Hallowed u-2

by Cynthia Hand

  Billy stops me on my way out the door to spritz some amazing, yummy perfume in the air and has me walk through it.

  “Home by twelve thirty or I’ll come looking,” she says, and I can’t tell if she’s serious.

  “Yes, Mom,” I mutter.

  She smiles sympathetically. “Have a good time at the dance.” I plan to. Spring is passing too quickly, marching relentlessly toward the cemetery and summer and college and all the other things I don’t want to think about. This night might be the only good time I get for a while. I’m going to live it up.

  The dance this year is at the Snow King ski lodge. The prom committee has done up the place like a jungle, fake trees, big fake flowers, even a giant apple tree in the corner with a plastic snake coiled in the branches.

  Last year was classier.

  But it doesn’t matter. This year, I’m with Tucker. Normally, in his cowboy clothes, his boots and T-shirts and tightish jeans, his flannels and Stetson, he’s unbelievably attractive.

  There’s a ruggedness about him that’s crazy sexy. But then there are times like these, when he shaves and puts on a rented tuxedo, wears a tie and everything, combs his hair just so, when he’s like a movie star.

  “They’re looking at you,” I whisper as we pass through the lobby, and a group of girls turns around to stare.

  “Nah,” he says. “They’re looking at you. That is one amazing dress.” We dance. Tucker’s not a great dancer, but what he lacks in skill he makes up for in jokes.

  He has me laughing the entire time. He tries to teach me to two-step at one point, then to western swing. Then a slow song starts and I lay my head on his shoulder and try to savor the moment, like it’s just him and me here, no worries, no work schedules, no impending calamities, no future plans at all.

  I feel Christian watching me before I see him. He’s dancing with Ava Peters on the other side of the dance floor. I lift my head and peek over Tucker’s shoulder at him expertly maneuvering Ava through the crowd. Ava laughs up at him, says something coy while looking at him through her false eyelashes.

  I press my cheek back into Tucker’s shoulder, close my eyes. But when I open them again I still automatically look for Christian, and when I find him, he looks right at me, meets my gaze and holds it.

  Will you dance with me, Clara? he asks. Just one time tonight?

  Before I can answer, Tucker pulls away. He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses it, thanks me for the dance. I smile at him.

  “Let’s get something to drink,” he says. “It’s hot in here.” I let him lead me over to the punch bowl and get me a glass. We stand for a few minutes by the door, the cool air washing over us.

  “You having a good time?” he asks.

  “Super.” I grin. “But I was wondering, where are your other dates?”

  “My other dates?”

  “If I remember correctly, last year you brought three different women to prom. Where’s the elusive Miss Allison Lowell?”

  “This year I only have eyes for you.”

  “Good answer.” I loop my arms around his neck and sneak in a kiss.

  “Ah, ah, ah, people,” says Mr. Phibbs, clearing his throat.

  Chaperone. I give him my best go-away look.

  “Chastity is a virtue,” he quips.

  “Yes, sir,” says Tucker with a respectful nod. Mr. Phibbs nods back and moves off to find some other couple’s bliss to break up.

  I slip into the bathroom to powder my nose and happen to bump into Kay Patterson. She’s examining herself with approval, reapplying her lipstick. She looks ravishing, wearing a long black mermaid-style dress, sparkling with what I hope are fake jewels.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your mom,” she says.

  I meet her big brown eyes in the mirror. I don’t think she’s uttered a single word to me since last year, back when she and Christian had just broken up.

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “My dad died of colon cancer,” she says flatly. “I was three. I don’t remember it.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  I can’t think of anything to say, so I start washing my hands at the next sink. She finishes perfecting her already perfect face and returns her lipstick to her bag. But then she stands there staring at me. I brace myself for an insult.

  “Most people don’t know. I have a stepdad, and everybody assumes that he’s my father.” I nod, unsure why she’s telling me this, and glance at the door.

  “Anyway,” continues Kay, “I want to offer my condolences. Whatever that’s worth.” I murmur thanks again and start waving my hand in front of the paper towel dispenser to get the infrared mechanism to spit out the paper. Nothing happens. Kay hands me a paper towel from a stack on the counter.

  “Christian’s worried about you,” she says. “I can tell. He lost his mom when he was young, too. That’s one of the first things that we understood about each other.”

  “I know,” I say to Kay smugly. Meaning: he told me too.

  She nods. “You should go easy on him. He deserves to be happy.”

  “He’s not my boyfr—”

  “You’re looking at him,” she says. “You might be all snuggly-wuggly with your boyfriend, but you’re looking at him.”

  “I am not.”

  She rolls her eyes. After a moment, she says, “He dumped me for you, you know.” I stare at her, a deer caught in the headlights.

