I finished gasping for air and stared at the teacher, who folded down like a piece of wet laundry let loose from the line. She thudded to her knees, and her face turned a weird plummy color. The bugging of her eyes began to seem natural and inevitable, but a faint alarm sounded in the back of my head. Other kids were screaming now too.
My gaze snapped away to the whiteboard. It was chattering madly against the wall, held on only by brackets. The instant I looked at it, there was a hollow cracking sound, and it fell, slamming onto the floor and actually breaking, a gigantic rip zigzagging horizontally across it.
A sensation like steam escaping through a valve slid through me, a sense of exquisite release.
Bletchley gasped and fell on her side, but regular color started to return to her face. She was breathing now. Someone retched in the back row, and my head snapped aside as if I’d been slapped, my cheek stinging. The air was thick with crawling electricity, suddenly hot as summer and humid like a thunderstorm was approaching.
Graves sat utterly still in the middle of kids who were getting up out of their chairs or screaming. His eyes were green flame, and his earring winked, a single silver star. His mouth was slightly open, as if he’d just had a hell of a good idea and was giving it such deep consideration the rest of his face had declared a vacation.
I turned around, my legs shaking like I’d just finished a hard five-mile run, and made it to the door. A new noise cut through the bedlam—the chimes for class ending, ringing in the middle of the hour. Now that was weird.
I let out a jagged sound that might have been a laugh, and fled.
I was four blocks away and still moving at a pretty good clip when his hand tangled in my coat, getting a good handful of my hair too, and he yanked me backward. I’d’ve gone down in a heap if he hadn’t shoved me upright, but as it was I overcorrected and we both fell over into a small mountain of dirty scudge-snow shoved aside from the street. I wasn’t wearing my gloves or a scarf. Snow burned my hands as I tried to struggle to my feet. My bag got tangled up, and Graves cussed me a blue streak, finishing up with, “—the hell did you do that for?”
“Boy,” he continued, bouncing up off the frozen-solid drift like he was one of those weighted-at-the-bottom dolls, “you sure know how to throw a party. I’ve been bitten, beat up, tied to a bed, James Bonded out, and now you finish off by choking a goddamn teacher!”
I didn’t try to say I hadn’t been touching her. There was no point. I’d been ill-wishing her—hexing, Gran called it, and to those with the touch it wasn’t small potatoes. I was pretty good at untangling hexes and curses, but not so good at throwing them at people, mostly because Gran wouldn’t hear of it. Cain’t hex, cain’t heal, she would always mutter, especially when the men from the county were out assessing property tax. But hexin’s a strong medicine, Dru. You mind me now.
To Gran, “strong medicine” could be good or bad, just like the laxatives she was forever talking about. Good for makin’ the mail move smooth, but too much and you shit yer brains out. Mind me now, Dru.
I’d once set out to ask her how exactly such an operation as the moving of the brain out through the digestive system was accomplished, but I’d lost my nerve.
Graves reached down, grabbed the front of my coat, and yanked hard enough to rip fabric, succeeding in hauling me to my feet again. “You’d better tell me what’s going on. Or I swear to God, I’ll—” He peered down at me. “Jesus Christ. You’re leaking.”
If by “leaking” he meant “sobbing like a girl,” I guess so. I wiped at my nose with my sleeve, snorted out a bray of a laugh, and went back to sobbing. Tears slicked my face, and I shoved him away. “Fuck off! I don’t need you complicating things! I’m dead, goddammit! Don’t you get it? I’m fucking dead!”
He shook dirty snow out of his hair. “You’re not dead. You’re too goddamn annoying to be dead. Now come on. They called 911 for Bletch—I don’t think you want to be here when that starts happening.”
Jesus, why won’t you just leave me alone? I was about to yell again, but sirens started in the distance. It was like a slap of cold water across the face, and I realized I was indeed crying completely and messily, and I was covered in dirty snow, I was pretty sure my socks didn’t match, I was a song of different aches and pains, and I hadn’t washed my hair in two days. I felt greasy and cruddy, my back felt like it was on fire, and the heavy weight in my bag was definitely not my smartest move.
I was being utterly idiotic. The realization woke me up out of whatever stupor I’d been wandering in for days now.
I hitched in a shuddering breath, trying to get some kind of calm back, failed miserably, and didn’t protest when Graves grabbed my arm and started off down the sidewalk.
“Why can’t I have a normal girlfriend?” he asked the air over his head. “I finally meet someone I like and she turns out to be crazy. Oh, well.”
“Girlfriend?” I half-choked, almost spraying snot out of my nose. Good one, Dru. You didn’t brush your teeth today, either. Sloppy, very sloppy. I was going to break out in a huge way after all this. It was going to be Zit City on the Anderson face. But right now my cheeks were so flaming hot it didn’t matter.
He gave me a sideways glance, and I really saw the guy he was going to be in a few years lurking under his baby face and the wild hair. His cheekbones were going to come out and he was going to be one of those pretty half-Asians. He already had good skin, even if it was reddened by the cold. “Well, jeez, you know.”
Was he blushing? So was I, if the lava flow covering my face and spilling down my throat was any indication. He kept glancing at me, and I couldn’t look away.
For Christ’s sake. The lunacy just would not end.
I wiped at my nose again, wished for a Kleenex. “I don’t—” I began. I don’t date. I don’t have time, even if you are one of the better kids I’ve met. And—
He shrugged, his cheeks going a deeper tomato red that had nothing to do with the snow. The flush spread down his neck, even. We were about even in that department. “It was a joke, Dru. God. Just relax, will you? Come on.” He kept dragging me. Admittedly, I didn’t put up much of a fight. But still . . . “A whole day at school ruined. You’re gonna wreck my GPA.”
“I thought you were going to take your GED anyway.” My lips were numb. My hands were too; I stuffed them in my coat pockets. The sirens whooped and brayed, getting closer.
“I want to get into a college so I don’t have to be poor. GPA still matters,” he informed me in the tone reserved for gormless idiots. “But hey, I’ve been good all year. Might as well take a couple days off. Now, you wanna tell me what’s going on? I’ve been thinking you probably don’t want some stupid kid messing up whatever you’ve got going, but I told you, I’m in it now. I might as well know what I’m facing, right?”
I looked down at the sidewalk. My face was still sweat-hot, prickling in the cold. Feet had worn some of the snow down; deicer, rock salt, and sand had done the rest. Ice rimed the concrete, but it was pretty passable, all things considered. It was a nice clear day, clouds lowering around the rim of the horizon but not closing the lens of the sky just yet. The only problem was the cold, knifing straight through every article of clothing.