by Lauryn April
I didn’t think much about what had happened between Brant and me as I walked into my bedroom and dressed for bed. I felt sore, felt tired, but my brain was focused on falling asleep so that I could wake up easily for school.
The next day started out like any other. I got up, got dressed, drove to school. But one thing was different-me. On my drive to school, I started to wonder if I was happy about the decisions I’d made. During my short time in the car, I thought about my previous night with Brant. I thought about how upset I had been about my dad, about my abilities, and the weight that I felt was resting on my shoulders. I had been raw with emotion, I had been needy, and I sought comfort in him. I knew that I cared about him, but we’d taken this huge step and we weren’t even dating. We hadn’t proclaimed our undying love to one another or even so much as declared ourselves to be in a relationship. I had wanted to sleep with him, but in that moment I wondered if I had been wrong to act on want alone.
I hadn’t thought it through and now there was no going back. Last night had been, well honestly, it had been incredible but I had no idea if it was worth it. I hadn’t planned for things to go as far as they did that night. When it came down to it I didn’t have time to think before I acted. I got caught up in my emotions, got caught up in him, and all rational thought had gone out the window. Like an amusement park ride gone rogue everything quickly spun out of control.
I grew nervous. I felt so unsure of myself, worried that I had made a mistake. I did honestly believe that Brant cared for me. I didn’t think he’d play me or try and hurt me, but what it came down to was that I didn’t really know. I had no idea where we were headed. I had no reassurance that I wasn’t going to end up hurt. All I could do was wait and see as I’d already made my choices. The day before, all I had was hope for what was to come between Brant and I, and that hope wasn’t gone. But there was a new sense of fear and uncertainty that now accompanied it.
When I got to school, I saw Brant, Jason and Skyler all hovering in their usual shadowed spot on the side of the building. The darkness of the shadows seemed deeper with the overcast sky above, and their faces were impossible to read. Clouds, the color of ash and soot, hung in the air, a screen of haze that blocked out the blue sky. I glanced at the guys and wondered if Brant was talking about me. I wondered if he was telling them every detail about our night together. I didn’t think he would. I wanted to believe that what we had shared was special and that he wouldn’t betray my trust like that. In truth, though, I simply didn’t know. As my paranoia ate away at me, I was about to listen in on their thoughts, but then Charlie walked up to me.
“Hey,” she called and my head jerked to face her.
“Hey,” I responded with surprise in my voice. She had startled me. I gave Brant and his friends one last glance and saw that Brant was making his way toward us, then I turned back to Charlie. “How’s it going?”
“Good, how about you? Did the rest of your weekend go well?” I thought about my parents, Mom crying, one plate missing from the dining room table, then I thought about Brant and I and felt a shiver run through me.
“Um, fine. Yeah, it was alright. How about you?”
Charlie was about to respond, but then Brant was right beside us.
“What was just alright?” he asked.
“What? Nothing.”
He and I stared at one another for a moment in awkward silence.
“My weekend was good,” Charlie said bringing my mind back to reality. Her eyes bounced between Brant and I. “So, anyway,” Charlie continued. “I’m hoping the computers will be back up today, you guys wanna meet me at lunch?”
It took a moment to register what she had asked me. “What, um yeah, yeah we’ll meet you there.”
“Okay, good.” She paused, her eyes again floating back and forth between us. “Is everything okay with you two?”
I don’t know, Brant thought.
“Yep,” I said quickly, “everything’s peachy.” A fake smile graced my face.
The bell rang and I shuffled off to class without saying goodbye to either of them. I could feel both Brant and Charlie staring holes into the back of my head as I walked away. I knew I was acting oddly, I just didn’t know how I was supposed to be. Everything had changed between Brant and I, and I didn’t know how to handle it. Were we supposed to go on like nothing had happened, were we supposed to be all over one another, should I have kissed him goodbye? I didn’t know what any of it meant. Was it just a one night fling or did this mean something to him? All I knew was that it meant everything to me. I needed to know what he thought, how he felt.
I slowed my step and tried to listen in on Brant’s thoughts without turning around. If last night meant nothing to him, I couldn’t let him see the pained look on my face. I heard various voices shift through my mind, but I found that it was hard to focus on Brant when I wasn’t looking at him. Finally, after some fumbling with my ability, I locked in on him.
I just wish I knew what she was thinking, I heard.
Before I could hear anything else, though, there was a hand on my arm distracting me.
“Hey,” Charlie said and I slowed down to face her. “What’s wrong?”
I stopped walking all together. “Nothing, really…”
“No, it’s not nothing, come on. Talk to me.”
“We don’t have time right now, I have to get to class.”
Students walked by on either side of us, some bumping into us as they pushed their way toward the door.
“You have Math first hour, yeah? Sumner or Berger?” Charlie asked.
“Sumner.”
“Good, because he has a sub today and I have study hall first hour.”
Her offer was tempting, but I didn’t need to land in anymore trouble. “I can’t skip class.”
“Yes you can. Not something I world normally condone, but you’re upset and half the time subs never take attendance anyway.”
