Fallen (11 page)

Cam’s demeanor was casual, as if by some stroke of luck he hadn’t heard what she’d been saying. He seemed to be the only kid at Sword & Cross who didn’t change
out of his school uniform the minute classes were over. But the black-on-black look worked for him, just as much as it worked to make Luce look like a grocery store checkout girl.

Cam was twirling a golden pocket watch that swung from a long chain looped around his index finger. Luce followed its bright arc for a moment, almost mesmerized, until Cam clapped the face of the watch to a stop in his fist. He looked down at it, then up at her.

“Sorry.” His lips pursed in confusion. “I thought I signed up for the seven o’clock phone call.” He shrugged. “But I must have written it down wrong.”

Luce’s heart sank when she glanced at her own watch. She and Callie had barely said fifteen words to each other—how could her fifteen minutes already be up?

“Luce? Hello?” Callie sounded impatient on the other end of the phone. “You’re being weird. Is there something you’re not telling me? Have you replaced me already with some reform school cutter? What about the boy?”

“Shhh,” Luce hissed into the phone. “Cam, wait,” she called, holding the phone away from her mouth. He was already halfway out the door. “Just a second, I was”—she swallowed—“I was just getting off.”

Cam slipped the pocket watch into the front of his black blazer and doubled back toward Luce. He raised his eyebrows and laughed when he heard Callie’s voice growing louder from the earpiece. “Don’t you dare hang
up on me,” Callie protested. “You’ve told me nothing.
Nothing!”

“I don’t want to piss anyone off,” Cam joked, gesturing at the barking telephone. “Take my slot, you can get me back another time.”

“No,” Luce said quickly. As badly as she wanted to keep talking to Callie, she imagined Cam probably felt the same way about whomever he’d come here to call. And unlike a lot of the people at this school, Cam had been nothing but nice to her. She didn’t want to make him give up his turn at the telephone, especially now, when she’d be way too nervous to gossip with Callie about him.

“Callie,” she said, sighing into the phone. “I gotta go. I’ll call again as soon as—” But by then there was just the vague buzz of a dial tone in her ear. The phone itself had been rigged to cap each call at fifteen minutes. Now she saw the tiny timer blinking 0:00 on its base. They hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye and now she’d have to wait another whole week to call. Time stretched out in Luce’s mind like an endless gulf.

“BFF?” Cam asked, leaning up against the cubby next to Luce. His dark eyebrows were still arched. “I’ve got three younger sisters, I can practically smell the best-friend vibe through the phone.” He bent forward as if he was going to sniff Luce, which made her chuckle … and then freeze. His unexpected closeness had made her heart pick up.

“Let me guess.” Cam straightened back up and lifted his chin. “She wanted to know
all
about the reform school bad boys?”

“No!” Luce shook her head to deny vehemently that guys were on her mind at all … until she realized Cam was only kidding. She blushed and took a stab at joking back. “I mean, I told her there’s not a single good one here.”

Cam blinked. “Precisely what makes it so exciting. Don’t you think?” He had a way of standing very still, which made Luce stand very still, which made the ticking sound of the pocket watch inside his blazer seem louder than it possibly could have been.

Frozen next to Cam, Luce suddenly shivered as something black swooped into the hall. The shadow seemed to hopscotch across the panels in the ceiling in a very deliberate way, blacking out one and then the next and then the next. Damn. It was never good to be alone with someone—especially someone as focused on her as Cam was at the moment—when the shadows arrived. She could feel herself twitching, trying to appear calm as the darkness swirled around the ceiling fan in a dance. That alone she could have endured. Maybe. But the shadow was also making the worst of its terrible noises, a sound like the one Luce had heard when she’d watched a baby owl fall from its palmetto tree and choke to death. She wished Cam would just stop looking at her. She wished something would happen to divert his attention. She wished—

Daniel Grigori would walk in.

And then he did. Saved by the gorgeous boy wearing holey jeans and a holier white T-shirt. He didn’t look much like salvation—slouched over his heavy stack of library books, gray bags under his gray eyes. Daniel actually looked kind of wrecked. His blond hair drooped over his eyes, and when they settled on Luce and Cam, Luce watched them narrow. She was so busy fretting over what she’d done to annoy Daniel this time, she almost didn’t realize the momentous thing that happened: The second before the lobby door closed behind him, the shadow slipped through it and into the night. It was like someone had taken a vacuum and cleared out all the grit from the hall.

Daniel just nodded in their direction and didn’t slow down as he passed.

When Luce looked at Cam, he was watching Daniel. He turned to Luce and said, more loudly than he needed to, “I almost forgot to tell you. Having a little party in my room tonight after Social. I’d love for you to come.”

Daniel was still within earshot. Luce had no idea what this Social thing was, but she was supposed to meet Penn beforehand. They were supposed to walk over together.

Her eyes were fixed on the back of Daniel’s head, and she knew she needed to answer Cam about his party, and it really shouldn’t be so hard, but when Daniel turned around and looked back at her with eyes she
swore were mournful, the phone behind her started ringing, and Cam reached for it and said, “I’ve got to take this, Luce. You’ll be there?”

Almost imperceptibly, Daniel nodded.

“Yes,” Luce told Cam. “Yes.”

“I still don’t see why we have to run,” Luce was panting twenty minutes later. She was trying to keep up with Penn as they scrambled back across the commons toward the auditorium for the mysterious Wednesday Night Social, which Penn still hadn’t explained. Luce had barely enough to time to make it upstairs to her room, to slick on lip gloss and her better jeans just in case it was
that
kind of social. She was still trying to slow her breath down from her run-in with Cam
and
Daniel when Penn barged into her room to drag her back out the door.

“People who are chronically tardy never understand the many ways in which they screw up the schedules of people who are punctual and
normal,”
Penn told Luce as they splashed through a particularly soggy portion of the lawn.

