Fathom (7 page)

“Hey, Kira, before you go,” he paused as if searching for the right words. “I wanted to know if—my friends and I are going to Sunset Beach tomorrow—”

I glanced back over my shoulder. At that moment, the sun peeked through the morning cloud cover. It highlighted the gold in his hair, accented his broad shoulders and muscles. For an instant, he looked like an ancient Celtic warrior, ready to go into battle.

“I know it’s all just typical tourist stuff, picnic, beach volleyball,” he said. “Things you probably do all the time. But I’d really like it if you could join us.”

I wondered if he could hear how my pulse sped up.

“What time?” I asked, the words out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

“Noon.”

I nodded to myself, then turned and jogged toward the stairs. I was halfway up the cliff before I realized that I had answered him. I had said yes, the word coming out while I was still thinking, spoken so soft I could barely hear it myself.

I looked back toward the beach, far below me now, and I wondered how he found his way here today. This beach was so small it wasn’t on any of the tourist maps.

There was something slightly mysterious about him and his friends.

Then I spun on my heel, climbed the remaining cliff stairs and ran through the yard filled with long grass. I raced through the door, grabbed the phone and dialed the Coast Guard, was on the line and trying to navigate my way through their answering system when I heard voices in the other room.

Gram and Dad. They must not have expected me home this early. I usually swam for at least half an hour, usually longer. They were in the hallway, just around the corner.

“Maybe she
won’t
be like her mother,” my father said. “Maybe she’ll be like me.”

“You know that’s not true,” Gram said, her voice sounding even more serious than usual. “We can both see the signs.”

“But she just turned sixteen. That’s too soon—”

“You know that’s when it all starts.”

“She’s just growing up.” Dad didn’t sound very convincing.

“Exactly—”

Then they both stopped talking and a heavy, ominous silence spread through the house. I could hear a clock ticking in the kitchen and the wind in the trees outside. Gram and Dad must have realized that I had come home. My mouth felt like it was filled with chalk and my tongue stuck to my teeth as I tried to speak when someone from the Coast Guard finally answered the phone. I collapsed into a living room chair, my shoulders shaking from all the adrenaline in my system. I was suddenly afraid and angry at the same time, like my emotions were in a high-powered blender.

Gram and Dad had seen the signs.

Something was happening to me. But they weren’t about to tell me what.

Kira:

On a normal day, school was pretty bad. Today it was horrible. With every step, I kept seeing images of the dead seals on the beach. I kept wondering if the Coast Guard would be able to save the ones that had been injured or if more seals were going to die. Part of me felt like I’d just lost some of my closest friends. Gram and Dad hadn’t helped either. Their words kept coming back to me. When Mr. L rambled on about the surface area of pyramids, I heard, “We can both see the signs”; when Mr. B explained acid base reduction, I heard, “Sixteen…that’s when it all starts.”

And then when I walked down the halls, Lucy MacElroy seemed to sense my vulnerability. She pulled a group of Teen Paper Dolls aside and they all started whispering about me and my mom.

“She’s crazy, just like her mother.”

“They should lock her up.”

“Too bad her mom didn’t kill her too.”

What she didn’t know was that this was the wrong day, the wrong time, the wrong place. For ten years she’d ruled the bratty girls at school and I don’t know what happened—I just flipped.

My eyes narrowed and my blood turned to magma. I stopped, let all the other kids push past me on their way upstream. My hands curled into fists and every muscle tensed. I turned to face them, saw the Paper Dolls standing in a huddle just outside my next classroom.

Lucy stared at me and grinned. Like she hoped that I had heard her.

In a heartbeat I lunged across the hallway, before any of them could run away. I grabbed Lucy—a tan, model-perfect blonde—and slammed her up against the lockers, the collar of her shirt bunched in my left hand, my right arm pressing against her throat.

I never realized how strong I was until now.

All the anger of the past ten years surged through me, memories of her and her snippy friends, girls who would do almost anything she said.

