When the World was Flat (and we were in love) (7 page)

I suddenly had the strange sensation I was being watched. I looked up and caught a movement in the window. I stood up and drew back the sheer curtain. My bedroom was at the side of our house, overlooking a veggie patch, or rather a dirt patch – another project Deb had started, but not finished.

The yard was gray in the early morning sunlight. It was also empty.

It must have been a bird that caught my eye, or a cat. But the cold that settled in my stomach said otherwise.

 

Jo knocked on the front door at 8.15am as usual.

“I called you a thousand times yesterday,” I said, following her onto the sidewalk.

“I know.”

I waited for her to go on, but then I realized I would be waiting a while. “Is everything OK with your dad?” I asked, searching her face, which was bowed, as if we were walking against a strong headwind. Her freckles stood out against her pale skin, like flecks of brown paint on a white wall.

“They think he has a secondary cancer.”

“What does that mean?”

“A second cancer,” she said unhelpfully. There was another silence, before she changed the subject. “What did I miss yesterday?”

I thought of my ride home with Tom. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

The school corridors were buzzing when we got there. The queen bee herself was spreading gossip like it was pollen about a new student that had flown into Green Grove overnight. “Fresh meat,” Melissa announced, as she walked past my locker where we had congregated. “Jackson Murphy.”

“Jack O'Lantern?” Jo asked. “He came back to Green Grove after all these years? He must be a glutton for punishment.” She smirked and looked at me to check that I had picked up her reference to him being overweight. I smiled, relieved she could joke after the news about her dad.

“I guess I am,” a voice said.

We turned and let out a collective squawk.

Jackson, at least I guessed it was Jackson, was leaning against a locker a few feet away. He was solid, but from what I could tell under his red hoodie it was muscle, not fat, these days. His grin showed us his adult teeth had come in, perfectly straight and brilliantly white. I wondered if they were porcelain veneers.

Jo colored until her skin matched her freckles.

Jackson was nowhere near as handsome as Tom, with features that instead seemed off-kilter: shaggy blond hair, wide-set eyes and a slightly skewed nose that looked like it had been broken. It brought him down a couple of notches on the hot-or-not meter, but gave him character.

Melissa was not into character though. “Welcome back to Green Grove,” she said without warmth, before returning to her hive.

“I see some things never change,” Jackson said with a laugh, his hazel eyes sparkling.

“And some things do,” Sylv observed, raising an eyebrow in appreciation.

The bell rang and everyone moved to their own lockers. As I turned to get my books Tom walked up to his locker, dropped his bag at his feet and busied himself with his combination.

Say something, I told myself, as I listened to him spin the dial. I opened my mouth and a small squeak slipped out. I bit my lip and then drew myself up to my full height. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Tom answered, without looking out from behind the metal door.

“Thanks again for the lift yesterday.”

He shoved a stack of books into his bag and stood upright, slamming his locker closed. “Don't mention it,” he said with a gruffness that made it sound literal.

As he stooped again to pick up his bag, I glimpsed a crumpled photo, half-hidden beneath his books. It looked like a photo of Tom with a girl.

She was a brunette like me, but with golden streaks through her hair like wheat, not caramel. His arm was around her, pulling her close in an embrace. And he was laughing, easily, freely, naturally, which was less like the Tom I knew and more like the Tom I had seen for a split second in his SUV. It reminded me of his words when he had apologized for being rude. “It was unlike me.”

My heart plummeted to my feet, continuing until it got to Antarctica. Of course. It explained it all. He had a girlfriend back in England or Australia, who he was hung up on, and for all intents and purposes she was hung up on him as well. They probably poked each other on Facebook and Skyped for hours on end. My heart gave a twist. Fool. And another. Fool.

“Tom, we have Legal Studies,” Melissa declared, swooping in and grabbing him like a hawk would a field mouse. She looked over her shoulder as they walked down the corridor, giving me a look that said, “back off”.

I gave her a you-too-because-he-has-a-girlfriend look, but I think it was lost in translation.