“What if he does? My mom would kill me if I got a Saturday detention.”
“Then I promise to hack into the school computer system and change your absent mark to a present one.”
I thought over her suggestion. I did need to talk to someone and I couldn’t talk to Brant. I finally decided to go with her and nodded in agreement.
Charlie and I sat down in the study hall room at an open table. The air was stale and dry smelling musty like the attic of my house. It reminded me of old dusty books forgotten and left beneath a bed or shut away in a closet somewhere, and it was quiet with only a low murmur of whispered voices to fill the space. Around us there were a number of other tables, some with large groups of people at them working on projects, others with small groups of people working silently by themselves. Charlie and I had a table to ourselves, and for that I was grateful.
For a short while, as I sat across from her, I was silent. “So... do you really know how to hack into the school computer system?” I asked.
Charlie shrugged. “Yeah, I do.”
“Do you do that often? Hack in, get yourself out of detentions, change grades.”
“No, I’ve never actually done it. I guess I only ever hacked into it in the first place to see if I could.”
“Why don’t you?”
“It’s just not my thing, I guess. I like to play by the rules… for the most part at least. But that’s beside the point. We’re supposed to be here to talk about you.”
I sighed. “Right, me.”
“Yeah, you… so what’s up with the weirdness? You and Brant were being all twitchy around each other this morning. Did something happen with you guys?”
“Yeah… something happened.” I was silent then.
Charlie looked on at me for a few moments, waiting for me to speak again. “Okay… Ivy, you’re the one that can read minds here not me, so if you want to talk to me about this, you’re going to have to actually tell me what happened.”
I sighed. “Last night, I went over to Brant’s house… I was upset… my, um, my parents
are getting a divorce.”
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said, looking truly sincere.
“It’s okay, I’m… dealing.”
“So, did he say something… insulting?”
I sighed. “No, he was… comforting, he was just… he was too comforting.”
How could someone be too comforting? Charlie thought, then I saw the look of confusion on her face transform. Her eyes grew wide and she took a sharp intake of breath. “Oh,” she said. I didn’t need to listen in on her thoughts to know that she knew what I meant. “Have you ever, you know, before?”
I felt my cheeks blush and I couldn’t look at her. Instead, I focused intently on my fingernails. “No, he was… he was the first.” When my eyes met hers again, she offered me a comforting smile.
“You guys aren’t dating are you?”
“No… last night,” I found my voice at the lowest audible whisper, “it just happened.”
She paused for a moment. “Did he… try… did you not want to?”
“It’s not like that. We both wanted to, but now… I just don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what any of it meant to him. Like you said, we aren’t dating… I’m worried that I made a mistake.”
“Have you talked to him about it?”
I felt my skin redden with embarrassment once again at the thought of talking to him, “No… I don’t know how. I’m too worried to find out that he doesn’t really feel the same way about me.”
“How do you feel about him?”
Her question took me a little off guard. I hadn’t taken much time to put my feelings for Brant into words. I knew I liked him, that I cared about him. I didn’t think I loved him. I’m not sure at that point I really knew what being in love felt like, as I’d never been in love before. What I did know was that I felt safe with Brant. I felt like I could talk to him, tell him anything. I felt like he would look after me, like he’d keep my secrets safe. I knew he made my heart beat faster. I knew that I wanted to be around him every second I could manage.
In that moment, I thought two things. First I wondered if maybe I did love him. I did feel for him in a way that I had never felt before. The second was that I trusted Brant and I realized that I had been over-thinking the entire situation. Not to say that the magnitude of what had happened between us was lessened, just that I was spending too much energy worrying about it. Instead of being paranoid about the worst possible outcome coming true, I needed to talk to Brant and find out where we stood with one another.
I looked for Brant after leaving the study hall room. I had about twenty minutes before second hour started. Brant should have still been in class, but I hoped that he had snuck out for a smoke. When I stepped out onto the courtyard, however, my eyes focused on someone else. Tiana sat at her usual table, but she sat there alone. No Christy, no Eliza, just Ti. It wasn’t lunch, but for a moment I thought about how, if Christy had a Student Council meeting and if Eliza and Damon were to go off campus for lunch, Ti would be sitting there eating alone.
Suddenly, I realized something; I realized how my spending time with Brant had made her feel. She and I had always stuck together, always had each other’s backs. She had been there for me when Christy showed up with Chase at Eliza’s, we had each other to eat with every day at lunch when the others were elsewhere. She had confided in me about her seeing Brant when she felt like she couldn’t tell anyone else. I hadn’t intended to, but I had betrayed her.
Despite how she treated Brant, she had cared about him, maybe cared the same way that I did now. Even though she had been wrong about Brant and I seeing each other when she accused us of it, even though that hadn’t been my secret then, I had still been hiding something from her. Looking at her sitting alone at that table, I realized how much my actions had isolated her. For the first time, neither one of us had backed the other up and it killed something important in our friendship.
