Feral (11 page)

But even if Sweet Pea could have heard her, she would not have listened. She was too hungry. And the other cats' need was every bit as great. Sweet Pea edged her head deeper beneath the branch, hurrying, racing ahead of the other cats. Sweet Pea was so happy, her whiskers quivered—she was more than ready to be the first to sink her teeth into the flesh, ready to start feasting before any of the other cats had a chance to steal the choicest bite.

It didn't matter to Sweet Pea that Serena had been feeding her for months, taking pity on her, showing her kindness. Sweet Pea was a wild thing. And she was hungry.

Serena tried not to look through her eyes at the cat, but down on the woods from her strange spiritual perch high above. She tried to distract herself from what was about to happen by thinking about how much like wrists the tree trunks looked, how the smallest branches were fingers reaching for the sky.

She wished that she could reach her arm up, too. Wished that she could grab hold of some magical force that would rescue her from enduring this final horror, the very thing she had feared since she was little. The monsters—in the woods—salivating as they grew close. It was happening.

Their feet sped, crunching through the snow. They purred as they grew close. They ran their rough tongues over their teeth.

Serena
knew
what was about to happen. And she was powerless to stop it.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

T
o be released from hours of rigmarole—changing clothes, registering, collecting textbooks, filling a locker, getting the official school tour—just in time to face the horrors of lunch as a complete and total outsider, Claire had decided, was truly its own special punishment. She'd missed her first four classes, including journalism. Of all things. The one class she'd truly been looking forward to. At least, that was what she told herself. She wanted it back, her love of stories. She wanted not to think of writing and remember what had followed the last story she'd cracked. It was maybe the worst thing that gang had done to her—soil the way she thought of journalism.

She filled her tray with soup and a soggy-looking grilled cheese, paid, and turned toward the buzzing cafeteria—tables upon tables of strange faces.

Claire glanced about nervously. Around her, chairs screeched across the tile floor; voices babbled on, as unstoppable as the gurgles of a river over rock.

And all of them—strangers.

She began to sweat nervously. Her body felt clunky. Her knees felt like they'd been wrapped with jogger's weights. Her tray grew as heavy as a concrete block.

“Hey there,” a voice rang out beside her.

When Claire turned, she found herself staring into the prettiest thing she'd seen since she'd arrived in Peculiar.
Ms. Isles
, read her lunchroom monitor badge.
Isles
, the perfect name for a woman with eyes the kind of blue that could only exist somewhere tropical. A woman who even smelled like coconut, like a vacation breeze—and who had perfectly coiffed beach-blond hair and the kind of ridiculously perfect body that begged to be put in a bikini.

Isles stretched her hibiscus-red lips into a smile. “I think someone's trying to get your attention,” she said, pointing across the cafeteria.

Claire followed Ms. Isles's pointed finger and saw Becca Holman at a table, waving.

She took a grateful step forward. Behind her, the cash register tallied up another lunch, and Owen veered around Claire, taking long strides toward Becca's table. Maybe Becca hadn't really been waving to her at all, Claire thought, her shoes squeaking against the tile floor as she came to an abrupt halt.

She watched as Owen strutted, his body ladder-straight, his shoulders thrown back. He carried himself like a peacock, throwing his colors about wildly.

With another ring of the cash register, a second boy stepped around Claire—Chas, still wearing his letterman's jacket with the leather sleeves. He carried his tray of food with one hand, easily sidestepping a girl who threw her chair backward without looking, right into Chas's path. His movements were so easy, sure. No wonder, Claire caught herself thinking, he was named last fall's most valuable member of the football team.

She stood, looking down at her tray, feeling dumber than ever as she continued to search for a place to sit. She wished she could melt straight into oblivion.

“Come on,” a low, smooth voice murmured into her ear.

When Claire lifted her head, she found Rich smiling at her. And just as it had happened in her street during the ice storm, Claire felt her nerves unwind.

