Scary Cool (The Spellspinners) (25 page)

I don’t think she even heard me. She was too busy freaking out about Alvin asking her to Homecoming without any magical push making him do it. But that was just as
well. I didn’t want Meg caught in the middle of
any
Alvin-Zara showdown, so the less she knew about it, the better.

Finally I said, “Let’s go. T
he boys will think we fell in.”

I didn’t even tell her about my first kiss.
I figured it could wait.

If anyone had told me that my first kiss would seem this unimportant when it finally happened, I wouldn’t have
believed them. I’ve been obsessing about it for at least the past year and a half.

I
guess all things are relative. Nothing
Tres
did could affect me half as much as seeing Lance and Cheryl together had done. And when Meg and I pushed through the swinging door of the girls’ room, back out to the wide, crowded hall where the boys waited, I
saw Lance
again
—leaning in to hear something Cheryl was saying, with his hand still on the small of her back—
and a fresh jolt of pain hit me.

This time, Meg saw them too. Her fingers closed convulsively on my arm. “Holy cow, Zara—look at that!”

“I know,” I said unhappily. “Try not to leave a mark, okay?”

“Sorry.” She removed her hand. But her eyes were still huge
behind her ugly glasses
. “I thought you and Lance were—well, never mind what I thought. I guess I was wrong.”

I took a deep breath and tried to smile. “Happens to the best of us. Come on.”
I shoved my way through the crowd to
Tres’s
side. Meg’s
gaze
was still
on me, filled with doubt and concern, but when she reached Alvin her focus shifted. Her cheeks turned a becoming shade of pink and her eyes started to sparkle.

I tried not to mind. It’s only natural, after all. Once a boy enters the picture, the best friend is no longer the be-all and end-all of existence, right?

It probably wouldn’t have hurt a bit, if I hadn’t already been hurting.

I reached for Lance’s mind, trying to pick up a whisper of thought or, at the very least, sense what he was feeling. I got back nothing but silence. He was as opaque to me as the sticks
that surrounded
us.

I’ve never felt so alone in my life.

After we got our picture taken, we
entered
the Cherry Glen High gymnasium
through a
decorated
arch
like we were walking into a real ballroom.
If I hadn’t been so miserable, I
might
have said “wow.”

The homely old gym was
almost
unrecognizable
.
It’s amazing what colored lights, loud music and streams of crepe paper can do to a room you’ve seen practically every day for years. The same might be said for my classmates. I mean, they weren’t wearing crepe paper (as far as I could tell), but
none of them
were wearing their everyday clothes—
and most
had their hair done differently.
Also, of course, I had never seen any of them dance.
If you s
hine some colored lights on a person with a new hairdo
and put them in motion,
they become unrecognizable. Almost.

Which may be why it took a
while
for me to realize there were a lot of people in the room I’d never seen before.

Tres
pulled me toward a knot of young men I didn’t
know
. They seemed to be friends of his from church, or maybe last year’s graduates. They entered into one of those “guy” rituals of chin jerks, arm punches and high-pitched laughter.
Tres’s
body language was all possessive and protective as he pulled me in to introduce me; he was clearly showing me off. I wasn’t sure whether I should feel annoyed, embarrassed or flattered. It didn’t matter; I had other things on my mind. Lots of other things.

I was upset about Lance going out of his way to hurt me. And Cheryl dating Lance. And
Tres
going all macho on me.
And Alvin expecting me to teach him how to teleport.
My emotions were way, way out of control. But there was something else going on, too …something I couldn’t quite identify. The atmosphere was thick with secrets. They
curled
in the air
like smoke and pulsed in the music
.

“Who are all these people?” I asked
Tres
. I had to lean in and shout
over the noise
. “Some of them look
kinda
old for a high school dance.”

He looked amus
ed. “
It’s Homecoming, remember?
Not just for high
schoolers
.
”

I had no opportunity to stop and analyze it.
Tres
threaded me through a throng of gyrating couples and I had to concentrate on what was happening in my immediate vicinity. I had to dance, little as the idea appealed to me. That was what I’d come here to do, right? Be with my peers. Dress up, go out, get together, dance.
Experience high school.

Too bad a large part of the
high school experience involves
emotional trauma. I was getting that
tonight
, too.
In spades.

While
dancing, my main goal was to
blend in with the crowd. This is always difficult for a
spellspinner
, no matter what we’re doing, and dancing was no exception. It was hard to find the sweet spot between looking like an idiot and looking too good. I couldn’t help watching Lance and Cheryl out of the corner of my eye, and whenever they swept into view it was clear that Lance did not share my fade-into-the-wallpaper instincts. His moves were subtle but gorgeous as he effortlessly steered Cheryl around in a complicated way that most boys would never dare attempt. She looked dazzled.

