Gravity, a young adult paranormal romance

by Abigail Boyd

  "Sorry to inflict my inner monologue on you," he said, tilting his head in my direction. "I have a bad habit of having full conversations with myself."

  "That's okay," I said softly, not knowing what else to say. I didn't do well with attractive boys. And I really had no interest in them now. I figured he'd go on his way, so I could get back to zoning out. But he didn't leave.

  "Ridiculous that I'm this late for my first day, huh?" he asked, and then shrugged. "I can't think of an excuse, either."

  To my surprise, he came and sat in the cubby to my left.

  "The truth is, I slept in, but I don't think I can tell them that," he continued. "Do you have any ideas that could help me in my situation?"

  "Nope, fresh out," I said matter-of-factly, keeping my eyes locked on the words in my textbook, even though it was impossible to read them with him talking to me.

  "Okay, how about this..." He held his hands out as if framing the scene. "I was trying to save a possum caught in the middle of the road..."

  "Make the animal cuter," I offered. I didn’t know why I was helping him.

  "Okay. I was trying to save a rabbit from being squashed. And once I saved him, I had to find his home. So I went trampling through the woods, and forgot about the time." He dropped his hands. "Do you think the ladies in the office will buy it?"

  The tone of his appealing voice was low, like we were conspiratorial partners. His lips were full and moved interestingly as he talked. I scolded myself for noticing that.

  "Actually, I think it's terrible," I admitted. "Your pants are spotless, which they wouldn't be if you had been running around the woods. Just tell the office people your parents had car trouble like a normal person."

  "I'm not really a normal person," he divulged, and the silly smile was back. It made him look even more attractive, his eyes crinkling. It was the kind of smile that any other person would immediately return, but he got on my nerves with his perpetual good mood. It was mostly annoying because I couldn't reciprocate.

  "Pretend to be. That's what I'm doing," I said.

  "Interesting," he said, leaning closer, his brown eyes inquiring. "Mind telling me why?"

  "Not really," I said. "Since I don't know you." I told myself I just wanted him to go away. Part of me didn't, however. I tried to ignore that part.

  He stood up and started walking towards the central office, then turned around and said, "I'm Henry Rhodes. I'm the village idiot where I come from. There — now you know me."

  I was silent for a second, studying him. He was possibly the strangest boy I'd ever met.

  "I'm Ariel," I replied.

  He nodded his head in my direction again with a smirk, and continued on his way to go spout some lame excuse to get out of a half day's worth of tardies. He practically had a strut to his step as I watched him disappear.

  The name clicked two seconds after he walked away. Henry was the boy Lainey had claimed.

  I walked into Honors American History later that day, and was surprised to see Henry sitting in the back row. Several jock guys sat in the desks surrounding him, football players and swimming team stars. It was almost as though we sat on two different sides of a chess board, with a bunch of pawns in between us.

  Thinking he would finally ignore me, and not knowing exactly how I felt about that, I walked in. When he spotted me, however, he smiled again. I turned away from him, my face heating up. There was no way that our little interaction was going to go anywhere. I wouldn't consider getting in the way of Lainey and lipgloss, let alone Lainey and a boy.

  "Hi, Ariel," Mr. Warwick, the teacher, said brightly. He'd been Hugh's friend for years, and had been over to our house for dinner countless times. He made a mean corn relish at our barbeques. "So you finally made it to my side of the hallway?"

  "Looks that way," I said.

  "Seating chart is on the blackboard. I believe you're right in the front."

  I took a peek, and saw that he was correct. I pulled out my thick History textbook and opened it up again. My heart thudded a little as I noticed it was the same page I'd been eyeballing when Henry spoke to me earlier.

  "Welcome to Honors American History," Mr. Warwick said once the bell rang. He stood up from his roost on the desk and shut the door. "We're going to learn things about the civil war you never thought possible. We may even get past it by the end of the year!"

