Fearless: No. 2 - Sam (Fearless) (2 page)
Read Fearless: No. 2 - Sam (Fearless) Online
Authors: Francine Pascal
Tonight,
as I sat on the park bench waiting for my head to explode, I had one moment of clarity in which I learned two things.
1) I have to find my dad.
I just have to. As angry as I am, as much as I hate him for abandoning me on the most awful, vulnerable day of my life, I don't want to die without seeing him one more time. I don t know what I'll say to him. But there's something I want to know, and I feel like if I can look in his eyes -- just for a moment -- I'll know what his betrayal meant and whether there's any love or trust, even the possibility of it, between us.
2) I have to have sex.
Oh, come on. Don't act so shocked. I'm seventeen years old. I know the rules about being safe. If my life weren't in very immediate jeopardy, maybe I would let it wait for the exact right time. But let's face it -- I may not be around next week, forget about happily ever after. Besides, I've been through a lot of truly awful things in my life, so why should I die without getting to experience one of the few great ones?
Who am I going to have sex with?
Do you have to ask?
All right, I have an answer. In that moment, when my fragile mind-set was shattered, the face I saw belonged to Sam Moon. Granted, he hates me. Granted, he has a girlfriend. Granted, his girlfriend hates me even more. But I'll find a way. 'Cause he's the one. I can't say why; he just is.
I wish I could convince myself that CJ wouldn't make good on his threat. But I heard his voice. I saw his face. I know he'll do any crazy thing it takes.
I won't go down easy. But I'd be stupid not to prepare for the worst.
Am I afraid? No. I'm never afraid. But the way I see it, dying without knowing love would be a tragedy.
She hated that pale blond hair, a color you rarely saw on a person over the age of three.
"YOU SOUND WEIRD."
"How do you mean?" Gaia asked.
"I don't know. You just do. You're talking fast or something," Ed said as he clenched the portable phone between his shoulder and his ear and eased himself from his desk chair to his wheelchair.
Ed Fargo was honest with Gaia, and Gaia was honest with Ed. He appreciated that about their relationship. With most girls he knew, girls like Heather, there were many
mystifying levels of bullshit
. With Gaia he could just tell her exactly what he was thinking.
Ed's mind briefly flashed on the hip-hugging green corduroys Gaia was wearing in Mr. McAuliff's class today.
Well, actually, not
everything
he was thinking. There was a certain category of thing he couldn't tell her about. That's why it was often easier talking with her on the phone, because then he couldn't see her, which meant he had fewer of those thoughts he couldn't tell her about.
"I had a bad night. That's probably why," Gaia said.
Ed wheeled himself down the shabbily carpeted hallway of his family's small apartment. Family photographs lined the walls on both sides, but Ed didn't seem to see them anymore. "A bad night how?" he asked.
"I almost got shot in the head."
Ed made a sound somewhere between laughter and choking on a chicken bone. "You w-what?"
That was another thing about Gaia. She was always surprising. Though too often in an upsetting way.
Gaia let out her breath. "Oh, God. Where to start. You know that guy CJ?"
Ed slowed his chair to a stop and clenched the armrests with his hands. "The one who slashed Heather? Isn't he in jail?" he asked with a sick feeling in his stomach.
"I guess he got out on bail or something," Gaia said matter-of-factly. "Anyway, CJ's friend Marco is dead, and he thinks I killed him."
Ed groaned out loud. How had his life taken such a turn? Before he'd first laid love-struck eyes on Gaia in the hallway outside physics class, he wouldn't have believed he would ever have a conversation like this.
"Marco is dead? Are you sure?"
"Only from what CJ told me."
Ed sighed. The really crazy thing was, in the brief time he'd known Gaia, so many violent and alarming things had happened, this wasn't so staggeringly out of the ordinary.
"Hey, Gaia? If trouble is a hungry great white shark, then you're a liquid cloud of chum."
Gaia's laugh was easy and comforting. "That's a beautiful image. I love it when you get poetic."
Ed resumed his roll down the hallway and into the galley kitchen. His late evening phone reports from Gaia, distressing as they sometimes were, had become as precious a ritual as his eleven o'clock milk shake.
"So tell me," Ed prodded, hoisting himself up a few inches with one arm to reach the ice cream in the freezer. "Tell me how it happened."
"Okay. I was sitting in the park, minding my own business --"
"Eating doughnuts," Ed supplied.
"Yes, Ed, eating doughnuts, when that loser came up from behind and shoved a gun into my neck."
"Jesus."
"I didn't take it seriously at first. But it turns out this guy is half crazed and deadly serious."
