Dull Boy (12 page)

 

I’VE BEEN STRESSING
about this meeting all week, my mood swinging back and forth. One minute I’m excited, pumped to meet other kids like me (finally!); the next minute I’m sweating bullets. I
want
friends, I don’t want to be alone—but what if Darla’s friends don’t want me?

And I like Darla, but I barely know her—even with all that top-secret file stuff. What if I open the door and she’s suddenly bald and sitting in a wheelchair with a plaid blanket on her lap and her massive cranium is throbbing like a telepathic strobe light? What if her crappy disguises were merely tacked onto a truly
excellent
disguise, and she’s not who I think she is at all??

Okay. Calm down. Time to call for backup.

Hiding behind the fountain in Sophie’s driveway, I punch in the number for Roast—conveniently added to my speed dial this afternoon, in case of an emergency freak-out. I try to make my voice as deep as possible, so that whoever answers believes me when I claim to be Catherine’s dad.

“It’s Avery,” I say when she picks up. “Sorry to bother you. I need some advice.”

“About coffee?”

“Not exactly. I’m meeting some other kids today who have um, unusual abilities. Hint hint? And I’m freaking out. I don’t know what I should do or say or if I should even go through with it. What do you think?”

Classic-rock music fills the silence. The growl of a blender crunching ice assaults my ear.

“Are they for real?”

“Yeah. I mean, I think so.”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of suspicious. I’d probably skip it.”

“Even if they seem—”

She curses under her breath. “I have to go. Some kid dumped a pack of chocolate muffins on the floor and is smearing them everywhere. It looks like a giant crap streak.”

She hangs up. Okay, really—what did I expect? That she’d wish me luck and volunteer to go with me? In my dreams, maybe.

I’m still behind the fountain, trying to force a fearless smile onto my face so I don’t look like I’m about to pee myself, when the front door opens and Nicholas storms out.

This is what I hear before the door slams:

Darla: “You can’t just invite someone else without clearing it with me! That wasn’t part of the plan!”

Sophie: “There are other people on this team besides you, and if you would ever take the time to
listen
to their ideas, maybe it wouldn’t be such a shock when—”

Nicholas is hurrying down the driveway, so I fake an untied shoelace to seem less creepy. “Oh, hey,” I say, popping up from behind the fountain. “Everything all right in there?”

His hands are plowed into the pockets of his trench coat. His eyes flicker. For a second I think they’re lit from within, like cool blue Christmas lights. But. Um. That’s impossible.

“Yeah. Fine. I just can’t deal when people argue. I get too agitated.” He’s taking deep breaths, like you do at the doctor’s office when they’ve got a stethoscope pressed to your back and all you can think about is breathing. “I don’t recommend going in to play peacemaker—neither one of them is going to budge. Feel like walking? I need to calm down.”

“Walking’s good,” I say.

Damn. His eyes
are
glowing. Does he have laser eyes? I wonder if Darla told them what I can do. How much does she even know? You could draw a few conclusions from my hero moment last summer, but does she know I fly? I’ve been pretty good about keeping that feat to myself. Catherine knows, but she barely talks to
me,
let alone the rest of the human race. I doubt she’d spill my secret to her “stalker.”

“So, when you say ‘agitated,’ how big of a risk is there that laser beams will shoot out of your eyes?”

Nicholas squeezes his eyes shut. “I don’t have laser eyes. The light is a symptom.” He’s grimacing, half hunched over like his appendix is about to burst.

“Are you okay? Do you need me to get Darla?”

“There’s nothing she can do. But if I stop answering you, because I can’t hear you? Promise me you’ll run.”

“Why? What’ll happen?”

“My senses go into overload right before . . .” He winces. “Um, hang on.” Nicholas crosses his arms over his chest and hurries around the side of Sophie’s house and into the backyard. I follow him; he keeps running until he falls to his knees and starts gasping.

