“How’s it goin’, ladies?” he asked, and Rick noticed he really poured on the smooth southern charm. The girls, except Li, giggled nervously. Weston stared resentfully at the intruders through his horn-rimmed glasses. Li studied Bran for a moment before her gaze drifted to Rick.
“It’s going fine,” she said. “How’s it going with you guys?”
“Good, real good,” returned Bran, taking his time. Li got right to the point.
“So what do you want?”
“Oh—we were just talking about your brother,” said Bran. “We haven’t seen him around all week. Is he okay?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Li said.
“What do you mean?” Rick retorted.
“He hasn’t been home. My mom said he went out of town for some training thing at Spike Ferrington’s gym. My dad says he’s been staying over at your house.”
“My house?” Rick was surprised. “He hasn’t been at my house. And he’s not training with Spike. Spike is my trainer. He would have told me.”
Li smiled up at Rick. She didn’t seem too concerned about Zhai, or about the fact that her parents had lied to her. “Well, I don’t know where he is,” she said.
Rick and Bran exchanged a glance. They’d first thought maybe the Flatliners had done something to Zhai—but if the Shaos were lying about where he was, that couldn’t be the case.
“You sure about that?” Rick demanded.
“Yes,” she said sweetly, still looking steadily into his eyes. “I’m sure.” Rick detected a strange undercurrent in her attitude, as if she was daring them to challenge her.
“She said she doesn’t know,” Weston, the little bespectacled blond kid, piped up.
Rick turned slowly to look at him, fully prepared to knock his head right off his shoulders, but Bran’s laugh diffused the tension. He reached out to give the kid a high five, which, after a moment of confusion, Weston returned.
“Looks like you got yourself a knight in shining armor!” Bran told Li. To Weston he added, “My granddaddy has a sayin’, kid. Don’t poke sleepin’ bears. You feel me?” He clapped Weston on the back, jarring his slight frame so hard his glasses almost fell off the end of his nose, and then he walked away.
Rick hesitated a moment longer, still gazing at Li. Yeah, she was hot, all right. If Zhai stayed lost, Rick might need to take more than just his leadership position. Li gave him one last radiant smile before he turned and headed back to the Toppers lunch table.
“Is it just me, or was Li playing with us?” he asked Bran.
“She knows more than she’d letting on, that’s for sure,” Bran agreed, giving Rick a sly glance. “I think under the circumstances we should pick a temporary leader.”
Rick only nodded, though inside he was shouting in triumph.
“I’ll bring it up to the other guys, see if they want to vote on it.” Bran stopped walking and looked up at Rick, who stopped, too. “Whoever gets picked, I hope he has a strong sense of honor. You know how bad I got dissed at that homecoming dance. I asked Zhai three times for permission to get back at Raphael Kain for it, and every time he said no.”
“If I was the leader,” Rick said quietly, “It wouldn’t be a matter of permission. I’d order you to get revenge.”
Bran smiled, “I knew I could count on you, buddy. Let’s go,” he said and started back to their table.
Rick looked up as the door opened and Raphael Kain walked in. Behind him, Rick saw Maggie passing by in the hallway. “Give me a minute,” he said.
Leaning against her locker, Maggie started shaking as soon as she heard his voice behind her.
“Where have you been?” Rick demanded, surly and threatening. She whirled around, her heart racing, expecting to see his monster persona—but he still looked like Rick.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“You’ve been avoiding me for days, and you haven’t sat with me at lunch all this week,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on—I’ve just been busy.”
“Well, get unbusy,” he ordered. “You’re making me look bad. Everybody’s asking if we broke up or something.” Behind him, she could hear the noise of the crowded lunchroom. “Come on, before lunch is over. Sit at my table with me.”
Reluctantly, she followed him inside, to the Toppers’ table, and she saw Raphael sitting a couple of tables away. He looked up and saw her come in with Rick. She cast a desperate look in his direction and, picking up on it, he moved one table closer.
