CHAPTER TWO
The next three classes were frustrating. I was scolded for the most arbitrary of things, such as getting up to use the toilet, or snacking in class, or ‘talking out of turn’, whatever that meant. My third period class returned from our field trip to the library with our soddy, overused history books. I took my seat with mine and flipped through the water-damaged pages to the more recent history—or the history that I was intimately familiar with.
Something caught my eye.
My hand floated into the air, stopping the professor in the midst of her over-rehearsed monologue on the importance of history. She threw her hands onto her hips and faced me. “Yes, Miss Andrews?”
I pointed to the page in question. “I don’t think this book is entirely accurate, professor. Is there another option?”
Her bowl-cut hair sprouted frizzies. “What do you mean, the ‘book isn’t entirely accurate’?” The snap of her voice on ‘accurate’ gave me a start, but I pressed on.
“Well, I was just glancing through. It basically insinuates here,” I gestured to the page in question, as if she could see, “that the United States government dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki largely as retribution for their attack on Pearl Harbor, which I know is what Truman said,” I still remembered the headlines, “but that’s stupid. Pearl Harbor was attacked in ’41, and the bombs were ’45. It wouldn’t have taken us nearly four years to mobilize a response like this implies. There was the Manhattan Project by that point, which caused our military to have itchy fingers for experimentation, and our government also obviously wanted to, you know, ‘compare sizes’ with the Soviets. I mean, before we’d even dropped the bombs, we’d been firebombing the real shit out of over sixty of Japan’s most populous cities, and they had already exhausted all their resources and made several attempts to surrender. I don’t see even an inkling of any of that in the text.”
The silence percolated throughout the room, the type of silence where I could hear the wind in my lungs with every breath. I simply shrugged. “So, can we use a book that’s more accurate?”
The professor rattled in place as her entire head flushed the ripest shade of tomato.
Yuuhi hid his face in shame, a practice that he’d been exercising many times throughout the day on my behalf. Jason, however, in the neighboring seat, raised his eyebrows at me, his lips clinging to what I thought was an almost smirk.
“Young lady!” The professor threw down her fists. “That language will not be tolerated in my classroom!”
I blinked at her. “What language? Nuclear bombs…?”
“Your sarcasm is dually noted, Miss Andrews. Why don’t you save that for your essays, hm? Then I can dock you for those inappropriate word choices.” She stared me down, as if she expected some sort of answer or lame apology. I completely blanked. Rhetorical questions were not my strong suit.
Jason, however, lifted his hand.
“Yes, Mr. Anderson?”
“Well, can we use a more accurate textbook?”
His friends, all dressed in black with strange hairdos, laughed and jeered at him. I didn’t think he was joking.
During our lunch period, Jason and his darkly dressed friends found a table out on the patio in the far corner and made it their nest, which meant Yuuhi and I had to stake out a table nearby to watch them. I was pleased. The concentration of artificial chemicals that human teenagers painted themselves with had gained a coarse sawdust-like texture in my throat and made my eyes water constantly. The patio area wasn’t quiet by any means, but the breeze rolling off the wall of trees was refreshing.
Yuuhi, however, was not so pleased. The scowl on his face as he pushed his sunglasses up his nose spoke an entire dissertation about how much he disliked the sun. I watched him simmer and shift uneasily as he cooked. I still found it odd. I guess he didn’t strike me as the type who would let himself become sensitive to the sunlight as he had.
But I shouldn’t have been surprised.
We had taken a seat on opposite benches, facing each other. I asked him, “So, why would you be chosen for a primarily daytime mission if you’ve got such an obvious weakness to sunlight? Why not a more accustomed unfortunate soul?”
His eyebrows lifted above his aviators. “Really? Don’t you all think we’re soulless?”
I slapped down my backpack atop the table and gutted it of my lunch components: an insulated bag, a thermal, many containers, and a fat red apple. He watched me pull out each item, one by one, as I said, “I don’t really know, I don’t really get the chance to ask, ‘Hey, do you think they have souls?’”
“But you think we do?”
I shrugged, fishing for my re-sealable plastic bag of utensils. “I don’t see why you wouldn’t.”
His lips pressed together as I popped off all my lids and upturned the insulated lunch bag. Packets of spinach and baby greens, cucumber and avocado slices, cherry tomatoes, and whole wheat pita bread tumbled out.
I continued with, “I think everyone has a soul, otherwise they’re just an empty vessel. Fae, shifters, weres, mermaids, hunters, you and me. I just think some souls are messed up.”
“Like mine?”
“Well, I don’t know you, do I?” I popped open a container of cold black beans and threw all my salad ingredients inside. “How can I judge whether or not your soul is a blackened pit unless you actually tell me about yourself?”
