Immortal Light: Wide Awake (9 page)

“
What are you looking for?” Kat
asked as she handed Lucy a tray. “Or should I say whom are you
looking for?”

Lucy looked at Kat like a kid with her hand in
the cookie jar. “What do you mean?”

“
He’s right over there,
Luce.”

Kat pointed an elegant finger
straight across the cafeteria, and immediately Lucy saw Mark
staring in her direction. Her heart both flipped and sank
simultaneously. She was elated to see Mark, and even more so when
he waved his hand at her, but he wasn’t necessarily her target.
Lucy waved back with a half-hearted smile and a sense of social
terror.

“
Why is he waving at me in here?”
she said, turning to hide her face by choosing a slice of pizza
from the bar.

“
Because
he
likes
you,
Lucy. What is the matter with you? Go over there.” Kat sounded
frustrated.

“
What? No, I
can’t. He’s with all the guys and …
”

“
Oh shut up, we’re going. Put this
down.” Kat grabbed Lucy’s tray and set it on top of the bar. She
grabbed Lucy by the wrist and started to drag her away, but Lucy
resisted.

“
No, I’m not going over
there.”

“
Why not?” Kat was now definitely
frustrated.

“
Because …
it
’
s just
…
”

Kat opened her eyes wide as
if to say ‘
Well? I’m
waiting!’

“
In the cafeteria, seriously?”
Lucy asked, expressing her own frustration.

“
Yeah, why not?”

“
I don’t know,” Lucy answered,
turning around to grab her tray of pizza and to pick up a bowl of
broccoli and cauliflower. “It doesn’t feel right yet.”

Kat’s shoulders fell. “Are you serious? The
guy went out of his way to say hi to you while he was with his
meat-head friends. He likes you!”

Lucy swiped her ID card at the
cashier’s stand and started walking toward a table. Kat snagged a
piece of pizza and followed her.

“
I just need time to process
it.”

“
Okay,” Kat said. “Just don’t
process too long. Guys are like puppies: short attention
span.”

The two girls sat down and started
eating. Lucy continued to look around the cafeteria. She was trying
to be subtle about it, looking like she was stretching.

“
It’s that other guy isn’t it?”
Kat said as she watched Lucy.

“
What? Who—I
mean, what guy?
”
Lucy buried her attention in her pizza.

“
You know who I’m talking about. I
spend the first day of school doing nothing but sizing up the
smorgasbord of guys. You’re looking for the new guy, Benjamin,
because he’s the guy that brought you to my house the other
night.”

Lucy sat stunned. It was the truth, but she
couldn’t tell Kat that. It was too irrational.

“
No, I’m just
stretching.”

“
Shut up, you’re
looking for Benjamin Raven. It’s okay. He’s cute, but he must
be
some sort of snob to be hanging out
over there.” Kat jerked her head toward the side of the room behind
Lucy.

Lucy turned around slowly. At a
table not twenty feet away she immediately saw Benjamin, and
practically sitting in his lap was Samantha. Lucy grimaced at the
sight when suddenly Benjamin’s head turned away from the seemingly
ebullient conversation and looked directly at Lucy. His green eyes
paralyzed her for a moment; then she shot back around to face
Kat.

“
Some guys are just natural snobs,
I guess,” Kat said, taking a bite of pizza.

Lucy stared at her lunch and didn’t say
anything. Her breathing was accelerated a bit, but Kat must not
have noticed because she was already onto her next topic of
conversation.

“
So, like I was saying, the reason
I saw Dave was because he totally came up to me and asked if I
wanted to go to the dance with him on Friday.”

Kat’s mundane conversation was enough to wake
Lucy out of her trance.

“
Really? Is that good? Didn’t you
like him in fifth grade or something?” she responded.

No longer feeling hungry, she picked up a
piece of broccoli and examined it in her hand. It was almost brown
it was so overcooked.

“
Yeah, he was so cute back then.
Remember when we both had braces and Princess Samantha was making
fun of me. He told her to go put her head out because it was on
fire. Remember that?”

Lucy weakly smiled and nodded her
head. Benjamin’s green eyes were still burned into her mind. As she
twirled the broccoli she closed her eyes. Two bright green orbs
floated toward her. They were mesmerizing. Suddenly they were
attached to a face, Benjamin’s face, and Lucy wished she could
reach out and touch him. She tried to imagine it
happening.

“
Lucy!”

The darkness turned white as Lucy opened her
eyes.

“
Are you okay? Seriously, you seem
a little out of it today.”

Lucy dropped the vegetable
from her hand onto her tray. “Yeah, I’m fine. I think I’m just …
tired, I guess.
”

“
Well, you
better wake up, honey, ‘cause I’ve already got a date for Friday,
and I have a feeling…
”
she turned her head in Mark
’
s direction.
“
… you
’
re about to have one,
too.
”

Lucy looked over and saw Mark’s beautiful
profile, his straight jawline and handsome features. She couldn’t
help but smile, but she knew the pecking order in high school. His
taste for her could change at any moment.

“
We’ll see,” she replied as she
stood to walk her mostly-full tray to one of the large plastic tubs
for dirty dishes.

“
Well, we’d better do more than
see,” Kat responded. “You gonna eat that?” she followed up,
pointing to Lucy’s tray.

Lying in the center of her tray was a
perfectly fresh, green, and raw floret of broccoli. Lucy looked
curiously at it. It must have snuck in there with all the cooked
garbage vegetables in her bowl.

“
No, go ahead; it’s
yours.”

She sighed as she found herself halfway
between the man of her dreams and the man in her dreams.

