Chapter 2
Oh, my God, I think. Way to go, Zip—he’s dead. You killed the new kid.
But how? Did I literally bore him to death?
“Um…Mrs. Harvey?”
Mrs. Harvey’s standing over a pair of my classmates in the center of the room, and, after hearing my voice, she turns around, instantly springing to my side upon seeing Kieran slumped forward on my desk.
“Okay. Okay,” she starts, sounding every bit as rattled as I feel. A slow tidal wave of confusion spreads throughout the classroom, and students start to gather around for a better view of what’s going on. Before I’m completely surrounded, Kayla barrels her way to Kieran’s side.
“We need to get him to the nurse,” Mrs. Harvey announces, shooting Kayla a look that seems to ask Right? We need to get him to the nurse, right?
Kayla bobs her head and glances at our classmates standing around him. “Yeah. Um…we’ll need some people to kind of, like, carry him.”
Doug Callahan and Cody Hull, both defensive linemen for the football team and the two biggest guys in the room by far, step forward to offer their services. Cody squats next to Kieran and tells Doug “Yo, man—get his other arm,” as he reaches out to Kieran’s right side. Kayla and I both open our mouths at the same time, but Cody has the pleasure of experiencing the surprise I had a few minutes ago before either of us can warn him.
“Oh, my God.” Cody bounces back up to his full height as if touching Kieran gave him an electrical shock. “Dude’s totally stiff.”
“Yeah. I think you’re going to have to lift him out of the chair like he is. So maybe one of you can reach under his arms and the other one can lift at his knees,” Kayla suggests in a whispery voice with all the emotion of someone instructing furniture movers on the best way to carry a coffee table. Cody grabs Kieran by his armpits, while Doug bends and grasps him near his ankles and the two of them lift his body as if he’s frozen in place, which I guess he basically is. Kayla sprints to the front of the room, and Cody and Doug dodge desks to haul their cargo out into the hallway with Kayla following. Those of us who remain in the classroom stand in silence, exchanging wide-eyed Okay—what the hell? glances.
“Well,” Mrs. Harvey breathes. “Let’s get this room back together, okay? We’ll share what some of you have written while we still have time left.”
Sure. Okay. Because whatever happened with Kieran totally didn’t happen and this is just another boring day in Advanced Junior English.
My classmates and I robotically arrange the desks back into their neat rows and Mrs. Harvey starts calling on pairs to share, but thankfully doesn’t call on me. Of course, I’m no longer part of a pair, or maybe she’s ignoring me, the Human Reminder that one of her students just got himself carted off to the nurse for reasons unknown. Either way, I’m more than happy to be left alone to concentrate on wondering what the hell went wrong with the New Guy.
Did I do something? Is he sick? I examine the fingertips of my right hand, rubbing my thumb across the skin near my fingernails. Did he infect me with some virus? Am I going to pass out without warning, too?
“Next two chapters for tomorrow,” Mrs. Harvey sings after the bell sounds, pulling me back out of my head. I drag myself to the hall, the noisy chaos between class periods making everything seem normal again. But as I raise my hand to my locker handle, I discover I’m shaking, which isn’t normal at all.
After steadying myself and grabbing some books, I stumble downstairs to the cafeteria for study hall, the recalled image of Cody and Doug lifting Kieran as if they were moving a statue clouding my vision. When I blink back to reality, I catch the few people who have already arrived to study hall eyeing me with a strange mix of fear and pity, leaving me feeling like a girl in a horror film who has no idea some guy with an axe is coming up behind her. Part of me can’t believe people know already, but most of me realizes that based on the size of our school, news of my lead role in the Kieran Lanier Tragedy could already be Titusville’s Big Freaking Deal for today.
No one speaks to me, probably afraid that doing so will cause them to freeze in place and have to be carried off to the nurse. I slink away to a corner table by the windows, hoping to bury myself in some trigonometry review for the next forty minutes. With seconds to spare before the bell, someone slides into the seat next to me so hard that she crashes into my shoulder, and I raise my head to meet Cassie’s smiling face.
“Heard you broke the new guy. No one had even gotten a chance to play with him yet.”
I’m apparently going to be famous for The Kieran Incident until the next Big Freaking Deal happens, so I surrender and go along with the joke. “Real shame, too.” I smirk at her. “He seemed cool. This is why I can’t have nice toys, I guess.”
“No kidding. But, seriously—I ran into Cody on the way in here and he said the guy kind of passed out or something. When did you develop so much power over guys?”
“I haven’t. I’m pretty sure I had nothing to do with it. One minute he’s normal and the next he’s out cold and all stiff, like he’d been dead for hours.”
“So if he wasn’t overcome by your stunning beauty, then what do you think his deal is?” Cassie asks as I snort at her gross overestimation of my looks.
“Don’t know, but something’s definitely wrong with him.” My mouth curls into a sarcastic grin. “So he’s a hot guy with issues—totally your type.”
“Not if he’s going to pass out on me all the time.” Cassie twirls a brunette lock from her ponytail around her finger. “You can keep him.”
