by Claudia Gray
In short, whatever crazy overprotective reaction Lucas was expecting didn’t materialize. Mom said only, “In case you’re trying to avoid us—and I would guess that you are—we’re headed to the balcony, because that’s where most of the students are going to go.”
Dad nodded. “Balconies are powerful temptations, and they exert a strong gravitational pull on fountain drinks in the hands of teenagers. I’ve seen it happen.”
Straight-faced, Lucas said, “I think I remember that from junior high science.”
My parents laughed. I basked in the warm rush of relief. They liked Lucas, and maybe someday soon they’d invite him to Sunday dinner. Already I could see Lucas beside me all the time, all the places in my life where he would fit.
Lucas didn’t look as certain—his eyes were wary as he led me into the theater lobby—but I figured that was pretty much the standard guy response to parents.
We chose seats beneath the balcony, where Mom and Dad would have no chance of seeing us. Lucas and I sat close to each other, our bodies sort of angled together, and my shoulder and knee brushed against his.
“Never done this,” he said.
“Been to an old-style movie house?” I glanced appreciatively at the gilded scrollwork that decorated the walls and balcony, and the dark red velvet curtain. “They really are beautiful.”
“That’s not what I meant.” For all his aggressiveness, Lucas could seem almost bashful at times; that only happened when he talked to me. “I never got to just—go out with a girl before.”
“This is your first date, too?”
“‘Date’—people still use that word?” I would’ve felt embarrassed if he hadn’t playfully nudged my elbow with his. “I just mean, I never got to be with anybody like this. Hang out without any pressure or knowing that I’d have to move on in another week or two.”
“You make it sound like you never felt at home anywhere.”
“Not until now.”
I shot him a skeptical look. “Evernight feels like home? Give me a break.”
Lucas’s slow grin crept across his face. “I didn’t mean Evernight.”
At that moment, the houselights were dimmed, and thank goodness. Otherwise I probably would’ve said something stupid instead of reveling in the moment.
Suspicion was one of the Cary Grant movies I hadn’t seen before. This woman, Joan Fontaine, married Cary even though he was sort of reckless and spent too much money. She did this because he’s Cary freakin’ Grant, which makes him worth losing a few bucks. Lucas wasn’t convinced by this reasoning. “You don’t think it’s weird that he’s researching poisons?” he whispered. “Who researches poisons as a hobby? At least admit that’s a weird hobby.”
“No man who looks like that can be a murderer,” I insisted.
“Has anybody ever suggested that you might be too quick to trust people?”
“Shut up.” I elbowed Lucas in the side, which jostled a few kernels of popcorn from our bag.
I enjoyed the movie, but I enjoyed being close to Lucas even more. It was amazing how much we could communicate without saying anything—a sidelong glance of amusement or the easy way our hands brushed against each other and he twined his fingers with mine. The pad of his thumb traced small circles in my palm, and that alone was enough to make my heart race. What would it be like to be held by him?
In the end, I was proved right. Cary turned out to have been researching the poisons so he could commit suicide and save poor Joan Fontaine from his many debts. She insisted they would work it out, and they drove off together. Lucas shook his head as the last shot faded. “That ending is fake, you know. Hitchcock meant for him to be guilty. The studio made him redeem Cary Grant in the end so audiences would like it.”
“The ending isn’t fake if it’s the ending.” I insisted. The lights came up for the brief intermission before the late show began. “Let’s go someplace else, okay? We’ve got a while before the bus.”
Lucas glanced upward, and I could tell he wouldn’t mind getting farther from the parental chaperones. “Come on.”
We made our way along Riverton’s small main street, where it seemed like every single open store or restaurant was crowded with refugees from Evernight Academy. Lucas and I silently passed each of them, searching for what we really wanted—a place to be alone. The idea that Lucas wanted some privacy for us made me feel both thrilled and a little bit intimidated. The night was cool, and the autumn leaves were rustling as we went down the sidewalk, stealing glances at each other as we made small talk.
