by Peter Moore
“Why don’t I just go into the store a few minutes after you do? Why do we need a signal?”
“It’s just better that way. What if I go in the store to use the bathroom or something before you’ve had enough time to evaluate the situation completely? Then what? No, we’re using the signal.”
Claire shakes her head. “There’s something wrong with you. Seriously.”
“Hey,” says a voice from behind us.
I jump. It’s Juliet. And she looks really good.
“Sorry I’m late,” she adds. “I had a whole big thing with my parents.”
I knew it. I knew there’d be a good reason she was late. “Everything okay?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s fine. They wanted me to stay home and sleep. But I told them that I could sleep in tomorrow. So.”
“So,” I say. Juliet turns her head a little and smiles at the space to my left. Which I remember isn’t just a space. “Oh, right. This is Claire. My friend, Claire.”
They say hi to each other. “Yeah, I’ve seen you with Danny at school,” Juliet says.
No, no, no! “Right. You’ve seen us together. That’s because she’s my friend,” I say. “Claire, she’s my good friend. Best buddy, really. I mean just…you know, we’re good friends.”
Both of them are looking at me. Juliet is smiling, but Claire is staring like she’s watching a car crash.
“Friends are welcome,” Juliet says. “Come on.”
We walk across the parking lot toward the bunch of kids. They’re all human, I’m guessing. She introduces us to everyone—Matt, Emily, Victoria, Stefan, Jamie, and Michael.
Stefan finishes a story he was telling about a kid who got caught in his parents’ basement, passed out with an empty bottle of vodka next to him. “They pumped his stomach.”
“I heard he was in a coma,” Jamie says.
“No. He had alcohol poisoning. They said his heart stopped for, like, ten minutes.”
“He’d be dead,” Juliet says.
“Maybe he’s actually a vamp. Then he wouldn’t die from it,” says Emily.
I notice a couple of them looking my way, obviously trying to figure out what I am. My blue eyes say one thing, my coloring and build say another. Some of the guys are sneaking looks at Claire. They probably don’t hang around with vamp girls too often, and I always forget how pretty she is. To me, she’s just Claire, so it’s kind of funny to see guys checking her out. Not to mention that none of these guys is her type, due to their being guys.
They argue for a while about whether the kid’s heart stopped or if something else happened. Then the subject changes to classmates from Millbrook. Of course, I have no idea who they’re talking about, but that doesn’t matter. I’m here with Juliet Walker.
She’s smiling at me a lot, but not so much that it seems fake, so that’s good. She includes me when she’s talking, and looks at me, which is another good sign. But every time I look at Claire to get a sense of how she thinks it’s going, she’s talking to that girl Victoria.
I’m trying not to stare at Juliet while she talks. Just keep it cool. At one point she tosses her hair and I see that she’s wearing earrings, hoops in hoops. I’m not used to that. Vamp girls don’t usually bother with earrings, since the holes would close up the second they’re taken out.
When the conversation turns to movies, Michael goes on about how bad the new Kurt Helsingermann movie is. “The action was lame. And that guy is too old now.”
This is my chance. “Helsingermann is the finest actor alive,” I say. I push my hair up like his. Claire catches my eye and shakes her head tightly, like, don’t do it. But this is a specialty of mine. I point at each kid while I put on the famous Bavarian accent. “You, go get zee veapons!You, get zat antenna vorking again! Und you, take ze girl und take cover. Und me? I vill disable zat varhead, und zen…I’ll come back!”
It gets a pretty good laugh. Claire is looking at the pavement, shaking her head, but what does she know about brilliant impersonations?
Juliet is laughing. She bumps her shoulder against mine. That means something. I’m sure of it.
She’s not paying more attention to me than she is to the other guys. I don’t know if it’s because she doesn’t like me more than them or because she doesn’t want to be obvious. I look over to Claire, who’s still talking to that Victoria. Thanks, Claire. Big help. You’re supposed to be watching me. I put my hands behind my head and stretch, but she’s not looking this way, and totally misses the signal.
