Nightlight (3 page)

On my way out, I bumped into a desk, which bumped into another desk, which bumped into a table with a Popsicle-stick and marshmallow model of the Globe Theatre on top of it. The model wobbled dangerously. Knowing my luck, it is a miracle it didn’t topple over onto the desk. Instead, it toppled onto the floor, where I accidentally slipped on it and somehow got marshmallow in my hair.

At lunch I sat with Tom and Lucy’s friends again. Looking around at all the other tables, I realized this must be the popular table. It was definitely the closest to the door—optimal for getting to class on time. Also, everyone at the table had a bag lunch with their name on it. I felt bad for the
kids at other tables, who were probably nice, but just not socially connected enough to sit close to the door or use paper bags. Tom’s lunch had “My Little Sugar-Pie” written on it. When I asked him why his mom only made him a little sugar-pie, he pretended not to hear. I made a note to pack some vegetables for that boy.

After lunch was Biology—with Edwart. I wished my heart wasn’t beating so fast as I walked down the hall. I especially wished my armpits weren’t sweating so much; I must be secreting pheromones like crazy, which would only heighten Adam and Tom’s frenzy. Drenched in my natural secretions, I walked into class and braced myself for their wild attacks. Instead, I saw Edwart. He looked like a boy in an ad for deodorant, which I definitely would have bought if he were selling it, even if it had aluminum in it, which causes AIDS. I slid into the seat next to him. To my astonishment, he looked up from his computer with a slight nod.

“Hi,” he said in the quiet voice of a boys’ choir of angels.

I couldn’t believe he was talking to me. He was sitting as far away from me as last time, probably because of the smell, but he seemed to know I was there instinctively, like some sort of animal.

“Hi,” I said. “How did you know my name was Belle?”

“What? Oh, I didn’t know that. Hi, Belle.”

“Yeah, Belle. How did you know that? Belle is a nickname.”

He looked about confusedly. “I’m sorry. I—”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, looking towards the
blackboard. “I’m sure there’s a
perfectly rational
explanation for all of this.” After that he stopped talking. I doodled a picture of what I’d look like if I got bitten by a vampire. I’d look very feminine.

Mr. Franklin explained that we were going to dissect a frog in class today. He gave each group a specimen, taken from a cold, anesthetic-smelling plastic bag. Our frog lay in the metal tray on our table, lifeless. It made me shudder to think of all the harmless flies it had probably eaten.

“So … should we start?” Edwart asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said quickly. I picked up the knife, and stuck it into our frog.

“Wait!” Edwart declared. “You have to read the procedure first!”

“It’s so easy,” I said, slicing the frog down its middle. I’d done this lab before. At a pond, when I was a little girl.

Mr. Franklin came over to our table. “Careful there, Belle! You want to be able to examine the inside!”

“I know,” I acknowledged. “I
was
in the advanced class at my old school.”

Mr. Franklin nodded, “I see,” he postulated. “Why don’t you let Edwart handle the rest of this dissection?”

I shrugged. It didn’t matter to me; if Mr. Franklin thought this lab was too easy for me, he was right. I leaned back in my chair, bored already. Edwart carefully stripped away layers of the frog’s skin and made notes on his diagram. I leaned forwards, suddenly mesmerized by his handwriting. For a second I thought that maybe I was looking at the handwriting
of an angel. Then I remembered angels don’t have hands. He must be something else—something else
supernatural
.

“So … uh … are you going to write any of this down in your lab report?” Edwart asked. He held up his sheet for me to copy, as if just because he did all the observing, he knew more about frog organs than I did.

“I already finished it,” I told him. I held up my sheet. I had drawn much more advanced pictures depicting what it would look like if you removed a human’s organs and replaced them with those of a frog. Below the diagrams, I listed a few organizations that take organ donations in case Mr. Franklin wanted to do the charitable thing and donate all these frog organs to people who needed them.

Edwart looked at my picture and frowned, suddenly ashamed of his own report in comparison. “Let’s turn our labs in individually,” he said, knowing I deserved all the credit. As he spoke, his eyes lit up a brilliant green.

“Were your eyes green yesterday?” I asked quickly.

He looked at me with a blank stare—the blank stare of a god. The kind of god in a commercial for a hubcap repair shop.