***

Lucy sat in the quad after school waiting for
Kat, and hoping to see either Mark or Benjamin. Unfortunately, she
knew Mark probably wouldn’t show up because of football, and
Benjamin was probably unlikely to show up without
Samantha.

“
Hey, Luce!” Kat’s voice came up
fast behind her. “Dave’s going to give me a ride, is that
okay?”

Lucy turned around to see Kat right next to
her, and standing about twenty feet off was Dave, holding Kat’s
bag.

“
Yeah, that’s great.”

“
You feel any better?” Kat asked,
clutching Lucy’s shoulder.

“
I’m fine. Go. Have fun.” Lucy
winked at Kat, who stood up and flashed a gleaming
smile.

“
I’ll do my best,” she said, then
turned to run back to Dave. “Call me later!” she yelled over her
shoulder, and Lucy waved her on.

Looking up at the afternoon
sky, Lucy saw that dark gray clouds had filled the expanse.
Figures
, she thought.
“You were supposed be a good day,” she said to the cosmos. “Now,
I’m just confused.”

She stood up and grabbed her heavy backpack.
Taking the stairs back down to her car, she felt her phone vibrate
in her pocket. It was a text from Kat.

Kat:
going for ice cream with

dave at six, you in?

Lucy:
no, you go. have fun. i’ll call u

later

Kat:
OK, *hugs*

As she approached her car, she
noticed a motorcycle right next to it. Sitting facing away from her
was the tall, sinuous figure of Benjamin. Lucy’s overworked heart
beat heavily once again. She didn’t know what to do because that
mysterious internal force was drawing her to him, but deep down she
had no idea why.

“
Hey,” she called out to
him.

She had absolutely no idea what to expect, but
at least he was there, the winner of her after-school sweepstakes.
As he sat up and turned around, she noticed he had been reading a
book.

“
Hey, yourself,” he said with a
smile.

“
So, how was your first day of
high school? Was it everything you thought it would be?” Lucy
asked. She could feel herself getting a little heated. All day he
had hung out with Samantha; she had to have had him brainwashed by
now.

Benjamin bobbed his head back and forth. “It
was alright. Your friend, Samantha, is quite the character. She
asked me out to a dance on Friday.”

Lucy closed her eyes and sighed heavily.
“She’s not really my friend; we’ve just known each other forever.
That sort of happens in small towns.” She tried to not look
completely dejected, but her shoulders couldn’t help but
sag.

“
Bad first day for you, huh?”
Benjamin asked, watching Lucy throw her backpack into her
car.

“
Meh, it was fine, I
guess.”

“
Well, maybe tomorrow will be
better.”

“
Here’s hoping.” Lucy wanted to
stay and talk with him. Her entire being screamed to be with him,
but she was tired. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess,” she
said.

It was hard for her not to sound despondent as
she spoke, so she just got in her car, started it up, took a deep
breath, and closed her car door.

***

By the time she made it home, she had all but
forced Benjamin Raven from her thoughts. She knew she couldn’t
compete for him and she knew what she had to do, but it was
something she didn’t want to do; she had to somehow forget about
him.

Slowly walking upstairs to her room, she
dropped her bag on the floor and flopped onto her bed. She had to
think about something else, something that wasn’t Benjamin Raven.
Reaching over, she pulled her backpack to the bed and pulled out
her literature book. She hoped it would be a distraction, but she
knew it wouldn’t work.

She leaned her head back against
her headboard and dropped the heavy weight of the book in her lap.
She thought of Mark and Benjamin, both in her head at the same
time. Mark was real, but Benjamin had a mysterious draw. Mark was
interested, and Benjamin was anybody’s guess. Lucy felt her eyelids
getting heavy, and it wasn’t long before she was back in the
rainforest.

Ferns covered the forest floor like a blanket.
The tall trees loomed overhead like ancient pillars and Lucy walked
again toward the west, noticing that it was more comfortable with
shoes on. She hoped to see the person she knew deep down was
Benjamin. In spite of her plan to forget about him, she felt the
need to see him one more time.

The golden light of the
sunset filled the trees and Lucy remembered the direction she had
traveled the last time. Coming again to where the cliff had been,
she looked around.
Where are
you
, she thought, but there was no one.
Her heart sank a little.

“
Hello?” she called out. But still
there was no one.

She sighed and walked toward the
precipice. There was a building or structure of some sort the last
time she looked over it. The excitement of getting a better look
carried her closer to the edge. She hoped to see it in better
detail this time. As she started walking toward the cliff, a voice
came from somewhere near her.

“
Lucy.”

It was Benjamin.

She froze in her tracks and spun toward the
sound of the voice. She didn’t see him until he stepped out from
behind a tree. He stood darkened against the light of the sun. He
wore a jacket and jeans, and for some reason there was the sword
again.

“
Benjamin,” she
said. “What … where am I?
”

“
That’s a little
hard to answer,” he responded. “How did you—
”

Before he could finish, a loud concussion
rocked the dream world, and before Lucy could stop herself, she was
swallowed in darkness.  

Lucy sat up in bed and saw that her phone was
in pieces on the floor, the back having popped off and the battery
having spilled out. It took a minute to get it back on. There was a
missed call from Kat. Lucy dialed her number, feeling disappointed
at having been pulled away from her dream. After one ring, Kat
answered.

“
Oh my gosh, what happened?” Kat
sounded frantic.

“
What do you mean?”

“
I just got a call from Maddi and
she said you were in the parking lot with Benjamin Raven. What
happened?”