Scary Cool (The Spellspinners) (7 page)

“I still can’t believe you’re here,” I remarked, locking my bike into the rack.
“And I’m still not clear on the concept. Tell me again.
Why
are you going to school?”

“I’m your bodyguard, babe.” His lime-green gaze flicked down my body and he
almost smiled.

I frowned. The
first
bell rang. I hoisted my
bag
and headed for
my locker
. Lance fell easily into step beside me. “That’s right,” he said, so softly that only I could hear him. “You know I’m not kidding.”

Yeah. Because my first thought had been to say
You’re kidding,
but—again yeah—he wasn’t, and thanks to the mind-meld we’ve got going on, I knew he wasn’t. So I hadn’t said anything.

Bodyguard. Great.

“I would think,” I said carefully, “that school is the safest place I could possibly be.”

“You’d be right,” he said, not fazed at all. “I’m just practicing.”

“You’re blowing my cover,” I muttered. He was, too. My strategy has always been to keep my head down and my mouth shut at school
, drawing as little attention as possible. Havin
g Lance Donovan beside me
was like walking through the halls with
a movie star on my heels
. The boy is so tall, and so gorgeous
,
and so scary cool
, I could s
ense heads turning and
eyebrows lifting
as we made our way through the halls.

“The sticks can’t hurt you,” said Lance, wit
h his typical dismissal of ungifted
people. “You don’t have
to care what they think
.”

I popped my locker open and grabbed my books. “Then what
do
I have to care about?” I slammed it shut and faced him. “You?”

He was standing so close to me, I had to tilt my chin up to meet his eyes.
I’d
momentarily
forgotten how tall he was.

I’d forgotten something else, too. The instant his kryptonite eyes locked on mine, time stood still. The noisy hall receded. Faded. Fell away. Lance and I were alone, drifting together on a whisperi
ng sea of half-formed thoughts. His and mi
ne.

His eyes seemed to fill my field of vision, as if I were falling into them.
I felt languid and light-headed…and too fascinated to be afraid.

They say that drowning is a very pleasant sensation, once you stop fighting. And from what I know of
wholesoul
, I
’d bet that’s true.

The second bell rang. With difficulty, I dragged myself back to reality and looked away, bl
inking to clear my vision. “
Holy smokes
,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” he said, sounding almost as dazed as I felt.
But I guess that answers your question.

I forgot what my question was.

He spoke aloud. “You asked whether you had to care about me.”

My arms tightened around my books as I tensed.
I was being sarcastic.

“Yeah,” he said again.
You usually are, babe.

I glanced sideways at him, uncertain where he was heading with this. I was still unable to speak, but Lance
—always so much more
in control than I am—had recovered his cool. He was looking down at me, half-serious, half-teasing.

“The answer is yes. Yes, Zara. You have to care about me.”

We were both late to homeroom.

…

Lance is a distraction. By the time I even
thought
about checking my phone, it was almost lunchtime. I felt totally guilty as I thumbed through the stack of increasingly urgent texts from Meg.

They were all about Alvin.

I shooed Lance over toward the snack bar and called her.

She didn’t bother with ‘hello.’ “
Omigod
,” she shrieked in my ear. “I can’t believe you didn’t answer me!”

“I’ve got Donovan breathing down my neck,” I reminded her.

“He goes to Cherry Glen High!”

For half a second I thought she meant Lance. Then I realized she meant Alvin.

“
He does?
How come I never saw him before?”

“He’s new. Can you imagine? Moving, and having to change schools your ju
nior year? That must really blow
. We have to be nice to him, Zara.”

I rolled my eyes. Which was okay, because she couldn’t see me. “I’m always nice.”

“I think I should invite him to Homecoming.”

“St. Francis has Homecom
ing? You don’t have
a football team.
What do you play? Chess?
”

“No, silly! I meant
your
Homecoming.”

I leaned against a handy wall and closed my eyes. “Okay. Let me get this straight. You want to inv
ite Alvin to Cherry Glen
’s Homecoming. Even though it’s his school, not yours.”

“Well, yeah.” But Meg’s voice sounded less certain than it usually did. “Is that lame?”

“I don’t know, actually.” I don’t know squat about this sort of thing. “Maybe you’ll start a trend.”

“But it can be done, right?” She sounded anxious now. “I mean, girls ask guys out all the time. And he doesn’t know anybody to invite, so it’s not like he’d be going with somebody else. And it’s
his
Homecoming, so he really should go. It’d be a shame to miss it.”

“I’ve missed it. I’ve missed it every year.”

“But he’s a
guy.
Homecoming is
a guy thing.
Sort of. Isn’t it?
”

The bell rang. Thank goodness. “Listen, I have to go. We’ll talk later. It’s probably a good idea, okay?”

“Really?”

“Sure.” I rang off, hitched my books higher on my hip, and headed for
the hamburger line, trying to avoid Lance’s eye. He stuck right with me, of course. I could feel his interested gaze.

