Silent Song (Ghostly Rhapsody) (2 page)

Only problem, he was my smoking-hot friend. Period.

Anna saw my lost-puppy look. With a sigh, she grabbed my elbow and steered us to our lockers. I dropped my stuff and then we moved arm in arm toward Lit class.

“You don’t have to like him just because everyone else does,” she said, breaking the silence. “I just thought you did and kind of left you two alone…”

“Hey, you did what any best friend should. I do like him, too.” I needed to hear that aloud. Maybe then my thick brain would remember it when the next opportunity arose. Maybe then if I said it often enough, loud enough, I’d manage to think of him that way. 

She glanced at me sideways and a small, knowing smile quirked up a corner of her lips. She didn’t buy my claim any more than I did.

“If you did, you’d have jumped his bones when you got the chance. But never mind,” she added when we arrived and a couple of other girls paid a bit too much attention to us. “Let’s go face our doom now and leave all the dirty gossip for later. The light at the end of the tunnel!”

I had to laugh at her sudden melodrama. She was such a drama queen. But the thing was, she always knew what to say and I sank down in the chair by her side.

“It’s not doom; it’s just Hawthorne.”

“Same difference.” She waved her hand airily and I tried to hold back my chuckles when Mr. Hedford started his lecture.

I wanted to pay attention, but Anna shoved a pink notebook under my nose after giving my elbow a sharp nudge. I thought we were too old to pass notes around, but that never stopped me from replying to whatever messages I got.

There’s going to be a party this weekend at Lena’s. You are coming, right?
it read in bright pink ink.

The word
are
was underlined twice, and Anna had nearly pierced through the page in her insistence.

I wrote back,
yes
, and then bit my lip and scratched it out.

Can’t,
I scribbled and passed the notebook back across to her.

She frowned.

You’re grounded.

No question mark. I hesitated and she retrieved the notebook.

You walked home and you were late and then you got grounded.
She pushed the page back to me.

With her blond, shining hair and wide, innocent eyes, Anna could have fooled anyone, but in truth, she was very observant. And very smart. Which meant that she knew the lounge we’d been at wasn’t far enough from my place to explain my tardiness away.

I drummed my fingers on the desk while thinking of an excuse that didn’t sound like one: It was a weekday; my folks didn’t want me going out in the first place; a strange alignment of the stars with Uranus precluded me from having a social life… Anything except admitting that I had been crouched in a yard with more mud than grass while the hours slipped by.

Mud? That’s it!

Ruined my jacket,
I wrote.
Mom says it’s because I’m spoiled.
For good measure, I lifted my gaze heavenwards when I passed back the note, but the explanation felt likely.

Anna huffed, but didn’t reply. Me destroying stuff, fashion stuff in particular, was a common enough occurrence that it didn’t pique her curiosity at all.

As a matter of fact, the best lies, and the best excuses, came with a sprinkle of truth in them. The spoiled comments came up regularly at my place. Mom complained about it more often than Dad. She said that I never valued what I had, that I didn’t know what it was to want something, and that I had to take better care of what I did have because not everything could be replaced. And if either she or Dad had seen my shoes before I took them off at the door to creep up the stairs yesterday night, they’d have grounded me for real on the basis of carelessness.

The stiletto heels had been caked with mud and one of them had gotten scuffed in the bushes. Later, I had been able to clean them almost back to new, and no one would’ve guessed it looking at them now, but the sight of the shoes right after I had left the yard had been hideous. I sneaked a satisfied peek at them under the table, proud of my work.

The bell went off right then and I jumped out of my skin, bumping a knee against the table.

Ouch.

Someone snickered behind me and I threw a glare in their general direction, just in case. Anna laughed outright, but she was my friend. She had privileges.

“You can still attend your after-school activities, right?” she asked me on the way to the cafeteria.

I nodded. “Yeah. It’s just the social life that’s threatened.”

“Cheer up, then! We’ll just goof around in theater instead of at the ice cream parlor. What’s the difference?”

“Mr. Hedford!” both of us said in perfect unison before breaking into a fit of giggles.

He was our theater director as well as our Lit teacher and he would not, under any circumstances, be invited to come to the parlor.

When we arrived at our lunch table, everyone else already sat there. Seeing Dave’s shock of red hair made me wince and I tried to stop Anna.

“Wait, wait, wait! What am I supposed to do now?”

“Do?” She shrugged and her wicked smile belied the innocent expression she tried to present. “Nothing! You hadn’t even realized you’d turned him down. Act as if you hadn’t been enlightened yet.” And she sauntered off, waving.

“Rayyy!” She barreled into her boyfriend with as much force as she had barreled into me that morning, but he didn’t wince. He wrapped an arm around her waist and guided her into a mock dip before swirling her around.

The pair of them was obnoxious, but kind of cute together and the rest of the gang “awwed” and cooed at their antics.

Then, before Anna completed her twirl, I saw it coming and called out, “Watch it!”

Of course, too late.

Anna’s head collided against the tray of our resident freak and all hell broke loose.

The tray went flying one way. The dishes went in the opposite direction. And the contents splattered about like a hand grenade. Girls squealed and ducked for cover, trying to avoid the rain of soup and vegetables of the day’s menu.

I could afford to be classier and just take a step back, without the screaming. I wasn’t in the disaster zone.

The guy just stood there, frozen, his hands still holding air where his tray had been, his front soaked with soup and his eyes fixed on his feet. Ray, in contrast, became a blur of motion.

“Damn it, idiot! Can’t you look where you’re going?” He turned to Anna, still glaring daggers at the culprit. “Hey, babe, you alright?”