“Ha!” A laugh erupted behind them.

Luce looked back and felt her face light up when she saw Arriane’s pale, skinny frame jogging to catch up with them. “Which quack said you were normal, Penn?” Arriane nudged Luce and pointed down. “Watch out for the quicksand!”

Luce sloshed to a halt just before she’d have landed in a scarily muddy patch on the lawn. “Somebody please tell me where we’re going!”

“Wednesday night,” Penn said flatly. “Social Night.”

“Like … a dance or something?” Luce asked, visions of Daniel and Cam already moving across the dance floor of her mind.

Arriane hooted. “A dance with death by boredom. The term ‘social’ is typical Sword & Cross doublespeak. See, they’re required to schedule social events for us, but they are also terrified of scheduling social events for us. Sticky predicky.”

“So instead,” Penn added, “they have these really awful events like movie nights followed by lectures about the movie, or—God, do you remember last semester?”

“There was that whole symposium on taxidermy?”

“So, so creepy.” Penn shook her head.

“Tonight, my dear,” Arriane drawled, “we get off easy. All we have to do is snore through one of the three movies on rotation in the Sword & Cross video library. Which one do you think it’ll be tonight, Pennyloafer?
Starman? Joe Versus the Volcano?
Or
Weekend at Bernie’s
?”

“It’s
Starman.”
Penn groaned.

Arriane shot Luce a baffled look. “She knows
everything
.”

“Hold on,” Luce said, tiptoeing around the quicksand and lowering her voice to a whisper as they approached
the front office of the school. “If you’ve all seen these movies so many times, why the rush to get here?”

Penn pulled open the heavy metal doors to the “auditorium,” which, Luce realized, was a euphemism for a regular old room with low, drop-paneled ceilings and chairs arranged to face a blank white wall.

“Don’t want to get stuck in the hot seat next to Mr. Cole,” Arriane explained, pointing at the teacher. His nose was buried deep inside a thick book, and he was surrounded by the few remaining empty chairs in the room.

As the three girls stepped through the metal detector at the door, Penn said, “Whoever sits there has to help pass out his weekly ‘mental health’ surveys.”

“Which wouldn’t be so bad—” Arriane chimed in.

“—if you didn’t have to stay late to analyze the findings,” Penn finished.

“Thereby missing,” Arriane said with a grin, steering Luce toward the second row as she whispered, “the
after-party
.”

Finally they’d gotten down to the heart of the matter. Luce chuckled.

“I heard about that,” she said, feeling slightly with it for a change. “It’s in Cam’s room, right?”

Arriane looked at Luce for a second and ran her tongue across her teeth. Then she looked past, almost through, Luce. “Hey, Todd,” she called, waving with just the tips of her fingers. She pushed Luce into one seat,
claimed the safe spot next to her (still two seats down from Mr. Cole), and patted the hot seat. “Come sit with us, T-man!”

Todd, who’d been shifting his weight in the doorway, looked immensely relieved to be given the directive, any directive. He started toward them, swallowing. No sooner had he fumbled into the seat than Mr. Cole looked up from his book, cleaned his glasses on his handkerchief, and said, “Todd, I’m glad you’re here. I’m wondering if you can help me with a small favor after the film. You see, the Venn diagram is a very useful tool for …”

“Mean!” Penn popped her face up between Arriane and Luce.

Arriane shrugged and produced a giant bag of popcorn from her carpetbag. “I can only look after so many new students,” she said, tossing a buttery kernel at Luce. “Lucky you.”

As the lights in the room dimmed, Luce looked around until her eyes landed on Cam. She thought about her abbreviated dish session on the phone with Callie, and how her friend always said that watching a movie with a guy was the best way to get to know things about him, things that might not come out in a conversation. Looking at Cam, Luce thought she knew what Callie meant: There would be something sort of thrilling about glancing out of the corner of her eye to see what jokes Cam thought were funny, to join his laughter with her own.

When his eyes met hers, Luce felt an embarrassed
instinct to look away. But then, before she could, Cam’s face lit up in a broad smile. It made her feel remarkably unabashed about being caught staring. When he put his hand up in a wave, Luce couldn’t help thinking about how the exact opposite had happened the few times Daniel had caught her looking at him.

Daniel rolled in with Roland, late enough that Randy had already taken a head count, late enough that the only remaining seats were on the floor at the front of the room. He passed through the beam of light from the projector and Luce noticed for the first time a silver chain around his neck, and some sort of medallion tucked inside his T-shirt. Then he dipped completely out of her view. She couldn’t even see his profile.

As it turned out,
Starman
wasn’t very funny, but the other students’ constant Jeff Bridges impersonations were. It was hard for Luce to stay focused on the plot. Plus, she was getting that uncomfortable icy feeling at the back of her neck. Something was about to happen.

When the shadows came this time, Luce was expecting them. Then she started to think about it and counted a tally on her fingers. The shadows had been popping up at an increasingly alarming rate, and Luce couldn’t figure out whether she was just nervous at Sword & Cross … or whether it meant something else. They’d never been this bad before…

They oozed overhead in the auditorium, then slithered
along the sides of the movie screen, and finally traced the lines of the floorboards like spilled ink. Luce gripped the bottom of her chair and felt an ache of fear swell through her legs and arms. She tightened all the muscles in her body, but she couldn’t keep from trembling. A squeeze on her left knee made her look over at Arriane.

“You okay?” Arriane mouthed.

Luce nodded and hugged her shoulders, pretending she was merely cold. She wished she was, but this particular chill had nothing to do with Sword & Cross’s overzealous air conditioner.

She could feel the shadows tugging at her feet under her chair. They stayed like that, deadweight for the whole movie, and every minute dragged on like an eternity.