HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (47 page)

Dell reconsidered.
Her temper, like every other emotion, seemed set on a hair trigger.
"I'm sorry. I know it's not your fault. All this takes getting
used to, that's all."

"Not all of it
sucks," he said. Then he laughed. "Sucks. Get it?"

She couldn't smile.
Eddie's jokes weren't all that good to begin with.

"Anyway, take
it easy, Weezy. Things will work out."

Weezy. That almost
made her laugh. He liked to be playful with her, rhyming a name for
her with whatever he was saying at the moment. She expected some day
he'd get to say, "There's a hitch, Bitch."

"What are you
smiling at?" he asked, glancing at the flood waters on the TV
screen.

"Nothing."
She was surprised he hadn't read her mind.

"Want to play
Monopoly?" he asked.

"You always
beat me. You always get the hotels first."

"Chess?"

"Not now. I
always get checkmated."

"Well, I'm
going out. Tell Mom and Dad I've already eaten."

She watched him go,
this time the normal way, one step at a time. She heard the front
door shut. She was left with CNN and a reporter in hip boots and a
yellow rain slicker.

She couldn't wait
to get back to school.

The first day back
at school Dell was as nervous as a goose stranded in the center of a
freeway. Cheyenne, one of her friends from her neighborhood, was
waiting for her at the front entrance before classes started. "I
tried to call, but your mom said you were in bed. What's up?"

Dell was careful
not to look her in the eyes. She said, "Oh, the usual, you know,
cramps and stuff."

"Oh, yeah,
that. Maybe you need hormone shots."

Surprised, Dell
said, "Why would I need that?"

"Well, that's
what my mom would say. She said she saw it on some TV show about
girls who get bad cramps. Hormones are all screwed up. A couple
shots—boom!—everything back to normal."

"Sounds
drastic to me." In fact, she wondered about that. Would she
menstruate? For what reason? She'd never have children if she could
never have a boyfriend. Oh, God, she couldn't ask Mentor about that.
She'd have to talk to her mother. She sighed aloud, and Cheyenne
looked over at her.

"You all
right?"

"I'm fine.
Just a little tired."

They walked under a
cool portico out of the hot spring sun, and then through the entrance
doors into the building. School would end in three weeks, thank God.
She didn't know if she could stand being indoors even that long. The
long dark hallway illuminated by overhead fluorescent lights was
oppressive to her, and the sounds of the lockers banging open and
shut sounded like an orchestra's percussion section had gone
cymbal-mad.

"You have your
sunglasses on."

Dell touched the
nosepiece. "They're almost clear. My eyes are bothering me."

"Listen, my
mom said you could go blind if you have a seeing problem and you
don't go to the optometrist."

"Come on,
Cheyenne. You know how your mom is." Cheyenne's mom had been
pushing odd cures and potions on her daughter's friends since they
were in first grade together. Dell opened her locker and took out the
books for her first class, English with Mr. Dupree.

Cheyenne nodded as
she waited by Dell's locker. Her attention had strayed down the
hallway where she looked for Bobby, her boyfriend. He sometimes
walked her to her own locker where they could sneak a quick kiss
behind the locker door. Dell envied her now more than ever. She
didn't have to think in order to breathe. She would get married and
have someone to love her forever. And she had a head of luxuriant
short black hair that rivaled the darkest night. Dell's own wild,
slightly kinky red-blonde hair was like a bright beacon signaling
rocky shoals ahead whereas Cheyenne's hair was sexy and sleek.

Cheyenne didn't see
Bobby yet, so she turned back to Dell, who was moving down the hall
shoulder to shoulder with the other kids. She caught up with her. "My
mom, yeah, my mom's got a cure for everything and that cure means
doctors, new treatments, herbal therapy, or vinegar. Did I tell you
she thinks vinegar is heaven's elixir? She takes two tablespoons of
the stuff every morning. Never mind what I said. You look good in
those sunglasses anyway. If you had on black clothes, you could
almost be one of Loder's gang."

"Heaven
preserve us!" Dell exclaimed, laughing.

Loder's group were
outcasts in the predominately white, Christian, middle class Lyndon
B. Johnson High. They wore only black, were into leather—even
in this heat—always kept on their sunglasses, and she'd even
heard some of them had split off into their own little cult and were
into vampirism. She shuddered. She could show them vampire! She could
bring a Predator into class that would make them cower and wet their
seats.

She had a great
loathing for kids who pretended they were searching for death and
immortality. They were wayward children, totally disillusioned and,
not only that, but they were silly. Black clothes and sunglasses
weren't going to make them live forever. It was just . . . crazy. It
was just . . . sad.

"Mr. Dupree's
gonna notice, though," Cheyenne was saying. They both shared
Dupree's first period. He wasn't a bad teacher, but he was pompous as
hell. He made the kids who dressed strangely his scapegoats, quoting
Byron and teasing them about being displaced in history by a few
hundred years. "You should be over in seventeenth-century
England at some castle," he often said in his booming voice and
pointing at one kid or another. "Frolicking through stone halls
and tossing plum seeds into a cold, dead hearth."

"Let him,"
Dell said, turning into Dupree's room. "He doesn't scare me."

As it happened,
Dupree glanced only once at Dell in her seat in the middle of the
classroom, blinked, then looked away. Dell had tried a little mind
coaxing. She sent the message to him telepathically: Sunglasses are
normal wear. Some students hate the glare off the windows. Keep your
business to yourself. It surprised and amazed her that it worked.

