It's the quiet ones you have to watch out for.
* * *
It took us almost twice as long to get back to school as it had to get to Fifties in the first place, and by the time we returned, Zo had finally recovered.
“Next time,” she told Annabelle, “I'm going to Coney, and we're going to leave you in the parking lot.”
Annabelle snorted and pocketed the keys.
How could the two of them even think of splitting up for college? They were like two halves of the same Porter whole! Besides which, Annabelle was even shier than I was. Who was she going to steal keys from if Zo wasn't around?
Sidhe. Home.
The image came as a reminder, in equal parts bitter and sweet, that there was a place where I wouldn't have to worry about these things, a place where my connection to my friends was a memory, instead of a living, breathing thing capable of making my stomach turn itself inside out.
I don't have to sit around waiting for them to leave me, I thought. I could leave them first.
Where had that come from? The whole point of my senior-year angst was that I didn't want the four of us to split up; why in the world would I even think of bringing everything to an end sooner?
Sidhe. Home.
No, I thought violently. This is my home. These are my friends. Leave me alone.
And just like that, the image and the longing were gone, and I zoned back in and slipped out of the car before the others could notice something was up.
I shut the car door behind me, and as the four of us started walking toward the school, I realized that my right hand had Morgan's necklace in a death grip. I loosened my hold and allowed the pendant to fall back on my chest.
“You guys ready to get your geek on?” Delia asked.
Annabelle, Zo, and I looked at one another. “Maybe?”
“Okay, folks. You need to find a partner and a lab station. The directions for your assignment and all of the supplies you'll need for the experiment are on your tables. I expect your completed reports on my desk by the beginning of class tomorrow.”
Normally, finding a partner in physics class was an excruciating experience for me, but this time the teacher's assignment wasn't the only one I was working on. Delia would kill me if she found out I had an opportunity to work with my geek and was too chicken to actually pursue it. And given the fact that he knew about my tattoo and was somehow at the center of some Sidhe shenanigans, I really didn't have much of a choice. I needed to know who he was, what he knew, and why one of the Sidhe would care whether I spent time with him or not.
Also, he was awfully cute …
I stood up and took a step toward Alec, who was sitting a couple of desks down, trying to gather his notebooks. He dropped his pen, and I bent down to pick it up. Unfortunately, he bent over at the exact same time, and the two of us bonked heads. Either he and I were a match made in heaven, or we were destined for the emergency room.
“Whoa … I'm so—”
“Sorry!” I blurted, interrupting his apology with my own.
“No, it's totally my fault. I'm just so …”
“Yeah, me too.”
I went for the pen again, and this time managed to grab it and hand it to him without taking any blows to the head. “Here,” I said, and the moment I got the word out of my mouth, I was overcome with a bout of spontaneous shyness. In some ways, being the type of person who was sometimes shy and sometimes not was worse than being like Annabelle, who was always reserved around anyone outside of our group. At least she knew what to expect. I could never predict whether I'd be Shy Bailey or whether I'd actually manage to be halfway articulate. I just had to open my mouth and wait to see what came out.
Right now, the answer was a whole lot of nothing.
“Do you want to … ?” Alec didn't manage to finish the question, but it was enough to unfreeze my tongue.
“… work together?” I finished.
He nodded and then I nodded, grateful that we'd both managed to nod without hitting foreheads.
By this time, there weren't many lab stations left, so we had to make our way to the far side of the room to find one that wasn't already occupied. As a result, Alec and I ended up wedged between two of the most popular guys in our grade and two of the least popular girls.
“Okay,” Alec said, wrinkling his forehead as he read the instructions. “Apparently, we're supposed to figure out the coefficient of friction for this.” He gestured to a large metal ramp on the table in front of us.
“And we would do that … how?” I asked.
He held up several blocks. Gingerly, he set one on the ramp, and we watched it slide down. When it hit the bottom, I reached for it, and his hand brushed mine as he did the same.
“Sorry,” he said quickly.
“No. It's okay,” I said. “I mean … I don't mind.”
Could this conversation get any more awkward? Could I get any more awkward? Things were not going according to plan. I was supposed to be probing his mind, not my limits for humiliation.
“I … ummmm … I think we're supposed to weigh the blocks,” Alec said, and the way he stumbled over the words reminded me that I wasn't alone in my awkwardness. Whether or not geeks were chic, they were definitely less intimidating than boys like Kane, who couldn't even define the word awkward, let alone imagine what it felt like to personally embody it.
Thinking about Kane had me glancing at the guys on the other side of Alec, who were tossing their wooden blocks back and forth as they verbally appraised the popular girls on the other side of the room.
Ugh.
“We need to weigh the blocks,” I said, forcing myself to pay attention to the nice boy right there in front of me. “That's because mass is part of the friction equation, right?”
He nodded. “And we've got a stopwatch, so we can time how long it takes the blocks to slide down the ramp.”
“And that should give us the acceleration.” I picked up where he had left off. I wasn't A-belle-level smart, but when I wasn't zoning out, I had my moments, and Alec seemed to bring my inner Smart Bailey out to play.