“Come on,” Rick told her. “Sit down.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“What?” He looked incredulous. “Don’t be stupid. Do as you’re told and we won’t have any trouble.” He looked around at his jock friends, smug.
“No. I . . . I think we should break up.”
His eyes narrowed. “Oh, you think so?” He glared at the other Toppers, and Bran rose and picked up his tray. The other jocks followed suit and filed toward the doors, leaving Rick and Maggie alone.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Maggie?” Rick demanded. “You never want to embarrass me in front of my friends. You ought to know that by now.”
“I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” she said.
“Even if it means you’ll never date in this town again?”
“I don’t care about that anymore.”
A red flush of anger inched up from his neck to his cheeks. “Hmm,” he said as if giving it consideration. “No,” he finished calmly.
“You don’t own me, Rick,” she said, getting angry now. “Anyway, we’re not in love. We never were. You’re not even nice to me. So we’re done.”
Rick sniffed and cracked his neck. “Nope,” he said evenly. “Not even close. I like having you around. I even like it when you get all pissed off like this. It’s a turn-on.” He moved closer, leaned in, and added quietly, “Besides, you need to think of your mom, with no man around the house to protect her. Accidents happen all the time. She might . . . I don’t know . . . fall down the basement stairs or something. Wouldn’t that be tragic?”
At the mention of the stairs, the blood in Maggie’s veins turned to ice. She looked up at Rick, trying to keep the horror from showing in her face. Did he know that the stairs in her basement led directly to hell? He was some kind of a demon, after all . . .
At the edge of her vision, she saw Raphael slowly rising from the next table. Rick glanced over and saw him, too.
“What are you looking at, rat?” he snarled.
“You, getting dumped on your ass,” Raphael said calmly. He was leaning casually against the table now, watching Rick, his eyes glittering with all the hatred Maggie felt. She had never been more attracted to Raphael Kain than at that moment.
Rick took a quick step toward Raphael, but suddenly, Principal Innis approached, walking up the aisle between tables and passing right between Rick and Raph, with three teachers behind him. They all sat down at the table right next to Rick, oblivious to any kind of confrontation going on. Rick looked at them with disgust as they started chatting about curriculum changes, and then he turned to Raphael and cracked his knuckles.
“That’s all right, ghetto boy,” he hissed. “But watch your back. You don’t want to let me get you alone.”
Raphael smiled at him. “I look forward to it, Rick,” he returned evenly. “Every time.”
Rick looked down at Maggie. “We’re done when I say we’re done,” he whispered, and leaned in to kiss her. Before she could pull away, he bit her bottom lip, hard.
Maggie watched him leave, trembling with fury.
Raphael was standing next to her now. “Well, that went well,” he said. He sounded amused. “You think he got the message?”
“Not likely,” she whispered, thinking about her
mother tumbling down the cellar stairs. Rick, she knew, did not make idle threats. “But don’t worry,” she added. “It’ll all work out. Thanks for backing me up.”
“Any time, Maggie,” Raphael said, walking away.
She reached up and touched her lip, and her fingertips came away bloody.
Maggie sat in her darkened bedroom, leaning against the foot of her bed, staring into the shadows. She heard a crash downstairs—her mother, no doubt looking for art supplies. She’d been a bit more lucid lately, and although she still spent sleepless nights obsessively working on the design for her new tapestry, the manic edge that dominated her behavior had softened a bit. But Maggie was getting worse. It was as if, when Maggie was finally crowned homecoming queen, some of her mother’s craziness had passed on to her.
