"I am?" Even as I so coyly—teasingly—asked the question, I thought of my nickname,
"T". Maybe the girls were right. I couldn’t help the frown that accompanied the thought.
Setting me back on my feet, Drew just grinned mischievously and shrugged. "That’s what they say," he taunted as he turned and jogged back across the field to his own practice.
Turning back toward the bleachers, I wiped the frown from my forehead and forced my mind to return to the task at hand. "Alright, let’s get this toss down."
Grumbling and complaining, the girls reluctantly descended the stands. I watched in wonder as they dragged themselves to the field. It was probably a mystery to almost everyone how such a motley crew managed to make it so far in competitions. We didn’t look very dedicated or energetic.
As the last of the girls walked past me, heading back out onto the grass, I couldn’t stop my eyes from flickering back to the fence. I was curiously hungry for one more peak at the stranger. He was still standing there, too. He just stared at me, as motionless as a statue.
Though he was backlit by the setting sun, I could see his eyes clearly. They were a dark, rich brown that seemed almost black in his pale, pale face. The spark of interest shone in their depths, but beyond that, there was something else. Danger? Determination? Sadness? Fear?
Satisfaction? Was it him, or was I simply seeing a reflection of my own inner demons? After all, I’d always wanted but never found someone with whom I could share the real Ridley. Was I imagining that I saw such a person in the face of the stranger? I couldn’t be sure what it was, but something in those eyes felt strangely familiar.
The longer he held my eyes, the more I felt like he was touching me in some way, almost physically, tangibly. Much to my surprise, my belly did a little flip, excitement dancing along my nerve ends.
We watched each other for a second or two longer and then, dismissively, he turned and walked away.
********
Later that evening, Summer and I sat cross-legged on my bed, making flash cards for our Anatomy and Physiology test. We were both taking college preparatory classes and Mr.
Richardson, our A&P teacher, gave us only four grades in the whole year. We had two major tests, a mid-term exam and a final exam. If you bombed any of the four, you really didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of fully recovering your grade.
Summer was probably my best friend, though that didn’t mean as much as it used to.
Much as had happened with almost everyone else, I’d grown apart from her over the last three years. But still, she was the lesser of the evils as far as friends went. I mean, confiding in Trinity was completely out of the question. Having her as my best friend would be like keeping a pet barracuda in my bathtub.
"If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell?" Summer didn’t look up at me, just kept writing on the back of the card marked Alveoli.
"Of course."
"Trinity wants me to help her get revenge on Devon. Well, sort of."
Devon was Trinity’s ex. If she had anything close to a weakness, he’d be her Achilles heel.
I put down my marker. I could sense a storm on the horizon, a nasty plan birthed in the sick mind of Trinity and it deserved my full attention. They didn’t call her The Unholy Trinity behind her back for nothing.
"By doing what?"
"She wants me to get Devon to take me out and then post on Facebook that he’s really, really tiny so that no one else will want to go out with him."
"Ahh," I said, immediately understanding her end game in such a plot. "Then Trinity will be the only one gracious enough to date him despite the vicious rumors."
Summer shrugged. "I guess." She still hadn’t looked up to meet my eyes.
"Summer, you’re not considering this, are you?"
She shrugged again.
"But why? Why would you do that? To Devon or to yourself?"
She looked up at me, frowning. "Oh, I wouldn’t actually have sex with him. I’d just tell people that we did."
"But everyone would think that you just went out and slept with him. Do you think they won’t be calling you a slut by lunchtime if you do this?"
"You know how Trinity is. If I say no, it’s hard to tell what she’ll do to me."
I growled, sliding off the bed to pace the floor. Everyone was afraid of Trinity, afraid of what she would do if she was angered. Trinity was smart, though. She never pushed the wrong people. She always picked the weakest ones of the herd to do her dirty work. She would never ask me to do something like that. I might bite my tongue a lot, but she knew I wouldn’t go along with something so deplorable. It was times like this that made me wonder if Stanford was really worth it.
"Summer, you can’t do this."
"I have to," she said miserably.
I paced the floor, thinking. I stopped when a possible solution occurred to me.
"Devon’s a nice guy. Let me talk to him. If he refuses to take you out, problem solved, right?"
Summer’s eyes lit up and she clapped excitedly. Though this disaster was averted, I knew it was just a matter of time before Trinity thought of something else, some other despicable way to win Devon back.
I called Devon and, as I suspected, he was more than willing to go along with our counter-Trinity plan and keep it hush-hush.
********
The next morning, I decided to drive to school. There was an away game that night and I didn’t want to get stuck riding home with somebody else when the bus dropped us back off at school.
Since I could never count on one of my rogue parents to be a reliable back-up plan, I tried always to make other arrangements—me. As usual, I was my own plan B.
I pulled my old Civic into a parking spot and grabbed my duffel from the back seat. I had to hurry. I was running late.