My fist clenched even harder, my jaw tightened.

“What did you say?” I asked. She didn’t know it, but I was daring her. Go ahead, say it again. Out loud and to my face. Just once.

Her eyes widened, her mascara so thick she looked like a cartoon. She glanced at her friends, but they had all taken a step away from her. A growing crowd of pimply, hormone-charged flesh formed behind me.

“N—nothing,” she stammered.

“Funny. That’s not what I heard. Coulda swore you said something about my mom.”

We were so close I could feel her heart speeding up.

“She’s dead. You know that, right?” I asked. Then I glared back at all the other high schoolers who had gathered around us.

She nodded.

“Don’t you think you should let the dead rest in peace?”

Unfortunately, at this point, one side of her mouth curved into a pathetic half-smile, half-sneer. She must not have realized that I had the upper hand here and it was aimed at her poster-perfect face.

“She was crazy,” she said. “Just like you.”

Wham. My fist was on its way, a lightning journey of blood and bone heading straight for her cherub nose, but my knuckles never connected. In my mind, I could already see blood pouring down her face, her nose twisting to the side. In reality, somebody had grabbed my arm and was pulling me off this blonde psycho-terrorist.

“Kira! What are you doing?”

It was Sean. He was dragging me through the crowd, not fast enough though. Two teachers had already scrambled out of relatively safe classrooms into the rumbling adolescent chaos.

“What’s going on out here?” a thick deep voice boomed. Great. It was Mr. L. My geometry teacher.

He shoved his way between Sean and me and Lucy. Somehow he managed to grab all three of us and drag us through the crowds, down the hallway to the principal’s office. He kicked the door open with his foot, growled something almost unintelligible like, wait here, then he tossed us into a row of plastic chairs, before hulking off to talk to the principal.

I’d never seen a teacher get that mad before and I sank down in my chair, did my best to look invisible. It wasn’t working though. Everyone in the office kept staring at the three of us, as if they were trying to figure out what had just happened out in the hall.

Lucy crossed her arms, then lifted her chin. Her mouth quivered and tears formed in her eyes—completely different from how she had acted a few minutes ago. I kept remembering the expression on her face when she had said my mom was crazy, that brazen look in her eyes, that half-sneer.

I glanced at the people behind the counter, saw their faces soften when they watched Lucy cry.

Unexpected anger surged through me again—an emotion so raw I didn’t know how to control it. I think part of me was still mad about what had happened to the seals, but another part of me was tired of being pushed around. I was tempted to jump on Lucy again, to finally give her what she had been asking for all these years.

My fist in her face.

“Are you even listening to me?”

Sean, at my side. Talking.

“What?” My voice sounded different, almost as deep and threatening as Mr. L.

“What happened?”

I shrugged. How could I explain ten years exploding in an instant?

Then it all slammed against me like a big crashing wave.

I might get grounded for all this. I might not even get to go to the party.

I glanced at Lucy again, saw her wipe her eyes with a tissue, then she shot me a steely glance that said, guess what, I won again.

“Holy crap.” I looked at Sean, my cheeks burning, and I lowered my voice to a whisper. “What have I done?”

Sean took my hand, his expression softening. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and I started sobbing. Right in front of everyone who had been waiting for this from day one in first grade. Right in front of the queen Paper Doll, herself. I couldn’t bear to look at her.

I knew she was gloating.

No matter what happened, she’d managed to win again.

•

For the first time in my life, I opened up. I ended up in the principal’s office, then met with the school guidance counselor and I told them everything. About the girls who teased me every day, about my mother and my sister who haunted me, about the seals that I found dead on the beach this morning. I even told them about the lies Lucy spread about me back in first grade. I thought my heart was going to break in half and that there wasn’t enough Kleenex in the world for all my tears and I kept thinking that at any minute, one of them was going to start laughing at me.

But nobody laughed.

They just listened and nodded their heads. They wrote things down in a folder with my name on it, a really thick folder that must have been following me around for the past ten or eleven years.