“Thanks. You’re a real friend.”
“No problem. And he’s your next door neighbor, anyway, so I think you should go for it…”
My head jerks back involuntarily. “What do you mean, he’s my next door neighbor?”
Cassie sighs like she always does when I ask her about something she assumes is common knowledge. “His family bought the McCaffery place. You didn’t know?”
My mom and I live in a small house my grandfather built on his land, land which used to be part of the McCaffery farm. Erwin McCaffery sold his farmhouse and a portion of his property to my grandfather about thirty years ago so he could build a bigger house for his growing family on the four acres he had left. Mr. McCaffery died last year, but rather than move his own family out from town, his oldest son Jimmy put the house up for sale and let the fields go fallow. I saw moving vans pull up to the McCaffery place last week, but I just assumed Jimmy had given up trying to sell and decided to move in.
“Marcy mentioned it before you got here this morning. I guess their dad’s going to run the counseling center at Sumner College,” Cassie says, referring to the liberal arts college located in its namesake town about forty-five minutes away. Sumner has a cute downtown with bars, antique stores, and coffee shops, as well as expensive new houses and proximity to a mall—basically, everything Titusville doesn’t have and probably never will.
“So, since he’s conveniently located and everything,” she continues, flashing a grin drenched with evil, “maybe you should think about hooking up with him. It’d give you something to do at night besides homework.”
I groan, sensing another Cassie Newbaum screed over my social life—or lack thereof—coming on.
“I don’t get why you have to study all the time.” Cassie says study as if it’s some nasty rash she’s just discovered on her butt. “You’ve been number one in the class for, like, ever.”
“Which is because I study so much. See how that works?”
“Oh, my God—you’re such a geek. You know, you need some serious fun before you wake up and high school’s over. What’s the point of being valedictorian if you didn’t enjoy getting there?”
“I’m not a geek,” I insist through a breathy laugh. “Making the grades I need to go to a good college and blow off this stupid town doesn’t make me a geek. And not wanting to drink beer in somebody’s basement every weekend while some loser I’ve known since we wer
e in diapers tries to paw me because he doesn’t have anything better to do doesn’t make me a geek, either, contrary to popular opinion.”
“Whatever,” Cassie says, shaking her head. “It’s not my fault all there is to do in this town is hook up, get drunk, and do meth. And I don’t do meth, so…”
With a heavy sigh, I turn back to my trig textbook. Cassie pulls her Intermediate English textbook from her backpack and starts struggling through Romeo and Juliet, which I officially read in Freshman English and unofficially read when I was twelve. She rests her chin on her hands and sighs every few minutes, probably bored by the play and frustrated with the language, knowing her. Distracted from cosines and tangents thanks to Cassie’s drama queen act, Kieran takes over my thoughts again, the phantom sensation of his stony skin tingling on my fingertips.
Okay. That’s it. I have to find out what’s wrong with him.
I shove my textbook and notebook in my backpack and stand up. “What are you doing?” Cassie asks. “The period just started.”
I answer with “I’ll be back soon,” before I walk over two tables and plop down across from our study hall monitor, who—lucky for me, given what I’m about to ask—happens to be Mrs. Denton, head coach of the girls’ varsity basketball team.
“Coach.”
“What can I do for you?” she asks, taping a pile of papers with a red pen.
“I think I need to go to the nurse.”
“You okay?” Coach squints, wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepening as she concentrates on me. I’m guessing I look pretty healthy, but even the suggestion that I might be sick would be cause for concern given that we still have a few weeks left in the regular season. I open my mouth, not knowing exactly what to say, but Coach’s eyes spring back open to full size before I can babble out an explanation. “I heard what happened with the Lanier kid earlier. Is that what this is about?”
“Oh, my God. How does everyone know about that already?”
Coach smiles at my frustration and cocks her head to the side, some of the feathered strands of her white-blonde pageboy haircut sweeping across her forehead. “I take it you didn’t get the chance to learn much about him?”
“I talked to him for, like, five minutes before he went all horror movie creepy on me. So, no.”
She doesn’t respond, but instead pulls a square pad of paper from her messenger bag and starts scribbling. “Give this to the nurse when you get there,” she instructs me before tearing the paper off and folding it. I take the note from her and stand up as she says, “And don’t worry if you don’t make it back before the end of the period. You can go straight to your next class.”
“Thanks, Coach.”
I hitch my backpack up on my right shoulder and once I’ve rounded the corner from the cafeteria into the main hall, I unfold the paper:
Joyce,
Zara McKee was with Kieran Lanier this morning when he had his episode. She isn’t aware of his condition, but she’s very concerned. I think she would appreciate being able to speak with him briefly if you feel that’s appropriate. I’ve excused her from second-period study hall to come to your office.
Thanks,
Patty Denton
Seeing words like episode and condition don’t do much to calm my nerves or satisfy my curiosity. What’s wrong with this guy? Is he dying or something?
Strangely afraid for this person I just met, I pick up my pace toward the front desk in the main office, the first stop for anyone heading to visit the principal, the vice-principal, or—in my case—Nurse Foster.