The door banged against the gym wall, and I jumped. I was sure Azazel was there, and I was finished. I’d failed.
“What are you two doing in here?” Coach Johnson bellowed.
My breath rushed out of my lungs. I’d never been so happy to see grumpy Coach Johnson, with his perpetual case of halitosis. I could have kissed him, stinky breath and all.
“I was just leaving.” I pushed Jake away.
He stood and gave one of his dazzling smiles, holding his palms out in front of him as if in surrender. “Have it your way, Milayna,” he whispered.
“What’s burning? Have you two been smoking?”
“No, sir,” I answered, looking Jake in the eyes. “Jake was just asking me to senior prom.”
“Oh, well, you two have at it then.” He grinned and winked at Jake—his star football player.
“No, no, that’s okay. I told him I already had plans for that night. I can’t go with him.” I stood and stepped around Jake, walking quickly toward the door before Coach Johnson left.
I ran down the hall to the doors and pushed through them so hard they smacked against the doorstops. I ran until I reached the bus and let out a huge breath when I sat on the ugly, green vinyl seat next to Muriel. Looking down, I realized my hands were shaking. In fact, it felt as if my whole insides were shaking.
“Milayna, what’s wrong? You’re shaking.” Muriel grabbed my hands.
“I ran into Jake.” My voice quivered and I couldn’t say his name above a whisper, like it was some kind of horrible curse word.
“Crap, what happened? Are you okay?” She squeezed my hands and pulled me toward her.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Coach Johnson walked in and I was able to get out of there, but it was close.”
“You can’t go anywhere without someone with you. You can’t take a chance something like that will happen again.” Muriel’s tone was firm. She almost sounded like my mother. I would have laughed at the thought if I wasn’t still reeling from my near date to Hell with its newest golden boy, Jake.
I let out a long breath—my cheeks puffed out. “I know.”
Even with the scare from Jake, the day didn’t end all bad. We won our swim meet.
***
After the swim meet, Chay was at the school to pick me up. I saw him through the window as we drove into the school’s parking lot, and I could tell by his face that Muriel had already texted him. His feet were planted shoulder width apart, his hands were clasped behind his back, and there wasn’t a trace of a smile on his lips anywhere.
Damn it!
“Thanks a lot, Muriel.” I glared at her.
“I thought maybe he could talk some sense into that stubborn brain of yours.” She shrugged a shoulder.
He met me at the door of the bus. As soon as I stepped out, he grabbed my bag, slung it over his shoulder, and stalked away. I followed close behind him. He opened the passenger’s door of the car for me to get in, shut it after me, and stalked around to the driver’s side.
Great. Just friggin’ wonderful. I don’t think he’s blinked since he’s picked me up.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Chay yelled as soon as he got in the car.
“I was just grabbing my clothes. I didn’t think—”
“Crap, Milayna, you can’t go running off like that. Why do you think everyone is going out of their way to make sure you aren’t alone?”
“Well, I didn’t ask them to,” I shot back. It wasn’t like I wanted everyone to have to wait on me, to interrupt their life and make me the center of it. “Wait. Everyone?”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s what you’re doing? Going out of your way to make sure I’m not alone?”
Not because I want to be with you, but because I have to rearrange my schedule to babysit you. Nice.
“Yes… No… that’s not what I meant.” I started to get out of the car. “Where are you going?” he called to me.
“To ride with Muriel.” I jerked my bag out of the car and slammed the door.
Jerk.
I jogged across the parking lot to catch Muriel before she left. She jumped when I yanked open the door of her car and slipped in, slamming it behind me. “Oh. Hi.” A frown pulled at her lips. “Everything okay?”
“Let’s just go home.” I forced a smile.
“What happened?” Muriel looked over at me when we were stopped at a red light. I ticked off the seconds in my head until it turned green. I just wanted to go home.
I sighed. “Nothing I want to talk about.”
