Gravity, a young adult paranormal romance (12 page)

"You said they just moved here?" Hugh
asked in passing.

I nodded, dipping a piece of bread in
the leftover sauce puddle on my plate.  

"I went to school with a Phillip
Rhodes, from first grade on up. I think we graduated the same year.
But I know he left after high school, when he got married." A very
thoughtful look had crossed my father's face, a skinny line
appearing between his eyebrows as he gazed off into
space.

"Cheryl Glass, wasn't it?" Claire
asked him.

Hugh nodded. "Yeah, I think so," he
said.

 
"Biggest snob in our
school," Claire divulged. "She acted like she invented the side
ponytail." It sounded like a familiar story.

"Henry said something about his
parents moving back here. It's probably the same family," I told
them.

For some reason, Hugh looked
troubled.

Chapter 9

I paced back and forth in my room with
my phone in my clenched fist.  I had been repeating the same
routine for about twenty minutes. Maybe the number was fake? Walk,
pause, look at phone, walk. Maybe the whole thing was some horrible
prank Lainey and Madison conceived over a tanning
session.

Finally, I typed out a text, and
forced my thumb to hit SEND. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Except possible humiliation. Having the text forwarded to everyone
in school...

The phone shook in my hand. Every
second I waited for a reply, I grew more anxious.

Thirty seconds later, the phone
beeped. I almost dropped it on the carpet.

Tomorrow after school is
good
, his reply to my suggestion read
plainly.

I let out a breath, and sank onto the
floor beside my bed. I set down the phone next to me and my hand
bumped something beneath the dust ruffle. I slid the object out. It
was a familiar photo album, the glittery pink front covered with
heart stickers. The anticipation in my chest melted into a numb
block.

I thumbed through the photos of Jenna
and me together. Birthday parties, on vacation. Smiling gleefully
in almost every shot. I pitied the girls in the pictures, who
didn't know how much their life would change when they got older.
Guilt slithered through me again. What was I doing? Maybe I was
just distracting myself.

I leaned my head back against the side
of the bed, and shut my eyes, the photo album still in my lap.
Jenna wouldn't trust Henry for more than flirting, I was certain of
that. But that was Jenna, or at least, Jenna the next generation,
whose buoyant attitude had crashed in flames somewhere along the
way.  

I wondered if she really had run away.
It wouldn't be that out of the question. I denied it initially
because I couldn't imagine her keeping such a big secret from me.
But even I had to admit that things had changed in the last months
of our friendship. And then there were all the times she had
complained about feeling trapped in Hell, and hating her
parents.   

I wondered what she would think of me
now.

Of most people I've heard it said that
if they were gone, they would want their friends to move on and be
happy. Not Jenna. Jenna would want me to set up a shrine and stand
vigil to it every night. And I knew I wasn't doing enough. Over the
summer, I had walked through every street and inch of woods
surrounding her house. I had put up flyers all over town. I had
answered every question her parents and, eventually, the police
peppered me with, and there were stacks of pages worth. But it
wasn't enough, and I knew it.

When I went to sleep that night, I had
a different kind of dream.

Henry stood at the end of a thin
ribbon of sidewalk. He waited patiently for me, his arms crossed in
front of him. I walked to him, because there was nowhere else I'd
rather go. His eyes were trained on my every step, and I couldn't
walk fast enough. I reached him and our mouths met. Hands sliding
through each other's hair. Tongues twisting. I had never had a
dream like this.

We were on the couch in the basement
then. His mouth broke away from mine, as he pulled his shirt up
over his head, tousling his hair. There was nothing but a blur
underneath, where his chest should be.

Someone knocked on the door.
Persistent, they wouldn't stop, even though I tried to block it
out. As much as I feverishly wanted to keep kissing him, I couldn't
ignore the sound.

"I have to go," I whispered. His face
retained its patience, his eyes soft and watchful.

"I'll always be here," he said.
 

I stood up off of the couch and walked
through the filmy haze. Then I was standing in front of the back
patio doors, staring outside. Someone stood out in the darkness, I
knew, but I couldn't see them.

That's when I woke up. The black air
in my room suffocated me.  

Nerves plagued me all day, to the
point where I couldn't eat lunch or I knew I'd throw up. The dream
I'd had about Henry made me both more aware of my feelings and more
conflicted. Henry and I didn't acknowledge each other in school,
and I wondered idly if he had changed his mind. I even scrolled
through my text messages to make sure his reply was still there; it
was. 

I didn't talk to Theo about it, even
though she had been there when Henry had first brought the
suggestion up. Instead we compared notes we had taken in Spanish,
our other class together, and kept our chatter to mundane topics.
 

After the bell rang in Art class for
school to be over, I stayed behind as I had the other day. Only
this time I was waiting for Henry instead of trying to avoid him.
My stomach was a pit of nerve soup as I stood up.

Lainey tried to walk out with Henry
and he said goodbye to her. I couldn't help but be a little pleased
at the stunned look on her face as she watched him walk back to my
seat. I looked down at the floor; a little afraid her eyes would
become lasers and bore a hole in me.  

"Are you ready?" Henry asked me in a
low voice. I nodded. "Do you need me to carry anything?" He held
out his arms, almost as if to hug me. I bit down on my
grin.

"No, thank you," I said
softly.

"Is somebody picking us up?" he
inquired, grabbing his own books off his desk and holding them
underneath his arm.  

"I actually walk home," I said. "I
don't live far." My speech stuck behind my tonsils, and I cleared
my throat.