At last, once we’d walked beyond the bus station that marked the end of the main street, we found an old pizza place just past the corner that looked like it hadn’t been redecorated since about 1961. Instead of ordering a whole pie, we just grabbed some plain cheese slices and sodas and slid into a booth. We faced each other across a table with a red-and-white checked cloth and a Chianti bottle thickly covered with candle wax. A jukebox in the corner was playing some Elton John song from before we were born.
“I like places like this,” Lucas said. “They feel real. Not like some corporate focus group designed every inch of it.”
“Me, too.” I would’ve told Lucas that I liked eating eggplant on the moon, if he liked it, too. At the moment, though, I was telling the truth. “You can relax and be yourself here.”
“Be myself.” Lucas’s smile was sort of faraway, like he had a private joke. “That ought to be easier than it is.”
I knew what he meant.
We were all but alone in the pizza parlor; the only other occupied table had about four guys who seemed to have come from a construction site, with plaster dust clinging to their T-shirts and a couple of empty pitchers testifying to the beer they’d already drunk. They were laughing loudly at their own jokes, but I didn’t mind. That gave me an excuse to lean across the table and be a little closer to Lucas.
“So, Cary Grant,” Lucas began, shaking red pepper flakes onto his slice. “That’s pretty much your dream guy, huh?”
“He’s sort of the king of dream guys, isn’t he? I’ve had a crush on him ever since I first saw Holiday when I was about five or six.”
You would think Lucas the movie buff would agree with that, but he didn’t. “Most girls in high school would be crushed out on movie stars who, you know, are making movies now. Or somebody on TV.”
I took a bite of pizza and had a very awkward cheese-strand situation to deal with for a second. Once I finally had a mouthful, I mumbled, “I like a whole lot of actors, but who doesn’t love Cary Grant the most?”
“Even though I totally agree that this fact is tragic, let’s face it: A lot of people our age haven’t even heard of Cary Grant.”
“Criminal.” I tried to imagine what Mrs. Bethany’s face would look like if I suggested a Cinema History elective. “My parents always introduced me to the movies and books that they loved back before I was born.”
“Cary Grant was big in the 1940s, Bianca. He was making movies seventy years ago.”
“And his movies have been on TV ever since. It’s easy to catch up on old movies if you just try.”
Lucas hesitated, and I felt a tug of dread, a swift, urgent need to change the subject to something else, anything else. I was one second too late, because Lucas said, “You said your parents brought you to Evernight so you could meet more people, get a bigger view of the world. But it seems to me like they’ve spent a whole lot of time making sure your world stays as small as possible.”
“Excuse me?”
“Forget I said it.” He sighed heavily as he dropped his pizza crust onto his plate. “I shouldn’t have brought this up now. This should be fun.”
Probably I should have let it go. The last thing I wanted to do on my first night out with Lucas was argue. But I couldn’t. “No, I want to understand. What do you even know about my parents?”
“I know that they packed you off to Evernight, which is basically the last place on earth the twenty-first century hasn�
�t reached. No cell phones; no wireless; cable Internet service only in a computer lab that has, like, four machines; no televisions; almost no contact with the outside world—”
“It’s a boarding school! It’s supposed to be separate from the rest of the world!”
“They want you separate from the rest of the world. So they’ve taught you to love the things they love, not what girls your age are supposed to love.”
“I make up my own mind about what I like and what I don’t.” I could feel my cheeks flushing hot with anger. Usually when I got this mad, I ended up bursting into tears, but I was determined not to. “Besides, you’re the Hitchcock fan. You like old movies, too. Does that mean your parents run your life?”
He leaned across the table, and his dark green eyes were intense, holding me fast. I’d wanted him to look at me like this all night, but this wasn’t the way I’d wanted it to happen. “You tried to run away from your family once. You brush it off like some stupid stunt you were trying to pull.”
“That’s all it was.”