“Don't just stand there,” Rich said, his hands full of both a lunch tray and a stack of yellow papers. “You don't want to miss a close-up view of the Bold and the Beautiful.” He winked, threw his head forward once in a gesture that insisted she follow.

Claire walked behind Rich and Ruthie, the cashier from 'Bout Out, straight toward the table where Becca sat, Chas and Owen like bodyguards on either side of her.

The air filled with high-pitched scrapes as Rich and Ruthie pulled two chairs back on the side of the table opposite Becca and the two boys.

“Claire Cain, a junior, just like us,” Becca told Owen and Chas, nodding once at Claire. “Her dad's the prof on sabbatical. Renting the—” She stopped repeating the story her own dad had told her, and clenched her teeth, making the muscles on both sides of her jaw bulge. She cleared her throat, tucked her blond hair behind both ears. “The old Sims place.” She exhaled slowly, like the words had been hard to lift.

“Hi,” Claire mumbled. Realizing she was still standing, she hurriedly dropped her tray onto the table, slopping her vegetable soup over the edge of her bowl and onto her cheese sandwich in the process. She screeched her chair backward, and sat down between Rich and Ruthie, her face hot and sweaty. She felt uncomfortable in her heavy black Peculiar High cardigan, but she couldn't take it off—it covered the scars on her arms, where the cuffs of her blouse rode up.

“Owen and Chas,” the girl said, pointing.

Owen nodded once, but Chas barely looked up from the video game he'd begun to play on his phone.

“
Stop
it,” Becca snapped at Owen, before dipping the tip of her fry into some ketchup.

“Stop what?” Owen asked.

“Staring at Isles.”

“I wasn't staring at Isles,” Owen argued.

“Who doesn't stare at Isles?” Rich muttered.

“
I
wasn't,
Wretch
,” Owen snarled. “I was thinking.”

Rich shook his head, rolling his eyes in a
should have known
manner as the nickname hit the air.

Before Claire could ask about the name, Chas snorted at Owen. “Since when do you think?”

Owen glared.

“Hey, give me your algebra homework, will you?” Chas asked. “Mine got lost in the ice storm.”

Owen shook his head. “If you'd get off that thing for five minutes,” he growled, pointing at the phone, “you'd get yours done, too.”

“Ooooh,” Chas said, laughing as he punched at his phone, seeming to enjoy the comeback.

Owen continued to stare at him in a way that said he hadn't meant it as a playful jab.

“You must be pretty bad off if you're asking
him
for his homework,” Becca snorted.

“Whoa,” Rich said, holding his hands up in a way that demanded their conversation be cut short. Rich, Claire realized, didn't usually run with this group. That much probably should have been obvious with his “Bold and the Beautiful” comment. She eyed the faces surrounding her table, wondering why so many people insisted on being books that spent the entirety of their high school years in one genre section—mystery (the loners), romance (the jocks and cheerleaders), literary (the brains and nerds), sci-fi (the socially inept techies)—and never wandered anywhere else. But then again, she reminded herself, she had once felt perfectly content never to wander from her own space, permanently—and happily—reserved at Rachelle's side.

Suddenly, Rhine appeared, clomping his heavy shoes straight toward their table. “Rich,” he said. “I saw the flyer. I want to help. Tell me what I can do.”

“Help with what?” Becca asked. “What flyer?”

“That's why Ruthie and I just came over. To tell you guys that we're getting together a search party,” Rich said. “Three o'clock.”

“A search party,” Becca repeated.

Chas sighed, shook his head while he tried to zero back in on the game on his phone. Owen raised his arms—his own uniform shirt had been immaculately ironed, Claire noticed—and covered his mouth, like he was trying to convince himself not to be sick.

“We're all going to meet up at 'Bout Out,” Rich announced. “I think maybe we should start looking there, then fan out. Maybe she was trying to get there, during the storm. It would have been dry and safe. Dad's still got that warming center going, because we've got a couple of families with pretty bad damage to their houses, stuff that needs to be fixed by an electrician, and who don't have power yet. I'm sure they'll come help. I know Dad will—and I'm sure we can get Mom involved, too.

