Instinct (14 page)

He places a
finger on my chin and turns my head to face him again, his eyes a deep sapphire
as they search mine. Compelled to answer honestly, I nod. Regret flashes across
his face and then he draws me closer, his eyes trapping me in a moment that
seems to last forever.

“Well, we
can’t have that, can we?” he whispers, mouth so close to mine I can feel his
breath on my lips. Still incapable of speech, I just shake my head, my skin
suddenly on fire, anticipation and hope thrilling through my veins. “Let me
show you how it’s done.” His voice is little more than a sigh and suddenly
there is no space between us.

His lips touch
mine feather light, the disparity from what Jake did making me dizzy, the kind
of head-spinning weightlessness I used to feel when I was a kid, twirling and twirling
just to see the world fly by. He focuses on my lower lip, carefully avoiding
the sore spot, and my mouth opens slightly, drinking in the heady, warm feeling
that spreads through me as his lips part and press against mine with just
enough force to make my knees weak. For a moment, he doesn’t move, and I revel
in the sensation of his lips, his breath mingling with mine. 

He pulls back
abruptly, eyes wide with surprise, and takes a step away from me. A chill
settles over me and I miss his warmth, his closeness in a way that doesn’t make
sense, as though we have been pressed together much longer than a moment.

“I’m sorry, I
don’t know why I did that,” he says and my heart drops to my stomach, my head
turning hot and fuzzy.

“Oh…I…I’m
sorry,” I stutter, so humiliated I’m surprised I’m still standing. I back away,
stumbling, wanting nothing more than to get away from Cole, from the disbelief
on his face. “I’ll just…”

I step on a
fallen twig and the crack seems to wake him from his thoughts. I am avoiding
his eyes, but he grabs my hand and I halt, so close to tears I don’t dare
speak.

“No, no…I
didn’t mean it like that. I just meant, that’s not why I came here tonight. I
wanted to continue our conversation from yesterday, but then you smiled like
you were happy to see me and you were hurt…and I couldn’t stand thinking Jake
kissed you first.” He speaks in a frantic rush, pulling me closer to him. I dig
my feet in, searching for my lost dignity.

“You know
what, Cole? I’ve had about all I can take of bipolar behavior today, so why
don’t you just get to the point or leave me alone?” I am shocked at how controlled
I sound, since hurt is still roiling around my gut like broken needles.

“I can’t
believe this. I’m usually so smooth,” he mutters, releasing me to run a hand
over his head in apparent bafflement. I just glare at him and cross my arms
over my chest to hide the fact that I am still trembling.

“I came here
to talk, to start getting to know you better, and then I just wanted to kiss
you, be near you. It’s…unexpected.” His eyes narrow for an instant and a thread
of suspicion enters his voice. “You didn’t forget to mention any other
abilities did you?”

I crinkle my
brow in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Do you maybe
have some compulsion talent added in with the whole honesty thing?” he asks
casually.

I am
speechless with my distress, and all the blood drains from my head, centering
somewhere in my chest like a hot metal knot. The damn tears prick my eyes
again, and I just start shaking my head, incapable of any other response.
Cole’s expression remains sharp for a moment and then he shakes himself and
reaches for me.

“Sorry, Derry,
I didn’t mean that…” he begins, but I swallow my hurt and move away.

“Stay away
from me. You and your psycho brother. I am done with this shit,” I growl,
turning to run back to the house, barely holding back the tears.

“Derry, wait.
I’m sorry,” Cole calls after me, grabbing at my arm.

I snatch it
away and round on him. “You know, I have been pushed around my whole life by my
mother.  Don’t you think that if I had the ability to make her do what I wanted
I would’ve used it by now? Maybe I would have made Jake leave me alone?” I
shake my head crossly and start toward the house, tossing one last comment over
my shoulder. “You know what the first thing you said to me tonight was? You
said you were drawn to me. I can’t force that.”

He calls after
me and attempts to follow, but I hurry inside and rush up the stairs, ignoring
my mother’s startled exclamation. I slam my door shut and stomp around the room
for a bit, trying to convert my humiliation and disappointment into righteous
anger. It doesn’t work.

I collapse on
the bed and draw my quilt up around me, burying my face in my pillow. But the
tears won’t come now. After fighting them so long, I give a dry sob and feel my
eyes burn, but there is no release. I don’t even know what I am most upset
about at this point, whether it’s Jake or Cole or just life in general, but the
inside of my skin throbs with the need to escape, to forget.

