Authors: Lauryn April
T
he next day Mom drove me to school as my Scion had spent the last two nights in the student lot. On the way there, I remember looking at her as she smiled and feeling my stomach knot as if some Boy Scout were trying to earn a merit badge with my intestines. I wanted to tell her about what I’d heard Dad think, and then at the same time I wished I’d never heard him think it in the first place. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t want to let her go on being hurt either. In the end I chose not to say anything. Maybe it was just because I didn’t know how.
She dropped me off and I approached my friends on the courtyard. They greeted me with concerned stares. I’d disappeared early on Monday, didn’t show up on Tuesday, and hadn’t said a word to any of them since. Both Christy and Ti had texted me but I hadn’t responded to either of them. It was no wonder they looked at me the way they did as I approached. It was as if I’d been gone for months and suddenly returned.
“She’s alive,” Eliza said as I approached.
“You okay?” Tiana asked.
“You sick or something?” Christy added.
“She was prob’ly just playing hooky,” Damon said. “Right, Ivy?”
I laughed. “No, I think I got food poisoning or something. I’m all better now though.”
“Well good,” Christy said. “You won’t miss any more lunch hour drama.” She spoke as if she had forgiven me for leaving her on the beach the Saturday before or, more accurately, as if she had forgotten all about it.
“What drama?”
“Monday at lunch, Eric Thompson took a nose dive into the pavement,” Eliza said. “Ryan Morgan tripped him and he ended up with a nose bleed.”
Tiana sighed. “It wasn’t
just
a nose bleed, he was gushing blood.”
“Ryan Morgan, as in captain of the football team Ryan?” I knew the name instantly. Ryan was always competing for attention with Kyle Allaway the quarterback.
“Yup,” Christy said. “Chase was giving me all the details about it. I guess Eric has gym with like half the football team and they’ve been playing all kinds of pranks on him.”
“Pranks?”
“Just guy stuff,” Damon said, “you know, locker room horseplay, nothing serious, just goofing around.”
“Right,” I said not sure what to think.
Eric was a heavyset guy with a quiet, sweet demeanor. He didn’t seem like the kind of person to enjoy joking around with the football jocks. For a moment, thinking about him and his giant teddy bear like ways made me feel bad for him and the possible torture I could imagine him enduring in gym. Then another thought occurred to me. Monday had been when I took a spill out on the common on my way to lunch. It had been when I heard someone think about everyone on campus being dead a month from now. Could that have been Eric’s voice I heard? He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d want to hurt anyone, not even someone who’d hurt him. But he was being picked on and the timing was right.
The bell rang shortly after that and I went to class, keeping my gift turned off. I didn’t leave the lights out for the whole day however. By lunch my curiosity got the better of me. I let the thoughts of my friends in. At first the voices all came at once. I wasn’t able to filter or focus; they just came tumbling in, reverberating and resounding, echoing against the inside of my skull. I closed my eyes and lowered my head. My fingers went to rub my temples as the pain started to set in. Then, I focused on my breathing. With each long deep breath the voices thinned. Soon the hundreds that I was hearing were only ten, and then I was able to focus on just my friends before me. I smiled, glad that
I had gotten control of it.
God, I would kill for Nicolette’s new Prada bag
. Christy was practically drooling at the brunette across the courtyard as she flaunted her new purse.
And it’s not like I can get the same one, lucky bitch got it first.
Ti pulled her hair back into a ponytail.
Field hockey practice last night was brutal
. She winced then rubbed her arm. She looked at Christy and took notice of the small salad she was eating.
Calorie counting again, she has no idea how good she has it. Girl’s thin as a rail. I play two sports and all she does is starve herself for one meal and she’s got a better body then me.
I sighed. Their thoughts were petty and vain, and while I’m sure if I paid attention to my own inner dialogue I’d find more than a few self-indulgent thoughts here and there, it seemed as if the only things that Christy in particular thought about was keeping her status at the top of the social totem pole.
