The Veil (4 page)

In my sudden rush to exchange my math materials for my Spanish ones, I somehow managed to drop my one and only pen behind the row of books at the bottom of my locker.

With a sigh, I reached my right hand back as far as it would go into the depths of the rusty metal rectangle. It wasn’t far enough, so I hunched over even more and, bracing myself against the side of the locker with my left hand, jammed my arm still farther into the abyss, straining to reach the floor on the other side of my books.

And that was the position I was in, crouched awkwardly on the ground with my right arm thrust into my locker up to the shoulder and my face squished against the top of the door frame, when I heard it.

“Hello.”

I froze, just as my fingers closed around the pen.

It was a voice I had heard many times—answering questions when called on in class, speaking casually to Emily—but it was never a voice that had been directed at me before.

I’m not quite sure how I knew he was speaking to me then. I wasn’t looking in his direction, and he could have easily been talking to any one of the dozen people walking through the hallway behind me. But he wasn’t speaking to them; he was speaking to me. I knew this with a strange, alien sense of certainty that felt very out of place inside of my usually skeptical head.

Almost as though it was out of my control, my head panned slowly up and to the left, in the direction of the voice.

Lucas Stratton’s green eyes were peering down at me, around the side of Emily’s locker.

“Hello,” I said back, dropping my eyes automatically until I was staring intently at the concrete floor, midway between where he and Emily were standing and I was kneeling. The fingers of my right hand clenched around my recovered pen like it was a live grenade that would detonate upon dropping. I could feel myself starting to sweat.

I’m not going to lie; I’d had a few fantasies about how my first, official conversation with Lucas Stratton would start. But not a single one of them included him catching me trying to crawl inside my own locker (especially on the day I had a giant coffee stain down my back), immediately after I’d just vomited, and not too long after I’d brought our first period class to a screeching halt with a public hallucination.

No, this was definitely not how I’d pictured it.

Needless to say, I couldn’t bring myself to look up at him again. Instead, I slowly pulled my arm out of my locker and forced my fingers to uncurl themselves and drop the pen. That seemed to go okay, but I could still feel him peering down at me. Instead of returning his gaze, I dragged my eyes up from the pavement and, ever so cautiously, up the front of the three lockers between mine and Emily’s.

As soon as my gaze fell on Emily’s open locker door, her head appeared around the side, eyes hard and ready to do battle with whatever had snatched Lucas’s attention away from her. But when she saw it was me—just me, nothing like the threat she had been expecting—her face relaxed into a bored, half smile.

“Oh, hey, Addy,” she said. Then she frowned again, but only slightly. “Did you just move lockers or something?”

“No,” I replied, very carefully keeping my eyes on the side of her face; an inch to the left, and they would find Lucas, and then I would hyperventilate and die. “I’ve had this locker since the beginning of the year.”

“Oh.” Then, as though to make up for the fact that she had been oblivious to the proximity of our lockers for the past two
months, she prattled on conversationally. “So, did you and Nate go to homecoming together?”

“What?” I asked. Even without looking at him, I could tell Lucas was
still
staring at me from the other side of Emily; his gaze was distracting, but it didn’t keep me from registering there was something odd about her last question. The homecoming dance had been two weeks ago; Nate, Olivia, and I had spent the evening in Olivia’s basement, watching
And Then There Were None
so Olivia could channel Agatha Christie and put the finishing touches on her own whodunit script. Actually going to the dance hadn’t occurred to any us.

“You know, homecoming?” Emily prompted me when I continued to stare at her blankly. “I didn’t see you there, but you went with Nate, right?”

The assumption behind Emily’s question suddenly hit me, in spite of Lucas’s ability to short circuit my brain.

“Nate? Why would I go to a dance with Nate?”

“Oh,” Emily said again, looking embarrassed. “I just thought . . . I mean, you guys are always together, so I thought—”

“ . . . that we were a couple?” I finished for her. The absurdity of the thought finally shook me out of my stupor. I shoved my precalc book into my locker and began fumbling around for my Spanish text.

“Hey, I’m not the only one!” Emily said defensively. “A lot of people think you guys are together, don’t they Luc?”

