Vesper (7 page)

Megan let out a long breath. "So when you said you thought it could have been you yesterday..."

"Yeah," I said. "Maybe it really could have been."

Megan yanked me up by the arm before I could react. My seat squeaked backward and a few guys at a table nearby stopped talking to check us out. I remembered very suddenly Terrance Sedgwick's stupid message, and I wondered if those guys had seen it, what they were thinking now as they watched me make a scene. Though I longed to regain the self-confidence I'd had last night and not care what anyone thought of me, I just couldn't.

Instead I blushed and gently shook Megan off.

"No, come on," she whispered to me. "We're going to the nurse, right now.

If there's something wrong with you, we're going to fix it."

"Yeah, okay. Okay."

Leaving my tray behind, I picked my backpack up from the floor and followed Megan between the tables, catching bits of conversation as I did. I felt like everyone was watching me as I passed, somehow7 knowing what had happened the night before.

"Hey, watch it!"

Megan stopped suddenly, and I nearly knocked her over. There was a thud and a clatter as leather smacked against the linoleum and pens scattered across the floor.

I peeked up to see that Megan had dropped her backpack while almost walking into a guy Td never seen before. An incredibly cute guy—tall, slender, with black hair and amazingly sharp eyebrows that gave him the whole broody bad-boy aura. He was even wearing black jeans and a black leather jacket, like he'd just stepped out of an old James Dean flick and was on his way to go race cars in trenches like the causeless rebel he was.

Megan scowled down at her dropped backpack. "Twice in one day, Patrick.

You seriously need to watch where you're going."

The guy regarded Megan with those dark, wise-beyond-his-years eyes.

Then he muttered, "Sorry.” There was a hint of an accent in his voice, but what kind I couldn't tell.

He sat down at the nearest table and pulled a sack lunch from his backpack. With an annoyed sigh, Megan bent down to pick up her bag and the few pens that had fallen out. As she did, I caught a whiff of something intensely... manly. Musky and heavy, like cologne.

I remembered the night before, the whole smell thing. The odors around me had been intense—but not as intense as whatever this smell was. And unlike Deputy Jaredś refreshing spring-clean scent, this one made my stomach flutter.

Is he the one?

The thought was distant, very distant, coming from some hidden recess of my mind. But the pull to
sniff was
inescapable. I had to know.

Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, and trying not to flare my nostrils like a freak, I sniffed in the direction of the new guy—and that's when another guy popped up in front of me and shoved a piece of paper in my face.

"Hey, want to go to a party?"

"Uh ..Not knowing what else to do, I took the paper—it was hot pink and used about a dozen different fonts to basically say that there was, duh, a party. Classy. Holding the invitation by its corners, I scanned its Comic Sans and Papyrus font-scribed message, sure that I'd been handed this by mistake.

"Leave her alone, Spencer." Megan was beside me again, her dropped belongings all gathered.

The guy who'd handed me the paper—short, funny Spencer from homeroom—ducked his head. "Hey, sorry, Megan, I just thought you guys might want to come, and I wanted to invite you before you left lunch. Mikey Harris is throwing his usual beginning-of-the-year party, and it's also gonna be a tribute to Em Cee, you know? A way for us all to get together and remember her."

I pushed my glasses up my nose and met Spencer's eyes. "Em Cee?"

"Sorry, I mean Emily Cooke. I had a class a few years ago with you and her in it, and she was Emily C. and you were Emily W., so in my head I shortened your names to, uh ..." He laughed shyly. "Em Cee and Em Dub."

I could feel my face go hot, and I really didn't know why. "Em Dub, huh?" I said.

"Wonderful, thanks for sharing, Spencer," Megan said. "We're not interested in any parties being thrown by Mikey Harris and his friends."

Snatching the invitation from my hand, she slapped it on the table next to the new guy and put her face next to his. "Here you go, Patrick. Join their club. Then you can start bumping into me on purpose like those snottards do, instead of doing it because you're incapable of watching where you're going."

The new guy blinked, looked askance at the neon pink piece of paper, blinked once more, and resumed eating. Megan grabbed my arm and began to pull me toward the lunchroom door now that the path was clear. Once her back was to us, Spencer gave me another invitation.

