The Awakening Series: Volumes 1 - 3

by Dean Murray

  "Wow…just wow."

  Kat smiled at me. "I know, right? Don't let on to Jace how amazing it is though. The last thing he needs is for this particular bad habit to be reinforced. If I didn't give him so much crap about the Viper he would have already replaced it with something even more ostentatious."

  The car chirped as Kat unlocked it. I climbed into the passenger seat and shook my head again at the black leather interior as I buckled my seatbelt. Kat pushed the start button and the engine roared to life with a throaty growl that shook my entire body.

  Kat returned my smile with one of her own. "That's nothing, watch this."

  She stepped on the gas at the same time she let off of the clutch and cranked the steering wheel to the left. We shot forward with a squeal of overheated rubber and smoke, slewing around and then shooting towards the exit. My knuckles went white as I held onto the door with one hand and the edge of the seat with the other.

  The road was approaching at an insane clip and I opened my mouth to warn Kat about the speed bumps, but she threw the car to the right at the last second, driving over the grass and skirting around the speed bump with only inches to spare before swerving back onto the asphalt. The car was still fishtailing as she jerked the wheel to the right and sent us screeching onto the main road that went past the school.

  I should have been scared out of my mind; with anyone else I would have been furious, but somehow the fact that it was Kat short-circuited my normal responses. I was still scared, but I felt alive in a way that I'd never felt before. It helped that Kat seemed to have complete control over the car. Her hands were rock-steady on the wheel, and when she made a correction it always seemed to be exactly the right amount of turn to put the car exactly where she wanted it.

  Kat brought the Viper to a roaring ninety miles per hour before coming off of the accelerator and letting our speed drop back down to a relatively sedate ten over the speed limit.

  "Where is the junior high?"

  "Seriously, you don't know?"

  Kat shrugged. "We just arrived in town this afternoon. We didn't even bother going to classes today—we were only at the high school so we could get registered for tomorrow."

  "Take a left at the stop light and then take a right at the old newspaper building. You can't miss it. You might want to slow down a little though—we're probably going to pass a cop at some point along Main Street."

  Kat took her eyes off of the road for just long enough to throw me a pout. "You sound like Jace. Seriously you have to wonder about a guy like that. Why buy a car with this much horsepower if you're never going to open it up and see what it can really do?"

  "I don't know. Bragging rights?"

  "Yeah, I guess." Kat shrugged as though it didn't really matter and then turned right. "So what's your sister's name?"

  "Ari. She's a freshman and she's the only reason I was still at school that late. Starting this week, she's helping out with making the sets for her school's production of Romeo and Juliet. We don't have internet at home so I thought I'd take advantage of the school's Wi-Fi since I had to stay in town anyway. I guess I'll have to start going to the junior high and waiting there for her."

  "Oh, I don't know. I think we can probably find something else for you to do instead of just hanging out at the school for an hour. Knowing Jace, he'll be full of ideas even in a small town like Cold Springs. Assuming of course that you're willing to hang out with us."

  I started to answer and then stopped as I realized that I had no idea what I was going to say. Despite all of his efforts to get his schedule swapped around to working days, my dad currently worked swing shift at the factory, which meant that he usually left for work forty-five minutes after we got home from school.

  Given that Ari and I were now stuck in town for an extra hour every day, we were embarking on an extended block of time during which we were only going to see him on the weekends. Assuming I could get Ari to keep her mouth shut, there was nothing saying that we couldn't spend all evening away from home.

  "I don't know—I guess it depends on what you guys have in mind…"

  Kat gave me a knowing look. "You're not expecting us to ever hang out, are you?"

  "Honestly?"

  "Always, Selene."

  "Well, if I'm going to be honest, once you've had a chance to get the lie of the land I fully expect you'll drop me like the radioactive social waste I am. The fact that you and Jace don't have any tie to the factory means that you don't have to bow down to Sandra, but if you don't play nice with her you're not going to have anyone else to hang out with. People around here have learned that they have to keep Sandra happy."

  "Not even you, Selene? Are you going to give her what she wants?"

  "It would be a lot easier." My response came out as a whisper.

  "It's always easier to give a bully what they want in the short term, Selene."

  "I know. The problem is that sometimes fighting back hurts other people."

  Kat shrugged. "Not fighting back hurts you. Give it some thought. Jace and I aren't going anywhere and it's not like we're going to give that spoiled princess what she wants, so we'll be around if you change your mind."

  She downshifted and then grabbed the emergency brake as she spun the wheel to the left. The back end of the car broke loose from the road and came whipping around us. A second later we skidded to a stop facing back the way we'd come, parked within inches of the curb. I was pretty sure that I'd left my stomach back on the road somewhere.

  I looked back and confirmed that there were only three feet between the back of our car and the front of the next car, and felt myself start to shake as the adrenaline finally hit my system. I opened my mouth, but I didn't know what to say.

  Kat winked at me. "Careful, Selene. If you keep hanging out with me you might decide you like living on the edge."

  "I have a feeling that being your friend might reduce my life expectancy."

  "Maybe, but you'll never know until you try."

