Shade (12 page)

“How rude would that be? Zachary’s a pre-Shifter. He can’t see
or hear you. It’d be like when my aunts and uncles start speaking Italian around me.”

“All right, I get it.” He sat, twisting his lips. “Can I just see what he looks like?”

“Logan …”

“I’m going, I’m going.”

But he didn’t. He glued his gaze to the front door of Zachary’s apartment building.

“I’ll see you tonight,” I told him. “Later.”

Logan disappeared without saying good-bye or even acknowledging my words.

The passenger door opened, startling me. Zachary slid in, out of breath. He smelled of soap and shampoo.

“Sorry. Football match went into extra time.”

“You play football?”

“Soccer. Nothing official, just mucking about with a group of Hopkins students from the building.” He pushed a lock of damp, dark hair off his cheek. “They killed me. I’ll never take the piss out of American players again.” At my confused look, he said, “Make fun of them, I mean.”

I took one last glance into the empty backseat, then put the car in drive. “I have to stop at the mall.”

“Good, we can eat. I’m starving.”

I frowned. It already sounded too much like a date.

We stopped at the department store first, so I could buy the sheets. It would be an excuse to make it clear that I was still Logan’s girlfriend.

Then I saw the prices.

“I can’t afford these.” I went from one display to another, examining the few non-red sheet sets. None of them cost less than fifty-nine dollars. “I only get to keep half my paycheck. The rest goes for college.”

Zachary surveyed the wall-size display of red sheets. “It looks like a bordello.”

“Welcome to my life.”
Hmm, that didn’t come out right.

“Why’s it so important you can’t wait for a sale?”

Here was my chance to explain. I’d tell him that Logan’s death had not only
not
made me boyfriend-less, but it meant that said boyfriend would now be sleeping with me.

But all that came out was: “It’s complicated.”

“Sheets are complicated?”

“When they’re not red.”

Zachary looked at the soft white package in my hands. “Why would you want sheets that aren’t red? Don’t you want to keep the ghosts—oh.” His quizzical expression flattened into embarrassment. “I heard your boyfriend came back. I didn’t know you were …”

“Yeah.” I ran my finger over the package’s zipper. “Like I said, it’s—”

“Complicated. Right.” He shoved one hand into his pocket and pointed over my shoulder with the other. “Clearance.”

“Huh?” It took a moment for my brain to translate his accent. “Oh. Thanks.” I went to the discount bin and was dismayed to find a choice between blue and beige stripes and a skyscape of cloud-hugging teddy bears. Sadness.

“What about these?”

Zachary held up a dark indigo sheet set. They were almost black, speckled with tiny yellow and light blue spots, like paint-flecked stars on a night-sky canvas.

“Perfect!” I checked the price tag. “But thirty dollars too much. Figures.”

He put the sheets in my arms. “I’ll give you the money.”

“No.” I pushed them back. “I can’t take it.”

“I owe you. I haven’t paid you for the petrol for all our trips.”

“The what?”

“The gasoline.”

“I haven’t spent thirty dollars on gas.”

“But you will.”

“Zachary—”

“It’s either this or I pay for the whole thing.” He headed for the register, the sheet set tucked under his arm. “You can’t stop me.”

I trotted to keep up with his long, determined strides. “Yeah,” I muttered. “I’m starting to figure that out.”

To save time, Zachary and I grabbed takeout from the food court. At Farmer Frank’s field, we set up a picnic next to our books, pencils, and giant pad.

“Who’s going to draw this thing?” I asked him. “I suck at art.”

“Me too.” Zachary fished a pair of ice cubes out of his cup and tossed them into the grass—apparently they don’t like super-cold soda in Europe. “It probably doesn’t matter. We’re just supposed to learn the process.”

“I guess.” I wrapped my hands around my coffee cup without sipping it. I’d bought it more for warmth than anything. “Eowyn said she wanted us to put ourselves into this project. Sucking at art is part of who we are.”

“I’ll drink to that.” We tapped our cups together. “Do you see any ghosts?” Zachary asked.

“Not yet. Maybe no one ever visited here who died, or maybe it didn’t mean enough to anyone to haunt. Or we got lucky and hit a quiet night.”

