Or was it eight?
No! Eight was the last number!
She started over again, but could sense that whoever was behind her had moved closer, and now the hairs on the back of her neck were standing up.
What did he want?
He was very close to her now. So close she could hear him breathing, almost feel his breath on the back of her neck.
He was going to touch her!
Her skin crawled. At any moment she would feel his fingers on her. Unable to stand it any longer, she whirled around to confront the person behind her. "What do you-" she began, and abruptly stopped. Jared! It was just Jared! "My God," she breathed, sagging against her locker. "You scared me! How come you didn't say anything?"
His eyes darted in one direction and then the other. Was he looking for someone? Kim scanned the corridor, seeing several faces she recognized, even some she could put names to. But who would Jared be worried about? "Who are you looking for?" she asked.
He frowned. "No one. But I think some of the nuns are looking for me," he said, his voice barely audible.
Kim stared at her brother. First he'd walked out without eating breakfast, not even waiting for her. Then she'd hardly seen him all day. She'd looked for him at lunchtime, but he hadn't been in the cafeteria, and so finally she sat with a girl named Sandy Engstrom and some of her friends. But she'd spent most of the hour keeping an eye out for Jared, and hadn't been able to concentrate on anything they were saying. "Why would they be looking for you?" she asked now. "Did you do something wrong?"
Jared shook his head. "They just don't like me."
Kim rolled her eyes impatiently. "What do you mean, they don't like you? They act like they don't like anyone."
Jared's expression hardened. "I'm telling you, they don't like me! All day, they've been watching me."
"Watching you?" Kim echoed. Why would the nuns be watching him? But then she thought she knew-he was feeling the same thing she was, that everything was going to be harder here. For some reason he was taking it personally. "It doesn't have anything to do with you," she protested. "It's just different here, that's all." She turned back to her locker, her fingers once again working at the combination, and finally the lock snapped open. "I've been feeling like some kind of retard all day, but it doesn't have anything to do with the sisters. It's just-"
But Jared wasn't listening to her anymore.
In fact, he wasn't even behind her. As she closed her locker, she saw him disappearing down the stairs at the end of the hall. She stared after him.
What was going on? Why was he acting so strange today?
But it wasn't just that he was acting strange. It was something else-something more.
It was the Twin Thing. She remembered noticing it this morning, when she felt the odd sensation of being alone, as if the mental connection she and Jared had always shared had suddenly been severed. At first she'd attributed it to Jared's moodiness, and was certain that by the time she got to school, their link would be mended. But it hadn't been, and all day she'd felt an unfamiliar loneliness, which she'd never experienced before.
Just now, when he was standing right behind her-less than a foot away-she'd had no idea it was him. That had never happened before. All her life, she'd always known when Jared was nearby, always known when he came into a room she was in. When they were really little, they'd even made a game of it, trying to fool each other, to sneak up on one another, each hoping to catch the other off guard. But neither of them had succeeded.
Until today.
And then she understood why Jared was feeling so strange. The same thing had happened to him! Of course! That had to be it. She hurried after her brother, threading her way through the crowd of students that milled in the hallway, then skipping down the stairs two at a time. Bursting out the front door, she looked around for Jared and spotted him half a block away, talking to Luke Roberts. She hurried toward them, calling out his name. But as she approached, both boys went silent, and when Jared looked at her, she had the impression that he wasn't glad to see her. His words confirmed it: "Can't you just leave me alone?"
Kim stopped short. "I-I just-" She floundered, unable to find the words she was looking for. Jared continued to stare at her, and now, in sunlight that seemed even brighter than normal in the wake of the storm that had passed through that morning, she saw that something in his eyes was different. Where before she'd always felt that she could see right into her brother through his eyes, now she sensed a curtain between them, as if there was something he didn't want her to know.
Something he was hiding from her.
Muffin! That must be it-he must have found out what happened to her cat, and didn't want to tell her. Which meant… Kim's heart sank when it occurred to her why Jared wouldn't tell her if he'd found her pet. "It's Muffin, isn't it?" she asked. Jared's face remained impassive. "You found her, didn't you?" She thought she saw something flicker in his eyes, but it was gone so fast she wasn't sure she'd seen it at all. And once again the Twin Thing was telling her nothing. But somehow, even though Jared had betrayed nothing, she was certain she was right.
Muffin wasn't coming home. She felt her eyes sting with tears, but managed to hold them back. "I-I just thought we could walk home together," she finally stammered, for the first time in her life feeling unwilling to share her emotions with her brother. Before he spoke, she knew what he was going to say, and this time it didn't have anything to do with the Twin Thing, or with Muffin. This time she could read it in the expression on his face.
"I'm gonna hang with Luke for a while," he told her. "You go ahead."
Suddenly all the uneasiness, all the worry Kim had been feeling, coalesced into something else.
Anger.
If that was the way he felt-if he just wanted to cut her off-fine!
Without another word, she turned and walked quickly away, her head high, her back straight, determined that Jared wouldn't see the tears that glistened in her eyes.
When his sister was gone, Jared turned back to Luke Roberts. "Well, what about it?" he asked. "If I show you where the cabin is, will you tell me who lives in it?"
Luke uneasily shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "How come you want to know?" he hedged. "When'd you see this place?"
Jared's voice hardened. "Someone killed my sister's cat," he told Luke. "He nailed its skin to the back wall of our carriage house." Luke's eyes narrowed. "My dog tracked him back to a cabin, but there were a couple of hounds guarding it."
"Maybe you oughta just forget about it," Luke suggested. "Can't your sister just get another cat?"
Jared's gaze fixed steadily on Luke. "You chicken?" he asked, his voice low, his eyes boring into Luke's. The other boy's jaw tightened and his right hand clenched into a fist. But Jared held his gaze steady on Luke, and finally the clenched fist relaxed.
"Okay," Luke said. "Let's go."
Kim was so totally preoccupied with the confrontation she'd just had with Jared that she barely noticed the pungent scent of smoke in the air. But when she turned the corner, she saw it-a great cloud of smoke was billowing up from-
The house!
Her heart pounding, she broke into a run, then slowed as she realized it wasn't the house that was on fire at all. There was a huge bonfire burning behind the house, a fire that was sending up clouds of steam and smoke so large they all but hid the building from her view. As she approached, her father came around the side of the house, into her line of sight. He was stripped to the waist, his skin glistening with sweat, as he pulled kudzu off the magnolia tree. As she came into the yard, he hurled a great armful of the tangled vines onto the fire. The flames leaped upon the leafy offering like a voracious beast, spitting new plumes of smoke and steam into the sky and filling the afternoon with hissing and crackling as it devoured the tangled green mass. Kim stopped and hung back, staying well away from the ravening flames. Even when the fire began to die back, she still watched the scene warily.