“And with acceleration and mass, we can calculate the force vector,” Alec continued.
“And we've got a protractor,” I added helpfully.
He smiled. “Cool.”
This was probably the first time in the history of the world that anyone had ever called a protractor cool.
“Cool.” I decided to become the second person in the world to do so.
“Do you want to do the stopwatch or slide the blocks?” Alec asked.
“The watch?” I said, somewhat unsure what the right answer to that question was. What if I picked the job that he wanted? Was that a turnoff? Before I could worry too much about my decision (or remind myself that in the grand scheme of things I had much bigger concerns), he slid the stopwatch my way, and I picked it up.
Alec grabbed the first block and weighed it. Then he set it on top of the ramp and raised his eyes to meet mine. “You ready?”
I nodded and smiled, and as he let go of the block, I hit the start button on the stopwatch. We wrote down the time and then moved on to the second block. Soon we'd acquired all of our data and just had to figure out how to get from there to an answer.
“It's got something to do with vectors,” Alec said. “Gravity is pulling the blocks down, and friction is fighting it.”
“Two forces,” I said, “opposite directions.”
“And in the end, the stronger one wins,” Alec said softly. “The friction slows the block down, but it can't fight gravity. Sooner or later, the blocks are going to end up at the bottom.” He paused. “Friction isn't enough to stop the inevitable.”
“It could be,” I found myself saying. “If it was strong enough.”
Was it sad that I found myself relating to a wooden block? This whole year was a ramp, and I was sliding slowly but surely toward the end.
Nothing will stop your friends from leaving.
It took
me a second to recognize that the voice in my head wasn't actually my voice, that the hated words weren't my own thoughts. Maybe because I'd thought them before; maybe because they were true.
Everything is ending, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, nothing you can say that will make your friends care about you as much as you care about them. There's nothing you can say to make them stay.
Stop, I thought, too sucker punched by the words to erect any kind of mental barrier to block the intruder from preying further on my fears. Please stop.
They're leaving you in little ways already, you know. Anyone could see how excited they are about their futures without you. Do you really think they could be that excited if they cared about you?
Get out of my head, I begged, still only half sure that there was an intruder and that my subconscious hadn't just decided to lay the smackdown by giving voice to every paranoid thought I'd tried not to think since the end of junior year.
We aren't telling you anything you don't know, Bailey. Your friends betray you every day. They betray what you foolishly thought the four of you had every second that they drift farther away. They don't even realize they're leaving.
You don't even realize they're already gone.
“Bailey?” Alec said my name in a way that made me think that he was repeating himself, but I couldn't force my way through the horrible, horrible truth to reply.
They're already gone. The onslaught was endless. Betrayers!
Not the truth, I chanted silently. I tried to cling to that. I tried to believe it.
We could punish them for you. We could make them stay.
Could they? Could they really keep things from changing?
The answer to my question came in a purr, and for the first time, I processed the “we” part of what had already been said and realized that there wasn't just one person, being, whatever in my head.
There were two. Maybe more.
Yesssss, the voices said. We could make them stay. Punish them for wanting to leave.
Punish them?
It's only fair, Bailey. They hurt you. We hurt them.
“Bailey.” Alec's voice was more forceful this time, and he put his hand on my arm. I jumped and accidentally relaxed the death grip I had on the stopwatch, which fell from my grasp and clattered to the floor. Shaking, I bent to retrieve it, and realized on the way down that my head was finally, blessedly quiet. The voices were gone.
“Thanks,” I whispered to Alec's shoes, knowing that he couldn't grasp what I was thanking him for. My mind my own again, I straightened up and placed the watch on the table.
My friends did care about me.
They had not betrayed me.
And I would never let anyone hurt them. Ever.
“Are you okay?” Alec asked.
Because the alternative was to openly admit that I was a total freak of nature, I nodded.
“So,” I said, attempting a subject change. “How 'bout that friction?”
The two of us went back to working on our physics project, our hands brushing every now and then as we recorded data and manipulated the experimental setup to get additional readings.
“Do you want to …” Alec choked on the words, and when he tried to continue, I thought that I'd have to do the Heimlich maneuver just so the second half of the sentence would stop blocking his airways. “… with me … I mean us … we could …”
What, I prodded him silently, careful to keep the words in my head, lest I psychically broadcast them to him. We could what?
Was Alec, in his own adorably awkward way, trying to ask me out?
Before I could get any kind of answer to that question, I felt a ripple of power, a wave of familiarity that had my stomach flip-flopping so hard and fast that it hurt. Pulled by some kind of magnetic force—or possibly instinct—I looked down at our feet. The shadows near our shoes shifted colors, giving them the appearance of movement even though they remained stationary. The presence—because that was, without question, the right word—moved from shadow to shadow, zig-zagging its way across the room until finally it came to the popular girls' lab table and stopped.
Turn off the lights, I thought, but I couldn't seem to vocalize it, and even though I knew getting rid of the light—and therefore the shadows—was the only thing that could stop whatever was about to happen, I couldn't talk my feet into moving toward the light switch by the door. Instead, I just stared at the popular girls, like the driver of a passing car craning my neck to get a better look at a head-on collision.
