And Claire still felt lost and alone. Having the familiar around only made all this seem more alien.
She kept arranging things until she realised it was verging on obsessive, and finally hooked up her computer, logged on to the house Wi-Fi (at least that was decent) and found e-mails had exploded like popcorn in the microwave of her inbox. One was from her dad, telling her to call to confirm she was safe in her new place. Ditto from Michael, and from Eve, and even an awkward, formal note from Myrnin that boiled down to the same thing (she was surprised he’d actually figured out how to manage it on his own). It was all really sweet, but she couldn’t stand to talk to them right now; the despair of having made the decision loomed all over her, and she knew she’d break down and cry if she heard a familiar voice. So she sent out e-mails instead.
It was all she could do not to beg them to come get her and take her back home.
No, I won’t do that. I didn’t quit
, she reminded herself.
I didn’t quit when I got to Morganville, and people were actually trying to kill me. I’m not going to quit now, just because I don’t like my room and my housemate’s kind of nuts.
It suddenly struck her that there was no message from Shane. Not one.
A lump formed hard in her throat, and she involuntarily looked up at the closest picture she’d placed of him. It was her favourite. She’d caught him relaxed, laughing, and the warmth in his face always made her feel safe and happy.
But what if that light was gone? What if she never saw it in him again – if he’d forget about her while she was gone, or everything changed between them?
It’ll be your fault
, something in her said.
Because you walked away
.
Claire reached for her phone and ran her finger lightly over the screen. So easy to call him. It only took a couple of motions, and then the phone would ring, and …
… And what if he didn’t pick up?
Claire dropped her phone and rested her burning forehead against her palms, and just as she was ready to crawl into her crappy, sagging bed and cry, her computer let out a little musical tone to tell her a new message had come in.
She grabbed the mouse and frantically clicked, and a video came up. It was murky at first, and then a light clicked on, and she saw Shane’s face gilded by it. He was in his room, she saw … it was just as messy as ever, and the sight of it, and him, made her throat close up with frantic longing.
‘Hey,’ Shane’s image said. It wasn’t Skype, not real time, just a recording, so she controlled the almost crazy impulse to talk back to him, blurt out how much she missed him, loved him,
needed
him. She couldn’t stop herself from touching the screen, and tracing the lines of his lips with her fingers. ‘So, I guess you’re there, at your new place. Hope it’s awesome. If it’s not, you’ll make it awesome, because that’s what you do. It’s your superpower. Also, this is for Claire, so if I hit somebody else in the list by mistake, stop watching now or I’ll have to kill you.’
That made her laugh, and he must have known it would, because he smiled just a little. It made the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkle slightly. ‘So anyway,’ he said, ‘Claire, if you’re seeing this, and you’re not so pissed at me you just delete the whole thing without watching … I miss you. I miss you so bad it hurts. I keep walking around the house and wishing you were here, and that I could – that I could figure out how to fix the screwed-up stuff I did. Until I can do that, though, I guess what I’m saying is that I miss you. That’s all. So if you’re lonely there, not out partying and meeting fancy Boston guys, maybe we can be lonely together.’
He’d been avoiding the camera, but now he made eye contact with it, and she felt like he was staring right into her. And that smile … it broke her heart.
‘Love you,’ he said, and logged off, as if he was afraid to be caught at it.
It made her eyes fill up with tears, and she sat for a few more minutes, starting it over, replaying it, watching his lips say the words.
We can be lonely together.
She was reaching for her phone when Elizabeth – without knocking – threw open her bedroom door with such force it knocked over one of her empty suitcases. ‘Hey!’ she said brightly. The dark mood she’d been in was already gone, and looking at her brilliant smile, Claire wondered if she’d imagined some of it. ‘Ready for some delicious home-made dinner?’ Liz asked. ‘Because I’m totally starved.’ She put her hands on her hips and looked around the room, then looked around again. ‘Um … did you unpack?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wow. I really need to show you how to decorate, don’t I?’
Not if this paint colour is any clue,
Claire thought, but she kept it to herself. She’d quietly get a can of something neutral and redo things to the way she wanted them – no confrontation, no drama, no fuss. ‘So, what’s for dinner?’
