Bleeding Violet (8 page)

I tried to think of what to say to the curious faces trained on me. Wyatt’s
own friends
didn’t know what he could do?

Oh my God, what he could do.

“Was it something bad?” Lecy asked, responding to whatever she saw in my face.

“Not bad,” I hurriedly assured her and everyone else. “Just … secret.”

Collective groaning protest.

“Bogus!”

“Why should you know when we don’t?” Petra whined. “You’re not even from here!”

“Come on, you can tell
us
.”

“I can’t,” I said over the ruckus. “You know how the Mortmaine are.” I was grasping at straws, but apparently, they knew
exactly how the Mortmaine were, because they stopped pressing me.

“I’m so jealous,” Lecy said, butting shoulders with me. “You have no idea.”

“Me too,” said Petra, butting me on the opposite side hard enough to hurt.

But I was a zillion miles from hurt. Just wait until I told Rosalee.

She’d have to admit I was fitting in now.

After school, Wyatt was waiting for me at the bike rail.

The clouds from that morning had burned off, and he stood crystal clear in the steamy sunlight, tall and straight as a young tree in his green shirt. Solid. Nothing about him suggested I’d seen him liquefied. He looked so normal. So … Boy Scout.

His gaze was forthright. “We need to talk about what you saw in there.”

I unchained my bike. “I don’t know what I saw.”

“You know exactly what the hell you saw!”

I shook my head, an involuntary twitch of negation as everything I’d witnessed crashed down on me. I hopped on my bike and pedaled away.

But Wyatt didn’t let me escape that easily.

He caught up with me, jogging alongside me as I rode off campus down a shady street lined with dogwood trees. “Why won’t you talk to me?”

“I want to talk to Rosalee first.” I hadn’t known it was true until I said it aloud.

“I could come over later.”

“You know where I live?” I asked, startled.

“Rosalee’s house.” He said it as though it were the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore. “Hanna.” He grabbed my handlebars and brought my bike to a stop, jarring me. “Don’t tell Rosalee about me. Okay?”

He looked so worried, I couldn’t help feeling offended. “I want to tell her about the lure, not about
you
.”

A look of relief brightened his face as he stepped aside and let me pedal away. I was all the way down the street when he called out, “Around five, okay?”

But I didn’t look back.

Now that I had recovered from the shock of what I’d witnessed in administration, I’d relaxed enough to remember that I was still pissed at Wyatt. When you had no one to vent to, everything stayed inside and festered like old meat in a
hot fridge. But now that I had finally made some progress at school, maybe Rosalee would let me vent to her.

When I finally got home, however, bursting with news, Rosalee wasn’t even there. No reason she should have been—she hadn’t been home in the afternoon since I’d moved in. I’d decided she reserved afternoons for her clients, but I’d still been hoping that my need for her would be enough to make her spontaneously materialize.

I went into her room. Since I couldn’t have her, I wanted at least to be surrounded by her essence, and Rosalee’s room was so uncomfortable and unwelcoming that it was exactly like being with her.

Hard, skinny furniture rested atop a cold wooden floor, furniture fitted with cabinets and innumerable drawers, all shut tight or locked. Black clothes choked her closet: loungy sweats and yoga pants on the right; tight, skimpy work clothes on the left. I should make her a dress—something non-sluttish. Something bright and pretty. Would she wear anything that wasn’t black? I bet she would if I made her something red.

I went to her nightstand, having saved it for last, curious as hell about what was in that red box.

But that drawer was locked. And the key was on her bracelet.

I went up to my room briefly, then came down and stripped the covers from Rosalee’s bed. With the needle and red silk thread I’d brought down, I stitched “I Love You” into her mattress.

As I remade the bed and stretched myself across it, I imagined the words beneath my body seeping into her as she slept, weakening her resistance to me.

Wyatt beat on the door at five o’clock sharp, fresh and pristine in his green overshirt; I bet he knew where
his
mother was. Before I could close the door in his face, he stretched out his hand.

“Hey,” he said, perplexed. “You said I could come over.”

“No, I didn’t, but since you’re here”—I gave him a bright smile—“hi!” I sent the smile to a dark place. “Now piss off.” I tried to shut the door, but his arm didn’t budge, even with all my weight behind the door.

