“You forgot those. In the art tower yesterday,” he said, pointing at the sunglasses.
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.” So that’s why he followed me into the green house….
“Are you ready?” he asked, taking out a pen and paper. I did the same but wondered why we weren’t getting out our books.
“For what?” I asked.
“Frog day. We have to dissect a frog,” he said.
“Is it alive?” I asked with interest. There was a jolt of excitement in my chest. Would I have to kill the frog? Would I care?
“It’s like our first test or whatever. Do you even listen in class?”
Not really, I thought.
“It’s really bad luck to look into its eyes. So don’t,” Tony explained.
“What’s so bad about it?”
“My dad says killing a frog is like killing a soul. It’s just bad. But listen. More important business, Lenah. Way more important.” Tony turned to face me. I expected this to be it. The moment he would confront me about Justin Enos. Tony’s features were all business. “I need you to sit for me again today. My teacher wants me to get one more thing right in the portrait.”
“I have, um, an appointment,” I said, thinking of my small promise to myself the night before. “After class.”
“What do you have to do?” Tony asked. “Hang out in the greenhouse?”
“No. I’ll tell you later.”
“Secrets, Lenah. So many secrets.” Tony sighed. “Come by Hopper around dinner?”
“Sure,” I said. Just when I took out my lab book and pen, I felt a kiss on my cheek. I looked up. Justin towered over me. He looked good—too good. There were crinkles on the sides of his eyes.
“What up, Sasaki,” Justin said with a nod.
Tony nodded back once and flipped open his anatomy notebook.
I didn’t need ESP to tell his mood was icy.
“I have practice after class, but you’re coming to dinner with us tonight, right? I have to ask you something and I don’t want to forget,” Justin said as Ms. Tate walked into the room.
“Yeah,” I said without a thought.
“I thought you said you would help with the portrait?” Tony said, and I could see a rising shade of red creep up his neck.
“That’s right, I did,” I admitted before Justin could say anything. “You think we could do it tomorrow?” I asked Tony.
“Whatever,” Tony grumbled.
“Don’t forget, Lenah, dinner. I have to ask you something. It’s about Halloween weekend,” Justin said as he made his way up to toward his seat. Why did he always have to look so good?
“He probably just wants you to watch him play lacrosse,” Tony scoffed. The idea of watching Justin run up and down the field, cradling a lacrosse ball, sweating and jumping while I sat by and watched? In my fantasy, Justin was dripping with sweat, glistening from the sun. It seemed like a really great idea.
“You’re becoming one of them,” Tony added just as Ms. Tate started to unpack a cooler.
“Who?” I asked.
“One of those girls who follows Justin Enos around. An official member of the Three-Piece. Or is it something even more lame if you join, like, Foursome?”
“I’m not one of those girls.”
“I wasn’t the one bungee jumping with Justin Enos. You were. Why did you even make me come?”
“I thought—” I started to say, but Tony interrupted.
“Soon you’ll be sitting on the sidelines watching him play sports. You’ll be coordinating your outfits, melting your brain. Just wait and see.”
My mouth dropped from the surprise of the return of two old friends—pain and shame; they pooled in my stomach.
“I really don’t—” I started to say, but someone slid a metal tray onto the table with a dead frog on its back. Its skin was a bluish gray from being preserved in ice. It looked frozen.
“Concentrate, Lenah,” Ms. Tate said. “Your test begins now.” She turned away to deliver another frog to the table next to ours. I stared down at the tray. I wasn’t expecting it to look like that—I wasn’t expecting it at all. Its small belly was rounded, and its legs were spread wide.
Tony picked up a few pins and pierced the swollen frog’s toes to a piece of blue fabric beneath its tiny body. Doing this exposed the belly so we could cut it open. I gasped, and my body jerked in an odd kind of hiccup. How odd, I thought. This frog used to hop, it used to live. It had a life, yet here it was on the table. Dead and out of this world, yet somehow still in it.