At the back of
my mind, I am listening for the creak of the stairs, the sound of my mother
coming to check on me. But the minutes pass by and there is no hesitant knock
at the door, no whisper of fabric as she sits next to me. When I finally do
hear her steps down the hall, she doesn’t even pause at my door before she
closes her own.

Then the tears
come.

I grin as
Nicole comes skipping through the shop door, her hair blown in wild tangles and
dotted with snowflakes. Her cheeks are red, her eyes bright, and there is no
trace of the sullen, downtrodden girl I met my first day of school three weeks
ago.  After her first big confession about her fears over Miranda’s death, she
clammed up a bit, keeping herself distant for a few days, as though waiting for
the other shoe to drop. But when I didn’t call her crazy or start mocking her
she made tentative gestures of friendship.

The day I told
Tasha her boyfriend was cheating with her cousin, Nicole and I became best
friends. Tasha had been posting nasty, unfounded comments about Nicole sleeping
with old guys at the train station for crack money. Nicole was miserable, and I
could see her drawing into herself like she did when we first met. Tasha was
hanging all over her football player boyfriend, looking so smug, and then he
opened his mouth. I don’t know what he really said, but I heard about his
little affair and for once I took vindictive pleasure in dishing out some
unwelcome truth.

Tasha called
me a freak, but she didn’t target Nicole again. Every day after that Nicole’s
smile got wider, more natural. Every day she came further out of her shell. And
for the first time in my life, I had someone that made me laugh, someone to
talk to about my boy troubles.

It was heaven.

“I’ve got a
secret you’re not going to like,” Nicole says, bouncing over to the counter
where I sit unhappily with the cash register. I finish ringing up my customer, who
purchases a beaded bag from the ‘20s. I give her my shopkeeper’s smile and then
sigh with satisfaction when the bell above the door announces her exit.        

“Oh my god, do
you ever stop working?” Nicole demands, climbing up onto the retro barstool
next to the counter.

Rolling my eyes
toward the back of the store where my mom is busy foisting her wares on an
unsuspecting elderly couple, I heave a sigh. Mom has had me doing inventory all
week, which means my newfound social life has taken a serious dip. If I thought
it was really necessary, I wouldn’t complain, but mom has revealed on several
occasions that she doesn’t want me to have friends or a social life. She just
wants me to stay with her, working at the store, waiting to use my ability for
her benefit.

“Oh, come on,
you owe me dinner. And I’m hungry,” Nicole pouts, extracting a reluctant
chuckle from me.

With a grin to
cover my trepidation over Nicole’s unwitting admission, I call back to Mom,
“Nicole’s here. I’m leaving!”  I jump down from my perch behind the counter and
grab Nicole, dashing out the door before Mom has a chance to argue. We pause
outside the store, trying to decide where to eat. Snow drifts down in soft
clouds, dusting the cobblestone street, covering the old, muddied snow from
last week like a balm over a bad memory.

“Ugh. No more
pizza. I can’t take it anymore,” Nicole begs and I roll my eyes at her
dramatics.

“Well, there
aren’t that many options. You’ve shot down all our usual choices.”

She glances
around impatiently and then her gaze settles on the café across the street,
The
Stone Bistro
. Following her gaze, I shake my head violently. “Hell, no. No
way. That’s where Cole works,” I remind her.

“Oh, come on.
How long are you going to keep avoiding him?” Nicole sighs, repeating her
oft-heard refrain. Since I couldn’t really give her the whole story about my
fight with Cole, I just told her he had kissed me and then regretted it. While
she sympathized with me, she didn’t understand the depth of my resentment.

Sometimes I
didn’t either.

Cole had come
to the store the day after the big first kiss fiasco, full of contrition, but
no explanation for what had happened between us.  I told him I accepted his
apology, and on some level I did, but the humiliation ran too deep to just let
go.  He stopped by almost every day and bugged me until I gave him my phone
number, after which he called every night to talk, mostly about our abilities
and what he thought we should do with them. Sometimes I answered, sometimes I
didn’t. He didn’t bring up the kiss and neither did I.

But it hurt
every time I saw him, and I’d been dodging him lately, too confused by my
feelings and what our relationship really was.

“Forever,” I
finally answer.