He stewed with those words, his jaw clenched and his eyes burning through the lenses of his sunglasses as he watched my hands move. “We’re mortal enemies. You know you shouldn’t trust me.”
I pried open the container of hummus, doused with olive oil and spices, for my pita bread. “Have you given me a reason to distrust you?”
“And if I say I have?” He continued to give me a very serious face—or, at least, he continued to give my assembly line of food a very serious face.
After slathering a triangle of flat bread with the hummus, I paused to give him the slightest of coy smiles. “Then I might compare it to this morning, when you said I was trying too hard to threaten you.”
I felt his gaze on me then. For a creature of ice, there was always something burning behind the dark emeralds of his eyes. I didn’t want to call it fire, because I had felt fire in another’s eyes before, and I hadn’t liked it.
This was something else.
I stuffed my mouth with the powdered bread and chickpea paste. As I unscrewed the top of my thermal and the sweet scent of almond milk rolled up to my nose, I said, “You’d better eat something, or else they’re gonna get suspicious about what you actually are.”
He had to contemplate a few seconds into the past, and then he strummed his fingers once against the weather-bleached wooden table. “There’s a movie you should watch. You’ve been reminding me of the main character all day—it’s called ‘Mean Girls’.”
“I’m not allowed to watch the television.”
His fingers splayed against the tabletop. “Why?”
“My dads don’t like television.”
Another furtive pause. “They do realize it’s the twenty-first century, don’t they? That the modern American home has at least one TV, if not one per room with a computer, a phone, electrical outlets, and indoor plumbing?”
“We had a television once, back in the late fifties, black and white and all that, but then my dad took it away.” It didn’t mean that I couldn’t sneak other opportunities elsewhere, of course. “I’m allowed to read the newspaper all I want, though.”
A third furtive pause. His fingers strummed the table yet again, and then he nodded. “Well, then. If the both of us make it out of this alive by the end, I’m showing you that movie.”
He stood with such conviction that I thought he had instead declared war. He marched away, and I watched his back recede for the cafeteria and the long lunch line inside. Before he could make it to the door, however, a couple girls bounded up to him, tiny skirts fluttering about their legs and bright smiles on their painted faces. He stopped, and naturally, suavely, turned to them with all the charm in the world.
I frowned.
Deeply.
Those were mating tactics. The girl touching her hair, rolling her shoulders, crinkling her eyes, she and her friend giggling at whatever he had to say. A mating ritual.
I wasn’t exactly personally familiar with mating rituals, but I certainly knew one when I saw it, and it was so blatant that I lost my appetite.
What a whore.
And I didn’t mean either of the girls.
My attention returned to my meal, but not before I caught a glimpse of Jason’s friends’ nest. I called it his friends’ nest because he never really seemed to be a part of that clique. If I had to pin it exactly, he kept everyone at arm’s length, maintained a perfect distance, and only put in the occasional comment to appease them. His attention had been as far away from his group as could possibly be, and it also hadn’t been on the book in his hand.
It had been on Yuuhi and me.
#
After lunch was Inter-People Studies, and as I flipped through the library-sanctioned handbook of all the different known species on the planet, I bristled.
‘The Demon: originally confused and indecipherable from what are now called devils, the demon most often shares a nearly indistinguishable physical appearance to that of a human, usually with only one or two unique details.’
And the visual aid revealed a crude drawing of a brutish, burly, particularly hairy snarling man with dark skin, elongated teeth and ears, snakelike eyes, and jagged red sigils along the arms and chest. The creature looked like it should have been carrying a fat club, wearing a fur pelt for a loincloth, and grunting at dinosaurs.
My hand shot into the air—well, it almost did. Yuuhi snagged my wrist, yanking my arm back down as he tried wholeheartedly not to explode on me.
I pushed the open book into his face. “Did you see this? When the hell was this thing written? The seventies? And by seventies, I mean eighteen-seventies, when Europeans still believed in scientific racism and were trying with all their God-given European might to prove that the African wasn’t even another ethnicity of human, but another species altogether like us—”
He tried to hush me with his other hand, but could hardly keep his own voice down. “Do you want to give yourself away? Because you’re well on track.”
My desk tipped on its rightmost legs as I leaned closer. “I’m a monkey!”
“At least you don’t look like an anorexic zombie.”
“Sir and Lady Andrews.”
Our heads swung around. The quiet danger in our professor’s voice as he stood at the front of our row, arms folded, eyebrow cocked, forced us both to swallow corks. My chair fell back onto all fours with a thud that echoed between the cramped classroom walls like a scream.
The professor then continued on with the syllabus.