Because she was going crazy. She no longer denied it. It started when she saw her boyfriend’s face transform into something demonic and she’d progressed from that to stairways to hell, floating cell phones, and books full of invisible writing. Now, for an encore, she’d decided to go ahead and starve herself. After a few days of indecision, she’d started her fast on Monday. She was fine all morning—half the time she didn’t eat breakfast anyway. But by lunchtime, she was ready to jump somebody for a french fry. Her stupid friends assumed she’d forgotten her daily yogurt and kept offering to share their lunches—raw carrots, string cheese, apples, containers of pudding, handfuls of potato chips. It was torture. By the end of the next period, she was really hungry. She went into the bathroom, locked herself in a stall, and leaned against the door, fighting the dizziness she guessed was from low blood sugar. Then she remembered what Lily Rose had told her. Meditation instead of starvation. Spiritual nourishment. Yeah, right, she thought. I’d like a spiritual pepperoni pizza and a spiritual Diet Coke, please.
But, with nothing to lose, she closed her eyes, slowed her breathing and tried. First, her mind kept drifting to Chips Ahoy. Then a group of loud Flatliner girls came in, talking about how cute the new kid Ignacio was, which shattered her tranquility. When they finally left, she managed to fall into a stupor that was half meditation, half mid-afternoon nap. When the class bell roused her, her hunger had diminished somewhat.
At home when dinnertime rolled around, she heated up a frozen meal for her mom and took it to her in her breakfast-room-turned-art-studio. To Maggie’s amazement, her mother actually put down her sketchpad and watercolor brush long enough to pick up her fork and try a bite.
“Where’s yours?” she asked Maggie.
“I grabbed something at the Dug Out after school,” Maggie lied. Even the smell of a disgusting TV dinner was making her ravenous.
The next day—Tuesday—hadn’t been as bad. She woke up dizzy and she was pretty spaced out for most of her classes, but her breakfast and lunchtime meditations really did seem to be tamping down her hunger. During her dinnertime meditation, she fell asleep and didn’t wake up until Wednesday morning.
When she sat up, her stomach was cramping, and she really felt for the first time like she was starving to death, but by the time she got to school a new clarity seemed to have seeped into her consciousness somehow. She actually listened to her teachers and she was taking notes even faster than they were talking.
Over lunch, Bobbi Jean and Rhonda noticed a change in her, too.
“Are you wearing different eye shadow or something?” Bobbi Jean asked as they picked up their trays.
“No, why?”
“Your eyes look weird.”
“Thanks a lot,” Maggie shot back.
Rhonda was staring at her too. “Well, they don’t look bad weird,” she said. “Just weird.”
When Maggie stood in front of the mirror in the girl’s bathroom gazing at her reflection, she could see what they were talking about. There was something about her eyes. Not a light or a glow exactly, but a certain animation; a vitality that wasn’t there before. There was a new sheen to her skin, too.
All the same, she was dying for a cheeseburger. As she washed her hands, she fantasized for the millionth time about Thursday when she’d be able to eat again. All she could think about was Thanksgiving—and turkey, stuffing and biscuits smothered in gravy.
She splashed water on her face, dried it with a paper towel and looked at herself again. Yes, there was definitely something different. Her senses were heightened, too. There were dozens of conversations going on out in the hall and she could hear and follow them all. Li’s dweeby little friend Weston was bragging about his Calculus grade; that fat Flatliner Beet was talking about movies with the annoying Flats cheerleader, Natalie. The new history teacher—Maggie didn’t know her name—was walking by with Mr. Brighton, talking about some History Channel special. She heard them all at once, and every conversation individually. It was amazing.
The bell rang. It was time for her to go back to class, but she wasn’t ready—not yet. She dug her phone out of her back pocket and held it in the palm of her hand. She stared at it hard, concentrating like the psychics she’d seen on TV and in movies.
Nothing.
She took a deep breath, shook the tension out of her neck and shoulders, and tried again. This time, she relaxed, and the same weightless, tingly feeling she got during meditation came over her. Instead of trying to make the phone rise into the air, she imagined herself untethering it, releasing it, letting it float away. A moment later, it left her hand and hovered a good six inches above her palm.
“Holy crap,” she whispered, staring at it in wonder. She let out a wild little laugh, and it dropped into her hand.
