The Hidden (12 page)

With a bemused shake of my head, I opened my locker door …

… and froze when I saw what was there.

Cyn must have seen the expression on my face, because she leaned in. “What? What is it?” Her hand snaked out to reach for what was sitting there, before I could find my voice.

“Don’t touch that!”

But I was too late. She had already picked up the blood-red bottle.

“It’s perfume.” She held it out to me, and I cringed. I didn’t want to touch it. “Is something wrong with it?”

“It’s not mine,” I said. Was it a gift from Vincent?

She turned it over to read the name. “‘Crimson.’ I’ve never heard of that brand before.” Opening the lid, she stuck it under her nose. “It smells heavy. And coppery. Like something …”

Bits of memory swam before my eyes.

Broken glass. Jagged edges. Sharp, cloying smells. And blood.

“It’s blood,” Cyn said swiftly. “
That’s
what the smell reminds me of. Tangy and coppery at the same time. What the hell? A perfume that smells like blood? Who would want to wear that?”

Without even realizing what I was doing, I tore it out of her hands and practically ran to the closest garbage can. My fingers burned where I touched the bottle, and I flung the repulsive object into the mouth of the canister.

The overhead bell rang, signaling the end of lunch, and the halls flooded with people. They jostled my shoulders and
crammed into my space. The hallways were tight with rushing bodies as everyone hurried to get to where they needed to be.

Suddenly a hand touched mine. Once, lightly, then grabbed hold. I looked down at the fingers wrapped around mine. They stroked my palm, and fingernails snagged painfully before letting go.

I looked up.

White-blond hair was all I could see, and Vincent smiled at me. “Hey, sweetheart.”

Then he melted into the crowd. Like he’d never been there at all.

My knees locked. My chest tightened, and I wondered if I was going to faint in the middle of the hall. “It’s not real,” I chanted, trying not to pitch over. “It’s not real. He’s not here. You’re just imagining it.”

The halls cleared, and I was left standing there, still feeling his fingers on mine. Remembering the other time he’d pressed on my arm and had left his mark. A red welt driven deeply into my flesh …

Kristen came over, and I glanced at her. She was staring at me.

“Is everything okay? Why are you freaking out over perfume?”

Cyn
. It was Cyn. Not Kristen. Kristen was dead. Not here. Not talking to me.

I came back to where I was. Back to the hallway, after lunch, and I wanted to scream. Wanted to cry. Wanted to make sure she’d seen what I’d just seen—Vincent.
Here.
Touching me.

But I stuffed all those feeling away. I shook my head, and found my voice. Smiling weakly, I said, “Secret admirer?”

She eyed me up and down. “I don’t think so. That was some grade-A freak-out going on.”

“It was a secret admirer I don’t particularly want gifts from.”
Do I tell her about what I saw? What if it wasn’t real? …

What if it was?

Then I remembered my dream about the forest and the red hair. I grabbed on to her arm. “You haven’t seen a guy hanging around here lately, have you? A guy that creeps you out?”

She looked down and tried to shake me off. “Boundaries, much?”

I tightened my grip. “I’m serious, Cyn. If you see someone who tries to talk to you and is acting skeevy, stay away from him.”

“Why?”

I
had
to tell her about it. No matter how crazy it made me sound. “I had this dream, and it might have been about you. Or maybe it was about Kristen. She had red hair too. But it was
dark
red hair, like yours, and a boy was chasing her … or me. He was chasing me. Or … I don’t remember.”

She pulled her arm away and gave me a strange look.

“Just … be careful, okay?” I said.

Because Vincent liked redheads. And Vincent obviously wanted to play.

As soon as I got home from school that afternoon, I told Caspian about the perfume bottle left in my locker.

“Any idea who put it there?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. But the look on my face must have spoken for me.

“So you think it was him?”

“I think that I saw him there too. After lunch. He was in the hall and he grabbed my hand.”

Caspian jumped up. “Do you still have the perfume? Where is it?”

“I threw it away.”

He started pacing. “I can’t believe this. He’s stalking you! How am I supposed to protect you? We need some backup. I need to let Kame and Uri know about this.”

“What are they going to do? Follow me around?” I groaned. “I don’t want that.”

Caspian stopped pacing and looked me in the eye. “From now on, I’m going everywhere with you. When your mom drops you off at school and picks you up, I’ll be there. Hell, I might even start going to class with you.”

I put my hand out, next to his. “You don’t want to do that. You’ve already gone to high school once. Who wants to repeat
that
experience?”

“I just want to make sure you’re safe,” he replied.

“So come pick me up. Every day, if you want. Like glue?”

“Like glue.”

… he summoned up, however, all his resolution …

—“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

O
n Wednesday I found a pile of broken glass surrounding my locker. I wasn’t sure if it was something left behind by Vincent or just the remains of someone who’d been careless with a Snapple bottle, so I told the janitor about it, and when I came back after my next class, it was gone.

Everything changed on Friday, though. On Friday … it got weird.

I was trying to open up my civics book to page 352 in class, when it fell across my desk with a heavy thump and opened to a page on its own. It opened because there was something stuck inside it.

I leaned in to get a better look.

There was a pile of small crescent-shaped crusty-looking things sitting there. Almost like dried-out pieces of hard candle wax. All of them were yellowed, except for one. It was bright red.

Picking up one of the yellow pieces, I examined it.
Is this earwax?

That thought grossed me out, and immediately I put the yellow thing down. Using my pencil, I poked at the red one. It was shiny, and had a slightly rounded tip.
That
can’t
be earwax. It almost looks like a …

Fingernail.

It looked like a fingernail.