I had a double period of Art Studies, but it may as well have been Math. My feet dragged, the soles of my shoes scraping on the concrete as I walked, chanting the word “hate” in my mind. I hated Tom. I hated that he was messing with my mind. I hated his girlfriend too. And Melissa. I also hated Mr Hastings. And, of course, I hated Dirk, who had decided to attach himself to me at the hip during Art Studies.

“Lillie! I thought of a location to shoot our project. I mean, for you to shoot and me to sketch. I was thinking of the National Park. You know how there are those moss-covered trees? They kind of look like the homes of dryads. Dryads are tree-spirits, by the way. They protect forests and woodlands, but if they leave their tree they can die. Their name means ‘oak' in Greek.”

“Uh-huh,” I said politely, as I took my seat, flanked by my new bestie, Dirk, and my new enemy, Kate. Kate glared at me from underneath eyelids blackened by a combination of eyeliner, eye shadow and mascara. Like Sylv, she was high on the dress code hit-list.

“We have a new student,” Mr Hastings said, with none of the pomp and circumstance such an announcement should hold in Green Grove.

Twenty-three pairs of eyes flew to the front of the classroom and to Jackson. His dimples told me that unlike Tom, he was a glass-half-full kind of guy. I was about two hundred and fifty per cent certain that coming back to Green Grove was going to turn that on its head.

Mr Hastings gave Jackson an overview of our major work, adding, “You can pair up with Lillie – our third wheel.”

Thanks for that last comment, I thought, as Jackson walked towards me, wearing a wide smile. The corners of my mouth moved upwards too, as I realized I had been rescued from the King of the Nerds and the Queen of the Emos.

“I think Kate would be into that – what did you call it? Death Knight? – you were telling me about last class,” I said to Dirk. His crestfallen expression lifted as he turned to Kate, whose purple-lined lips twitched into a small smile.

“Thank you,” I breathed to my knight in shining armor, as we sat down at another desk.

“For what?” Jackson asked.

I tilted my head towards my former partners, who were deep in conversation thanks to my matchmaking.

Jackson grinned again and then squinted at me, as if sizing me up. “Photographer?” he asked. “A stab in the dark,” he added with a nod to my camera. “I have psychic powers, you know.” He placed his fingertips on his temples and closed his eyes. “You also like the color blue. Pale blue. Like the color of an iceberg.”

I startled as I thought of Tom and his glacial eyes. How did he know? But then I remembered I was wearing a pale blue sweater. I rolled my eyes. “OK. You got me on both counts.” I spotted a scribble of ink on the back of his hand. It was a map of the school, as if you could get lost between here and the main building. “Let me guess,” I said with a smile. “You like to draw.”

His mouth fell open. “You cheated.”

I shook my head. “I have psychic powers too,” I teased.

He laughed and I pushed up the sleeves of my sweater as his thousand-watt smile gave me a hot flash.

He leaned down and pulled a tattered sketchbook from an equally tattered bag. “Trade?”

I hunted through my own bag, which was a bottomless pit of lunch wrappers, crumpled notes, film canisters, books and pens. Six months ago I would have had a heart attack that it had become such a landfill. These days I was more concerned about the man – or woman – in the balaclava than a few half-eaten muffins squashed at the bottom of my bag.

I pulled out a bundle of photos. “This will be a lucky dip,” I said apologetically.

The first photo was of the ant carrying the crumb, which had been taken minutes before Tom had criticized my photos of Sylv. I touched a shadow in the corner of the image, which I knew belonged to Tom.

I flicked to the next pic.

“Wait,” Jackson said, putting his hand on mine. I blushed and moved my hand in order to bring back the photo.

“Let me guess,” he said, rubbing his chin comically as he studied the photo. “This is a statement on consumerism through the representation of mass consumption. The ant symbolizes the spread of the manmade world to the natural environment.”

I stared at him. “Um. No. It's just a photo of an ant carrying a crumb.”

“Thank God.”

“For what?”

“I thought you were an art snob.” He pointed at the photography books I had pulled from my bag and I drew them into my chest, like a mother gathering up her children.

When Jackson showed me his sketches I saw they were as detailed as my photos.

“I use carbon, instead of graphite,” he told me and I nodded, as if I was up on my pencils.

