Under My Skin (Wildlings) (34 page)

"There isn't that much sleep in the world," Marina says with a wink.

He chuckles. Closing his eyes, he's gone in moments.

Rico shakes out his blanket, then moves it closer to the fire. A moment later, he's asleep as well.

Elzie rubs her hand again on my stubbled head. "You look cute," she says. Her own hair has just started to grow back. It's a soft fuzz, haloing her pretty head in the firelight.

I touch my own. "Not a look I was planning on."

She flicks a nail against the fabric of the white shirt I grabbed from the lab.

"And seriously," she adds. "Tomorrow we're going to practice how you keep your clothes on when you change back."

"I wasn't really worrying about that at the time."

Her eyes go warm with sympathy. "You should get some rest," she says. "You must be beat."

"I am."

I think she's going to lie down beside me, but she stands up and stretches.

"I'm going down to the ocean," she says. "I want to see what it feels like swimming without somebody's trash bumping into my face.

"No," she adds as I start to get up. "You need to sleep."

I nod.

"I'm going to turn in, too," Marina says.

Elzie raises her eyebrows and gives her look that I don't understand.

"Later," she says.

Marina and I watch her go.

"So what's up with you two?" I ask her.

Marina pushes her hair behind her ears and sighs. "Nothing, really."

"Come on. I can tell it's more than nothing."

"You're not going to like it."

"I don't like much of anything that's happened to me in the past twenty-four hours, but I'm dealing with it. I'm pretty sure I can handle a girl fight."

"It's not that," she says. "It's about my being a Wildling."

All the tension drains out of me. What a relief. If that's all this is, I can deal with it. It doesn't explain the weirdness between the two of them, but I don't mind to provide a listening ear to Marina. After all, she just changed. I know how disconcerting that is.

I reach over and touch her under the chin.

"Come on," I say sympathetically. "Don't let it freak you out too much. It might not seem like it now, but it's actually pretty cool, once you get used to it."

"I know."

It takes me a moment to process what she's just said and, even then, I'm pretty sure that I must be wrong. I have to be wrong. This is Marina, my best friend. We don't have secrets about anything.

"What do you mean, you 'know'?" I ask.

"I know how you get used to it."

My chest feels like it's encased in a metal band squeezing the air out of my lungs. I dread asking the question, but I do.

"Just … how long … have you been a Wildling?"

She's staring at the ground, unable to look me in the eye. "Around five months," she whispers.

"Five
months
?"

She nods.

"You've been a Wildling for five months and you never told me?"

Her shoulders are slumped and she looks miserable. "I didn't know how to. And then the longer I didn't, the more impossible it seemed."

The imagined metal band tightens a notch. "I told you right away."

"I know."

"You and Desmond were the first people I told. I came to you as soon as I could."

"I
know
. How do you think that makes
me
feel?"

"Oh, I'm
so
sorry. I didn't know it was all about how
you
feel. I'm not sure I know
you
at all anymore. The Marina I knew would never have kept something this big from me."

Her face goes from slack to a pained grimace. "Please don't be mad," she says.

"I'm not. I'm just really really hurt and confused. If you can keep something like that from me, what else are you hiding?"

Her eyes are shiny and her lower lip is trembling, but I don't feel the urge to comfort her. She takes a raggedy breath.

"I'm Nira," she says.
My Life as an Otter
... that's my blog."

Another notch tighter. This is just too much. She totally pretended she knew nothing about it when I told Desmond and her about having found it.

 "I don't get it," I tell her. "I thought we were friends."

"We
are
friends."

"Then why have you been lying to me all this time?"

"I didn't lie! I just didn't tell you everything."

I think about her giving me advice, like to surf online for more information, or that day in the library, when she was talking about Wildlings and shape-changers like it was just something she'd researched.

She tries to straighten up, without much success. "Do you tell me everything?" she asks.

I look her in the eye. "Yeah, I do."

I watch a tear trickle down her cheek as she looks away. It seems to take forever to travel down to her chin. Any other time I'd be comforting her the way I always have whenever something's gone bad in her life—like when her folks split up or when her sister hassles her—but I just can't muster the sympathy.

Her shoulders slump again. "I guess I'm just not as good a person as you," she says.

"That's bullshit. What it really means is that our friendship wasn't as important to you as it was to me."

Her face searches mine unbelievingly. "That's not true!"

"Did you ever stop to think how much you could have helped me when I first changed?"

"I
know
. I already said I screwed up when I didn't tell you right away. And then I just didn't know how."

"When I changed might have been a good time."

She stares back down into her lap. "I just ... couldn't. It had already been months since it happened to me. I felt ashamed that I hadn't told you. I knew you'd get mad."

I stand up. "I told you. I'm not mad. But I don't see how we can be friends after something like this. How am I supposed to trust you about anything?"

"Please, Josh. Please don't say that."

"Is this what was going on between you Elzie?"

She looks up at me and nods. "She said I should tell you."

"She was right."

"Except now, the thing I was most scared of is happening. I'm losing my best friend."

The tears are rolling one by one down her cheek.

I shake my head. "No,
I'm
the one losing my best friend. You didn't think of me that way or you would have trusted me enough to tell me a hell of a lot sooner."

"Please stop saying that."

"Jesus," Chaingang says. "Would you lovebirds keep it down? People are trying to sleep."

"Screw you," I tell him. If he punched me out right now, it would be a blessing.

He grunts and rolls over.

I find myself wondering if I was even talking to Chaingang. Maybe I meant Marina. Hell, maybe I was talking to myself. I don't know. I can't stand to see her crying. I feel like crying myself. But this is too big a thing. It hurts way too much. And I can see it's really hurting her, but she had a chance to make it right and she didn't take it. Me, I just got blindsided and lost my best friend to a lie. I feel that hard place inside of me get colder. Maybe Elzie's right. You can't trust anyone.

