Irish Melody (2 page)

The alarm on his phone sounded and he knew that meant he had less than ten minutes left for lunch. Most people waited until the last minute to come back from lunch, but he couldn’t do that. He had to throw away the trash and set up his desk again.

Hannah released his hand and Ippy gathered the trash. “Hey, I might take a nap this afternoon—if I see Caelum, do you want me to say hi?”

Ippy nodded and started to get out of the car, but he hesitated, his hand stopping on the door as he stood just outside of her car.
I want him to visit me, too.

Hannah looked surprised, but she nodded anyway and slowly smiled. “Sure. I’ll let him know that you want to see him, too. Hopefully he’ll be able to. He said that he could do it to anyone he was close to. Just, Ippy, if he can’t I don’t want you to be mad, okay? I don’t know if you two have the bond. I don’t even know how he and I got it, and I don’t want you to be hurt if he isn’t able to. Okay?”

He nodded and closed the door behind him before going back inside with only a few minutes to spare. He had his desk perfect when the teacher walked back into the room followed by Sara who was helping her carry a few books.

“Hey, Phillip,” Sara said once she’d put them down on the teacher’s desk. He looked up at her, wondering what she could want. She rarely spoke to him—in fact, none of them really did. He thought it was because he didn’t talk back to them. “Jessie said that you and Hannah were holding hands in Hannah’s car. She saw you when she walked by, but you were too busy to see her. Aiming a bit high there, aren’t you,
mange
?”

Ippy flinched at the old name that she and the others had been calling him behind Hannah’s back for the last year. He flipped his notebook to a new page and quickly wrote that he didn’t have mange. He didn’t see how she’d have been able to forget because he’d just told her, like he’d told her that he didn’t have fleas or lice either when she’d told everyone that he did.

“Sara, go sit down,” the teacher said. Sara rolled her eyes, but she did as she was told even if she did make kissing noises as she walked past him.

Though Ippy had tried to ignore her, he spent the next hour wondering what she’d meant by saying that he was aiming high. Hannah wasn’t any taller than he was. He might have even grown taller than her after his last little spurt. So what did Sara mean by him aiming high?

“Phillip, are you paying attention?” the teacher asked him, interrupting his thoughts.

Most of the students would have probably said yes. But he knew that was a lie. He hadn’t been. At all. He’d been thinking about what Sara had said and since he never lied, he shook his head. Some of the kids laughed, another threw something at the back of his head that felt like a pencil. The teacher rolled her eyes and Ippy put his head down over his notebook, intent on following along as she turned and kept teaching again. He didn’t know what she was talking about, only that it was a history lesson, because that was the textbook everyone else had open. Usually they had individual lessons, but history was one of those topics that everyone could follow along with. The memorization was just different for each of them.

He liked memorizing things because he was good at it. The states, the capitols, then all the countries were all tests he’d done well on because he liked the system of memorizing things. They weren’t abstract concepts or strange ways of getting to the same answer like math was. It was just facts, and he liked them because they made sense and there was order in them. Like on his desk. Everything was neat. Only the states couldn’t be lined up from smallest to largest, and the presidents he’d had to memorize didn’t go in alphabetical order and the one time he’d try to present them on a test like that, even though he’d had everything else right and even explained what he was doing and put dates by each of their names, he’d still failed that part of the test because really they weren’t in order the way the teacher had wanted. And so he’d had to redo it or risk getting a failing grade because the presidents and their order was what most of the test was about, even if the presidents weren’t supposed to go in that order, not really anyway, but that’s what the teacher had wanted and so—

“Phillip, if you can’t bother to pay attention in my class I’m going to send you to the alpha to deal with you. He’s a very busy man, so I’m sure he wouldn’t like to be interrupted.”

He looked up at her and wondered when they’d moved on to chemistry. Or when it had become nearly two o’clock in the afternoon.

“Do you want to be sent away?” she asked him pointedly as the whispers started up.

