13 to Life (18 page)

I moved between them, blocking Pietr from Sarah. I looked at her, hoping my eyes were filled with a look of honesty and blind friendship—like I thought they had before the dance. “I needed some privacy—some time without people
staring at me, so I could babble insanely and cry rivers. Pietr just knew.”

Sarah blinked at me. I thought I saw the spark of something ignite in the green depths of her eyes. But she blinked again and it was gone. “He’s smart—I
told
you.” She beamed.

“It’s not intelligence,” he said. “I know something about what Jess is going through.”

Sarah folded her hands primly in her lap. “Oh?”

Pietr groaned, a sound that seemed to rise from the depths of his soul. He rubbed a hand across his forehead, his eyes closed.

He’d said it once already. “Pietr’s parents are dead, too,” I said suddenly, as fast as a person ripping a Band-Aid off because a slow peel is like punishment for already being wounded.

His face relaxed. He nodded.

Sarah was on her feet, hands on his chest. “Oh, Pietr,” she soothed. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know!”

He patted her hands. “I’ve barely been in Junction long enough to unpack. There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

His arm wrapped lightly around her shoulders, Pietr led us back to the gym. Amy linked her arm with mine, smiling when she saw everyone dancing.

“And we danced, like a wave on the ocean, romanced—”

“Come on,” Sarah urged, her eyes bright as she tugged Pietr and Amy onto the dance floor. Attached to Amy, I followed, making up my mind. I would have a good time. Starting—now!

“We were liars in love and we danced—”

Pietr kept his eyes on Sarah—most of the time.

There were a couple of moments I caught him looking at me with nearly the same look Jenny had been giving Derek. It was unnerving.

I turned, dancing more in Amy’s direction.

Amy pointed to the speakers and I searched my memory. “The Hooters,” I said, naming the group.

We danced like maniacs, doing silly moves when “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” came on and sitting out when “Total Eclipse of the Heart” marked the start of a slow dance. Well, I sat out.

Marvin found Amy and dragged her onto the dance floor. Although I couldn’t bear to watch them kiss (traumatized by memories of his rubbery lips back in fourth grade), I had to admit that otherwise they looked pretty cute together. Like they fit. And while Marvin watched Amy with a fierce intensity, he wasn’t the only one looking at her. His hands tight on Stella Martin, Max watched Amy, too. I wondered if that might become a problem.

Sitting alone, I tried focusing on the line of boys standing in the shadows across the gym. If this dance was going to be anything like my last few middle-school dances, I’d spend most of the slow dances staring stalker-like at people I hardly knew.

When I was little I dreamed of going to dances. I thought I’d be the most beautiful girl there—the star of some social show. Now I just wanted to read a book. A good, quick-to-read vampire book. Something that defied the very definition of proper literature. Something simply
fun.

My gaze caught on a couple dancing slowly into my field of vision. Well, not so much
dancing
as doing that weird slow-dance wobble. Derek and Jenny. I tried not to gag. They looked like they’d been glued together.

Dad told me when I was getting ready for my very first dance that there was a Junction teacher with a ruler who measured to make sure there was a proper distance between dance partners. I remembered that at that first dance I kept looking
for the ruler, worried I was breaking some big rule. Now I
really
wanted to see that guy.

And then there was Pietr. Dancing with Sarah as if he might break her. He knew that she’d already had her brain scrambled once, so he was overly cautious with her. Nope, no ruler needed there. I sighed, relieved and frustrated at the same time.

Amy was suddenly in front of me. “Hey! You’re not even paying attention!”

“Huh?” I had mentally drifted off, zoned out.

“You’re missing some good music!” she proclaimed, snatching my hands off my lap and pulling me out of my seat.

“So what—?” I asked over the blaring music. “You’re an eighties convert now?”

Amy grinned. “At least it’s not disco!” she reminded me.

And we danced!

Another set of slow songs, and this time Amy sat out with me. “He looks bored,” she said, motioning vaguely toward the dance floor.

“Who? Marvin?” Even Marvin had been asked to dance. I was feeling lower than low.

“Well, yeah. Him too. But I mean
your
guy.”

“Derek?”

“No. God! I’m going to start carrying a chart,” Amy warned. “Pietr.”

“Oh. I hadn’t noticed.”

