Ask Me (8 page)

After a few more heated words, Tank pushed Alex with both hands, making him stumble back a step. Alex pushed back, and Tank fell into the other boy, knocking him over. I leaned forward, not sure what to do, looking to see if any of the coaches had noticed yet. There was shouting now, but through my headphones I couldn’t catch any words, just anger. I lost sight of Alex for a minute as Tank and the other boys surrounded him.

I stood up, then sat back down. What could I do? What should I do? Coach Clark—the baseball coach and Coach Townsend’s male counterpart—had finally noticed and
had run into the fray. I saw Alex again, still standing, face-to-face with Tank, their noses nearly touching. Coach Clark stepped between them and shoved them apart, shouting too.

Alex turned his back on the whole thing and stomped toward the locker room. Tank shouted something after him, restrained by a hand on his barrel chest by Coach Clark. Another boy threw a cup full of Gatorade at Alex’s back, hitting him with a splash of orange-colored liquid.

Alex didn’t even stop walking.

A bunch of kids laughed, Coach Clark uselessly barking for order.

How fast he had fallen
, I thought. Not that long ago he’d been carried on their shoulders.

I WAS SURPRISED TO
see Alex walk into art class after gym. His hair was still wet from the shower, dark curls dampening his collar. He seemed calm. But word of the altercation with Tank had preceded him, and the other students stepped out of his way more quickly than was necessary. He didn’t say anything, just walked to his desk and dropped his backpack on the floor and pulled out his drawer to get his self-portrait out.

I had no idea why, but I felt like I should say something to him. Do something. It made no sense. For all I knew, he
was
the one who had killed Jade. I shivered for a minute as I imagined those big hands of his holding a knife. Just twenty minutes ago, he’d looked like he could take Tank’s face off with them. Of course, I’d felt that way about Tank myself a time or two.

I gathered my pencils and took them to the sharpener, not looking at anyone as I walked across the classroom. I stuck the first pencil in and listened to the industrial whir of the sharpener. Alex was hard at work on his portrait, ignoring the whispers. A girl who normally worked at the table right next to him and had been trying to catch his eye picked up her things and took them to another desk, half the room away, like she thought he was going to bite her. I could tell he noticed when she moved. His eyes flicked up to the now-empty desk and then did a quick circuit of the room, landing briefly on mine and then, more determinedly, back on his art. I was the master of the quick glance. I knew it when I saw it.

I pulled out the pencil, which I had sharpened down to half its original size. Useless. I stuck in the next one and watched it this time, pulling it out before it, too, disappeared. I worked quickly through the rest and gathered them up in my right hand.

My stomach gurgled, a lingering reminder of my earlier upset. If this kept up, I was going to waste away to nothing. The shapeless yellow dress I was wearing already hung from me, too large and too square for my angular frame. I walked back towards my desk, my left hand rubbing my stomach, trying to get it to settle. Maybe Mrs. Rogers would give me permission to get some peanut butter crackers from the vending machine in the teachers’ lounge.

I wasn’t paying enough attention to where I was going, and I walked into the corner of Shelley’s desk, my hip bumping it and sloshing her painting water. A few drops splashed onto the desk, missing the elaborate and gaudy
collage she was working on entirely, but she sneered at me anyway.

“Watch where you’re going, you freak,” she said, pulling her picture farther away from me.

“Sorry,” I said, even though I really hadn’t done anything wrong. It was easier than arguing. I stepped back, my hand still cradling my stomach as it knotted in pain again. I could really use a Sprite.

“What, are you pregnant or something?”

“Something only, only something, something is nothing to me,” I said, my shock at the question not enough to stop the inevitable nonsense. How could she even ask that? I’d never even kissed a boy. But my nonanswer only served to ratchet up the look of distaste on Shelley’s face.

“Totally preggers,” chimed in a girl behind me: Lucy, the last person I’d have thought would say something in this class, since she deigned to sit near me sometimes. “I saw her throw up in gym today.”

Shelley leaned toward me, her eyes narrowed. She looked me up and down as I tried to think of something, anything, to defend myself. “Who’d sleep with
that
?” she finally said and then laughed, a few other girls joining in.

“Someone,” I whispered, prepared enough this time, at least, to not speak loudly. But it only served to make my answer all the more plaintive and pitiful. A dull flush spread across my face. I forced my hand away from my stomach, even though it roiled even more under their scrutiny. I burned to say something back and spill her dirty secrets. How she had lost her virginity at thirteen to a high school boy. That her current boyfriend had slept with two
other girls. That scare she’d had sophomore year when a condom had broken and she’d cried every day in the girls’ bathroom until her period.

But I said nothing. Anything I said would only lead to questions, more questions, and nothing good ever came of that. And who would believe me anyway?

“Leave her alone.” I felt a warm hand on my shoulder, moving me to the side. Alex stepped in front of me, solid as a wall.

“Oh, I see,” said Shelley with a smirk. “And here’s the answer to the big question.
You
must be the dad. Congrats, Alex!” The other girls laughed with her, a crueler edge to it. She leaned to the right past Alex so she could look me right in the eye. “Better be careful. Don’t want to wind up like his last date.”

I couldn’t see his face, standing behind him, but I saw his fist clench. Without thinking, I grabbed his hand and pulled him away.

“Don’t,” I said. I kept pulling until we were through the door and out in the hall. Mrs. Rogers didn’t bother stopping us. I dropped his hand as the door shut behind us, blocking their laughter. He looked at me a long moment, his dark eyes hard. Did he expect me to say thank you?