Ippy shook his head. No, he didn’t want Samson to be mad at him. But it was so hard to focus without Hannah there. If she’d been there, he was sure he could have paid attention. He’d never had this much trouble before she’d graduated. Why did she have to be so much older than him? Two years wasn’t all that much. And pretty soon he’d be graduating too and then she, Caelum and Ippy could go start their adventure together. But where would they live? Caelum was in Ireland and Hannah had a passport, but Ippy didn’t because his parents said he didn’t need one. They’d told him that when he’d asked for one right after meeting Caelum. They said he’d never be leaving the states and couldn’t survive in another country on his own. But he wouldn’t be on his own because he’d have Hannah there and she’d always been there to take care of him and then Caelum could, too. They’d be there for each other.

People were getting up around him and Ippy looked at them. He wondered why they were packing up their things and why the teacher was getting her purse and putting away her books. Were they leaving early?

He got up from his chair and went to her with his notebook ready. He asked if they were already done then showed her the notebook.

She shook her head at him. “You missed out on an entire afternoon of class. You might as well have not even come back from lunch. You’re getting a zero for participation today.”

His face fell and he shook his head, quickly writing that he didn’t know why he couldn’t pay attention.

“Maybe because you were too focused on your girlfriend. I don’t care who you kids date as long as it doesn’t affect your schoolwork. But Phillip, you’ve been barely present for the past week. You’ve been physically here, but I can tell that you aren’t paying attention. I’ll be calling your parents to let them know what’s going on. Maybe they can stop this. I thought maybe you were coming down with something, but after another student caught your little display in the driveway, I’m convinced that I know what the problem is.” She moved away from him while he was still writing down a question to see if there was any homework that he hadn’t heard about.

As he left the room and stepped onto the driveway to wait for Hannah, he heard laughing over his shoulder and turned to see Sara and her friends smiling at him. He watched them while he waited, wondering why she was still smiling at him until she walked up to him and put each of her arms over his shoulders. He stepped back instantly, not liking to be touched by most people. Hannah and Caelum were the only people that could touch him when they wanted to, and Sara was nowhere near that top of the list. She came with him though, her long fingernails curling into his shoulders until he couldn’t move back without having pain. She was smiling, but her eyes weren’t. Hannah had taught him that, to look for the creases around someone’s eyes to see if they meant it or not. It wasn’t a big deal to her, he knew this because she’d said so, but because he didn’t like when people were lying, she’d taught him that so that he could know when it was happening to him.

He tried to pull his phone from his pocket to ask her what she was doing, but she pressed up against him. It wasn’t comfortable at all and he brought his hands up to push her away on her shoulders. Ippy heard a car door open and close while Sara was leaning toward him, but then she was yanked back and Ippy found Hannah’s braided brown hair in front of him as Hannah twisted Sara around. They were yelling, Ippy knew this because his ears started to hurt, but he was paying attention to the bright purple tie and bit of ribbon Hannah had braided into her hair. It hadn’t been like that before and he found that he liked the sight of it blowing in the breeze. Samson, Christopher, and a few of the other adults came out toward them. They were running and Ippy ducked his head as Samson’s wolf caught sight of him. Submission was respect and respect was required. The yelling stopped abruptly and Ippy tucked his hands into the back of Hannah’s shirt. She reached behind herself, showing him her palms. People were talking, but he didn’t care as he put his fingers against her palms. She didn’t close her hands around his fingers and he’d stopped being afraid that she would. Instead she kept her hands flat and he looked at her braided hair going down her back.

Ignoring the yelling, even Hannah’s, was hard. But he’d gotten better at it. His mom and dad told him that he couldn’t freak out whenever he wanted to. Hannah had been there. They were at a store and the loudspeaker was broken. It hurt his ears whenever it skipped and garbled the words and he didn’t remember much, but Hannah had told him later that night that he’d gone to the floor and started crying out. His parents hadn’t been happy. That’d been a year ago and he was trying to get better. His mom told him that he was an embarrassment. He knew that was a bad thing and didn’t want to be that for them or for Hannah. He pushed himself into wrapping his hands around her fingers. She didn’t move, but he could see her shoulders shaking.

Then Sara pushed her back and she ran into Ippy. Suddenly it was as if all the noise in the world was coming at him at once and he screamed to make it stop. He covered his ears and bent down at the waist, trying to be as small as possible as all that noise grabbed at him. There were prickly words, sour words, hot words and all those words coming at him all the time. Then there was Hannah kneeling in front of him with her brown eyes, so pretty, always so pretty, looking up at him from her position below him. But that wasn’t right either. She couldn’t be under him. She was higher than he was in the pack. She shouldn’t have been kneeling in front of him.

Ippy saw her mouth moving when she turned away from him and he looked over to see Sara yelling at her. At least he thought that she was yelling from how red her face was and how big her mouth was getting. Her dad showed up while she was still yelling and then Samson was pointing wildly. Hannah touched his nose and Ippy looked back at her. She smiled at him and he started to drop his hands, hoping the sounds were over now, but she shook her head and added her hands over his own. He smiled back at her and left his hands where they were. Ippy didn’t think about how long they knelt like that in Samson’s driveway.

He only focused on her hair, her smile, the fact that she smelled like fish tacos and lime juice just like the kind she got from her favorite Mexican restaurant, and how warm her hands were as they covered his. Not many people could touch him. He could name them all on one hand. But he didn’t ever mind when she did, and sometimes he even liked it. He’d been liking her touch a lot more lately. Her hands were soft, her nails short so that they didn’t dig into his skin when they held hands and she’d painted her nails sometime in the afternoon. Now they were a rainbow of colors. She’d put on gold eyeshadow too. He didn’t like that so much. She looked prettier without make up on.

Hannah pulled her hands away from his head and he started to drop his hands too, after looking to her for confirmation. She nodded and he put his hands on the driveway between them. Her nails were really pretty. Maybe she could do his, too. Maybe even in rainbows, too. He thought he’d probably like that. They didn’t look messy or cheap, which was what his mom said sometimes when she saw the colors Hannah did to her nails, but never to Hannah’s face. He thought Hannah never looked cheap or messy. She was classy like Audrey Hepburn. Ippy liked when he and Hannah watched movies with her in them. Ever since her dad, Liam, had introduced them to the classic movies they’d been seeing a lot fewer of the more recent movies. Except for the horror movies. They’d seen all the classic horror movies first.

Hannah got to her feet and Ippy went with her. He stood beside her as Samson and Christopher spoke. Liam was there, along with Hannah’s other dad, Travis, and Ippy wondered when they’d come. And why Hannah wasn’t standing with them.
Your dads are here,
he told her, in case she’d missed them standing a few yards away. They kept looking back at Hannah and Ippy. He wondered why.

She nodded. “Yep. I saw them. Thanks though.”

Why aren’t you with them?
he asked. There was nothing stopping her from going to them, no barrier that he could see. Only a bit of driveway, and even that wasn’t all that much.

Hannah turned and gave him a little shrug. “No reason. Guess I just wanted to stay over here. I like it on this side.”

Why?
There was nothing special about this side of the driveway. The sun wasn’t even at the right position to give them a bit of a view on the few flowers that grew wild along the edge of the woods.

She turned away and he thought she might not answer him. But then she did. “Because you’re over here.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, but he tried anyway and hoped it was the right thing to say to her.
I like that you’re over here, too. And I like your nails.

Hannah turned back to him and smiled. “Thanks. I was just messing around. Daddy Liam was going on and on and then sent me upstairs to come back with a balanced budget worksheet for the pack. Then I saw my nail polish bag and well, long story short, I’m in a bit of trouble for getting distracted.”

I get distracted a lot too,
Ippy told her, knowing all about getting in trouble for that fault.

“Yeah, but you’ve got a good excuse. I was just bored.” She shrugged and stuffed her hands into her pockets as the men came toward them. Ippy mimicked her, putting his own hands into his pockets as he waited for them to come up.

Samson wasted no time yelling at them as soon as he’d pulled them into his office. Christopher stood beside him and Hannah’s dads were behind Ippy and Hannah as they sat in chairs that were far too big for them across the large desk from their alpha. Ippy shrank back, trying to become small in the room full of wolves far more dominant than he. He looked over to Hannah and was surprised to see her looking angry when she should be small too. Like he was.