“You’re mad at me.”
“No.” I let out a huge sigh. “I don’t know what I am.” I dropped my head in my hands.
“Okay. Well, what happened?”
“He basically said he was spending time with me because I wasn’t supposed to be alone,” I blurted.
Muriel snorted. “You know that’s not true, Milayna.”
Yeah. So why am I making an issue of it? Ugh. Sometimes, I don’t understand my own brain.
My stomach clenched and twisted. I gritted my teeth and hit the dashboard with my fist. I didn’t want a vision now, but my head started to pound and my eyes saw images of things that hadn’t happened yet.
“Muriel, I’m gonna have a vision.” I blew stray hair out of my face before cursing violently under my breath.
Come on. Give me a freaking break, please.
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
A gas station. No, a convenience store. A woman.
I concentrated on the store. I strained to see the name. Bob’s… something. I couldn’t make it out.
A woman. Spilled pop. A crushed bag of chips. A gun.
“Muriel, look for a convenience store called Bob’s.”
Gunshots. Blood.
“Hurry, Muriel.” I gripped the door handle so hard that my fingers ached. The tension snaked up my hand and my arm to my neck, where it slithered around and started tightening.
My insides were churning. I could feel my lunch swirl in my stomach, threating to make a repeat visit. I couldn’t help thinking of the Waterway. What if we didn’t get there in time? What if we didn’t find the woman?
Blue T-shirt stained with blood. A bloody hand.
“I see it. Hold on.” Muriel made a U-turn, earning several honks and a few fingers. She pulled into Bob’s Convenience Store’s parking lot.
“There, the blonde in the pink dress walking toward the door. We gotta stop her from going in the store.”
“Here.” Muriel pulled her wallet out of her purse and hurled it on the ground behind the woman.
I jumped out of the car. “Ma’am? Is this your wallet?”
The woman turned around, looked at Muriel’s neon green wallet, and shook her head. “No, that’s not mine.” Leave it to Muriel to have the ugliest wallet in history. The woman could tell right away it wasn’t hers.
The vision hadn’t changed.
Gunshots. Blood. The woman.
I took two steps toward her, the wallet in my outstretched hand. “Are you sure? I’m almost positive I saw it fall out of your bag.”
“I’m positive. My wallet isn’t that color,” she said, an amused look on her face.
“Oh, you wouldn’t happen to know whose it is?” I stepped in front of her when she tried to sidestep me.
“Why don’t you look inside and see if there’s any ID?”
Crap. The vision hasn’t changed, and I can’t get her to stop going into the store.
“Muriel!” I called, my voice quivering and an octave higher than normal. I didn’t have a good feeling about this vision. No matter how I played it out in my head, it didn’t change, at least not for the better. Butterflies started to swarm my stomach and my blood felt like goo oozing through my veins.
“Yeah?”
“Call the police. Now!”
“‘Kay.”
The woman stopped and looked at me with wide eyes. “What do the police have to do with the wallet?”<
br />
“Nothing. There’s a robbery in progress. I need to report it.”
“Where?” she asked, panicked. She looked around, turning in all directions.
“Here.”
That wasn’t exactly true. The robbery hadn’t taken place yet, but it was the only thing I could think of to keep the woman out of the store and keep her alive. The vision had changed, but my stomach was still tied in knots and the blood rushing through my veins was full of adrenaline. Something wasn’t right.
Blood. Glass. Bloody blue T-shirt. Stop it.
“Muriel, get down!” I screamed at the same time I tackled the woman. She fell on her hands and knees just as the bullet soared through the front window of the store.
Glass covered us. My hands were sliced and bleeding. Shards of razor-sharp glass were everywhere. The woman had a bad gash on her right cheek, but otherwise, we were both fine.
Slowly, the twisting in my stomach eased and fear slithered from my neck as the images faded. I could hear the far-off wail of sirens. They wouldn’t get here in time. The man had already run from the building.