I scurried into Home Room and scooted into my seat, dropping my bag quietly onto the floor. Mrs. Dingle was going over the local news, as she did every morning. She felt it was her duty to keep us informed of what was going on around us, as if we were all so oblivious we wouldn’t find out otherwise. But then I realized something. She was probably right. The only reason I knew what was going on was because I went to sleep with the television on. I couldn’t tolerate silence. Or, better yet, I couldn’t tolerate the places my mind went in the silence. Either way, I heard the news whether I wanted to or not.
The first tidbit she force-fed us was the increase in the number of animal deaths. Farm animals were being mauled and brutally killed all over the area. The Wildlife Officers had neither confirmed nor denied speculation that there might be a pack of wolves or even a mountain lion terrorizing livestock in the region. As an avid animal lover, topics like that disturbed me, even more than those involving the Slayer, which was what Mrs. Dingle moved on to next.
Southmoore was a thriving city that lay just north of our small South Carolina town, Harker. For that reason, citizens and reporters alike had all been closely following the killings there. As a community, we hadn’t been put on lockdown yet, but if things got much worse up north or, heaven forbid, moved down south to us, our freedoms would be quickly and severely curtailed.
As she droned on, I let my mind wander. For some reason, it meandered straight down a path that led to the guy I’d seen at the field the day before. I could picture his face with perfect clarity, as I’d done countless times since yesterday. There was just something about those eyes.
Just then, as if a light tap had sounded on the inside of my skull, I looked up. There, standing in front of the lockers outside my classroom, was the object of my ruminations. He had obviously been walking somewhere. He had stopped, mid-stride, right in front of my Home Room door. He just stood there, staring at me with those hauntingly dark pools of chocolate.
I was immediately captivated. Looking into his eyes was like standing at the edge of a deep pond and gazing down into swirling, hypnotic waters, becoming mesmerized by them, trapped in them. I felt as if I couldn??
?t look away, not even if I had wanted to.
I have no idea how long we stared at each other that way, but when the bell rang, I jumped, blinking and looking around guiltily. When I looked back out into the hall, I was deflated to see only a row of gray lockers. There was no intriguing stranger standing in front of them anymore. He was gone.
I hopped up out of my desk and hurried to the hall, hoping to catch another glimpse of him, but I wasn’t fast enough. Floods of bustling bodies were already pouring out of all the classrooms. I scanned the sea of faces, but among them, I didn’t see the pale face for which I was searching.
Inordinately disappointed, I slowly made my way down the hall to my locker. I couldn’t help but ask myself why I was so interested in him, why it mattered where he went, why I cared.
With no answers rising to the surface, I put my duffel away and put books into my messenger bag to carry to class. I tried to convince myself that it was just curiosity that made him so noteworthy—normal, healthy curiosity—but in the back of my mind, I kept seeing his eyes. There was just something about those eyes.
The rest of the morning was nothing short of excruciating. The minutes of each class seemed to tick by at a snail’s pace. I caught myself watching the hallways more than the teacher and, between classes, watching every face that I passed, looking for a pair of compelling black-brown eyes. I never did find them, though, and the whole hide-and-seek thing just left me frustrated to the point of a headache.
Lunch was something of a reprieve, thank goodness, but only because I was surrounded by people who required an incredible amount of focus and attentiveness from everyone else around them. They were like solar panels and attention was like the sun. They absorbed it, absorbed us, and trust me, it’s not easy being the sun.
At our table on the covered concrete patio just outside the cafeteria, Drew sat on one side of me and Summer sat on the other.
I saw Trinity lean around Summer to address me. "Are you and Drew going to Caster’s party this weekend?"
The way she was eyeing me said she’d had to repeat herself, something Trinity found intolerable. There were few things that got under her skin more quickly than being ignored. I didn’t do it on purpose, of course. I was just preoccupied. But I knew that in a thousand years, Trinity would never understand how anything could be more interesting than our group discussions at lunchtime. She didn’t ask what I was thinking about and I didn’t volunteer.
"Caster’s party," she snapped.
"Oh, sorry," I said.
Trinity always gave the final say on social events, like what the group was doing, when we were doing it and who we were doing it with. She was like the popularity godmother.
When she tapped her wand on a particular person or activity, it took on a life of its own. With her approval, the sky was the limit, a reputation could soar into the limelight. But with her disapproval, she could squash a person’s spirit under her heel like it was nothing more than a bothersome ant.
If I weren’t the captain of the cheer squad who happened to be dating the quarterback of the football team, she wouldn’t have given my input a second thought. But I was both of those coveted things, and it was my status—and my status alone— that prompted her to care what my plans were. Besides, she knew that my plans would likely include Drew, which in turn would likely include Devon.
One more year, one more year, one more year, I reminded myself, sick to death of all the high school games and drama.
"I don’t know," I answered, turning to Drew. "Drew?"
