Sage's Eyes (24 page)

My father volunteered again to take me to school. I knew he was hoping to catch a glimpse of Summer, but when we arrived in the parking lot, he was nowhere to be seen. I did see his car already parked.

“'Bye,” I said, and reached for the door handle just as my father reached for my arm to stop me.

“I love seeing you excited and happy, Sage. I want you to have the best possible teenage life. I know you're a responsible person, and I'm proud of that. Just beware of how easy it is to lose a grip on yourself.”

I nodded, and then he did something he didn't often do. He leaned toward me to kiss me on the cheek. His cautioning and his kiss did slow me down. I had been ready to charge into the building and seek out
Summer immediately. Secretly, I hoped he would be waiting at my locker.

“Thank you, Dad,” I said, and got out.

He didn't drive away quickly like my mother usually did. He sat there watching me enter the school. I looked back and waved from the doorway. Then he turned and looked in the direction of Summer's car. Or I imagined that was what he was looking at, for how could he have known which car was his? I watched him drive off and went inside.

The girls were waiting for me at my locker. Kay was holding out a paperback novel. I had forgotten. They all had copies of the same one,
Reflections of a Desperate Heart
by Belladonna.

“I thought it would be funnier if we all had the same book,” she said.

I didn't want to take it. Now that she actually had done it, I thought it was childish, and I didn't want to look childish to him. But I knew I couldn't refuse without causing a stir. One of them was sure to accuse me of not wanting to take the chance of annoying him.

“Keep it prominent on top of your books like we are,” she instructed.

“We'll keep them there all day,” Mia said. “Of course, he might ask only you about it.”

I put my jacket into the locker and organized my books for the day. “I can tell you now what he will probably do,” I said after doing as they had instructed.

“What?” Darlene asked, smiling in anticipation of my saying something outrageous.

“Ignore us,”
I told them. Disappointment bordering on anger flashed across their faces.

“Maybe this will be one time you're wrong,” Ginny said.

I shrugged. “We'll soon know,” I told them, and we started for homeroom.

“We'll all walk by him,” Kay commanded. “Try not to look at him.”

Walking past him meant we all had to take a different route to our desks, walk up a different aisle once we entered the room. Kay wanted to be first. I fell behind so I would be last. I was planning on shaking my head like someone who had been made to do something silly, but Ginny turned out to be the one who was right. I was wrong. He didn't ignore us.

He had expected us.

On top of the books on his desk was a copy of his father's novel
Reflections of a Desperate Heart
by Belladonna. I couldn't help smiling. My girlfriends gathered at the back of the aisle, all looking shocked and devastated. I was going to laugh, but Kay turned furious.

“You warned him!” she accused. “You spoiled it.”

“No, I didn't. How could I? I didn't know the exact book you would buy, did I?”

Realizing that, she lost some of her fury. “But how—”

The bell rang for us to be at our seats.

“He might have seen you buying the books,” I offered as we separated.

All the other students in the room who had realized we were carrying the same novel were looking at us curiously, especially Peter and Danny. I smiled and shrugged at them.
Let Kay explain it
, I thought, but I wanted to know the truth. How
did
he anticipate what we were planning to do? Had one of the other girls given it away somehow, maybe talked about it with someone else, and he had overheard? How clever he was not to mention it during our phone conversation last night. He was definitely complicated, just as I had first thought, complicated and clever.

The second thing he did that surprised me more than any of the others was that he ignored me. I now was afraid that what I had told my parents was true, that he might just have called each of us last night and promised to meet us all or something. What a joke that would be on us. Somehow I would feel more taken in than any of them, however.

He got up to leave when the bell rang and immediately joined Nick, Greg, and Ward. I joined the girls, and we fell behind him and the others deliberately. I was so tempted to ask them if he had called any of them, but then I would have to confess that he had called me. I wasn't ready to do that.

“I guess you're right,” Kay said. “He probably spotted me in the bookstore, and I didn't see him there.”

“It was still a funny idea,” Ginny insisted. None of us was keeping the novel prominent anymore, however.

“I'll probably read it now,” Mia said. “It looks sexy.”

“That will be the first book you read this year,” Ginny quipped.

“Look who's talking. You're the one who gets summaries from Peter,” she fired back.

“You're just jealous.”

“Right. One of these days, Mr. Madeo is going to realize you didn't read the assignment.”

“Not unless you tell him,” Ginny said.

“I don't have to tell him,” Mia replied.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Ginny said, stopping.

We all stopped. Mia looked to Darlene and Kay for help and then turned to me when she wasn't getting any.

“Probably it means that Mr. Madeo isn't as unaware of what goes on in his classroom as you think,” I offered. “He has a way of smiling wryly when you give an answer, Ginny. You're looking at notes Peter gave you and reading them verbatim.”

“Verbatim?”

“Exactly how he told you. Everyone has his or her own way of writing, speaking.”

Ginny looked at the others, who were all looking at me.

“Do some of the homework yourself,” I said. “Put things in your own words, at least.”

“You know something you're not telling me,” she said.

“Do you?” Darlene followed quickly.

“Mr. Madeo is going to ask Peter about it,” I revealed.
Moments after I had given her my advice, it had flashed before my eyes. Peter would confess.

“How do you know? How can you know that?” Kay demanded.

“I see the way he looks at him after Ginny answers a question or hands in a paper or test,” I said. “Don't worry about it. Peter will simply stop helping you. Mr. Madeo won't change any grades you've received.”