Beast.

“I thought we were gone talk.”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” I said, hating his stupid accent. “We don’t even speak the same language.”

“You think I’m some freak?” he said, indignant. “Some monster? You scared of me?”

“Scared of what?”

“You know.” He hesitated. “What you saw.”

“Oh. Ohh yeah.” How could I have forgotten that, Wyatt swirling greenly in the window? My smile came out of hiding all by itself. “Are you hungry?”

“Maybe,” he said in this cautious tone, as though he didn’t know what to expect from me.

“Wait here.”

I left him on the porch and went into the kitchen to prepare refreshments: bottles of iced tea and open-faced roast beef sandwiches. I was shocked by how anxious I was to get back to him. He was so normal-looking. But then, so was I. No one could tell just by
looking
at me how scrambled my brains were.

On the front porch the white garden chair sat next to a long shelf of potted red chrysanthemums. I removed a few of the pots and set the tray of food on the shelf.

“Good,” Wyatt said, eyeing the tray. “I thought you was gone dump that one all over me too.”

“You deserved it,” I said, unrepentant.

He sat on the floor next to the chair. “I guess I did.”

“You can sit in the chair,” I told him. “I’ll bring the chair from the kitchen out here for myself.”

“What for?” Wyatt kneeled up and grabbed a sandwich from the tray. He exhibited none of the cockiness from before, none of the bossiness. Or maybe it was harder to see those qualities with him crouched at my feet like a dog.

I sat in the garden chair and we ate in silence a minute, until I couldn’t resist. “Do what you did before, what you did in the window. I want to see it.”

He looked as shocked as if I’d asked him to masturbate in front of me.

“Come on. I won’t laugh.” But I was already laughing. He had such an old-lady look on his face. “I’ve already seen you do it.”

He had to think about it for a long time. “Hand me a drink,” he said.

I poured the bottled tea into a glass of ice cubes that had half melted in the heat and gave it to him.

“Not the glass, the bottle.”

I handed it over and watched him press his hand to the opening. And like the ice, his hand melted and slipped wetly
into the bottle, a wet, brown blob dancing just over the remains of the tea.

After a few moments, he pulled his hand free, and once it resumed its proper shape, he drained the last of the tea from the bottle. He watched me warily the whole time.

What a freak! What an amazing and marvelous freak!

Hope brightened his face as he studied my expression. “You don’t think it’s weird?”

“It’s beyond weird,” I assured him breathlessly. “Beyond cool, even.”

“Only another weirdo would think that was cool.”

“Busted.”

“Bullshit. What’s weird about you?” He looked me over. “Besides your fixation with purple.”

“It doesn’t matter. Compared to what you can do, I’m boringly normal. So what are you?”

He put his half-finished sandwich on the tray as though he’d lost his appetite. I thought about what I’d said and immediately felt bad.

“I’m sorry. I can’t believe I asked you that. I hate it when people ask me that.”

He lifted his eyebrows, bemused. “Why would they ask you?”

“Because I’m biracial. People look at me and can’t figure me out, so they ask, ‘What are you?’ Like I’m a whole other species. But you …
are
you another species?”

He did some more thinking. “You had to accept a lot today. I don’t wanna blow your mind.”

“It’s already blown.”

“You
think
it is. I could vaporize it if I wanted to. But I don’t. Especially now that you know about me. And it doesn’t bother you.”

He crossed his legs in front of my feet, leaned forward, and rested his chin on my bare knee. The underside of his chin was sweaty, but I didn’t push him away; he was so cute, like a little boy, looking up at me. The late afternoon sun burned in his eyes, letting me see all the way inside him, but not in a spooky lure way. This was something else.

I folded my hands in my lap; his breath tickled my fingers. “Does it bother other people? What you can do?”

“It might if they knew about it.” His expression turned grim. “Only the Mortmaine know.”

“Don’t you like them?” I asked, noting how straight he kept his back even while he leaned against me. “The Mortmaine? I mean, you are one of them.”

Long silence. Someone was playing “Stoptime Rag” haltingly on the piano next door.