"You never know," he whispered to me. He put his hand in the air as we walked away. "Okay. Well, bye!"

"Bye," I said quietly. I glanced again at the invitation. Emily Cooke's name jumped out at me—maybe because it was in a huge font, bolded, and italicized. Or maybe it was just because I had her on the brain. And though last night I'd been wondering who I myself had become, as I read Emily Cooke's name just then I thought,
Who were you?

"Throw that away," Megan demanded as she dragged me through a cluster of kids.

I crumpled the pink invitation, but when Megan's back was to me, I shoved it into my pocket.

As I did, my eyes drifted back to the new guy sitting at his table, alone, seemingly unfazed by his run-in with Megan's massive hostility while he bit into a pear. He observed the view out the big bay windows that lined the back of the lunch hall, apparently engrossed by the blue peaks of Mount Rainier on the clear horizon. The farther we got from him, the fainter the musky cologne I smelled became, until I couldn't smell anything but rehydrated mashed potato product and greasy gravy from the cafeteria kitchens.

I turned back to Megan. "That guy," I said. "You ran into him earlier?"

Megan snorted. "Yeah, he's some new guy, Patrick something. He almost knocked me over in second period too."

We brushed past a few teachers standing in the mostly empty hall. When they were out of earshot, I asked, "Does he always smell like that?"

Megan guided me around a row of lockers toward the front offices. "Uh, smell like what?"

"I dunno. He was wearing some sort of cologne. He smelled ..Perfect.

Amazing. Stimulating. "Nice," I finished.

"First the deputy, now the new guy?" Megan groaned. "What the frick, Emily, are you suddenly going all boy crazy? Are you seriously transforming into one of the bobble-headed idiot chicks we go to school with?"

"What?" I said. "No, I..." I trailed off. "No, I'm not."

"Let's just get you to the nurse." Eyes filled with anger, she muttered,

"Trust me, Emily. You'd be better off dead like the other Emily than turning

'normal' like one of
them."

"That's a bit harsh."

"No," Megan said, "it's not."

I didn't want to argue. When Megan got riled up, talking to her was impossible. So I kept silent, and I wondered, would it really be so bad to be the Emily Webb I'd been last night full-time? My body hadn't seemed so clumsy and bloated. I had felt like I didn't have any cares at all. Sure, I'd acted brazen to complete strangers, performed a few dangerous feats that could have left me dead. What if I could learn to get that under control?

But what if I couldn't?

After a long moment I said, "Yeah. Let's get me fixed up."

"Well, as far as I can tell, girls, you're both completely healthy." The school nurse, Mrs. Hawkins, stood in front of me and smiled. Her blond perm glowed under the bright fluorescents, making her seem like a grown-up and wrinkled version of one of those chubby angels you see hanging in church-lady bathrooms.

I studied the walls, not sure what to say. I mean, I felt fine
now,
but I knew I couldn't seriously be
healthy.
Across from where I sat atop her little examining table there were all sorts of posters tacked to the walls. One about the food pyramid, another about proper brushing, one with tiny writing all about the dangers of sex. They were all faded, the laminate peeling from their edges. I wondered what the school board had deemed healthy to put on a poster about sex back in 1986 when these posters were plastered here.

"She's
not
okay, Mrs. Hawkins," Megan insisted. She stood much too close to the nurse, towering over the short woman. "She was dressing all trashy, coming on to my brother's twenty-one-year-old friend, sneaking out of her house. There was even something about drive-bys with drinking/' She waved her hand at me. "I mean, come on! Shitty is
not
Emily!"

Mrs. Hawkins rested a pudgy hand on Megan's arm. A little gold chain she had round her wrist slid beneath the sleeve of her Lane Bryant blazer.

"No offense, dear, but you two are teenagers," she said. "In my experience, if it's not drugs or alcohol driving you kids crazy, it's hormones. Girls develop at different rates, and perhaps Emily is just... developing."

Megan let out an exasperated sigh and stomped away. "Please! Emily
developed
when we were eleven."

