XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (31 page)

“About what?”

“The Pact. I should have done something before it went that far.”

Janis’s gaze fell back to her glass. “My dad says hindsight’s always twenty-twenty.”

“Is Scott okay?”

“I think so.”

“I tried calling both of you last night. Him, to see if there was anything I could do. And you to make sure you’d gotten home all right.”

“Yeah, my dad gave me the message. Thanks.”

She could see in his eyes that he was waiting for her to explain
why
she hadn’t been home when he called. But what could she say?
Oh, a funny thing happened, babe. It turns out Scott and I took a trip to the past together a couple of months ago. That’s right! Only neither of us knew that the other had had the same experience until last night. Ha, ha! So one thing leads to another, and next thing you know, I’m telling him all about my dreams of mushroom clouds and out-of-body experiences, not to mention this newfound power to tip away shots on goal and blast ex-friends who turn bitch. And Scott, he tells me about
his
power to fly inside telephone lines and blow up federal taps. So yeah, we decided to stay up late talking instead of going home.

Janis couldn’t even tell him an approximation of the truth, and a part of her mind clenched with anger: anger toward him for being so damned normal and anger at herself for holding his normalcy against him. And here he was, being so patient. She started to reach past the condiment basket for his hand, but the waitress returned, setting two steaming plates of steak burgers and fries between them.

“Well, it’s too bad about the grounding.” Blake uncapped the ketchup bottle and coaxed a fat dollop onto his burger. “My parents were really looking forward to meeting you.”

She signaled for him to add some ketchup to her plate, beside the fries. “I was looking forward to meeting them, too.”

Truth was, dinner in polite company with Blake’s parents felt like the very last thing she wanted. Maybe the two-week grounding her father had handed down for her curfew violation wasn’t such a bad thing, after all. It would give her a reprieve, time to think.

Blake tucked a napkin over the knot of his tie, then paused, his dripping burger poised in front of his mouth. “No Standards today?”

Janis looked down at her purple sweatshirt. She shook her head. “Not for me.”

The realization crept over Blake’s face. He set his burger down and wiped his hands. “But you’re just one day from completing your pledge period.”

“Margaret and I already had that conversation this morning, thanks.”

“But have you thought it through?”

“Have I thought it through?” She stared at him.

“What I mean is…” He held his hands up. “There are going to be service days, socials, weekend trips, that sort of thing. I was looking forward to us doing those things together.”

She kept staring at him, the french fry she held between her finger and thumb growing cold. “Do you honestly think I can just go traipsing back into that club all
fa-la-la
after what happened last night? You were there, Blake. You saw what they did to Scott. Jesus.”

“Look, I talked to Grant afterwards. He and Britt are going to apologize to Scott and grant him full membership. They’re even going to waive his fees.”

Janis gave a sharp laugh. “Yeah, to save their own asses.”

The muscles at the hinges of Blake’s jaw tensed. “At least they’re willing to own up to their mistake.”

“Big of them.”

“What about you, Janis? Have you given any thought to the girl who injured herself trying to get away from you?”

The fry caught halfway down Janis’s throat. She reached for her Coke. “Injured?” she managed. “Amy was injured?” The fight fell out of her like the checkers from a game of Connect Four.

“Sprained her ankle when she fell.”

Janis closed her eyes and saw herself storming into the audience, her fury soaring inside her, an inferno. She saw herself throw her arm out; watched Amy’s eyes fly wide as the pulse collided into her; heard her scream, a sound shrill with terror, with pain. And Janis could
feel
the pain. Because in the moment the pulse had hit her, they were connected, she and Amy. It hadn’t lasted long, less than a second, but in that instant, Janis could feel her own ankle wrenching, could feel the tissue tearing like a nylon stocking.

Janis pushed her plate aside and held the sides of her head.

“Hey, there’s still time to make it right,” Blake said gently.

“How?”

He took her hand. “I’m not supposed to know this, but early tomorrow morning the older Gamma brothers and Alpha sisters are going to surprise us at home and take us to breakfast to celebrate our first day as full members. Maybe you can use the opportunity to apologize to her.” The thumb that stroked the back of her hand felt sensible and reassuring. “You should think about it, anyway.”