“Well, yeah. I mean, I have green eyes,” he said.

The bell rang, and I started in my seat. I had lost track of time, staring into Edwart’s odd green eyes. He hurriedly left the classroom. I exhaled and inhaled deeply, trying to breathe in his scent, but all I could smell was lab frog. I stood up, knocking over several other students.

•  •  •

I checked my e-mail after school, and I already had forty-four e-mails from my mom. I clicked one at random.

I quickly wrote her back, trying to sound as cheerful as possible, but it was hard to conceal my depression from her. She knew me too well. She knew that when I wrote that I had met a nice girl to be friends with, it meant that most of the people at school were boring. She knew that when I said Dad and I were getting along fine and he had even bought me a car, it meant that a demonic boy at school was being mean to me. Thank God we came up with this secret code when I was little to confuse cyber-stalkers. I wanted to tell her that Switchblade wasn’t so bad. If only something dangerous would happen. Or not necessarily
something
dangerous, but
someone
dangerous. Then maybe my Mom wouldn’t have to be so concerned for my well-being.

I whipped up a few racks of lamb for dinner.

“Belle, you really didn’t have—” my dad began as he sat down at the table.

“No, Dad,” I said. “I used to cook all the time in Phoenix. Really. It’s fine.”

“I wish you’d let me cook every once in a while,” he said. “It’s just—I mean, I love your cooking, but I told you I was a vegetarian, and…”

“You don’t like it, Dad?” I asked concernedly, worried that I hadn’t cut the meat into small enough pieces or fun enough shapes.

“No, no, it’s great, Belle. I know it’s been hard for you here. It’s great.”

I smiled as he took another bite. At least Dad was trusting me a little more in the kitchen.

By the next morning, the rain had turned to snow. I wasn’t too thrilled. I liked being able to travel to and from class via puddle, jumping from one to the next and rating the puddle on the Belle-Goose scale—a scale from 1–5 where 1 represents dry land and 5 represents a tsunami. Jim had already left by the time I got up. I spent a half-hour worrying that he hadn’t found the bread I had left for him in the cabinet, or the milk I had left in the milk-carton. Then I put on my puffiest snow-cape and hurried outside.

My U-HAUL was snowed in, but fortunately I have arms—optimal for picking up huge amounts of snow and putting it elsewhere. The only trouble was, I didn’t have any place to put the snow besides my front yard. So, I put the piles in the back of my U-HAUL. Then I realized this was a great opportunity to make a giant slushie. I ran back inside for the sugar and red food coloring. I sprinkled both onto the
snow. As I started the truck, I thought about what I’d name my cooking show. The first thing that came to my mind was:
Goose Cooks Geese
. The second thing that came to my mind was: “Perfect!”

I kept hitting the breaks as I drove to avoid skidding on ice and to create a rocking sensation in my U-HAUL that would mix all the ingredients in the back into one delicious slushie. At red lights, I simulated ice-cream truck music by humming.

When it snows, the rules of parking no longer apply, so I stopped in the street and began to walk towards the school’s side entrance. That’s when it happened.

It wasn’t in slow motion, like an old person walking, but it also wasn’t in fast motion, like an old person running. It was like when you sip an energy drink with a skull on it, even though your mom said not to, and your brain kind of speeds up as you sip and then goes slower as you swallow and then speeds up and goes slower until you throw up. And then you drink another one on a dare.

It was careening towards me across the sky in a perfect arc, careening so quickly that I knew I wouldn’t be able to get out of the way. I’d never imagined how I would die, but I had kind of hoped it would be in a war. I had never thought it would be like this: by snowball.

And then suddenly, Edwart was in front of me, his dark, curly-yet-disheveled tresses blocking my view as I heard a giant
squish
. I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t even possible. Edwart had saved me.

“How did you—how?” I asked, looking from my perfectly pristine snow-cape to his jacket, soiled with snow. But Edwart wasn’t listening. A wide, almost otherworldly grin was spreading across his face.

“Prepare for doom, Nemesis!” he hollered, gathering up some snow and hurling it towardss the school.

I couldn’t believe it. Now Edwart was defending me!

