Sage's Eyes (21 page)

Summer didn't look at me. He went right to the piano. Our first number was the Adele song “Someone Like You.”
Mr. Jacobs liked to intersperse the selections he chose from classical music with some modern music so as to have something for everyone in the audience when we performed our concert just before the Thanksgiving break.

We all took our positions and Mr. Jacobs happily took his in front of the group, or team as he would call us. Summer didn't need the sheet music. He impressed everyone, especially me, but I thought perhaps he liked Adele and had serendipitously memorized this one. Jan sang the opening verse solo, and then we all came in, never more perfectly on key and in sync according to Mr. Jacobs.

“With a pianist like this, you almost don't need a coach,” he said.

I had never seen him so filled with enthusiasm and so light and happy. He had always struck me as too intense, as if everything he did in his life was in competition with someone. He was tall and lean, with chiseled facial features and deep-set dark brown eyes almost always soaked in a pool of intensity and determination. The motto he had hung over his classroom door was “Anyone can play, but not everyone can win. Practice!”

Although Summer used the sheet music for the rest of our numbers, I had the feeling he could play every one of them without it. Once he did play a song, I noticed that he didn't refer to the sheet music again. Some people have photographic memories, and some have it along with a special ear for music, I thought. Summer was just one of them.

Or was he more?

We were all doing so well and getting so many compliments from Mr. Jacobs that we audibly sighed with disappointment when the bell rang to end our class. I noticed there wasn't a girl who didn't linger in hopes of walking out with Summer, but Mr. Jacobs kept him back with his compliments and enthusiasm. He was waving his arms and shifting his feet like he was talking excitedly to a team playing in a close championship game.

Before I walked out, I caught Summer gazing at me with his small impish smile. Despite the caution I was feeling, it made me want to linger, and even though I felt a little foolish and obvious doing so, I waited just outside the doorway, fiddling with my notebooks, pretending a reason for my delay.

He was beside me so quickly and silently that I thought for a moment that he really could float. I looked up at him. He did have stunning deep black eyes. Most boys I had met rarely held their gaze on you when you looked intently back at them. Their eyes shifted, and they got a little nervous, as if they had been caught looking at you and thinking about you with lust. Some of the girls I knew liked that and
washed away their prospective new boyfriends' nervousness and guilt with their own obvious looks of desire. They would titillate each other with promises of sexual pleasure.

There was no nervousness in Summer's face. He was filled with self-confidence. I wanted to be annoyed by it, to think of him as arrogant, but something restrained me, something pleaded with me not to drive him away. Of course, it had to do with his good looks, but there was more curiosity in me about him than anything else. Why was he so different from other boys I had met?

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey yourself. You play beautifully,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“How long have you been playing piano?”

“Not that long,” he said, with the sort of impatience someone would show if he thought the compliment was nothing unusual. “You should be the one singing solo.”

I pulled my head back. “Really?” I asked dryly. Because I gave him a compliment, he had to give me one? Did he think I would crumble quickly and maybe become his first female conquest at the school? “And you know this how?”

“It's not a false compliment, Sage, just because you gave me one,” he said, reading my thoughts. Usually, I was much better at disguising them, from boys especially. “It's not rocket science. I could distinguish your voice from the others', and you have the timbre.”

“Timbre?”

“Your
voice has that delicious complexity a good singer's voice needs. I mentioned that to Mr. Jacobs.”

“And what did he say?”

“He thought I might be right, especially when I referred to your singing the lead in ‘Must Be Santa.' It would sound better with just you singing the questions.”

“Oh, so you really have been studying music. Is that your favorite subject?”

“I don't think of it as a subject. Music, art, poetry are ways to extend yourself, grow bigger and touch stars.”

“Touch stars?” I asked, smiling.

“I would have thought you knew that yourself, Sage.”

“I'm surprised you know my name.”

“A little bird whispered it in my ear,” he said, and reached for my hand and touched my ring. “Interesting ring. Those are dragons, right?”

“Yes. You know what it's supposed to mean?”

He studied the ring, still holding my hand. “I believe one is supposed to be the dragon of the east, the messenger of heavenly law, facing the dragon of the west, keeper of earth knowledge.”

“How do you know that?”

“Didn't you see it? That same bird whispered in my ear.”

“Very funny.”

He shrugged. “I'm into that spiritual stuff. I guess you are, too, if you're wearing this ring.”

I finally took my hand back. “My uncle gave it to me. He bought it in an antiques shop in Budapest.”

“Oh. Well, it's a beaut,” he said. He was looking at me so intently I had to shift my gaze away.

“Got to move on,” I said.

“We have history now, right?” he asked.

“Right,” I said, and started down the hallway. He was right beside me.

“You haven't been here that long, either, correct?” he asked.

“No, I haven't.”

I tried to hide my smile, but I was pleased he had taken such interest in me, enough to ask others about me. I wondered if it was just me or if he had asked about any other girls who had captured his early attention.

“Why did you transfer from your old school? Did you get into some sort of trouble? I don't imagine you did poorly in your grades, and from what I understand, this school's not much closer to your home. You're a pretty good student, right?”

I stopped walking and turned to him. “You know where I live, too?”

“It's not—”

“Rocket science. I know. Since you're asking so many questions about me, why were you homeschooled?” I fired back, hoping Kay's information was correct.

He shrugged. “We traveled a lot. It was just easier.”

“Why did you travel a lot?”

His eyes lit with laughter. “We were being chased.”

“What?”

He widened his smile. “We're all being pursued by something, aren't we?”

“Very funny. Where did you live before you came here? Why did you come here to this particular town in Massachusetts?”

“Why, why, why. You didn't get a job on the school newspaper and get assigned to interview new students or something, did you?” he asked.

