Cornerstone (7 page)

“I’m glad he did.” my mom says. She lifts a lock of my hair away from my temple and pushes it behind my ear. “But I wanted to talk to you about him. I don’t want you to get very attached to this young man.”

“What? Why?” I pull away from her touch. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing.” she pauses, dropping her hand in her lap to twist the skin of her ringless fingers. “He’s just not like us, that’s all.”

“Like us?” I balk. “Mom, there’s
no one
like us. If I have to wait around to find someone
like us
, I’d have to join the circus.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean then? He’s too popular? He’s got more money? What? How does he need to be
like us
to make you okay with him?”

“It’s not that he couldn’t be a great friend, Nali. I think you could be very good friends and I think he already seems almost protective of you, but there are limits. His family is, well, it’s just that...”

“He’s out of my league?” I finish for her. She frowns.

“In a different way than you think.” she says.

I am off the couch then, yelling at her. “You think he’s out of my league?”

I feel my eyes bulging. My mother, who is supposed to love me more than anybody, thinks I’m not good enough for a boy like Garrett.

My legs are trembling. I would pace if there were room to do it, but there isn’t. The energy hammers inside my legs,
Run, Run, Run,
but I stay put because I want to scream at my mother. I want her to take it back. Now.

“You’re not understanding me.” she says. She twists her finger harder.

“What’s there to understand?” I shriek. “That you think I’m not good enough for some guy I just met?”

“Honey, you’re better than any boy you’ll ever meet.” She looks up at me with a somber face. She’s right. I don’t understand. Not at all. “We’re in a different world. No, that’s not what I’m trying to say. We’re just different people, that’s all. His family and ours, it’s just...different. How can I say it?”

She throws up her hands in the air as if she’s tried to explain this to me a thousand times and I’m still too dumb to get it.

“Different.” she says again. “I can’t explain any better than that. Just different. That’s it. That’s all I can tell you. It won’t work because we’re always going to be different.”

“I’m getting out of here.” I say. I work my way upstairs and she doesn’t follow. I get into my running clothes, shoving my cast into my jacket sleeve so hard that it looks like the seams will pop. When I come back downstairs, she’s still sitting on the couch, staring at a stack of paper on the floor at her feet.

“You’re going running?” she asks when I pass the couch, following the trail through her piles of garbage, to the front door. “How are you going to run with a cast on your arm?”

“I’ll figure it out.” I growl at her. “Just don’t worry about it. You wouldn’t
understand
.”

I go out, slamming the door behind me.

~ * * * ~

There are no cars in the school parking lot when I get there. The place is deserted, which has never bothered me before, but as I cut around the back of the gym, I spot the tree line at the far end of the track and think of the woods and the man with the shovel and the hair at the back of my neck prickles. The weird thing is that the hair isn’t rising out of fear. My body is so juiced with adrenaline that when I think of the man, the feeling at the back of my neck is more like the hackles of a vicious dog. I almost
want
to see him, to dig my fingernails into his face and beat him with my cast. The way I feel at this moment, I think I could kill him.

But there is no one here and the track is empty. I don’t care. If the school’s entire sports roster of teams decided to have a field day all together right this minute, I would still run. My legs are surging like I’ve got a direct line into an electrical outlet and all I want to do is disconnect.

I peel off my jacket and dump it on the ground, dropping into quick stretches that I don’t hold long enough to do much good. The air is damp and cool, like it could melt off my cast, but I don’t care about that either. All I can think of is the energy, rolling over me in hot, angry currents. I’m going to explode.

The first two miles I take at a sprint. The cast makes pumping my arm clumsy and awkward and the bones inside ache like their own explosion, but I’m so charged, it doesn’t slow me down. Every time my feet hit the track, another burst of frantic energy pounds through me. By the third mile, all the jarring has probably given me nerve damage because I can’t feel my arm anymore, but I’m minutely calmer and more aware of how alone I am, the echo of my feet soaked up by the surrounding trees. I fall into a rhythm of both pace and breathing that is as numbing and spiritual as a chant.

