by Dean Murray
The lazy, half smile was back, but this time it didn't send my heart racing even faster, it calmed me down. That smile felt like coming home.
"You're going to be late to your first class, Selene, you'd better get going."
"What about you?"
He shook his head. "I got what I came for today. I can always start school tomorrow. Besides, I have a house to unpack and a night to plan."
Jace stepped back, letting go of my arms and releasing me from the paralysis that his touch had inflicted on me, and then opened the door to my car and picked up my backpack, holding nearly thirty pounds of books straight out in front of him as though it were weightless.
I went to take it from him and he moved it just out of reach with a playful smile. "I think you'd better put this on first. I'd hate for the administration to send you home to change."
His other hand was holding the leather jacket that I'd left on the roof of my car. I started to ask him what he was talking about and then looked down at myself. Somewhere during the course of the morning—probably when he'd grabbed me to stop me from bashing Sandra's head in—the neckline of my sweater had gotten stretched out. Luckily it wasn't ruined. It would be fine after I hand washed it, but it was riding much lower on my shoulders than it had been when I put it on this morning.
I'd already been flashing enough skin that it would have been a borderline case, but he was right, there was zero question but that I would be sent home.
I let him help me into the jacket, and then used the heavy weight of the leather across my shoulders and arms to adjust the neckline of my sweater back to something less scandalous.
"I don't think that I ever actually thanked you for fixing my tires."
"Sure you did. Seeing you this morning is all the thanks I need."
It was too good to be true—he was too good to be true. As much as I wanted to just enjoy it for however long it lasted, a jaded, cautious part of me knew that the longer I went along the worse it would be when he yelled 'psych' and dumped me on my butt.
"Why are you being so nice to me?"
"You're going to be late for class, Selene."
"No, I'm serious, why are you doing all of this? All it's going to do is cause you and Kat problems here at school. I'm not worth that."
He looked angry for the first time I could remember. "Never say that again. You're worth more than all of the rest of the kids in this school combined. They are nothing more than insects. I hate this place for making you feel that way."
I should have been terrified—Jace looked like some kind of avenging Norse deity—but I knew his fury wasn't directed at me. Besides, he'd seen the worst I had to offer and hadn't even flinched. It seemed like it was only fair to return the favor.
We were standing several feet away from each other now, but I could still feel the warmth of his hands on my skin. It was like his jacket had trapped the sensation and bonded it to my skin. I forced myself to stop playing with the neckline of my sweater.
"You're avoiding the question."
His smile this time had an air of resignation to it. "If I tell you, will you get moving so you're not late for school? The last thing I want right now is for you to start getting in trouble and making your dad suspicious that something is going on."
"Fine, you tell me why you're being nice and I'll go to class like a good little girl."
"You remind me of someone I used to know, someone who meant the world to me."
I felt my expression stiffen. It all made sense now. The hints he'd been dropping all fit together perfectly. He'd lost a girlfriend at some point in the past and he still hadn't recovered from that loss, still hadn't gotten over her.
He was being nice to me because I reminded him of her. I was nothing more than some kind of freaky, post-death rebound.
I took a step backward. "I'm not sure dinner tonight is such a good idea…"
He pulled his teleporting trick and was there in front of me again. He captured my hand in his and shook his head at me. "This is why I can't tell you anything. You draw the wrong conclusions and then overreact. I'm being nice to you because I once knew someone very much like you. That means I'm uniquely placed to appreciate all of the things about you that nobody but your dad and Ari notice."
It sounded good, but I wasn't sure there was any difference between what I was afraid of and what he was saying.
"I don't know, Jace. I don't think I'm up to competing with a memory."
"With somebody else that would be the case, Selene, but not you. For you it will never be a competition."
"How is that even possible?"
He smiled at me again. "You know that I'm telling you the truth."
My heart started stuttering as I realized he was right. On some deep, untouchable level I knew him—knew him well enough to know that he was absolutely telling me the truth.
"That's crazy."
"Crazy? Yes. The truth? Yes. Wonderful in ways that you can't even begin to explain? Yes. Say you'll still come tonight. You promised…"
I just nodded, unwilling to trust my voice when my insides seemed so determined to rearrange themselves. It was his hand on mine that was doing it, but I wasn't willing to let go, not yet. I had a feeling that I would suffer through a lot worse than some industrial-sized butterflies for the sensation of his skin on mine.
"Good. Now go to your first class. You promised to stay out of trouble."
Jace let go of my hand and then reached up and guided me through a half-turn with gentle pressure against my shoulders. With his leather jacket between his hands and my shoulders, I couldn't feel anything more than just pressure, and that more than anything else seemed to break the intoxicating spell that he'd cast on me.
I nodded and started towards the school. I wanted desperately to look back at Jace, but I forced myself to watch where I was going. I might very well have already lost my ability to exercise my free will, but I needed to at least keep up the illusion that I could still choose something other than what Jace wanted.