I walked toward her and thought about how I would feel if I showed up at school tomorrow to find Brant giving some girl a ride to class, thought about how even if we stopped hanging out that it would hurt to see him talking with someone else. Tiana was reading and taking notes from her Physics book, but looked up to me as I neared. I met her eyes and she glared at me silently as I sat down before her.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” I said.
She was silent.
“I never mean to hurt you.”
Yeah, well you did, I heard her think, but she said nothing.
“I know you feel betrayed, I know I wasn’t there for you, and I’m sorry.”
She looked away from me, her eyes searching into the distance. I sighed and stood from the table. I hadn’t expected her to accept my apology. I hadn’t expected anything really. I had just felt the need to tell her that I knew I’d hurt her. I felt her eyes turn back toward me as I began to walk away.
It was my fault too, she thought, and for a moment I paused. I didn’t tell you everything, you didn’t know how I felt about him. “Ivy, wait…” she said.
I turned around.
“Thank you,” she said. Then after a long pause, “I’m sorry too.”
I nodded and felt a sense of resolve between us. Maybe not enough for us to ever be friends like we were, but enough to feel the tension that had been there melt away. I smiled at her and walked back inside.
It was lunch when I saw Brant next. I ran into him in the hallway on my way to the library. At first I felt my nerves winding and twisting together like vines working their way up a trellis. Then I took a deep breath and confronted him. I walked across the hall. He noticed me as I got close and slowed down. I took note that he seemed as nervous as I was.
Ivy, he thought as he spotted me, the sound of his inner voice holding excitement and worry all within the short two syllables of my name.
“Hey,” I said, “I think maybe we should talk.”
His eyes darkened on my words and silently he nodded. I smiled softly then turned away from him without another word. He followed me as I weaved past the other students in the hall and went out onto the common. We sat down at our usual table. For a moment we were both silent. I felt nervous and twitchy and began fidgeting with my fingernails. Then finally my eyes met his.
“Last night… When we…” I paused. My voice was caught, trapped by my nerves. “God, I don’t know how to say this.”
The muscles in Brant’s jaw twitched. “Look, forget it, you were upset… if it didn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry about it. Just cold comfort, yeah?”
After hearing those words, the feeling that came over me was that of being on some speedy, snaking and convulsing carnival ride after eating nothing but fried and sugary food.
I can deal, he thought.
“Is that how you feel? Did it not mean anything to you?” Every word was shaky, each sentence a step closer to bringing me to tears. My muscles tightened and I practically held my breath in anticipation for his response.
God no, he thought. “I’m just saying, it doesn’t have to mean anything, not if you don’t want it to.”
“Do you want it to? God, Brant, I am tired of defensiveness and mixed signals.” I took a breath and summoned the last of the courage I had. “I like you, I have feelings for you, and last night was… it meant something to me. I just don’t know if it meant anything to you.” My eyes were pleading with him, pleading for an answer no matter what it was. I needed to know, even if his answer wasn’t what I wanted it to be.
“It meant something to me too, it meant a lot. I thought… it was just this morning you seemed… I thought you regretted it.”
I shook my head, “I don’t regret it, I wanted to, I just… what does it mean, what does that mean for us now?”
Brant smiled at me. It means I like you too, Ivy, more than a lot. He was leaning across the table. The skinny slab of stone between us was covered quickly as Brant reached a hand out to stroke my cheek. Then he kissed me. I leaned into him and laughed into the awkward angle of it all. I didn�
�t care that we were out on the common and that anyone could see us, didn’t care that people would stare, that they would talk. I wasn’t ashamed of him. He sat back down after that with a smile on his face.
“So…” I began, but my words were cut off by a voice over the loud speaker.
‘Attention ALH students, the assembly that was scheduled for the twenty-fifth has been moved to this Friday. Please be prepared to meet in the gym during first hour in your spirit wear. Again the assembly will no longer be the Monday after next, it will be this Friday. All students are required to attend in school colors. Thank you.”
This Friday was the fifteenth. The assembly would be for The Play in the Park. I remembered Christy talking to her mom on the phone about it.
“School assembly, fun,” I said sarcastically.
Brant, however, didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes were staring off into the distance but looking at nothing in particular. His mind was racing, mulling something over. I could almost picture his thoughts churning like cogs in a machine.
Monday after next, that’s it, Brant thought.
I looked at him confused. “What?”
“The Monday after next, that’s when everything’s supposed to go down, yeah?”
The bomber’s thoughts rang through my mind, a month from now they’ll all be dead, and the Monday after next would be that day. The same day we were supposed to have had an assembly.
“You think whoever’s been planning this chose that Monday because of the assembly?”
“Think about it, it makes perfect sense. The whole school together at the same time in the same place, if he wants to kill us all he’ll need us all together.”
“Now that the assembly is moved you don’t think he’ll move his plans up too, do you?”
“I’m thinking he’ll have to. We just had our time to find him cut in half.”
It made sense, perfect sense, and that frightened me. Now instead of having two weeks to figure out who wanted us all dead, we had until Friday. As the day was already half way over and the assembly was first hour on Friday, that left us with three days. We only had three days. I felt the panic set in. My heartbeat picked up and I started to worry that it wouldn’t be enough time.