“I think you were onto something. I think you were right to feel weird about Evernight. And I think you ought to listen to that voice inside yourself and stop listening so much to your parents.”
Lucas couldn’t be saying these things. If my parents ever heard him talking like this—No, I couldn’t even think about that. “Just because Evernight sucks doesn’t mean my parents are bad parents, and you have a lot of nerve criticizing them when you hardly know them. You don’t know anything about my family, and I don’t understand why you care.”
“Because—” He stopped, as if startled by his own words. Slowly, almost disbelieving, he said, “I care because I care about you.”
Oh, why did he have to say that now? Like this? I shook my head. “You’re not making any sense.”
“Hey.” One of the construction workers had just punched up some tacky eighties metal on the jukebox. Now he was strolling toward us, off balance. “You givin’ that little girl trouble?”
“We’re okay,” I said hastily. This was not the time to discover that chivalry wasn’t dead. “Honestly, it’s okay.”
Lucas acted like he hadn’t even heard me. He glared at the guy and snapped, “This isn’t any of your business.”
That was like dropping a match into a pool of gasoline. The construction worker swaggered closer, and his friends all stood up. “You go treating your girlfriend like that in public and damn straight it’s my business.”
“He wasn’t giving me trouble!” I was still angry with Lucas, but the situation was clearly getting out of control. “It’s great that you guys are, uh, looking out for women—seriously, it is—but there’s no problem here.”
“Stay out of this,” Lucas said, his voice low. There was a note in it I’d never heard before, an almost unnatural intensity. A shiver went up my spine. “She’s not your concern.”
“You think you own her or somethin’? So you can treat her however you want? You remind me of the pig my sister married.” The construction worker looked angrier than ever. “You think I won’t give you what I gave him, you’re dreamin’, kid.”
In desperation I looked around for a waiter or the store owner. My parents. Raquel. Basically, I was hoping for somebody, anybody, who might put a stop to this before the drunk construction guys beat Lucas to a pulp—because they were huge and there were four of them and by now they were all clearly spoiling for a fight.
I never imagined that Lucas would strike first.
He moved too fast for me to see. There was a blur of motion, and then the construction worker was sprawling backward into his friends. Lucas’s arm was extended, his fist clenched, and it took a moment to sink in: Oh, my God, he just hit somebody.
“What the hell?” One of the other workers came at Lucas, who dodged him so quickly that it was like he was there, and then he wasn’t. Instead he was at an angle, able to shove his opponent away so hard that I thought he’d fall down.
“Hey!” A man in his forties, wearing a sauce-stained apron, walked into the dining area. I didn’t care if he was the owner, the chef, or Papa John—I’d never been so glad to see anybody in my life. “What’s going on here?”
“There’s no trouble!” Okay, I was lying, but it didn’t matter. I slid out of the booth and started backing toward the door. “We’re going. It’s over.”
The construction workers and Lucas kept staring at each other, like they wanted nothing more than to kick the fight into high gear, but mercifully Lucas followed me. As the door swung shut behind us, I could hear the owner muttering something about kids from that damn school.
As soon as we were in the street, Lucas turned to me. “Are you okay?”
“No thanks to you!” I started walking quickly back toward the main street. “What’s gotten into you? You started a fight with that guy for no reason!”
“He started it!”
“No, he started the argument. You started the fight.”
“I was protecting you.”
“He thought he was, too. Maybe he was drunk and gross about it, but he didn’t mean any harm.”
“You don’t understand how dangerous a place the world really is, Bianca.”
Every other time Lucas had talked like that—as if he were so much older than I, and he wanted to teach me and shelter me—it had made me feel all warm and happy inside. Now it made me angrier. “You act like you know everything, and then you behave like an idiot and start a fight with four guys! And I saw how you fight, too. You’ve done this before.”
Lucas had been walking alongside me, but his steps slowed, like he was shocked. I realized that what had really shocked him was that I’d figured it out. I was right. Lucas had been in fights like this before now, and more than once.