She looked appealingly at him. He was still watching me, and I was beginning to wish it really was possible to crawl all of the way inside of my locker.

“Luc,” Emily said, after a long moment had gone by and he had said nothing. She raised her voice, obviously annoyed at having to repeat herself. “Don’t people think Addy and Nathan Whitting are together?”

“Hmmmm,” he said noncommittally. His eyes never left me.

With a sudden flash of annoyance—didn’t he know it was
rude to stare, even at people whose spontaneous mental problems had just recently manifested themselves before his very eyes?—I grabbed the first book I could snatch up and slammed my locker door shut. “Nate and I are just friends,” I told Emily, stuffing the book into my bag without looking at the cover. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get out of there. “We’ve been friends for a long time.”

“I know,” Emily replied. “That’s why I thought . . . oh, never mind.” She closed her locker with an exasperated sigh and turned away from me.

I flung my bag over my shoulder and got to my feet, turning in the direction of Spanish class.

“Goodbye,” came Lucas’s voice from behind me.

I turned back around and this time I stared directly into his eyes, the same way he’d been inexplicably staring at me all morning. His body was relaxed, still leaning against the row of lockers, and there was a mild, pleasant expression carved into his flawless face.

But his eyes—you know when people say they can practically see the wheels turning inside someone’s head? Well, that’s exactly what I saw in Lucas Stratton’s unbelievably gorgeous eyes just then. His wheels were going a mile a minute.

And it was something about me that had gotten them turning.

“Bye,” I said curtly. Ripping my eyes away, I marched toward Spanish.

——

Somehow, even after the episode at my locker, I managed to make it to Spanish on time. I did not, however, manage to get my Spanish book there with me; the book I had hurriedly grabbed out of my locker turned out to be my AP U.S. history text. There was no hiding my mistake from the notoriously detention-happy Señora Castigo, but I managed to talk her into forgiving my uncharacteristic infraction, just this one time.

Later, I also managed to keep my lunch down, and I saw no more frogs. The only cats I saw were the cougar mascots on the
many posters, reminding us of tomorrow’s game against Sonoma.

Lucas continued to stare at me strangely whenever we were in the same room. But thankfully I sat behind him in the two other classes we shared, and I only had to put up with his strange glances at the very beginning and end of both periods. At least he seemed to be the only one staring—everyone else appeared to have forgotten my little freak-out in math class and had moved on to gossiping about more interesting things.

By the time I met Nate and Olivia in front of the school auditorium for the tech crew meeting, I’d managed to convince myself that Lucas’s disturbing, newfound fascination with me was only payback for the two months I’d spent doing nothing but stare at him. Fair enough. Let him get back at me. Let him think I was crazy. What did I care?

I was amazed to discover I
didn’t
care. If it took a day of seeing weird things and one vomiting incident to break the crazy spell he had over me, that was fine. I was cured. I was free! It was definitely worth it.

The thought put me in such a good mood that when Mrs. Grimsby, our surly and generally unpleasant drama teacher, asked for a volunteer to be prop master, I immediately raised my hand. She pursed her sourpuss lips in my direction, handed me a rehearsal schedule, and promptly declared the tech crew meeting to be over.

“This is better than I thought,” Nate said, examining the schedule as we walked through the nearly deserted school parking lot toward my car. Olivia had stayed behind to ask Mrs. Grimsby something about tomorrow’s rehearsal, after reminding us both we needed to leave my house that night by half past six
at the absolute latest.
“Olivia made it sound like stage manager was such a big deal, but it says here I only have to go to three rehearsals, plus the three performances. That’s nothing.”

“Well, there’s not much technical stuff to Olivia’s play,” I explained. “It’s an old-fashioned whodunit. There’s only one set,
and we don’t even have to build it. College of Marin is lending us the living room set they used when they did
Arsenic and Old Lace
last fall.”

“Yeah, hopefully the spring play will be more of a challenge.” Nate let himself into the front passenger side of my car. “Do you think you could drive me to rehearsal tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

I dropped him off at Sully’s, and he reminded me once again that he and Olivia would swing by my house at six thirty.