"Great," he said, the usually-present
smile arriving. "We can take advantage of the warmer weather before
it says goodbye."

We walked out of the emptying school
and through the parking lot. Out of nowhere, shyness had overtaken
me, rending me speechless. I watched the cars pulling into traffic;
I couldn't even look at him, afraid I would either start laughing
and be unable to stop, or I would faint.  

"What did you think of the quiz in
History?" he asked as we made it to the sidewalk. I shrugged my
shoulders, which had tensed up considerably.

"Half the time I don't know if Wick is
being serious or not," he said, shaking his head. "I have a hard
time editing my notes down." I knew I should respond with my own
opinion, but I couldn't find the words.

We walked in silence for a few
minutes, me berating myself inside my head. The sunlight made the
gray sidewalk shimmer. I knew I was making a fool of myself, but I
didn't know how to stop it. It was like watching a slow-motion
video of a person jumping to their death from a skyscraper.
 

"Won't it be great when we can start
driver's training?" he asked, still trying to get me to talk.
"Finally be able to go wherever we want." I nodded
noncommittally.

"What's with you?" he asked finally,
stopping in his tracks. "You've barely said a word this whole
time."

"Sorry," I said, finally turning
towards him. He was almost exactly the same height as I was, maybe
an inch taller, so I looked straight into his eyes. "I don't mean
to be so awkward, I just...I've never been great at talking to
guys. They all think I'm weird."

He smiled, not a smirk, but a genuine,
nice smile. "Don't worry, I'm safe. Nothing freaks me out. You
could tell me anything and I wouldn't think you're bizarre. Well,
almost anything. You've never murdered anyone, have
you?"

I shook my head, and a short laugh
came out of my throat.

"Ha! I knew I could do it," he
declared triumphantly.  

"Do what?" I inquired.

"Make you laugh. You're always so
serious around me. You've made my day, dear." He nudged me with his
shoulder.

The old-timey affection was not
missed, nor was the physical touch, but I chose not to comment on
either of them. The dam on my words was broken, however, and I
started talking back to him.

"You promised you'd bring up our
discussion the other day," he reminded me.

"I did," I agreed.

"Why is it so bad that I'm friends
with those people?" he inquired, searching my eyes.

I looked down at my feet. "They're
awful."

"They're not so awful," he argued.
"You just think they're better than you or something. Well, I'm
here to tell you it isn't true."

I blushed, feeling my features become
a little look of shock for a moment until I smoothed it away. "How
did you know I felt that way?"

"You hunch your shoulders," he
offered, looking up at the sky as he thought of other reasons. "You
look at people as though you're afraid they will bite you at any
moment. Why?" When he asked the question, he looked at me
again.

I didn't have a real answer. Jenna
felt like too sacred of a topic.

"Ever since we were little, I remember
knowing I was different than them," I said, gazing up at the halo
around the sun. "And it wasn't just their clothes, or the fact that
they had white chocolate raspberry brownies at the bake sale when I
had plain old chocolate chip."

That made him smirk. "So what was it
that felt so different?"

"It was like they knew how much more
important they were than me, and they never let me forget it," I
said. I had never really analyzed the situation so much
before.

"But nobody there is more important
just because of how much their parents checks are worth," Henry
countered.

That caused me to chuckle again. "That
just tells me how new you are," I said, playing with the zipper on
my coat. "And how innocent and sheltered from the world you must
be. Money always buys power."   

Henry pushed his hands in his
sweatshirt pockets. I wondered for a moment if I offended
him.

"Innocent is not the word I would
use," he said, then appraised me. "Can you keep a little
secret?"

"Sure. As long as it's little," I
teased.  

"My parents are mostly pushing me to
hang out with specific people. To them, it's never too early to
start networking."

"Ah." Sounded like Claire in
overdrive. 

"Ever since we moved back here in May,
we've had a ton of dinner parties and social get-togethers that I
have no interest in. I've had to wear a tie more than once, to give
you an idea. They're all old friends, my parents and their
parents."

"So your mom and dad used to live
here?" I asked. He nodded, looking curious as I fit the pieces
together. "Hugh said something about that."

"Who's Hugh?"

"Oh, my dad," I explained. "My parents
were kind of hippies, I guess, when I was little. I've never called
them mom or dad, just their names."

"My parents would kill me if I called
them by their first names," he said ardently.

"Metaphorically, I hope," I
said.

"Not really," he said, looking ahead
as a couple of little kids cut us off on bicycles. "Respect is the
number one rule in our house. I have to call my father "sir." My
parents are both lawyers, and they bring the courtroom home with
them." That impressed me and made me wonder how he had turned out
so down to earth at the same time.

 
The leaves on the
trees had only begun to change, dots of color in the green flush. I
wondered if he was warm in his sweatshirt as the sun beat down on
us, even despite the cool breeze. I was debating taking off my coat
myself. I plucked the hair elastic around my wrist, whipping my
hair up and not entirely believing this whole conversation was
real.  

We turned onto my street after a few
minutes. A few people were out mowing their lawns, or tending to
their fall flowers.

"This is my house," I said when we
arrived, with a faux grand gesture of my arms. "Ta da." He laughed,
his eyes crinkling again. I don't know if I'd ever seen someone
with a more genuinely happy smile, and it made his face more
impossibly gorgeous the more I saw it. The goofiness I had once
seen in it had disappeared.    

Hugh was standing in the dining room
when we walked in, waiting like a bouncer to either okay Henry or
kick him out. 

"Hugh, this is Henry," I said,
watching his reaction for signs of trouble, ready to shield Henry
from oncoming missiles.