Downcast (6 page)

I would shut my locker and see him standing a few feet away, eerily still, his eyes fixed on me.

Orthopedic clogs were not made for running, but I ran up the stairs anyway, to try and make it to U.S. History on time from Government. It was my longest distance and tightest time between classes. Naturally, I end up tripping up the stairs because I am the only person who can fall
up
stairs. But instead of the face-plant-yard-sale-slow-slide-down-the-steps, I got two bands of steel wrapped around my waist to catch me.

I looked up into Haley's face, trying to remember the words for "Thank you." I felt his fingers tighten, digging slightly into my waist, and every sound in my throat died.

Abruptly, he released me, but not before I saw a haunted look of pain pass like a shadow over his face.

By English, I was exhausted from trying to not think of him while trying to be aware of where he was at all times so I could avoid him.

At the end of the day, I trudged to my locker and stuffed my backpack full of the things I needed for homework. I pulled out my jacket, shut the locker, and sighed, leaning my forehead against the cool metal.

"Why are you sad?" asked a low, raspy voice behind me.

I whirled around to find Haley standing so close to me that I could almost feel his breath against my lips as he bent his head to mine.

"I'm not sad," I replied automatically, my mind scrambling for something—anything—to get me out of there. Above all, I couldn't afford to look into his eyes, which were...damn, which were soft and endlessly dark like black velvet, inviting me in. It would have been so easy to follow him into the invitation of in his eyes, to let the walls around me fall to dust and shed every protection and pretense.

"Yes, you are," he said, smiling a little. "You're a terrible liar."

"I'm tired and stressed," I said instead, knowing he had caught my lie, but hoping to deflect.

"Are you always tired and stressed?" he asked quietly, his expression turning grave.

I suddenly remembered that I shouldn't be talking to him, that this was against the avoidance policy. Yet, it seemed so natural to speak with him. It was like I wanted to pour all my words into him, tell him everything I was thinking and feeling. Oh, this was bad. This was really, really bad.

"I don't know," I admitted, blinking hard because stupid tears had just decided to show up. "Maybe."

I leaned back against my locker for support. The metal of the locker was icy cold, and sharp slats from the vents bit into the back of my skull, but I didn't care. We were so close that if we inhaled at the same time, I was pretty we would breathe each other’s breath. A wave of longing to be held by somebody, anybody, hit me like a literal punch to the heart. The very pain of it made my body tense and tighten.

"Do I…stress you out?" he asked, his voice dropping to pure smoke and gravel.

"N-no," I stammered, suddenly very aware of his beautiful menace. "Why would you?"

He gave a mirthless little chuckle, and I swear I could almost feel the rumbling vibrations from his chest reverberating in mine. "I sincerely hope I don’t. But, I suppose it all depends."

"On what?"

"On how much of a mommy's girl you are." There was such bitterness in his voice that for a second, my skin stung as if it had been burned by acid.

How did he know about my mother and her controlling reputation? Gossip from other people? Probably. Still. It was weird that it would upset him that much.

"I'm my own person," I finally replied awkwardly.

"Are you?" he asked softly. He still hadn't moved, and his breath whispered against my lips. Without thinking, I inhaled quickly, almost as if to try and catch it. His expression grew achingly sad as he traced one side of my jaw with his forefinger before pulling back and walking away.

I stood there with his words echoing in my mind.

Was I?

***

At the store, I snipped the stems of the roses with a little more force than necessary.

Mrs. Schultz looked slightly alarmed as she waited for me to finish prepping her bouquet. I tried to smile reassuringly at her, but I guessed it came out as an overconfident snarl.

Snip.

Was I stressed out by Haley? My answer was—after two bunches of Gerbera Daisies and an orchid pruning incident—definitely ”no.” Was I afraid of Haley? I didn’t think so. He didn’t intimidate me in the sense that I thought he was physically dangerous or psychotic or anything like that. But, maybe I was afraid of him in a different way. He was intense. He was cool. He was interested, and maybe that scared me the most. It was as if some law of physics had been suspended for the past few days, allowing the moon to wander off, gravity to take a break, and a cute guy to seem like he had a thing for me.