“What’s Homecoming?” he wanted to know.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“It’s some football thing.”
And a dance.

“A dance?”

I should have known he’d pick that up.

“Yeah. They call it ‘homecoming’ because sup
posedly all the alumni come home
for it. Not that I’ve e
ver seen anyone do that
. I
mean,
think about it. O
nly
losers
and
pervs
want to hang around hi
gh school once they’ve graduated.
”
I leaned into the little window and shouted my order. It’s kind of noisy at
school
during lunch.

“Make it two,” Lance told the girl taking orders. And to my surprise, he took out a wallet and paid for us.

“What is this, a date? You don’t need to buy my lunch.”

“Shut up,
Norland
.” He
li
fted the tray with one hand and touched my elbow to steer
me toward an empty table
in the quad
. The
chatter surrounding us
covered the fizzing sound and the bright sunshine hid the faint purple sparks, but he jumped l
ike a bee had stung him. And
swore.

I wagged a playful finger at him. “No touchy.”

His mouth set in a grim line. “This isn’t funny. I might need to touch you someday.”

“I can’t imagine why.” I tossed my hair back and slid onto a plastic chair. I w
as feeling pretty sly
.
Lance slammed the tray onto the table in front of me and I sna
gg
ed a French fry. “Besides, i
f you really needed to touch me, a few sparks wouldn’t stop you.”

“You got that right.”

Curious glances were stabbing into me like arrows.
The quad is where the popular kids sit.
I never
eat my lunch
in the quad
—
let alone with a boy. I
saw Cheryl
S
ivic
, one of my chief tormentors during grade school, out of the corner of my eye. She was
staring straight at me. From long habit, I dipped my head and let my hair slide past my cheeks like a curtain, hiding my face. “Anyway,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant while simultaneously hiding—a difficult trick to pull off, by the way—“Meg is planning to invite
a boy
to Homecoming. So that’s new.”

Lance didn’t answer
right away
. He was watching me with a thoughtful expression
, absently chew
ing on a fry. Then he said,
“A
re we going to Homecoming?”

Alarm shot through me. I leaned forward. “Listen, Donovan, I have to fly below the radar here. I don’t go to football games, and I
for sure
don’t go to dances.”

“Why not?”

“I thought you, of all people, would understand. Th
ey don’t boil
witches in oil
anymore, but that’s mostly because nobody believes in witches. Do you really want to reopen that debate? I don’t. So I keep my head down.
I thought you’d approve.
”

“How does dancing reopen that debate? You’re not fooling me, cupcake.” His eyes gleamed. “You don’t go to dances because nobody asks you.”

He was
right, of course. But so was I.
“I’m halfway through high school. I’ve got the finish line in my sights. So far, I’ve only made it on
to
the evening news once—an
d nobody figured out it was me, so that doesn’t count.”

“I figured out it was you. That’s what brought me here in the first place, remember?”

“Don’t change the subject.” I pointed a French fry at him. “My point is, nobody in Cherry Glen knows I’m a
spellspinner
. And if I keep my dis
tance—like I always have—there’ll be
nothing for them to find out.”

Cheryl
Sivic
walked past our table. Slowly. The smile she gave me could have curdled milk. “Hi,
Zara,”
she said. She made my name sound like an inside joke. Which, to her and me, it was. Since she hadn’t called me anything but “Freak” for years—an
d that was to my face. I know
she calls me worse things behind my back.
“Who’s your friend?”

She was givi
ng Lance the full treatment. Sultry
look, head toss, posing so her boobs stuck out. I
hated her so much
I couldn’t move or speak. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Lance had picked up my emotions—of course—
and
was looking at Cheryl
’s blond gorgeousness the way most boys look at … well … me.
His green eyes were glacial with
dis
interest, like she didn’t even exist.

Cheryl
is not used to being looked at that way.
Her nasty smile slipped a bit
.

“Lance,” I
mumbled
, “this is
Cheryl
.”

He jerked his chin at her. “Hi.” And returned his attention to me,
turning his shoulder to Cheryl
and
leaning toward me across the table to continue our conversation. Making it obvious that
Cheryl
had interrupted.

Making
Cheryl
Sivic
look like a fool.

He wasn’t rude, exactly. He just made it clear that he thought
she
was rude.
T
here was nothing
she could
do but retreat. Of course, she was going back to the table full of cheerleaders and football players that ruled Cherry Glen High, and Lance and I were just sitting by ourselves
. B
ut Lance made it seem like I had the better place. And for the first time
in my long history with
Cheryl
, I really felt that I did.

“You know, Zara,” he said to me then, “I’m taking you to that dance.”

“Um. You are?” I said faintly.
I was still reeling from the shock.

He
nodded. “You want to do high school, you said. Okay, then. Do it right.”

After school, I went to snag my Schwinn from the bike rack. With Lance standing there watching me
strap
my English textbook
, my algebra homework and a couple of folders onto the book rack, it looked less cool to me somehow. I was obviously picking up his opinion by osmosis.