A smile turned up the corners of my lips. At least Jace wasn't completely infallible. There was no way I was making it to my class on time. Not after the amount of time we'd spent together in the parking lot. The simple fact that there wasn't anyone else still in the parking lot would have been more than enough to establish that the second bell had rung a long time ago.
Chapter 5
I wasn't late, and that was pissing me off for more reasons than just the fact that Jace was once again right.
It made absolutely no sense. There were always people who waited out in the parking lot until the last second.
Even more weird, as I walked across the parking lot I realized that everything was eerily silent. No birds were singing, no insects were chirping, there was nothing but the sound of my footsteps to indicate I hadn't gone deaf.
All of that changed as soon as I stepped through the first of the double doors that formed a kind of airlock system to keep out the cold Colorado winters. The first door had been propped open, but as I reached for the next set of doors, the door behind me swung shut of its own accord.
The thump as it hit the metal doorframe made me jump. It was like the door closing had opened up some kind of auditory floodgates. I could hear the hum of conversation and yelling on the other side of the doors and now that the entryway was a little darker I could see through the safety-glass windows set into the doors ahead of me.
The halls were full of other kids, and as I stepped through the second set of doors I checked the digital clock set high in the wall and saw that I still had three minutes to get to my first class.
I'd never realized before that instant how much I depended on my sense of time to ground me. I'd been a little…distracted…while talking to Jace, but there was no way that our conversation had been less than three minutes long.
I had the nagging feeling I should step back outside and confirm that the parking lot was still empty, but instead I found myself moving towards my English class as though on autopi
lot. Apparently I wasn't ready to deal with a world where the physical laws I'd grown up with no longer worked like they were supposed to.
I thought about turning around and going out to the parking lot. It was tempting, but if I went out there and saw dozens of kids where just seconds before there hadn't been any, I wasn't sure my mind could stand up to the implications.
Even worse, what if I went back out there and it was still empty and silent? What if I somehow got stuck inside of that weird, isolated version of the world forever?
I knew I was being silly, that there had to be an explanation for everything that had happened so far, but I just couldn't take the chance that I was wrong.
I stumbled into my first class thirty seconds before the second bell and went through the first half of the day in a haze. I was so far gone that I didn't even notice the looks I got from every single girl I passed.
I didn't start putting the pieces together until I grabbed my normal lunch of French fries and slipped out of the cafeteria to go sit in a quiet corner in one of the halls that was full of nothing but vacant classrooms. I'd known that people knowing Jace was interested in me was going to cause problems, and despite all of that I'd stupidly worn his leather jacket through the first four classes of the day.
Even the girls who hadn't ever met Jace were still going to know something was up. The real kicker was that I couldn't do anything about it. Even if I took Jace's jacket off now—which I couldn't, not if I wanted to avoid being sent home—the damage was already done. I was screwed.
I was debating just skipping the rest of my classes when I heard footsteps approaching from around the corner. I had a couple of seconds to worry that Sandra had tracked me down, and then Kat came around the corner with the same devil-may care smile that had graced her face as we'd sped through the town on two wheels.
"Selene, what on earth are you doing out here by yourself?"
"Honestly? I'm trying to keep a low enough profile that Sandra and her friends will forget about me."
Kat started laughing, and then stopped again after a second. "Oh, sorry. I didn't realize you were serious. You can't have really thought you were going to fly under the radar wearing that sweater…"
"Yeah, one of my split personalities was running the show when I got dressed this morning. She's since retreated back under the rock inside my head where she usually lives and now the rest of me is left to deal with the results of her craziness."
Kat sighed. "You poor thing. Rather than keeping the crazy you buried under a rock you should be putting her in charge of the asylum. You're letting Sandra and her pet sluts dictate everything. You should be flaunting the fact that you've got a new rich, hot boyfriend, not trying to hide away like you're ashamed of it."
"Do you call everyone you don't like sluts?"
"Nope, usually I call them whores, but you seem a little sensitive for that, so I thought I'd rein myself in a little—are you proud of me?"
I shook my head in disbelief. "How do you do that? How do you make me feel like none of this matters and that we're both destined for bigger, better things?"
"Well, I just happen to know that none of this really matters. I mean seriously, this is just high school. In a year and a half we're both going to graduate and we never have to come back unless we want to. The first reunion is mostly just full of a bunch of posers trying to impress each other, so it's not like we'll be missing anything."
Kat plopped down next to me with her back against the wall and grabbed one of my French fries. "Man, these things are one of the best inventions ever. I still remember the first time I had fries—talk about life-changing. I hope that I never forget that day. Hey, next time you should get some extra salt—you're only young once, right?"
Thinking about the likely retaliation I was going to have to weather from Sandra and her clique had ruined my appetite. I pushed the remaining fries over in her direction.
"I wish I had your confidence, Kat. I just can't stop thinking about all of the different ways that Sandra could screw me over."
Kat scrunched her nose up in thought and then pulled her phone out of her front pocket. "We don't have enough time left before our next class starts to do anything about Sandra, but you just leave her to me. Come on, let's get moving. I want to get to Chemistry with enough time to convince the teacher to put me in the right assigned seat."