I want to live, I thought. How many times had someone pleaded? How many times could I have let them go? My hands hung lamely by my sides. My pen fell out of my fingers, onto the table, and rolled onto the floor.
“Lenah?” Tony said.
I just stared at the frog’s cloudy, unmoving eyes. For this one unexplainable moment, I was this frog. I had been dead and lifeless for so long and here I was, enchanted and brought back to life.
“Did we not have moments of grace?” I whispered.
“What?” Tony asked.
I continued to stare at the frog’s lifeless body. My heart beat and my eyes blinked. The frog moved out of focus, and Tony’s face came to the forefront of my mind. I could taste food dribbling down my throat, see Tony digging into scoops of his ice cream, an orange flower on Justin’s tongue, the rain…the glorious rain.
“I want to live,” I said, refocusing on the frog.
I pulled out the pins, one by one, from the frog’s tiny, webbed feet. Then, I pushed back in my chair and cradled its cold body in my left palm. I approached the windows that lined the side of the anatomy classroom. I unclasped them and pushed out. As though holding shards of glass, I held its limp body, close to me, keeping my arm near my ribs.
I leaned out the window and reached down. Underneath a rosebush, a flower that symbolizes love, I lay the small frog on rose petals. I covered it with a few mounds of dirt, making sure its body was mixed with the earth and the rose petals. In Latin, I said, “Ignosce mihi…forgive me.”
I turned to face the class. Without a word, I gathered my books and bag and left.
Chapter Seventeen
I sat on the Madame Curie statue’s basin and looked out at Wickham campus, but my eyes quickly lost focus. Even though I was staring at thousands of blades of grass, in my mind I saw the rigid sculpting of Vicken’s biceps as he wielded his sword. I shook my head and looked back at the individual blades of grass fluttering in the wind. That soon lost my interest and another image from my past came to the forefront of my thoughts—Rhode’s eyes. He blinked so that his long lashes barely grazed the top of his cheeks. The image burned me and I gasped for air. I sighed, shook my head, and focused back on the campus. I could see the splits in the wood of the trees across the pathway. My breath felt heavy when I inhaled and then exhaled. Would I cry? I kept waiting for it to happen, but it hadn’t happened—not yet, anyway.
I tried to concentrate on anything that would have been difficult to see with the human eye. If I was still seeing with my vampire sight, maybe I hadn’t fully acclimated? For the first time, I wished it was gone.
I continued to watch the wind rustle the leaves. Students walked by, carrying books and backpacks. Teachers and groundskeepers passed me, too. I watched them all, anything and anyone to distract myself from the event that just happened in the anatomy classroom.
Then someone sat down on my right.
“You can rip a cat open with your bare hands, but you couldn’t cut the frog?” Justin asked gently.
“I couldn’t cut the frog,” I admitted. I turned my head to look at him. I kept my hands clasped between my knees.
He took my hand into his, and we sat in silence for a moment. Justin rubbed the top of my hand with his thumb. This sent a comfort through me. Justin had a way of making me feel as though everything, no matter what it was, would be all right. That anything could be fixed, even the ghosts of my past and all the ways I tried to escape my pain.<
br />
Justin, I could feel. I gripped tighter onto his hand—Justin, I could feel with my whole body.
We sat like that for a few moments and soon everyone in our anatomy class filed past. Tony included. He stopped next to the basin.
“Len—” Tony started to say. His eyes darted to Justin’s hand intertwined with mine. He looked forward, and embarrassment passed over his features. He looked down at us again and then stalked away toward Hopper.
“I have to go in a minute,” I said with a sigh and stood up. “I have an appointment.”
“For what?”
“Family obligations,” I explained, kind of nudging my feet into the dirt. I glanced back at Tony, but he was almost halfway across the meadow. “You said you wanted to ask me something?”
“Two weeks from now is Halloween,” Justin said. “It’s a really big deal in my family because there’s a football game at the local high school and my dad’s the coach. I mean, he’s a lawyer, but he’s a coach, too. This game is a huge deal to him. Anyway.” He sighed. “I’m going home for the game and I really want you to come.”