They talked to me with calm voices like they really cared.

Like I wasn’t invisible, not even a little bit.

Sean thought we were going to get suspended or worse. We might not even pass tenth grade, I think that was what he told me later, at lunch.

He was wrong.

In the end, he came out like my Knight in Shining Armor. He was just defending his best friend and trying to stop a fight.

Even though part of me was really wishing that he would say he was more than my best friend when we sat across from each other at lunch. That he would take my hand and tell me how much he really cared about me.

Still, in the end, one good thing came out of all of it.

Lucy got suspended for two days.

Once I heard the news, I couldn’t stop smiling.

•

Brianna caught up with me in between third and fourth period, somewhere between the Civil War and French verb conjugation. I was walking with my head a tiny bit higher than usual, my Doc Marten boots thudding against the floor and my right hand twisting through my hair—one of my many nervous habits.

A hand grabbed me by the shoulder and I swiveled, ready to duck, still expecting Lucy to sneak up behind me and even the score.

It was Brianna. She put both hands up to show she hadn’t meant to scare me.

I sighed. Nothing like flinching when your one and only girl friend touches you. Right in front of all the Paper Dolls. They’d been pretty quiet since this morning, but that didn’t mean I trusted them. I had a feeling they were texting each other right now. It’d probably be on their Facebook pages by the time I got home. With accompanying photos.

“Sorry,” I said. All my muscles relaxed and I retreated into my old body, my posture slumped, my hair falling over my face as I looked down.

“Are you okay?” Brianna asked, her eyes wide, an expression I would have mocked if it had been on a Paper Doll. Today, for the first time, it looked like genuine concern. “Did she hit you?”

I shook my head.

“I didn’t think so.” Brianna grinned. “Did you hear what happened?

In her excitement, she must have forgotten that I was the outcast here. Nobody shared gossip with me.

“Lucy had to hand over her cell phone and car keys to her mom. Before they even left the office.” Then she lowered her voice. “She’s grounded, too.” We leaned toward each other and the world around us disappeared. Nobody jostled us as they passed. Apparently I’d earned a wide berth today. “You’re still coming to my party, aren’t you? You have to, you just have to.”

“I want to,” I said.

“You can’t leave me there with all the jocks and the cheerleaders and the band geeks.”

“I might find a way to pull it off,” I said, a plan in mind. “But I doubt that Sean will be able to make it. You know how his dad is. And Sean was going to give me a ride—”

“You
have
to come, even if Sean can’t. I can pick you up.”

But this was going to be my first date with Sean, I wanted to say, even though I hadn’t known that for sure. Still, I had everything planned out—even our first kiss. I never did anything without a plan.

Until today.

“Kira?”

I looked at her, wondering what I had missed.

“Call me, okay? When you’re ready to go.”

I nodded.

Then we parted and I slogged into position beside all the other students, shouldering my way upstream. Pretending not to notice that the Paper Dolls around me seemed almost human without their queen.

•

By the time I got to honors English, I had everything figured out. I was going to march into class and confront Mrs. P about this meeting she had scheduled with my dad and me. I was going to get it all straightened out, prove that I had just been goofing around in my journal. Of course, I never meant any of that stuff.

She would see it my way. For sure.

I was going to channel all these strange emotions and use them to my advantage—because normally I was a bit too timid to speak up to a teacher. About my grades. Or the homework. Or anything.

So I strolled into class, my backpack draped over one shoulder, my head up.

Then the crowd of students cleared—all happy little drones, heading for their seats—and I saw who was standing at the head of the classroom.

A substitute.

Mrs. P wasn’t even here today.

That was when I knew that the Doomsday Clock was still ticking and I wouldn’t be able stop it. Dad and I were still going to have to face Mrs. P on Monday. It didn’t matter that Lucy had gotten suspended or that the Paper Dolls were mysteriously subdued or that I might find a way to get to Brianna’s party. What was waiting for me on Monday felt like a killer whale hiding in murky water.