another guy and gotten knocked up while they were still living in California. Knowing my mom—how much she loved my dad and how important honesty had always been to her—it seemed psychotic to even think of her as a cheater, but it would explain so much, especially if . . .
I forced myself to open the folder again and turn past the report proving my father wasn’t my father. On the very next page, things got interesting. The Enforcers had ordered a blood analysis, comparing the blood they had on file for me at SA headquarters with blood found on the hospital beds of patients at University Medical Center’s intensive care unit. The blood type—AB negative—was identical, as I’d suspected. But it also said that both samples had tested positive for the same rare virus, ensuring a nearly one hundred percent probability that they had come from the same person. From there it hadn’t taken SA long to decide who was to blame. After all, they already knew a Settler with AB negative blood who had the virus. Me.
The third page in the file contained the results of an amnio done on my mom while she was pregnant, an amnio that gave all the details about the virus the unborn baby was infected with and recommended termination of the fetus. Termination of me. Guess I knew what Mom’s big “mistake” was now. I was the mistake.
I sucked in a deep breath as everything I’d just read swam around in my brain. It wasn’t a rare blood type that I had at all, it was a virus. A freaking disease!
“WB retrovirus. Type two.” I mumbled the words aloud as I scrolled through the description contained in the amnio results.
The Type II part was apparently significant because it was present only in women, not men, where Type I could be carried by either a male or female. So my mom’s argument—quoted in the last page, right there in black and white—that my bio father, who also had the virus, might be responsible for the attacks was discounted.
My bio father. I had a bio father, and he was apparently enough of an evil bastard that my mom would suspect him of attacking me with living zombies. And, according to the file, he’d given me a virus just by being my stupid bio father. A virus that had altered my DNA, making me some kind of super-powerful freak. It had also released potentially harmful metallic elements into my blood, making me “predisposed to violent psychotic breaks involving the use of forbidden magics.”
My cheeks flamed even as the rest of me grew cold. Kitty and the Elders and God only knew who else knew about this. They knew that the man I’d always loved like a father wasn’t my dad, and that I was really the spawn of some evil maniac and had a crazy-making virus.
Of course, just reading about psychotic breaks was enough to make me certain I was having one. Because I was just that crazy. Here I’d thought I was just a little high-strung, but now I knew I was a breakdown waiting to happen. I was a freak, a virus-ridden freak whose parents had lied to her her entire life. It made me feel like I was suffocating. Dad couldn’t not be my dad. I loved him so much, and I’d assumed he loved me.
But what if he didn’t? What if he secretly hated me for being someone else’s kid? A psychop
ath’s kid? A diseased psychopath’s unholy offspring—
“Megan, I couldn’t find the backpack. I think I left it in my locker at school like an idiot. You want to come with me to grab it?” God! Not Aaron again. Couldn’t he take a freaking hint? “Hey . . . are you okay?”
I shoved the file back in my purse as fast as I could, keeping my face down. “Fine, I’m fine.” I didn’t want anyone to see me crying, especially not Aaron. His idea of comfort would no doubt involve his hands in places I didn’t want, and I just couldn’t deal with that right now. I’d probably punch him in the nose because that was what people on the verge of a psychotic break did.
“You don’t sound fine. Are you crying?”
“No, I just . . . I think it’s something I ate.” I swiped at my cheeks and slung my purse over my shoulder. I had to get away from Aaron. Now. “Or maybe something I didn’t eat. I didn’t have time to grab anything after practice. I think I should go hit the tents before we get started.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said, following me onto the ice in his street shoes.
“I’d really rather be alone right now, but thanks.”
“Come on, let me buy you a funnel cake. We can eat it in my car.”
“No thanks, I—”
“I bet you’ll feel better if you sit in a warm car for a few minutes.” He reached for my arm, but I managed to slip away before he could catch my elbow.
“No,” I snapped, skating faster toward the tents, not sure where I was going to go when I reached the edge of the ice, just knowing I had to get away from Aaron. What was with this guy?
“What about some hot chocolate?” He caught me this time, his infuriating paws closing around my waist.
“Aaron, leave me—Ah!” My one hundred and eighty-degree turn to face Aaron turned into a three hundred and sixty-degree spin into a major fall. I hit the ice chin-first with a very unladylike “oomph.” Though I doubted anyone noticed my grunt, considering my skirt was suddenly up around my armpits.