“You don’t lie as well as you think you do,” she said with a sniff.

“Ugh.”

“Oh. Sarah doesn’t look too happy.”

I peered out onto the dance floor. Amy was right. Sarah
looked worse than unhappy. She looked straight at me, stretching to hold on to Pietr’s shoulders.

My heart fell into my stomach and started jumping around like a fish fresh from the stream. I was the first to look away.

“That can’t be good,” Amy whispered, still watching.

I tried to look mesmerized by the floor. “Is she still glaring at me?”

“No. She’s talking to him again.” Amy leaned forward in her chair, following my lame ploy that there was something absolutely fascinating about Junction High’s gym floor. She kept up the spy game. “Nope. She’s mad.” She poked me. “He’s not trying to dump her now—not at the dance.”

My heart stopped. “No—” But I wondered. Every time my dad had wanted out of something, he screwed it up so badly my mom quit asking him to do it. “Is he stepping on her feet?”

“What? No.” Amy looked at me. “Sometimes I just can’t follow your line of logic,” she admitted.

“Way better that way. He won’t break it off tonight. I told him he couldn’t.”

“Okay. I
definitely
don’t follow your logic,” she confirmed. She cocked her head, listening. “It’s winding up again!” Amy shouted, as if I’d gone deaf since her last statement.

Pietr was before me, pulling me onto my feet. “Dance with me,” he said.

Sarah was behind him, glowering at me. I hesitated.

Amy grabbed Sarah and headed to the dance floor. “Fast or slow?” she called.

Pietr had me by the wrist. I followed.

“I don’t know!” I yelled to Amy.

But on the dance floor couples quickly formed and someone shut off a set of lights as a hint.

“Slow,” Amy groaned, dragging Sarah back to the chairs.

I tried to go with them. I did. But Pietr already had me by the waist.

“Stay,” he commanded.

“Fine. You’ve probably already doomed my friendship with Sarah, anyhow, by neglecting her during this dance,” I said, resigning myself to reach up and rest my hands on his shoulders. “She’s going to be jealous.”

“I thought
I
always stated the obvious,” he said, pulling me closer.

I couldn’t help it. My eyes scanned the room. Nope. No rulers in sight.

“Who are you looking for?” he asked, all his Russian heritage returning and becoming audibly concentrated as he grated out that one name that seemed to irk him. “Derek?” His eyes narrowed.

I chuckled at the idea of Pietr, the popular and handsome—definitely handsome—new guy, being jealous of where
my
attention went. I leaned my forehead against his chest and sighed. “You wouldn’t understand,” I breathed.

“No,” his voice rumbled in his chest, deep with my ears so close. “You’re right.” The words reminded me of Hunter’s growl. “When it comes to you liking Derek, I can’t understand.”

I closed my eyes and tried not to think of anything but being close to Pietr, right then and right there.

“I wanna know—why can’t this be love?”

Van Halen’s song ended, and I dropped my hands away from Pietr’s shoulders, taking a half step back.

“Wait,” he said, tightening his grip on my waist. He looked thoughtful, peering at the ceiling as he listened to the first few notes of the next song. When his eyes next met my own, there was something different there—something sad and so completely lonely. . . . “
This
is my song,” he whispered.

He pulled me close, his arms wrapping around me, hands resting at the small of my back. I didn’t know what to do, so I leaned my cheek against his chest.

I could hear his heart beating. No matter how slowly we danced, it seemed to race like an old clock that had just been wound. I thought if we could both somehow slow time down, then we could be like this: close, together—forever.

I closed my eyes, listening to the song—his song—and his heart. At odds with each other. “Queen.” I whispered the group’s name, realizing it was from the album I’d looked at.

He sighed, a sweet, gentle sound. And I relaxed, resting against him and swaying ever so gently as he did. His heartbeat finally slowed as we danced, the tick-tock of a more reasonable clock. I wondered if it felt like time could stand still to him.

I thought that if this was what forever felt like, then
I
wanted to live forever.

“Who dares to love forever?”

“When love must die . . .”

He winced at the last line and I drew back, startled, looking up at his solemn face, his tightly closed eyes, and wondering what I still didn’t know about Pietr. . . .

Sarah was almost between us at the song’s end.