She looked dazed. Reaching up, she checked her head for bumps and her clothes for stains. Then, she shrugged and went back to normal.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Ray delivered her to Dave for safekeeping and turned back to the immobile guy like a predator on a rabbit. I took the chance to rush to Anna’s side and see with my own eyes that she was okay. Lena already hovered over her and kept throwing nasty glances at the two guys.

“I get that you’re worthless,” Ray snarled, “but at least you could try not to be a bother!”

His words were too soft for what I had expected. It hadn’t been any random guy messing up our area and his girlfriend, but
him
. Keith. You know the saying about the black sheep? Keith wasn’t ours. He wasn’t even part of the herd.

“Did you hear me?”

“I’m sorry,” the weirdo replied after a moment of silence.

His voice came out raspy, probably from disuse, but still it surprised me. It was deep, and he was a wisp of a kid. I mean, he was on the average-height side, but so skinny that I expected him to sound like a child or something. Not like that. Not more manly than the huge bulk of Ray bearing down on him, anyway.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, finally lifting his eyes from the floor and darting his gaze from Ray to Anna. I didn’t know how he could see anything past that curtain of hair in his face, but he seemed relieved at her neutral expression. “I didn’t see you.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine.” Anna dismissed his apology with a flicker of her hand and smiled a little, though she didn’t aim it at him.

“I’m glad. I’m going to pick up this mess now,” he said, looking back to Ray, as if he had to justify his movements or else be jumped by a wild beast.

“You do that.” Without a backward glance, Ray came back to the table and claimed his spot by Anna’s side, hugging her protectively.

Keith reappeared a moment later with a bucket and a handful of paper towels, but we didn’t deign to give him a glance. He knelt at our feet and fixed the disaster in silence, his expression hidden by that black curtain with silver streaks. We ate and chatted about the upcoming party, the best new movies, how our football team would sail through the next match and what this year’s theatre project would be.

We chatted and laughed, and I was very careful not to look at him, not to stare at his black-nailed fingers, and definitely most careful not to wonder about what those fingers were capable of at night, dancing along the neck of a guitar.

We just ate and ignored him and during the meal, no one mentioned that Ray had swirled Anna way too fast for Keith to react in time or that the soup soaking up his awful black tee must have burnt him. 

After the lunch break, Ray unglued himself from Anna and headed off for football practice. Lena also hung back for a while, exchanging smiles with him and, more importantly, with some of his buddies. A new school year required hunting for new prey, I guessed. It would make her late for her own extracurricular activity, but hey, if those were her priorities…

I turned back to mind my business and leave her to hers and was startled at the proximity of a smiling Dave. Call me coward, but as Anna had suggested, I acted as if nothing at all had happened between us.

“Which play do you think we’ll pick for this semester?” he asked.

“I hope it’s not another Shakespeare. I like the guy, but there’s just so many times I can recite his lines before it gets old. What about you?”

“Don’t worry. I think Mr. Hedford is done with that Elizabethan frenzy he caught in seventh grade.”

“About time!” Anna chimed in. “Took him what, five years?”

“So what’s the new fancy?” I asked.

“No idea.” Dave opened the door for us girls and then followed to our usual place. “I heard he wanted to do something more… modern.”

“Cats!”

Dave and I, no, the whole classroom, turned to look at Anna.

“No. Way.” I enunciated slowly to make sure she understood what I felt about her suggestion.

She poked me as soon as everybody’s attention slipped back to their own conversations. “You’d be cute with whiskers,” she said. “Don’t you think, Dave?”

He ducked his head and smiled, poor thing. “Alice’s cute in anything she wears.”

“What if she doesn’t wear anything, then?” She wiggled her eyebrows.

“Guys,” I said, a bit more forcefully than I wanted to. “Stop talking like I’m not here.”

Both of them said they were sorry. Only one of them looked repentant.

I aimed a kick at Anna’s shin under the table and she just giggled.

“Oscar Wilde,” a booming voice claimed without preambles, and we turned to see the rest of the theater club members in silence and Mr. Hedford brandishing an old, musty copy of… something.

“What about him?” mumbled Anna.

The professor—doubling as director—sent her a warning glance that somehow managed to catch me as well, even though I had done nothing wrong at all, and then waved his book. Booklet. Whatever.

“This year, the St. Francis theater group will represent one of the most significant works of the acclaimed genius that is Oscar Wilde.”

Dave leaned a bit to the side and whispered, “He makes us sound like big shots.”

I gave him a mock haughty look. “We are big shots.” That got me a smile and damn it, but the guy was considered handsome for a reason. With some effort, I brought myself back to the discussion and forgot about his dimples and pretty, laughing eyes.

“It is the third of his great opuses, but the first for which he gained recognition. Imagine it—he earned more than seven thousand sterling pounds during the first year on stage through royalties! This play, ladies and gentlemen, was a riot. Of course, I know that you would expect any work by Wilde to be ground shaking. I dare say you will not be disappointed.” He grabbed a stack of booklets, in way better condition than his own, and handed them over to Lena. “Ms. Brighton, please give a copy to each of your classmates.”

She did, taking her sweet time. When it was our turn, I leafed through, hoping that the title would ring a bell.

Lady Windermere’s Fan.

It didn’t.

Glancing around, I saw Anna’s deep frown and Dave’s quizzical expression and breathed a sigh of relief. At least I wasn’t alone in my ignorance.

“Professor,” said a nice enough girl who always spoke with a dreamy voice impossible to hear from the last row of seats in class, whose name I never could remember. “I’m familiar with this play. Will it be okay for the board’s standards?”