  Kat pushed a button on the dash and the hard top above us started to retract. With all of the near-death terror, I hadn't been paying very much attention to the front of the school, but as the car finished making the switch to a convertible, I realized that what I was hearing was cheers. A second later Ari was standing up against the car and shaking her head.

  "That was awesome. You must be some kind of pro right? I don't know how else you could both drive like that and have afforded to have Hennessey put a Venom conversion on this thing."

  Kat gave Ari a perky smile. "Nope, no pros here—I'm just a gifted amateur. You must be Ari. My name is Katrina, but everyone calls me Kat. Some moody skank let all of the air out of your sister's tires so I'm giving you both a ride home."

  Ari's smile got even wider for a second. I frowned at her. "Did you even hear the first half of what she said, runt? I've got four flats. For all I know all four tires are ruined at this point."

  "Yeah, I heard, but you're only kind of freaking out, so that probably means that the tire situation is under control. Besides, we're about to drive off in a Viper Venom and the whole drama club is here to see it, which means by this time tomorrow the entire school will know I got to sit in one of the sweetest muscle cars known to mankind. We could get hit by a meteor on the way home tonight and I'd still die happy."

  "Well, based on what I've seen so far, with Kat driving you just might get your wish, but it will probably be us hitting the meteor rather than the other way around."

  Kat stuck her tongue out at me. "I think I'm going to like you, Ari. Your sister didn't tell me that you were a gearhead. Unlike me, you can probably fix all of the stuff that I'm planning on breaking over the next few days. You'll have to excuse Selene, she's still trying to recover from being forced to be something other than dull."

  I was still trying to come up with a response as Kat reached back between the seats and grabbed a heavy, black leather jacket.

  "Here, Selene. It looks like Ari was smart enough to wear a jac
ket to fight off the chill of driving very fast down a road with the top down, but you weren't, so you're going to need Jace's jacket. Put it on so we can get out of here."

  I accepted the jacket and put it on with a frown. "You're planning on Ari and I sharing a seat, aren't you?"

  Kat batted her eyes at me. "Unless you want me to let Ari drive, in which case you and I can share a seat."

  I held a hand up before Ari could jump all over that idea. "No, there is no way Ari is driving this thing."

  "But, Selene—"

  "No, and that's final. There is no way we could afford to fix this thing if you wrecked it. Kat is driving, but…" I gave Kat my best stern look. "You are going to need to take things more sedately with Ari in the car."

  Kat gave me a wide-eyed, innocent look. "Why, Selene, I never would have even considered putting your sister in danger. I'll drive like a sixty-year-old grandma on her way to Sunday school. Scout's honor."

  I shook my head at her, but Ari opened the passenger door and plopped down on my lap. "Okay, let's go. Are you sure you can't squeal the tires a little as we leave? It would do a lot for my street cred…"

  The car dropped into gear with a click that was only barely audible over the engine, and then Kat let the clutch out and spun the tires in one long squeal. I opened my mouth to yell at her, but was assaulted by the smell of burning rubber.

  I got a lungful and started coughing. Kat once again gave me her best innocent look. "Would you believe I meant a sixty-year-old grandma with an especially grabby clutch?"

  Ari looked back at me and nodded, face full of mock seriousness. "She's right, Selene. They have to upgrade the clutch on these things. If Kat hadn't given it a little extra gas it would have died. "

  I rolled my eyes at her, still coughing too hard to get a word in edgewise. By the time my coughing finally subsided to the point where I could give the two of them a piece of my mind, Kat had been driving sedately for nearly five minutes.

  "How did you ever end up as such a gearhead, little sister?"

  Kat raised her hand. "I'll bet there was a boy involved. Am I right or am I right?"

  Ari smiled. "Yep, you're right. Two years ago I had a crush on Jack Samuelson, but he barely registered the presence of anything that didn't have headlights and a gearshift so I had to become con-ver-sant in car speak in order to get his attention."

  I thought the way she'd stretched conversant out like that was juvenile, but Kat just made a fist and pounded it against my sister's knuckles.

  "I knew it. And then by the time you decided that Jacky boy wasn't worth your time you realized that you liked cars. I swear, ninety percent of everything we girls do ends up coming down to boys in some way or another."

  Ari turned even further so that she could look at both of us at the same time. "I don't know about you, Selene, but I think Kat and I are going to be great friends."

  Kat's look of innocence had been replaced by one that was pure mischief. "I'll bet you're starting to reconsider your desire not to hang out with us, aren't you, Selene?"

  "Yeah, I'm starting to realize that leaving you and Ari alone with each other would be a very bad idea."

  Chapter 2

  Kat dropped us off at home and then left with a jaunty wave before I realized I was still wearing Jace's jacket. That meant I was going to have to track him down tomorrow in order to give it back to him. At least he'd seemed relatively normal—surprisingly so in comparison to Kat.

  I shook my head as I followed Ari into the house. I never would have guessed when I woke up that morning that I was going to end up getting a ride home in a sports car from a crazy person.

  Dad had turned the thermostat down again which meant two things. First that the house was downright cold, and second that he'd had a bad day at work yesterday and had been more worried about his job than he usually was when he got home. The thermostat had become the perfect barometer of how Dad was doing professionally, and finding out that he'd lowered it again put a damper on my mood faster than anything else could have.

