by Ramona Wray
“You really are a fool, aren’t you?” He sounded mad.
Without another word, he turned on his heel, poised to leave. “Wash your face,” he added in a raspy voice. “Your date,” he spat out the word, “is waiting.”
And he was gone. I took my time and washed the tears away thoroughly while trying to figure out what had happened. My instinct told me that he’d been mean with Rosalie and Cat as payback. For me. But how could he have known what they were saying? Unless he’d heard them gossiping on some other occasion. Maybe he had watched them follow me into the bathroom and had worked out for himself what might go down. Strange, I didn’t think he’d been in the café … but then, I was there with Ryder, which made it hard to notice the world going up in flames around me. And why did he get so angry? Because I’d been crying? Absurd.
But absurd often applied to Lucian Bell. The strangest thing about it was that, no matter how hard I tried to deny it, we did share a connection. Nothing like the déjà vu flashes I got with Ryder, no, this was something else. When Lucian was close by, I could feel it. Feel him. I had this image of a blue lump of oil pastel splashing into water and slowly dissolving; thin, delicate tendrils spreading across the water like a net of the finest Chantilly lace. It was something like those delicate blue tendrils I felt pulsing between us, tugging at me, letting me know when he was near. My skin always prickled with them.
It didn’t matter, I told myself, but it did. It traced back to Ryder’s secrets somehow. The three of us were linked in some way. Not a Larry, Moe, and Curly kind of deal, either, despite all the bantering; whatever the bond between us, it was unnatural. And something told me that it had everything to do with the chill I carried inside lately.
Chapter: Eleven
I was crushing on Lucian. On top of everything else. I guess my first clue was her laughter, because she always giggled around him in that flirty, oh-Lucian-you’re-the-best-thing-since-sliced-bread way. Also, she’d taken to tossing her hair over the shoulder, vigorously enough to make innocent bystanders, namely me, wince at the sight of it. Who in her right mind would do that to her own scalp, but a girl seriously trying to get a guy’s attention? Not that this particular girl had to work too hard at it; Lucian was forever hanging around us at school, talking to her but staring at me and pissing Ryder off. Guess where that left me? That’s right: between Ryder, my boyfriend, who hated Lucian with the proverbial fiery passion and J, my best friend, who wanted Lucian around, so, basically, in hell.
My own feelings for him were hellishly conflicting as well. Yes, he was cocky, and inappropriately outspoken, and endlessly annoying at times, but … Sometimes he’d be in the middle of a group, talking and laughing, and then he’d catch my eye and his expression, his laughter, his attitude, everything changed. His confidence melted into a softness that touched his eyes and settled into his smile, making him look almost shy. And therein lay my problem. It was as if there was this whole side of him that had nothing to do with the irritating, bigheaded, and sometimes downright obnoxious Lucian. A side he only revealed when and if I was close enough to see it. It made it hard not to wonder about the reasons why I had to be the one with the power to push that magic button. Why, around me, he was capable of acting normal and so… likable, sometimes.
I wanted to know his story, and how it tied in with Ryder’s and my own, so badly it hurt, but I was being a coward and he wasn’t volunteering any info.
He was waiting for me to ask.
But I wasn’t going to. Fear is easier to ignore when it’s unfocused, when you don’t voice it, so I tried not to put it in words, not even in my head. Because deep down, I knew Lucian had answers. Answers which could potentially mess up the best thing that had ever happened to me: being with Ryder.
So we were in a bizarre on-hold state, treading water. J watched Lucian, he watched me, I watched Ryder, who in turn alternated between watching me and Lucian. Nobody did anything about it. We were stuck.
Meanwhile, interaction between the four of us went something like this:
Lucian, in the cafeteria, pushing away a plate filled with a mystery concoction that may or may have not been lasagna: This food is incredibly bad.
Ryder, smiling angelically: Maybe you should think about skipping lunch. Or going to McDonald’s instead, maybe down in Marquette.