Jason watched us with his elbow propped up atop his desk in the row beside me, chin in hand, positively straight-faced. Despite my hysterics, I knew for certain no one other than Yuuhi had made out a word of what I’d said.
Still, I doubted words were what Jason needed to deduce what we’d been talking about.
At the end of the class, as everyone began to pack up their academic instruments, Jason leaned toward me and murmured, “Are you going to request a change of books again?”
I swallowed.
When I twisted to him, he had already turned his back to me as he stuffed his binder into his backpack.
Another thing I learned throughout the day was how to quickly sneak my snacks, stealing from the baggy between my thighs when the professor turned away for just half a second. Keeping my metabolism balanced for me and my kind was key, otherwise lethargy affected us hard. We had a lot of compact body mass, about twice that of a human and five times more efficient, which meant we had a lot more to carry and needed a lot more energy to carry it.
Art class was the laziest of the previous courses. The professor called role, botched a number of names, gave a short introduction, and then said we could read the syllabus on our own time if we absolutely felt compelled to do so. I liked this guy, especially since he said he graded more upon effort than skill. I’d never been very good with crayons, so I was relieved the teacher wasn’t going to stuff art supplies down my throat and order me to regurgitate a Van Gogh. He didn’t even spare me half a glance as I munched away on granola from one of my snack bags.
But someone else did.
“You could probably eat a second lunch in this class,” Jason said from the stool to my left, “and he won’t care.”
I gulped. Hard. The half-masticated granola chunks scraped down the walls of my throat.
Yuuhi, I could tell, tried very hard not to look up from his second read of the syllabus, an attempt to play off the comment as if it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
It didn’t help.
Gym class was equally as lazy. The professor called out our names and assigned us lockers in the changing rooms. Then, we were sentenced to free play in the gym. A few boys took up basketballs, but most everyone else plopped down in the bleachers, segmented in their cliques, and continued to talk about clique things.
I watched them, studied them. Body language was something I was only vaguely familiar with, but after only a day of having it displayed wherever I went, all of it began to make sense. The chest-thrust, the raised chin, the twirled legs, the flutter of hands, the knees pressed together, hugging the binder, tossing the hair, rubbing the back of the neck. It was as if everyone was always on stage, acting a particular part, some sort of character, and none of them would give up the dance.
Yuuhi and I stood at the foot of the bleachers, his sunglasses dangling from the collar of his shirt. He caught me giving the packs of teens a crinkled brow and said, “I’m beginning to think that this puzzled face of yours isn’t actually a puzzled face, but simply the way your face is.”
“I’ve read about clans, but I’ve never seen them in person before. Not like this.”
“Have you ever been to a mall?”
“A mall? Is that a shopping center?”
He cleared his throat and rearranged his thoughts. “Most everyone has a group of friends, Tails. It means survival.”
The corner of my mouth lifted with a humorless smile. “From what? This place is littered with proctors and armed security at every main doorway. There’s no predator here—”
He shook his head. “A predator doesn’t necessarily mean someone or something that’s going to eat them, Kal. Not all predators seek to feed or torture physically, or I suppose you haven’t noticed at all the dirty looks that many girls have given you when they see you clinging to my side in the hallways.”
My nose wrinkled up. “What? Dirty looks? Why? I haven’t insulted anyone today. And I don’t cling to your side.”
The stupid crooked smirk climbed to his face again. I hated that smirk and the way it pinched his eyes with a sense of knowing better than I did. I wanted to punt his face into the sky and name it as a new star. “I’ve decided your naiveté is cute, Tails. No, don’t look at me like that. It was a compliment.”
Right.
I didn’t know what a mall meant, so I couldn’t recognize condescending.
“Hey, Andrews!”
Both of our heads turned, but it was clear by the group of boys, one of which was juggling a basketball, that the call to arms had not been addressed to me. Yuuhi immediately stepped into character. “What’s up?”
It was one of the boys that Yuuhi had made easy friends with during the day. “You play ball, don’t you? C’mon, let’s see it.”
Yuuhi scoffed. “You don’t want me to play. I’ll wipe the floor with the other team. It’ll be ugly.”
The members of said other team jeered. It seemed to be a regular practice for boys to make loud noises when they approved or disapproved of something. Oftentimes, a fine line separated what they approved or disapproved of, such as when I’d been walking at Yuuhi’s side down the cramped hall and a group of boys erupted into tortured battle cries—over a picture of a naked woman on a telephone.
One of the boys from the other team threw his hand into the air. “Fuck you, Andrews.”
Another boy said, “Bet your sister plays better than you.”
Why did I have to be dragged into this cockfight?
