Chapter Five

I got out of bed the next morning feeling a whole lot better than when I’d gone to sleep. The ache in my head and in my ribs was gone. I hoped the problem with my thought transference was fixed, too.

Mom sipped a cup of tea while I ate a bowl of organic whole grain cereal, aka cardboard. “Why do you always wear such drab colors?” she asked with her nose wrinkled like they smelled bad as well.

“I like this outfit,” I said, glancing down at my white shirt and jeans.

Mom shook her head in disbelief. She wasn’t a vain person, but she put effort into maintaining her health and appearance. With her light brown hair in a high ponytail, she was wearing a pink tank top and a pair of dark yoga pants. She looked like she was in her midthirties, not fifty-two. I knew it frustrated her that I didn’t make the most of my assets the way she did. I couldn’t very well tell her I picked my super-bland clothes to protect her, so I usually ignored her comments about them.

“Maybe I’ll get you a pretty dress at the mall today,” she said with a wink at me.

“Nice offer, Mom, but I don’t do any pretty-dress activities. It would just sit in my closet and collect dust.”

“You should do pretty-dress activities,” she insisted. “You’re a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl. You could be out with friends enjoying life. Instead you spend every Friday night playing video games with your brother. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you love your brother, but you should have more of a social life.”

“I appreciate your concern, Mom. I really do, but I’m happy with how things are. The day will come when I need a nice dress, and I promise you’ll be the first person I tell, okay?”

“I’d better be,” she muttered before sipping her tea again.

I took my bowl to the sink and then scooped my backpack off the floor. “Gotta go,” I said, heading for the garage.

My old car, with its squeaky doors and rust spots, waited for me in the garage. Our housing development had labeled it an eyesore and ordered us to park it in the garage or risk a fine. Mom hated the car more than she hated my old jeans, and I’d caught her staring at it a few times like it might give her posh car some horrible disease. To me the dents were character. My car had tinted windows and a good stereo, and it blended in a lot better at Fillmore than my mom’s Porsche.

I got to school early. The north halls were even more deserted than they had been the day before. I opened my locker and moved things around, keeping the illusion as consistent as possible. There were no kissing couples to get around in the stairwell, so I made it to room seventeen in excellent time. That’s where my stellar morning ended.

Brandy and Ian flashed smiles of welcome as I entered the classroom.

I’d spent a good part of the drive to school trying to decide how I was going to deal with them. There was nothing special about our interaction yesterday. We only knew the basics about each other. I’d decided to be pleasantly withdrawn with them. Over the next few days, they would likely find more exciting people to hang out with, and then I would fade into the background.

Doing it that way would be easier on them than on me. Exposure to the normal world would make me want more of it. I’d had a social life before, and I craved friendship like a drug. A little taste of it would drive me crazy for more, so I would have to keep strong in my resolve to remain invisible.

Giving the Palmers a small smile, I headed for the desk I’d been sitting at yesterday. Brandy was out of her seat and had a grip on my arm before I could put my backpack down. “Hey,” she said, pushing me toward an empty chair next to Ian. “We saved you a seat.”

I tried to move away from her, but for such a thin person, she was remarkably strong. She maneuvered me into the correct position and pushed me down into the chair. It was a shock to the system to be manhandled like that. I turned, wide-eyed, to Ian. He was chuckling. “You get used to it after a while,” he whispered.

“Ouch,” Brandy said, pointing to the bandage on the side of my face. “That looks painful.”

In reality, the edges of my cut had come together seamlessly, and the bruise had faded to a barely noticeable shade of gray. I’d darkened it with a deep mauve blush from my mom’s cosmetics case that morning. “It’s not too bad,” I said, adding a wince.

“Ian and I were just talking about you,” she continued. “I was saying how nice it would be to get to know you better. We’re kind of new here. I mean, we’ve been here for a few weeks, but we don’t really know that many people. And, well, I’m bored. Not that Ian isn’t great company, but he’s not a girl. You know what I mean?”

Ian rolled his eyes and smiled. “I can’t pretend to be interested in everything she says every second of every day. She lives with us, so I’ve gotten pretty good at tuning her out entirely.”

