Undone (2 page)

A
t least twenty people from Eastview were just huddled together in the parking lot by the chain-link fence that separated the lot from the school grounds. They were standing on their toes, leaning against one another, trying to see what was happening. Everyone was shouting and talking, but I didn’t hear what any of them said. I wasn’t thinking, either. I just pushed my way into the thick of it.

At first, it looked like a blur of hair. Two girls going at each other. Then someone stumbled, and I recognized Janelle Tenner’s dark hair and tanned skin. The sight of her sent a spike of excitement through me. It was what I felt whenever I saw her.

I liked her. I always had. Ever since I came through the portal. If she hadn’t been at that beach, in the ocean . . . If she hadn’t been in that exact spot at that exact time, I would have drowned that day.

But she was there: an angel in a pink bathing suit.

She pulled me to the surface and swam us back to shore. She held on to me and didn’t let go. She saved my life.

She didn’t know I existed. Yet.

I pushed closer. Her head whipped back from a full-on punch. Her nose was bleeding, her T-shirt was ripped, and something had cut the skin above her left eye. That made my stomach ache. She was so pretty and funny and perfect . . . and someone had done this to her. Sweat prickled the back of my neck.

Her legs swung up, kicking at the air, and I realized two girls were holding her arms. I didn’t say anything. My throat was too tight to speak. Hands loose and ready, I pushed people out of the way so I could step in and break it up.

I grabbed the girl closest to me and tried to pull her off Janelle’s arm. She struggled, elbowing me in the ribs.

Janelle yelled again and threw her body forward, trying to get free. Seeing her like that caused my anger to swell, and before I could stop it, I felt it turn into energy.

It rushed through me, a thick heat that seared each part of my body, from my chest down my arms, eager to be channeled into something productive.

There wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it.

It burned as it moved through my fingertips, into the girl I was holding on to. She yelped and grabbed her arm, letting go of Janelle.

With one arm free, Janelle reached out, swatting Brooke’s hand in time to keep it from hitting her face. The noise of the crowd tripled.

I stepped back. My hands tingled from the rush, and I smelled burning skin. The crowd pulsed around me but didn’t recognize that anything was amiss.

“Shit.” I jerked back and glanced down at my hands. I hadn’t meant for that to happen. I’d been so angry I’d burned her. The portal had done more than just send me to another world. It had made me a freak who could burn things when I got angry.

In front of me the girl was still holding her shoulder. She didn’t know the pain was my fault.

The skin was branded red. The burn, a distorted version of my handprint.

I took a deep breath and willed my anger to dissipate. There was a single drop of blood on the ground, I noticed. A dark red circle standing out against the black pavement.

I focused on Brooke and pushed back into the center of the fight. I wasn’t the only one. A couple of guys on the baseball team swarmed in as well, and we got in between them, grabbing Brooke by the shoulders and pushing her back through the crowd, which didn’t miss the opportunity to boo us.

When it was over, I turned back to look for Janelle. This was my chance to talk to her. I took a deep breath, trying to steady my emotions, and I wiped my sweaty hands on my shorts. I hoped that they wouldn’t shake and that my voice wouldn’t crack and that the words would come. I’d just jumped into a fight for her. I’d ask her if she was okay and offer to walk her home. I’d tell her Brooke was just a jealous bitch. She would laugh and then pause to look at me. She might first recognize me as the guy she borrowed a pencil from in math freshman year, but eventually she would remember pulling me out of the ocean that day we first met. We’d laugh about the coincidence, her saving me all those years ago, and now me jumping in to return the favor. She wouldn’t care that this situation wasn’t quite as dire. She’d think it was romantic anyway, and I’d finally work up the nerve to ask her to get dinner with me Friday night.

Only I was too late. Janelle wasn’t alone. Kevin Collins stood next to her in his baseball uniform, squirting his water bottle at her face. She grimaced as she used the ripped neck of her T-shirt to wipe the cut above her eye. He acted like he was going to squirt her again, and she shoved his shoulder, in a way that only longtime friends can.

I watched them, for probably a few seconds too long, before I swallowed down the disappointment of another missed opportunity and headed back to It’s a Grind. I could at least get my coffee.

“Come watch the game. I’ll give you a ride home after,” Kevin was saying as I passed them.

“No thanks. I’ve heard what happens when you give girls a ride home,” she said, walking away. For a split second I thought about going after her.

“Hey, I’m just trying to be nice!” Kevin called.

She looked back but kept walking. “You forget, Kevin, I know you. You aren’t capable of nice.”

I paused. If I went after her now, she would think I was like him, trying to take advantage of the situation. Or she would think I was weird, jumping into a fight to help a girl that I’ve never even spoken to. Worse, she would be right.

I pulled my eyes away from her and went inside to buy my coffee. I’d get rid of this headache and go to work, and today would just be another day in a long line of days that I didn’t manage to talk to her.

B
y the time I got off work, Elijah and Reid had heard about it. I knew that as soon as I stepped outside the shop and saw them waiting for me.

We were hanging out tonight, we hung out every night, but even with Reid’s new car, they never would have come to pick me up.

Not unless they were pissed.

