Dark Hope (8 page)

“Hey, you,” he called to one spectacularly unathletic freshman. The geeky boy looked up from his lunch tray, surprised. “Do you want to be the Wildcat this Friday?”

The geeky boy nodded excitedly, pushing up his glasses.

“Great! Here you go,” Michael said. He tossed the head to the boy, who promptly fell off of his seat with the effort of catching it.

“Problem solved,” Michael said, taking his chair. “Ladies.” They shrieked with horror and swarmed around the boy, trying to reclaim the costume. I stole a glance at Michael. He seemed oblivious to the commotion he’d just caused.

On Valentine’s Day, the entire squad decorated his locker with pink, red, and lacy white hearts, spraying the entire thing with so much perfume that we had to wheeze our way through the locker bay. But it didn’t stop there. The cheerleading squad had sold singing “Cupid-Grams” for charity: a few dollars got you candy, a valentine, and a singing telegram, all delivered to your true love in class. So every hour, a scantily clad cheerleader dressed as Cupid or Venus serenaded an amused Michael, delivering professions of love from one of her teammates. By the end of the day, the Cupids had gotten increasingly hostile as Michael refused to let them sit in his lap or give him a kiss. In our last class, after finding Michael unresponsive, the frustrated messenger had simply dug around in her fake bag of arrows and slapped the other valentines down on everyone’s desk, forgoing any singing. As she pulled the last letter out, her eyes narrowed.

“Who would send you a valentine?” she said acidly as she looked at me, holding the envelope between her fingers as if it were a piece
of used tissue or a dead mouse. “Here.” She let it flutter down to my desk and turned on her heel to stomp out of the room, forgetting to give me my candy or a song.

I looked at the red envelope.
Hope Carmichael, period 6, Mrs. Mormon
, was written in flawless cursive script across the front. I traced the silver ink and realized I didn’t know what Michael’s handwriting looked like.

My heart was thumping. I shot Michael a look, but I couldn’t catch his eye. The class was resuming its conjugations so quickly that I shoved the envelope into my back pocket, saving it for later.

It was burning a hole in my pocket during the entire walk to our lockers and out to Michael’s Charger. We were unusually quiet during the ride home. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw Michael darting me curious glances, his eyes deep as the sky as he watched me.

When he stopped in my driveway, he reached across my lap to open the door. I held my breath, every inch of skin tingling with the awareness of how close he was. He paused with one hand on the handle, fixing me with a deep gaze. His eyes seemed to sparkle, shifting between different shades of blue as if they were waves dancing in the sun.

“Aren’t you going to open your valentine?”

I drew a shaky breath and forced a laugh. “Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. Probably a mistake.”

He arched one eyebrow and grinned, a deep dimple puckering his chin. “Um-hmm. A mistake. Whatever, Carmichael.”

Only then did he lift the latch, allowing me to flee from his car.

I placed the red envelope on my nightstand, where it tempted me throughout the night as I went through the forced march of environmental science, math, literature, and social studies homework. Only after I’d packed up my books and gotten into my pajamas did I allow myself to pick it up.

I sat cross-legged on my bed and drew a deep breath as I stared at it lying in my lap. Finally, I took it in my hand and ran one trembling finger along the script before flipping the envelope over to break the seal. I slid out the card—an old-fashioned lacy heart embossed with roses in shades of cream and pink—and read the verse that had been hand-lettered on the front:

I flipped over the card. There was no signature, nothing at all. I felt my brows knitting together as I puzzled over the simple lines. They were familiar, but from where? And what did they mean?

I reached under my bed, pulling out my old Bible, and flipped quickly to Psalms. I trailed a finger across the page until I found the verses I sought:

I stared at the page, bewildered. My secret admirer had sent me
Bible verses. But he’d altered it, turning it from a plea to a promise of protection. Protection from what? The only thing I seemed to need protection from was overzealous cheerleaders.

Was it a warning? My mind raced. If so, whoever had written it had expected me to recognize the verse and go to the Bible to discover the rest. But who at my school would even know I would be familiar enough with the Bible to pluck this verse out, to recognize it and find the words that came after it?

Nobody
, the little voice in my head reasoned.
Whoever wrote your card probably saw the quote out of context and simply copied it out, no greater meaning intended
.

But that still left the question of who had sent the card. Could it have been Michael?

I blushed, almost ashamed to admit to myself how much I had wanted it to be from him. But why would he send me a valentine, especially one so weird? No, it couldn’t have been from Michael.

Then I felt all the blood drain from my face as a more likely culprit occurred to me: my dad. How had he managed to infiltrate the cheerleaders’ Cupid sale and send me a card? Anger and embarrassment rushed through me at the thought of him insinuating himself into my new life, despite all my attempts.

How stupid I was
, I thought, crumpling the delicate card in my fist. I threw it across the room, disgusted at my own gullibility. Of course it had been Dad. Who else had the bad habit of tossing Bible verses around to embarrass me? Swallowing my disappointment, I turned off my light and curled up in a little ball in my bed, savoring my misery.