She pushed his shoulder, pretending to be offended. “Anyway, I think it’s time for us to branch out,” she said, “and I was wondering if you have plans for this Saturday.”

I was prepared to be pleasant with the Palmers, but I wasn’t going to hang out with them. “Um…ugh,” I replied inarticulately.

“We’re inviting a few people over,” she continued. “Ian’s parents are going to be out of town, so we’ll have the place to ourselves. It won’t be anything crazy. We just want to get to know some people better.”

Feeling a rise of desperation, I formed the thought You don’t want this girl to come and pushed it into Brandy’s mind. She was already fixed on the idea and my thought didn’t take hold. She kept staring at me expectantly. The only thing worse than accepting her invitation would be a drawn-out discussion about why I couldn’t.

“Okay, sounds good,” I said, vowing to come up with a good excuse as to why I had to miss it.

Brandy did a little bounce and clapped her hands like a child. A couple people had come in and were watching us. Fortunately, Connor arrived, and like sunshine, her attention turned to him. Within fifteen seconds, their mutual excitement had them talking over each other, and no one noticed I was in the room anymore. Except for Ian.

He tapped his pencil on my desk, and asked, “Feeling all right?”

“Better than yesterday,” I admitted.

“Good, because I worked on our script for the Byron presentation last night, and I was hoping you could take a look at it.”

When he bent over to search for it in his backpack, I smelled the clean scent of soap and noticed the hair behind his ears was still wet from a shower. I stared a little longer than I should have. Pulling my eyes away, I repeated I’m not interested in Ian Palmer ten times in my mind.

He sat up and handed me a stack of papers. I did a quick look through them and found he’d done a good job of compiling a history of Lord Byron and various examples of his work. “This is great,” I admitted. “I didn’t expect you to do so much of it without me.”

“I hope you’re not offended,” he said, running a hand through his damp hair. “You can change anything you want. I couldn’t sleep last night, and working on the presentation was better than tossing and turning for hours.”

I found that ironic. I was the one who’d been assaulted and robbed, but I’d slept like a baby.

“Oh, and I picked up your glasses at the store last night, too,” he added. He laid the mangled things on my desk and one of the lenses popped out. “That’s tragic,” he said, shaking his head in mock sympathy.

“No worries,” I said, pointing to the pair I was wearing. “I have a spare.”

“Why do you even wear them? The lenses aren’t prescription.”

I pretended not to hear him and turned to ask Brandy what time she wanted me to come over Saturday.

I planned to go to my car to eat lunch, so feeling like a fish swimming upstream, I steered and dodged through groups of people going the other way toward the cafeteria. Wyatt Smith, a particularly burly football player, was a difficult obstacle to get around, and he accidentally pushed me sideways as we passed. I careened into a group of giggling girls. They weren’t happy about it, and one of them, Nikki Cole, yelled, “Watch it!”

“Sorry,” I said to the group as a whole.

“I guess we’ll have to forgive you,” Nikki said with a cunning smile. “If we had feet as big as yours, we’d probably be clumsy, too.”

The girls around her laughed.

I knew more about Nikki Cole than I wanted to. She was tiny, barely five feet tall. Her hair shone an unusual reddish-blond color, and her wide eyes were a striking cornflower blue. She was cruel but about as popular as a girl could get at Fillmore High. “Watch it next time, Sasquatch,” she said, turning her back on me.

I paused long enough to form the thought nothing to remember and pushed it into the minds of the girls in the group. Their expressions cleared and they went back to ignoring me like nothing had happened.

I breathed a sigh of relief. My thought transference was working again.

Brandy waved to me when I walked into sixth period. Remembering my resolve to be pleasant, I took my seat next to her. She leaned over to give me a hug. I held still as a statue until she let me go. She seemed to like physical contact with strange people as much as I hated it. “Why didn’t you come eat lunch with us today?” she asked.

“I had an errand to run,” I lied.

“Well, Ian went looking for you when you didn’t show up. I think he was worried. Maybe because of what happened at the bookstore last night.”

“He told you about that?”

“I knew something was bothering him when he came home, and I bugged him until he told me. Are you mad?”