I didn’t say anything as I got into the backseat. There was really nothing for me to say. I wasn’t about to deny anything: They wouldn’t believe me. Besides, we didn’t lie to each other. Everybody else, sure, but not each other. Not after everything we’d been through.

Eli turned and stared me down as Reid drove through Pacific Beach.

I looked straight at him and refused to flinch. I couldn’t take back what I’d done. I didn’t want to.

It wasn’t until we were pulling onto the 5 that finally Reid couldn’t take it anymore. “You want to explain yourself?” he asked, breaking the silence.

I shrugged. If they’d heard about the fight, they’d know who was involved and why I jumped in. They’d have heard about the burn on that girl’s arm, and they’d know what had happened. I didn’t need to explain it.

“What the fuck, man?” Eli said.

“You broke the rules!” Reid added.

“I know.” I did know, and it wasn’t something I did lightly, which
they
should both know.

I was the one who’d set the rules. Coming through the portal years ago had side effects on all of us. When we got angry, we burned things with our touch. It happened to Eli first. He lost control of his temper while arguing with his foster parents. He grabbed a plastic baseball bat they’d given him, planning to snap it in half, and instead it melted in his hands. After that I did the same to a plastic water bottle, Reid burned a hole through his couch cushions, and Eli almost blew up his Christmas tree. That’s when we started to put it together.

There was something different about us.

It wasn’t just the world we lived in that had changed. We had too. The portal altered us.

Burning things in anger was problematic. We needed to know how to control it, so I started studying what I could do. I channeled the anger and tried to change things, then I took the emotion out of it, and I tried to reverse it. If I could melt ice into water, maybe I could turn it back, too.

The real progress, though, came when Brett Edgerly stole my lunch money in seventh grade. Reid gave me half his sandwich and Eli offered to beat him up, but I just watched Brett from across the cafeteria as he used my money to buy two twenty-ounce bottles of Coke. I filled a paper cup with water and stared at it, wishing that soda was mine. I tried to convince myself that it didn’t matter, then I got an idea. I thought about Coke and the molecular structure of it, and I went over to where Brett was sitting and let him call me a loser. Then I reached over and grabbed his Coke, and as I focused on it, I felt that familiar burn in my chest. It built, spreading into my arms, and I urged it onto the bottle. By the time Brett pushed me and grabbed his soda away from me, the carbonation was gone. I had turned it flat.

That’s when I realized the extent of what we could do. We could manipulate molecular structure, change the physiological makeup of things. With the right focus we could heal broken skin, turn a kitchen table to a pile of dust, or burn someone. We were like radioactive superheroes, and there were practically no limits to what we were capable of.

Which was why I came up with limits to impose on us. Rules to keep us all in check.

No using our abilities on other people.

No using our abilities in anger.

And no using our abilities in front of other people. That was the easiest way for us to get turned into some governmental science experiment.

I had just broken all three.

Eli was still staring at me. “You know? That’s it? You fucking know?”

I glanced out the window and watched the lights flicker by. There wasn’t anything else to say.

“You can’t just go around making rules and then breaking them when you feel like it,” Reid added.

“It wasn’t about that,” I said. “It was Janelle, she was in trouble—”

“She’s always in trouble!” Reid yelled. “And you always have to run to her rescue, but she doesn’t even know you’re alive. You should be helping us figure out how to get home.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing?” I said.

“I know what you’re doing. You’re risking exposing us because you’re too busy worrying about some chick who doesn’t matter.” Reid slammed his hand into the steering wheel to accentuate his point.

“I care about her,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.

“You don’t even know her.”

I looked at Eli.

“Dude, you don’t,” he added. I knew what he meant: Just because she saved my life that day in the ocean, that didn’t mean I knew her. The truth is, we had never had a real conversation.

I couldn’t tell him that I did know her, though. That I knew her expressions and her movements, that I understood the emotions in her voice. That wasn’t what mattered. Even if I thought I knew her, she didn’t know me.

“You’re right,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it. I just . . .”

“I get it. She saved you; you think you owe her a debt.” Eli shook his head. “You don’t anymore—that debt has been repaid.”

I couldn’t force myself to put a lie into words so I changed the subject. “We’re getting closer,” I said. It was true, even if we weren’t quite there yet.

When we went through the portal, we had some of Reid’s father’s notes. From them we’d started trying to re-create his machine that had opened the portal and gotten us here. It wasn’t easy, even with the notes. We didn’t understand a lot of them, and building this thing from scratch in Reid’s foster parents’ garage had its problems even if we knew what we were doing.

Reid pulled the car into his driveway and slammed it into park. It felt deliberate, like he was disagreeing with me.

“We’re so fucking close, I can practically taste it,” Eli said. “Before summer we’ll be home, and you’ll be so famous, you’ll have to fight the chicks off. That’ll make you forget about the ones here.”

I nodded, despite the tightening in my chest. I wanted to get us home. I needed to. It was my fault we’d gone through the portal, and we’d been here so long I was having trouble remembering my real life: my parents and my brother. I had a hard time picturing their faces or hearing their voices. I had to get back to them.

I just didn’t want to forget Janelle.

As we got out of the car, I caught sight of Reid’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

He was still pissed.