"So what happened?" Ed asked, milk shake momentarily forgotten.
Gaia sighed. "He actually pulled the trigger. I thought I was dead -- a wild experience, by the way. It turned out he must have loaded the gun in a hurry because there was no bullet in at least one of the chambers. I took that opportunity to throw him."
Ed's mind was spinning. "Throw him?"
"You know, like flip him."
"Oh, right," he said.
"You're making fun of me again," Gaia said patiently.
Ed shook his head in disbelief. "I'm not, Gaia. It's just . . . you blow my mind."
"Well, speaking of, I think this guy CJ is dead set on killing me. I'm scared he's really going to do it," Gaia said.
"You're scared?" Ed asked a little nervously. Having seen Gaia in action, he would have imagined it would take more than a pimply white supremacist with a borrowed gun to hurt Gaia. It would take something more on the order of a hydrogen bomb. But if Gaia was scared, well, he had to take that seriously.
"Figure of speech. I'm scared
abstractly,"
Gaia explained.
Ed rocked a tall glass on the counter. "Gaia, you worry me here."
"Don't worry," Gaia reassured him. "I mean, think about it. CJ is kind of a moron, and I happen to be okay at self-defense."
Ed felt reassured. That last part was an understatement to rival "Marilyn Manson is an unusual guy." He could hear Gaia thumping her heel against her metal desk. He realized the ice cream was melting and spreading along the countertop. He absently scooped some of it into the blender.
Prrrrrrrr
rrrrr.
"Ed! I hate when you run the blender when we're talking," Gaia complained loudly.
"Sorry," he said. By the time she finished complaining, the milk shake was frothy and smooth. That was part of the ritual.
"I don't want to die," she said resolutely. "You know why?"
"Why?" he asked absently, sucking down a huge mouthful of vanilla shake.
"I haven't had sex yet."
Ed spluttered the mouthful all over his dark blue T-shirt. Cough, cough, cough. "What?"
"I don't want to die before I've had sex."
Cough, cough.
"Right," he said.
"So I need to have sex in the next couple of days, just in case," Gaia added.
Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough --
"Ed? Are you okay? Ed? Is somebody around to give you the Heimlich?"
"N-No," Ed choked out. "I'm (cough, cough) fine." In fact, he had about four ounces of milk shake puddled in his lung. Could you die of that? Could you drown by breathing in a milk shake? And shit, he'd like to have sex in the next couple of days, too. (Cough, cough, cough.)
"Ed, are you sure you're okay?"
"Yesss," he answered in a weak and gravelly voice.
"So anyway, I was thinking I better do it soon."
"It?"
"Yeah, it. You know,
it."
"Right. It." Ed felt faint. Milk shake, as it turned out, was much less handy in your veins than, say, oxygen."So, who ... uh ... are you going to do
it
with? Or are you just going to walk the streets, soliciting people randomly?"
"Ed!" Gaia sounded genuinely insulted.
"Kidding," he said feebly, wishing his palms weren't suddenly sweating.
"You don't think anybody's going to want to have sex with me, do you?" Gaia sounded hurt and petulant at the same time.
"Mmrnpha." The noise Ed made didn't resemble an English word. It sounded like it had come from the mouth of a nine-month-old baby.
"Huh?"
"I ... um ..." Ed couldn't answer. The truth was, although she made every effort to hide it, Gaia was possibly the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life -- and that was including the women in the Victoria's Secret catalog, the
SI
swimsuit issue, and that show about witches on the WB. Any straight guy with a live pulse and a thimble full of testosterone would want to have sex with Gaia. But what was Ed going to say? This was
exactly
the category of conversation he couldn't have honestly with her.
"Anyway, I do know who I'm going to do it with," Gaia said confidently.
"Who?" Ed felt his vision blurring.
"I can't say."
Ed definitely wasn't taking in enough oxygen. Good thing he was in a chair because otherwise he'd be lying on the linoleum.
"Why can't you say?" he asked, trying to sound calm.
"Because it's way too awkward," Gaia said.
Awkward? Awkward. What did that imply? Could it mean . . .? Ed's thoughts were racing. Would it be too crude to point out at this juncture that although his legs were paralyzed, his nether regions were in excellent working condition?
He felt a tiny tendril of hope winding its way into his heart. He beat it back. "Gaia, don't you think you'll need to get past
awkwardness
if you really plan to be doing
it
with this person in the next forty-eight hours?"
"Yeah, I guess." He heard her slam her heel against the desk. "But I still can't tell you."
"Oh, come on, Gaia. You have to."
"I gotta go."
"Gaia!"
"I really do. Cru-Ella needs to use the phone."