Snip.

Maybe I was afraid that someone had actually seen me, seen all the way through the shaggy hair, baggy clothes, and wall of nerdiness that had been my protection from the other kids and their constant mocking of my lack of knowledge of any popular culture. (
Did I know those movies and music contained very bad values and would give me the wrong idea about how boys and girls interact?
)

Snip. Snip. Snip.

"Would you like some greens to fill out the bouquet, Mrs. Schultz?" I asked, trying to unclench my jaw. "I have some really nice Baby's Breath and a couple of small ferns that came in today."

"Uh, yes," she stammered, backing a step away from the counter. "Whatever you think."

"Okay."

By the time I was wrapping the flowers in paper and stapling the preservative pack into the fold, I decided that I was afraid of Haley, after all, because I was afraid of what he represented. If he was leading me on and setting me up for the world's biggest humiliation, well...there was just no way I could deal with that. It would be devastating, in a way that I instinctively knew would damage me deeply and permanently.

I'd seen it happen before, with other classmates, and it wasn't a pretty sight. Morris Chow had tried to ask Kara to the homecoming dance our sophomore year. She had said no. Brutally. To this day, the Gaggle snicker and stare at him whenever he walks by them. I had learned my lesson just by watching him try to get through the days and weeks that followed his rejection, trying to pretend it didn't matter, that like his mom and other adults said "There would be other girls." Sure, there'd be other girls, but there would always be Kara who had laughed when she said no.

At this point, I could hear my mother's voice, gently trying to explain that those popular kids were just jealous that I was so sensible and mature. She would have pointed out that the popular kids were all wrapped up in their little world and that they'd end up working at K-mart for the rest of their lives and never know what it was like to think for themselves. They'd been raised with bad values and listened to all that rock music and seen those racy, violent movies. I was much better than that. I'd been raised with good values and was a good person. The proof of that was that we had such a wonderful mother-daughter relationship, didn't we? I didn't even feel the need to rebel because I was so sensible and mature.

Having let her have her say in my head, I felt no need to invite her into the conversation in real life. It would only irritate me to have to listen to the same thing over again. Besides, it wasn't true. I might have been raised with good values and be a mature, sensible girl in my mother's world, but I was a geek to the rest of my world, which was within the walls of Darbyfield High. My two worlds were constantly colliding, pressing in on me and crushing me with their expectations, opinions, and judgments. I could barely breathe sometimes from the suffocation. I had no space for my own thoughts, feelings and desires. My wings had been chained and locked, and I served two sentences under two different jailers.

And yet...

Haley had challenged me, dangling a key to my cage before me that I could take to free myself. Just those simple words we had exchanged had opened up a little breathing space for me, yet I didn't know what to do with the air that now filled my chest.

"On how much of a mommy's girl you are."

"I'm my own person."

"Are you?"

I could be. The oxygen burned my lungs.

"Hey, Starr!"

I snapped out of my girl-power reverie and slapped on a stupid grin for Benjamin, the Health and Floral Departments Manager.

"Need a break?" he asked, joining me behind the counter. "Why don't you take your fifteen minutes now? If you take the Floral and Health trash out to the dumpster, I'll throw in an off-the-record five minutes."

"You're the best, Ben," I replied, grabbing the trash bin from under the desk and smoothly knotting the bag and yanking it up fast so the vacuum action wouldn't make it stick in the bin.

The light outside had faded from the intensity of twilight blue to the flat grey shadows that swept over the sky before it turned fully to night. What should have been a pleasantly cool evening in early fall was bitter, and I saw the white puffs of my breath on the breeze. The icy air made the shadows around me sharper, and for some weird reason, I was reminded of Haley.

Shrugging off my distraction, I slung the bags into the dumpster and went over to my graveyard to check on it, rubbing my hands along my arms to try and warm them up.

