The Temptation (Kindred) (6 page)

“That’s great,” I said without any real enthusiasm. The knife scared me.

“Awesome,” griped Kelsey, a vegetarian.

“Yeah, right?” said Logan, completely missing the sarcasm in her voice.

“Um, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I need to go to the bathroom,” Kelsey announced, gripping my arm with her hand. “Shane? Do you need to go, too?” She gave me a look that meant she wanted me to come with her.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”

“Women,” said Logan, again rolling his eyes as he shut the knife back into its case. “Never understood why you always go in pairs. Whatever.”

He didn’t seem to suspect anything. I was relieved, and got up to follow my friend.

In the privacy of the locked women’s room, after Kelsey and I agreed that Logan was acting creepy, even for Logan, we eagerly unfolded the note Travis had given me. It read:

Shane,

I can’t stop thinking about you. I hope you feel the same way. Meet me at the crash site Friday afternoon at three. Sorry about the dream. You weren’t ready. Explain all later.

Travis

I stood silently for a long moment, in shock. It had been real. The dream had been real? I’d known it was, but there’d been doubt, too—until then. He’d been there. It was right here in my hand, proof of it. My mouth went dry, and I felt weak in the knees.

“What is? What’s wrong?” Kelsey asked.

I looked her hard in the eye, and squeezed her hand. “You have to promise you’ll believe me, if I tell you something. Promise never to tell anyone else.”

“I promise.”

I told her about the terrifying dream, and how it wasn’t a dream at all but something else, something I didn’t understand, and she and I just stared at each other, unable to speak for a long moment.

“Do you think that was Travis who got shot in the dream, maybe?” she asked.

“No. It was a grown man, with kids.”

Kelsey’s brow furrowed, and she winced. “You know you can’t go around telling this to anybody, right?”

“I know. But I swear it’s true, you have to believe me!” I began to tremble, thinking she might not have believed what I told her. She squeezed my hand back to reassure me, but still looked very concerned.

She said, “I’ve known you ten years, and I know you’re not crazy. But promise me you’ll be super careful with this guy.”

“Why?”

“Because, what if he’s . . . bad? What if he’s trying to lure you out there to hurt you?”

“Hello?” I cried. “If that was his goal, he could have just let me die last week!”

“It was really that bad?” I could tell from Kelsey’s eyes that she doubted me, and my heart broke. There was no way to make her—or anyone who hadn’t been there—understand. Tears formed in my eyes.

“I swear. I was almost dead. I was seconds from death when he—he healed me.”

“Even if he did. Still. You don’t know him.” She was full of unspoken doubt, and worry.

“You saw him,” I cried. “Does he seem bad to you?”

“No. He seems great, actually,” she said thoughtfully. “Much better than Logan.”

“I know,” I said miserably. “It doesn’t make any sense! I can’t understand any of this, but I know that I’m falling in love with Travis, Kelsey!”

“I can understand that. He’s hot.”

“It’s not just that. I feel something—this electric feeling. It’s so peaceful, but so weird! I crave him now, all the time. I hate being away from him.”

“So you’re going back out there Friday?” she asked me.

“I think I kinda have to, don’t you think?”

Kelsey nodded, the best friend you could ever have. I couldn’t think of a single person other than Kelsey who would believe any of this, just because I’d said it. That’s what best friends did: they believed you, against all odds.

“He’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met,” I said.

“
If
he’s a person, you mean,” she said, ominously.

“What do you mean, if he’s a person?” I asked, overcome with a shiver. “What else could he possibly be? You saw him.”

Kelsey answered by raising an eyebrow. It terrified me, because something in me knew she was right.

M
y first class of the day was AP physics.
Normally, I looked forward to it, for no other reason than that our teacher, Mr. Hedges, was so eccentric it was funny. But as I sat at my desk in the second row, between Logan and Kelsey, listening to Mr. Hedges review material for the upcoming final exam, my mind kept going back to the horrific dream about the murder. I shuddered, and stopped myself from crying. I tried to pay attention, but it was no use. I kept finding myself re-witnessing the shooting, trying to make sense of it.

The classroom was like most of the classrooms at Coronado Prep—tastefully decorated and high-tech, while still being comfortable. One side of the room was taken up with large windows, and my eyes kept wandering to the snowy scene on the quad outside.

“Shane!” I heard Kelsey whisper urgently. She poked me in the ribs. “That’s you.”

“Miss Clark? Earth to Miss Clark?” Mr. Hedges stared at me over the top of his smudgy black eyeglasses, his beefy arms crossed over his chest. His nappy graying hair jutted out in coils around his head. His dark eyes appeared tired. Altogether, he looked like a huge toddler who’d just been roused from slumber. I suddenly zoned back in.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hedges,” I said. “Can you repeat the question, please?”

“No problem,” said Mr. Hedges sarcastically. “I’m of course
more
than happy to waste my day and the time of all your fellow students repeating questions that I quite properly phrased already, because
you
can’t be bothered to pay attention to an education your parents are paying more for than most people make in a
year
.”

“I apologize.”

“Don’t. Just listen carefully this time.”

“I’m listening.”