  I had heard lots of positive things about his goofy teaching style and laid back attitude. From everything I knew about Mr. Warwick, it rang true. Most students called him Wick. It felt too weird to me, so I always just called him the Mr. Warwick. Probably odd considering my use of my parents' first names. But everybody has quirks.

  "For instance, the battle of Bunker Hill? Not fought at Bunker Hill. It was actually fought on Breed's Hill. Now when you go home and your parents ask you what you learned, tell them that. I'm sure they'll be impressed, and you don't have to pay attention for the rest of the day."

  He winked while the class snickered. I had a feeling this would be one of my favorite subjects now. There was hominess about the room everywhere else in school lacked. Warwick felt like a family member, but not one of the ever-watchful ones I had at home.

  Henry ended up being in my English class, too, though I tried not to register it. Because both classes were Honors classes, a lot of the same students were in both. English remained my most anticipated subject, since it had always been my favorite. Two bookcases crammed full of every book I had ever owned filled the corner on my room at home.

  But I was soon disappointed.

  The silver-haired teacher, Ms. Fellows, parked herself next to the antique overhead projector in the front of the room. A student shut off the lights. The blinds were already pulled down, and shadow descended over our desks. Ms. Fellows looked incredibly bored, like she was ready to go to sleep. She droned on about grammar, scribbling her speech down with dry erase markers and smearing it with the side of her hand.

  I couldn't stay present in the dark. My mind drifted, and my thoughts came to rest where they often did, on the last night I saw Jenna. I'd turned over every word I remembered in my head a thousand times like an old coin, but I still felt like I was missing something. The exact phrase or moment that Jenna decided to leave for good, if that was truly the case, always escaped me. It didn't help that for starters she was furious that night, a ball of sizzling anger.

  "What do you mean, you're going out?" I'd asked, sitting on my checkered bedspread.

  The day had been warm, holding steady in the low eighties. But after the sun went to sleep, the temperature quickly started to drop. Still wearing shorts, her tanned legs were bare. Not clothes that she typically wore out after dark.

  "The words have one meaning, Ariel. Not difficult to understand," she said impatiently, spitting out her words like they had thorns.

  "It's after ten," I protested, my voice sounding pitifully like a whine. I never would have worried about looking immature in front of her before. But now it was all I could think about.

  She wouldn't look at me. She stared at her own eyes in her reflection; putting her curly hair up in a ponytail and taking it back down. She had on her dress-to-impress makeup, a double layer of mascara and champagne-colored eyeshadow. I wondered if she was meeting up with a boy.

  "What is happening to you?" I asked finally. I couldn't stop myself. "I feel like I don't even know you anymore."

  She glared at me, and her blue eyes were icy. I had never seen her look at me with so much contempt. I wondered what horrible thing I'd done, flickering quickly through the possibilities.

  "I don't have time for this," she said, stomping out of my room. Then she headed for the outside door.

  "Take your sweatshirt, it's getting cold," I said. Jenna always complained about being chilly.

  She sighed at me, the dampener on her good time, grabbing her yellow sweatshirt off the back of a chair.

  "Anything else you need, mom?" she asked, rolling her eyes at me as she stood impat
iently by the open door.

  A tear rolled down my cheek and I wiped it away.

  "Stop acting like a baby," she commanded sharply, bracing her arms against the doorway. "I'll be back before midnight. You'll never even miss me." She swung outside into the night, but she made sure I heard her next words.

  "I won't miss you."

  And with that she was gone. Out of my life, possibly forever. Would I always wonder what I could have done to stop her from leaving that night? If I'd known she wouldn't be back, I would have chased her outside, but she would only have become angrier with me.

  She hadn't always been cruel. In fact, for years we'd been thick as thieves, our personalities the exact right fit. I patiently listened to her stories, almost never pointing out how she embellished her dates to make her life sound more exciting. But in the months before she left, she changed. Sometimes I felt like whomever she had been vanished before my eyes, long before she stepped out into the night.