  Her mouth purses up for a minute like she’s suppressing a smile. “He didn’t say that to me, of course. He gave me a bunch of phony lines about being fair to me and what I needed and acted like he was doing me a favor. Not that I didn’t see it coming. He’d been acting weird for a while. Not himself. And I saw how you looked at him and how he looked at you.”

  “He didn’t look at me,” I protest.

  She scoffs. “Whatever.”

  “Christian and I are friends,” I try to explain. “I have a boyfriend.”

  “Maybe you do,” Kay says with a shrug of her bare shoulder. “But you still look at him.” My face must be the color of beets.

  Then she looks me up and down, taking in my dress. “You’re going to have to step it up if you want to be with him.”

  “Mind your own business, Kay,” I say then, pissed, and storm out.

  And plow straight into Christian. Just as another slow song begins to play.

  I’m starting to think that prom is forever cursed for me.

  “Hi,” he says. “Dance with me, Clara?”

  We belong together, springs to my mind. I can’t tell if it’s him or me who thinks it.

  Insert fluttery panicky feeling in my chest.

  “What. . I. . God,” I stammer, then sigh in exasperation. “Where’s Ava?”

  “Ava’s not my date. I came stag.”

  “Stag. You. Why?”

  “So my date wouldn’t get offended when I wanted to dance with you,” he says.

  That’s when I notice Tucker about five feet away, listening. “You’re forgetting one thing,” he says, moving to my side and slipping his arm around my waist. “Clara has a date. Me.

  So your tough luck.”

  Christian doesn’t look fazed.

  “It’s one dance,” he says. “Clara and I are friends. What’s the big deal?”

  “You had your chance,” Tucker replies coolly. “You blew it. So go step on someone else’s toes.”

  Christian hesitates. Looks at me.

  Tucker shakes his head. “Dude, don’t make me knock you around in here. I don’t want to mess up my tux.”

  A muscle ticks in Christian’s cheek. I get an I-could-kick-your-sorry-butt-if-I-wanted-to vibe from him, clear as day.

  God. Men.

  I step between them.

  “No offense, Tuck,” I say, turning to him, “but I am not a piece of meat, okay? Stop growling over me. I can handle this myself.”

  I turn to Christian. “No,” I say simply. “Thank you for the offer, but I have a date.” I decide where
I belong, I tell him silently.

  He nods, takes a step back. I know.

  Then I take Tucker’s hand and lead him away to the dance floor, leaving Christian standing there alone.

  The dance isn’t much fun after that. I expend a huge amount of energy trying to block Christian out, while at the same time trying not to think about him at all, which turns out to be impossible. Tucker and I are both tensed up for the rest of the night, quiet, pressing close as we dance, holding on like we’re afraid we might slip away from each other.

  We don’t talk on the way home.

  Before I moved here, I never got the whole love-triangle thing. You know, in movies or romance novels or whatnot, where there’s one chick that all the guys are drooling over, even though you can’t see anything particularly special about her. But oh, no, they both must have her.

  And she’s like, oh dear, however will I choose? William is so sensitive, he understands me, he swept me off my feet, oh misery, blubber, blubber, but how can I go on living without Rafe and his devil-may-care ways and his dark and only-a-little-abusive love? Upchuck. So unrealistic, I always thought.

  Joke’s on me, I guess.

  But Christian and I were kind of assigned to each other. He’s not interested in me because of my devastating good looks or my winning personality. He wants me because he’s been told to want me. I feel things for him because he’s like this big mystery to me, and because I’ve been told to want him, and not by just my mother but by the higher powers, the people upstairs, the Big Guy. Plus Christian’s hot, and he always seems to know the right thing to say and he gets me.

  Joke’s really on me.

  And why — this is what I can’t understand — do the people upstairs care about who I love when I’m seventeen years old? Tucker is my choice. My heart, making its own decisions.

  I suddenly feel the urge to cry, the biggest surge of sorrow I’ve felt in a long time, and I think, God, will you just leave me alone?

  “Everybody okay?” Wendy says, nervously, from the backseat.

  “Peachy,” I say.

  And then Tucker says, “What’s that?”

  I stomp on the brakes and we screech to a stop.

  Someone’s standing in the middle of the road. Waiting for us, it seems. A tall man wearing a long leather coat. A man with coal-black hair. Even from fifty yards away, I know who is it. I can feel it.

  Not my sorrow, then.

  Samjeeza’s.

  We’re toast.

  “Clara, who is that?” Tucker asks.

  “Bad news,” I mutter. “Everybody buckled in?”

  I don’t wait for an answer. I don’t know what to do, so I go with my gut. I slowly take my foot off the brake, and move it to the gas. Then I floor it.

  We pick up speed fast, but at the same time we are in slow motion, creeping along in some alternate time as I clutch the steering wheel and focus on Samjeeza. This car, I figure, is my only weapon. Maybe if I knock him into next week with it, we’ll be able to get away, somehow.

  It’s our only chance.