Parents. Justin’s parents. In my mind was a gold earring in a palm—in the rain. I tried to ignore the image in my head.
“Your house?” I asked, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “For Halloween?”
“Yeah, the thirty-first. It’s only an hour or so away.”
There was silence for a moment as Justin’s words flowed through my mind.
Yeah, the thirty-first.
I placed my palm on my head and ran it over my hair. Heat suddenly swirled in my cheeks and I found it very hard to breathe smoothly.
“So do you?” Justin asked. “Want to come?”
It’s October…, I thought.
My breath came through my nose in short wisps. My heart thumped so hard I felt it in my chest.
“Oh,” Justin grumbled, and then swallowed. “You don’t have to come.” Justin must have been reacting to my silence. There was a fade in his eyes. He was still sitting on the basin, even though I had stood up and slung my bag over my shoulder.
“No. I want to,” I said, though my voice was breathy. I started to back away from him down the path. “Look, I have to go. I’ll come by your room after my library shift,” I said. “Around six?”
“Lenah, wait!”
I turned from him and ran up the path toward Main Street.
The truth was that I wasn’t running away from Justin asking me to go to his parents’ house. I was running from the date, the ticking clock in my head that I had let fall silent. Justin’s invitation had set it back in motion because it was October and Nuit Rouge had begun.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so distracted—Nuit Rouge had started and I hadn’t even realized it! I walked slowly down Main Street, taking in the sites of the town I had now grown to love. I shoved my hands deep into my pockets as I passed by the marina and into the more residential part of Lovers Bay. It was surprisingly easy to let my guard down. Justin Enos, Tony, and all that Wickham offered distracted my thoughts every moment of every day. I knew that as the days of Nuit Rouge passed, I had to dive deeper into my human existence and leave the vampire world behind. Just as Rhode had said—my life depended on it.
I stepped through the cast-iron archway of the Lovers Bay cemetery. As I followed the signs to the main office, I knew in my gut that I was doing the right thing. Once I stepped inside, I noticed it was very…white. Floral paintings on the wall gave the room a light pink glow. A woman stood up from behind a white antique desk. She was young, early thirties, with a facial expression that set her mouth pointed down. “Can I help you?” she asked in a soothing tone.
“Yes, I would like to erect a tombstone,” I said. “In memoriam,” I added, suddenly remembering Rhode’s remains were hanging around my neck.
“Do you have a tombstone ready?”
“No,” I replied. “Not exactly.”
The woman opened a brochure that she slid out from a stack on the right side of her desk. “You can call this number here. They’re local monument dealers. They can help you design a tombstone.”
I took out an envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills. As Rhode said, I was to deal exclusively in cash. And let’s face it, I had more than enough. The woman’s eyes darted to the money and then to my face.
“How much is a plot, generally?” I asked.
The woman looked me up and down and then sighed. “How old are you?” she asked, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Sixteen,” I said.
“I really can’t do this without a parent’s consent,” she said with an edge of power in her voice. I hated humans like this.
“This tombstone is for my parents. Both of whom are dead. So if you want a couple thousand dollars for your cemetery, then you’ll allow me to put it up. If not, I’ll go somewhere else.”
“Oh,” was all she said with a bow of her head so I couldn’t see her embarrassed eyes. She pulled out a sheet of paper for the plot purchase. “My mistake.”
She charged me two thousand dollars so Rhode’s tombstone would rest under the branches of a sturdy oak tree. Even then, even while understanding the certainty of his death, I couldn’t fathom that Rhode had ever been weak enough to die from the sun.
That next week, Justin and I walked toward the lacrosse field on a Friday afternoon.
“I’m glad you’re coming home with me for Halloween,” he said, his hand wrapped in mine. Justin carried his lacrosse gear over his other shoulder. “You haven’t changed your mind in a week, right?”
