Keep You From Harm

by Debra Doxer

  Despite my hurt and anger, a part of me can understand what he’s saying, and my traitorous emotions are thrilled that he still wants me. But I don’t deserve the way he treated me, and I can’t pretend it’s okay. He’s watching me with uncertainty. I don’t want to hurt him anymore than he wants to hurt me. But I do want to try to explain myself, something he didn’t bother to do for me.

  “You could have talked to me, Lucas,” I say, surprised at how calm my voice sounds. “I’m a reasonable person. I would have listened. If you’d explained yourself, I would have been capable of understanding you. But instead, you turned back into the asshole I first met, and you treated me like crap.”

  His jaw clenches at my words.

  “And now I can’t be sure you won’t do it again, but I do know that I don’t have to let you.” I step to the side and start to walk around him.

  “You know now, don’t you?” he states from behind me. “Those people at the party told your brother.”

  Rage flares through me, and I spin around. “Yes, I do know, and if you think that has anything to do with what I just said, you don’t understand me at all. But I guess that makes sense. You always do assume things about me. When are you going to realize that you haven’t gotten anything right yet?” With that, I storm off to class.

  “Sophie is practically glued to Lucas again. It’s disgusting.” Gwen wrinkles her nose in their direction before offering me a sympathetic look.

  I don’t want to glance over at their lunch table, but I can’t help myself. There I see Sophie chatting at Lucas, leaning into him, and he’s basically ignoring her, like always. When he looks over in my direction, I dart my eyes away, but not before he notices me staring. “Damn,” I mutter, taking a nibble of my sandwich.

  “I can’t believe it ended before it even got started,” Gwen continues.

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Gwen.”

  “Fine, be all mopey by yourself then. Sometimes talking about stuff helps, you know.”

  I sigh. “Did I tell you that Kyle is giving me driving lessons now? I’m going for my learner’s permit in a few weeks.”

  She perks up. “That’s great. You know, he keeps looking over here.”

  I slump in my chair. Of course I know exactly who she’s referring to. “Let’s not talk about him or where he’s looking, okay?”

  “Are you sure he’s the one who blew you off because he really looks like he wants to come over here and talk to you?”

  I toss my sandwich back into my bag. Feeling like I’m under a microscope is messing with my appetite. “I’m going to head out. I’ll see you in chemistry.”

  From the corner of my eye, I notice Lucas stands when I do. By the time I reach the door, he’s there. “So, that’s it?” he says, stepping in front of me. “You don’t give people second chances? I’m not allowed to make a mistake?”

  I don’t doubt his sincerity, and I can clearly see his remorse. There’s also fear in his eyes, fear that I won’t forgive him. I nearly cave right then. The strange pull I feel when I’m near him isn’t gone, not even close. It may be even stronger now. My heart wants me to throw myself into his arms, to feel his warmth around me again. But reason tells me it’s better this way. After what he did, I’m afraid to give him another chance to do it again.

  “No, Lucas,” I reply quietly, calmly, not revealing that what I’m about to say is killing me. “No second chances.”

  I see anger fill his eyes as they shift away toward the hallway. When they flick back to me, they’ve iced over, chilling me to the bone, and I walk away from him, not wanting to acknowledge the hurt I’ve just inflicted.

  I sleepwalk through the rest of the day knowing that I’ve done the right thing, but feeling miserable about it anyway. It only gets worse when Chad stops me the in hallway to ask me out again. Of course, Lucas walks by at that moment and sees us talking. He doesn’t look away. Instead, his eyes bore into me as he passes.

  When I get home, I do my homework and listlessly sit through dinner. Then Kyle takes me out for another driving lesson. It’s the same route we took last night after we left the nursing home. He sensed something was wrong and out of the blue, he asked me if I wanted to drive home. Now we’re going to go out a few times a week to practice, he promised. When we’re alone, I’m tempted to ask him what he knows about the healing ability our family has. What harm could there be in asking? Then I remember my mother’s adamant warnings, and I remain silent.