The store clerk hurried to the door. “Are you okay?” He helped us up, picking the large pieces of glass out of our hair and off our clothes.
“We’re fine.” The woman sounded a little dazed. Her eyes were wide and she wobbled when she walked, like a little girl wearing her mother’s high heels.
I sat on Muriel’s car’s bumper and waited for the police. The sensations of the vision slowly dissipated and were replaced with the normal reaction of scared shitlessness a person would have after having a bullet soar over their heads—vision or no vision.
The police wanted a statement of what happened. After they interviewed the store clerk, they interviewed the woman. She said she hadn’t seen anything, but I’d saved her life when I pushed her to the ground.
Great. Thanks, lady.
“Miss, what happened?” a police officer asked. He had kind eyes and reminded me of my dad.
“I happened to look through the window and saw the man with the gun. I panicked and pushed the lady down.” That was mostly the truth.
“How did you see the gun?”
“Through the window,” I repeated.
“The window is covered in posters and signs.”
“Well, some of the window is uncovered or I wouldn’t have been able to see through it.” I tried not to sound annoyed.
“Did you see the man?”
“His back was to me.”
“What about when he ran out of the building?” The officer took notes in his little notepad.
“He was holding a gun. I tried not to look at him.”
“Why?”
Just drop it already!
“Why? Because I didn’t want him to start killing the witnesses!” I said, my voice rising. I tried to sound hysterical. I was sure I came pretty close since I was borderline hysterical by that point. The reality of what happened had started to sink in. One of us could have been shot. Killed, even. Yeah, hysterical seemed to sum up my emotional state. And even though I was only a few weeks away from technically becoming an adult, I wanted my mom and my grams’ purple couch. That always made me feel better.
“I’d like you to come to the station and look at some mug shots anyway, just in case something jogs your memory.”
Muriel and I drove to the station. She was quiet, and the silence made me uneasy.
“I’m sorry,” I said, smoothing out a piece of tape holding gauze on my hand.
“For what?” Muriel glanced at me.
“Making you go with me.”
“Milayna, you probably just saved my life. Here I thought the group was trying to keep you alive, and you just saved that woman’s life and probably mine too. Thank you.”
She reached out, grabbed my hand, and held it a little too tight considering I’d just had half a plate glass window pulled out of it by the EMTs, but I held on to her just as tightly.
We were one bullet away from possibly losing one another. Demons, Azazel, now freakin’ bullets flying around. It’s too much. Too many things threatening the people I love and I don’t know how to protect them from it all.
“It was nothing. All in a day’s work.” I smiled. Muriel squeezed my hand before letting go. She didn’t smile back.
We called our parents and told them what happened. Then we spent the next four hours of our life looking through picture after picture of criminals along with the store clerk.
“I couldn’t believe how many there were,” I said as Muriel and I walked out of the police station. Goose bumps broke out on my skin thinking about it.
“I know, right?” Muriel muttered. “It would have been nice if the surveillance cameras,” Muriel made air quotes around the words surveillance cameras, “were actual working cameras and not just empty boxes put up to deter crime. ‘Cuz, guess what? It didn’t work.”
My lips twitched. “Yes, that would have definitely been helpful.” Muriel had been bitching about the cameras since the store clerk told the police they weren’t real working cameras. She’d bitched to me, the police, and the store clerk, who really got a dose. “I just wish I could have given them something useful to work with. But I didn’t see the guy long enough… Anyway, that’s four hours of our life we won’t get back.” I sighed.
“Yeah. I’m just happy we had four hours of life left.” Muriel unlocked the car, and we climbed in to go home.
***
My dad met us at the car when Muriel pulled into her driveway. “Are you okay?” His face was pinched with worry.
“Yeah.”
We walked across the street to my house. As soon as I opened the door, I smelled him. He waited in the foyer, his hair mussed from running his hand through it. My heart lurched when I saw him, and I reminded it we were supposed to be mad at him for the idiotic thing he said. But somehow, it didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore. And I didn’t want to spend my life choosing to be angry.