“Hey, Addy,” he said, lingering beside my car door. “You’re okay, right? Terrance Seaver was telling everyone about math class this morning—”

“I’m fine,” I told him, trying to infuse conviction into my voice. It wasn’t too hard; I
did
feel fine.

He seemed convinced. He gave me his trademark wave and walked through the door of Sully’s.

——

At home, there was an amazing smell coming from the kitchen. I followed my nose through the living room, solemnly greeting the five or six cats lounging on various surfaces.

Gran came through the swinging kitchen door to greet me. “It’s the birthday girl!”

Unlike me, Gran has most definitely not lost her accent; she still speaks exactly like the actors who portray English royalty in movies. But no stuck-up member of the English aristocracy would have dropped her oven mitts on the ground and wrapped me up in a heartfelt hug the way Gran did just then.

“You’re strong!” I gasped.

She laughed, released me, and lifted her right arm into a bodybuilder pose. She patted her bicep, which was invisible inside the puffy sleeves of her blouse. “Not bad for a seventy-five-year-old,” she said.

“What’s all this?” I asked, gesturing to the dining room table behind her. Between the two place settings, there was a giant bowl
of homemade gnocchi (covered in what I was willing to bet was my favorite, spicy tomato sauce), a salad with mounds of goat cheese on top, and a huge layer cake with chocolate frosting.

“Didn’t you get my note this morning?” She pulled out one of chairs and gestured for me to sit.

I obeyed; the combination of smells coming from the meal was downright intoxicating, and I could feel my mouth starting to water. “Yes, I did. Thanks for the rose.”

There was a loud
ding
from behind the closed kitchen doors.

I got halfway out of my seat. “Let me—”

“No, no.” Gran patted my shoulder and placed herself between my chair and the kitchen. She was still smiling, but suddenly she was standing in front of the kitchen door in much the same way guards stand in front of bank vaults. I wasn’t surprised. In all of our years together, Gran had never once allowed me to help her out in the kitchen. In fact, she was so private about her cooking she rarely let me even be in the room with her when she was working.

Gran disappeared behind the door, and I barely had time to settle myself back in my seat before she returned, holding a tray of buttery garlic bread. “I know it’s a bit early for dinner,” she said, putting the bread on the table and taking the seat across from me, “but I thought you’d like some real food before you go out to celebrate with your friends. I assume you’re leaving early?”

“Yup,” I leaned back so I could see the clock over the mantle. “In about an hour. Your timing is perfect!”

“Let’s eat then.”

The thing about Gran is, she was never what you expected. Oh sure, she was a proper, gray-haired old lady who lived in a scary house with eleven cats, raising a foundling relative, but who would think a woman who lived in London for almost her entire life could cook the best Italian food you ever tasted? It was a wonder the two of us managed to stay as thin as we did, with no one else to help us finish all of her amazing food.

As far as I could tell, Gran had no friends of her own. But she was very enthusiastic about mine, always wanting to hear about what was going on in their lives and so on, but she never once encouraged me to invite a single one of them over. Not even Nate. Somehow, I always got the feeling she would prefer me not to ask to have guests over. So I never did.

I was stuffed by the time we got to the cake, but I ate a piece anyway. I was just scraping the last of the frosting off of my plate when a horn beeped outside.

“There’s Nate and Olivia,” I said apologetically, suddenly reluctant to leave Gran.

She smiled as she rose from the table and picked up both of our empty plates. “Have a good time, dear.”

“Thanks for dinner. If you leave the dishes for me, I can do them when I get home.”

Gran shook her head, just as I knew she would. She never let me help with the cleanup any more than with the cooking. But I always offered anyway.

“Back before ten, I assume?” she asked, as I made a beeline for the front door.

“Of course!” I called.

——

Nate and Olivia still refused to tell me where we were going, but as Olivia drove us south, toward San Francisco, I started to form an educated guess. The tires on her yellow Prius squealed dangerously as she zipped in and out of lanes on the 101 freeway. Olivia’s driving was always at least as dramatic as everything else in her life.