“You're the one who sounded that way first,” I replied, my face heating up.

The testier I was with him, however, the more he seemed to enjoy it. His eyes brightened again, and his smile deepened. His teeth were as perfect as mine, his skin just as smooth and blemish-free. Any stranger looking at the two of us could think we were citizens of a future world, a world without illness and disease, a world in which people never lost their youth. I could imagine us paired to have perfect children, our sex the ultimate, the sweetest any man and woman could enjoy. We each would have the power to bring the other into those instant and delicious climaxes the girls were always joking about, assuring our world that we would produce children with flawless genes.

These thoughts changed the surge of heat in my cheeks to a blush accompanied by a tingling around my breasts. I raised my books higher, as if I had been caught half naked. Now I was the one feeling nervous in the presence of a boy, and for the first time, too.

“We'll have
to postpone the interview. I don't want to be late,” I said, turning sharply away from him and walking faster.

I thought he didn't like the abrupt way I had shut him down and deliberately lingered behind me, but he caught up when we were just about at the classroom door and gently put his hand on my left elbow so we would enter like a bride and groom at the altar.

“Touchy, touchy,” he said, bringing his lips so close to my ear I felt as if he had kissed me.

We were the last two to enter the classroom. Everyone was looking at us. The bell rang for class, so I hurried to my desk, forgetting until I sat that Cassie Marlowe had sat across from me in this class. Summer slipped into her seat, glanced at me with those exasperating laughing eyes, and opened his textbook to the exact page we had left off on yesterday, as if he had always been there.

Talk about a new student being prepared from the get-go, I thought. Again, I had the feeling that he could hear my thoughts. He leaned toward me, his eyes fixed on the front of the room as he tapped the page and said, “Peter Murphy clued me in.”

I looked back at Peter. He was his usual oblivious self, already reading ahead before the class even began. When did he talk to Peter? I wondered. Peter and Danny weren't part of the group of older boys I saw Summer talking with at lunch or in the hallways between classes. Someone must have told him that Peter was the brightest student in our class. At least he cared about his schoolwork. He wasn't all glamour and flash
and another one of those boys who saw school mainly as a playing field for sex and romance.

I desperately wanted to be less obvious about my interest in him and fought to find a comfortable indifference, but I couldn't help looking at him when he looked away. It was impossible to deny it. Yes, he was very good-looking and sexy, musically inclined, and apparently a good student all wrapped into one new boy. He was almost too good to be true, and that alone warned me to remain cautious.

My gaze drifted to Darlene and then to Ginny and Mia, who hid their infatuation with him as badly as they could hide their frustrations. They were all looking at me as if I had done something terrible to them, their eyes sending tiny darts toward me.

“What?” I mouthed.

They all looked away instantly.

Summer turned to me. I thought he had seen it all, but it was actually more than that. He seemed to understand not only how they felt but also how I felt, how troubled and wounded I was. I didn't want to lose my new friends for any reason, and certainly not over him. He shrugged and whispered, “Don't let them bother you. They'll get over it.”

I felt my heart stop and start. How could he be so tuned in to everything that happened around him, but more important, perhaps, everything that happened to me? His words of assurance and caution also implied that annoying self-confidence of his again. He had instantly concluded that they were upset because I was getting his attention instead of any one of them.
Arrogance could use him to sell conceit to humble monks, I thought.

The fear I had sensed when I had first seen him returned in waves. That confidence I had when confronting any other boy in this school was under siege. Where was that maturity, that balance and responsibility, that caused my new girlfriends to accuse me of being too old, more like a chaperone? For the first time, I felt vulnerable. Like anyone else, I could be manipulated, tempted, and drawn into doing things I shouldn't do. My parents' warnings now sounded like go-to-your-bomb-shelter alarms.

Get hold of yourself, Sage Healy
, I ordered myself.
Don't fall head over heels the first time you get a little attracted to someone.
A little? I nearly laughed aloud at the voice of caution within me.
I think this is already more than a little. Can't you feel the way your body trembles when you're near him? Can't you sense the rising tide of your own sexuality, making those erogenous places on your body tingle and demand the satisfaction that used to come only in fantasies?
I was drifting deeper and deeper into that part of me that defined me as an adult woman. I could sense nothing else. I actually forgot where I was, which almost got me in trouble for the first time.

My teachers were quite fond of me, because I was truly one of the most attentive students in their classes. When they needed someone to provide the answer to a question that would get us moving faster into the assignment, they always called on me. I could sense it was coming, and I was always prepared. So I was genuinely surprised
and shocked suddenly to see everyone looking at me, big smiles on their faces, especially the girls who always wanted me to stumble and be what they called “human.”

“Miss Healy,” Mr. Leshner was obviously repeating, perhaps for a third or fourth time. “Are you among the living today?”

The whole class laughed, except for Summer. He just smiled, but then he grew quickly serious, his eyes urging me to recuperate quickly.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Leshner. That was the Treaty of Versailles, ending the First World War on June 28, 1919, which ironically was exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Leshner said. “Exactly the answer I was hoping to get.”

Gleeful smiles fell like late-autumn leaves around me.

That is, except for the smile that blossomed on Summer's face. As if he was responsible for it, he seemed to be taking more pride in my quick and successful recuperation than I was. I looked down at my notebook and didn't raise my head again until the bell rang to end the class. Everyone rose almost before it had stopped ringing, just as they did every day at the end of the last class, to hurry out to after-school activities or their rides home. Our principal, Mrs. Greene, called it “something akin to rats deserting a sinking ship.”

Summer didn't even stand. He sat there, leaning back in his seat and looking forward, as if there was something still happening in the front of the room, something only he could see. After his long pensive
moment, he tapped his pen, put it in his shirt pocket, and closed his book. I hadn't moved. He wasn't surprised.