  Lucas isn’t in school the next day. I worry about him, but I don’t ask anyone about him. Flyers for the senior prom have appeared all over school and it seems everyone is buzzing about it.

  “We’ll all go together,” Gwen exclaims at lunch. “All four of us since we don’t have dates.”

  Then Lisa clears her throat. “Actually, I do have a date.”

  This is news to Gwen and me.

  “I’m going with Jared from work. I asked him yesterday.” She blushes a deep red and glances down at her lunch tray.

  “I was going to ask you, actually,” Tyler states with surprising confidence.

  Gwen levels a stunned expression at me and then transfers it to Tyler. “You’re asking Raielle?”

  Tyler chuckles. “No. No offense, Raielle, but I’m asking you, Gwen.”

  Her mouth drops open. “You are?”

  He nods and she turns to me, seeming to seek my approval.

  “Say yes, you idiot,” I laugh at her.

  She giggles, trying to stay cool despite her obvious excitement. “Okay, yes,” she tells him. “But what about Raielle? She can come with us, right?”

  Tyler hesitates, but I don’t. “No way. I’m not crashing your party. You guys go and have fun.”

  “But what about you?” Gwen asks.

  “I don’t really do dances. I’ve never been to one, and I don’t want to break my record now,” I say good-naturedly, trying to make them believe it. It’s true that I’ve never been to a dance, but I can’t help imagining what it might be like to go with Lucas. I immediately chastise myself because I decided not to think about him today. Taking it one excruciating day at a time, I am determined to purge myself of all my feelings for him.

  They stare wide-eyed at me. “You’ve never been to a dance?” Lisa says, verbalizing all their thoughts, bringing me back to the conversation.

  “Last I checked, it wasn’t a requirement for graduation,” I joke.

  We finish lunch with talk of hiring limos and buying dresses. At least, they talk about it. I eat silently, somehow managing a smile whenever someone looks at me.

  Lucas arrives at school the next day with a cast on his arm and misery in his expression. His eyes are sunken in, and I can feel the pain of his injury the moment he lowers himself into the desk beside me during first period. The room is still half-empty, and after the way he looked at me when I refused his apology the other day, I would have thought he’d be sitting as far away from me as possible. But he’s stubbornly sitting beside me even as he’s ignoring me.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  He doesn’t move, and I decide he’s not going to answer when he finally glances at me and shrugs. “It was an accident. I was fixing a loose shingle on the roof and I fell.”

  “You fell off the roof of your house?” I ask, incredulously.

  “Yeah,” he mutters through tight lips.

  “You’re lucky you only hurt your arm? Is it broken?”

  He sighs and turns toward me. “Are we speaking again?”

  I hate the anger that sparks in his eyes despite his outward calm. “We were never not speaking.”

  “Just not dating,” he says, wincing slightly when his cast bangs again the desk.

  “Right,” I reply quietly. “Are you taking anything for that? Some aspirin maybe?”

  “Not your concern.” He faces forward again, dismissing me.

  It’s his right arm, and I watch as he struggles to take notes with his left hand. I feel the familiar pull toward him
, but there’s more beneath it now. Empathy for those who are hurting is another part of my power that I try to control. But I know I can’t with Lucas. There’s no point in even trying. It would be so easy to fix his arm. Fixing a broken bone is like riding a bike for me, easy as can be. He winces again as the teacher hands back our homework assignments from last week and Lucas reaches for it with his right arm, the bulky cast that runs from his elbow to his wrist banging against the desk again, harder this time, emitting a loud thud.

  At that moment, I decide to heal it. Consequences be damned. I can’t watch him in this miserable state when I know I can do something about it. I’ve repaired many friends’ broken limbs, making them think that it was never as bad as the doctors thought. It’s interesting how easily people believed the improbable over the impossible, the impossible being that I healed them.

  After the bell rings, Lucas glances at me with surprise as I fall into step beside him on our way to our next class.