“You alright there, Ivy?” Tiana asked me. “You’ve been quiet lately.”
“Yeah, I was just thinking about Eric,” and I had been earlier.
“What about him?” Christy asked.
“It’s just… After Ryan tripped him, did no one go to help him?”
“Mostly we all just laughed. The guy’s a big tub of lard.”
“He must have been so embarrassed.”
Tiana sighed. “Yeah, well that’s life. It’s tough but it’s just how it is.”
I frowned at their complete lack of compassion. It would have been the right thing to help Eric up and it bothered me that neither of them even seemed to consider that. You don’t always do the right thing, especially when you’re seventeen, but they refused to even recognize what the right thing had been. I wondered if they’d always been this shallow and self-absorbed and I just hadn’t noticed. I wondered if I was only realizing this about them after being able to hear their thoughts. Either way, in that moment I felt disappointed with them.
9
Follow Me Down
T
hursday morning, Eliza convinced Christy and Tiana to go off campus with her and Damon for lunch. I was invited as well but didn’t want to go. They teased me, thinking I refused their invite because I didn’t want to break the rules. They didn’t know that I’d already broken my ‘I’ve never skipped class’ streak. They said we wouldn’t get caught and not to be lame, but that wasn’t why I didn’t want to go. They were gossiping about the winter formal and again making plans to get a hotel room. They even seemed to have convinced Tiana to go in on their plan. I said I wouldn’t be going because, in all honesty, I wasn’t in the mood for idle gossip. I didn’t feel like talking about jewelry and shoes or the way Mallory Kinney’s hips looked huge in the dress she wore to homecoming. So when lunch came around, I grabbed a bagel and went to the library.
The library, along with the school store, was run by students in the DECA program on their study hall or lunch time. That day, a girl with long, dark brown hair that lightened up to blonde at the tips was working behind the checkout desk. Her hair was curled into a loose wave and floated around her face, framing her pale skin and dark lined eyes. She gave me an annoyed look when I first walked up to the counter. I had the book I wanted in one hand and my half-eaten bagel in the other. Her eyes flashed at the ‘no food or drinks allowed’ sign, but she said nothing. I checked out a book on telepathy and took a seat at one of the tables.
I finished my bagel before I’d even made it past the prologue, and by the time I got half way into the first chapter I was growing bored. It consisted of a lot of opinionated and vague ideas about the possibility of telepathy, none of which were really helping me with my specific and very real situation. So I pretended to continue reading and instead opened up my mind to listen in on those around me.
I saw Skyler Bishop sitting in the corner with his headphones on. His shaggy hair fell into his face and he was singing along with
The Smashing Pumpkins
in his head. He looked like he had gone out to the parking lot to get stoned and was sitting in the library to quietly live out the rest of his high. On the other side of the room, I tuned into the sound of a girl reading
The Great Gatsby.
To her right another girl was proofreading a paper, mentally chiding herself for bad punctuation, and to her left there were two rows of computers with probably six or so guys looking things up on the web. I was about to focus in on what they were looking up when he sat down before me.
“Hey,” Brant said.
I looked up from my book and stared at him, annoyed. “Hey.”
He snatched the telepathy book out of my hands and started to flip through it. “Doing homework?” he asked.
“Give that back.”
He smirked at me. “Make me,” he said and I glared at him.
“You know, you’re really pushy sometimes.” I eyed him with an annoyed expression.
He said something then, but I didn’t hear him. The sound of his voice was a soft murmur at the back of my mind, something else was at the front.
It won’t be a big enough explosion, we need more.
I tuned into the voice the same way I would if someone had just said my name. It was the same voice I’d heard on Monday, the one that had said ‘a month from now they’ll all be dead.’ I still didn’t know who the voice belonged to, but it was one I’d never forget. The deep and rough tone of his speech sounded pained in my mind, pained and angry.
“Hey, are you listening to me?” Brant asked.
I ignored him and abruptly stood up. My telepathy book sat forgotten on the table.
It’s gotta take out the whole school, I don’t want anyone to survive.