“Fine, fine. 
Pizza it is,” Nicole capitulates, shrugging and looking wistfully toward the café.
I ignore her and lead the way down the hill to the pizza parlor, not looking
back.

“So, I have
something to tell you,” Nicole says, her voice hesitant.  I stuff the last of
my crust in my mouth and look at her inquiringly.

When she
doesn’t continue, I lean forward, lowering my voice. “What is it? Are you
okay?”

She nods and
then looks out the window, watching the snow deepen, erasing the sidewalk in a
streak of white. Finally she takes a deep breath and nods, as though making a
decision.

“I think I
know what Miranda found out about Phillip,” she says, her voice barely above a
whisper.

I freeze,
startled by the sudden revelation. Nicole hasn’t said anything else about her
suspicions since the first day she told me, and I had let it go as well. The
only time I see Phillip is in first period, and we’ve remained friendly, but I turned
down his few attempts to ask me out. No matter what the truth is, I can’t get
over the unsettled feeling he gives me or the constant, uncomfortable buzz
under my skin.

“What do you
mean? I thought…you haven’t said anything about this in a while,” I ask, unsure
of how to react.

“No, I just
didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. Hear me out, okay?” Nicole’s
voice is fragile and I know she is worried about how I’ll react, but I can
sense the truth from her and know that whatever she has to tell me she believes
to be true.

“Of course,” I
say, maintaining eye contact until she relaxes and leans back in her seat.

“Okay. Let’s
pay and then go somewhere quiet.”

Since it’s my
turn, I pay the bill and we head outside, shivering as the cold creeps through
the openings on our jackets. “Where do you want to go?” I ask her.

“Let’s walk
down to the river,” she answers, starting down the street before I can argue.   I’m
not nuts about discussing her dead friend by the river she died in, but it’s
hard to change Nicole’s mind when she’s set it on something. I hurry to catch
her, digging my hands into my pockets, trying to bury my unease.

“So what’s
with all the secrecy?”

Nicole gives
me scathing look. “You’re joking right? He probably killed Miranda because of
what she found out and you want me to blurt it out in the middle of a
restaurant?”

I put up my
hands defensively. “Okay, okay. Yeesh.” 

She snorts and
picks up the pace, reaching the bottom of the incline and turning to the right
toward the overlook and the path to the old railroad bridge. “So has Jake given
you any problems today?” she asks, changing the subject.

With a sigh I
shrug. “Friendly as ever,” I answer, uncomfortable with the turn in the
conversation. Everything having to do with Jake makes me uncomfortable. While I
have managed to avoid actually speaking to him about anything not related to
the newspaper, it seems as though he is always there; waiting in the hall
outside my classes, around the corner when I’m eating lunch, standing just
behind me when I turn around, his slate eyes watching my every move with
unnerving intensity.

“Not gonna say
anything else about it, are you?” she asks, humor creeping in her voice. She
can laugh. He doesn’t threaten to either kiss her or kill her on a daily basis.

“Nope,” I mutter,
refusing to think about it. If I let thoughts of Jake intrude for too long,
I’ll drop out of school and move to a different town.

When we
finally reach an acceptable spot alone in a corner on the overlook, Nicole
drops her joking manner and turns serious eyes on me.

“So what is
it? What did you find out about Phillip?” I ask, unable to contain my curiosity
any longer. 

Nicole sighs
and gives me a wary look. “You’re not going to laugh at me, are you?”

            I roll my eyes so
hard my head hurts. “No, Nicole. I think we’ve established by now that I won’t
laugh at your theories. If I wasn’t willing to ride your crazy train, I
would’ve gotten off weeks ago.”

            She punches me
lightly in the shoulder and then drops all signs of humor. “Ok. Look, I don’t
have any solid proof yet, but I’m pretty sure that Phillip’s a drug dealer.”

I blink,
thinking that compared to some of her other theories, dealing drugs seems kind
of tame. “What makes you think that?” I ask, trying to be supportive.

“Miranda’s mom
called me yesterday and told me she was packing up some of Miranda’s stuff to
put in the attic. She wanted to give me the chance to pick out some of her
things to keep.” Nicole’s eyes blur with memory for a moment and I feel a
twinge of sympathetic pain on her behalf.
            “That was nice,” I comment, trying to encourage her to keep going,
to not get caught up in the miasma of guilt and sadness that swarms her every
time she mentions Miranda’s death.

