That was it! She intended to have him tag along with her and Jeff! He'd look like some kind of an idiot!
He'd almost called her back right then, but as he reached for the phone, he'd changed his mind. Linda wouldn't do a thing like that, would she? He thought about it for a long time and finally decided she wouldn't.
He'd spent some time on his homework, then gone to bed. But he still couldn't figure it out-Linda was a cheerleader, and going out with the star of the football team. And even though she wasn't very tall, she was still an inch taller than he was. So why would she want to go out with him?
Giving up on sleep, he switched the light on, got out of bed, and went to stare at himself in the mirror.
Skinny. Not wiry, like his mother always told him. Just skinny. His chest looked narrow, and his arms were much too thin.
Unbidden, an image of JeffLaConner came into his mind. Was there really a chance he'd ever look like that?
Then he remembered Robb Harris. Three years ago, when theHarrises had lived in San Marcos, Robb had been just as skinny as Mark was now. But Robb had put on weight, and looked great.
Maybe he could do it too, Mark thought as he stared unhappily at his own image.
And it wasn't just Linda, he told himself. It was everything. He knew he'd been thinking about it all afternoon while he andChivas were walking in the hills. He just hadn't admitted he was thinking about it. But there wasn't any point in putting it off any longer.
He was in Silverdale, and he wasn't going anywhere else. And if he was going to live here, he was going to have to fit in with everyone else, even if it meant learning to like sports.
Even if he didn't learn to like sports, he could fake it. He could go to the games and cheer as loudly as anybody else.
And he could start doing exercises. He'd been doing them in gym since seventh grade, and he could do them again.
That was the whole thing, he decided. He didn't like the way he was, so he would change himself.
Lying down on the floor, he braced his feet under the lowest drawer of his desk, then folded his arms behind his head. Taking a deep breath, he began to do sit-ups.
To his own surprise, he managed twenty-five of them before his stomach began hurting so much he couldn't go on. But tomorrow, he told himself as he climbed back into bed, he'd do thirty. And the day after that…
His thoughts were interrupted by a sound that cut sharply through the night, instantly silencing the insects that had been buzzing softly outside.
It was the same piercing, agonizing scream he had heard earlier, when he'd been up in the mountains.
Except that now, in the darkness of the night, the scream sounded different.
It sounded almost human…
Chapter Seven
CharlotteLaConner glanced at the clock that glowed dimly next to the bed. Nearly one-thirty. Beside her, Chuck was snoring softly. How could he sleep, knowing that Jeff had still not come home? Charlotte got up, slipped her arms through the sleeves of a light robe, then went to the window and peered out at the street. The night was quiet. A gentle stillness lay over the valley that seemed totally at odds with the turmoil in her mind.
It had been a bad week for her, and every day things seemed to be getting worse. It had begun on Monday evening, when she'd tried to talk things over rationally with Chuck. He'd listened patiently while she'd told him about seeing Ricardo Ramirez. But when she'd gone on to say that she'd decided Jeff was going to have to quit the football team, his expression froze and a hard look came into his eyes.
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," he'd said.
His words had lashed her like a whip, but she'd bitten her lip, then tried to argue with him.
It had done no good. "It was an accident," he'd insisted.
"You don't ask a kid to give up his favorite sport just because of an accident."
As far as Chuck had been concerned, that was the end of it. If he'd even noticed the tension in the house since then, he'd given no sign, acting as if nothing had changed. But Charlotte, unable to get Rick Ramirez out of her mind, had grown quieter through the week, and become acutely aware of changes in Jeff.
If they were really changes.
For by now, she wasn't sure. Perhaps Jeff hadn't really changed at all, and she was simply reading things into his behavior. Still, she believed his personality actually was changing. Jeff's temper-always so even when he'd been younger- appeared to flare up now at the least provocation, and twice this week, when she'd asked him to do something, he had yelled that he already had too much to do, then slammed out the door. On both occasions he'd come back a few minutes later and apologized, and she'd been quick to forgive him. A repeat of the scene on Saturday night was the last thing she needed.
But her son's sudden rage had led Charlotte to watch him closely, searching for clues to his mood before she spoke to him. And as she observed him, often when he wasn't aware that she was watching, she'd begun to feel that it wasn't just his personality that had undergone a transformation-he seemed to be changing physically as well.
His eyes seemed to her to have sunk slightly, and his brow, always strong, now seemed to have thickened and grown heavier. His jaw, carrying the same square line as his father's, had a slight jut to it, giving him an aggressive look that became even more pronounced when he lost his temper.
When Jeff had come home after football practice today, his hands looked swollen, and when she'd asked him about it, his eyes flashed with quick anger. "Anything else?" he demanded. "Got any more problems with me, Ma?"
Charlotte had recoiled from his words, then tried to tell him she was only worried about him, but it had been too late.
He'd already disappeared into his room to spend the hours until dinner working out on the Nautilus equipment Chuck had bought him the previous summer. Immediately after dinner he left the house, and she'd neither seen nor heard from him since.
She heard the faint sound of the big clock at the foot of the stairs striking two, and finally turned away from the window. With mixed emotions-part trepidation, part anger that she'd come to fear her own husband-she went to the bed and shook Chuck. He stopped snoring, then wriggled away from her and rolled over. She shook him again, and he opened his eyes and looked up at her.
"What is it?" he mumbled. "What time is it? Christ, Char, it isn't even light out!"
"It's two in the morning, Chuck. And Jeff isn't home yet."
Chuck groaned. "And for that you woke me up? Jeez, Char, when I was his age, I was out all night half the time."
"Maybe you were," Charlotte replied tightly. "And maybe your parents didn't care. But I do, and I'm about to call the police."
At that, Chuck came completely awake. "What the hell do you want to do a thing like that for?" he demanded, switching on the light and staring at Charlotte as if he thought she'd lost her mind.
"Because I'm worried about him," Charlotte flared, concern for her son overcoming her fear of her husband's tongue. "Because I don't like what's been happening with him and I don't like the way he's been acting. And I certainly don't like not knowing where he is at night!"
Clutching the robe protectively to her throat, she turned and hurried out of the bedroom. She was already downstairs when Chuck, shoving his own arms into the sleeves of an ancient woolen robe he'd insisted on keeping despite its frayed edges and honeycomb of moth holes, caught up with her.
"Now just hold on," he said, taking the phone from her hands and putting it back on the small desk in the den. "I'm not going to have you getting Jeff into trouble with the police just because you want to mother-hen him."
"Mother-hen him!" Charlotte repeated. "For God's sake, Chuck! He's only seventeen years old! And it's the middle of the night, and there's nowhere in Silverdale he could be! Everything's closed. So unless he's already in trouble, where is he?"