I guess that’s why I don’t notice him at the top of the bleachers, until I’m circling back toward them, in the middle of my fourth mile. He’s in running gear too, dark pants and a white tee shirt that distracts my eyes from his inky hair. The cotton shirt clings to his chest. He’s got a body that makes the entire female population at Simon Valley feel hollow and wanting. And it makes me think of how my mom says I’ll never have him.

Garrett trots down from the top of the stands, the way I never do. I always over-think it and end up wobbling between each riser, but Garrett’s steps are solid and sure, as if he knows he won’t slip and bust an ankle or knock out all his teeth. By the time I have rounded to the bleachers, he is at the bottom of them, jumping down onto the track. He falls into pace easily beside me.

“Hey, are you allowed to run with a cast?” he asks with a smirk.

“I’m doing it.” I tell him. “So that must mean I’m allowed.”

“Rebel.” he laughs. “Have you heard anything from the cops?”

“No.” I shake my head. Now that I’m a little more mellow from the run, I don’t want to start talking about what happened. I’ve run the man from the woods out of my head. I need to switch the subject, which is super easy to do the second that I connect with the blue calm of Garrett’s eyes.

“How long have you been sitting in the bleachers?” I ask.

He shrugs like he’s been up there for years, waiting for me to come stretch and sprint; watching me circle the track over and over, to relieve the pressure. Which is, kind of, his fault.

We run two laps in silence. Our shoes fall on the black top in unison. Our breathing aligns and we sound like one runner instead of two.

On the next lap, my arm begins to throb so bad that I think the cast is going to blow off. As I slow down, Garrett’s steps remain in time with mine, as if he is anticipating what I’m thinking. We both drop off to a walk.

“Arm bothering you?” he asks, eyeing my swollen, purple fingers with a sympathetic wince.

“Yeah.” I say.

My bones feel like they are trying to jack hammer their way out of my cast, but what I would really like to say is that there is a lot more bothering me than just my arm. I want to ask him if everyone at school knows about what happened and I want to ask why he was up in the bleachers watching me run. I want to find out why he is still bothering to talk to me at all, since he’s seen my house. And I want to know if he thinks he’s too good for me. Instead, I just flex my fingers and rub my aching arm above the cast as we walk.

“You know,” Garrett says, stepping in front of me. I jerk to a halt so I don’t slam into him. “I might be able to make that feel better. I’ve been told I’ve got the touch.” He wiggles his eyebrows at me. “I’m a healer.”

I laugh at him as he reaches out for my hand. I flinch before he even touches my fingers. And then I feel it.

His touch is a color.

Indigo.

It is more gentle than the fluid sky of his eyes and warmer than the midnight ink of his hair. The jack hammer in my bones instantly stalls. He spreads his thumbs over the top ridge of my palm, kneading his color beneath the cast. Suddenly, all I want to do is close my eyes. When I see that he is completely focused on my hand, I do.

Beneath my eyelids, I am melting. He smoothes his fingers over my skin, penetrating the muscles with heat instead of pressure. His touch transfers the warmth through my hands and it rises up my arms like spreading Fahrenheit. The heat drains every last ember of adrenaline from my body and leaves me paralyzed with comfort. A satisfied moan blooms in my throat before I can stop it. The sound escapes in a hum over my tongue, startling my eyes open.

Garrett isn’t staring at my hand anymore. His eyes are on mine. His gaze is as penetrating as his touch.

“Feel better?” His voice is thick. The lazy grin on his face doesn’t mask anything.

I look down at my fingers protruding from the end of the cast. They just look like my fingers. They’re not bruised sausages anymore. I wiggle them carefully, but the throbbing doesn’t return. I want to say something smooth or even just ask how he did that, but my voice is trapped, or maybe just held down, by absolute amazement. My entire arm, from fingertips to elbow, just feels like my arm now, wrapped in a heavy, awkward tube. Garrett gently replaces my arm to my side before he steps away. I feel drugged and soft at my edges, like I did in the hospital. He smiles like he understands.