“I don’t know,” she said, but her head had already begun to nod.

* * *

Scott bit into his pizza slice, a paper plate poised under his chin to catch the dripping cheese. Then he sat back, savoring the taste of his first non-cafeteria meal at the school in almost three months. A cracked-open can of grape soda fizzed softly on the knob to his right. Nestled in the roots of a giant oak tree, he was in the same spot he’d eaten the first day of school. Indeed, he was eating the same lunch. But Scott didn’t feel the same.

He peered around at the pair of food trucks parked at the curb, at the students spread over the leaf-covered lawn, most of them in jackets now, a cool wind tossing their hair. Scott’s own jacket was padding the ground beneath his bruised bottom, but he sat as tall as ever. He didn’t feel alone like he had on that first day of school. And better still, he didn’t feel like he had to hide anymore. His worst fears had come to pass, and strangely, he felt freed from them.

Now tails, now heads.

Scott took a swig of the grape soda. That’s what Grant didn’t understand. It had never been about Gamma. The club had only ever been an access way to something else. To some
one
else.

For the untoldth time, Scott relived his and Janis’s journey last night, through the band of woods, up Oakwood’s main street, the past three years dissolving into a void, then and now sliding together. And where then and now met stood the same swing set on which he and Janis used to whisk past one another as kids, over the same sweet-smelling mulch. But their time on the swings last night had reached beyond the blithe doings of kids.

Far beyond.

“There’s a wood shed in Mr. Leonard’s backyard,” Janis had told him. “I went inside twice, in my out-of-body state. Passed right through the wall. The first time I found a hatch hidden beneath the pile of kindling. It was surrounded by some kind of energy field that I couldn’t push through. And then Mr. Leonard opened the shed door, and I flew, screaming, back to my body. Do you remember when I ran out of the classroom that first day? Well, that was me remembering. The next time I went into the shed, the lock had been changed, the floor covered with plywood. But I was able to feel a keypad beside the hatch. And that’s when I knew for certain he had something hidden down there.”

The details of the account remained with Scott. He wiped his hands with a brown paper towel and removed a letter from the small pocket of his backpack. It was a note, really, a few handwritten lines that had taken him all of third period to compose. After rereading the note, he folded it back up, more or less satisfied.

I’ll give it to her seventh period.

The casualness of the thought was another way Scott felt different. It wasn’t like those hand-wringing moments past when he used to tell himself he was going to approach her—
today is the day
, the chant went—and then shied away. Last night had changed that, too.

Which reminded him…

In his backpack, he swapped the note for a thick envelope, pushing it into his shirt pocket.

There was something else he needed to do that day.

He stood and shook the sand from his jacket, collected his trash, and slung his pack over his shoulder. Then he began walking toward Titan Terrace, toward the bend near the repaired tennis courts, where Jesse’s black Chevy Chevelle leaned against the curb.

* * *

Janis reached her locker at the same time the bell rang overhead to start fifth period. With pale fingers, she began twisting out the combination on her Master Lock. After their perfunctory kiss in the dirt parking lot beside the practice fields, Blake had sprinted to make his next class, but Janis had drifted toward her locker, the students thinning around her. Being late didn’t matter. Nothing seemed to matter—only what she had done.

I injured Amy.

The thought repeated itself like a self-flagellation. She could tell herself that Amy had asked for it, had deserved it. And maybe she had. But in the pulse, Janis hadn’t experienced only their old connection; she had glimpsed something else also, something pressed deep down into the shadows of her former friend. She remembered the same something flitting across Amy’s crumbling face the day she had tried to apologize. A dark secret whose contours Janis couldn’t quite make out. And underneath it, a plea for help?

Janis yanked the lock free and hooked it over her finger. When she opened the metal door on her neat line of books and folders, something fluttered to the ground, a folded slip of paper. She knelt, her books pressed to her chest, and retrieved it. She looked up and down the empty hallway, then shook the note open. A cold sense of déjà vu seized her.

I was wrong. You’re not a lesbian.

