Feral (20 page)

“Can you help me?” she asked, her voice sounding too high and too pitiful. “I was looking for the stairs.” She cringed. It was a stupid thing to say. Stairs—who could care about stairs? Why didn't she ask them where they
were
? But then again, would not knowing where she was walking show how confused and vulnerable she really was?

The silhouette moved toward her in slow motion, each of his movements creating an intensification of emotion and sound. Claire could hear his feet cracking through the half-frozen puddles in the pavement. He walked strangely, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He stepped into and out of a streetlight—so quickly, like a blink—but Claire swore he had a peach-fuzz mustache.

“
Schoolgirl!
” he boomed.

Claire opened her mouth to scream, but only whimpered. Tried to run, but fear had weakened her legs—or maybe it was that she couldn't count on her legs to respond any longer to a threat, not after they'd been shattered. She cringed, closing her eyes as tightly as she could.

He's found you, he's here again, he's probably brought all his friends, maybe hundreds of them this time, hundreds, and the next time you open your eyes, you'll see them: fangs. Because they're wild they're here to tear you apart this is it the end the end the end . . .

When she finally cracked her eyes open, she saw it for sure this time, only inches in front of her face: a peach-fuzz mustache. But this wasn't the face of the freshman that had turned horrible shades of mortified when Rachelle had teased him. This was someone else—his features flashing before her in black and white.

“Casey,” Claire whispered.

“You shouldn't be here,” he told her. “Bad things happen to people who aren't where they're supposed to be. Don't you know that?”

When she didn't answer, he gripped her arms, shook her. “I paid the price. Because Sanders wasn't where I thought he'd be. Because he was in the locker room when he shouldn't have been. I tried to tell Serena, too. People should stay where they're supposed to be. Do you hear me? You
shouldn't be down here
.”

Claire screamed, struggled to push herself away from Casey. As she fought, a sliver of light pierced her eyes. She grimaced, trying to wiggle away from it. But the hands on her arms refused to let go.

“Please—” she muttered. As she opened her eyes again, she realized the light was bouncing off a pane of glass in a nearby classroom window. She could see herself there in the reflection—standing in the basement of Peculiar High. Not an alley. There was no ice storm. Claire was in a hallway. And the hands gripping her arms belonged to Rich.

“Did you hear me?” Rich was asking.

Claire shook her head. “What?”

“You shouldn't be here. You left that door upstairs wide open. Good way to get suspended for the rest of the semester.”

Claire panted, fear returning to her in waves, even though Rich was here, even though Casey and the alley and the ice had disappeared.

Because she knew what she had seen. Those articles were wrong—those odd instances weren't pranks. Casey was real.
That
was why Serena had come down to the basement. That was maybe even why she'd died.

We're in it together.
Isn't that what Becca had said? She and Claire were connected by what they'd seen: Serena, torn to shreds, ravaged by a wild pack. Feral.

Serena and Claire were connected, too. They'd both stayed to work on a story. At the beginning of an ice storm. And look what happened.
Just look.
Claire's ears filled with the sounds of snapping limbs. Breaking bones. But she was not just remembering it. Those sounds were back, crackling in her ears. Taunting her.

Wild creatures that had torn them both to shreds—they had that in common, too.

It was all connected. Claire could feel it. Serena had stayed to work on a story about a boy up to no good and had turned up dead. Claire had written a story about a boy up to his own kind of no good, and had turned up beaten to a pulp in the middle of a Chicago parking lot. The kind of beaten that had very nearly resulted in her own death.

It was too similar. Too, too similar. There were no mere coincidences this strong.

Serena needed Claire. Because no one else saw Peculiar the way Claire did—with fresh eyes. Something was going on here, in this town. Something that Claire would understand, because of what she'd been through.

It's okay, Serena
, she thought.
We're in this together, too. . . .

“Claire?” Rich asked. “Claire? Are you okay?”

Limply, Claire nodded.

“Come on. Let's go back upstairs.”

Claire fought to gain control of her legs, weakened by fear, as Rich led her around the corner and toward the exit of the out-of-bounds basement.

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C
laire wondered, as she sat across the table from Rich at lunch, if she should tell him about what she'd seen in the basement. If anyone would entertain the possibility of a spirit being real, wouldn't it be the son of the preacher? He would be, she felt, the last to look at her like she was crazy if she were to come right out with it: Casey was no urban legend—he was real. And Casey obviously knew things—he knew about the alley Claire had been in during the Chicago ice storm. He had shown that alley to her, down in the basement. But what had he shown Serena? Had something happened to her—something other than an accident? Was Casey somehow responsible?

“What's your dress like? The one you brought with you from Chicago?” Becca asked from the opposite side of their table.

When Claire stared back blankly, Becca went on, “The one you told me about this morning. For the dance.”

“Oh,” Claire said, trying to remember what it was, exactly, that she had packed. Certainly not a formal. “Just—it's black and—kind of—basic.”

“
Classic
,” Becca corrected. “Sounds pretty,” she chirped. “You know, I was thinking—we all could go together. Me, you, Rich—”

Rich snorted. “You and me?” he blurted. The question wasn't antagonistic—instead, showed a genuine surprise.

“Sure,” Becca said. “And Owen, and Chas.”

“I'm not going,” Chas announced, plopping his phone down on the table as he picked up his sandwich.

Becca frowned. “But you'd planned all along—”

“I don't want to go, all right?” Chas snapped. “I never did.”

“The next thing you know,” Becca told Owen, “you'll say we aren't going anymore, either.”

“
Becca
,” Owen sighed, wiping his face in exasperation. “I'm so sick of this. You've got it in your head that something's going on with me, that I've got some girl on the side. What girl, Becca? Huh? You really think in a town this small that nobody would have said anything by now?”