  Ari hadn't put two and two together yet, but it was only a matter of time. For now she just complained as she went about cooking dinner for us. At least she'd realized that the thermostat was a big deal, even if she hadn't figured out why yet. She would spend the evening complaining, but that was all she would do.

  It was cold enough that I didn't even think of taking off my jacket until we'd finished eating, and even then I probably wouldn't have realized I was still wearing it if I hadn't had to wash the dishes. I pulled it off and hung it over the back of my chair and immediately felt a sense of loss.

  It was the smell that did it more than anything else. It smelled like leather, cologne, and sunshine, like someone had packaged all of the best things about boys and then slathered it over the jacket, working the scent deep into the leather.

  It was the kind of jacket that you sometimes saw in old movies, a jacket that was made to withstand decades of use, a jacket you could wear on a motorcycle and know that it would protect you from the pavement if you dumped the bike over doing sixty-five. The black leather had been somehow doing more than just protecting me from the cold air inside our house. It had been cushioning me from all of the worries you expect a seventeen-year-old girl with no mother, no social life, and an overworked father to suffer from.

  For a little while I'd been living wholly in the moment rather than worrying about what might be barreling towards us with all of the momentum of a freight train. It had been nice.

  I finished the dishes in record time, hoping that I'd be able to recapture that feeling by putting Jace's jacket back on, but I had no such luck. The jacket still smelled like a little piece of heaven, and it felt almost like I had Jace's arms wrapped around me, but that wasn't enough to distract me from all of my worries.

  Ari didn't comment about the jacket until later that night. I'd finished up the last of my homework and was slowly pulling it off so that I could change into my pajamas when she broke the easy silence between us.

  "So Kat's brother must really be something…"

  "What makes you say that, runt?"

  She stuck her tongue out at me, but didn't let the much-hated nickname sidetrack her as she followed me into the bathroom.

  "Oh nothing much, just the fact that you've worn his jacket all night, the fact that you're obviously wishing you could get away with wearing it to bed…"

  "I am not!"

  "Yes, you are, but there's no need to get so defensive. There isn't anything wrong with liking a boy."

  "It's comments like those that prove it's a good thing I'm around to keep you from getting swept up in some torrid romance that leaves you in Las Vegas divorced before the one-week anniversary of your marriage, runt. I don't have the time and we don't have the money for me to start mooning after Jace or any other boy."

  I squirted a little toothpaste onto my toothbrush and tossed the tube to Ari with more force than I usually used. She easily plucked it out of the air and rolled her eyes at me.

  "Isn't that the point of having a boyfriend? Don't they pay for everything?"

  "Maybe in the movies that's the way it works, but these days it's more like fifty-fifty."

  "You don't know that."

  She was right. It wasn't like I had any experience dating, and I didn't have any close friends—female or otherwise—to live vicariously through, but it sure seemed like the girls I watched from afar spent a lot of time and money chasing the objects of their affection.

  For once being speechless turned out to work in my favor. Ari sighed. "You're right. Damn feminists. They should have stopped pushing so hard a couple of decades ago."

  "What, you'd rather live back in the days when women couldn't vote?"

  "Nope, after women got the vote, but before men stopped being chivalrous."

  I finished washing my face and used a towel to pat my face dry. "I'm not sure there was ever any such time period."

  "Sure there was. I have it on good authori
ty that there was a block of three whole years where everything was perfect. Mom told me all about it—she called it the golden age."

  There was one thing that was guaranteed to instantly shut down any conversation around our house. Mom. Dad and I had gotten really good at not mentioning her, but Ari still sometimes forgot the unspoken rule.

  She realized what she'd said almost as soon as she'd said it, but by then it was too late. "I'm sorry, Selene. I wasn't thinking."

  I shrugged. "It's okay. It's not like you don't miss her too."

  Ari followed me to our cramped little bedroom and dropped down onto her bed. "Sometimes I wonder what things would have been like if she never had cancer. No medical debts, no second mortgage, Dad working more reasonable hours."

  I tried to blink the impending tears away. It didn't seem to be working. I turned off the lights so she wouldn't be able to see me and made my cautious way over to my bed.

  "We wouldn't still be living in Cold Springs. Without all of the debt Mom would have been able to convince Dad to go get a job somewhere else."

  It was a seductive vision. A world where we weren't beyond broke, a world where Sandra was a non-issue in my life, a world where my mom was still around to have some of the awkward conversations that dads weren't very well-equipped to have with their daughters.

  I felt the tears break free and trickle down onto my pillow. I would have been happy to just let the conversation die right there. I needed the barrier of silence to shelter me while I tried to put myself back together.

  Ari, on the other hand, seemed to have an ongoing need to talk about what had happened, a need that neither Dad nor I had been willing—or able—to fulfill. Apparently she felt like the conversation so far meant that all of the usual rules were off.

  "It's been almost five years. I still remember what she looks like because I sometimes sneak into Dad's bedroom and go through the picture albums hidden in the back of his closet. I don't remember what she sounded like though. Do you remember, Selene?"