And then I saw the words scrawled across the pages:

they keep growing even after you’re dead

I slammed the book shut and stood up so hastily that my chair hit the ground behind me, and everyone turned to look. I couldn’t tell if they were looking because of the noise the chair had made, or because of the noise
I
had made. Something between a gasp and a scream.

Ms. Huffner stopped writing on the chalkboard. “Is everything all right, Miss Browning?”

“No … I … It’s …” I just stood there, looking down at
the pile of
fingernails
someone had put in my book. “I need to …”

It wouldn’t come out. My words were stuck inside me and the room was spinning, and why was Vincent
doing
this to me?

“Do you need to go to the nurse’s office?”

I guess I nodded or something, because she said, “Go on, then. You are wasting everyone else’s valuable time.”

Leaving the book behind, I fled the classroom. Out in the hallway the air was cooler, and the world stopped spinning. Sliding down against some lockers, I inhaled deeply and then leaned over to put my head between my legs.

With my eyes tightly closed, I tried to rationalize it all away.

Those weren’t
actually
fingernails. They were probably just petrified pencil shavings. Or old pieces of glue and eraser. Or bits of paper.
Nodding meant that I had to agree with those thoughts, so I did. It was easier that way.

Standing up slowly, I pushed myself away from the wall and detoured to the bathroom. I’d just go hide out in there until the bell rang.

At the end of the day, I went outside to hang out by the curb to wait for Caspian. Cyn was there, smoking a cigarette, and I sat down beside her.

“We’re always running into each other,” I said. “Have you noticed that?”

She exhaled and then shrugged. “That’s what happens when you have nothing to do in a small town and a mother who makes you wait for a ride. You?”

“About the same.”

She offered her cigarette to me, and I blanked. I’d never smoked before. Had never really felt the urge to, so it wasn’t something I’d thought about.

She extended her wrist farther. “Are you going to take it, or just stare at it?”

“I’ve never … I don’t smoke.”

“First time for everything.”

The cigarette butt ashed, and then the ash flaked away. It looked kind of gross, but she had a point. And it was now or never. It wasn’t like I had my whole life ahead of me to change my mind.

I took it from her hand and placed it to my lips. It was thin and papery-tasting. Smoke wafted up into my eyes, and I inhaled deeply. I didn’t know if I was supposed to count to ten or something, but finally Cyn said, “Whoa, whoa. Exhale.”

I think I swallowed some of the exhale, because it felt like
my lungs were going to explode. I coughed and choked, smoke wheezing out of me in little gasps.

Cyn laughed. But it wasn’t a mean laugh, and as soon as I was able to, I was laughing too. It suddenly felt like I’d just done something monumental. Like climbing Mount Everest, or hiking the Great Wall of China.

She took the cigarette back and demonstrated. “Like this.” After inhaling for a second, she pulled the butt away and tipped her head to the side, exhaling a stream of smoke.

“Let me try it again,” I said, reaching for it. She handed it over, and I mimicked her actions.

The second time wasn’t so bad, and I coughed only a little bit as the smoke leaked out of me. It was a strange feeling. One I wasn’t entirely sure about.

“That one’s almost out,” Cyn said. “You want another?”

Little pieces of ash sprinkled down onto my jeans, and I glanced down, brushing them to the side. “No. I don’t think so.” I ran my tongue over my teeth. They felt funny. “My mouth tastes gross, like a combination of—”

A shadow fell over me, and I looked up.

“Smoking on school property is naughty,” Vincent said, wagging his finger. “Are you being
naughty
schoolgirls?”

My first instinct was to scramble away from him as fast as
possible, but I tried to control myself. I didn’t want to show him fear. Digging my palms into the asphalt beneath me, I felt the sharp sting of tiny rocks and hard cement.

“This isn’t a spectator sport,” Cyn said. “Get lost, asshole.”

His hair was still blond, like Caspian’s. And although it wasn’t flat-ironed and lying across his face like it had been when he’d been on the bed in my bedroom, the streak of black was still there. It sent a shock wave through me. How closely he resembled Caspian.

Vincent sat down between us, and I was too scared to move.

“I like your hair,” he said to Cyn. “Red is
definitely
your color. Mine, too.”

“Don’t care. Move the fuck on,” she replied.

My senses were starting to flood with awareness, and I knew I couldn’t sit there—
right next to him
—for much longer.

Cyn turned to stare at him, and I flattened my palms on the ground, readying myself. I had hit him once before. I could do it again if I had to.

“Did we invite you to sit here?” she said. “Who the hell are you?”

“Oooh, spicy! Abbey knows how much I like the spicy ones.” He leaned into my ear and whispered, “
De
licious. Just like Kristen.”

I pulled away, horrified.

Before I could stop him, Vincent reached over and laced his hand through mine. “As to who I am? I’m Abbey’s boyfriend. Didn’t she tell you? My name is … Caspian.”

I jerked my hand out of his so hard and so fast that I fell forward off the curb and landed against the street. “No—no you’re not,” I managed to say.

Cyn gasped, and Vincent laughed. Then he stood up.

“Don’t smoke too much, girls,” he called, sauntering away. “Naughty, naughty, naughty!”

A minute later a black Mustang roared away from us, turning around a corner and racing past a stop sign. I rocked back and watched him go.

And then I leaned forward again, and puked.

Cyn helped me get cleaned up in the school locker room, and I kept apologizing to her. She kept telling me to stop, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t know if I was apologizing for making such an idiot out of myself, or apologizing for feeling so helpless. Either way, it sucked.

“I can’t
believe
that happened,” I said, bent over the sink. “Talk about humiliating.”

“It was probably just the cigarette,” Cyn replied. “Or the fact
that that guy was a
major
douche bag. I thought he looked like trouble.”