  Chapter 5

  When the end of the day finally arrived, I found I was wary of going back to the electives hall. I still hadn't come up with a logical solution to what happened with the lockers, unless I had mad cow disease eating my brain, and to be honest I hadn't been trying to think about it. Once I actually got there, my irrational fear dissipated. The crowd was busy shouting and joking and scrambling to get to class. No room existed for my dread.

  I went into the art room, and saw that my calculations through the window were correct. It was quite a bit roomier than our classroom from last year. But bright replications of famous paintings covered every wall, and carts of paper and paints crowded the side aisles. I looked to the board; no assigned seating. Those were the hardest classes now. Just finding someone to sit by became an awkward chore.

  A girl sat alone in the back row, dressed in dark, creative clothing. Her dress looked like it was made out of torn sweater pieces stitched together. I wished I had the guts to dress like that, instead of my bland uniform of t-shirts and jeans. Behind her little tortoiseshell glasses, the girl's eyelids sparkled with thick silver glitter.

  I walked towards her. She looked like a fascinating person to talk to, and I had never seen her before. But she spotted me, and picked up her brown messenger bag from the floor. Dropping the bag on the seat next to her with a clunk, she scowled at me. The bag was covered with little pins that had phrases on them I was too far away too read. I assumed they all had an antisocial theme.

  "Okay..." I said under my breath, turning back around.

  I took a seat in the second row next to a nerdy boy who ignored my presence. I had been getting a lot of that reaction today, so it didn't bother me. In front of me, I noticed with an internal groan, sat Lainey. Her cloying cloud of fruit punch scented perfume hit me in the face like a chemical warfare attack. But the only other empty seat in class was right next to her, and bumping elbows would be ten times worse.

  Henry breezed in through the door the second before the bell rang.

  "You have got to be kidding me," I said out loud, shocked at the coincidence. Both Lainey and the boy next to me looked at me as though I were insane. I began to conclude I probably was. But the situation was getting a little ridiculous, like the universe enjoyed rubbing absurd but gorgeous smile boy in my face. He swung into the seat next to Lainey agilely, depositing his books on the table.

  To my surprise, Henry spun in his seat, looking at me. Gripping the chair back, he said, "I'm not following you, I swear. This is pure coincidence."

  "Uh huh," I said, frowning. I had no idea how to react to his attention. I'd checked my face out discreetly earlier for stray ink or anything else that would have caused embarrassment, but found nothing.

  "I have a question for you," he said, tipping the chair off the floor and looking at me down the bridge of his nose.

  "Fire away."

  "Why do I irritate you so much?" His face was open and patient, watching for my explanation.

  Lainey had now turned towards us, her china doll face wrought with confusion, openly watching our conversation like she had stock in it. I remembered her words about going ballistic if anyone got near Henry, and I had no doubt that she meant it.

  "What gave you that idea?" I asked, avoiding Henry's inquiring, curious eyes. Something about his stare seemed both intimate and knowing. I was mortified that he had caught on; I didn't think I acted that obvious. But judging my actions had become hard, now that I felt so removed from them.

  "Just had that feeling," he continued, unfazed. "But I think you'll get used to me, now that we'll be spending our afternoons together." It seemed as if he enjoyed that idea. Or perhaps he was playing with me like a toy on a string. I felt hopeless to tell the difference.

  "Funny how that turned out," I said softly.

  My eyes flicked to Lainey again, whose face was scrunched so much at the center she risked imploding. That would be interesting to witness. Henry swung back around before I could respond again.

  With the moment broken, I felt a wave of guilt crash over me. How could I be worrying about boys when I had no idea where Jenna was? Or even if she was alive or...I felt seeped in selfishness. I stared at the shiny copy of Van Gogh's Arles bedroom on the wall, until the orange and cyan started running together. I blinked. I could practically hear Jenna whispering, "What about me?" in my ear. But then of course I really would be nuts.

  I breathed in sharply through my nose, shutting my eyes and detaching myself from the feeling as much as possible. It was a talent I had discovered recently, and while I knew it probably didn't fall under the healthy coping category, it worked to keep me functioning.