“This’ll help keep them away, aye?” He held up the flashlight. Its lens was painted over with red nail polish to protect our night vision. “They hate red?”

“Most of them.” I remembered the crazy-mom ghost in the food court last week, then realized I hadn’t seen her or any others when we were there tonight. Maybe the mall had finally sprung for BlackBoxing. But you’d think they would’ve advertised it.

“You’re so lucky not to see them,” I told Zachary.

“I dunno.” He scooped out another ice cube. “I think it would be kind of interesting.”

“Maybe, if it were just the ghosts. But then there’s the DMP, ready to pounce on us the second we turn eighteen. I’m sick of their ads and letters and now these stupid assemblies.”

“Won’t they pay for your college?”

“That makes me even more suspicious. If it was such a great job, the government wouldn’t have to bribe us.”

“It’s not bribery. It’s paying for something they think is important. Like teachers in poor neighborhoods.”

“I guess.” I swished a French fry through a puddle of ketchup. “Megan’s brother John made a deal where the government would pay off some of his med school loans if he’d be a doctor in Nowhere, North Dakota.” Or maybe it was South Dakota. All I knew was that he said there was only one bar in the whole town, and in the winter some people left their cars running all night to keep the engines from freezing.

A cold breeze came up, as if I’d conjured it with my thoughts. I shivered so hard, the coffee splashed out of the little hole in the lid.

Zachary unzipped his dark brown leather jacket. “Here, take this.”

“No, you’ll freeze.”

“Don’t insult my rugged heritage.” He shook out the coat and scooted over to me. “I’d be a real walloper if I let you shiver.”

My eyebrows popped up. “A real what?”

“Never mind.” He draped the coat over my shoulders. I trembled again from the sudden heat. “Put your arms in. Don’t make me dress you like a wean.”

I couldn’t even ask what a “wean” was, because my brain was stuck on the scent of the warm leather. The jacket’s collar came up around my chin. Was that how his neck smelled?

“Thanks.” I cleared my throat. “I’ll dress warmer next time.”

“Me too.” He tugged the cuff down over my wrist, his finger brushing the back of my hand. “Just in case.”

I tried to focus on the star chart in front of me instead of the boy to my right. When Logan died, I’d stopped noticing Zachary’s hotness, as if all my senses had switched off. Now that Logan was back (sort of), I’d become Little Miss Ho-Bag again.

“Um.” I turned on the flashlight, casting a red glow over the book in my lap. “It says here to start by marking north, and not to cheat with a compass.”

“Yeah, the way you do that is—”

“I know that much.” I pointed to the Big Dipper and followed the last two stars to find the North Star, Polaris.

The pad was clipped to the board, which was good, because the wind was picking up. I suppressed another shiver—I did
not
want Zachary taking off any more clothes on my account.

We marked the other three directions, then found the celestial equator and the ecliptic, which laid out the approximate path of the zodiac, the sun, and the planets. Eowyn had given us lists of constellations to find and draw each month. After I did the first two, I let Zachary take over while I finished the gooey remains of my cheese-steak.

Over the next hour, we took turns eating and drinking and filling out the map. As our eyes grew adjusted to the dark, more stars became visible, which would’ve been annoying had it not been so utterly gorgeous. No garish sunset could compare to this pure, still brilliance.

“We don’t have to put every star on the map,” Zachary reminded me as he christened the grass with his soda’s leftover ice. “Just the brightest ones.”

“I know.” I added another tiny point of light that didn’t seem to belong to any constellation. “But I’m hoping if we make this insanely full of stars, we won’t have to do it again.”

“It’s no’ that bad, is it? Freezing our bums off to create something completely pointless?”

I laughed. It
wasn’t
that bad to spend time with Zachary. The level of not-badness was almost scary.

“I’ll survive. I hope Eowyn lets us move forward with our research next month.”

“With
your
research, you mean.” Zachary stuffed his empty cup in the fast-food bag. “Which you still haven’t told me much about.”

“I did tell you.” I spoke forcefully to cover up my vagueness. “It’s on megaliths.”

“What about them?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to read more before I can figure out the questions, much less the answers.”

“Maybe I can help.”

I straightened my posture and massaged my neck, which was stiff from looking at the sky. “I’ll let you know.”