"Gaia! Please? Come on! Tell."
"See ya tomorrow."
"Gaia, who? Who, who, who?" Ed demanded.
"You," he heard her say in a soft voice before she hung up the phone.
But as he laid the phone on the counter he knew who'd said the word, and it wasn't Gaia. It was that misguiding, leechlike parasite called hope.
COMMENT
THE TIME HAD COME. HEATHER
Gannis felt certain of that as she slammed her locker door shut and tucked the red envelope into her book bag. She waited for the deafening late afternoon crowd to clear before striking out toward the bathroom. She didn't feel like picking up the usual half-dozen hangers-on, desperate to know what she was doing after soccer practice.
Okay, time to make her move. She caught sight of Melanie Young in her peripheral vision but pretended she hadn't. She acted like she didn't hear Tannie Deegan calling after her. Once in the bathroom she hid in the stall for a couple of minutes to be sure she wasn't being followed.
Heather usually liked her
high visibility
and enormous number of friends, but some of those girls were so freakishly
needy
some of the time. It was like if they missed one group trip to the Antique Boutique, they would never recover. Their clinginess made it almost impossible for Heather to spend one private afternoon with her boyfriend.
Heather dumped her bag in the mostly dry sink and stared at her reflection. She wanted to look her best when she saw Sam. She bent her head so close to the mirror that her nose left a tiny grease mark on the glass. This close, she could see the light freckles splattered across the bridge of her nose and the amber streaks in her light eyes that kept them from being the bona fide true blue of her mother and sisters.
Her pores looked big and ugly from this vantage point. Did Sam see them this way when he kissed her? She pulled away. She got busy rooting through her bag for powder to tame the oil on her forehead and nose and hopefully cover those gaping, yawning pores. She applied another coat of clear lip gloss. For somebody who was supposed to be so beautiful, she sure felt pretty plain sometimes.
She wished she hadn't eaten those potato chips at lunch. She couldn't help worrying that the difference between beauty and hideousness would come down to one bag of salt-and-vinegar chips.
As she swung her bag over her shoulder and smacked open the swinging door, she caught sight of the dingy olive-colored pants and faded black hooded sweatshirt of Gaia Moore. Heather's heart picked up pace, and she felt blood pulsing in her temples.
God, she hated that girl. She hated the way she walked, the way she dressed, the way she talked. She hated that pale blond hair, a color you rarely saw on a person over the age of three. Heather wished the color was fake, but she knew it wasn't.
Heather hated Gaia for dumping scorching-hot coffee all over her shirt a couple of weeks ago and not bothering to apologize. Heather hated Gaia for being friends with Ed Fargo, her ex-boyfriend, and turning him against Heather at that awful party. Heather
really
hated Gaia for failing to warn Heather that there was a guy with a knife in the park, when Heather was obviously headed there.
All of those things were unforgivable. But none of them kept Heather up at night. The thing that kept her up at night was one small, nothing comment made by her boyfriend, Sam Moon.
It happened the day Heather got out of the hospital. Sam was there visiting, as he was throughout those five days. He had disappeared for a few minutes, and when he got back to her room, Heather asked him where he'd been. He said, "I ran into Gaia in the hallway."
That was all.
Afterward, when Heather quizzed him, Sam instantly claimed to dislike Gaia. Like everybody else, he said it was partly Gaia's fault that Heather got slashed in the first place.
But there was something about Sam's face when he said Gaia's name that stuck in Heather's mind and wouldn't go away.
Heather's mind returned again to the card floating in her bag. She sorted through the bag and pulled it out. She needed to check again that the words seemed right. That the handwriting didn't look too girly and stupid. That the phrasing didn't seem too
. . . desperate.
She'd find Sam in the park playing chess with that crazy old man, as he often did on Wednesday afternoons. And if not, she'd go on to his dorm and wait for him there. She'd hand him the card, watch his face while he read it, and kiss him so he'd know she meant it.
She was in love with Sam. This Saturday marked their six-month anniversary. He was the best-looking, most intelligent guy she knew.
She loved the fact that he was in college.
She had made this decision with her heart. Sam was sexy. Sam was even romantic sometimes. He wasn't a guy you let get away.
So why, then, as she wrote the card, was she thinking not of Sam, but of Gaia?
Dear Sam,
These last six months have been the best of my life. Sorry to be corny, but it's true. So I wanted to celebrate the occasion with a
very
special night. I'll meet you at your room at eight on Saturday night and we'll finally do something we've been talking about doing for a long time. I know I said I wanted to wait, but I changed my mind.You are the one, and now is the time.
Love and kisses (all over),
Heather