“Chas kept his secret,” Becca challenged.

“Yeah, for two seconds,” Owen reminded her.

“You're different than you used to be,” Becca said, twisting her paper napkin with the force of a woman wringing the neck of a man who'd wronged her.

“She's right about that one, pretty boy,” Chas agreed.

“So what? You're not supposed to change in your life? Ever?” Owen thundered.

“Change is good,” Chas told him. “Becoming an asshole generally is not.”

“I'm an asshole now because—why? I changed my hair?”

“Because you built yourself a pedestal and sat on it,” Becca said.

Owen frowned, holding his hands palms up, as if to show his innocence. “Jesus. You know what—forget this,” he said. “If you want to go to the dance, Becca, that's fine. I'm happy to take you. But I don't want to go just to be told all night how much I suck.” He grabbed his tray and stomped off, leaving the table quiet and the air around it tense.

Claire felt bad for Owen as he hurried away—she didn't care how he'd been acting lately, it didn't seem right for Chas and Becca to gang up on him that way.

She glanced to the side, at Rich, her mind instantly drifting back toward his rescuing her in that basement. She wanted so badly to tell him what had happened. But her questions returned—about Casey, about what she'd seen, about what had happened to Serena—piling up until she felt like someone who had just inherited an heirloom painting she knew nothing about. She needed to find out more before she said anything to Rich, she decided—otherwise, she just might end up accidentally giving away something incredibly valuable.

“No need to remind you guys, I'm sure,” Isles said that afternoon, picking a stack of paper up off the corner of her desk, “but our chapter test was scheduled for today.”

No, no, no
, Claire thought as Isles began to make her way toward the closest row of desks, distributing the papers. Isles, her bright hibiscus-red lips glowing against the moldy backdrop of the school. Isles, who trailed the warm smell of coconut everywhere she went.

“Is that really the best idea?” Claire blurted. “In light of everything that's happened the past few days?”

Isles flinched. “We've been preparing for this test for quite some time,” she said. “I think that you'll find this exam to be no problem, based on your grades from your previous school.” And she winked.

Claire frowned; she wasn't ready—since arriving in Peculiar little more than a week ago, she hadn't so much as cracked a book. She was still trying to come up with a reason to ask to be excused—an F wasn't exactly the best way to start off any class—when the test paper hit her desk.

A matching test. Claire felt the nervous knot inside her begin to unwind. She could fake a matching test.

But the moment before she could scribble her name on her test paper, she caught Becca staring at her from the opposite side of the room. Becca's wounded look bounced Claire's words right back at her—
Is that really the best idea in light of everything that's happened
—and asked, at the same time,
What do you really know about it?

Claire's question had obviously upset Becca. Her stare said to Claire that it didn't really matter that she'd seen Serena dead. True horror was reserved for Becca, who'd known the way the face beneath the pile of limbs had looked smiling in the July sun. Becca, who'd once felt those half-eaten arms around her neck, hugging a friendly hello. Becca was the one who was suffering—not Claire.
If I can take this test, you can
, Becca's eyes seemed to insinuate.

Claire watched Becca swivel to face forward again, a sad slump settling into her shoulders.

What if I had died?
Claire asked herself.
How would Rachelle have acted then? What if she had seen me lying out there in the lot? What would it have done to her?

Claire noticed the way Becca's hands trembled as she smoothed her test sheet and pressed too hard against her paper, snapping her pencil lead violently—and she wondered,
Did Rachelle look just as frazzled and upset when she'd come to visit at the hospital?
Yes, she had—but didn't she almost gag, too, seeing Claire the first time? For a split second, just before telling her that it wasn't nearly as bad as she'd expected?
Yes!
She had—Claire remembered it now, clearly—there Claire was, hopped up on the kind of painkillers that could have knocked out the Hulk, and mostly, Rachelle was just disgusted.

Rachelle had just
kept
looking at her like that. Like some horrible, nasty bloodstain that was not the same, even when the bandages and the casts were removed. Oh, she'd smiled. She'd pretended. But while Claire was being homeschooled the entire fall semester of her junior year, while she was going through excruciating physical therapy and while the nurses and her therapist and her father had all busied themselves with cheering her on, there was Rachelle, scooting herself into Claire's bedroom for after-school visits, looking at Claire like she was never, ever going to be the same.

No wonder Claire'd written those awful things in her unsent emails. All that pain—for what? For a friend who grimaced, wearing her disgust out in the open when she looked at Claire.
It was for you
, Claire heard the voice in her head cry out, as her hand tightened around her pencil.
I got that way because I swooped in to save you!

Her pencil began to pop beneath the pressure of her hand, threatening to snap in half.

“Time,” Isles called. “Pencils down.”

What? Time already?
Claire thought, panicked. She pushed her hair behind her ears and curled herself over her test paper.

But the letters running down the side of the page only seemed to swim, like leaves on top of a river.
Write anything, Claire
, she told herself.
For God's sake, anything.

She'd just begun to make her first mark when Isles slid Claire's paper off the top of her desk.

Claire scrambled after it, trying to snatch it out of Isles's hand. But Isles was already snaking up the aisle, leaving the faint scent of coconut behind her.

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“I
want to go—”

“Claire,” her father interrupted, his tone putting a pall over their dinner. He cleared his throat as he pushed his glasses up into his face.

“What?” Claire asked, frowning against her father's nervous tic. “There's nothing weird about wanting to express your condolences by attending a funeral.”

“But
this
funeral, Claire,” he pointed out, shaking his head. “I just worry. . . . Besides, you didn't know the Sims girl.”

Claire sucked in a breath, pushed her creamed spinach about on her plate.