“Edwart! Edwart!” I screamed, relinquishing any attempt at self-control. I rushed towardss him as he swiftly bent down to pick up more snow. Pinning his arms to his back, I stopped him from exciting the snowball-hurler any further. “You saved my life!” I cried. “Isn’t that enough? Stop this endless cycle of vengeance!” I perched on his back to stop him from the demonic violence he was capable of, two snowballs hit him in the face.

“Uhh,” he said, freeing his arms and brushing the snow from his eyes. “Hey, get off me, you girl! You’re going to make me smell like girl things!”

I let go, mesmerized. The snow was dripping off his coat, almost as if
it didn’t stick to him
.

“How are you doing that?” I asked, successfully concealing my absolute terror of his superhuman force.

“Edwart has a girlfriend, Edwart has a girlfriend,” someone shouted.

“I do not! She is not! I do not know her!” he yelled, protecting our blossoming mutual intrigue from petty rumors before turning back to me. “What?” he asked. “How am I doing what?”

“The snow! It’s melting off you!” I took a step closer until our faces were nearly touching. “You’re—you’re not human, are you?” I whispered intimately.

He laughed a little. Nervously.

“Is this about Biology class?” he asked. “Because I only knew all that stuff about frogs because I once had a frog. It’s not like I go on Internet sites to practice dissection or anything like that. Like nerds do. I don’t even study for class. Or get good grades. I hate school things. I mean, it’s like, why don’t we all just skip class and, like, hang. You know?”

I was suddenly blushing. His shoes, covered in dirty snow, were too beautiful to be real. I bent down to investigate, poking them with my finger. He pulled his foot away quickly and nearly fell over. Miraculously, he regained balance by
simply putting his foot down
.

“Hey! Stop!” he cried. “Do you … so do you like games and stuff? Like, video games … computer games … board games … potato chips …”

His attempts to evade my question only infuriated me more. I stood up. “I know what I saw—someday, you will trust me enough to tell me the truth.”

“The truth about what? I’ll tell you now—about bullfrogs?” He laughed. “That’s easy. The truth is, they absorb air through their skin.”

I looked over my shoulder to protect him from any listeners. There were definitely a few perked ears thirty feet away. “The truth about your
abilities,”
I said, raising my eyebrows. I meant to raise only one like they do in detective
movies but as soon as I raised one the other sidled up as well. All I knew was, no average human would be able to jump from the sidewalk to the gutter as fast as he did.

“Listen,” he whispered ferociously, like a ferocious breeze or very gentle hurricane. “I am an average student, like everybody else. I do normal things on the weekend. Everyday after school, I go back to my house and chill and hang until bedtime, which is whenever I want it to be because my parents are too negligent with me to set a curfew. Understand?” He gripped my shoulders tightly. I knew if I didn’t concede, he would easily crush me.

“Yes. I understand. But this isn’t the last you’ll hear from me,” I muttered.

That seemed to appease him. He released my shoulders and ran away, flailing his limbs in that graceful way he had.

I fumed all the way to class. How did he know we were in Bio together? How did he know to walk in front of me at the
exact moment
a snowball was coming? Why did the snowballs melt off him as if they were made of some watery substance? Most of all, why was he lying to me about his true superhuman identity? I was so upset, I accidentally started a fire in math, sending one boy to the nurse’s office. I guess I had been rubbing the sticks I carry with me together so hard that, whoops, I started kindling a flame. Gee. Edwart was really taking over my brain. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, not even taking the Riemann sum of the approximate distances traveled in each integral of the problem I was working on. Boy, was I all out of sorts.

That night I had my first dream about Edwart Mullen. Carnival music was playing, and I was sitting in a colorful tent, surrounded by animals. We were all eating popcorn together and joking around. Suddenly, the tent went dark, and Edwart entered the stage, alone. He was wearing stilts and saying, “Whoa! Whoa!” as he walked in a wobbly way.

I woke up in a cold sweat, terrified.

THE MONTH FOLLOWING THE SNOWBALL ACCIDENT
was tough. People kept looking at me, especially when teachers read my name on the attendance list and I said “Here.” Somehow my new nickname for Edwart, “Hero,” didn’t catch on. So, I decided to break my unwritten, unspoken, and unthought understanding with Edwart, and start telling our story.