J, blushing furiously: You know, Ryder, I liked you better when you were all mysterious and didn’t open your mouth.
Me, fed up and ready to hit something: And, J, I liked you better when you were my best friend.
Repeat ad infinitum, no matter the topic of conversation, no matter where or when it took place.
Then, Lucian came up with the idea of a big party, a barbecue-slashbonfire that, if nothing else, should have provided the youth of Rosemound with a nutritious meal. It would make up for all the hardship endured during the week, when everyone had to ingest the insipid chow supplied by the school cafeteria.
Right away, Ryder countered, “So, your parents, they don’t mind you having the whole school over?”
“They won’t be home. They travel a lot, so I’m by myself most of the time. But hey, man, if you have a problem with the idea of an unchaperoned party, don’t come! I’ll take care of Lily for you,” Lucian replied, with a frozen expression.
“I’ll just bet you would,” Ryder snarled back.
So why did we go, you might wonder. First off, it didn’t help much that J screeched excitedly that we, meaning she, Ryder, and I, would, of course be there, all before I had the chance to blink. But in the end it wasn’t her big mouth that had made it final, but Ryder’s stubbornness. Somewhere in the middle of him asking me if I wanted to go and me denying it fiercely enough to raise questions, he figured out, probably at the same time I did, that I was curious. I wanted to see how and where Lucian lived. It was like what Winston Churchill once said about Russia: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key.”The reason for my poorly disguised interest was simple: Ryder was my Russia and I was kind of hoping that Lucian was the key. No way of telling how transparent my reasoning was to my boyfriend but once he’d worked out that, in my heart of hearts, I wanted to go, there was no stopping him. He was like a dog with a bone! So … we went.
Lucian, it turned out, lived not far from the Hopscotch Café, in a quiet cul-de-sac that accommodated only one other house beside his own. I had spent most of my life in Rosemound, but couldn’t recall noticing either the street or his house, an attractive white split-level set in the middle of a sweeping yard that melted into the surrounding forest.
When Ryder, J, and I got there just after nine o’clock, the party was already in full swing. A couple of tiki torches marked the entrance, and row after row of vibrant Christmas lights outlined the porch and the two dormers above. Licks of flames, a few more torches, and a large open-fire burned out back, and Miley Cyrus was belting out “Can’t Be Tamed” from somewhere inside the house. There were so many people, it felt like the whole Rosemound High was there. It was more than enough to make me hesitate.
“This is going to be great!” J professed excitedly, hopping around Ryder and me like a little certifiable bunny.
Instinctively, I grasped Ryder’s hand harder.
“It’s okay,” he whispered in response. “I’ll make sure no one gets too close.”
Of course he knew I was scared out of my pants. Because he was Ryder and I didn’t need to tell him when something was wrong. I didn’t need to tell him that the number of people crawling around us, loud and too psyched to care about the permanent damage they were inflicting on their own eardrums, as well as ours, made me dizzy. He was Ryder. He knew.
There were a couple of kegs out back, and flickering candles everywhere. I saw Lucian the second we set foot in the backyard; he was by the fire talking with a couple of football players and, unlike everyone else around him, he wasn’t holding a plastic cup filled with what could only be beer. He saw me at the exact same time, and the se
cond our eyes met over the crowd in between, he was already walking toward us.
J’s face glazed over with pleasure.
Ryder tensed.
And Lucian … well, he was just Lucian, dressed to kill, less preppy than usual in dark washed jeans and a white polo shirt, and smiling that private, soft, only-for-Lily smile.
“You came,” he said, mostly to me, as soon as he joined our group.
“Of course we came!” J answered.
At least he had the decency to reward her eagerness, bordering on embarrassing obsession at this point, with a half-smile.
This was my first party so, naturally, I expected the worst. Someone could bump into me, accidentally pulling me to the ground, where I’d pass out from the prolonged contact. I’d have a seizure featuring abounding foam at the mouth from being so close to all the people. Lucian and Ryder could get into a fight and spill some terrible, dark secrets in front of the whole school. Mom could give in to her fear of my being burned at the stake by the party-goers in some creepy, Children of the Corn scenario, and she’d show up half-mad and, quite possibly, armed, to stop them.