Everybody loves a train wreck.
“I mean, honestly, who do girls like that think they're kidding? This isn't a movie; we're not going to, like, adopt them, and I'm sorry, but there are some things that makeovers just can't fix.” Not realizing she was being watched (by Alec, by me, and, most important, by the presence in the shadow), Jessica (who was really pushing for a promotion to Meanest Mean Girl) continued her diatribe on the audacity of unpretty people. As sugary venom dripped from her glossy lips, Jessica tapped her fingernails on the edge of the wooden block she was supposed to be studying.
Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
My senses heightened and on absolute edge, I felt and heard each tap like a gunshot.
Stop, I told her silently, trying to focus my power enough to get the message across, but either popularity was its own kind of psychic shield, or something (or someone) between the two of us was interfering.
“You should have heard those girls talking this morning. They were all, ‘Oh, he's just sooooo dreamy. Do you think he loves me? Will we go to the big dance together? Will they make a Disney Channel Original Movie about our fuzzy-wuzzy puppy love?’ Puh-lease.”
Just shut up, I thought in Jessica's direction, hoping she'd get the memo, as much for her own benefit as because she could have easily been talking about me and saying the exact same thing. As I repeated myself over and over again on the off chance that I'd break through, the shadow moved from the floor up to her legs, snaking its way along the shadows cast on her body by the lab table and experimental apparatus.
“I have three words for girls like that.” Jessica, completely unaware of her own peril, tossed her hair and gave the girls at the table behind me a pointed look. “Pa, thet, and ic.” She faked a shudder. “Heavy on the ick.”
You don't know what you're doing, I shouted, putting so much psychic juice into it that I thought I might give myself an aneurysm. You don't know what you're doing to those girls or to yourself. But it was like screaming through a wall of water—my warnings went completely unheeded and, in all likelihood, completely unheard.
“Move,” I said, switching tactics and speaking out loud, but the word emerged as a whisper. Beside me, Alec shuddered violently, and I wondered if he felt the wave of power—ancient but adolescent, angry but pure—that surged through the room as Jessica shifted in her chair, inadvertently throwing her head completely into shadow.
Like the evil-girl disciple that she was, Jessica didn't stop slinging cutesy insults until the very end, when without warning, every strand of hair on her head fell to the floor.
That haircut is just adorable … maybe next time you can just shave your head. Believe me, bald is beautiful, at least compared to that. The taunt Jessica had thrown toward one of the I-Want-To-Be-Mrs.-Him girls from study hall echoed in my ears, as the quiet shhh-shhh-shhh of hair hitting the floor, lifeless and wispy, spread through the room. The rest of the class finally noticed what was going on, and then there was chaos.
Oh … my … gosh …
Is she … ?
Thank you, God, for this glorious …
What the … ?
Jessica's shrill scream distracted me from the barrage of my classmates' thoughts long enough that I managed to slam up some hard-core mental barriers. Beside me, Alec had gone completely white. I didn't blame him. Maybe he somehow knew the same thing I did.
Whatever Sidhe were doing this, they weren't done yet. Not by a
long shot.
As the tittering and anxious mumbles all around me built to a low roar, the veins on Jessica's bald head began to bulge. They moved erratically back and forth, jumping all over her naked scalp in a rhythm reminiscent of the way evil sometimes moves in scary movies— jagged and staccato, like someone had edited out parts of the path the veins should have taken to get from point A to point B.
Jessica screamed like a banshee and clawed at her own head, French-manicured nails scraping against skin. The girl next to her chimed in with a few screams of her own, even as she backed frantically away from her so-called friend.
I was petrified by the half-formed idea that Jessica's head might start spinning all the way around. Or worse, explode. Instead, her hair started growing back at high speed, bursting out from her scalp like a living creature. And that's when I realized it was. A living creature. Or, more correctly, creatures, plural.
Have I ever mentioned that I really, really hate snakes?
Apparently, the rest of the class felt the same way, because they didn't bother waiting on the final bell before rushing the door in a mad dash to exit first. The teacher, to his credit, didn't abandon ship with my fellow students. On the other hand, I wasn't about to give him too much credit, given that the second the snakes had appeared he'd fainted dead away.
Unconscious teacher. Panicking classmates running into the hallway. I needed to put an end to this, and I needed to do damage control. Unfortunately, I couldn't move. The snakes, hissing and writhing around Jessica's head, turning her into an unwilling high school Medusa, kept me frozen in place.
You have to do something, I told myself sternly. I was one hundred percent sure that the snakes weren't earthly in origin. They were Otherworldly, and that made this my problem. Unfortunately, knowing that and attempting to give myself pep talks did absolutely nothing toward freeing up my bound-by-terror muscles. Knowing that something had to be done, I opted for a course of action that didn't require moving.
Stop this! I sent the order to the being or beings in the shadows, channeling every ounce of power my voice had carried in the Otherworld into those two words.
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