by Carrie Jones
I groan. “Too true, but only because you insisted on that marathon this summer before you would let me watch the movie versions with all the hot actors.”
“Star Trek: The Original Series, or TOS, as we call it. Good times … good times…” Lyle adjusts his coat and yanks up one of the laces on his shoe. His fingers move so quickly. I blink to force myself not to stare. “Always better than the J. J. Abrams versions.”
“So much less hot.”
“Excuse me,” he counters. “Nimoy versus Quinto. Old Spock wins and you know it.”
“Yes, but Shatner versus Pine. Pine is so-o-o much hotter.”
“Shatner was hot in his day.” Lyle blinks hard.
“You are so wrong.”
Seppie clears her throat. “You two are tangenting again.”
“I prefer the word digressing, personally,” Lyle says.
“Whatever.” Seppie starts the engine. Heat blasts out of the vents, for which I am grateful, and we drive home. “Mana. No parties for you tonight.”
“But it’s party night! Teacher in-service day tomorrow. No school. Those are the best parties.”
“She’s whining. Mana, you’re whining,” Lyle says. He pulls me over so that I can lean on his shoulder. Car headlights flash into the cab of the truck, illuminating his face, which seems a little funny from my angle. I’m kind of beneath his chin, and it’s so nice there that I might never move, at least not of my own free will.
“I am not whining,” I mumble, but I am, and it’s because I’m completely freaked and I don’t want to be alone, thinking about what just happened. About Dakota and his tongue. The cranky man named China. How I could jump like that, like some sort of frog.
“Delayed response.” Seppie turns on her high beams and zips down the road.
“Very delayed response, indicative of her head trauma,” Lyle mocks.
“I have no head trauma,” I say, and sit up straight, remembering. “Seppie, you’re supposed to be at Anna’s tonight, because tonight is—”
“My fantastic hookup night with the fantastic Tyler Carter, and if not him, then the equally fantastic point guard, Thomas,” she finishes. “Yes, I know.”
A car approaches. She turns on the low beams. Lyle rubs at my arms, trying to warm me up, I guess. Seppie sighs hard.
“Seppie is still going,” Lyle explains. “She’s just dropping us off first.”
“Us?”
“You and me,” he says. “Damn, Seppie, your heater sucks.”
“I know.” She turns onto Hardy Road, which is almost to our subdivision.
I sit up straighter and put my hands in front of the heater vent. Then I say, pretty reluctantly, because I’m just trying to be polite, “You don’t have to come home with me.”
Lyle taps my thigh with his fingers. “No big. I live, what, three houses away?”
“But you probably want to go hook up, too.”
Seppie snorts. “When does Lyle not want to hook up? The key word here is want; notice that the word want is not the same as does.”
He reaches behind my back and punches her in the arm. She swerves. “Jerk. Way to win over the ladies, assaulting them.”
“It works for all the neanderthals,” he deadpans, and we both groan and hit him. Seppie calls him a sexist, even though we both know he doesn’t mean it, and he pulls me back against him. “How is our little concussed one? Still seeing people disappear?”
“No,” I say. “Why is there no music?”
“Loud music sucks for concussions.” Seppie turns again. “You saw people disappear?”
I shrug. She’s reacting like this is a big deal, and we haven’t even told her about what I can do. What I did.
“We should probably take her to the hospital,” Seppie says.
“I’ll ask her mom. We’ll need insurance cards and all that,” Lyle says.
“Hey, I’m right here.” I unbuckle my seat belt as Seppie swerves into our driveway. I stare up at the house. The lights aren’t on. “She’s not home?”
“Probably not back from the game yet,” Seppie says.
Some hard thing nests inside my gut, a giant ball of dread. “My mom always zips out of there. She hates talking to the other moms.”
“Maybe she met someone,” Lyle says, shrugging off his seat belt and opening the door. We are no longer touching; this sucks.
“And they are having a romantic rendezvous at his place.” Seppie singsongs it out like a soap opera character.
“Right. My mom…”
Lyle laughs. “Maybe Deputy Bagley.”