My head jerked to look around the room as his words sent a wave of panic through me. Frantically, my eyes scanned the library looking from face to face, but I didn’t know where the voice had come from and there was so much of the library I couldn’t see. I walked toward the rows of computers where all I could see were the tops of students’ heads. I listened for him, but I didn’t hear him think anything else. Spinning around I saw the stacks on the other side of the room where students could be standing between the rows of books, out of view. I twisted my head around looking and listening until the room was a spiraling blur, but nothing else came to me.
Brant put his hand on my shoulder and stopped me from my panicked rotation. He looked at me with concerned eyes. I ran a hand through my hair, pulling at the amber stands. I didn’t know what to do or even what to think. Someone was planning to blow up the school.
”Ivy, what’s wrong?” Brant asked with true concern. “What did you hear?”
My mouth fell open but no words came out. I couldn’t speak, and then the bell rang and I watched as all the students in the library got up gathering their things and began to walk out. The nausea I felt was as if all of my organs had detached and were rearranging themselves inside my body. What I had heard frightened me and I begin to tremble. My breath came out in short, shaky pants and my eyes flickered frantically around the room. Brant was still looking at me expectantly but I couldn’t talk to him, so I ran. I rushed out through the library doors and started to weave past students in the hallway.
I raced to my next class trying to distance myself from the library where the words of whatever twisted individual that wanted to kill us all still rang through my mind. I was also running from Brant. I didn’t want to tell him what I’d heard. It would make it all too real. I knew things I wasn’t supposed to know and I didn’t know how to deal with that. So I tried to escape the responsibility that was running me down, chasing me like a wolf on the tail of a rabbit. The only problem was my next class was Psychology and I wouldn’t be able to escape Brant for long.
I turned off my gift. I blocked out the voices. I didn’t want to hear what Brant was thinking. He sat down at his desk a short while after I did and glared at me. I refused to look at him. I heard him sigh and could tell by the way he clenched his jaw and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling that he was frustrated with me. Mrs. Rochester arrived and started her lecture, continuing on with Freud. I tried to pay attention to her but soon realized that Brant hadn’t given up on trying to talk to me.
Ivy!
I heard in my head.
I visibly flinched. Despite my efforts to block out all voices, he had broken through and my name rang in my head loudly as if he’d yelled in my ear. I turned toward him with a glare that was razor sharp. He smirked.
‘Stop it,’ I mouthed.
We need to talk after class.
‘Fine,’ I rolled my eyes and went back to focusing on Mrs. Rochester’s lecture. To my right I could see Brant gloating in silence as he leaned back in his chair with a grin on his face.
A
fter class Brant practically cornered me in the hallway. He followed me out of class and walked with me down the hall until he could pull me off to the side by the lockers where we were out of the way of foot traffic. He glared down at me expectantly waiting for me to talk.
“Well, what happened back there? You went all like
The Shining
on me in the library.”
“I heard something.”
Behind me a noisy group of guys moved down the hallway and distracted me. I looked in their direction as they walked past and I realized that I still didn’t know who this person was that wanted to kill us all. He could be anyone.
“I… can we talk later, when we’re not…
here
?”
Brant looked around. He grabbed me by the arm then and pulled me down the hall.
“Come on, Daniels.”
“What, where are we going?”
“Somewhere not
here
.”
“We can’t just…”
Brant stopped walking. “What? Leave? Don’t tell me you’ve never ditched before, I’ve seen you.”
I remembered the day I first started hearing the voices and how when I left I’d walked past Brant in the parking lot.
“Fine,” I said jerking my arm free and followed him out of the school.
We made our way to the student lot, both of us keeping our eyes open for the school security guard or Mrs. Farrow. Luckily neither was in sight. I followed Brant to his car and got in the passenger seat. He sat down in the driver seat and I was surprised when he started the car.
“We don’t really need to go anywhere, this is far enough.”
“If I’m gonna leave school to hear what you have to say, I’m going farther than the parking lot.”