‘How about mac and cheese with some chicken? It’s leftover KFC, but it’s still good, I swear.’
It did sound good. Claire hadn’t even realised she was hungry until her stomach started growling, and she slid out of the chair behind her computer and stuck her phone in her pocket on the way out the door.
Dinner wouldn’t take
that
long.
… Except, it did. Elizabeth was hell to cook with; she wanted everything done just right. Claire stuck the macaroni in boiling water, and Liz got upset and took it off the burner because she wanted to check the temperature of the water first. Claire asked why, and that brought on an insane volume of information about cooking pasta at just the right temperatures, and the physics and chemistry of food, and honestly, even as much of a physics junkie as Claire was, she couldn’t really apply it to box pasta with reconstituted cheese substance that sold for a buck a box. She just backed off and let Liz conduct all her temperature observations, mix the sauce, and generally obsess about getting the chicken chunks just the right size to go into the pasta once it was done. All this took about an hour, which was about half an hour more than Claire wanted to spend on mac and cheese, even if Liz added something she said were Chinese herbs and white truffle oil. In the end, it tasted pretty much like she expected, but by then Claire was willing to eat the box, too.
Claire took the cleaning up role, which seemed to suit Liz, and when that was done, she headed for the stairs.
‘Wait,’ Liz said. ‘So – you’re leaving? Just like that?’
‘What do you mean, just like that?’
‘It’s our first night here! Don’t you think we ought to, you know, celebrate? I have a movie we can watch, or we can just catch up and talk—’ Liz was practically begging her. ‘Please? I know it’s been a really long time and maybe – maybe you’re just really feeling lost, and I want you to like it here. So let me help.’
I just want to go upstairs, call Shane, and spend all night talking
. But if she said that out loud, it would sound like she was some girl who couldn’t exist without a boy, and wasn’t that what all this coming-to-MIT had been intended to prove? Pretty ridiculous to fail the first test, on the first day she was apart from him.
‘Sure,’ Claire said, and tried to force some cheer into her voice. She felt horrible, but it wasn’t Liz’s fault. Her former best friend was trying to fill the void, and the least Claire could do was let her.
Besides … she could call Shane later.
Elizabeth was, as it turned out, a movie
fanatic
, and six hours later, Claire finally begged off from the video assault and climbed the stairs, feeling more like a zombie than a survivor of the living-dead attack. Watching gory horror movies on the first night in a creaky old house, with a flaky roommate, was not nearly as much fun as it had been in the Glass House, surrounded by people she loved and trusted. That house had always seemed – and been, on some level –
alive
, and protective of them.
This one felt cold, alien, and utterly indifferent to her life or death, which made imagining the creaks and bangs to be serial killers intent on murder all too easy.
Claire made it up the steep climb, turned on the lights, and climbed in bed with her phone. She thought about shutting the lights off again, but in her sleep-deprived, overstimulated state, every shadow looked like a monster, and she thought she could see things moving at the corners of her eyes.
Better to leave them on.
She dialled Shane’s number and snuggled down in the pillows, warm and safe, finally, beneath the covers even if the mattress felt weirdly hard, and the sheets smelt of unfamiliar detergent.
His cell rang, and rang, and rang, and finally it went to voicemail.
That was like an ice dagger to the heart; she felt numbed and destroyed, all at once.
He didn’t answer
. She’d called, she’d watched the video, and he wasn’t there, wasn’t answering. She was too tired to think rationally, so the next thing in her mind was that he’d gotten angry, turned his phone off, maybe even blocked her calls. What if he’d gone out? When she’d moved to Morganville, Shane had been dating other girls, though not seriously … maybe he’d already called one of them, gone out to the movies, or …
… Or worse. Maybe he was already forgetting her, laughing at some other girl’s jokes. Someone older and prettier.
Stop it,
she told herself angrily, and shut off the phone.
Just stop it.
Claire shut off the ringer, tucked the phone under her pillow, and tried very, very hard not to cry.