“Very well. Miss Clark, can you please name at least four natural structures whose growth pattern is dictated by the mathematical golden ratio?”

My heart rate raced in a panic. I used to know this. I hadn’t thought about it in such a long time that I couldn’t remember. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to come up with the answer. I wondered if I actually did have a head injury. This wasn’t a hard question! I could feel everyone in the room shifting uncomfortably as they waited for me to get it together. Then, I remembered.

“Um, a pinecone, a ram’s horn, a fern fiddlehead, and . . .” I stopped. I couldn’t remember a fourth thing.

“And?” said Mr. Hedges before blowing his nose into a well-used handkerchief.

“And I can’t remember,” I admitted miserably.

“And you can’t remember,” he repeated nastily. He looked around the room at the other students with his eyebrows raised in superiority. “Anyone?”

A girl I’d never liked much raised her hand in the front row, always eager to humiliate me.

“Reba?” said Mr. Hedges, nodding to her.

“A snail’s shell, sir.”

“Very good. A snail’s shell. Yes. All of these structures grow in a spiral according to the golden ratio, which can be found using numbers in what is known as the Fibonacci series. We can see this relationship very clearly in the ram’s horn, pinecone, snail’s shell, and fern fiddlehead, but did you know that the same ratio exists in many other places as well?”

We all sat blinking at him.

“For instance,” Mr. Hedges continued, “the ratio between the length of your hand to the length of your forearm is also governed by this same simple principle. So is the orbit of our planet. So are the relationships between intervals in music as it has evolved in various cultures all over the earth, with the pentatonic scale being always the first to spring up, because it is the scale you get when you divide a vibrating string exactly in half, and then again exactly in half, and so on. Nature is marvelously consistent, and it is these very same basic ideas that I am using now, in my work in quantum physics at the university.”

Logan’s arm shot up now, interrupting yet another of Mr. Hedges’s monologues.

“Yes, Mr. Lucero?” said the teacher, annoyed.

“Yeah, um, you said you were, like, trying to find parallel universes, right?” asked my boyfriend, in a way that sounded clumsy to me.

“Not trying, Mr. Lucero. I have quite nearly succeeded. String theory is predicated upon the very real existence of parallel universes. It is no longer a question of if, but rather of where and how many.”

“So, you’re saying there are universes out there just like ours?” asked Logan doubtfully. He looked at me with an expression meant to convey his utter disdain for the teacher. I know Logan thought he was a crackpot.

“Yes. An infinite number of universes, exactly like our own, but also entirely unlike our own.”

“That’s cool,” said Logan. “That’s some total
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
stuff, man.”

I knew Logan was being sarcastic, and so did every other student in the room, but Mr. Hedges, the typical absentminded-professor type, so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he barely made it out of his head each morning, did not pick up on the mockery.

“I would have to agree,” he said, rubbing his chin.

Though I normally found Mr. Hedges’s rants incomprehensible, something about what he was saying made sense to me now, at a visceral level that I did not understand. My heart thundered with excitement as a new, untested instinct surfaced, a knowledge that was just out of reach, but
there
, where none had been before. The sudden thrill in my belly surprised me, and suddenly, terrifyingly, I heard Travis’s voice inside my head, saying,
He’s not crazy, Shane. He only seems crazy. He knows.

Strangely, the locket around my neck began to feel warm, and then quite suddenly hot. I put my hand to it, and sure enough it was burning up. Even stranger than that, the tiny clasp on the heart locket had opened, something that was ordinarily difficult to do. I closed it, and tried not to panic.

Then, to my chagrin, the teacher turned his attention to me again. “Miss Clark. You’re a musician. And a very good one from what I understand.” His eyes were on fire with crazy delight. It scared me.

“I guess,” I said, feeling creepy and uncomfortable.

“Do you have your instrument with you today?”

I shook my head. “No, sir. I’m waiting on my new one to come in. Mine was destroyed in a car crash.”

“Well now, that’s a shame. A crying shame. Hmm. Would you please be so kind as to bring it in when you get it, so that you could demonstrate the pentatonic scale and harmonics for the class?”

“Okay.” It was odd he didn’t ask about the crash, but he was weird to begin with.

“It’s all part of the same thing, you know,” he said, staring me down.

“Okay,” I answered.

I looked over at Kelsey. Her eyes burned with amused sympathy.

Mercifully, the bell rang then, and Mr. Hedges was forced to release us to the rest of our day. Logan, in a rush to get somewhere, gave me a quick peck on the lips, and said he’d see me at lunch. It felt wrong to kiss him. Something had shifted in my heart. It didn’t belong to Logan anymore. It belonged to Travis, and I had a strange sense that he was close by.

As I gathered up my books, Kelsey put a gentle hand on my arm.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I lied with a fake smile. “Everything’s fine.”

I
’d never lied to my mother
in any significant way, so I felt like a criminal as she stood in the doorway from the laundry room to the garage the following Friday, watching me load Buddy into the Land Rover. She thought the dog and I were taking a short trip to Santa Fe, to have dinner at my dad’s. I told her he and his new wife were having a big dinner party and they wanted me there. I couldn’t tell her I was driving back out toward Farmington on Highway 550 to see the guy who’d saved me. I knew she was unlikely to call Dad, and he would never call her, so there was no risk in this particular fib.