“Do not make me puke. I really don’t want to have to talk to him.” I pull myself out of the truck. The impact of landing on the driveway sends little shock waves around the gash in my leg. Seppie argues and frets that she should stay with me and Lyle till Mom gets home, but we convince her that leaving me does not equal being a bad friend.
I finally order her, “Go be a total flirt, okay, Seppie?”
“Obviously.” She laughs.
I slam the door shut and she backs out of the driveway, honking as she goes.
“Poor Tyler,” Lyle says. “He stands no chance.”
“It’ll be good for him.”
Above us, the night sky stretches and stretches across everything, black and deep and full of unknowns.
Lyle sneaks his arm around my waist and carries both our bags over one arm. “Just to make sure you don’t fall down.”
“Lyle, you are being super sweet and awesome, but you did see me do a quadruple twist, right? You did see me when I cheered a whole quarter. I am not concussed. I am okay,” I say, but I don’t move away. I know I’m hyperfixated on all this touching, which is not how you are supposed to be when someone is just your best friend, but for some reason Lyle’s arm makes me feel better, like it always does when I’m coming out of a stunt and plummeting toward the ground. I know he will catch me. I know the moment I feel his arm that I will be safe.
He mocks Mrs. Bray’s voice. “Yes, you were a good little cheerleader, all sticking in there for the squad.”
“Better than Mrs. Bray.”
“A hell of a lot better,” he says as we walk across the porch. “I can’t believe she went home in an ambulance.”
“She is pretty melodramatic. I mean for a—”
“Cheerleading coach?”
“No, for an old person.”
“They did a good job stitching your leg up, though,” he says as I search for my keys. He pulls them out of the front pocket of my bag. “You always put them there.”
“Thanks.” I smile at him.
“We should probably talk about how you did the twist. That was beyond amazing. I had no idea you could do that.” He smiles back down at me and it feels funny, different between us, all of a sudden. It feels like the air vibrates or pulses. Maybe I really did hit my head. I glance away first and move to put my key in the doorknob, but the moment I do, the entire door swings open. It’s already unlocked! I jump back. Lyle’s fingers tighten their hold on my arm.
“What is it?”
“It’s always locked.” I pull away from him, flick on the lights, and yell, “Mom?”
The lights blind me for a second, but just a second. Then I see it. The entire living room is demolished. The couch is upside down. The cushions are spilled across the floor, ripped apart. Mr. Penguinman, my ancient stuffed animal that I named when I was three, who should be in my bedroom, sits all the way up in the ceiling fan. Television wires and cables lie tangled on the floor, and the sliding glass door to the porch is …
“Holy…” Lyle mutters, but he doesn’t move.
“Lyle!” I scream. “Get down!”
And just as I scream, something smashes toward us, flashes fast above my right shoulder, and crashes through the double windows. Glass shatters. I race after it, bashing past the still-frozen Lyle and onto the porch. Dakota freaking Dunham flies down the driveway and then gains altitude, zipping up above the trees.
I
start chasing after him, but I am not Lyle, and a flying Dakota is a too-fast Dakota. It’s pointless, totally pointless, so I stand there in the freezing cold, in the middle of my driveway, staring up at the dark sky. Pain shoots up my leg. Lyle appears next to me.
“Mana?”
I whirl to the side. “Still think I have a concussion?”
His mouth works hard at forming my name again. His broad shoulders tense up. “Mana?”
I start running back toward the house to see what’s gone, what has happened inside. Why would Dakota rob my house? It makes about as much sense as him being able to fly.
Lyle yanks me back toward him.
“Mana. Was that…”
He can’t say it. He can’t believe it. But somehow, somehow I can.
“Yes,” I say. “That was him.”
“Dakota?”
I blow warm air into my hands and try to quiet my heartbeats. “Dakota. He must have gotten away somehow.”
Lyle staggers backwards and bangs his head on our stupid HOME SWEET HOME sign. “Holy crap.”