You’re a freak.

This note had no signature, either. Janis let it fall from her fingers.

* * *

Creed, in his John Lennon shades, spotted him first and jerked from the driver’s side window where he’d been leaning. Then his younger brother turned. A cigarette dangled from the corner of Tyler’s mouth, and he squinted out at Scott through the smoke. Creed nudged him toward the sidewalk so the way was blocked.

But Scott’s limping stride didn’t falter, even as he glimpsed the narrow blades extending from the thumb and first finger of Creed’s glove. Scott got as close as he dared, about two parked cars from the Chevelle, and stopped. Traffic hummed along Titan Terrace. Students streamed around him. He’d be safe as long as he didn’t go any closer. He shifted his gaze to the enormous elbow sitting on the car’s windowsill.

“Did you come to piss yourself again?” Creed asked.

“I came to talk to Jesse,” Scott called back.

“Come and talk, then.”

Scott shook his head. “Just Jesse.”

Creed glared at Scott another moment and then palmed his bowler hat as he leaned toward the window. He said something, waited, said something else, then stood from the window.

“Jesse says the time for talking is over, shit face.”

“I have something for him.”

“What?” Suspicion narrowed Creed’s voice.

“Something he’s going to want.”

Creed kept staring at Scott, then leaned toward the window again. Tyler watched from the sidewalk, not saying anything. He took a drag on his cigarette and blew an indifferent stream of smoke.

“Bring it over,” Creed said when he stood.

“Not until you and your brother leave.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Creed spiked his smoking butt into the gutter and began stalking toward Scott.

At that moment, the elbow over the windowsill lurched to life, and a hand appeared. With two sausage-sized fingers, it waved Creed off. Creed looked from the hand to Scott and snarled. Then he backed away, jerking his head for his brother to follow.

Scott waited until they were up in the faculty parking lot before approaching. He watched the Chevelle’s open window, his feet tracing a narrow path along the far edge of the sidewalk. Very soon, the elbow in Scott’s view joined a giant shoulder and the shoulder a squat head that bulged from the collar of a black leather jacket. Scott looked into a pair of impassive gray eyes.

“I wanted to give you this.” Scott pulled the envelope from his pocket.

“What is it?”

“There’s more than three hundred dollars inside. I figured it would cover those charges on your phone bill from last year. Yours and Creed’s. I didn’t mean for your father to… to do what he did.”

Jesse’s eyes didn’t move from Scott’s.

“What about last month?” Jesse asked.

“Last month?”

“We lost our phone service. Stayed out all night. Creed’s, too. Happened on a Sunday.”

“Look, I haven’t done anything to your phones this year. I’m just trying to make this right. I want to get past this.” He held out the envelope with the bills. It was the lunch money he’d been able to save over the last three months, plus some. His father had exchanged it all for tens and twenties.

Scott gave the envelope a shake. “Here.”

Jesse’s eyes remained on his, and Scott could see them assessing whether or not he was telling the truth. The gray eyes shifted to the envelope. And just as Scott was remembering how fast Jesse could move, Jesse’s fist swallowed his wrist. He pinched the envelope away with his other hand.

“This doesn’t square us,” Jesse said.

Scott felt his bones mashing together. He twisted around and stifled a cry.

“You’re still gonna get your arm broke,” Jesse said flatly. “That was the deal. But here’s what I’m gonna do.” He held up the envelope of money. “Because of this, we’re back to one arm. And ’cause I’m feeling especially generous, I’m gonna let you pick the time and place.”

“Look, can’t we just—”

Jesse’s grip tightened.

“All right! All right!” Scott yelled. He tried to think, but the pain felt like the stab and twist of a dull knife. “Where it happened the first time—do you remember? We were in The Grove, I tried to run, and Creed caught me down in the woods, in that clearing. Remember?”

“All right. When?”

“After the holidays.”

Jesse cinched his grip. “Be more specific.”

“Ow! New Year’s Eve! Midnight!” It was the first thing that flew into his mind. He knew his parents would be out that night. They went to Larry Habscomb’s party every year. It was one of the few things they still did together.