“Come on,” he says, tipping his head toward the bleachers. “I brought your backpack.”

We turn toward the stands, walking silently beside one another, his hand brushing so close to mine that I want to reach out and take it. I try to will him into awareness, as if I could telekinetically weave his fingers into mine, but he seems more interested in scanning the arc of the track than looking at me. Four steps before we reach the bottom step of the risers, he stops dead and turns back toward the tree line at the opposite end.

I follow his gaze and in a split second, maybe less than that, my eyes catch on the leaves of a branch. I don’t know how I can make it out from this distance, but my vision narrows in on the limb with its leaves mashed unnaturally around a dark entrance to the woods. I blink and focus on the shadow and realize I’m not looking at an emptiness among the trees but a very full man, dressed all in black, swaddled among the branches. His face is completely shrouded, pushed deep in a dark hood.

“Who...” The whisper of the word is still on my lips as Garrett tears away from me, in a lightening sprint, toward the trees.

I see the tree branches shake a trail of the man’s retreat as he escapes back into the woods. Garrett reaches the tree line only seconds later. I don’t know how he got from me, to the tree line, which is across half a football field, but he did. My chest begins whirring and I shoot off after him like a runner out of the blocks. I don’t think to do it, I just do. My breath flows through me, easy and deep, and my protective bubble blows out around me like a snow globe. I am in and out of myself at once, watching as I cover the ground as silent as a rabbit, but a hundred times faster. I don’t question how the ground passes beneath me in a dirty blur or of how weightless I feel.

I just focus on following Garrett.

He crashes through the shroud of branches and the limbs are still quivering as I tear through, about twenty feet behind him. I follow his trail as best I can, the leaves whipping back and stinging my face. The man is so fast, I lose sight of him immediately. I put up my cast to shield my face and glimpse Garrett dodging to the right. Although my body automatically shifts in the same direction, I falter with the thought that maybe it would be smarter for me to take a different path. Circle around. What if I’m the one to actually catch the man? The thoughts multiply and the fear of touching the man’s ski mask again, or smelling his rotted breath, seeps into me.

Like a vacuum that has suddenly sucked me up, I am jerked back inside myself. The rhythm that had made my speed effortless, collapses under me. My feet stumble as if I’ve miscalculated the number of steps in a staircase and fall down the last. I pitch forward, hitting the ground hard and rolling as I try to keep my cast pulled into my chest. The momentum finally throws me down, flat, onto my stomach, both arms sprawling at my sides. I would groan or scream or both, if the air wasn’t completely kicked out of my lungs. It takes a minute before I can even pull in a dusty breath.

I lay there, panting against the ground, listening as the sound of Garrett’s chase grows more and more faint. After a few moments of not being able to hear the footsteps any longer, I push myself onto my feet, checking to see if anything is broken or re-broken. Nothing is. My arm isn’t even aching.

I retrace my path out of the woods, half walking and half running and fully expecting to find Garrett along the way. Every time I think I’ve found the exit to the track, there is no exit, but more trees. It didn’t seem like I ran into the woods nearly this far, but I follow the prints all the way back to the exact bush that Garrett annihilated when he barreled into the woods. I scour the ground at the opening and find both mine and Garrett’s prints along with the rippled print of a workman’s boots.

My ears feel like they are working on bat sonar. I twist, searching for sound or movement, but the only snapping or rustling I hear is what I am doing myself.

I scuttle out of the woods, trying to will Garrett to come darting through the trees. I run to get my jacket, still heaped on the track, and my backpack from the bleachers. I don’t know what I should do next. I pace in front of the bleachers, wringing my hands in front of me while I keep my eyes on the trees. I don’t want to leave in case Garrett returns or in case I hear him calling to me, and I don’t want to stay because Garrett might need help and I keep hearing things behind me and beside me and in front of me that aren’t there.