I stopped her by grabbing her arm and refusing to let her drag me along behind her. "Wait, you're in my class?"
Kat didn't look up from the last French fry, which she was studying with a kind of sad longing. "Yeah, I'm in all of your classes. I would have been here this morning, but Jace was in full 'oh my gosh, the house is a mess and Selene is coming over tonight' mode. So of course I had to…"
My shock must have been obvious, because as soon as Kat looked up at me she stopped talking.
"That probably sounds creepy, doesn't it?"
"You think?"
Kat plopped the last fry in her mouth. "Look, it's not as creepy as it sounds. Jace is in all of your classes too…"
"Right, because having the Barbie twins stalk me together rather than separately is so much less creepy."
"This is so not my fault. I'm placing the blame for all of this squarely on Jace's shoulders. Look, you and Ari are the only interesting people we've met in this entire town. We could have just left everything to chance and spent most of our days bored out of our minds, but that's not really our style. Why settle for mediocrity if you have the ability to go get what you want and nobody gets hurt along the way?"
"Why do I get the feeling that you really do get everything you want?"
Kat's response was too perky to be practiced. "Because I do, obviously. Now that we've got that settled and you're no longer creeped out, let's get to class."
We stopped at our lockers, which were suspiciously close to each other, and then headed off to Chemistry. Mr. Reynolds had flown in the Air Force for twenty years before making the transition to small-town educator, and it showed. He ran his class with a ruthless discipline that made the rest of the teachers look like pushovers.
He was less than five years away from retirement and not afraid to make kids look like idiots if they disrupted his classroom. Kat entered the class and studied Mr. Reynolds with slitted eyes for several seconds before nodding.
"He'll do very, very nicely."
I started to follow her up to the front of the classroom, but she stopped me. "Could you just wait back here, Selene? I'd really hate to have you get caught in this—it's really considered bad form—you know how it is, right?"
"Um, no, you're talking crazy again."
Kat's sigh was melodramatic. "Someday you're going to understand how hard all of this was for me. Fine, you can come, but stay a few feet back behind me."
I gave her a 'whatever, I'm too cool for any of this, but I'll humor you just because I'm that reasonable' look and then dropped back to follow her at a 'safer' distance.
"Hello, Mr. Reynolds. I'm Kat. Could I trouble you for a moment about the seating arrangements? I think we've got some problems that need to be worked out."
It was bold and almost guaranteed to send Mr. Reynolds off. He took a big breath as though getting ready to start yelling, but before he could actually get the words out Kat closed to within a foot or two of him and he did a double-take, almost like he hadn't really seen her the first time he'd looked at her.
"What do you need out of me, Kat?"
There was a note in Mr. Reynolds' voice that I'd never heard before, but Kat acted like nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
"Could I please see the seating chart for the class that will be starting in the next few minutes?"
"Of course, just one moment while I grab it."
He jumped to his feet and hurried over to the lectern he used to hold his notes. Kat drifted along behind him, making it look casual, but staying within a few feet of him.
"Here it is, Miss Kat."
"Just Kat is fine."
She pointed towards the seat towards the back where I normally sat. "Am I reading this right? Is that where Selene sits?"
"Yes. Is there a problem? Do I need to kick her out of my class?"
"Oh, no, that is the last thing I want to have happen. Selene is my close personal friend; I hope that you've been nice to her."
Kat shifted around even closer to Mr. Reynolds and I thought for a second his eyes were going to pop right out of his head.
"I didn't know that she was important to you. I promise I'll work harder at being nice to her."
"I'm sure you will."
Kat patted him on the arm and I finally figured it out. Mr. Reynolds didn't just sound eager to please, he sounded like he'd found his own personal grail. He wanted Kat, but it wasn't sexual—wasn't just sexual. I got the feeling that he would have done anything for her, right up to slicing his own wrists if she asked.
A few more seconds of silence passed as Kat studied the seating chart and Mr. Reynolds danced back and forth from one foot to the other like a four-year-old who needed to pee. The suspense was killing me.
I stepped forward, quietly, in an effort to get close enough to get the faintest taste of whatever it was she was doing to him. I was almost close enough for her to see my feet without looking up from the lectern when it happened.
One second I felt fine, then all of a sudden I wanted to drop down to my knees and kiss Kat's feet. The urge was so compelling that I couldn't help myself. She looked up as my knees started to bend and swore.
"Damn it, Selene, you were supposed to keep your distance."
I wondered how I could have been so stupid. What had I been thinking? Of course the most important thing was to honor her wishes. What I had or hadn't promised didn't even enter into it for me as I scrambled backwards on all fours in a desperate effort to get back to where I'd been before I'd displeased her.
"I'm so sorry that she disobeyed you, Miss—I mean, Kat. Are you sure that you don't want her punished?"
I found myself nodding. It was only logical, I needed to be punished, the only question was whether she was going to want him to do it or if she would want me to punish myself. I was obviously too unworthy for her to punish me.