The plaque falls to the floor behind his sneakers and he jumps. I fast walk into the house and pick up one of the slashed yellow cushions from our love seat.
“We should call the police,” Lyle says.
I whirl around, clutching the pillow. “And tell them what? After I reported him assaulted and potentially kidnapped, Dakota Dunham came here, trashed my house, and then flew out the window?”
Lyle starts trying to put the love seat back on all four legs. I help him. It resembles a great, cushionless oasis in a sea of mess.
Then he says, “I think I’m in shock.”
“Yep.”
“You, too?”
“Me, too.”
“I’ve never been in shock. I always know what to do. I’m really just not the kind of person who goes into shock.” He sits on the love seat and reaches out his hand. I take it. I have held that hand a million times in cheering, but this time it feels different, charged, like we are trying to meld our palms together, give each other strength and take it at the same time, you know?
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “Weird stuff is happening. Everyone has to be in shock sometimes. You should have seen me in the locker room.”
His hand is so much bigger than mine, but he doesn’t squeeze too hard when he says, “Your mom is going to freak when she gets here.”
I nod. She is so orderly, so neat. “She loves the love seat.”
Normally Lyle would mock me for saying “loves the love,” but instead he just says, “Maybe we could sew up the cushions.”
We sit there another minute.
“I should check out the rest of the house,” I say. “And get my stuffed animal off the fan. And clean up and stuff.”
“Sure…”
We do not move.
“I’m glad she wasn’t here when it happened,” I add, staring at a shattered, framed picture of me and my mom on the back of the Cross Sound Ferry, on our way to Long Island, when I was eight or so. She has her arms all wrapped around me and we are both laughing, our hair whipping each other’s faces, thanks to the wind.
“Mana?”
I snap out of it. “What?”
“What if she was?”
“Was what?”
“Was here.”
As soon as he says it, Lyle jumps up and runs across the living room. He leaps over cushions and books and pictures so ridiculously fast. I follow him into the kitchen. Shattered glass crunches beneath my cheer shoes. Lyle yanks open the door to the garage.
“Crap,” he says, and turns to gape at me with terrified eyes.
I stare past him and see it: Mom’s car.
CHAPTER 4
“Mom!” I yell for her without really thinking about it. My mom’s car is here and that means … that means …
Rushing into the garage, I yank open the door of our dark blue Subaru station wagon, the perfect mom-mobile. Her purse still sits on the passenger’s seat. The keys dangle from the ignition, but there is no mousy woman there, no small, smiling Mom.
Whirling around, I bash into Lyle. “She was here.”
“Mana, it’s—” Lyle catches me by the shoulders, but I push him away and rush back into the kitchen. “You’re jumping to conclusions. Slow down.”
I zigzag around the splattered orange juice puddle soaking into the floorboards and slam the refrigerator door shut. “She might have been here when it happened. She might still be here.”
I step on a broken teacup; its scattered blue pattern is like sea glass that has been battered by rocks and sea.
“Look at that,” I say to poor Lyle, who is still open-mouthed, standing right where I pushed him. I have never pushed anyone before in my life. “Look! This whole place is a mess. And Dakota flew. Did you see him fly? You saw that, right? Still think I’m hallucinating from my concussed brain?”
“Okay. Hold on. Let’s be rational.” He puts his hands out in front of him like a politician. Lyle is not a politician, and I know he’s only acting this way to try to calm me down. It has the opposite effect.
I point at Lyle’s face. “I will kill him for doing this to our house. I do not even care about his acid-tongue issue.”
For a second there is silence. Then a wind picks up outside. Lyle hauls in a breath so deep that his whole body moves with it, and then he says, “You’re … you’re kind of angry.”
“Lyle.” I stop ranting and really stare at him. He is trying so hard to be his composed, normal self. His hands are still up in the air, waiting for me to take them. I do. I force my voice to be calmer, more steady, and ask, “Where is my mother?”
One of his shoulders moves up just a tiny bit. He tightens his hold on my hands, his face concerned. He gropes for an answer and offers, “Maybe she’s at a neighbor’s?”