I’m tense and forget not to grind my teeth. A white-hot arrow of pain shoots through my jaw and electrifies every nerve in my body. I yelp, in a less than manly way.
Everybody goes silent and looks at me. “Are you all right?” Juliet asks.
“Yeah, sorry. Bit my tongue.”
“Oh, I hate when that happens,” she says. Fortunately, the conversation starts up again. I do the secret signal twice in a row, and as I walk across the parking lot to the store, I’m still not sure Claire even noticed.
It feels like I’ve been standing next to the frozen food cases forever. I’m frustrated and I’m cold. If Claire doesn’t get here in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to kill her. And what is up with that pain in my tooth? It doesn’t hurt if I push on it with my finger, but it kills when I clench my teeth.
“Why are you hiding in the back of the market?” Claire asks.
“Where were you?” I say to her. “I’ve been waiting here for, like, half an hour!”
“You were waiting maybe two minutes. I was talking to Victoria. Sorry if I didn’t stop her in the middle of a sentence so I could rush across the parking lot and into the store. That wouldn’t have been too random.”
“Well, I was worried that you didn’t see the signal.”
“Didn’t see it? It looked like you were bringing a plane in for landing. Who wouldn’t see it?” She looks through the glass freezer door, opens it, and peers inside.
“Claire! Come on. You’re here on a mission and you haven’t even been paying attention.”
“I’ve been paying attention. Just not every second.” She reaches into the freezer and takes out a bag of peas. It makes an annoying crunching sound as she kneads it back and forth in her hands. “How old do you think Victoria is? Guess.”
“We’re not talking about Victoria. We’re talking about Juliet.” I pull open the freezer door, take the bag of peas from her, and toss it back inside.
“She’s a senior,” Claire says. “Doesn’t she look younger?” She draws a smiley face in the fog on the glass.
I wipe it away and shut the door. “Would you please focus for one minute? Come on! You came here to help me read the signals. What do you think?”
“I think maybe she likes me,” she says.
“Juliet?”
“No. Victoria.” She opens the next freezer door and watches the glass fog up. She starts to draw another smiley face, but I grab her finger and hold it.
“Okay,” I say. “You don’t even know if Victoria likes girls. Do you?”
“Not for sure, no. But I get that feeling.” She starts to draw with her other hand, still not looking at me. “She’s cute, isn’t she?”
I let go of her finger and give up. “Yes. She’s cute. And I don’t know how to tell if she likes you, so don’t ask me.”
She draws a big smile on the face, and then adds horns, for no reason I can imagine. Trying to talk to her about Juliet is pointless. Suddenly I hear the quick, steady pulse of a heartbeat, right in my ears. But my heart doesn’t feel like it’s going that fast.
Claire looks upset. “I wish I’d worn my black lamé pants instead of this dorky skirt, which I don’t even know why I bought in the first place. It’s a bad look. The lamé would have been much cooler, right?”
“No. And I can’t believe I’m saying this to you, but you look great,” I tell her. This night is so derailed it’s not even funny.
Claire erases the face on the glass and starts another. “
I think Juliet likes you.”
“Really? Why do you say that?”
Claire shrugs. “She had this look on her face when she was laughing at your Helsingermann impersonation. Which, by the way, was mortifyingly bad and is something you should never repeat in public.”
“What kind of look?”
“The right kind.” She shuts the freezer door. “I think it’s time to stop being a coward, put a signal out there, and see what she does.”
I like the idea, even if I don’t know whether she’s talking about Juliet and me, or about herself and Victoria.
It’s been light for hours and I still can’t sleep. I keep thinking about what happened last night.
Whether Claire’s advice to be brave and put out a signal was meant for me or for herself, she was right; on the bus ride home, she told me that she’d gotten Victoria’s phone number.