I traced a finger over the fine lines, recognizing the streetscapes of Green Grove: Main Street, the Memorial Fountain, the Fur Museum, Wal-Mart. I laughed as I recognized a figure on the sidewalk. “Jo!”

Jackson frowned. “Really?” He studied the drawing and nodded. “Huh. It does look like Jo. Funny.”

I continued to flip through the pages. “Green Grove. Green Grove. Green Grove,” I said as I surveyed the sketches.

Jackson shrugged. “I like this town.”

“You like this town?” I repeated incredulously.

“I was born here.”

I was going to point out that he had also been bullied here, but instead I said, “Me too, but… You like Green Grove?”

Jackson laughed and then leaned towards me with an earnest expression. “If you want to talk about identity then talk about this town. Both of us are products of Green Grove.”

I hesitated. I could hardly say I was a product of New York or LA, but to tell the truth I was a product without an ingredients list at the moment. It was kind of hard to hold onto your identity when you had died about forty times in the past four months, even if it was just in your dreams.

I narrowed my eyes as I realized he wanted our major work to be about Green Grove. “No.”

He raised an eyebrow. “No?” He looked thoughtful for a moment and then brightened. “What about family? Are you a product of your family?”

I thought of Deb. “No.”

“No again?” He pouted. “I thought Mr Hastings said this was about teamwork.”

I laughed at myself. “Fine. I guess I will have to learn to love Green Grove.” It seemed like the lesser of two evils.

He beamed again. “I can pick you up on Saturday. Yeah? Two?”

He had a location in mind, but his lips were sealed.

“A teeny tiny clue,” I begged.

He shook his head.

“What happened to teamwork?”

His dimples flashed. “Badlands Street?” he checked.

I frowned. First Tom had known where I lived, now Jackson.

“I used to live two streets down on Wyoming Crescent,” he reminded me.

“Oh.” I searched my memory.

“I knew you had forgotten. You remembered my nickname though: Jack O'Lantern.” He grimaced, but it turned into a grin as he asked, “Do you remember when Jo stole my school bag in fifth grade and you wrote Jack O'Lantern on it with a sharpie?”

“I think so… I mean, yes. I do,” I said, my face flushing with embarrassment.

“And then I wrote on both of your bags as payback. Jo was Freckle Face and you were–”

“Buck Tooth Bandit,” I finished, wondering why he would bring up such a memory. Thank God for braces, I thought, touching my front teeth self-consciously. My mind automatically went to my tooth again, which I had decided I had chipped while eating nuts or candy. Hey. It was either that or acknowledge it had happened in my dreams.

“We all got detention,” Jackson continued with a smile.

“I must have blocked that from my memory,” I said, giving him a half-smile in return.

 

“He sounds hung up on being called Jack O'Lantern,” Jo said after I recounted our conversation.

“He probably came back to Green Grove for revenge,” Sylv said. “Like in that horror movie where that pumpkin goes bad-ass and kills all those kids.” She clicked her fingers as she tried to remember the name of what sounded like a forgettable film.

“You said you wanted to sleep with him two minutes ago,” Jo said.

“I do.” Sylv threw a grape and Jo batted it back. Her hand-eye coordination was second to none. Me, on the other hand, I could have missed a beach ball.

“Where are you going on your date?” Jo asked.

I shrugged, ignoring her use of the word “date.” “He wants it to be a surprise,” I explained, which of course made it sound even more like a date.

“If he takes you to an abandoned farmhouse, slaughterhouse, warehouse,” Sylv ticked them off her fingers, “nuthouse, trainhouse–”

“Trainhouse?” Jo and I asked in sync.

Sylv grimaced. “I would have said train station, but I was going for a theme.”

“Haunted house?” I offered.

“Bingo! Anyway, if he takes you anywhere that ends in ‘house' you need to–” She frowned. “Dammit. How did they kill the bad-ass pumpkin?”

“They turned him into soup?” Jo suggested.

I guffawed.

Sylv shrugged. “You can thank me when he turns out to be a serial killer. Or worse.”

“What could be worse than a serial killer?” Jo asked.