The list was practically endless.
But none of it happened. Something oh-so-awkward did instead: J stalking Lucian, more or less, every single second of every hour, with the exception of those few hurried ones when she had to choose between visiting the bathroom or living through her own bladder bursting. After one such bathroom visit, joint, in the long-established tradition of female toilet-attending etiquette, she suggested enforcing another long-established female tradition commonly known as “the snooping around”. What did it involve? Delicately put, invading Lucian’s privacy or, in less delicate terms, sneaking into his room and shamelessly intruding on his personal space and belongings.
I wanted to be the sane, virtuous one and reject the idea right away, but the truth was that my own curiosity matched hers only too well. So instead of doing the right thing and walking away, dragging my BFF along, I took comfort in the idea that, at least I wasn’t the only one being bad. J and I were in it together. Some excuse!
What I and my partner-in-crime found was that, unlike the rest of the house, a shrine to the glory of nondescript furniture and pastel undertones that triggered my gag reflex, Lucian’s room was beautiful. The walls were painted orange, very radical for a guy, and the floor, or at least the bits that weren’t littered with books, various gadgets, and numberless sheets of paper, was decked in a lime-green carpet. J and I both liked the mess: old copies of Dostoyevsky and Camus novels with annotations in the margins next to piles of Vangelis, David Lanz, and Amethystium CDs, framed prints of Bosch and Brueghel, loads of video games and sports trophies, including baseball, swimming, tennis, even a few equestrian ribbons. Seeing Lucian on a horse made me ask myself, would the wonders ever cease?
But while J was bursting with delight at all these delicious discoveries, I found myself frowning. There wasn’t anything even remotely unusual about Lucian. This was the room of a boy with a little too much free time on his hands, maybe a bit lonely, but otherwise perfectly normal. There were no dark secrets connecting him to Ryder and certainly no skeletons in his closet, which was meticulously stocked with more preppy outfits than the Hollister store at the Mall at Millenia in Orlando.
We left the room with J blabbering excitedly about how The Garden of Earthly Delights was one of her favorite paintings, too, and the fact that Lucian had a print of it above his bed was a sign that they belonged together. Also, that he had to be extremely smart, because anyone who could appreciate a Bosch triptych, a painting made of three panels, set side by side, she explained, obviously boasted a sizable brain.
I didn’t see the “practically-a-genius” art lover in question when we got back and, as I was feeling ashamed of what we’d done, especially given the big fat nothing it had produced, I asked J and Ryder if we could all leave. My BFF quickly declined, hoping that Lucian might drive her home later, but Ryder welcomed my request with honest enthusiasm. Things were set, and I was just about to climb behind him on the bike, when an eruption of screams and shrieks originating in our host’s backyard changed our plans.
From bits of conversation and yet more shrieking, we worked out even before arriving at the scene that there had been a snake attack. A snake attack! Not just any snake but a massasauga, a black rattler, something close to impossible. In Michigan, the massasaugas can only be found in some southern parts of the state, and nobody remembered ever hearing of an incident, let alone witnessing one, when such a reptile had ventured so far north. Except for, apparently, this one.
It took only a couple of seconds before I realized that the victim was J. Her shrill voice and flashes of her white dress as she twisted and turned in a frenzy, surrounded by equally loud boys and girls, made a picture that stopped my heart.
“It bit me! The freaking thing bit me! Oh my God, I’m going to die!”
The people around her drew back and gave her room to continue that crazed spinning, all the while shouting a million different things in a pandemonium that made it impossible to understand anything. Everything moved too fast, too loudly, too … I tried getting to her, but Ryder pulled me back. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear him … I couldn’t … I had to …
“Stop moving, Jane!”