“I’m your partner, remember. Not your bloody assistant.” He took the pencil out of my hand. “And as your partner, I say we stop for the night, while you can still feel your fingers.”

I put my nearly numb hands in my (his) jacket pockets before he could offer to warm them for me. “Fine. We can finish labeling the stars before our meeting next month.”

As we packed up our stuff, Orion rose over the horizon, which meant it was getting really late.

“It’s funny,” I told Zachary. “I always heard that stars were different colors. That Betelgeuse was a red giant and Rigel was a blue giant. But I’ve never actually seen the colors before.” I zipped up the bag of supplies and set it on the folded portfolio.

“You don’t get out of the city much, do you?”

“Not at night.” I hugged my knees to my chest to keep warm, not wanting to leave quite yet. “I don’t usually like the dark.”

“I can understand why.”

We were whispering now, because even the crickets had gone to bed. “I haven’t seen a single ghost all night.”
Except Logan,
I added mentally.

“That’s not true. Look at the Milky Way.” Zachary leaned back on one hand and swept his other over his head. “Some of those stars are already dead. In the thousands of years it takes their light to reach us, they could’ve exploded or burned out.”

I gazed up at the long, blurry stretch of silver that could’ve been mistaken for a high cloud. “So we’re seeing them the way they were, not the way they are now.”

We sat for a few more minutes in silence, and I began to understand why Eowyn was making us do this exercise. Three thousand years ago, people probably couldn’t imagine the birth and death of stars. Those points of light were constant, dependable, eternal. Must have been comforting.

We packed up my car and drove home, under a sky full of ghosts.

Aunt Gina was already in bed when I got in at eleven o’clock. She’d left a note propped up against the coffeemaker.

Long day ahead tomorrow, so I turned in early.
Poke your head in my room when you get home, okay?
Love, Gina.

I tiptoed up the creaky wooden stairs, brushing my fingertips against the frames of my mother’s photos—her first day of kindergarten near the bottom step, her high school graduation in the middle; and the third one at the top, a month before she died, with me in her lap in front of the Christmas tree.

In every photo, her eyes glinted with good-natured defiance. Gina
said that Mom had never let rules get in the way of having fun. Until now, I’d assumed this was a bad thing.

I snuck past Gina’s room and into my bedroom before pulling the sheets from the bag.

The label on the package said,
WASH PRIOR TO FIRST USE
. I wondered why, until I unzipped it. The sheets were stiff and scratchy and smelled like the plastic casing. I calculated how long it would take to wash and dry them. Too long.

Stopping to think about it made me—well, stop to think.

How could I sleep on these sheets with Logan, when Zachary had not only picked them out, but helped pay for them? It felt almost like cheating. But on which guy?

A soft knock came at my door, and I shoved the sheets and bag under my bed. “Come in.”

Gina cracked the door open. “Hi, hon, how was it?”

“Cold. But we got it done.”

“It was chilly tonight.” She leaned on the doorjamb, her green silk robe hanging loose around her fleece pajamas. “You should bring this boy by so I can meet him.”

“It’s not like that. Zachary’s just a friend.”

“A friend you’re sitting alone with in a dark field. I need to meet him.”

“He only serial-killed me a little bit, I swear.”

She chuckled. “You seem better since the funeral yesterday.”

“Yeah.” I sat on the bed and took off my shoes. “Closure, you know.” My voice sounded too casual—I suck at lying even worse than drawing.

“Aura.” Gina’s voice was the opposite of casual. “Have you seen Logan since the wake? Are you spending time with him?”

I pulled off my sock and examined it for holes. “I’ve run into him. But you know Logan, he never stays in one place for long.”

Gina came to sit beside me. I held my breath as the heel of her embroidered slipper brushed the shopping bag handle under the bed.

“Sweetie,” she said, which meant a lecture was coming. “I know it’s hard. You thought you’d lost Logan forever, and then suddenly here he is again. It’s confusing and agonizing and thrilling. It makes it very hard to accept reality.”

“Uh-huh.” I let my bracelet fall to the floor, pretending to accidentally drop it. When I bent to pick it up, I pushed the shopping bag with the sheets farther under the bed.

“But Aura, Logan is dead.” She emphasized the last word. “He doesn’t belong here.”