I did the math in my head. A little over two months until my birthday. Then I’d be sixteen.
Sixteen and never been kissed
, I thought bitterly. Kissed? I’d never so much as held hands with anybody. I punched my pillow. Well, at least Michael didn’t seem to
like those cheerleaders, I consoled myself. Having to hang out with them would be unbearable. With that last thought to cheer me, I drifted off to sleep.

The next day, Michael kept sending me meaningful looks, which I deliberately ignored. How could I explain my dad and the crazy note he’d sent? Better just to stay away from the whole topic. I managed to avoid a direct conversation during passing time and classes, but once we were at lunch, I couldn’t hold him off.

“So, Hope, who was your card from?” he demanded as he steered me toward our usual table, choosing seats well removed from the rest of the crowd.

I did my best to look uninterested and shrugged. “I dunno. It wasn’t signed,” I said, pushing my mashed potatoes around on my tray.

“Secret admirer, eh?” Michael grinned. “C’mon, what did it say?”

He seemed way too interested in my love life. I looked at him again with suspicion. Could I have been wrong? Could it have been him after all?

I rolled the idea around in my mind as I looked at him across the table. I couldn’t deny that he continued to intrigue me. He was dressed again, as always, in one of his odd, monochromatic outfits—the only thing ever changing being the exact shade of white he chose. It was a sort of hippie aesthetic that made sense, I guess, for someone who had grown up in a cult, and I had to admit it looked good on him. The white set off his glowing skin perfectly, and the way the clothes moved about him hinted at his strong, toned body and made him seem even more mysterious.

Don’t kid yourself
, the voice in my head spoke up.

“What are you eating?” I asked, trying to change the subject. I’d noticed he never ate the cafeteria food. Instead he packed an odd lunch of white, lumpy health food stuff that was possibly the most unappetizing thing I’d ever seen.

“Would you like to try it?” he asked politely, after watching me stare at it with revulsion for what must have been the tenth lunch period in a row. “It’s just like tofu. It’s really good for you.”

“No thanks,” I shuddered, pushing the equally disgusting lima beans the lunchroom had served around on my tray. Thank goodness he’d let the whole valentine thing drop so easily. “Did you see Dan Frasier fall asleep today in Science? It was so gross. He actually started to drool.” I kept babbling on about Dan’s unfortunate lapse of consciousness until I realized I was talking to myself.

“Michael?”

He wasn’t paying attention. I followed his gaze. His eyes had drifted to one of the televisions mounted all around the cafeteria. Someone had changed the channel to one of the twenty-four-hour news programs. A constant scroll about refugees and violence in the Middle East crept across the bottom of the screen. Michael set his jaw, crumpling his brown lunch sack in his big, golden hands.

“Michael?” I asked again, waiting for his attention to return.

His reverie broke, and he turned to me with a sheepish grin, though his eyes still looked troubled.

“Sorry, Hope, what was that?”

“Are you interested in current events?” I asked, as politely as I could, trying to hide my annoyance.

His eyes danced with amusement. “You could say that, I guess.”

Before I could ask him more, he started wiggling his eyebrows at me, making one of his patented goofy faces. “I was really
just looking for the basketball scores. How ’bout an ice cream sandwich—my treat?”

“I thought you didn’t eat ‘junk,’” I teased him.

“Call it research. I was thinking of writing my biology paper on the eating habits of the American teenage girl. I am in awe of your calorie consumption. I just plan to watch. Maybe capture it on my iPhone.”

I grabbed the crumpled bag out of his hands and threw it in his face, laughing.

I couldn’t figure out why he had picked me, but for the first time ever in my life, I had a friend. And he was a friend with whom everything seemed effortless, a friend with whom I didn’t have to pretend to be dumb, a friend with whom I could talk about important things instead of the latest program on TV. Between that and being practically faceless in my new school, I was in a state of bliss.

But something was going wrong. By the start of my third week in school, Michael seemed distant. He was preoccupied. In every class, he seemed to be sneaking peeks at papers he had tucked inside his books, rapidly shoving them inside his backpack as soon as class was over. Over the course of the week he became increasingly short tempered. By the time Friday rolled around, he was like a caged lion. His entire body was tense, his face looked drawn and tight around the eyes, and even the slightest question from me would cause him to snap.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as the final bell rang and we spilled out toward the locker bays, wondering what I’d done to upset him. I
didn’t have much experience with friends, so I was sure it was my fault. “Can you tell me what I’ve done?”

“It’s not about you, Hope. Just leave it alone,” he sighed, his frustration palpable as he twirled the combination to his locker.

“Problems, Michael?” A dry voice interrupted our conversation.

We both turned. It was the dark-looking boy who had stared at me during the first week of school. He was surrounded by the same pack of friends who’d been fighting that day. Even the obnoxious boy from the bus was there. Only now, he wasn’t the only one paying attention to me. Everyone’s eyes were fully focused on us like a pack of wolves surrounding stray sheep.