“They’re okay,” Wyatt said. “But they’re so
rigid
. There’s all these nitpicky rules and stupid channels to go through. Like they’ll help people, but not individuals. If you and a bunch of people are at the park and y’all are about to get eaten by a monster, they’ll come to the rescue; if you’re at home about to get eaten by the same monster, they won’t do shit.

“Or like at school. They knew about the lure, but since the lure only attacked people who touched the windows, they were just like, well, then don’t touch the windows, dumb-asses.

“And the Mortmaine have this thing about how they only want people to use standard weapons on hunts. Like, the card I used on the lure? I’d have got my ass handed back to me for using that. They
hate
when I use my cards.”

“Why? It worked. I don’t know how, but—”

“They don’t care if stuff works. ‘We can’t take the risk of your experiments blowing up in our face,’” he said, mimicking some hardass he knew. “If the goal is to fight evil, what does it matter what weapon you use? I wish they’d leave me the hell alone and let me do my own thing.”

I brushed my palm over his head, to see if his buzz cut was
as prickly as it looked. It was. “If you were left alone, you’d hate it. Loneliness gets old in a hurry.”

He leaned his head into my hand. “Hanna? Do you believe in redemption?”

“Of course.”

“Then will you sit in my lap again?”

I laughed in his face.

“Seriously,” he said, pretending to be hurt. “If you really believe in redemption, you’ll let me try to replace a bad memory with a good one.”

Almost before he finished speaking, I slid out of the garden chair and sat sideways in his lap, settling my hips into the cradle of his crossed legs and slipping my arm around his strong shoulders.

Much better than our time in the cafeteria—no trays, no cell phones, no friends in the way.

A ghostly breeze filtered through the porch screen and cooled the wet spot Wyatt’s chin had left on my knee. The skirt of my dress had bunched around my hips, exposing a good portion of my legs. Wyatt got an eyeful, but he didn’t try to feel me up. He really was a good boy. It made me glad to know I’d been right about him.

“Nice?” he said, squeezing my waist.

“Um-hm.”

“It’d be nicer if you let me take you out.”

I laughed again. “What happened to all that no-more-transies-ever crap?”

“That was before I knew you were cool.”

I rested my forehead against his and watched his lips pull up into a smile. “Your girlfriend will come after me with a rock if I go out with you.”

“
Ex
-girlfriend. And Pet ain’t the violent type. She’s … kind of a wuss.” He said it as though he were disclosing a shameful secret, like that she had a tail or a third nipple. “There’s a movie theater just down your street—the Standard. They’re showing French movies all week, but—”

“I love foreign films!”

“You would.” He tugged a wayward strand of my hair that gleamed blondly in the sun. “You’re Swedish, right?”

“I’m
Finnish
. And American. And white and black. And neither thing excludes the other, regardless of what you’ve been taught to believe.”

He smirked at me like I was being naive, like he was humoring me. “Say something in Finnish.”

I told him to get bent.

“What’s that mean?”

“I said you’re very charming.”

He ducked his head in this cute way that made me feel guilty for teasing him. “If you come tomorrow at six,” I told him, “I’ll cook dinner before we go.”

“Sweet.”

I gave him my number and he stored it in his cell phone, slim and green as a dragon’s scale.

The sound of squealing tires broke the mood. Far beyond the porch screen, a familiar lemon Jag screeched into the driveway.

Wyatt helped me to my feet. “Is that Rosalee?” He pressed his face to the screen, trying to peer around the side of the house.

“Do you want to meet her?”

He looked shaky-excited, like a girl at her first boy band concert. “Hell, yeah,” he said, following me into the kitchen.

We stepped through the back door in time to see Rosalee slam the car door shut. The man with the snakelike tongue got out as well, scowling.

As Rosalee stormed our way, the snake yelled her name. “Don’t walk away from me! Who the hell do you think you
are?” He grabbed her arm, and before I could move, Rosalee turned and kneed him in the groin.

“What part of ‘it’s over’ don’t you understand?” she shouted.

The pained look in his face mixed with incredulity, as though his favorite teacup Chihuahua had somehow sprouted fangs and chomped his ass. He slithered to the ground like an oil spill in his expensively slick suit.