Now, she turned her attention to the mirror in front of her. Relaxing, letting that magical feeling work through her, she raised her arm and pointed at the mirror.
“Bam!” she said—and it shattered.
Maggie took a little step back, startled. Then she giggled. “I know magic,” she whispered. “This is so freaking awesome.”
On Thanksgiving, Maggie ordered dinner from Spinnacle for herself and her mom and drove down to pick it up. When she walked back into the kitchen with the heavy paper bag full of food in her arms, she was shocked to see her mother pouring champagne into two crystal flutes. Her hair was up and wet from a shower, and she was dressed presentably for once. Maggie peered through the doorway into the dining room. The table was set with their good China and silverware and candles were lit.
“Well, look at you,” she said as she unloaded the bag. It was still a little weird to see her mom looking almost normal.
“I didn’t want to stop working this morning,” Violet admitted. “But this is such an important holiday.”
“Yeah, I’m dying for some turkey, too,” Maggie agreed, but her mom gave her a strange look.
“It’s not the food that’s important,” her mom said.
It was to Maggie. She gave a sarcastic little shrug as she carried the turkey into the dining room. It smelled amazing. After they sat down to eat, something else happened—something weird. Maggie’s mom said a grace of sorts.
“We humbly thank you for the food you’ve set before us, the family you’ve placed among us, for the world you’ve set beneath us and the sky you made above us. You keep evil from us, and raise us when we fall. For these and all our blessings, we thank the mighty All.”
Before her mother even said amen, Maggie was ladling gravy onto her massively stacked plate, as fast as she could with trembling hands. As she chewed the first bite, her eyes closed in ecstasy. She’d never known heaven could exist in a single bite of food, so deliciously mind-blowing it was almost divine—and perhaps for the first time in her life, she was truly thankful for it.
As she plastered butter on a dinner roll something else happened. She thought about all the people who weren’t going to have Thanksgiving dinner—and it bothered her. It had never bothered her before. She’d never given it a
thought—not even when the cheerleaders were leading the food drive at school.
Oh, yeah, she thought. No doubt about it. I’m going to be stark-staring, bug-eyed loony tunes, just like my mother.
Laughter rang through the dining room of the Torrez’s apartment.
“And my stupid brother laughed so hard, horchata shot out his nose!” As Clarisse finished her story, Ignacio’s mother roared with laughter and his dad chuckled. Nass was smiling too (it was kind of a funny story), but his heart wasn’t in it. He was thinking about Dalton.
It was too bad he couldn’t just love Clarisse, he lamented to himself—his life would be so much easier. She was best friends with his mom, she was already like a daughter to his dad, and although she had a bit of a wild streak, she was crazy about him. No, he corrected himself, Clarisse was just plain crazy—no one in their right mind would rip off a bad dude like Oscar Salazar. But she was hot. Hot in Los Angeles and even hotter in Middleburg where the local guys didn’t quite know what to make of her. But she still wasn’t Dalton.
“Hey dad, you mind if I take the truck out?” he asked suddenly.
“It’s Thanksgiving! You should be here with your family,” his mom chastised him.
“What for?” his dad asked. “Let them have fun. You and Clarisse want to go to the movies or something?”
“Nah, I talked to Raph earlier. We’re taking some food over to Emory and his family.”
“You’re a good boy. I’ll put some of our leftovers in containers for them,” his mom said as she gathered up the dessert plates.
“Great,” Clarisse said. “Let me grab my jacket.”
“No,” Nass said, so quickly his mom looked up in surprise. “Raph wants to talk to me about something. I think it’s kind of personal. I won’t be long, but I have to do this alone.”
Clarisse’s expression darkened, but she said nothing. She picked up the rest of the plates and followed Amelia into the kitchen. He knew she’d make him pay later for leaving her behind, but he had to get some down time—away from her.
GHOST CROWN: THE TRACKS TRILOGY - Book Two Page 31
