Sapphire: A Paranormal Romance (2 page)

A honk came from
outside.  This was followed shortly by a sound that was only slightly quieter
than a Howitzer shell going off in the living room.  George had arrived with
his car.  The engine settled into a low rattle as the car set about trying to
shake itself to pieces again. 

“Yo, Jimmy!” came
the bellow from the car. That could only have been George leaning out the
driver’s side window.  George was not known for being subtle.

“That sounds like
George,” Jesse said.

“Yeah, that’s
him,” Jimmy said.

There was a
pause.  It seemed like there was more to say, but anything else would have
crossed some line between them and that line was still held by Jimmy’s father,
even though he was gone. 

“You be careful
tonight, Jimmy,” Jesse said.  “Come by the library when you can and tell me all
about it or give me a call tomorrow.”

“I will,” Jimmy
said, and paused, then added. “Thanks for calling.”

“You bet,” Jesse
said.         

Then he was gone,
and Jimmy ran back to the bedroom.  His mother was there with her hands to her
throat in an unconscious anxious gesture she often did, looking as if maybe she
had been crying.  His mom appreciated how Jesse looked after him, but the pain
of losing his father was still there.  Jimmy smiled and gave her a kiss on the
cheek.  Another honk came from outside, so Jimmy had to move.

Jimmy tried to
move past his mother, but she grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him back
and looking him full in the face again.  She smiled, and, much to Jimmy’s
consternation, he saw tears swimming in her eyes.  She was about to give him
some sort of speech about how proud she was of him.  It would be similar to one
she had given him when he had first gotten the scholarship to attend Clark
University.

“Be careful,” she
said instead, her voice quavering.  “And have fun.”

Jimmy smiled. 
This time, he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.  He left quickly just
because he did not want to see her cry.  He ran down the hall and through the
living room. 

Jimmy bolted
through the door and heard it bang shut behind him. George was hanging out the
window of his car, his tuxedo jacket already tossed in the backseat.  He had a
huge grin on his face, his hair already wild and windblown from driving with
the window down. 

“Come on, the
party awaits!” he yelled in the rather odd way of speaking that George had and
that so marked him as an outsider, and leaned back into the car, reaching over
the passenger’s seat to unlock the door.

“What’s it waiting
for?” Jimmy asked as he opened the large, rusty door with a loud screeching
sound.

“Us, my man,”
George said as Jimmy planted his ass on the passenger seat and slammed the
door.  “It is waiting for us.”

Jimmy laughed. 
“You do live in an amazing fantasy world.”

George leaned
around the passenger seat to peer out the back window as he shifted into
reverse.  “You should move into my world, my friend,” he said.  “Plenty of
room, and the fun never stops.”

Jimmy laughed
again.  He thought that maybe it would be a night to remember, after all. Once
Jimmy was situated in the passenger seat, as often happened when he was with
George, Jimmy’s own form of speech slipped into the oddly formal way that
George spoke.

   “Then lead on,
sir,” he said. “Lead on!”

Driving
through Knorr was like having access to your own personal roller
coaster track.  For Jimmy and George, this was the route they took nearly every
day of their lives.  The high school was right next door to the grade school,
and they had been that way for as long as they could remember.  To an outsider,
however, the long and twisty roads that ran up and down steep hills with no
streetlights and forest and wilderness encroaching upon the road were a
white-knuckled thrill ride.  Most tourists bypassed places like Knorr.  They
stayed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and hurried to places like Pittsburgh or
farther east to places like Philadelphia, New Jersey, or New York. 

George drove like
a maniac.  Even to Jimmy, who had driven the roads many times and ridden in his
share of cars and buses, it was a bit too erratic.  He held on to the strap
above the passenger door several times and repeatedly stomped his right foot
down on an imaginary brake pedal.  George laughed each time he saw Jimmy’s
stomping and stepped harder on the gas.

“You have got to
lighten up,” he said.  “If we are to get any action tonight, you are going to
have to be a bit more fun than you usually are.”

“How the hell are
we going to get any action tonight or any night?” Jimmy said.  “In case you’ve
forgotten, everyone else at this dance is going with a date.  We are in the
bullpen with the losers who stand along the wall and watch.”

“Perish the
thought,” George said.  “Some fair young maiden will swoon before me before
this night is over. Mark my words.  Maidenhoods shall be taken tonight!”

Jimmy rolled his
eyes.  “Yeah, because girls our age really dig guys who use words like that.”

George laughed and
reached into the back seat to a spot behind Jimmy.  He rummaged for a second
and then pulled his hand back.  In his right hand he held a silver flask.

“What the hell is
that?” Jimmy asked.

“Find out,” George
said.

Jimmy sighed and
took the flask.  He unscrewed the cap and took a whiff.  Whatever it was, it
was powerful enough to curl the hairs in his nose.  He immediately drew back
and coughed.

“Jesus!” he said.

“I bring something
more than my fancy-ass words,” George said.

“You are going to
get in so much trouble if you get caught bringing booze into the prom,” Jimmy
said as he handed the flask back.  George immediately deposited it into the
pants of his ill-fitting tuxedo. 

“We are the best
people to be bringing in contraband,” George said.  “We are the good kids.  No
one will suspect us.”

“You sure are some
master criminal,” Jimmy said.

They rounded a
bend, and the wheels of the car crunched on the gravel near the edge of the
road.  The trees seemed to be reaching for them.  Up ahead was a short bridge
that narrowed the two lanes.  It was a long bridge that stretched across a huge
gap.  At the bottom of that gap was a river that, to the untrained and
unknowing eye, looked lazy, but really had a vicious current.

“Hey, what’s
that?” Jimmy said, pointing and leaning forward.