  “So, what is this? I’ve got to break something so you’ll be nice to me?” he asks with his familiar smirk.

  “I never wanted us to stop being nice to each other,” I explain without quite looking at him.

  He bumps me lightly with his good arm causing me to turn to him. “I really am sorry,” he says.

  I nod. “I know.”

  We go through the rest of our morning with awkward, restrained friendliness, and I can tell that Lucas isn’t exactly sure where he stands with me. I can’t help him because I’m not sure either. I know that I miss him, and I would like to be friends, but I’m afraid to want more.

  Before lunch, Lucas stays after class to get the assignments he missed yesterday. I wait by the door for him as the hallway quiets down and students scatter either to class or to the cafeteria. When he’s finished, he appears surprised but pleased to see me waiting by the doorway.

  “Hey,” he grins at me.

  “I copied all the notes for you from our morning classes yesterday. I have them in my locker if you’d like them.” Actually, I hurriedly did that before class so that I’d have an excuse to get him alone and to touch him.

  “Sure. Thanks.” He eyes me, unsure. My friendly behavior is obviously confusing him.

  We walk together down to my locker. The hall is quiet now as he stands patiently beside me, watching as I enter the combination and pull the metal door open. I can feel his eyes traveling over me, and I try to contain the self-conscious flush coloring my face. I grab the loose papers and turn toward him. When he reaches out his good arm, rather than placing the notes in his waiting hand, I touch my palm to his. Immediately, my stomach flutters with anticipation. The pleasant buzzing sensation begins, and I can feel the energy growing. It peaks inside me before uncoiling and flowing from me into Lucas. He sucks in a breath, and his hand jerks within mine. His forearm is actually broken in two places and those sections fuse back together as I breathe out slowly. But then something else happens. I begin to see a scene in my head. I see a woman coming at Lucas with a baseball bat. Her mouth is open in a scream. Her chestnut hair swings wildly around her face. She raises the bat over her head, and his arm comes up to shield him. When the bat jerks downward, I hear something snap in Lucas’s forearm just before his face crumples in pain.

  With a sharp inhale of air, I remove my hand from his, letting the notebook pages drop onto his open palm. I know I just saw the truth of his injury. I don’t know how, but I did. When I allow myself to look at his face, I see absolute astonishment there. His eyes are wide and wild as he stares at me. When I heal injuries, I know the other person feels the same exhilaration I do, but this time, I’m not sure what Lucas felt. I know his bones are healed, but did he relive their breaking with me? Is that what just happened?

  “If you have any trouble reading them, just let me know,” I say with a shaking voice, gesturing to the notes resting absently in his hand, trying to return us to normalcy.

  Lucas blinks at me as he attempts to comprehend what just happened. He turns his hand, and the papers flutter to the floor. Then he lifts his other arm, the one with the cast, and looks down at it, flexing his fingers and turning it over. His eyes find mine again, and they narrow on me. “Ray,” he whispers before holding his arm up in front of him and staring at it. “What the hell just happened?”

  “What do you mean?” I laugh, and it’s not exactly an academy award winning performance. Then I take a step back. “I’m heading to lunch.”

  “Wait,” he says.

  I stand there watching his shock change to confusion. He wants to say something to me, to ask me something, but he doesn’t. He just stares at me as though studying me long enough might give him the answers he’s looking for.

  Finally, I end the standoff. I bend down, pick up the papers, and hold them out to him. But he doesn’t acknowledge them. “So, um, I can hold on to these for you,” I say, acting like nothing strange is going on. Then I step further away from him as I shove the papers into my bag. “I’ll see you later.” I flash him a tight smile before I turn and head down the hallway, anxious to put distance between us, to let him think about what happened, and to dismiss it as crazy while he decides to be happy that his arm is no longer broken. That’s how it goes. That’s how it has always happened before. But I’ve never healed Lucas before, and I’ve never had the event that caused the injury play itself out in my head. Knowing Lucas, I’m afraid he won’t let it go the way most people do. I don’t think I can let it go either now that I know his mother did this to him.