I wore a pair of flattering jeans, with a couple of layered long-sleeved T-shirts, silver hoop earrings, boots, and a cute short white parka. I’d put on makeup and blown my long wavy hair out straight and shiny. I wanted to look good when Travis saw me. I thought about taking off my locket, but again it seemed to warm and glow when I thought of Travis, and something inside of me told me I needed to wear it.

“Be careful,” my mother said, as she always did before I drove anywhere. “Call me if you’re going to be late or if you need me for anything.”

“Okay,” I mumbled, unable to meet her gaze. I felt exposed and cruel, but what choice did I have? Sometimes, the truth just wasn’t an option with parents.

“Have fun,” my mother said. “Give your father my regards.” She looked pained, and I figured this was because she still loved him. I’d heard her tell her sister once that she thought she’d always love him and never get over him, and I felt terrible for her. He was my dad, I knew that, but he wasn’t worthy of my mother’s love. The thought of me with him and his new wife and their baby twins was probably very difficult for her now. Poor Mom.

“Okay. Love you,” I said, and I meant it, with a massive pang of guilt.

“Love you, too,” she said with a sad little smile.

I climbed into the driver’s seat, and closed the door. My mom kept watching me. I tried to ignore the poignant look on her face. She was sad to see me growing up. She never said it, but I sensed it. She was dreading the day I would move out and leave her all alone. I dreaded it, too, for her sake. She needed to move on from my dad, and start dating again. I didn’t know how to tell her something like that, but someone needed to.

I drove for a while and as I went through the Santa Ana Indian Reservation, my heart pounded and my belly fluttered. I marveled at the stark beauty of the land as it unfolded before me. The world felt endless out here, and you could see for what seemed like hundreds of miles in every direction. You understood how small you were here, and the true force of the planet, the enormous scale of it, came over you powerfully.

Before I knew it, I was passing through the tiny town of Lybrook again. It looked the same in the sunshine as it had in the storm—small and depressing, a dry and splintered speck of civilization adrift on a sea of sand and hardened snow. I blinked, and the town was gone, already withdrawing in the rearview mirror.

I arrived at the crash site, which I now noticed was near mile marker 111, five minutes before the time I was supposed to. I parked on the north side of the highway, turned off the car, and sat for a moment, looking around expectantly. Buddy was agitated, his hackles raised. A growl rolled around in his chest. Maybe he remembered the place, and what had happened to him here. I scratched my dog behind the ears. He walked daintily onto my lap and sat down, looking up at me affectionately. I kissed his bulbous head, which smelled of dust, and lifted him up to set him on his own seat once more.

“Wait here,” I said, checking my makeup and hair in the mirror. Satisfied that I looked as good as I possibly could, I exited the car, nervous with anticipation.

The air was cold and sharp, and smelled like the many ski trips I’d taken with my mother—clean, natural, outdoorsy, snowy. The scent of freedom, I thought. As before, there were no cars around. I searched for a sign of Travis, but saw nothing except the mile marker and, near it, the two small roadside crosses I’d noticed the day of my accident, stuck in the ground, one right in front of the other.

They called these types of crosses
descansos
in New Mexico, and my mother had told me that it meant “resting place” in Spanish. They weren’t graves, exactly. They were informal memorials, erected in places where people had died, by those who’d loved them. Because we had a huge problem with drunk driving in our state, there were
descansos
all over the place.

Given that there was nothing much else to look at, I crossed the road to check them out, and saw that the
descansos
were made of white painted wood. I looked at the closest one. It was decorated with faded plastic flowers, a cheap teddy bear, a threadbare American flag, a Denver Broncos cup, and what appeared to be several photographs protected by plastic-zippered Baggies.

I squatted and brushed the ice and dirt from the name on the cross, and a couple of cars zipped past behind me, leaving a cold, hard wind in their wake. This reassured me a bit—should anything weird happen, there would at least be people driving on the highway today.

A name was painted onto the wood of the first cross in neat black letters, and as I read it, the ice of fear filled my veins.
RANDY HARTWELL
, it read. Hartwell? I recognized the last name as being the same one Travis had given me as his own. From the birth and death dates, I calculated that Randy Hartwell had been twenty-four when he died in this spot earlier this year.
On my sixteenth birthday
. Goose bumps sprouted across my arms, and crept up the back of my neck.

My eyes darted manically to the second cross, and my breath stuck in my throat. A plastic Baggie with a photograph in it covered most of the first name. Only the last two letters of the name were visible. They were
i
and
s
. My heart thundered and my belly felt sick with fear. I recognized the boy in the photograph, faded though it was. I reached out and moved the Baggie with the photo aside, and that’s when I saw it.
TRAVIS HARTWELL
. Same death date as the other cross, different birth date. The photo in the Baggie was of the boy I knew, holding a trophy of some kind, smiling at his achievement. The news hit me like a bucket of bricks dropped upon my head. According to this
descanso
, my new friend, the beautiful boy who’d saved me, was born eighteen years ago.

And he was dead.