  Tucker starts to yell and clutch at the seat. My head gets cloudy with sorrow, but I push through. The beam from the headlights falls on the angel in the road, his eyes glowing like an animal’s catching the light, and in that last crazy moment, as the car bears down on him, I think I see him smile.

  For a second everything is black. There’s white dust floating around my head, from the air bags, I think. Beside me, Tucker suddenly comes to, inhales deeply. I can’t see him too well in the dark, but there’s a bright silver web of cracked glass on the passenger window. He groans.

  “Tucker?” I whisper.

  He lifts a shaky hand to his head, touches it gingerly, then looks at his fingers. His blood looks like spilled ink against the sudden whiteness of his skin. He moves his jaw back and forth, like someone punched him.

  “Tucker?” I hear the note of panic in my voice, almost like a sob.

  “What the heck were you thinking?”

  “I’m sorry, Tuck. I—”

  “Man, those air bags really hit you, don’t they?” he says. “How about you? You hurt?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wendy?” he calls.

  I crane my head around so I can look toward the backseat, but all I can see from this angle is a bit of her long hair in front of her face. Tucker starts wrenching on the door, trying to get out, to go to her, but it’s partly crushed and refuses to open. I try my door — same problem. I close my eyes, try to clear my head of the fuzzy cobwebs that are collected there.

  Do this, I tell myself.

  I grasp the door handle firmly and pull it, then press my shoulder into the door and push as hard as I can. There’s a pop, then metal shrieking, giving way, and suddenly the door comes completely off its hinges. It falls to the ground. I unbuckle my seat belt and slide out, hurry to the other side of the car, pull the door smoothly off for Tucker, throw it into the weeds at the side of the road. He stares up at me for a second, his mouth slightly open. He’s never seen me do anything like that before.

  I’ve never seen me do anything like that before either.

  I hold out my hand. He grabs it, and I pull him out of the car. He moves straight back to Wendy’s door, which opens easily. He tries to pull her out, but something’s keeping her there.

  “Her seat belt,” I say.

  He curses, still dazed, and fumbles around for the latch, then lifts her out. She doesn’t make a sound as he carries her to the side of the road, lays her gently on the gravel at the shoulder.

  He takes off his tuxedo jacket and slips it beneath her head and back.

  “Wake up, Wendy,” he orders her, but nothing happens. I kneel down next to him and watch the rise and fall of her chest. I listen for the beating of her heart, slow and steady, the most welcome sound in the world.

  “She’s breathing,” I tell Tucker. “Her pulse is strong.” He bows his head in relief. “We have to call 9-1-1. Right now. Where’s your phone?” Back to the car I go. It’s totaled, the whole front end completely mangled like I hit a telephone pole at eighty. No sign of the angel. Maybe he poofed himself back to hell. I go back to the driver’s side and start digging around in the mess for the small black clutch with my phone in it. I can’t find it anywhere. This feels so surreal, like it’s not even really happening, a bad dream.

  “I don’t know where it is,” I cry. “I know I had it when we left.”

  “Clara,” Tucker says slowly.

  “Just give me a minute. I know it’s here.”

  “Clara,” he says again.

  Something in his voice stops me. It sounds like it did that day in the mountains when we hiked to see the sunrise, when the grizzly bear came out of the brush. Don’t run, Tucker had said, exactly that way. I move like molasses back out of the car, straighten up, look toward his voice, and freeze.

  Samjeeza is standing next to Tucker. There’s not a scratch on him. My car looks like it’s been through a compactor, but here he is, smiling slightly, his posture all casual, like he and Tucker are merely hanging out at the side of the road. He’s holding my cell phone.

  “Hello, little bird,” he says. “Good to see you again.”

  That name sends a jolt of fear and revulsion straight to the pit of my stomach. My entire body starts to tremble.

  “You hit me with your car,” he observes. “Is this your boyfriend?” He turns to Tucker as if he wants to shake his hand, but Tucker looks away, at the ground, at the car, anywhere but into the angel’s burning amber eyes. His hands clench into fists.

  Samjeeza gives a short laugh. “He’s considering whether or not he should hit me. After you struck me with your car, he still thinks that maybe he should fight me.” He shakes his head.

  The motion has that strange blur to it, like there are really two of him, one laid on top of the other, a human body, and some other creature. I’d almost forgotten about that. “Humans,” he says with cheerful amusement.

&nb
sp; I swallow so hard it hurts my throat. I refuse to look at Wendy lying there. I can’t look at Tucker, either; I can’t be afraid for him right now. I have to be strong. Find a way to get us all out of this. “What do you want?” I ask, fighting to keep my voice steady.

  “An excellent question, one I’ve asked myself for a very long time. I was angry with you, little Quartarius, since you. .” He turns his head and lifts his hair to show me his ear, which even in the dark looks misshapen. It’s growing back, I realize. I pulled it off last summer, when I had the glory in my hands, and all this time he’s been growing it back.