“I won’t lie.” Yuuhi lifted his hands to concede the point. “She could turn any one of you into a basketball and shoot you straight through the hoop without trying. Isn’t that right, Kali?”
“What?” was all I could manage.
“Bullshit!” boy one of Team Other said. “I’m calling your bluff, Andrews.” He grabbed the basketball from boy two and hurled it straight to Yuuhi’s chest. He caught it, the impact causing his body a shiver. Yuuhi wasn’t especially strong, after all, if not toned only enough to take a hit from something like me and survive. Maybe.
Once he had crossed into the court, however, he turned back to where I stood rooted and beckoned me with his eyes. “Come on, Tails. I have a reputation to build.”
Maybe I preferred his sunglasses on his face. A barrier of lenses meant I didn’t feel so compelled to follow after him when he coaxed me. “Pretty sure you slapped mine onto the table instead.”
“So?” In a blur, he launched the ball at me with perfect aim. I caught it, and I didn’t shiver. Ever amused, he said, “Just show a little restraint and let them know that those pigtails are only there to look good.”
What was that supposed to mean?
I didn’t get a chance to ask. He jogged up to the hoop, where the other boys met him with more jeering and name-calling, and then he ticked his head to the half court line. My palms grazed the goose-pimpled flesh of the hard rubber ball as I considered the situation. I hadn’t exactly decided what to do when my feet carried me to my designated spot, and the nine other boys faced me with laughs of mocking and, ‘What do we do? She’s a girl, we don’t want to hurt her. Let’s approach cautiously and make it obvious that we’re approaching cautiously.’
My lips pulled into a frown. I bounced the ball against the floor and it rebounded hard against my hands. The impact of the hallow rubber echoed throughout the gym, and I found myself glimpsing the stands. A handful of eyes watched, including Jason’s from his clan at the far corner of the bleachers, high up top and removed from everyone else.
My skin prickled. Apprehension, excitement, I couldn’t tell what it was that made my nerves shoot off pulses of static, but the thrill got my blood pumping fiercer.
One of the boys mocked a leap for the ball. I didn’t flinch. His footwork and the feint in his eyes betrayed the lie, but the other boys mistook my lack of reaction as inexperience and laughed harder.
“Alright, look,” the boy said. “We’ve only got like a couple minutes left. I’ll go easy on you, okay? I don’t want to hurt your pretty face or nothing, just swear to smack your brother in front of everyone, got me? I want a picture of it.”
“A picture.” I bounced the ball again and caught it easier this time. “Because it’s funny for a girl to smack a boy.”
He shrugged, the grin unrelenting. “Or a girl to smack a girl. Whatever you’re into.”
Slowly and deliberately, I nodded. “Ah. Sorry, homeschooled and all that. I don’t really understand modern day social references.”
He opened his mouth, but I planted my feet firmly against the floor, drew a sharp breath into my lungs, and tossed the ball high into the air. Each of the young men followed the arc of the orange spec above their heads, turning in sync, before the ball swished cleanly through the hoop.
An unusual hush settled throughout the gym. It didn’t go completely silent, but the sense of awe pervaded the entire court and crawled into the bleachers. Heads turned and fingers pointed, and the amount of eyes that settled on me doubled, then quadrupled.
And then the nine boys erupted into wild battle cheers. They converged on me, rowdy and alit with excitement and disbelief. I lost track of Yuuhi as pheromones and the musk of sticky body odor flooded me. Soon after, the bell drop-kicked my skull. As the other teenagers gushed down the bleachers and streamlined to the doors of freedom, the nine boys made me their new best mate and tried to convince me to play with them later and practice more and join the girls’ team and run for office and cure every disease.
When they finally uttered their sweet goodbyes and shoved off, the gym had emptied. Jason was gone, and so was Yuuhi.
Shit.
I hadn’t pegged Yuuhi as the type to trick or take advantage of me, but if he went after Jason and got to him before Jason had a chance to step inside the sanctuary of his house, I was totally, royally screwed.
I raced to where my backpack sat, abandoned and lonely, and threw it onto my shoulder before I made for the doors. I would have beaten the group of meandering boys, but a shiver up my spine stopped me cold. There and gone in a heartbeat, a whiff of ill intentions stung my sinuses and raised the alarm in my mind. I checked first over my shoulder, scanning the empty gym, allowing the boys to exit through the doors first.
That was a mistake.
I whipped back around, took half a step, and then I saw Yuuhi there in front of the doors as they fell shut. His hand held a ring of keys, one of which he had stabbed into the panel control of the gym lights. The other hand held a sleek black handgun, raised, and aimed right at me with his trigger finger curled.
I got a good look of the stark seriousness in his eyes before his key hand twisted, and all the lights in the gym switched off.
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