“You know,” Kay said, her eyes still narrow and dark with suspicion, “you scare me sometimes.”

No one else said anything.

They started walking, and I did, too, but I was a little behind them, and my heart was pounding with fear and disappointment. The disastrous result of our prank had put them all in a foul mood, I told myself. They would look for any way to take it out on someone. I had just stuck my head out too fast. They'd get over it, I told myself, but I didn't foresee it. I just hoped it.

Summer continued to ignore me between morning classes and even in class. Maybe he was waiting for me to make the first move, but my mother's warnings were louder than my desire to give in. He was just playing games with me, I thought. I tried to be angry about it, but his occasional quick glances, flashing those deep black, enticing eyes, kept me too fascinated to ignore him.

The girls continued to be cool to me, Ginny most of all. Everything I said either got no response or a quick monosyllabic yes or no, sometimes just a grunt.
I wondered if they would still want me at their table at lunch, but I didn't have to concern myself about it. I had lost track of Summer between our last morning class and my entry into the cafeteria, but he was suddenly at my side when I was in line.

“Let's start the hens clucking,” he said. “That table near the window,” he told me, nodding at it. “Just the two of us.”

A part of me wanted to ignore him as he had been ignoring me all morning and go directly to my girlfriends' table, but it was as if I couldn't turn away, as if I was in his magnetic field, firmly held. I didn't say yes or no, but that didn't matter.

He remained at my side. We got our food, and then he took my tray and started for the table. Despite the plates, glasses, and books, he looked incapable of spilling or dropping anything. Smoothly, he crossed the room, avoiding all eyes, and sauntered comfortably to the table. I followed, my head down. I felt the small smile on my lips and the amazed and envious glares from my friends and other students. He waited for me to sit and then sat himself.

“It's always better to surprise people, don't you think?” he asked.

“Is everything a game to you?”

“Game?” He thought, opened a container of milk, and nodded. “I suppose most everything but not everything.”

“Okay. How did you know about the book prank?”

“A little bird whispered in my ear,” he said.

“I'd like to meet this little bird already.”

“Something tells me you have,” he replied. He looked over at the table of boys gazing our way with fat, licentious smiles smeared over their faces. They were poking one another and muttering sexual innuendos. Never had they looked more immature to me. It was Summer who was making me see it, too.

“I have? What is that supposed to mean?”

“You're more like me than you care to admit. Right now, at least. I think it frightens you.”

“What do you know about me? Why do you say that? And how am I like you?”

“Questions, questions. Isn't it better when the answers come slowly, naturally?”

“You can be quite infuriating,” I told him, and began to eat, chewing harder than usual. I saw the laughter in his eyes but ignored it.

“Okay. I saw Kay buying the books and figured it out. It wasn't—”

“Rocket science. Come up with something new. You're starting to get monotonous.”

“Oh!” he cried, holding his hand over his heart. “That's the cruelest cut of all. To accuse me of monotony. It could drive someone like me to suicide. Would you want that on your conscience?”

“So don't be monotonous,” I said, and he laughed.

“Exactly what I would have said. See? We
are
alike.”

Are we?
I wondered.

Most of my life, I felt different from everyone else. There was never anyone I really thought was very similar to me. I didn't want to be thought of as different,
so different that being a close friend to me was next to impossible. And yet Summer seemed to make friends easily. That was one of the things that attracted me to him. I wondered how he was able to do it, to be so self-confident and, yes, superior and still be liked so easily and quickly.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Oh, I do,” he replied, and then he unbuttoned the two top buttons of his shirt and turned to me to show that he was wearing a medallion. He held it up.

There were two dragons on it, facing each other, exactly the way they were on the ring Uncle Wade had given me.

“I had forgotten that I had this,” he said, tucking it back under his shirt and buttoning up. “Seeing your ring reminded me. My father bought it for me years ago.”

I continued to stare at him, my mouth slightly open.

“What?” he asked, smiling.

“You forgot? How could you forget while you were making such a big deal of my ring when you saw it, telling me what it meant? Why didn't it remind you then?”

“What's the big mystery? I put it away a while back and forgot about it, but when I put it on this morning, it felt like part of my body that had come back to life. It's like you and that amber necklace. From what I understand, you've been wearing it since the day you were given it and probably don't think about it, just like it was part of your body. Why do you wear it so often, anyway?”

“It brings good luck.”

“You really believe that?”

“My parents do, and that's what's important. Don't change the subject. That medallion is quite a coincidence, don't you think? I told you my uncle found this in Budapest. Where did your father get that?” I asked suspiciously. “Or did you happen to find it yourself in some store, like yesterday, and come up with this story?”

“Absolutely not,” he said, now looking indignant. “It's just as I said. My father gave it to me. I didn't think about it until last night just before calling you.”

“So where did he get it?”

“I never asked him. It was one of the many things he bought me after my mother died,” he added, and started eating.

Now I felt bad. “Oh. I'm sorry. How did your mother die?”

He kept eating, looking at the boys. I thought he wasn't going to tell me because it was too painful for him and he was still a little angry about my accusation, but he put his sandwich down slowly and turned to me. “Drunk driver,” he said, patting his lips with a napkin. “It wasn't your typical death by drunk driver, either. She wasn't driving. She was walking across a street, and he went through the red light. I was almost with her. I was five at the time. She usually took me along whenever she went shopping, even if my father was home. She always wanted me with her, and going anywhere was exciting to me. That particular day, I fell asleep on the sofa, and she didn't wake me to go.”