“If she was at a neighbor’s, she would have contacted me. This is the woman who expects updates hourly if I’m not at home or at a game or at school.” I let go of him and yell for her again. “Mom!”
Nothing answers. Nothing except the thuds of Lyle’s feet following me into the kitchen and … another noise?
I motion for him to be still. His foot squishes into a pile of super-spicy hummus. He stops.
“Do you hear that?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer, just moves in front of me. His voice is a quiet command. “Stay back.”
Right.
I step beside him.
“You never listen,” he mutters. “If we were in World of Warcraft, you would be in the prison at Render’s Valley for insubordination.”
He glares at me in a way that I would normally classify as geek cute, but that’s not why my stomach crashes into itself and the hairs on my arms stand up. It’s the noise, a heavy banging from my mom’s bedroom … a banging that is coming closer. Terror shuts my throat. Lyle’s muscles tense.
“What is it?” I whisper as I stare across the living room at my mom’s bedroom door. Nothing. But whenever we watch scary movies, Lyle always shouts at the actors to look up, so I do. Something moves on the ceiling, creeping out of Mom’s bedroom and into view. I yank his shirt. “Lyle … Lyle … Look up.”
His voice is like a machine—a dead, robot machine. “See it.”
“What is it?”
He doesn’t answer for a second, a big, horrible second, and then he whispers, “Unearthly? Maybe undead? Maybe cyborg? Um…”
This thing … I can’t look away. It’s like a man, but not a man. It’s gaunt, almost emaciated. The skin is pulled tight over bone and muscle. It’s the color of death, ashy gray, and it smells like death, too, like decay and garbage and dead mice in the basement, like mold on books.
“Holy crap. It’s got webs for feet,” Lyle whispers.
I nod in the tiniest way I can, but it’s not the feet I’m worried about. It’s the mouth, which is open and full of razor teeth, scissor sharp and wild. It’s the mouth that terrifies my heart into trying to beat its frantic way out of
my chest. And its eyes … its eyes are black, all black, and they stare at us.
“Exterminate,” it says.
Crap.
“That’s a Doctor Who line,” Lyle says, looking at me all excited for some reason.
“God, Lyle.”
“It is. It’s from Doctor Who. Only it’s the Daleks who say—”
“Lyle!”
The thing does not care about never-ending British television series. It leaps toward us, makes it halfway into the living room with one bound. Muscles move over bone. Web feet connect with hard wood. It leaps again, right at us.
I dive for a butcher knife on the floor while Lyle flies sideways into the kitchen counter, awkward, not sure where to go, and slipping on orange juice. The creature lands three feet in front of us, on all fours. Claws on its hands carve grooves into the wooden floor. I swear it smiles.
“Run!” Lyle yells and scrambles. He rips a silverware drawer out of the counter. Forks and spoons clank onto the floor. He whales it in front of him, holding it like a shield, just as the thing’s claws rips four long gashes down its length. Lyle throws the drawer at the beast, clobbering it in the head.
The thing pushes it off, pretty much casually. Great.
I grapple for Lyle’s hand and yank him. We run into the garage, slipping on hummus and orange juice and the remains of a jar of pickles. Lyle slams the door closed, but we can’t lock it from this side.
Lyle clenches the doorknob and pulls, trying to hold it shut with his weight. With a high kick, I smash my foot into the garage door opener. The door starts to rumble up.
“I can’t keep it shut.” Lyle’s face twists with effort.
The little blue door to the house vibrates. Four giant slash marks go through two inches of metal. Lyle gulps.
“Get in the car,” I order him. I hold my knife out, but I’m thinking it’s not going to be too effective against this web-footed, claw-handed thing.
“Mana…” Lyle’s big hands flail out against the door.
“Do it!” I yell, ripping the fire extinguisher off the wall. I pull the pin out of it and point it at Lyle’s back, which is still stupidly in front of the door.
“Mana…”
“Do it now, Lyle. Get in the car and start it, now. Fast. You’re the fast one.”