Ryder and Lucian both shouted it at the same time, their voices echoing each other and raised above the racket. In slow motion, I twisted and saw Ryder’s face set as if in stone, and then he and Lucian locked stares above the crowd. A cold spell drifted over the people gathered there, and for a second
everything was still.
“Stop moving!” Lucian repeated. “Stop it, Jane.”
People moved out of his way.
“Your blood pressure … the more you move, the quicker the venom gets to your heart.”
No sooner had he barked out that warning than she fell. Noiselessly, gracefully, like a magical princess from a fairy tale, she slipped into a heap of white silk and black curls.
“No!” Ryder hissed in my ear. “I can’t let you.”
I must have been struggling hard against his grip, a stupid thing to do because there wasn’t any way to her with so many bodies barring my path. But this was only vaguely registering on the outskirts of my consciousness: Ryder’s arms around me, crying, his words. Everyone was shouting out commands.
“Cut it open.”
“Tourniquet.”
“Suck the poison out.”
“Ice the wound.”
“Stop the blood flow.”
“No! Blood must flow.”
“No, people have died.”
“Gangrene.”
“Lost limbs.”
“Gone, she’s gone already.”
And then… quiet. Lucian kneeled next to her.
“Jane. Jane, are you awake?”
No answer.
“Someone call an ambulance, people.”
“It’s on the way,” a few voices echoed.
“Where is the damn snake?”
“Dead.”
Lucian’s ear pressed to her chest.
“Hell’s teeth! Heart’s almost stopped,” he whispered, but with the silence that had taken over the whole world, it seemed, everyone heard each word.
His eyes flew to me for a split second and my heart contracted painfully even as his lips fastened on her leg. He sucked and spat in a silence that hurt my ears. Nobody moved, or breathed, or even made a single sound. I heard the sirens roaring in the distance, then closer. And closer. But, by the time the ambulance was outside the gate, Lucian’s rhythm had slowed down a lot and his face was whiter than a sheet.
When the EMTs passed Ryder and me, there wasn’t just one limp body lying on the grass. There were two.
Miraculously, they both made a full recovery and were released from the hospital in time to make Monday morning classes. Nobody could explain the sudden appearance of the rattler in Rosemound, and the incident was even featured in the Rosemound Gazet
te, in an article detailing the dos and don’ts in dealing with a rattler bite. Apparently, sucking the venom out with your mouth wasn’t something anyone should try. Similarly, the overexcitement, complete with hysterical arm-flapping and loads of pirouetting was another big no-no. J should’ve kept her cool and Lucian should’ve used a Sawyer “Extractor” Snake Bite Kit to suck out the venom. Too bad we didn’t have one on hand.
Just like the doctors, who varied from those congratulating Lucian to those laying into him for ever attempting what he had, my own feelings were fairly contradictory. Had he really saved her life, or had he almost killed her? Why did his backyard, of all the backyards in Rosemound, have to have a freak black rattler snaking around the very night he threw a party? Had he avoided a tragedy, or had he very nearly caused one?
Who wasn’t conflicted about any of it? My BFF, of course. As far as she cared, his full name was Lucian Knight-in-Shining-Armor Bell and he could speak or do no evil. He’d saved her life, yet another sign that they were meant to be together. Duh!
The following week, we were lunching outside since it was warm enough to sunbathe, a weird occurrence in Rosemound this time of year. The courtyard was a lush green, surrounded by pine trees, with stone tables and benches scattered about, some of which were covered in moss. They were cold, but beautiful, and students always stepped on each other to grab a good seat.
Our current position wasn’t in the A-plus area, since that was reserved for seniors, but somewhere to the side and partially tucked away behind a thick tree trunk. I preferred this table anyway.
Ryder had had to run back to the cafeteria to pick up an additional soda for J, since she’d gone through the first one in a single gulp. Lucian, strangely, was MIA and, with them both missing, there was nothing left to stop my best friend from pouring her soul out to me again, for the millionth time since the party. About the same thing.
