The Rest of Us Just Live Here (23 page)

“Look!” he says, pointing beyond us, across the lake back in the direction of town. We see the reflection even before we turn.

There are flashes and streaks of blue light criss-crossing the sky, fast, frantic, like a lightning storm, over our town. We can’t see the town itself, only the trees that line the lake, but even at this distance, which is at least seven or eight miles, the sky above where we just were is like a town-sized fireworks display.

“My parents are okay,” Henna says, hanging up her phone. “They want me to come home, though.”

“Is that when you said,
There’s no way in hell
?” Mel asks.

“Yes. Yes, it was.”

Meredith is in the capital with our mom, who had to be down there for campaign stuff in the morning and wasn’t – this is how much we’ve abandoned hope for my dad – going to leave her with just him to watch her. Meredith answered on the first ring anyway, having seen video and feeds of it online. “It’s only small towns,” she said. “Remote ones like ours, but they’re all calling it ‘freak lightning’.”

“As long as you’re okay, Meredith,” I said to her.

“I am,” she said. “Are you?”

I don’t really know the answer to that question. We’re all gathered along the waterfront, just watching the lights. They’ve been arcing for a good half-hour now. We haven’t heard any sirens. Mr Shurin, at his house, says he hasn’t heard anything either, though there are a lot of people who’ve pulled their cars over just to watch it. Steve called the hospital, and they told him they didn’t need him. So whatever’s going on is at least not killing anyone.

Or not killing anyone that we know of, that is. I wonder how the indie kids are doing?

“Is it the end of the world?” Nathan asks.

“I doubt the end of the world would start with our town,” Jared says. “Though maybe it would, actually.”

And then all the lights stop.

“Whoa,” Nathan says, pretty drunk by now.

The lights weren’t making any sound, not any that made it this far out to the lake at any rate, but it still feels like a silence has fallen. We all stare at the empty sky for a few quiet minutes. Then Mel stands, taking Steve by the hand. She leans under his arm as they head back into the cabin.

“I’m ready for bed, too,” Henna says, getting up from the log. Nathan gets up with her, more than a little stumbling. “You all right?” Henna asks him.

“Yeah,” he laughs, “just a little hammered.”

“We noticed,” I say, still sitting next to Jared. “All of us.” Jared elbows me, hard.

Nathan just stares at me. “You don’t even know me,” he says. “You haven’t even tried.”

“No,” Henna says, taking him by the arm and leading him to the cabin. “No, he hasn’t.”

I watch them go until it’s just me and Jared out here, him sipping a beer, me having a Coke. The smell of the beer is making me a bit grumpy, too. The staler it gets, the more it smells like my dad.

“You need to lay off him,” Jared says.

“Why? We don’t know anything about him. He said he used to be an indie kid; what if he brought all this shit with him?”

“Mike–”

“And why was he by my house? Why did he want to get up on that bridge?”

“That was Henna’s idea–”

“He could be the cause of all this, for all we know. And now he’s in there with
her
.”

“She’s not going to sleep with him,” Jared says, frustrated. “He’s not going to sleep with
her
.”

“How do
you
know?”

And there’s a silence. I turn to him.

Then something clicks.

“Oh, no. No way.”

“Mike, I–”

“Jared, please don’t say–”

But then he stands, his attention suddenly grabbed by something out in the darkness. He’s still in his towel. So am I, with just my jacket over me. His eyes are running back and forth across the undeveloped part of the lake down from the cabin. It’s full of trees.

There’s a blue light among them. Getting closer.

“Shit,” I say, standing, too, ready to get the others, ready to run–

“No,” Jared says. “No, it’s not…”

He takes off.
Towards
it. “Jared!” I yell.

But then of course I run after him. My feet are bare and I’m stepping on rocks and pine cones and God knows what else in the dark. “What are you doing?!”

The blue light emerges from the line of trees, and I see.

It’s a mountain lion. I’d wondered why none had come to pay homage to Jared since we’ve been at the cabin, but I thought maybe he’d asked them to leave him be tonight. But here comes one, running in an odd, crooked way, its eyes glowing blue and an aura of blue light around it.

“Jared, don’t!” I say, still ten steps behind him. “The deer were–”

But he and the mountain lion have met. It drops at his feet, flopping over them, looking up at him through the blue glaze. He kneels at once, putting his hands on it. I reach them.

“Jesus,” I say.

The mountain lion is horribly mangled. It’s hard to even look at.

“Was it hit by a car?” I ask. I step a bit closer and the blue light flashes out, catching my forearm. It’s like being hit with boiling water. I yell and jump back. A ton of it is hitting Jared, but he’s not moving, must be a God thing. But if that’s what’s hitting the poor mountain lion…

Oh, man.

Jared says nothing, just concentrates hard on the big cat. Then he lets out a grunt and the blue light vanishes. In the sudden darkness, I can’t see him at first, just hear the mountain lion yowling, obviously in terrible pain.

“It’s all right, girl,” Jared whispers, and the palms of his hands light up. He presses them against her, and her whimpers lessen. I go closer now. The blue light seems to have blasted through her over and over again, erupting from inside her at different points. The tears and burns against her beautiful tan fur are painful to even see.