I blinked hard to make sure it wasn't the light playing tricks on me. My body shook so hard that I fell into a cramped crouching position, hugging myself tightly. I couldn't believe it because it couldn't be real.

Just two days ago, everything had been lush and thriving.

Now, every flower, every leaf, every blade of grass was dead, rotted away on the hard, cold ground.

THE DAY BEGAN
the same way as yesterday. I woke up from a weird dream about a cold, dark place, and then it was a cold, dark day outside.

I looked out the window and down into my garden. The flowers were wilting and dying from the cold, entombed by a hard, grey frost. I frowned, wondering for the millionth time since last night why the graveyard flowers had died so suddenly. Yet, they weren’t just dead, they had practically decomposed.

Maybe someone had spilled cleaning supplies or something had leaked from the dumpster. Maybe the town had come and sprayed weed killer, suddenly trying to clean up the graveyard after ignoring it for the past several decades. Maybe...

Yeah, no. There was no rational explanation I could think of that would fit. I couldn't even come up with a plausible irrational explanation.

Shivering from the chill in the air, I turned away from thoughts that danced closer and closer to the young man I had seen in the graveyard, caressing the headstones with reverence.

"Good morning, sweetie!" Mom called from the other side of my door. "Time to get up!"

"I'm up," I replied. "Be down in a minute."

"It’s extremely cold out. Dress extra warm today. Maybe you should wear your corduroy skirt and that nice Peruvian alpaca sweater I got you last year. The one with the matchstick dolls on it?"

"Okay, Mom."

I sighed.

***

From what I knew, most television shows and books about teenagers had them doing all kinds of exciting things after school: playing sports, hanging out with friends, shopping, grabbing hamburgers together, having slumber parties, going to the beach or the lake, even having study dates.

I thought the Gaggle and the Jocks, and even some of the Goons, led that kind of life. For the rest of us, though, life was get up, go to school, come home. The only variation was going to work a couple times a week.

School was the stage where the drama happened every day, and the rest of my time was spent at home, analyzing that day and preparing for the next one. My entire social life revolved around the eight hours a day I was ignored at school.

Except, I wasn't being ignored now.

When I got to school, I noticed Kara glaring at me as I crossed the gym lobby, and then she followed me up the short flight of stairs to the senior hallway. I tried to walk just a little faster, but she not only kept up, but managed to catch up to me.

Suddenly, she shoulder-checked me into my locker. It didn't hurt, but it startled the crap out of me. I whirled around to face her. The last time someone had tried to beat me up was in the third grade, and it looked like my ten-year dry spell was about to come to an end.

She lunged at me, pulling back just at the last moment. I cringed, throwing my arms over my head to protect myself. The blow didn't come. Nor did the hair-pulling or the slapping.

I heard her aluminum-can-crumpling laughter and realized she had faked me out. I lowered my arms and looked at her, trying not to recoil from the nasty sneer on her face. My ears burned from humiliation, but I refused to be the first one to break eye contact.

Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw three of the Goons come up alongside Kara.

"Hey, Rock Starr," Joe Bandino taunted, using the nickname I hated because it was given to me knowing it was everything I was not. "Nice sweater."

"Are all those your imaginary friends?" Matty Forbes, aka Goon #2, asked.

"They're dressed-up boogers!" Chad Samuels, aka the gross one or Goon #3, snickered.

"Ew, that's gross, Chad," Kara sniffed, curling her lip. That wasn't in defense of me, though. It was an upholding of her dainty feminine reputation.

I still wouldn't look away from Kara. Angry tears were close, and I prayed for something, anything to happen.

"What's up?"

My heart jerked sideways in relief as I heard Zack's voice to my right, except, this was not the lighthearted jock from English. His words were casual but rock-hard, as if he was giving the others one chance to be nice and walk away.

Kara, Joe, Matty, and Chad looked at Zack and seemed to shrink in size—at least half an inch.

"Nothing," Matty mumbled, trying to look defiant at the massive build of Darbyfield's newest quarterback.

"We were just talking," Kara said, smiling nervously.