She’d never felt so abandoned, or so lonely, in her life.
It hadn’t taken me long to pack most of my crap up. Truthfully, I didn’t have that much; I wasn’t a fashion victim like Eve – hell, even Michael had more clothes than I did – or a collector of stuff. A few well-aged tees, some jeans that had seen the worst of acids and bloodstains and buckshot, and not in that fancy-ass designer way. More the ‘I survived that’ way.
I decided to ditch the stereo – it was a third-hand ancient thing anyway, and cheap – and that was the biggest thing I owned, besides weapons.
It was the weapons that were going to be tricky. A shotgun weighs a decent amount. Throw in multiple other deadly sharp things, some stakes, a couple of crossbows, and you’ve got a problem … particularly if you’re planning on having no fixed address for a while. In other words, I had to pick what I could easily carry in the battered camping backpack my dad had once used for the same purpose. Turned out that minus the clothes, my phone, some basic stuff for not smelling gross, the pack weighed about fifty pounds when I finally got it on to test it.
Doable. Soldiers pack that much plus body armour, and I wasn’t exactly humping it through the mountains of Afghanistan.
As I shucked the backpack and leant it against the wall, I sensed someone watching me … and I was right. Michael. ‘Can’t talk you out of this,’ he said. It was a statement, not a question.
‘Nope.’
‘You’re sure this is the right thing to do.’
‘Yep. You and the missus need some alone time. Last thing you need is me hanging around here like the new house ghost, haunting Claire’s room. Besides, man, I don’t do emo.’
‘I never said you had to go.’
‘Never had to,’ I said, and checked my phone again. No calls. Every time I checked and I didn’t see Claire’s name, I felt the dark, jagged ball of anxiety inside get a little bigger, choke me a little more. ‘You giving me a ride to the border or what?’
‘Shane—’
I gave him a long look, and he shut up. ‘We’ve been through a lot, Michael, but I’m not going to collapse into your manly arms and cry about it, okay? I already said I don’t blame you. I don’t. It’s not your fault she left us … it’s mine. I should have trusted her more. I should have believed in
you
more. I got some things to make up for, not just to her but to you. And it’s probably better I do that away, so you and Eve can get to feel actually married without me lurking around in the background.’ That still hurt, the idea I was holding them back; I knew that was part of why Claire had decided to go, too. But he and Eve
did
need alone time. It was just truth, hard as it was.
‘I’ll give you a ride,’ Michael said. He walked over to my backpack and picked it up like I’d loaded it up with feathers. ‘You got weapons in here?’
‘A few.’
‘You know that it’ll get your ass arrested out there, right?’
‘Only if I’ve got really bad luck, or I decide to hold up a liquor store with ’em.’
‘You are a cocky bastard, did I ever tell you that, bro?’
I flashed him a grin. ‘Did you really think you needed to?’
He backslapped me as he passed me. ‘Come on, criminal. Eve will kill me if I don’t let her say goodbye.’
‘Oh man, that means she’s gonna cry. Again.’
‘Like a river,’ he assured me. ‘Good thing you wore a black shirt. That mascara never comes out.’
I stopped him at the top of the stairs, and for a moment we just looked at each other. Then he set the backpack down, and hugged me hard. No need for words or speeches or anything like that; he just offered me a fist to bump, I bumped, we were good.
And then we went downstairs to where Eve was pacing the floor, chewing on a neon-coloured thumbnail. Sometime in the past couple of years girls had started painting their nails weird, so the neon thumb didn’t match the other four fingers, which were standard Goth black. She’d tied her colour-streaked hair back in a ponytail so tight that I wondered how it didn’t give her a migraine, and she looked pale even though she’d gone light on the rice powder today. In fact, she didn’t look particularly Gothed out any more – dramatic eye shadow and liner, but not a lot else.
Although she was wearing her combat gear – tight black shirt, cargo pants, heavy boots. Everything but bandoliers.
‘So you’re going after all,’ she said. She didn’t sound particularly surprised about it, and I recognised the dangerously flat tone of her voice. ‘I’m not sure if you’re crazy or just in love.’