He backed up and made his way out of the student lot. I sat silently for a moment, tracing the Z28 insignia on the dash. The inside of Brant’s car was falling apart. The carpets were dingy, the tan leather worn. I wondered for a moment why he drove what most assuredly must be a gas guzzling tank. With his dad being well off enough to make donations to the school large enough to build a new swimming pool, I had expected him to have something… newer. He probably could’ve gotten a brand new Camaro if he wanted and yet he drove this.
“Why do you drive this anyway?” I asked when the curiosity finally got to be too much for me to handle.
“You don’t like the Z28? She’s a classic.”
“Please, this car looks like it’s from 1980. It’s not a classic.”
“1981 for your information.”
“Whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes, realizing that I didn’t really care about the car he drove. I looked out the window for a little while. We entered one of the more wealthy subdivisions in the area, Laurel Hill Estates. I don’t know if I’d really call the houses that were there ‘estates’ but the name made it sound fancy and I always assumed that was the point. It was the kind of place where they set rules and regulations for everything from the color you painted your house to the amount of cars you were allowed to have in the driveway at one time. Christy lived at the far end of it, but other than that I didn’t really know the location.
“So, start talking,” Brant said, diverting my attention from the window to look at him. “What’d you hear?”
I took a deep breath and found my nerves trembling again. “Remember when I fell on Monday?”
“Yeah?”
“Before I passed out I heard… I heard this deep voice. It said that a month from now we’d all be dead.”
Brant looked to me then with a disturbed face. His eyebrows dropped low and puckered. It was then that I also realized that we’d stopped driving.
Brant sighed, “Come on, you can tell me more inside.” I looked out the window at the large brick house and when I looked back to Brant, he’d already gotten out of the car so I got out.
“Where are we?” I asked shutting my car door.
“My house.”
I don’t know why I was surprised that he lived in such a big house, such a nice house. I knew that his father made a lot of money, I had just been thinking about it in the car, but Brant didn’t seem like he belonged here. I followed him around the house to the back sliding glass door. It was unlocked and he slid it open, stepping inside without a second thought. I was hesitant about following him at first. I peered into the house. Brant was standing in the kitchen. He turned around and saw that I wasn’t behind him.
“Well, come on,” he said and I did.
I stepped into the kitchen and closed the sliding glass door behind me. It was a big kitchen with stainless steel appliances, dark granite counter tops, and a beautiful mosaic tile backsplash. My mom would kill to cook here, I thought.
“This way,” Brant said and I saw him standing near an open door.
The door led to the basement. I followed him down and the stairs creaked as we moved. When we reached the bottom, I saw that the basement had been finished. The walls were painted a dark blue. There was no carpet, just a cold cement floor, but a large black rug took up a good amount of the space. On the wall hung a decent size flat screen TV. Below it was a short white dresser and across from it was a worn black leather sofa and small wooden coffee table. On the far wall was a queen size bed with white sheets and a blue comforter that was half-crumpled on the floor. There was no headboard but various posters from rock and heavy metal music groups lined the walls. The clothes hamper on the far wall was full, but other than that the space was relatively clean. Brant walked over to the black leather sofa and plopped down. He sat leaning back with his limbs spread out. I chose not to sit next to him and instead hovered just before the TV.
“So you heard someone say he wants us all dead in a month on Monday, what’d you hear in the library then?”
“I heard the same voice. This time… it sounded like he was looking up how to make a bomb or something. He said that it wouldn’t be a big enough explosion, said it needed to be big enough that no one survived.”
Brant sat up straighter, his eyes locked on me with a look of unease.
“I don’t know who it was, I tried to look around to see if I could figure it out but… whoever they were they sounded serious.”
“We’ve got to figure out who it is then.”
“What?”
“Well, we know this is going to happen in about a month, we’ve got to stop it.”
“Brant, how? The most I know about this guy is just that. He’s a guy, that’s all I know.”
“Well, that’s something, and we know that he was in the library today.”
