Luminosity (Gravity Series #3) (The Gravity Series) (24 page)

“I didn’t pass out,” I mumbled, squeezing my eyes shut. I could go to sleep right there, sitting up.

“What would you call it? A siesta?”

I opened my eyes to see Callie’s face right in front of mine. She was checking my vitals. “Has this ever happened before?” she asked.

Alex took the opportunity to tell her about my so-called seizure back during the seance at the orphanage. “She was twitching on the floor and everything. We had to carry her out. And then the time you saw her, when Lainey hit her. I didn’t see her then, but Theo said that she crashed like a bag of bricks.”

“Where was the seizure? The first one?”

Alex looked at me, questioning my eyes. I glared at him, shaking my head quickly. “Twister dance party. Got a little frisky with those circles.”

“Alex, how about you go to class now?” I said loudly. He shrugged and left the room.

She placed a thermometer under my tongue, waiting for it to beep.

“Did you have any luck with the book I gave you?” she asked casually.

“A little bit. I found out that this jewelry I have is kind of special.”

“Oh, really?” Her tone was bored, polite. And yet still, something held me back from telling her.

“Yeah, I have this pair of sapphire earrings that it says makes me smarter. Go figure.”

The lie was pathetic, but the thermometer beeped and she pulled it out. It was digital but she shook it absentmindedly anyway. “I think it’s important you go home for the day. Put your feet up. