Plus One (23 page)

“Why would someone as smart as you sit in the back of all your classes?”

He looked sideways at me and smiled. “Should I tell you the story?”

“Please.”

“I missed the first day of school my sophomore year, because I was sick. On the second day, I went to what I thought was my immunology class. I was late and the teacher had already started talking. The room was jammed, and there was only one desk free in the back, so I squeezed past the other kids and stepped over backpacks and inched my way down the aisles until I finally sat down. I thought it was kind of weird that immunology would have so many students, but it wasn’t until I was already settled that I knew I was in the wrong room. This class was basic biology, also known as Bio for Trees, because you can be as dumb as a tree and still pass it. I was trapped: I would have had to disturb the entire class again to get up and leave, and what do you know, there was this excellent drawing of the Council Overhang on the desk to distract me for that period.”

I smiled. The clatter of the starlings became like the sound of metal scraping against metal. He raised his voice over the din.

“The next day, on a lark, I skipped my immunology class on purpose—just that once, I told myself—so I could go back and see what the artist thought of the virion I had added to the drawing. In fact, I ended up dropping immunology and registering for basic bio, and I taught myself immunology on the weekends.”

“You took Bio for Trees just to draw on my desk?”

He nodded, with a little closed-lip smile.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“After that, on the second day of every new term—the second day because by then I’d figured out that you were a Night student—I scouted the desks in the back of each class to see if we shared a room, and if I found another kid sitting at your place I made him move, to stake my claim to it for the rest of the semester.”

“You bullied other students to sit in my seat?”

He had to practically shout over the birds, raising a finger for each item he ticked off. “First:
charmed
; second:
bribed
; then, only when options one and two failed:
bullied
.”

At that moment the trees exploded. The starlings, on a mysterious mass whim, burst from their perches like thousands of synchronized windup toys. They formed a zeppelin-size cloud that seemed to levitate into the sky, swirling as each bird adjusted instantaneously to the smallest movement of the bird next to it. The cloud shimmered, flashing black and silver in the light, twisting on itself, blowing above us like a plume of smoke on the wind. D’Arcy and I, and every other person on the prairie with us, turned our heads and swiveled our bodies, following the path of the birds.

“A murmuration!” someone shouted.

Back and forth the cloud of starlings swirled: now as concentrated as a tornado, then unfurling like a massive flag in the wind, finally rolling in on itself into a tube, and a ball, becoming blacker and smaller in its density, then breaking apart into two midair groupings and shape-shifting seamlessly together again. The cloud ebbed and flowed through the vast sky—wheeling like a wave cut loose from the ocean, pouring over the farmland across the road—and suddenly disappeared high above the trees, only to reappear just as quickly, swooping back over the prairie, so low over our heads that D’Arcy and I ducked instinctively, my hair whipping in the downdraft the birds generated, their wings beating like the rush of the surf, deafening as they passed. I screamed involuntarily, my chest bursting with the marvel, the joy, the miracle of nature. It gave me the sort of exhilarating edge of fear that I had whenever I experienced something astonishingly beautiful. The mass of birds flew up, straight up, headed for orbit, and then curled and plummeted in a limp waterfall of tiny bodies behind the trees, falling straight toward the ground into utter silence.

The people around us laughed in overt wonder. I was gasping for air, and my heart was beating frantically in my chest. D’Arcy’s face fairly glowed.

I shoved him in the shoulders, making him lose his balance, blurting, “No fair!” and then caught him before he fell. We steadied each other—I grabbed his elbows, he held my waist—as I said, forgetting to conceal a smile that was probably transparent with adoration, “You just
had
to top my Milky Way, didn’t you?”

Friday
4:30 p.m.

And then, because he was in my arms and he hadn’t let go, and holding him gave me a feeling of being planted firmly on the earth, and because thousands of starlings knew exactly how to live without questioning themselves, I kissed his cheek without thinking. It wasn’t a quick peck, it was one of unabashed appreciation. It happened, for me at least, as if it were in slow motion. His skin was warm and firm and so real, with that soft stubble I had felt in the hospital, and the smell of D’Arcy.

The kiss was very near his mouth, and because he didn’t flinch, didn’t waver even a millimeter, didn’t take his eyes off mine, he just exhaled a moist vapor of intimacy, I kissed his lips, but only lightly, because now I knew for sure what I was doing, and half of me understood it was a mistake. The other half was defiant, despite the fact that giving him up, as I had to do in every conceivable future scenario, might kill me.

He wouldn’t let me pull away. He moved his hands from my waist to the small of my back and drew me closer instead.

He said with a playful smile,

“Powerless

But for the star destroyer

Unknowing

She crash-lands in his heart.”

“I knew I was a bad poet,” I said breathily, because being that close to him was knocking the wind out of me.

“You kept me going.” He touched his forehead to mine, closed his eyes, and brushed his beautiful great nose against my stinging cheek, caressing and breathing me in at the same time. I shivered with pleasure. And that was when I realized that the poem and the cleaved heart were references to the lost love between his parents, not the lost love of another girl. Again without thinking, I lifted my arms to encircle his neck and pressed myself against him, because I was sorry that Jean and Hélène had caused him anguish. I kissed his mouth, but harder this time.

His lips parted, as if he had only been waiting for me, and my body was taken aback by the welcome. It felt like someone had scooped out my insides and dumped them on the ground. I opened my mouth wider, our tongues touched shyly, and a rope from my heart to deep in my pelvis pulled itself taut. It didn’t seem possible that my body had remembered desire after months of dying alongside Poppu, but a surge of inner heat burst into flames inside of me. I was greedy for his lips and his warm saliva and the exquisite pressure of his chin against my sunburn. I needed to wrap my legs around him, if only they weren’t supporting my weight. I moved my hands up, through his hair, and braced the back of his head so I could push harder. I had the alarming sensation of wanting to devour him, and I remembered his once saying, “You’re like a wild animal, do you know that?”

He nibbled my upper lip to slow me down, to get me to listen. I stopped, reluctantly, my mouth poised for more near his, my heart thudding in my chest, my breath coming furiously, as if I were sprinting. He whispered, with both a definiteness and a quaver of vulnerability, “I want to be alone with you.”

There were other Day visitors around us, walking quietly past on the path, affording us the only privacy they could by averting their gazes.

“Me, too.” I heard my voice, husky and hungry.

“Where?” His eyes were penetrating, and I could see in them that his quick mind had already ruled out the obvious candidates and he hoped I’d have an idea. None of the locations I could think of was secluded in the afternoon light—not the meadow, not the woods, not the caves—not with all these visitors.

“If only it were night,” I said.

“I know, right?” His voice had a mix of irony and exasperation. “But we can’t wait for night, we need to find gas somehow and get you an audience with your grandfather before it’s too late.”

I shook my head, bewildered. How powerful a drug was desire that it could make me temporarily forget about Poppu? And what sort of heroic friend was D’Arcy that he would remind me at a moment like this?

He squeezed me against him, his hips pressing mine, tourists be damned. He kissed me, harder even than I had kissed him, our teeth knocking together once. And then he forced himself to stop and he bear-hugged me, as he had on the rock near the natural bridge, and exhaled the words “Don’t forget” near my ear.

“Don’t forget what?” I gasped.

“Don’t forget you want me.”

He loosened his hold, and I nearly collapsed from the trembling weakness of wanting him.

“I couldn’t possibly forget.” I almost laughed.

He dropped his head back, face to the sky, and called out a strangled,
“Zut.”
And then he straightened up, sighed, tipped his head in the direction of the parking lot, and said, “We gotta go.”

Friday
5:00 p.m.

Remembering Poppu, remembering that the real world was about to slap me in the face, didn’t mean that I couldn’t hold D’Arcy’s hand—his right and my left because he hadn’t forgotten my injury. We laced our fingers as we walked, and he rubbed his thumb along the side of my hand up to my wrist.

When we got to the car he opened the trunk and we searched inside. Thievery was the plan, again, but to siphon gas from another car we’d need a hose, which turned out to be one thing Jean’s off-the-grid car didn’t have.

“If I jogged to the gas station it would take me about an hour,” he said in a low voice. “Walking back with a full gas can would take another hour and a half, maybe two. The Suits would lock on my position as soon as I made the purchase, and they’d have too much time to find me. I’d lead them straight to you.”

“We could push the car to the station, so that we take off as soon as we’re gassed up,” I whispered.

“Push the car ten kilometers?” he asked rhetorically, shaking his head “no.”

“Maybe one of the RVs in the campsite has a hose we could steal.”

A hand reached out the open window of the car next to us and tapped the heavy ashes of a cigarette onto the gravel. I had assumed the car was empty, and I startled. I saw red nail polish on short, bitten nails, multiple bracelets and bangles, and intricate tattoos snaking up the skin of a tanned-looking arm.

A girl sat up slowly—she had been in a completely reclined position in the shadows—and rested both forearms on the window ledge of her car. She had black spiky hair, short on top and long in back, perfectly round circles of rouge on her cheeks, red Cupid’s bow lips, black painted eyelashes above and below her eyes, and when she smiled one of her front teeth had a silver cap. My stomach clenched at the memory of Dice’s beating, as it did whenever I saw the Noma.

“You two seem to be a bit fucked, no?” She got a good look at D’Arcy and drawled appreciatively, “Well, aren’t you interesting?” She was chewing gum, but she still took a drag on the cigarette.

“Why aren’t you under curfew?” I asked, pulling rudeness out of fear.

“Shut the fuck up,” she said, dropping her cigarette out the window. She forced the creaky door of her jalopy open. She was smaller than I was, but insanely wiry. Her shirt was cut off to show powerful weight-lifting abdominal muscles. There was a giant bulge in the front pocket of her black shorts. She used a red shoe—it had a stylish heel and strap, but a rounded oversize toe—to grind out the butt. “Do you really think you can out-bitch me?”

It was the strangest thing. She was so cocky that I felt instantly inferior to her—physically smaller, and like a total square, like a geek. Me, the rangy girl who could barely keep a job and stay in school, the outsider who caused other students and teachers to pretend to check their phones as they passed her in the hall.

She took a step closer to me and said without emotion, “I’ll cut you to pieces and feed you to my dogs if you look at me wrong. That makes you an amateur.”

D’Arcy put his left arm around my shoulder and stuck his right hand out. “D’Arcy Benoît.”

She chewed her gum with noisy pops and dragged her eyes to meet his, like it was almost not worth the bother. He didn’t drop his hand, but from the corner of my eye I saw him eventually tilt his head and raise his eyebrows with a little half smile, wordlessly asking, “Are you going to shake it or not?”

The answer was not. She leaned back against her car, picked a piece of tobacco off her tongue, and flicked it away, saying, “I could prolly help you, if you make it worth my while.”

D’Arcy hugged me to him with one squeeze and let me go, successfully conveying two messages:
She’s apparently not going to cut you to pieces at this very moment
and
Let me do the talking
.

“Help us how?” he asked.

“You need gas, I have a car.”

“You’d get us gas?”

“Depends on what you give me in return.”

“We don’t have money.” He tipped his head toward me. “She can’t … access hers, and I can’t turn my phone on.”

“So I heard. You’re running from the cops.”

We didn’t have the advantage of asymmetric information, that was sure.

D’Arcy looked at me. “Is there anything of value in the trunk?”

Only a sixteen-thousand-dollar mannequin,
I thought. Out loud I said, “Your day pack, a toolbox.”

“There are a lot of expensive tools in it,” D’Arcy confirmed.

“That’s not enough,” the girl said, shaking her head. “I’ll get you a full tank of gas, so you won’t have to stop before you get to Chicago.”

“What makes you think we’re going to Chicago?” D’Arcy asked.

She rolled her eyes like he was an idiot. “Illinois plates, city sticker, helpless Rays.” She was right about almost everything.