“Yeah. I
haven’t talked to her in a while, so I was surprised when she called. But
Miranda and I were friends for a long time, so I guess she remembered me after
a while.” Nicole shakes her head and the focus reenters her eyes. “Anyway, so I
went, and I was looking through her stuff and I found her journal. It was
hidden in the false floor in her window seat, where we used to hide our candy
stashes and dirty books.”  Nicole laughs suddenly, warm sentiment written
across her face.

“Dirty books,
huh?” I tease, glad to see some of her grief has eased at the memory.

“Shut up.
Anyway, I guess no one else thought to look there, because it obviously hadn’t
been disturbed. So I took it with the other stuff.”
            I frown at this news, wondering if what she has done is wise. “Was
that a good idea? Maybe you should have given it to her mom, or the cops or something.
For the investigation.”

            She just gives a
dismissive toss of her head and pulls a dark brown leather journal from her
purse. “There is no investigation, Derry. No one cares anymore but me. Even her
mom is trying to forget her, packing up her stuff to tuck away like she was
some visiting relative who forgot her suitcase. No one else wants this shit
stirred up again, but I was right. Read this,” she commands, flipping open to a
page and shoving the notebook in my unwilling hands.

With serious
trepidation I look down at the slanted script on the pages, the dark ink
burning its message into my brain.

I can’t
breathe, I can’t think, I can’t sleep. Food tastes like his spit and I can’t
get it out of my mouth. No one cares, I can’t tell anyone. Phillip knows and
told me I’m just a dirty slut who asked for it and if I tell anyone else he’ll
break up with me and make sure everyone at school knows what happened.
Sometimes I don’t care, I want everyone to find out so that he’s punished, so
that he can’t do it to anyone else. But the shame…my mother would never
understand and Jake…he’d hate me. I waited for so long, and I always thought it
would happen with Jake, that we’d have our first time together and it would be
perfect. But then Shockey took me and I can’t get his scent out of my skin.
Phillip says he can smell him on me. He wrinkles his nose every time he sees me
like I’m rank, and I feel like I am, I feel like I’ll never get clean.

I gasp, tears
burning my eyes, and put my hand to my mouth. The despair, the hopelessness
that emanates from this page in a dead girl’s journal is suffocating, her
untold guilt and shame thick like smoke in my lungs.

            “Right? That has to
be what she found out!” Nicole exclaims triumphantly.

 I glance up
at her in shock before I remember whatever I just read is not what she saw. An
overwhelming sadness settles on my shoulders as I realize that this poor girl’s
sense of degradation was so intense she lied even in her journal, something she
never believed anyone else would see. With a heavy heart, I take another look
at the passage, filing away the terrible knowledge that has just been forced on
me. 

Today I
found a mysterious brown paper bag in Phillip’s glove box. When I asked him
what was in it, he slammed the lid on my fingers and told me to shut up. I
don’t know what he’s into, but it has to be illegal. He gets this expression on
his face, this glee when he looks at it, the same expression he has when we
walk around the halls together with everyone looking. He just likes to have
things. I don’t know why I don’t just open the bag, why I don’t tell him to go
to hell.  I just don’t seem to have the energy anymore.

“I don’t know,
Nicole. Why does this make you think he’s a drug dealer?” I ask, trying to keep
my voice steady. All I want to do is go home and lock myself away to weep for
Miranda, for her deeply hidden anguish. 

“Well what
else would he keep hidden in a brown paper bag in his glove box and be so
touchy about? That sick bastard, hurting her like that. I knew he was doing
something to her. I just can’t understand why she didn’t leave him. She left
Jake,” Nicole muses, creasing her brow so deeply the lines are etched on her
face.

“Is that the
only part that makes you think that?” I ask, wondering if Nicole has any idea
what really happened to her best friend.

“Yeah, and it’s
near the end. I got this journal for Miranda on her birthday at the end of
September, so she only had it a few weeks before she died. Everything else is
about how much she loves Phillip, how mad she is at Jake. There’s one brief
entry that seems weird, she mentions not being able to get clean, but it’s
really short. Here,” she says, flipping back a chunk of pages and pointing to a
half page entry. At first glance the handwriting is chaotic, frenzied, as
though scrawled out painfully, against the writer’s own will. With a sinking
stomach I read what is truly written.