He walked to me, cupped my face in his hands, and kissed me hard and deep. My father cleared his throat. Chay kept kissing me, and I kept kissing him back. I wrapped one arm around his waist, the other around his neck, and cradled the side of his head. I held him tight against me, until not even a whisper could fit between us. And still he was too far away. I felt so safe in his arms that my heart hurt. I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted my salty tears on our lips.
“Okay then. Ignore the father.” My dad walked away.
“I’m sorry about what I said, Milayna. It came out all wrong—” He wiped my tears away, kissing each spot. “Don’t cry. I can’t stand to see you cry.”
I waved off his words and shook my head. “It’s okay.”
“Your hands. What happened to your hands?” He looked at the bandages the EMTs had applied.
“Just some glass. It’s nothing.”
He kissed me again. It was a slow, make-your-toes-curl-and-insides-swirl kiss, and my heart drummed against my chest. I leaned into him, urging him to take the kiss deeper.
“Chay, would you like to stay for dinner?” my mother called.
He lifted his head and grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And that’s how you get their attention.” I heard my mom tell my dad in the kitchen.
I giggled and walked toward the smell of food. I was starving. When I walked into the kitchen, I froze. The large window behind the kitchen table was right in front of me. Through that, I could see my goblin buddies waiting for me in the backyard.
“Oh, yeah, I meant to tell you. You have some little red visitors.” My dad dished up some of the casserole my mom sat on the table in front of him.
I watched them run through the yard. “How long have they been here?” A weight fell onto my shoulders and pushed the air out of my lungs. I closed my eyes briefly and covered my face with my hands.
“About five hours.”
I let my hands fall slowly from my face. “About when the robbery happened,”
I whispered.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll go out and see what they want so they’ll go.”
“Eat first, before it gets cold. They’ve waited this long. They can wait until after dinner.” My mom sat down at the table and patted the chair next to her.
Chay pulled out my chair, and I sat down. Throughout dinner, my parents and Chay asked me a million and one questions about the vision I’d had: what had happened at the convenience store, what the police said, how my hands felt, and on and on. By the time dinner was over, I felt like I’d been interrogated again, only my family was more insistent than the police officer had been.
After dinner, Chay and I sat on the deck and waited for the mini-goblins to reveal the purpose for their visit. I lay sidewise, my head in his lap. His arm was like a steel band around my waist, holding me to him. After the day I’d had, I welcomed the sense of protection he offered.
“Milayna’s here!” Friendly said in a singsong voice.
“It’s about damn time. I was getting bored,” Scarface said.
There were seven hobgoblins running amok in my backyard. I knew two of them. One I’d named Scarface and the other Friendly, based on his personality. They usually always came to bug me. It was like they were my personal demon buddies. The others I’d never seen before, although they all looked alike, so it was hard to tell.
“What are you doing here, guys?” I let out an exasperated sigh. I was drained from the vision and the hours I’d spent at the police station. I just wanted a quiet, peaceful evening so I could sleep.
“Did you like our game?”
My heart slowed. I could hear it plodding along in my chest, squeezing the blood through my veins. “What game?”
“The store. That was a close call with the bullet,” one of the hobgoblins said, its eyes wide.
“How do you know about that?” I pulled myself up to a sitting position. My knees were pressed against my chest and my arms wrapped around them. Chay wrapped his arm around me and scooted me close to his side.
“‘Cause we did it. It was easy convincing the guy to rob the place. Just a few subliminal suggestions and he was all set. Of course, he thinks it was all his idea, but that’s okay. Whatever gets the job done, right?” The demon’s lips pulled over his yellow, chipped teeth in what I guess was intended to be a grin. It looked more like a snarl, so maybe that was what he meant it to be. Who knew with them?