“Just be still,” Jared keeps whispering. “You’re safe here. You’ve found me.”

She grows even quieter, until it’s just her breath we hear. She’s curled up against his leg, like she was seeking refuge in him. Which I guess she was.

“I can’t save her,” Jared says to me, his throat heavy. “She ran all this way to find me, getting mangled the entire way, and I can’t save her. It’s beyond the reach of my powers.” He holds her against his shins, gently stroking her. She sounds ragged, but at least no longer in pain. He leans down close. “You rest now. You sleep, without pain, in the arms of your God.”

Her breathing slows, then slows again. I wait there with them both until she makes no more sounds at all. “Dammit,” I hear Jared whisper, and even in the moonlight, I can see the tears on his face. He strokes her sadly a last time, then lays her head down on the grass.

“Are you okay?” I ask, stupidly.

“The indie kids think they’re the only people in the world,” he says. “They think their actions don’t affect anyone but them.”

“I know. The whole world is like that.”

“Not everyone,” he says, looking over at me. “Not you.”

“Jared–”

“I’m in love with Nathan,” he says. “And I think he’s in love with me.”

“Yeah…” I say. “I kinda figured that out just now.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. At first it was too private, too fragile, and he’s still freaked out about liking guys and…”

He doesn’t finish, but I can guess. “You’ve been lonely.”

He just nods. “I didn’t want to harm anything. I didn’t want to bring it out into the open and have the light kill it somehow. And I couldn’t stand the thought of hurting you.”

“It doesn’t,” I say.

“You’re my best friend, Mike. The best friend I’ve ever had. You’ve never judged me, you’ve taken every weird thing I’ve thrown your way completely in stride, you never ask for much in return even when I’m dying to give it. You didn’t even let your mom and my dad get in the way of us being friends.”

“I wouldn’t have let this get in the way. I wouldn’t have been hurt. I’d have been happy for you.”

“You hate Nathan.”

“Because of Henna’s stomach feeling for him–” I stop. “She knows, doesn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Does everyone?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“Mike–”

“No. No, I, um…”

I don’t know what to say. Because
this
is what hurts me.

Henna’s on the couch when we make our way back to the cabin. I walk ahead of Jared, not looking back. He and Nathan will share the other bedroom, I guess, though I doubt anything will happen. Jared’s never going to be the guy who takes advantage of a drunk person.

“Night,” he says when we get back inside.

“Night,” I say. After a beat, he goes into one of the bedrooms.

“Hey,” Henna says from the couch. When I don’t answer, she sits up. “You okay?”

“I don’t think I am.”

She opens her arms. I lay down next to her, and she holds me. It’s the closest we’ve ever been, but all I want her to do is just hold me.

Back when I first went to the hospital on the night of the accident, Steve gave me this oil to put on my scar to keep it from stretching and getting bigger. I often get caught in a loop with it, rubbing it in, wiping it off, rubbing it in, wiping it off, until I’m sure I’m doing far more stretching damage to the scar than would have ever happened by just normally using my face.

But this time I actually stop myself. I rub it in and leave it. I wait to see how that feels. But no, I’m not trapped. I can
see
the trap. I can see it waiting for me to step into, if I want, see the spiral just there, ahead of me, waiting. But I can also wash my hands and dry them and leave the little bathroom at the cabin.

The medication must be working, because that’s what I do, after taking one last long look at my scar.

“I’m sorry,” Mel says.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.

“I wanted him to tell you. He kept saying he would–”

“It’s fine. There’s nothing to talk about.”

I go to the dock, strip to my underpants and jump in the lake again. The sun’s up. It’s morning. The water’s still ridiculously cold. I go down deep and just hover there. Rays of sun stab down at me through the surface. They don’t make me any warmer.

Henna filled me in on some of the details. Nathan hung around outside Grillers to meet Jared on his breaks. Nathan was in the Field that night because he met Jared there after a fight with his mother. Henna was at home with her parents on the night of the Bolts of Fire concert because Nathan was with just Jared at the movies. All those mysterious Saturday nights that Jared’s been taking? Whatever they were before, they’ve been something different lately.

Everyone could see it. Except me. Because I was too focused on Henna.

And is that my fault? I’m asking seriously. If I’d been looking at my best friend in the world and not myself or the girl that I claim so hard to be in love with, then maybe I’d have seen it, too. Because I guess it was obvious.

But what were they waiting for? Why were they waiting at all?

Are we all friends or are
they
just friends?

You always think you’re the least-wanted
, Jared said.

Sucks to be right.

I surface before my lungs explode. Henna’s waiting on the end of the dock. “Wanna drive me back?” she asks.

I look up at her from the water. “No,” I say.

She waits.

“Yes,” I say.

“I thought you’d figure it out,” Henna says, as we drive. “It was a surprise to me, too, but eventually I realized I was getting no vibes off Nathan at all, no matter how strongly
I
felt. And then I’d see him looking at Jared a little too long.”