Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (4 page)

“We’ll be right back after these messages,” a boy
blasted in my ear. I almost jumped out of my skin. He grinned, his bangs hanging low in his eyes. “And now for a word from our sponsors!” The boy belched exuberantly only six inches from the side of my head. A table nearby howled with laughter, a black-haired guy and his redheaded friend giving each other high fives and punching the air. Heat was rising to my cheeks again as the boy ran back to them and sat down.

Two girls were rolling their eyes and shouting at the boys
. One girl looked over to me and called, “Sorry! He apparently escaped from the kindergarten.”

“
I . . . am . . . Nash,
” belched the boy with the bangs in his face. “
Nice . . . to . . . meet . . . you.
” His two guy friends chortled. There was one more boy at the table with his back to me. Digging around in his backpack, he wasn’t paying heed to the burping or the shouting.

“We could
return him,” I suggested to the girl who’d spoken. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so out-of-place in my outfit. She and her friend were nicely dressed themselves in simple but stylish summer dresses.

The girl laughed.
She had a narrow face and a long nose, but good cosmetics made her big eyes pop to draw attention to them instead. “He’d only come back. Hi, I’m Savannah Kingson.”

“Jessa
Bright.”

“I know,” she said, like I had just said two plus two made four.
“Sit with us!”

“Yeah, then I won’t have to walk so far to-” Nash belched.

Not about to turn down an invitation to sit with people, I gathered up my things and moved to their table. They shuffled around to make room for me, three of the boys bouncing up and down with every inch they scooted and belching when their backsides touched the bench. The fourth just slid over quietly while leaning back. He was still getting something out of his backpack.

Savannah grimaced
at me. “This is their only talent, so be kind.”

“Hi, I’m London,” said the other girl
after giving me an appraisal. She shook her head at the boys and smoothed back her long strawberry blonde hair. “That’s Nash Darby and his burping buddies, Easton Mitchell and Diego Holland.” She pointed to the redhead and black-haired boy in turn.

“The Burping Buddies!” Nash enthused.
“Our band has a name. You want to be our manager, Adriel? Hey, Adriel!”

“Just a second,
please,” said the last boy, deep in his backpack and almost out of view beneath the table.

“The back of the head is Adriel Graystone,” London said.
“So, you’re from Los Angeles? This place must be a real come down for you.”

It seemed rude to agree, even if it was true.
“What do you guys do for fun around here?”

Savannah gestured to the burping buddies.
“Pathetic, I know. So, do you know any celebrities from living down there?”

I smiled, feeling more confident now.
People loved to hate celebrities, but one had to be careful when talking about them or be mistaken for jealous. “Yeah. You can’t live in Los Angeles and
not
run into celebrities here and there. See the movie
Ever and Beyond
?”

“I’ve seen that!” squealed Savannah.

“The diner scene was shot in my hometown,” I said. She looked impressed.

“Dude, what are you looking for in there?”
Easton asked the back of Adriel’s head.

“But do you know any
celebrities?” London persisted.

“I went shopping once with
Justine Tellemer.”

They all looked stunned.
Justine Tellemer had been a big name in the teen scene for a long time, having headlined all three
Zombie Blast
movies. She’d partied herself right into a rehab over the summer. Boys wanted to date her, girls wanted to
be
her, and she’d brought in purses with her assistant to a Malibu consignment store while Downy and I were in there shopping not that long ago. It wasn’t exactly going shopping with her, but it wasn’t exactly a lie either. Pissed that the clerk wasn’t offering as much as she wanted for the purses, Justine had lifted one high and asked me what I’d be willing to pay for it. Stunned to be in her presence, I blurted whatever the price tag was. That bumped up what the clerk was offering, and Justine perused the rack across from me before leaving. Downy and I squealed the whole drive home and wondered how bad a superstar’s finances had to be for her to be taking purses to a consignment store. All of those millions were going to drugs.

“So what was she like?” Savannah said in awe as Adriel turned around and set down a handful of raisins
and a crushed box on the table. Then he looked up and paled to see me, like I hadn’t been what he was expecting to see there. Forcing out a smile, he covered up whatever had startled him.

I lost my track of thought momentarily.
Handsome
did not describe this boy, not even a little. Blue eyes and dark blond hair brightened his extraordinarily lovely face. There was a slight lilt to his full lips, as if he found something about me amusing. It wasn’t unkind but a gentle humor, and beyond it, there was sadness. I couldn’t explain what it was that made me think of melancholy, yet I felt it hanging there between us with everyone else unaware.

Breaking away from his gaze, I
answered Savannah’s question about what Justine was like. “You almost don’t recognize stars when they’re not on the red carpet. They look so different. She’s still really pretty, but she has awful hair in real life. It’s been so chemically abused that it’s lanky and broken off. Those are wigs she wears in movies.”

“I hear she’s an awful diva on set,” London said.

“She’s kind of mean to her assistant,” I agreed. The poor girl had been holding a dozen bags and Justine still waited to have the door opened for her when they left.

“And this, at long last, is Adriel
of the Crushed Raisin Box Clan,” Nash said without belching. “Adriel, this is Jessa Bright.” My last name, however, he burped.

“We met,” Adriel said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. I would have remembered this boy from my morning classes! That wasn’t a face it was possible to forget.

“In the orchestra room,” Adriel
explained.