“Huh?” George
replied, his eccentric way of speaking lost for the moment.

“There, dumb-ass,”
Jimmy said, pointing more vehemently.  “By the side of the road, near the bridge.”

It was just a
shadow.  The sun had set below the trees and the hills.  Although the sky above
them was still a shade of blue, it was a deepening shade.  When you lived among
these hills, night came fast.  However, there was definitely a shadow moving on
the side of the road.

Jimmy’s heart
began to pound in his chest.  It felt like someone had reached into his chest
and was physically manipulating his heart.  In the deepest recesses of his
stomach, he felt butterflies.  The tips of his toes tingled in the
uncomfortable shoes his mother had bought for him.  His palms began to sweat.

“Is that a
person?” George said, and actually, finally, took his foot off the gas.  “Who
the hell would be dumb enough to walk along the side of this road?”

Jimmy shook his head. 
He opened his mouth to say something, but his mouth was suddenly as dry as
sand. 

The figure came
into sharper focus.  It was, indeed, a person.  Whoever it was, the person was
walking toward them.  As they drew closer, it became obvious that the person
was female.  She walked slowly, as if she were just going for a pleasant
stroll. 

“It’s a girl,”
George said.

Jimmy nodded. 
“Pull over.”

George gaped at
him.  “Why?”

“What if she’s
been in accident and needs help?” Jimmy asked.

George didn’t have
a response to that one.  He talked a lot, but George was basically a good guy. 
He shrugged and veered the car to the shoulder.  The girl came fully into view
as the headlights hit her and they could now make out the details of her
appearance.

She was a little
shorter than Jimmy.  Her skin was pale and flawless, from what Jimmy could
tell.  Her hair was brown and cascaded down around her shoulders.  She had a
small and straight nose that was positioned perfectly above her little bow of a
mouth.  She wore a fancy blue dress that came down to just above her knee.  On
her feet were blue shoes.  When the car pulled over to her, her head came up
from studying the ground at her feet and her eyes met Jimmy’s.  His breath
caught in his throat.  Her eyes were the most intense green he had ever seen. 
A hint of a smile creased her expression.

Jimmy was hardly a
guy who could pick up girls easily.  For the most part, the female creature
might as well have been from another planet, as far as Jimmy was concerned. 
Women had animated discussions that made no sense to him.  There were enclaves
around town where the girls and women gathered, and Jimmy tried to look at them
as he walked past without really looking.  For example, the little shop in
downtown Knorr where the women got their fingernails and toenails done.  He
would walk past the shop and try to peek in for an instant.  All of those colorful
little bottles lined up in rows on the wall, chairs attached to basins, the
whirling noise of a rotary tool, and smells were weird, and it was like he was
peering at some alien life form on an examination table.  With that big of a
gulf between where Jimmy was and girls were, he found himself incapable of
anything more than the most basic communication.

Something in his
chest was hammering like a caffeinated carpenter.  He realized it was his
heart.  He had never felt like this before.  He wondered, for just a moment, if
he was having a heart attack.  Before he even realized he was doing it, as if
pulled by invisible strings that emanated from the top of his head through the
roof of the car and into the endless void above, he was rolling down his window
and leaning out.  A moment later he was climbing out of the car.  George made a
surprised noise he could hear easily over the rattling din of the engine.

“Hey, there,”
Jimmy said, immediately wishing he had come up with some sort of better line
than that.  “Where are you headed?”

She smiled wider
and then looked down again.  Jimmy had a moment of fear when he thought sure
for sure that she was going to laugh at him.  He realized he had not taken his
ill-fitting tuxedo jacket off and his shirtsleeves were evident.

“I was headed to a
dance,” she said quietly.  “I think I got turned around.”

“You’re not from
around here, are you?”  Jimmy said, and then muttered a curse to himself under
his breath.  Had he learned to talk to women from some book called
1,001
Clichéd Things to Say to a Woman
?

She shook her head
and her hair danced across her shoulders.  “No, not from this part of town,
anyway.”

Jimmy nodded. 
Then, he realized that the moment he always feared would happen when he spoke
to a woman had arrived.  He had no idea what to say next.

“We’re headed to
Knorr High School for the prom,” George said.  Jimmy actually jumped.  He
hadn’t realized that George was leaning out of the car, as well.

Jimmy nodded,
feeling a sudden pang of jealousy and competitiveness with George he had never
felt before.  “Yeah,” he said, “want to come with us?”

He looked over at
George.  George’s eyes were wide and his mouth was gaping. 

“Sure,” said the
girl.  “A dance is a dance, right?”

Jimmy laughed a
lot harder than he intended and the joke warranted.  Then he opened the door
and got out of the car.  The car was a true boat of a vehicle, and the front
seat could easily seat three people.  He didn’t know why he wanted her to sit
up there with them, but he suddenly had a very powerful urge to make sure she
did not slip out of sight.

“Your chariot,”
Jimmy said, and did an awkward little bow.  Again, he figured this would be the
point where she would burst out laughing.  She did laugh, but not in a way that
indicated he was being made fun of.  It was a genuine laugh, and it reminded
him of wind chimes on a summer day. 
Good Lord
, he thought,
I’m even
starting to
think
in clichés now
.

She walked to the
car door and the gravel crunched beneath her feet.  The blue dress brushed
against her legs.  She made a curtsy at Jimmy and then climbed into the car. 
She slid into the middle of the seat and adjusted her dress so not too much of
her legs were showing.  Jimmy found himself staring at her for a moment, and
then shook his head and got in.  He slammed the door.

“So, um,” George
said, still hanging out the driver’s side door, “I guess we’re going to the
dance as a threesome.”