I edge closer, my boots sinking into the soft earth. “Nicholas? You okay?”

Nicholas is hugging himself, bent all the way forward so his forehead almost touches the grass. He looks like he’s about to start puking, but nothing comes out.

Crap. I have no idea what to do. I don’t even know what I’m dealing with here.

The wind starts to pick up.

“Nick!” I shout. “Can you hear me? Hang in there. I’m going to—”

The backdoor opens. I hear the thud of bare feet on wood and then Sophie races past me, dressed for summer in shorts and a tank top, plastic cherry earrings bobbing back and forth.

“Don’t!” I say, feeling about as pathetic and panicked as a person could possibly feel. Do I stop her? “He said to run if he gets like this! Not to—”

“I know what he says!” Sophie shouts back. She hurls herself at Nicholas, wraps her arms around him from behind, and yanks his trench coat open. The trees in the yard start to tremble, branches waving in the sudden wind. Leaves and buds are torn from their places, sucked toward Nicholas like he’s the center of a tornado. Leaves cling to him, flutter across his body like panicked butterflies—and then they disappear
into him
.

I move for a better look—and that’s when I see it.

There’s some kind of
vortex
raging in his chest: dark and swirling like liquid night. Nicholas’s shirt is flapping up around his neck; the vortex stretches in a jagged diamond shape from his belly to his collarbone, churning like a maelstrom. Sophie’s arms are clamped across his chest; she gives a little yelp, but she’s not being drawn into it—not like everything else around him.

“What can I do?” I shout. I trip closer, the pull of the vortex tugging me forward.

“We need something big! Something to sate it!” Sophie turns her head, blinking against the grit that’s being sucked toward Nicholas. “The patio furniture! Can you throw a chair so it lands in front of him?”

And not hit them with it? Crap, I don’t know; I don’t have super aim.

I grab a wrought-iron chair from the patio and hurl it into the air, aiming to overshoot them by about twenty feet, since I don’t know how close it needs to be—but it never gets a chance to land.

Sophie shifts her arms from Nicholas’s chest to his shoulders, uses her body weight to pull him back so that his vortex is pointing skyward. The chair rockets toward him, shrinking and warping as it gets closer, until it looks more like an arrow than a chair: paper-thin and wavy and surreal and then . . .
gone
.

The bright blue light in Nicholas’s eyes starts to fade. The vortex quiets, spins away to nothing. I wipe the grit from my eyes and I see his ribs heaving, skin covering them instead of a living storm.

“Did I hurt anyone?” Nicholas blinks and finally starts to look around him, his eyes gradually focusing on us. “Sophie, I could have killed you! What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t going anywhere if you weren’t. I’m just glad you didn’t suck my earrings out before I got sticky—I just made these.” She fingers the plastic red cherries dangling from her ears, seemingly unfazed. Then she flashes a smile at me. “Hi, Avery. Have you been here long? I guess this is more of a demo than you were hoping for.”

“Um, yeah . . . it was pretty intense.”

She grins. “There’s pizza inside. I don’t know about you, but watching Nicholas almost destroy us always makes me hungry.”

I feel myself flushing—totally stupid. Didn’t we almost die here? Why am I so fixated on how cute she is? “Thanks. Pizza’s great.”

Nicholas is quiet. He’s trying to close his trench coat, but most of the buttons are gone. Sophie’s bouncing around, telling me how happy they are that I came today, and how much fun we’re going to have. But Nicholas can’t let it go.

Destruction, absorption—whatever his power is, he can’t control it. He looks haunted by what just happened, even though the only casualty was a chair from Sophie’s parents’ patio set.

I wonder, looking at him, what else he’s done.

S
inking my teeth into a slice of pizza piled high with glistening pepperoni, I listen to Darla admit she was wrong—for probably the first time in her life. Well, according to Sophie anyway.

“I’m sorry we caused you to flare up,” Darla says. “We shouldn’t have been arguing like that.”