Dear God, I wanted the floor to
rip open and swallow me whole! I looked away from him hastily and willed myself not to blush. If only I could rewind time, find those locked restrooms and decide to go to the office. I’d fixed my underwear right in front of the most attractive boy I’d ever seen. I waited in misery for him to tell everyone the details.

“Whatever were you doing in the orchestra room, Jessa?” London asked.
“It’s only taught in the afternoons. Do you play something?”

“It was a mistake,” Adriel said as I tensed.
“She was looking for the office, and I had sneaked in there looking for a piece of music the orchestra played last year.”

“I don’t play anything,” I said.
Was he not going to say anything about our embarrassing encounter? Maybe this whole year wouldn’t be an utter disaster with me as the joke of the school. “Just a few piano lessons when I was little.” I’d been terrible, plunking along with no sense of rhythm and forgetting my piece at the recital in front of thirty people. My parents let me stop after a lengthy tantrum on the floor of the living room.

“My mom
still
won’t let me quit the flute,” moaned Savannah, and the conversation moved on to other topics. Adriel lifted his backpack to his lap and sorted through his belongings to remove the raisins squashed on them. The burping buddies serenaded us, and after the song punctuated at its close by Nash lifting a cheek and farting, the girls stood as one to move to another table. I followed them.

“Kindergarten might
be shooting too high,” I said when we resettled.

“You’re disgusting, Nash!
And so are you, Diego and Easton!” London yelled.

“Please don’t leave me
with them,” Adriel pleaded, and the bell rang. Nash bowed with one last fart and headed off with Diego and Easton going after him. Offering one last apology for them, Savannah caught up with London and the two merged into the crowd gushing out of the cafeteria to the classrooms.

I
put on my backpack. It bunched up the scarf so I took both off to fix them. Adriel dropped the textbooks into his backpack and tossed the raisins to a trashcan. “It’s just first day excitement. They won’t be so wild tomorrow.”

“That was pretty bad,” I said.
Some of the guys at Bellangame High hadn’t been all that mature, but their behavior was still a far cry from burping and farting through our lunch period.

“And y
ou didn’t need to embellish,” Adriel added.

“Excuse me?”
I asked.

“About shopping with Justine Tellem
er. London and Savannah are good people, a little shallow, but they’re not out to get anyone. So you didn’t have to stretch the truth. They would have been happy with what
did
happen.”

“I wasn’t lying!” I exclaimed.
He couldn’t know anyway.

“I didn’t say you were lying.”
Zipping up his backpack, Adriel put it over his shoulder. “But you didn’t shop
with
her, like you two are friends. That was your implication. I think it was more to the truth that you were in the same place at the same time.” He smiled and picked up one last raisin from the table. Without returning the smile and not trusting what might come flying out of my mouth as a retort, I stormed off to computers. That he’d seen through my tale was unnerving, and that he made mention of it was downright rude. The story hadn’t been hurting anyone.

What was I down to?
Two hundred and sixty-eight days? Feeling like I was standing before Mount Everest, or perhaps a guillotine, I went into the classroom and chose a computer. It was still two minutes to the bell so I went online. Very little of the Internet was accessible through the firewall, and it was deadly slow. Someone hissed at me and pointed to the classroom rules printed on the board. Students were only allowed to go on the Internet with a signed permission slip from a parent or guardian, and also at designated times set by the teacher. I clicked off.

Ms. Crane came in as the bell sounded.
The syllabus was dismaying: typing for speed, spreadsheet and database skills, real basics like learning the difference between hardware and software. These were all things I’d done in junior high. This class was going to be a waste of time. The assignment for the class period was proper hand positions on the keyboard when I could type sixty words a minute with one correction.

Rapidly peeling off
streams of
lad
and
lass
, I finished before everyone else. Since I couldn’t go online, I looked around my computer and out the window. One more class and school ended. I could change in the restroom, given they weren’t locked up the instant the bell rang, and wait for campus to empty. No one needed to see me riding home in my sweats.

In the distance, a familiar figure
loped by with clippers. It was Zakia Cooper. My first thought was still
Jaden
. The actual Jaden had been so kind, even though I must have painted an awful picture as a sniffling, straggly-haired lost child. He’d talked to me the whole way home, although I couldn’t remember what we had talked about. It was too easy to get turned around in all of those curving streets, but he’d known the way. Bellangame was on the square, every side road leading back to a main one, which made it impossible to stay off course for long.

Walking to the bursting planters outside another building, Zakia got to work hacking them back.
He was at ease with the work, his movements steady and sure. Piling up the clipped vines in one spot, he moved from planter to planter and tamed them. Each planter he inspected from every angle, and whatever he saw on some resulted in him making an X of red tape on the side. One of the planters selected for an X had a missing piece, so soil was spilled over the concrete.

“Cute, isn’t he?”
whispered the redheaded girl to my right. She was wearing old-fashioned glasses, but they fit her elfin face well.

“Yeah,” I agreed.
Zakia was adorable. I loved the loose curls of his hair.

“They never stick around, the Cooper boys.
Too bad, because they’re so hot. Can you imagine them all together?” She returned to pecking out lines of
lad
and
lass
with her index fingers. “It’s Kitts, by the way. I’m a junior.” The teacher bent down between us to check our progress and correct Kitts’ hand positions.

“That’s a funny name,” I blurted to Kitts when Ms. Crane walked away.

“Is Jessa short for Jessica?” Kitts asked.

“No.”
I realized how rude I was being. “I’m sorry. I’ve just never heard the name Kitts before. It’s pretty.”