"What?" He hadn’t been paying us the least bit of attention.
"Caster’s party. Wanna go?"
"Maybe," he shrugged.
I turned back to Trinity. "Maybe."
Her expression showed frustration and I knew she was reaching her patience threshold.
"How am I supposed to make plans if you two won’t make up your mind?"
"Go if you want to go. We’re not stopping you," I reminded her casually.
It was like poking a bear and I knew it. I suppose it was my passive-aggressive way of lashing out. Whatever. It felt good.
Trinity growled in response. She didn’t need to say it, but we were both thinking to ourselves that that would never happen. She turned to pass what she’d learned down the lunch table and I could almost see the indecision spreading across faces like wildfire. No one’s plans would be concrete until Trinity gave the go-ahead that we were all going to Caster’s party.
I sighed and thought again how I couldn’t wait for high school to be over.
I didn’t let my exasperation show, however. I’d long since discovered how to live inside the shark tank without getting eaten or becoming a shark: never let ‘em see you sweat. Don’t show any emotion, no matter how many you’re feeling. It just reveals your weaknesses and, to them, weaknesses are like blood in the water.
I try never to let them see me get angry, upset, defensive, flustered, uncertain, anything.
I’m sure that, to them, I seem somewhat robotic, but it keeps me out of trouble and keeps them at arm’s length. And that’s how I survive.
Spearing a cucumber with my fork, I nibbled its crisp edges while I listened with half an ear to what was being said all around me.
Drew and Devon were talking to Josh about how to get more horsepower under the hood of the Mustang they were working on. Trinity was whispering to April and Aisha so quietly I couldn’t hear her, which invariably meant she was talking about me (Trinity was rarely ever so quiet). Summer was regaling Carly and Shana with her personal success stories of pairing ankle-high boots with a skirt. Chace and Minty were arguing over which freshman at the table next to ours had the nicer rack.
All their talk jumbled in my head as my mind strayed once more to a pair of the most intense eyes I’ve ever seen. I was both intrigued by my unusual reaction to him and aggravated by it. I mean, it’s not like he’s Damon Salvatore hot or Keith Stone smooth. But regardless, he’d certainly managed to work his way into my head with absolutely no effort on his part whatsoever.
What’s worse is that I have a boyfriend. I shouldn’t even be giving him a second glance, much less thinking about him so much, and yet I just couldn’t seem to escape those eyes.
Shaking off thoughts of him—again—I looked out across the campus. As if they were drawn by some invisible magnetic force of nature, my eyes collided with the very ones I was trying to forget.
There he was, sitting beneath a tree all the way on the other side of the green expanse of grass behind the school, and just like before, he was simply staring at me.
I shouldn’t say "simply." There was nothing simple about the shower of chills that rained down my back and arms. There was nothing simple about the flutter in my chest that made me feel short of breath.
Instantly, I forgot all the reasons I was avoiding him, all the reasons I was trying not to think about him. At that moment, I just wanted to hold his gaze as long as it would hold me back.
Penetrating, unwavering and extremely unsettling, his boldness was probably wildly inappropriate, but not in a stalker way. It was bold in a good way, in an exciting way. The way he looked at me, I felt like the only girl in the world.
He didn’t smile and he didn’t move a single muscle. He just stared at me, like he was seeing right into my soul. I sat perfectly still and let him.
"Ohmigod, Ridley! Could you be more obvious?" Trinity’s tone was a little louder and sharper than need be and it carried all the way down the table. I knew she was trying to get Drew’s attention.
I jerked my eyes away from the fathomless brown ones and turned a frown on Trinity.
"Obvious? About what?" I assumed my most casually confused expression.
It was important to remain calm and appear casual no matter how not casual I was feeling. I hid every iota of emotion behind a carefully schooled mask of confident nonchalance.
It was essential.
"Who’s that?" At Drew’s question, I felt like sneering. Her pl
an had worked perfectly.
"Who?" I looked up questioningly. I didn’t need to ask to whom he was referring; I knew, but I did so just to prove my point: that I had no idea who they were talking about.
"That guy over there," he said, tipping his head toward the stranger. "The one that’s about to get his teeth handed to him."
My eyes darted back to the mesmerizing ebony ones, but I looked quickly away before I fell into their depths again. Then, with a shrug that belied how jittery I was, I said, "I don’t know."
"Hey," Summer said, throwing her two cents in. "That’s the guy from yesterday, the one who was totally stalking you."
"No one’s stalking me, Summer," I snapped. The look of shock on every face in my line of sight had me instantly regretting my impulsive display of emotion. "You watch too much Gossip Girl," I added with a carefree laugh.
Faces relaxed somewhat, but I knew it wasn’t quite enough.
"So who else is going to Caster’s party?" I asked, knowing that was the only thing more interesting than me having a stalker. If I didn’t nip it in the bud, something like that would be fodder for the gossip mongers