“No. I guess not.”

“It is weird, isn’t it?” she continued. “That some guy would leave a package for you and another guy would steal it on the same day. I wonder what was in it.”

“A book,” I said, seeing my mental picture of it all over again.

Mr. Dawson cleared his throat noisily in our direction, indicating we were to stop talking. With apologetic smiles, we focused our attention on his lecture.

She stuck by my side after class and followed me all the way to my locker, where Ian was leaning with his shoulder against the wall. His pose was casual, but he looked kind of sweaty and his face was flushed.

“Something wrong?” Brandy asked, eyeing him up and down.

He made a go-away gesture with his head. “I’ll see you at the house, okay?” he said.

“Sure, I guess,” she replied. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Alison.”

“You look like you’ve been running,” I said, going around him to my locker.

“If you only knew,” he said irritably. “Where were you at lunch?”

We weren’t on a level where that was any of his business, and I was taken aback that he’d ask in such a harsh way. “I had an errand to run,” I said.

“What kind of errand?”

I turned to look at him full-on. “What’s it to you?”

“Some guy smacked you upside the head yesterday and left with a package that didn’t belong to him. Then you just disappeared at lunch, and I thought… It doesn’t matter what I thought. I guess the whole thing bothers me more than it bothers you.”

So much for being pleasantly withdrawn with the Palmers. Ian was pushing all my buttons. “It does bother me,” I said grumpily, “but I doubt the guy will come all the way out here to knock me around some more. I find it really hard to believe you’re worried about that, either, so what exactly is the problem?”

We were both in nasty moods and standing nose to nose like a pair of boxers before a fight. I opened my locker to block him out of sight. He pushed it closed. “I can’t explain why,” he said, “but when you didn’t show up for lunch, I thought something bad happened. The feeling was strong enough to make me drive around looking for you while I fried half to death in the heat. Believe me, I didn’t want to.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m not your responsibility,” I hissed, “and I don’t want you checking up on me. I can take care of myself.” I did my locker thing, closed the door, and walked away.

He caught up. I heard him exhale a long sigh before he spoke again. “Like I told you last night, I saw you lying flat out in a pool of blood twice. Both times you looked dead. Admittedly, I don’t know you that well, but seeing that took a toll.”

He had a point. If I’d found someone beaten and bloodied, not once but twice in the same day, it would have messed me up a little, too. I was still mad, though.

At the parking lot he touched my arm. “Listen, Alison,” he said more gently. “Obviously, where you go and what you do is your business. I was just really worried.” He ducked his head, letting the gold hair fall across his forehead and shade his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said with half a smile. “Forgive me?”

I wanted to stay angry, but my heart had twisted in all sorts of ways. “Okay. Just…give me some space, will you?”

He nodded and more hair fell across his forehead.

Crap, crap, crap.

“I’ll give you space, if you promise to watch your back.”

It was a strange request for him to make, but I agreed. “I always do,” I said, getting into my car.

Lillian was back to her usual self that afternoon. She spoke only three sentences to me, made eye contact twice, and never smiled once as we worked. While she searched the internet for treasures, I organized the store and inventoried a new order of books. By six o’ clock I’d finished everything including my homework. I pulled out the Byron script and started reading it over.

Byron himself had supplied plenty of fascinating anecdotes, but Ian wrote with a flair that made everything more interesting. According to the script, Byron had been an attractive man for his time, meaning he had a chin. He’d lived extravagantly and partied with flamboyant company. He was also depressed and antisocial sometimes. He treated most people in his life, especially the women he seduced, terribly. All these nasty character traits combined to make him a celebrity in his generation.

On the whole, I couldn’t like him. But it was impossible not to love words strung together like, “She walks in beauty, like the night,” or “There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.”

I added a few of my own thoughts to the script and then put it away to discuss with Ian later.

At six thirty, Lillian told me to hang up my apron because I was done for the day. I had thirty minutes left of my shift, so I worried I’d done something wrong. Then I caught her watching me with a concerned expression. Ian wasn’t the only one who thought the man from last night would come back and….do what, I wasn’t sure.