At first I really didn’t notice much of anything. Girls were busy grabbing protein bars or cereal or some other favorite breakfast food. And then I realized that it wasn’t what I was seeing that was weird—it was what I wasn’t. There was none of the typical joking around going on where someone makes fun of someone else’s hair, and then someone else tells her to tell her mom to be quiet. No one was talking about boys. At all. No one was complaining about not having their homework done. Actually, no one was saying much of anything. They were just chewing and breathing and smiling. A lot.
I gave the Twins a WTF look.
Pod people, Erin mouthed to me while Shaunee nodded her head.
“Almost as annoying as that asshole Stark,” Erin whispered.
I tried not to sound massively guilty when I said, “Stark? What about him?”
“The buttball walked through here while you were still upstairs. All like he owned the place and didn’t care who knew he’d been raping and pillaging some poor helpless pod girl,” Shaunee said, still keeping her voice down.
“Yeah, you should have seen Becca. She panted after him like a terrier,” Erin said.
“And what did he do?” I asked, holding my breath.
“It was pathetic. He barely looked at her,” Shaunee said.
“Talk about being used and then wadded up and thrown away like a snot rag,” Erin said.
I was trying to figure out what I could say that would give me more info about what Stark had or hadn’t done without letting the Twins know I cared as much as I was caring, and I thought I should maybe try to say a little something that would kinda somehow stand up for Stark, when Erin’s eyes got all wide and buggy as she stared behind me.
“Well, speak of the damn devil,” Shaunee said in her best mean-girl voice.
“Literally,” Erin added.
“Wrong table,” Shaunee said. “Your minions are all over there and there.” She waved her hand around the room at the other girls who had stopped eating and were staring behind me, too. “Not over here.”
I swiveled around in my chair to look up at Stark. Our eyes met. I’m sure mine were wide and startled. His were deep and warm, and I could almost hear the question he was asking with them.
Ignoring everyone else in the room, I said, “Hi, Stark.” I was careful not to make my voice too friendly or icy. I just said hi to him like I would any other kid.
“You look better than the last time I saw you,” he said.
I could feel my cheeks getting warm. The last time he’d seen me we’d been in bed together. While I was still staring into his eyes and trying to figure out what the hell I could say to him in front of everyone, Erin spoke up.
“Big surprise that she looks better than when you were chomping on Becca last night.”
“Yeah, watching that would be enough to make anyone look a little peaked.”
Stark broke his gaze from mine. I saw his eyes flash a dangerous scarlet as he rounded on the Twins. “I’m talking to Zoey, not either of you. So butt the fuck out.”
There was something about his voice that was deeply frightening. He didn’t yell. His expression hardly changed. Instead, he radiated a terrible sense of coiled snake, pissed and deadly and on the brink of striking. I looked more closely at him and saw a ripple in the air around him, like heat waves lifting from a tin roof in summer. I don’t know if the Twins saw it, too, but they definitely sensed something. Both of them paled, but I hardly spared a glance for them. It was Stark I was keyed on because I knew I was glimpsing the monster he’d talked about. Seeing the almost instantaneous change that came over him, I was reminded of Stevie Rae—before she’d found her humanity again.
Was that why I cared about Stark so much? Because I’d seen Stevie Rae struggle with the same dark impulses and win over them, and I wanted to believe he could win, too?
Well, dealing with Stevie Rae had taught me one thing for sure, and that was that a fledgling in this position could be a very dangerous creature.
Keeping my voice completely calm, I said, “What was it you wanted to say to me, Stark?”
I saw the struggle on his face as the kid I knew fought with the monster who clearly wanted to leap across the table and eat the Twins. Finally he shifted his gaze back to me. His eyes still glowed slightly red when he said, “I didn’t really have anything to say. I just found this. It’s yours, isn’t it?” He lifted his hand and, clenched in it, was my purse.
I looked from it to him, and then back at the purse again. I remembered what he’d said about being scared of purses like I’m scared of spiders. When I looked into his eyes again, I was smiling.
“Thanks, it is mine.” I took it from him, and as our hands brushed I said, “A guy once told me that girls’ purses reminded him of spiders.”
The red left his eyes like he’d thrown a switch. The terrible aura that had surrounded him was gone. One of his fingers wrapped around mine and held for just an instant. Then he let loose the purse and my hand.
“Spiders? Are you sure you heard him right?”
“I’m sure. Thanks again for finding this.”
He shrugged, turned, and slouched out of the room.
As soon as he was gone, all the fledglings except the Twins and me started whispering excitedly about how hot Stark is. I ate my cereal in silence.
“Okay, he’s beyond creepy,” Shaunee said.
“Was that what Stevie Rae was like before she Changed?” Erin asked.
I nodded. “Yeah, basically.” I lowered my voice and added, “Did you guys notice anything in the air around him? Like a weird rippling or an extra-dark shadow?”
“No, I was too busy thinking he was going to eat me to look around him,” Erin said.
“Ditto,” said Shaunee. “So is that why he doesn’t freak you out, because he’s like Stevie Rae before she Changed?”
I lifted one of my shoulders and used the excuse of a mouth full of Count Chocula to not say much.
“Hey, seriously, I know what Kramisha’s poem said and all,” Erin said. “But you gotta watch yourself around him. He’s totally bad news.”
“Plus, the poem might not have been about him,” Shaunee said.
“Guys, do we really have to talk about this right now?” I said after swallowing.
“Nope, he has zero importance to us,” Shaunee said quickly.
“Ditto,” Erin said; then she added, “You gonna check to be sure he didn’t steal your stuff?”
“Yeah, whatever.” I unsnapped my purse and looked into it, pawing around a little and taking an out-loud inventory. “Cell phone…lip gloss…cool sunglasses…money holder thing with, yep, all my money and my driver’s license in it…and—” I broke off abruptly when I found the little note that had an arrow broken in half drawn on it. Below the arrow were the words: Thanks for last night.
“What? Did you find something he ripped off?” Erin asked, trying to peer across the table and into my purse.
I snapped it shut. “No, just nasty used Kleenex. I wish he had ripped that off.”
“Well, I still say he’s an asshole,” Erin grumbled.
I nodded and made little agreeing sounds as I finished my cereal and tried not to think about Stark’s warm hand stroking my hair.
My classes, as my Spanish teacher, Professor Garmy, would had said, had she not turned into a good little pod professor, were no bueno para me. And the worst part was, if you took away the disgusting Raven Mockers, who seemed to be everywhere, I could have almost convinced myself that everything was normal. But almost can be a really big word.
It didn’t help that my schedule had been changed around at semester, so that I was in classes with all different kids, none of them being Damien and the Twins. Aphrodite was nowhere to be seen, making me worry on and off about whether she and Darius were being eaten by Raven Mockers. Of course, knowing Aphrodite, they were still in her room playing doctor.