Shelland Conall has always believed herself to be ordinary, and she's never had reason to suspect otherwise. Not until an enigmatic stranger seems to show up at every corner, and he's claiming to be the one that saved her life. Thing is, Shelland do...
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Chapter Twenty-Five
The tip of a dry-erase marker squeaks across the whiteboard and the noise grates against my spine. Today, I feel off—hungover, almost—from all the magic that I've been utilizing recently. Olivian had warned me about consequences, but I never really listened. I suppose I had thought that I'd be the exception to the rule. I would have this impenetrable guard from consequence since I was—am—different, but I can't shake this eerie feeling that I'm not alone. I've had the suspicion of being watched since I woke up from the mini-coma at Dad's. Since then, my body has been hyperaware, every foreign sound or motion alerts my senses and then my nerves go haywire.
I haven't heard from Beck since our dramatic departure, and frankly, good riddance. After my belated epiphany, I can't decipher what's truth and what's a lie. How many times have I met him? How many times have we ridden this carousel of first meetings, stories, and magic? Then again, I feel like Olivian would have made some sort of catty remark about it if that were the case...
I groan, and suddenly twelve pairs of eyes are on me, including Mrs. Hatfield, the chemistry teacher. She's locked her unibrow on me, silently appointing me as her unsuspecting victim to humiliate. On a normal day, before I was preternatural, I'd be the one to willingly pop off answers in an attempt to beat Pete in our year-long competition—we used to take bets on who would irritate Mrs. Hatfield first. She's always had a soft spot for Pete since she used to watch him when his parents had to go to the school-board meetings.
"Shelland, what are the bonds between phosphate molecules called?" She asks, that familiar smug smile pursed on her wrinkled lips.
"Phosphoanhydride bonds," I say without an ounce of enthusiasm. This is when Pete would try to upstage me. He would boastfully explain, "The Phoshoanhydride bond is what gives the hydrolyzed ATP its high energy."
And then, we'd go back and forth between facts and explanations until either Mrs. Hatfield or the bell would cut us off.
As if she can feel my disdain, her gaze shifts, and her eyes linger on the empty desk to the right.
Pete's Missing-In-Action today, and I have a sneaking suspicion that he's at The Fox Glove, learning a new subject from a very different kind of teacher.
"Thank you, Shelland." The smile on her lips is wide, but the inner corner of her eye gives her away with a twitch. Instead of asking me to elaborate as she would Pete, Hatfield simply pivots around her desk and begins to doodle the two bonding molecules on the whiteboard.
"The level of disorder—the entropy—of ADP is greater than ATP's, so the reaction spontaneously occurs because it wants to increase its own entropy level," she continues drawing. "But, the physical chemistry of ATP is higher than ADP's, so naturally the molecules want to have a lower energy state, which is why the equilibrium shifts toward ADP when with water."