“He insisted on dancing with his guide,” she explained, giving me her broadest smile as she put a hand on his arm. Possessively. “He said proper courtesy is very important to people of his background. What an interesting song, too,” Sarah commented.

Forcing my eyebrows to stay level, I backed up. “It was by a group called Queen. Thank you for the dance, Pietr,” I said, watching Sarah the whole time.

Amy put her hands on my shoulders and began to guide me away. “My mom’s in the parking lot,” she explained to Pietr and Sarah. “You two have fun!”

We slipped our shoes on and headed outside. “So,” she said as soon as the school’s doors closed behind us. “Do you think someone with Sarah’s sort of head trauma can ever really return to what she was like before the accident?”

I was frozen, not by the autumn breeze playing with the hem of my skirt, but by the possibility. “I don’t know.”

“Well, we’d better hope not,” Amy pointed out dryly. “Because if the old Sarah ever shows up and realizes how tight you are with her hunky boyfriend, then that cute little package you call
friend
is gonna want to absolutely kill you.”

I hung my head, knowing Amy was right. Because of the original trio of Jenny, Macie, and Sarah, Sarah was the smartest. And the cruelest by far.

I had never been so exhausted after a dance as I was after Homecoming. It wasn’t just that my feet hurt (they did), but it was the pain in my head and the ache in my chest knowing that I wanted Pietr more than ever. We shared heartache over the loss of family. We were attracted to each other and actually had significant things in common. But I’d pushed him toward Sarah and now he had to play the cards I’d dealt.

I was so stupid. As a writer, I knew if I’d been a character in a novel a good editor would have scrawled TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) on the manuscript pages. Well, maybe not too stupid to 
live,
but definitely too stupid to
date
.

I tugged on my sleep shirt. The wind was picking up outside, throwing leaves around. But the scratching of leaves on my window wasn’t what pulled me across the room to peer into the darkness outside.

No. It was the howling.

I’d heard coyotes. This was different. Richer, deeper, longer.
It was a sound that blended with the night and rose out of the shadows to stroke the starry sky.

I rubbed my arms, fighting the prickling sensation that raced across them. I knew almost instinctively that what I was listening to was a wolf. I wondered if it was what had been outside the barn the night before Pietr came to Junction High. Or if it had been what tore through the bushes and left a bit of its fur behind. Or maybe this was a second one—one wolf tracking the other.

I crawled into my bed, pulling the covers up and adjusting my pillows. I always fell asleep comfortably enough; it was only when I dropped into the nightmare that my body struggled to fight what my mind could not.

The dogwood tree was in full flower, pink petals spread wide, glinting in the sunset’s brilliant blast of color. I remembered reading that its petals showed bite marks of the Devil—that Satan had bitten its flowers, enraged by the tree’s sorrow at being used for Christ’s crucifixion.

I pulled out my cell phone and hit send when Mom’s picture popped up. “Yeah, I’ll be by the dogwood,” I heard myself confirm. “On your way? Awesome.” I flipped the cell shut, looking at the tree’s twisted branches again. At one time the dogwood supposedly grew as big as the oak. When the Romans crucified Christ, legend claimed the dogwood formed the cross. Christ, sensing its sorrow, promised it would never grow so large or straight again that it could be used for such a cruel purpose. And the dogwoods grew shriveled and twisted but also grew content.

A whisper of tires on cracked asphalt signaled the approach of Mom’s sedan. I knew it now without seeing it. But in my nightmare, I always turned, watching her approach. I saw the
car turn into the parking lot. And, like dreaded clockwork, Sarah was there—behind the wheel of her parents’ Jag, tearing into the lot. On a joyride. And distracted. Tires squealed. Rubber burned as each driver saw the other—too late. The noise made me jump and cry out—though it was the same noise I’d heard every night since the actual accident. I screamed, choking on the smell of burning rubber as I ran straight toward the tangle of steel. 911. . . .

“This is 911. What is the nature of your emergency?”

“Car crash—at the parking lot by Fifth and Main,” I panted. “Two cars—”

In the back of my mind a voice was shrieking—begging—why was the dream continuing? Why didn’t it stop? Like it always stopped? Before the real tragedy? Before the truest part of the pain?
WAKE UP!
My mind screamed, but my body was rigid—frozen with shock at knowing what was coming and unable to pull me back from the horror I wallowed in nightly during the dream.