  I see no sign of Lucas for the rest of the day. He doesn’t make an appearance at lunch, and I find myself nibbling on my lip as much as my sandwich. He may be confused, but I know that physically he’s completely fine now. Based on his reaction, a small seed of worry begins to sprout inside me. What if he tells someone? If he does, I’ll deny it. The likelihood of anyone believing him is slim anyway. As the anxiety takes hold, I begin to regret healing his arm. Broken arms mend. I didn’t have to intervene, and I can only hope that it doesn’t blow up in my face. But I never could stand to watch people suffer in even the smallest way. I haven’t begun to process the vision that accompanied the healing this morning. That has never happened before, and I don’t know why it did now. I have no one to talk to about any of this. The questions are swirling around in my head, and the answers are completely out of reach.

  After school, I catch a ride with Gwen to her house so we can finish our chemistry lab. She’s wavering as to whether Tyler’s asking her to the prom means that he likes her or not, and it feels good to immerse myself in her typical teenage issues for the afternoon.

  College acceptance letters will be arriving soon and like me, Gwen nervously checks her mailbox every day. Unlike Lucas, the rest of us are on pins and needles. Gwen wants to return to Manhattan and has only applied to schools in the city. I’m worried that my letters won’t find me here in Fort Upton. Kyle assured me that he took care of having any mail addressed to me forwarded here. I took the extra step of calling the schools to give them my change of address. So, the letters should arrive just fine. But so far, they haven’t.

  The day is finally over, and I’m heading down to my bedroom, when the doorbell rings. Since I’m the closest to the front door, I pull it open to find Lucas standing in the darkness on the other side.

  “Who is it?” Kyle asks, stepping beside me. “Hello, Lucas,” he says with a frown.

  Lucas offers him a tense smile. “I came by to see if Raielle wanted to go for a drive.”

  Kyle hesitates and glances at me. I can’t read anything in Lucas’s stoic face, but I know we need to talk, and as wiped out as I’m feeling, I’d rather get it over with.

  “It’s supposed to storm pretty hard later. Maybe another night would be better,” Kyle suggests.

  Lucas is about to say something when I interrupt him. “We won’t be gone long.” Then I reach for my coat without waiting for Kyle’s answer. He stands silently while I slip it on, and since he doesn’t appear to be
stopping me, I head out the door.

  It’s a cool damp night. The air is heavy with moisture even though the rain hasn’t started yet. As I silently follow Lucas to his truck, I notice that his cast is gone. He opens the door for me, and I get inside, still getting no read on his mood since his face is a mask of neutrality. His silence is probably a bad sign though. Once we leave my neighborhood, I turn to him. “Where are going?”

  “Not too far,” he says, his eyes on the road.

  Soon fat raindrops begin hitting the windshield. Lucas pulls onto a bridge that crosses over a river and parks to the side. In the distance, I can see the glittering lights of a city skyline.

  “That’s Albany,” he says.

  “I didn’t know it was so big,” I comment, peering out the window at the glowing buildings that stretch upward, disappearing into the low hanging clouds. Below us, the rushing water is a moving dark mass.

  “We’ll have to talk in the truck,” he says. “I was hoping to take you down there.” He gestures to a grassy area just below the bridge. “There are some benches. On a clear night, the view is pretty amazing.”

  I take the fact that he wants to share amazing views with me as a good sign. It’s not raining too hard yet but the heavy drops ping around us as they land on the truck. Lucas keeps the heat running, and I catch the faint aroma of his spicy scent in the air.

  His intense eyes meet mine. They’re shining at me in the dim light. I notice that his hair curls more in the humidity, just like mine does. He turns his body toward me, resting his right arm along the back of the seat behind him. “I cut the cast off this afternoon,” he says, raising and lowering his forearm. “Since I don’t need it anymore.”