After at least half an hour of agonizing, I finally got up the nerve to put my hand on Juliet’s elbow, and she didn’t move it. After I let go, I tortured myself wondering if she was just being polite, but then she put her hand on my back and kept it there.
Which was better than I dreamed—I should have been ecstatic. But then there was that surprise last night, and it’s been giving me a nagging, dark-cloud feeling ever since.
Claire left the store a few minutes before I did, so it wouldn’t look like we’d had a little strategy meeting. And I kept hearing that beating sound. Throbbing, like a racing heart. But when I put my hand on my chest, my heart was beating much slower than the sound. I had to be imagining it.
Except that it was just too clear, too real. I was definitely hearing it, and it was coming from somewhere in the store. I looked around, and then in the convex security mirror, I saw. On the other side of the store there was a guy, maybe in his early twenties, standing in front of the candy rack. He had a magazine open in one hand, his head tilted down as if he was reading, and with his other hand he was stuffing candy bars into his pocket, one after another. He was looking back and forth, up and down the aisle. Nervous. Jacked up.
And I knew. I walked toward him, just to make sure, and as I got closer the sound grew louder.
I was hearing the shoplifter’s heartbeat.
I’d heard it from across the store. I don’t know what that means, but one thing I do know: it’s definitely not normal.
Maybe getting to school half an hour early is overkill, but I don’t want to miss Juliet before class. I wonder if staking out a girl’s locker is considered stalking. It’s probably not stalking if she likes you.
At least I feel better now. When Mom woke me up after midnight on Sunday, asking if I was planning to sleep the whole night away, it sounded pretty good to me. I’d been up all day, thinking, and I’m no good without a decent day’s sleep. Mom could see that I didn’t look great, so I told her my crit was low, and luckily the hemometer backed me up when she checked. After I finished a liter of SynHeme, which I barely got down, she let me go back to sleep, and I spent almost all of last night and today dozing in bed under my Sol-Blok canopy.
Which is why I had no trouble getting up before sunset tonight so I could get to school early. And here come the kids. It takes less than a minute for the halls to fill with students.
There she is. Juliet smiles when she sees me waiting at her locker. Her teeth aren’t picket-fence perfect like vamps’ teeth. She has this one on the bottom, next to the middle ones, that’s just a tiny bit crooked. I love that tooth.
“Nice way to start the week,” she says.
“I had a good time Saturday night.”
“Me, too.” She makes a shooing motion to move me away from in front of her locker. She spins the dial. Her fingernails are short, and each one is painted with different nail polish, all deep blues running into green. I’m surprised I never noticed it before, but it’s cool. Something a vamp girl would never have the nerve to do. “We should do it again,” she says. “Go out, I mean.”
“When?” I say, too quickly.
She laughs. “Whenever you want to.”
Whenever I want to. Well, that would be every day of the week. We could drop out of school, too. But that’s probably the answer a completely obsessed psycho would give. Not the impression I want to make. “So, you guys do that every Saturday night?”
“Most of the time, yeah.” She’s got her notebooks, but keeps rooting through her locker. “But it doesn’t have to be with them. We could do something, just us. If you want.”
Just us? Did I hear her right? “Well, I don’t know. I don’t usually hang around alone with a girl until I’m sure she’s not going to try to take advantage of me.” Oh, man! Did I really just say that?
But she laughs. In a really good way. “Maybe it’s worth taking a chance. Live dangerously.” She closes her locker and gives me a sly smile.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I say. I try to smile the same way she is, but I probably just look demented.
It doesn’t seem to bother her, though. “I have to go to the girls’ room,” she says. “Go on ahead. I’ll see you in class.”
“Sure. I’ll English in see you. Wait. See you in English. I meant to say it that way the first time.”
She laughs and shakes her head, then gives me a little wave as she starts down the hall.
We could do something, just us. It’s going to be hard to think about anything else today.