It must have
worked. He didn't even ridicule Brady or Chignon, the two kids in her
class dressed today in tattered black jeans and shirts. He stuck to
the program, talking about Texas literature—which was lame, in
his opinion—and Southwestern authors in general. Their
assignment was to read Larry King's Best Little Whorehouse In Texas,
the play. Dell knew she could finish it in under five minutes and
besides, she liked the assignment. She'd even been to LaGrange and
seen the old tumbledown whorehouse when she was a little girl on a
short vacation with her parents.

The day went fine
except during History where she sat just one seat in front of Ryan
Major. She felt him staring at the back of her neck until she turned
around, her index finger going to the centerpiece of her sunglasses.
She knew he could see her eyes. But it wasn't her eyes he was
interested in. When she turned she watched his gaze fall from her
face to her chest. She turned back around immediately and if she
could have blushed, she would have. Was he looking at her breasts or
had she accidentally stopped breathing? What if she'd forgotten to
take breaths? Oh, God, what could he think if she had?

She tried to calm
herself. She knew if she wanted, she could peek into his mind. Her
history teacher was boring anyway, making the past so dry and brittle
no one listened to him. Should she really pry into people's minds?
Was it fair?

To hell with fair.
She'd been granted supernatural powers and decades on Earth to use
them. It would be stupid to ignore her abilities. She wanted to test
them.

She narrowed her
eyes to slits and turned inward. She visualized Ryan behind her. His
forest-green pullover T-shirt, his new denim jeans, his hands crossed
on his desk, a class ring on his right hand from North Dallas.
Although he would graduate now from Lyndon B. Johnson, his ring would
be from the other school. It must be hard for him to change schools
that way, right at the end. She imagined his face, his eyes on her
back as she carefully breathed. Easy, easy, she told herself. Slip in
easy so he won't know.

And then she was
there, reading his thoughts, not shocked by how jumbled they were.
Her parents had explained about that. How it wasn't as easy to read
people as she thought. The brain, they said, was a storm of activity
and thoughts were like snowflakes in a blizzard, flying everywhere,
each snowflake a connecting thought to another until the ground of
the brain was covered with hills and valleys of thoughts layered and
packed down like snow in drifts.

She heard Ryan's
thoughts as if they were being whispered in her ear. She got a
snippet of this and one of that. She was not gifted enough in mind
reading to be able to follow the several streams of thoughts in their
completeness. She caught tail ends and bits and pieces . . . wonder
if it's satin . . . long hair, I like long hair, why do most girls
cut off their hair anyway? . . . she's so still . . . like a statue .
. . breathing so gently . . . wait, is she even breathing? . . .

He had wondered if
her blouse was made of satin. Silk, she could have told him. She'd
given up her usual sweatshirt and jeans today in favor of a sky-blue
silk blouse and a short tropical-printed skirt. She was a different
person. She felt like dressing differently now.

He liked her hair
long. She resisted an urge to slide her hand behind her neck and lift
her hair up to let it fall. She knew it would catch the light and
shine if she did that. Her hair, as unmanageable as it was, was
almost metallic, like crinkled gold foil, when caught in a certain
light.

Though she could
read what he was thinking, she knew it was morally irresponsible to
act on that knowledge for personal gain or ego. So she did not reach
out and lift her hair for his benefit. For a full two minutes. Then,
smiling, feeling happy she had the power to play with people even if
it was not exactly fair, she reached back and lifted her long hair,
letting it fall softly across her shoulders and cascade down her back
again. That would get his attention.

And he had wondered
why she was so still and if he'd really noticed she wasn't breathing
for a time.

God!

She had lapsed in
her breathing. How dangerous it was out here in the public view where
she must be completely human and normal again. She must not let that
happen again. This one time Ryan (and anyone else behind her who
might have noticed) would put it down to their imaginations. She must
be breathing, they just couldn't see her doing it, that's all. But if
she made this mistake very often, someone somewhere, maybe even Ryan,
would call attention to it, or even ask her outright—Why aren't
you breathing? How can you not breathe?

She tumbled away
from contact with Ryan's mind and concentrated only on her breathing.
She took a deep breath, in fact, and let it out in a little quiet
whoosh. There. Let him see that. Let him not wonder and puzzle over
things that were none of his business.

Dell smiled again,
and bit the inside of her lip. At least he was interested enough in
her to be staring. He had noticed her. Probably only because she sat
in front of him, but still . . . he liked her hair. He had wondered
what her shirt was made of.

Then darkness
surrounded her thoughts and she fell into a deep depression while her
history teacher's voice droned in the background and the seconds
ticked off on the schoolhouse clock on the wall above his head. It
didn't matter if Ryan noticed her or not. He shouldn't, really. And
she shouldn't care. They had no future, not even as friends.

Chancellor, her
history teacher, was saying something about a myth concerning living
forever, about eternity. She came to suddenly, focusing on his words.
They had been studying the myths of primitive South American and
African tribes for the past week. She guessed his recital now had
something to do with it.

Chancellor said,
"The Namibian people tell their children about the hare and the
moon to teach a lesson about the afterlife. The hare asked the moon
if the moon would ever die. The moon said that he rose each night
without fail and the hare could live forever, too, if only he
believed. The hare said that he could not believe in the eternal, he
had seen too many of his kind die, sometimes horrible deaths, and
they did not rise again to live.

"The moon told
the hare that even though his fellow hares did not appear to be
alive, nevertheless, they lived; no one could see them, that was all.
Like when the moon disappeared in the daylight—it had not gone
forever, but only for a time. The hare said he could not believe in
eternity and so he guessed he would really die, no matter what the
moon said. The Namibian parents told their children this story and it
was the reason why animals and men appeared to die now and not live
again. But the moon was eternal, riding the sky forever, because he
believed that he would. And despite the way it looked, men and
animals also lived on, invisible, but eternal."