"Josh ..." she begins again.

I can't do this anymore. I can't talk it out. I don't know if there can ever be an out with this.

I turn and walk away from the fire.

"Josh, don't!" she cries.

But I can't go back. Everything's too screwed up for me to go back.

I walk until I can't see the fire anymore. The land slopes to the sea and I follow the incline down into the marshlands, skirting the wet ground until I come to a stretch of sand that leads down to the ocean. We're closer to the shore than I expected. I walk along the edge of the tide in my bare feet. Kelp and eelgrass litter the sand. After awhile I just stand there letting the waves lap against my ankles. I stare out into the forever of the ocean and my breathing settles into the rhythm of the tide.

I look up at the stars. I can't tell if they're the same as the ones in the world we left behind. I just know they're brighter than I've ever seen, even with the moonlight, and there are thousands upon thousands of them.

I think about Mom. She's got to be so worried. All she knows is that a bunch of guys Tazed me outside of school and then drove off with me in a van.

I hope Desmond and Barry got away before anything bad could happen to them.

Then I think about how all of this started up because Desmond couldn't keep his mouth shut. That pisses me off, too. But at least he didn't lie to me.

I focus on the waves as they wash against my calves. Tide's rising. I let the steady rhythm empty my head and take me away.

The water's just below my knees when I hear the soft pad of footsteps on the sand behind me. The wind's coming from her direction, so I know who it is.

Elzie comes up and wraps her arms around my waist. She lays her head against my back. I don't know where I went in my mind, but the press of her body feels good and helps bring me back. She grounds me. Right now, being in this place and with everything that's gone down, I really need to be grounded.

"I guess she finally told you," she says.

"Yeah."

"So how are you doing?"

"On a scale of one to ten? Maybe zero."

She sighs. "I should have let her do it in her own time."

"No. I needed to know. Besides, who says she'd
ever
have told me?"

Elzie just holds me a little tighter. The soft touch of her body helps ease the tension in my chest.

"Did she tell you?" I ask.

"No."

"Then how did you know?"

She shrugs. "I just did—the way Wildlings always know each other."

"
I
didn't pick up on it."

"That's because she'd already changed. You knew her as a Wildling before you changed so she didn't seem any different."

"But she did tonight."

"Maybe it's because of where we are. This place feels so different—like everything is sharper and crisper."

"When did you find out?"

"At the skate park—the first time we met."

"But you didn't tell me."

"It wasn't my secret to tell," she says. "I didn't agree with what she was doing."

"This makes me feel like such a dumb-ass. It really sucks."

She turns me around and looks into my eyes. "Would you have told me if our positions were reversed? If it was my best friend who was the Wildling?"

I don't really have to think about it. "Probably not."

We don't say anything for a while. We move back from the rising tide, but we stay on the beach, looking out over the ocean. It's strange seeing it so empty. There are no freighters slowly going by in the distance. No lights from big oilrigs way offshore, like there are in Santa Feliz. It's—I don't know—pure.

Elzie is beside me, her arm around my waist.

"How did you leave things with her?" she finally asks.

I shrug. "Not great. She was crying ..."

"And you just walked away?"

"What was I supposed to do? She
lied
to me. She was my best friend and right when I really could have used her help, she abandoned me."

She bumps my hip with hers. "That's not fair."

"Tell me about it."

"No," she says, "I mean it's not fair for you to put that on her. Just because she kept the fact that she's a Wildling a secret, doesn't mean she abandoned you or didn't care about you."

I take the hand that's on my waist in my own and turn to face her. "You can't be serious."

"When you told her, she was supportive, wasn't she? Right from the start."

"Well, yeah, but—"

"And she's the one who put everything in motion and risked her life to get you away from ValentiCorp."

"Jeez, make me feel worse, why don't you?"

She puts her other hand on my shoulder. Her gaze holds mine.

"I'm not trying to, Josh. You guys have been tight for a really long time. I just don't want you throwing away your friendship. The way things are going, we need all the friends we can get."

"But how am I supposed to trust her?"

She leans her head against my chest.

"I don't know," she murmurs. "Me and trust aren't exactly bosom buddies."

She straightens up and turns to look out at the ocean.

"Marina messed up," she says. "I'm not going to pretend she didn't and you can't either. But remember, you guys have a lot of history—good history. Is it really worth it to hang on to this feeling of betrayal and lose all of that?"

"She lied to me for five months. It's a huge deal."

"Of course it is. But only about that one thing. Sure, it happened to both of you, but she decided to keep it private when you didn't." She turns to face me again. "Where's the rule that says she's not allowed to keep some stuff to herself? What makes you right and her not?"

"Nothing, I suppose ..."

She taps her forehead lightly on my shoulder. "Just don't close the door on your friendship. And listen, it's
me
saying this, which ain't easy."

"Okay," I tell her. "I'll try not to close the door."

She takes my hand. "Come on, let's walk for awhile. Can you believe how beautiful it is here?"

I let myself be distracted and nod in agreement. It's not just the absence of the Pacific Coast Highway and parking lots and condos and all those other artifacts of civilization that inevitably follow the coastline—though that certainly helps. Without the light pollution, the sky is a deep dark velvet as far as we can see, and we can see a long way. The air is a rich stew of brine and marsh and wet sand, without a trace of smog or exhaust. But mostly, it's the space. I'm so aware of how it unrolls around us in all directions and seems to go on forever. And because of that, it feels like we can, too. That something inside us can expand and reach its full potential with nothing to stop it.

I try to explain the feeling to Elzie and she nods.

"I know just what you mean," she says. "We should stay here."

I smile. "And do what?"

She stops. "I'm serious. Why go back to a crappy world where nobody cares about anything but themselves?"