Nicholas, who’s sipping chamomile tea (Darla says it has a calming effect), shrugs. “It’s not your fault. I need to keep it together better. I was already on edge because I was nervous about today, and—”

“And hearing that Jacques was coming didn’t help. I understand,” Darla says. “Sophie shouldn’t surprise us like that. I am totally in agreement.”

Um, end of apology? And who’s Jacques?

Sophie laughs in disbelief. “Noooo, he was nervous about Avery. You kept making it sound like Avery was this hard-ass who would beat us up if we looked at him wrong.”

“I am,” I say. “I’m totally gonna beat up all of you as soon as I finish my pizza. Darla first.” I chomp into my slice. “You better keep feeding me if you want to live.”

Darla humphs and resumes picking the onions off her pizza and wiping them on her plate. “That was
before
. Obviously I told them you were okay once I got to know you.”

“So . . . is it out of line if I ask what happened back there?”

Nicholas shakes his head. “No, you should know. So you know that I mean it when I tell you to run.
All
of you.” He shoots a pointed look at Sophie.

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not helpless. I happen to be well adapted to your particular death trap.”

“My power is . . . unstable. And dangerous. You saw the vortex, right?” I nod, and he goes on. “It’s dormant until I lose my emotional equilibrium. If I get upset, or angry, or overly nervous, it activates. The vortex starts absorbing things until it’s satisfied and I finally calm down. Sometimes it wants a little, sometimes a lot—but I don’t know
what
it wants, or why it does this. I don’t know how to stop it. When I try to resist and keep my coat closed so there’s a barrier, it hurts like hell. All I can do is try to get away from people before I give in.”

My lips part with a question:
Have you ever absorbed a person?
But it’s too personal, too cruel to ask if the answer is yes. I silence myself with another bite.

“I don’t know what happens to the things I absorb. Only that they don’t come back. So maybe they become part of me. But I think I destroy them.” He’s staring into his tea, knees up in front of his chest—to form a barrier, I guess, since his trench coat is open.

“There’s no proof of that,” Darla says.

“No proof of anything else either.”

“You know what we need?” Sophie says. “Some music to cheer us up.” She springs to her feet and Nicholas groans.

“If I hear any more J-Pop I am going to become
very
unstable.”

“Hmm, yes, what might help—some soothing Norwegian death metal? Nice try, Nicholas.” Sophie scrolls through her playlists. “I don’t think Nordic screaming helps your mood any.”

“We should play ‘In the Garage’!” Darla says. “It’s only the best song ever!”

“It’s only your anthem,” Sophie says. “I think you’ve heard it enough.”

Sophie settles on some bubbly pop that appears to have Nicholas attempting to strangle himself with the string from his chamomile tea bag, and we settle down for the rest of our confessions.

“Demo time for me,” Sophie says. “Avery, will you help?”

At her instruction, I carry a stepladder in from the garage and prop it against the wall. Sophie climbs up, flings her clothes off so she’s only wearing a bikini (whoa), and leans back so that her whole body is touching the wall—arms at her sides, pointed toes still braced against the top of the stepladder.

“Okay, now pull the ladder away.”

I just blink at her. “You’ll fall.”

“Gee, I didn’t think of that.” Sophie rolls her eyes in this goofy way. “Just do it.”

Prepared for the worst, I yank the ladder. And miraculously, Sophie stays exactly where she is. It looks like . . . do you know that amusement-park ride where you’re inside this big cylinder, and everyone braces themselves against the wall and the thing starts spinning faster and faster until centrifugal force sticks you to the wall, and then the floor drops and you’re still stuck?

That’s what Sophie looks like: just chilling, in no danger of falling. She slides her feet up one at a time until her knees are bent and her feet are flat against the wall. “Welcome to the most useless power ever,” she says, and laughs. “I’m sticky. Well, when I want to be. And sometimes when I don’t—it’s not perfect.”