“I just… this is too much, it’s too big. How am I supposed to stop it? This guy wants us all dead. He hates everyone at Alta Ladera and he’s obviously really serious and… I’m just me.” I thought then about what I’d do if I didn’t stop it. What was my plan? Try and skip school that day and hope for the best? I couldn’t just do that.
“Well we’ve got to try right? People are going to die otherwise, Ivy.”
I knew he was right. It was the right thing to do even if I didn’t think I could possibly stop it. I had to try. “Why do you care? It’s not like you like anyone in our school anyway?”
I saw him stiffen. He seemed almost mad that I was questioning his motives.
“I may not like any of them, but that doesn’t mean I want them all dead. Look, we know something here, and maybe we can’t stop it, but we’re the only ones that even have a chance to. I can’t just not do anything.”
I nodded, “Okay so, where do we start?” I took a step toward him and sat down at the opposite end of the sofa.
“Gotta figure out who it is first, the way I see it.”
I nodded. “Then what?”
He was about to answer when we both heard a noise and I turned toward the stairs. They creaked as someone moved down them. I heard voices and then after a moment I saw Skyler and Jason emerge from the stairwell. They saw me and I watched their eyes go wide.
Brant’s got a girly over, Oo lala,
Jason thought as he and Skyler glanced at one another before setting their sights on Brant.
Great timing, guys,
Brant thought and as he stood up, I followed suit.
“Hey Brant, you ah, ditched out without us,” Jason said.
“Yeah and I see why,” Skyler added looking at me.
“Yeah, sorry, guys. Ivy and I got partnered up in Psych for a project. We were just going over some notes. I wasn’t really expecting you to stop by.”
I was a little amazed at how quickly and smoothly he’d come up with the lie. For a moment I wondered if we really did have a Psych project that we were supposed to be working on.
“Yeah I bet you weren’t.” Jason jabbed Skyler in the ribs.
“Right, well I’m gonna go take Ivy home and I’ll be back here in a few.”
“I’ll, um, I’ll be in the car,” I said and walked up the stairs.
Brant lingered in the basement as I walked up the stairs. Before I even reached the top step, I heard his friends questioning him about me. I walked to the top of the stairs then stopped to listen. For a moment I felt guilty about being nosy, but then I realized that I could listen in on people’s private thoughts and that made me not feel so bad about eavesdropping.
“You’ve got a thing for the Daniels girl,” Jason said and I could picture Brant glancing at the stairs as if to assure himself that I’d gone up them.
“I saw you and her in the library together today,” Skyler added.
“I don’t have a thing for Ivy. She’s just my partner on this Psych thing… that’s all.”
For some reason when he said that, it hurt a little.
“Sure thing, man.”
“Seriously, guys, the only Daniels I like is Jack… which you better have brought over by the way.”
“Of course,” Jason said. I pictured him pulling the square bottle out of his bag.
“Well good then, lemme go take this chick home and then we can have ourselves some fun.”
I heard him start to walk up the stairs and I quickly moved away from the door.
“Just don’t start drinking ‘til I get back,” he called down to them.
By then I was on the other side of the kitchen standing before the sliding glass door.
“Ready to go?” he asked me.
“Yup,” I replied.
I was silent when we got into the car and he looked at me but said nothing. As we drove, I noticed that he’d shoot me a glance every few minutes, but the ride continued to be quiet until I realized that we weren’t on our way back to school, back to my car. We were driving toward my house.
“Hey, wait you have to take me to my car,” I said.
“I’m already half-way to your house.”
“I can’t get to school tomorrow without my car.”
He gave a frustrated sigh. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow, ‘kay?”
My lips thinned. “Fine, whatever,” I said.
“Are you mad at me or something?”
Was I? I didn’t know. It wasn’t like he did anything for me to be mad at him for. Hell, he’d offered to help me figure out who wanted to blow up the entire school. Still though, I felt upset with him.
“No, I’m not mad,” I said and tried to forget the strange little twist that I’d felt in my stomach.