I was not having fun.

And there was something about all the strange faces in the room that made me uneasy. Was it my imagination, or were several of them watching me? Not all of them, of course. There was a plump
middle-aged
couple who seemed to be having the time of their lives, whooping it up on the dance floor.
They were okay. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that some of the adults in the room looked a little too tense, a little too shifty-eyed.

A
little too much like me, frankly. I bet I looked tense and shifty-eyed too.

The music pounded. The lights swirled. I couldn’t see what was happening through the crowd.
Fear prickled along my skin; I sensed danger and couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
This is not my favorite way to feel.
Eventually
Tres
picked up on it. He leaned toward me, shouting
, “Are you okay?”

I couldn’t think how to answer. “Could we sit down for a minute?” I shouted back.

“Sure.” He reached for me. Took my hand. Started muscling his way through the mob, leading me to the side of the room, which was lined with round tables and chairs. And the oddest thing happened:
Just as we reached the edge of the dance floor,
Tres’s
hand disappeared.

Startled, I glanced down. His
fingers were still laced through
mine. I just couldn’t feel them anymore.

A peculiar sensation, like a chill, had started at my fingertips and
was crawling up both arms, leaving numbness in its wake.
I had barely registered this fact before
the floor disappeared
. Emitting a startled gasp, I looked down again
,
and again saw nothing wrong—my eyes told me that my feet were touching the gym’s thickly-waxed
hardwood floor—
but I could no longer feel it.

It was terrifying.

These thoughts flashed through my mind:
Am I sick
?
I’ve never been sick.
Spellspinners
don’t even get
zit
s, let alone the flu, so this would be a first.
Am I
about
to faint?

I looked around wildly. The music’s thump sounded distorted.
Tres
was staring at me like I’d just sprouted horns. Perhaps I had; anything seemed possible. He was shouting something, but I couldn’t make out his words. Other people turned as
Tres
shouted, and when they saw me they stopped dancing and stared, too. Some started backing away. I saw one girl scream, but I couldn’t hear her.

I was disappearing.

I realized it when
Tres
let go of my hand—or did it just float through his like a ghost?—and I tried to grab his sleeve. I saw my arm. It was
fading
. I don’t know how else to describe it. I was, somehow, less opaque than a
normal
person should be. Not transparent—not yet. But visibly heading in that direction.

And surrounding me—at a distance, but closing in
through the crowd
—was a ring of seven
spellspinners
. I recognized only Lance, Amber and Rune, but the
re were four more—
strangers to me, pinning me with their glowing eyes and holding me helpless in a net of magic
.

Could I have broken through it to summon Power of my own? I don’t know; the ambush scattered my wits with fear.

Terror
simultaneously sharpen
ed
my focus and paralyze
d
me. Time slowed to a crawl.
I saw Meg and Alvin on the other side of the gym, so into each other that they were oblivious to what was going on
with
me. I saw Cheryl
Sivic
standing stock still with her mouth open. She looked furious; what was that about? Ah, yes. Lance must have been mid-dance with her when he turned and started walking away. To
ward me.

And
Cheryl
hadn’t noticed I was turning invisible
—because
to Cheryl, I had always been invisible.

How o
dd that in a moment like this, that thought could hurt so much.

It was happening fast, but somehow I had time to notice and think all these things while I faded.
I
even had time to wonder whether, in the end, I
would
wink out
and be gone,
like
a blown-out match…or
would my disappearance be
more like turning off a radio, with my signal still beaming out as strong as ever, but nobody able to
hear it anymore?

I
felt all
seven of the
spellspinner
minds that were focused on me. I could sense each one
individually
. Rune, troubled and reluctant
, filled with regret as he acted
. Amber, gloating. Four
strangers who were taking the battle
much less personally; each
one
of them was determined to see it through but they were all afraid, to varying degrees.
And Lance.

Lance.

The wall between us was gone. It had to be, for him to join with the others and do this. His mind was forced to reach for mine, so I reached back, groping frantically for the one
spellspinner
who had ever been an ally. My teacher, my torment, my sometime-crush.
My soul’s other half
.
Lance
.

And he couldn’t keep me out. I
slipped right into his brain and merged
my consciousness with his. It was a desperate move, but desperate is exactly what I was.

The sheer weight, the complexity, of what was going on
with him
was crushing. I felt myself stagger beneath it, struggling to breathe.
He was not wholehearted about this night’s work—no, indeed. I caught that right away, and clu
ng to it, hope flooding me
as I perceived the complicated depths of Lance’s anguish. An anguish that was completely invisible on the surface, but was there, all the
same, and so strong I actually pitied him.

Pitied Lance! When
I
was the one
thrashing around
in the net—and he had helped to put me there!

But this is the screwy thing about
wholesoul
. It messes you up, to really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head.