“I figure,” he went on as Becca's face grew distant, “I'll go home to grab all the weatherproof clothes I can find: long johns and Thinsulate socks and hiking boots and my weatherproof parka and extra sweatshirts and jackets. Nobody'll have to bow out because they're cold.”

“I was right here,” Rhine said. “At school. I mean, I keep thinking I should have maybe seen something. When Sanders cut the day short, it was like it shocked everybody. They all ran out, then started to come back for the papers and the books they'd accidentally left behind. I must have been here another hour, letting people back in, after the doors were locked. I never saw Serena. But if she never made it home from school—I just keep thinking I should have seen her at some point.”

“You can hang some of these flyers,” Rich said, handing him a chunk of his stack.

“We've hung flyers in the front window of the store, too,” Ruthie added. She leaned over the table, her chest bulging over the top button of her too-tight blouse. She shook her dark hair from her eyes just before reaching around Claire to push one of Rich's yellow paper notices across the table. “We used her last yearbook photo. If you've got something more recent . . .” Her voice trailed, as Becca rubbed her forehead and pushed the flyer back toward her.

“Funny thing, isn't it?” Becca snapped at her. “
You
wanting to help?”

Ruthie shot another pleading look at Chas. But he was lost in his game.

“I
knew
it,” Becca told Chas. “That first night, when she wasn't at her house, and she wasn't at yours, either. I knew something was wrong.”

“For God's sake, Becca,” Chas moaned.

Becca seemed to ignore his tone, preferring to gaze at her reflection on the back of her spoon. Her hand flew up to smooth her hair on the side of her head. The gesture seemed kind of thoughtless, though—it looked like a habit, like Becca was the kind of girl who spent a lot of time looking at her reflection: in the mirror taped to her locker door and the shiny sides of metal napkin dispensers and even windows, when the light hit them just right. She was obviously the kind of girl who cared a lot about the way she looked. But why wouldn't she? She was so ridiculously perfect, with that silky butter-colored hair and the face of a Cover Girl model, she was practically a cliché. She probably got stared at all the time, Claire figured. A girl who got stared at so much would just naturally spend a lot of time double-checking her appearance, making sure people would like what they saw.

But today, as pretty as she still was, she looked a bit unraveled. She only had eyeliner on one eye and her blouse was buttoned wrong.

“Why would Serena want to talk to
me
?” Chas asked.

“Because I
know
her,” Becca said, leaning forward, fire in her glare. “Maybe
you
don't, but
I
do. I know her; I can predict where she'll wind up—like Dad knows how to follow the dirt roads straight to every fishing hole in the county. I
know.
It doesn't matter that she found out about
you
two,” Becca went on, dragging her pointing finger from Chas to Ruthie, who flinched. “She would have tried to end things on a good note.”

“Becca!” Chas shouted. “Enough, okay? You were the one who built up some great romance in your mind.
You.
I'm telling you, it never happened. Serena and I just got smashed together, because
you
liked the idea of us being together. Just because you and pretty boy over there,” he said, pointing at Owen, “are a couple, you thought it would be cute for the best friends to be a couple, too.
You
were the one who liked the idea of me and Serena. We didn't. Trust me.”

Becca narrowed her eyes. “Serena would never want
anyone
for an enemy. Not even someone who had screwed around on her. She'd think of something—return a box of your stuff, maybe—ring the doorbell, and wind up talking to you on your front porch. You'd sit on the porch swing, like two people who had only just met, until your fingers were blue from the cold, and she'd finally stand to go, and you'd turn toward your house, not thinking anymore of how horrible you were, you ridiculous
cheater,
but realizing what a cool person Serena really was. And how much you were going to miss hanging out with her. It was Serena's gift. She could never let anger be the last note. She's just so
likable . . .
”

“Likable?” Chas repeated, scooting up in his seat. “Are you joking? She was dull. Seriously. She never had a damn thing to say.”

“Has,” Becca corrected.