“Bianca—”
“Save it.” I held up my hand, and we walked in silence back to the rental bus, which already was surrounded by students milling around, most of them with shopping bags or sodas in hand.
Lucas swung into the seat beside me, like he was still hoping we’d talk, but I folded my arms across my chest and stared at the window. Vic bounced into the seat in front of us and crowed, “Yo, guys, what’s up?” Then he got a look at our faces. “Hey, looks like it might be a good time for me to tell one of my long rambling stories that goes nowhere.”
“Great plan,” Lucas said shortly.
True to his word, Vic went on and on about surfboards and bands and weird dreams he’d had once upon a time, and he didn’t stop talking until we were back at school. That saved me from having to talk to Lucas; and, for his part, Lucas didn’t say anything at all.
Chapter Six
AFTER THE TRIP TO RIVERTON, I FELT LIKE A fool who had thrown Lucas away for nothing.
Those construction workers had been drinking. Plus, there were four of them and only one of him. Maybe Lucas had needed to show them he meant business to avoid getting beaten to a pulp. If he’d done the only thing he could, what right did I have to judge him?
“No way,” Raquel said when I confided in her the next day, walking across the grounds. The leaves had finished changing color, so that the hills in the distance were no longer green but crimson and gold. “If a guy gets violent, you get out. Period. Be thankful you saw his temper in action before you were the one he was angry at.”
Her vehemence startled me. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”
“What, you never watched a Lifetime Original Movie?” Raquel didn’t meet my eyes, just fiddled with the braided leather bracelet on her wrist. “Everybody knows that. Men who hit are bad men.”
“I know he overreacted. But there’s no way Lucas could ever hurt me.”
Raquel shrugged and pulled her school blazer more tightly around her, as if she felt a chill, though it wasn’t that cold out. For the first time, I wondered how much of her quiet demeanor and boyish appearance were a means of hiding herself from attention she didn’t want. “Nobody ever thinks that something bad ca
n happen until it happens. Besides, he kept telling you how much everybody here sucked and how you shouldn’t be friends with your roommate or just about anybody else, right?”
“Well…yeah, but—”
“But nothing. Lucas was trying to isolate you from everyone else so he’d have more power over you.” Raquel shook her head. “You’re better off without him.”
I knew she was wrong about Lucas, but I also knew that I hadn’t come close to figuring him out.
Why had Lucas started criticizing my parents? The only time he’d ever seen us all together was at the movie theater, and they’d been friendly and welcoming. He’d claimed that it was about my halfhearted attempt to run away on the first day of school, but I didn’t know if I entirely believed that. If he had a problem with Mom and Dad, he’d obviously dreamed it up for some bizarre paranoid reason that I was better off not having to deal with.
Explanations invented themselves in my head. Perhaps he’d had some girlfriend before me—probably chic and sophisticated, a girl who had traveled all around the world—and her parents had been snobbish and unfair. They’d shut Lucas out, maybe had forbidden him to ever see their daughter again, and so now he was scarred and distrustful.
This imagined story did me absolutely no good whatsoever. First of all, it made me feel sorry for Lucas, like I understood why he’d behaved so strangely, when really I didn’t. Also, I felt insecure compared to this theoretical sophisticated previous girlfriend—and how sad is it if you feel threatened by a person who doesn’t even exist?
I don’t think I’d realized just how important Lucas had become to me until then—until we were separated and I had real reasons for staying away from him. Chemistry class, the only one we shared, was an hour of torture every day; I could almost feel him near me, the way you can feel a fire’s presence in a cold room. Yet I never spoke to him, and he never spoke to me, respecting the silence I had demanded and maintained. I didn’t see how he could be in more pain than I was. Logic said I was better off walking away, but logic didn’t matter to me. I missed Lucas all the time, and it seemed like the more I told myself to leave him alone, the more I longed to be with him.