  The teacher, Ms. Vore, came down the aisle, passing out black sketchbooks. I had nearly forgotten I still had class to sit through. Ms. Vore had replaced the batty, purple Mumu wearing art teacher from last year. I always assumed dressing like a carnival fortune teller was part of the job requirements, but this lady looked normal. Stylish even, her hair pulled up in a smart bun, and wearing a well-fitted black vest over a white oxford shirt.

  As soon as she began to speak, she won my approval.

  "Your sketchbooks are the window to your creativity," she said, rubbing her hands together, her eyes excited as though she were a student herself. "I'm going to give you assignments to complete in them, but I also want you to feel free to doodle whatever you want when the urge strikes you. If you fill up one book, I'll give you another. Just let yourself loose on the pages."

  She launched into a demonstration of different types of shading on the board, alternately putting down her chalk and picking up a dog-eared book that she held up and swooped around so everyone could see. I paid close attention, hoping that my art skill could magically improve.

  While she had perfectly okay skill, it didn't seem like she was the best artist ever, either. Which I found endearing, compared to the effortless talent my father had. Ms. Vore seemed to have more appreciation than talent.

  "All of these people spoke through their art," she said, admiring the colorful pictures from her book upside down. "There's no reason you can't do the same. It's very freeing to explore various techniques. You might be used to acrylics, for example, and find a whole new world can be created with oils."

  The class breezed by, the only one other than History to seem faster than the hour allotted. Ms. Vore stood in front of her desk as we walked out, smiling and saying goodbye. She even knew some of the other students' names already.

  I felt tired after school, but not as hopeless as I had expected at the beginning of the day. All of my teachers were fine, save for English and Geometry, and I would make it through, if I kept my head down and kept going. Time had become the thing that I lived through, instead of anticipating or keeping track of it.

  "How was your first day back?" Hugh asked as we were driving home. He gave me the side eye. "You appear to be in one piece."

  "Mostly. It went fine." I shoved my heavy backpack between my knees. In some convoluted logic, nearly all of my teachers h
ad decided to assign homework. I thought we were supposed to be immune from that the first day.

  "I'm glad," he said. "I worried all day about how it would go." This from the person who said I'd do fine.

  I sat wordlessly for a moment, watching the blurry outline of trees and street signs through the car window, the shards of sunlight falling on the sidewalk.

  "You know," I said, cautiously bringing up a touchy subject, "It's such a short drive, I could easily walk."

  He paused for a second, eyes fixed on the road. "Claire wouldn't like that. I'm assuming that's why you're asking me, the pushover."

  "You're not a pushover," I protested. "I'm asking you because she's hardly around, and you're here. And it's probably only a ten minute walk. The school is in the center of town, I wouldn't have to set foot on any back roads." I had laid out my whole case, and now I could only wait for him to deliberate on it.

  Briefly, he took his right hand off of the steering wheel to pat me on the shoulder, managing a quick grin. "I'll talk to her about it."

  He had finally shaved off the wiry beard he adopted when he opened the gallery last year. His face looked ten years younger, his childish, rounded cheeks making him boyish.

  "When did you shave?" I asked.

  "About two weeks ago," he said, looking perplexed. "Didn't you notice?"

  "Of course I did," I said, trying to act as though I had been joking. But I hadn't noticed at all before now.

  The Mazda pulled into our driveway, and Hugh parked in the garage behind the house. I went in through the back door as he fetched the mail, lobbing my backpack onto the table to await later attention.

  I pulled out the makings for a sandwich from the fridge, taking the bag of bread off of the top. I was suddenly starving, as I hadn't eaten during my odd lunch break. I smeared mustard on bread, and I wondered again about Henry Rhodes, the odd newcomer who had caught the attention of Hawthorne.

  It definitely seemed as though he had assimilated with the popular crowd quickly, but he seemed genuinely nice. And very hot, to be honest. Possibly the cutest boy in school. Which meant I never had a chance.