Self-consciously, I wrapped my arms around my chest as Mrs. Hawkins inspected me. I had felt more aware of my stupid chest the past couple days than I had in years, and I didn't like that at all. Being in fifth grade with everyone else still flat as a board, and me ... It was just easier to cover things up, keep quiet, and hope everyone would forget I was different.

Megan turned back to face Mrs. Hawkins. "She never acted like this back then, and even if she was going to now, why just for a couple hours a night?

And on the same night as Emily Cooke lost her mind, went walking in the dark in a nightie or whatever, and got herself killed? Is that something that

'developing' girls do?"

Raising her fist to her pursed red lips, Mrs. Hawkins let out a prim little cough. "Well, yes, you have a point," she said after a moment. Leaning in toward Megan and me, she lowered her voice. "Honestly, girls, there's only so much I can do as a school nurse. I'm only here because I taught Health and Sex Education last year, and I was going to be let go this year unless I took this post."

Reassuring.

Shuffling away, she went to a file cabinet near the door and yanked it open. She said, "Emily, you seem fine from what I can tell, but if you're really concerned you should have your mother take you to a see a real doctor."

Nonchalantly, Megan said, "Her mother's dead."

Mrs. Hawkins spun around from the filing cabinet, one hand fluttering to her chest. In her other hand she clenched a bunch of pamphlets. "I'm so sorry, dear. I didn't know."

"Oh, it's all right, it happened when I was two," I said.

"Still, dear," Mrs. Hawkins went on. "The relationship between a girl and her mother is an important one. I can't imagine what it would be like to not have had my mother show me the ropes growing up."

If I wasn't uncomfortable before, well, I surely was then. The last thing I wanted to talk about with the school nurse was growing up mommy-less.

And so I just said, "I have my father and my stepmother. One of them could take me, I guess."

Her plump cheeks rising into a smile, Mrs. Hawkins handed me the pamphlets. "Well, I'm glad to hear that. Now take a look at these and see which one you feel fits your problem. I was a girl once myself, and I know all about the moods we get, but if you think it's more...” I held the pamphlets side by side. The first one read, "From Bliss to Blah: The Blight of Bipolarism." The next said, "So You're Going to Be an Unwed Teenage Mother?"

"Thank you." Grabbing my backpack from the table beside me, I leaped down to the floor. I felt unnerved—Megan had been more than a little forthcoming about what had happened last night, though thankfully she'd left out the part about my jumping out of her car—and I couldn't help but think Mrs. Hawkins was thinking how much of a freak I was.

Before the nurse could say anything else, I yanked open the door and stepped outside. The nurse's office was connected to the front office lobby, and old secretaries milled about, deep in discussion—about how to keep teenagers from rioting or how to handle uppity parents or whatever.

I marched out of the office and into the hall. Lunch was long over and fourth period had started. I realized I should have gotten a note from Mrs.

Hawkins, but I decided I'd much rather get yelled at by my English teacher than go get poked and prodded by the nurse again. "Hey, Em, wait up!"

Megan ran up to me in the hallway and took my arm. "Well, that was a waste," she grumbled. "Remind me never to get seriously injured at school with her as our potential lifesaver."

I glanced down at the pamphlets, then unzipped my backpack and shoved them inside. I wondered if there was a pamphlet on how to handle sudden-onset adolescent ghost possession. That could have been actually informative.

"So, we need a plan," Megan said as we walked. "Because you probably won't be able to see a doctor tonight, so I should come over and keep watch, make sure you don't do anything stupid."

I stopped and looked at Megan, part of me suddenly not wanting her to be there later. It was that secret, hidden part of me again, the one that daydreamed about being some sort of comic-book hero.

Flipping her head, she sent her long hair cascading down her back.

"What's that look for?" she sniped.

I hadn't realized I was giving her a look, so I twisted my head away. "Sorry, it's just... Maybe it won't happen again. I feel fine now, anyway."

"Don't be dumb," Megan said. "Earlier you were worried you were going to get yourself killed because you couldn't control yourself when you had those mood swings or whatever."

I didn't say anything. The change that had happened the night before was freaktastic, yes, but... what if I let it happen again? What if I didn't have Megan there, watching over me as I turned from dowdy lady into super-tramp? I could feel those sensations, experience that addictive, liquid grace....