The problem is right in front of me, but I just can’t pull myself together to solve it.
y(x+h) = y(x) = k1/6 + k2/3 + k3/3 + k4/6 + O(h5)
Between the good news of Juliet wanting to go out with me again and this distracting feeling that the bone marrow in my arms and legs has turned to molten lava, it’s a little hard to concentrate.
Mr. Wells is watching us take the test, his eyes wandering from student to student. He looks kind of sad, which I guess I can understand. Being a human, he probably didn’t take this level of math until graduate school.
He has tiny capillaries in the whites of his eyes, like little brooks branching out from streams. He also has big pores on his cheeks. And there’s a little spot next to his mouth where he didn’t shave as closely as the rest of his face; most of it is regular stubble you’d see at eleven o’clock, but in that spot, it’s maybe a tenth of a millimeter longer.
Wait: I’m in the back row and he’s sitting at the front of the room. I must be hallucinating.
I snap out of it when I notice Mr. Wells looking at me right in the eye. He taps his watch and I go back to the test in front of me.
“How can you say that?” Bertrand is beside himself as we walk down the hall. “It was the easiest test we’ve had all year!”
“I don’t know. I just couldn’t focus,” I say. The hall is crowded and everything seems too loud.
Two arms drop heavily on our shoulders and then Hugh is between us. “Boys, get ready for this. Tickets for the Rubber Crutches go on sale tomorrow.”
“They suck,” I say.
“Plus they’ll sell out in about ten seconds,” Bertrand adds.
“True, but my dad knows the guy who owns their label, and he could probably get us tix. Good ones.”
“That’s what you said for the Mad Scientists concert, and you came up with nothing,” Bertrand says. “Your father’s connection is…”
“Disconnected,” I say.
“Danny Gray!” calls a female voice, high and squeaky. I stop walking, turn, and see Alexis Bouchon, one of my sister’s friends. She waves me over. I tell the guys to wait for me, and I go to her. She looks like a near clone of Jessica, but with slightly less attractive features. “So, Jess wanted me to tell you something.” Of course she did, because Jessica would never talk to me in public. “She said, ‘Turn your phone on, stupid. Mom’s been trying to call you all evening. She’s picking you up after school for a dentist appointment.’ Oh, and, ‘Wait for her in the back parking lot.’ That’s it, I think.”
“Thanks.”
Alexis shrugs and hea
ds back to my sister.
“Alexis. One thing.”
She turns to listen.
“It doesn’t bother you to deliver messages for my sister?”
“Why would it? Jess gives messages to my little brother for me so I don’t have to talk to him, either. It’s what we do.” She walks away like what she just said is the most sensible thing in the world.
Ah, a trip to the dentist to make the day even better.
“Didn’t I just go, like, two months ago?” I ask Mom in the car.
“You went nine months ago, and it’s my fault for not getting you there for your six-month filing. Your teeth must be quite sharp. I had to schedule a double appointment so he could get all the work done.”
“Sounds super.”
Dr. Loeb takes me in almost as soon as we get to the waiting room. He asks how school is going while he gets me set up in the chair and starts checking around in my mouth. Then he furrows his brow and he says hmmm a few times. He wheels backward on his little stool and looks at my patient file. “That’s strange,” he says.
“What?”
“It’s been almost ten months since you were here, but I’m looking at your teeth now, and they don’t need filing. They haven’t grown at all.”
“That’s weird. What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure,” he says. “Open, please.”
I open wide, and he pokes around with a little hook instrument. “Any problems with your other teeth? Anything bothering you?”
“Ackshully, ’esh,” I gurgle around his gloved fingers. He takes his hands out of my mouth.
“What’s up?”
“Well, the other night I guess I was grinding, and I got a sharp pain in this tooth here,” I say, pointing.
He examines the tooth, pokes some more, then tells me he’s going to take some X-rays. A few minutes later, he’s looking at the pictures on a big monitor, going hmmm again a bunch more times, and checking my file again.
“Did you find what caused that toothache?” I ask.
