She gave him a self-conscious, questioning look. "I didn't just creep you out, did I?"
Bron shook his head. "No, that was definitely not ... too creepy." To be honest, he wanted more, and he felt guilty for wanting it.
"Good," Galadriel said. "Thank you. Now, as I said, I want a do over. I want you to know that I'm not the same person you met on Sunday."
"I can see the difference already."
She smiled confidently, reached her hand out to shake. "I'm Galadriel Mercer. My parents named me after a stupid elf princess from a book. In the past, I've always pretended to be embarrassed by the name, but to tell the truth, I think it's kind of cool. You know what my middle name is? Eowyn."
Bron laughed. "Man, they really hammered you."
Galadriel sat back in her seat, wiggled to get comfortable as Bron turned on the ignition. "To tell the truth," she said, "I like my middle name even better."
She fell quiet as he drove, and Bron began to wonder about what she'd said. He had accidentally taken her hope, and she had rationalized it. She thought she had felt depressed by his rejection. And when he gave her more hope, once again she had invented an explanation for the change that took place in her.
He wondered if that was the way that people always worked. Do they invent reasons for how they feel, getting the reasons wrong?
He remembered seeing a clip in school about a woman in Africa named Umandu who was dying from AIDS. She had blamed a woman in the village for her problems. After all, the woman was a witch, and had obviously cast a spell.
So as a dying act, Umandu had gone to the witch's home and chopped off her arms with a machete, leaving her to bleed out.
Though Bron lived in one of the world's most modern and sophisticated countries, Galadriel was still showing symptoms of "magical thinking."
Am I any different? he wondered. Yesterday I played the guitar better than I would ever have imagined possible, and Olivia assured me that I'd improve vastly this coming week.
It almost felt like magic. Yet there had to be a scientific explanation for what Olivia had done to him.
He knew that memory flows through the brain with electrical impulses, but there was a chemical component to memory, too, one that was triggered by the electrical impulses. Was it possible that all Olivia was doing was manipulating electrical fields, so that information somehow crossed the barrier from one body to another?
Yet I feel as if I have been touched by the gods.
He thought of how Galadriel expressed her own feelings about what he'd done.
Drive, passion, hope. Whatever you called that quality that he could steal from others, he had given Galadriel a great deal of it.
Was that the difference in her: hope? Could a little extra hope really change how a person acted, turn them from being unlovable to ... someone he cared for?
He'd never really thought about it much, the value of hope, but he had to admit, he was starting to care for Galadriel.
Chapter 23
Betrayals
"It is not the giant pine huddled in the midst of the forest, but the tree that must stand alone in the storm that grows the strongest."
Whitney woke late on Wednesday morning. The auditions the previous night had taken their toll, but her worries about Bron took a greater toll. Seeing Mrs. Hernandez run out of the school like that, the alarm on her face, had left Whitney a bit frazzled.
If Bron had been arrested, Whitney's first impulse was to blame Justin. Yet in the clear light of day, that didn't seem reasonable. Maybe Justin might plant drugs in someone's car, but he wouldn't have planted a body, would he?
Which left Whitney with a new worry: who was Bron Jones, anyway? Other than the fact that he played the guitar like an angel and he looked really hot, she didn't know much about him.
Maybe she'd been fooled, the way she'd been fooled when she began dating Justin as a freshman. She was still trying to disentangle herself from that relationship.
Then she had to wonder, Do Bron and I have a relationship at all? He was supposed to call me last night. Why didn't he call?
Whitney got up and ran down to the Bear Paw Cafe, where her mother worked as a waitress, and asked for a half-order of the cherries jubilee crepes, along with an egg for a little protein. The cherries jubilee crepes breakfast wasn't the healthiest thing she could eat, she knew, but they were sooo good!
At the other tables, people were talking about a big shoot out. A bunch of policemen had been killed last night, down at the police station. Whitney called her mom over.
Whitney's mom was pretty still, petite with red hair and smiling eyes. One look at her, and you could guess that she'd once been an actress. Her mom said that her looks were her only asset. It helped with the tips.
As her mom refreshed Whitneys water glass, Whitney asked, "So what is this about a shooting?"
"Oh, yeah," her mom said. "Fourteen officers were killed late last night. More like assassinated, from what we hear—necks broken, single shots to the heart. Some of the lucky ones were just knocked unconscious, probably with some kind of drug. They can't remember a thing."
"That's crazy!" Whitney said.
"Justin's dad was there," her mom said. "He's one of the lucky ones that got knocked out." Whitney remembered the phone call last night, the caller ID from Officer Walton, and wondered if Bron had gotten tangled up in something big.
"If you ask me," her mom said, "this sounds like some kind of attack from the CIA or something. The killers were all professionals...."
She scurried off to take care of another customer.
Whitney fretted all through breakfast. Maybe Bron hadn't called because he'd been arrested. Maybe he'd seen the shootout.
A wild thought made her wonder if he could have even been involved in the shootout.
That's crazy, Whitney decided. Maybe he doesn't really care that much about me. Maybe I was being premature when I kissed him yesterday. Some boys like to just kiss and grope, after all, and it doesn't matter much who they do it with.
An image flashed in her mind—Justin trying to put his hand up under her blouse, his face flushing with rage as she pushed him away.
She shook her head, trying to clear it of unpleasant memories.
As Whitney dove into breakfast, her phone vibrated. She answered, saw a picture of Bron out in front of the school, smiling. A text message below asked, "Can I pick you up?"
She suddenly felt so happy, tears filled her eyes. Bron hadn't been arrested. He couldn't have, could he? In the picture he was just standing there, smiling, after all.
She texted her address, and asked "Fifteen minutes?"
He texted back. "CU."
She smiled, bolted down the best breakfast ever, and ran back to her house, and took a look at it from the outside. She lived in a trailer park, in the poorest part of town. The area was so trashy, most people didn't even know it existed, tucked up as it was behind a few businesses. There were only eight trailers in the park, and each looked crummier than the last.
This was the acid test, Whitney knew. If Bron could see her house and get over it, accept her for what she was, then maybe their relationship could go somewhere.
She stood in the front yard—a patch of dry cheat grass and milkweeds, and just waited, head hanging. There were cigarette butts on the ground. The neighbor guy had been out here smoking again. Her mom's trailer wasn't much, two small bedrooms surrounded by rusting aluminum, but it kept them warm in the winter. Not that it ever got cold in Saint George anyway.