“You shouldn’t let them talk to you that way,” he said.

“
You
shouldn’t, either,” I said, perhaps more sharply than I needed to. What was I supposed to do anyway? Threaten them? But I knew not to ask. Questions inevitably led to more questions, never answers.

Alex looked me up and down like he was measuring me. “
I
can take care of myself,” he said.

I swallowed.

He opened his mouth as if to say something more, then turned, his footsteps echoing in the empty hallway.

No one was home when I got back after school, and I let myself relax in some music and the chance to collect my thoughts. I had hung out in the girls’ bathroom until after school ended, going back into the art room to grab my backpack only once I was sure everyone had gone. Alex’s things had been spread out on the desk, untouched. I had hung around for a few minutes, unsure what I should do. In the end, I simply put his art supplies back in his drawer and left his backpack sitting on top of the desk.

He had made a lot of progress on his self-portrait, more than I had made on mine. The strong, bold shape of a phoenix was taking shape, practically leaping off of the canvas. At least I hadn’t dissuaded him from using that symbolic bird to represent himself.

This day had been too crazy. This
week
had been too crazy. I’d had more real conversations, if you could call them that, with people at school than I’d had since I had
started prophesying. A boy had stood up for me, though I still wasn’t sure why. Another boy had sat with me at lunch. On purpose. Delilah and I had even shared some moments.

It gave me hope.

When this curse was finally gone, maybe life could actually get back to something approaching normal. Gran had lost the ability at seventeen, but my birthday had come and gone in January.
“Anytime now,”
Granddad kept telling me. Any time now I could have a life again. Of course, I knew I shouldn’t read too much into it. Both boys had been on the wrong side of public opinion for perhaps the first time in their lives, especially in Will’s case. And Delilah was lost without Jade.

I found Gran’s sewing kit and took my dress off. I wanted to fix it before they got home so Gran wouldn’t feel she had to buy me a new one. Not that the dress was anything special. The faded floral fabric was thin in more than one place, and the stitching was already uneven. But it was the principle of it. The best way to repair it would be to add a thick ribbon or sash around the waist to cover up all the bad spots. I found an old dress in the scrap bin to act as a donor. I carefully removed the brightly colored lilac sash. It didn’t really match the washed out tones of the dress, but it would have to do. I wasn’t exactly high style anyway.

My wardrobe was yet another thing that set me apart from the other girls at school. I didn’t like shopping—it was too public—and Gran’s taste ran from the 1940s to the early 60s. And after I’d been dumped here, I’d outgrown all my old clothes, like I had outgrown my old life.

I no longer owned a pair of jeans. Actually, the only pants I owned were a pair of very retro capris that Gran insisted on calling “pedal pushers.” That, combined with my reputation for spouting random nonsense, had helped keep the boys far away, which was generally okay with me … and with Granddad. The way I figured it, I would go shopping when I was rid of my curse, if we could afford it. A brand-new start all the way around. Something to look forward to. Something to hope for.

Sitting next to Will today had been the closest I had probably ever been to a boy who wasn’t sticking an elbow in my back. Thinking about it brought back the heat of his shoulder, and I blushed yet again.

I shook my head and managed to poke myself with a needle for my trouble. That felt right. Thinking about boys only brought pain.

I wondered if I would ever find a love like Gran and Granddad’s. They had been married for over fifty years. Would I be marked forever by my curse, even after it was finally gone? Would I be doomed to repeat my mother’s mistakes? My parents’ marriage had crumbled like a child’s sand castle hit by a wave. No relationship could withstand utter truth.

Just ask my mother. “Why is your dad always late on Fridays?” she’d chirped one night not long after the prophesying had begun. I was twelve, just like Gran had been when her “gift” started. Mom wasn’t really expecting an answer from me, just puttering around the dining room table making sure things were pretty. She liked things to be just so.

I answered anyway. Up until that day, she hadn’t noticed that I had begun answering every question I heard, no matter what it was. In and of itself, this wasn’t surprising, though. She’d never paid much attention to me, anyway, so long as I stayed out of her way.

“He’s banging Daisy Rodriguez.”

I clapped a hand over my mouth, but the words were out. I was a relatively innocent kid, but even I knew what that meant. It wasn’t something I would ever have said in front of an adult until my gift had taken choice away from me.

All I remember was a sharp intake of breath from my mother. “What did you say?”

I repeated it. I’d had no choice; she’d asked.

She slapped me once, hard across the face, then bundled me off to my room and slammed the door. I cried until Dad came home. He didn’t come to console me or check on me. No, after he came home, there had been a lot of screaming, but none of it directed at me—not that it mattered. I spent the night hiding in my closet, hugging an ancient stuffed teddy bear as each shouted question brought a new answer from my lips. I knew before they did that it was over and that we’d never be a family again, if we ever had been.

That was the first time I truly learned that most answers are better left unsaid.

By the next morning it was official: Jade’s death was murder. She had been found at the edge of the woods off of Laurel Creek, leaving a trail of blood behind her. Even after being stabbed three times in the chest and stomach, she had managed to crawl a good distance before she bled to death. The weapon had missed her heart and her lungs, but it hadn’t mattered in the end. If you lose enough blood, there’s nothing you can do but watch as your life drips away. I knew that Jade had curled herself into a fetal position and stared unbelievingly at the thin but steady stream of blood leaving her body until finally her eyes had gone dim.