“I’m excited to meet your family,” I said. Justin brought my hand up to his lips and kissed my knuckles.
Coming toward us, across the meadow, was Tracy and a group of commuter kids. Just as we passed her, one of them, a tall girl with black hair and dark-framed glasses, pretended to cough but said “bitch” under her breath. I ignored it. Tracy glanced back at us and she narrowed her eyes at me, tossing her hair over her shoulder.
The week after Justin asked me to go home to meet his family, I wrote a paper for anatomy class. I had to write about the entire dissection process of the frog. Ms. Tate said she understood what had happened in class (she would never understand, but I digress) and I was to write a paper instead. For a week straight, I only saw Tony during anatomy class. He wasn’t home when I knocked for breakfast or lunch. His roommate always said he “just wasn’t home.” Tony didn’t answer his phone, either. How was it possible to avoid me so successfully? The art tower seemed a sacred place to Tony, and I wasn’t going to poke my nose around there when he was obviously avoiding me.
Another week passed, and on that next Friday it was warmer than it had been; all I needed was a light sweater and jeans.
“My mom is cooking up this whole big meal in your honor,” Justin said.
We were back on the path and almost at the lacrosse field. It was about three in the afternoon.
“Your mother?” I gulped, feeling a stab of anxiety in my chest. I usually avoided the thought of my mother’s eyes or how she smelled like wax candles and apples.
“Yeah, she keeps asking what you like to eat. And you eat a lot for someone so thin. So I told her to make my favorite. Pot roast.”
I wondered for a moment what Justin’s mother would look like. He kissed me on the cheek just as we got to the edge of the lacrosse field.
“We’re gonna leave at, like, five-thirty or so, does that sound okay?”
“Perfect,” I said, and sat down. Once I did, Claudia and Kate plopped down on either side of me. This wasn’t a surprise. They had been doing that all week. That is, sitting down next to me when Justin was around and then virtually ignoring me when Tracy was with them. It must have been exhausting.
“Lenah! Look what we got,” Claudia said. Her eyes were wide with excitement. Around Kate’s and Claudia’s necks were two tiny vials of pixie dust, the kind you can buy in a child’s store.
“We tried to fi
nd some that looked like daggers, like yours. But we couldn’t,” Kate added.
“Yeah, we thought we should try to coordinate,” Claudia said. “Your style is definitely…unique.”
“Coordinate?” I asked, and rolled up my sleeves as the boys on the lacrosse team started to whiz up and down the field passing the ball back and forth from one another’s nets. I lifted my chin toward the sky. Claudia looked up at the sky, too. She didn’t know it, but I was checking the time from the position of the sun.
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Claudia said, stupidly assuming I was thinking about the weather. “Wait until the team moves indoor for the winter.” I had on sunglasses as we lay in the field.
“It is so stinky in there,” Kate said. “And, like, every girl comes to see the guys play. Losers.”
“Lenah! Look!” Justin said, drawing my attention to the field and pointing at Curtis’s bright pink knee pads. I shared the laugh with him before the coach yelled for Justin to “stop flirting with his girlfriend.”
“So, Lenah. You and Justin?” Claudia was leading. She smiled in a way that I realized she meant me to understand something that she was not saying aloud.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“You just came from Seeker. Together. Did you two…”
“Did we what?” I asked, lowering my chin to look at her over my lenses.
“Didn’t he come from your dorm room?” Claudia asked.
I shook my head. “He’s never been in my room.”
“What?” Kate cried, sitting up. “He’s never been in your room?”
I shook my head again.
I watched the field. Justin ran toward the goal, cradling the ball in his net. When he got the goal in, Kate and Claudia sat up. We screamed in joy. We weren’t losers. I was popular now. People watched me and Justin walk by wherever we went. But could I show him my room? The things in my life that made me…well, me?
Though, Kate was right. Justin would start asking about the room eventually. Claudia leaned back on her hands to enjoy the sun. She casually looked left in the direction of Hopper. “Ew,” she said unexpectedly.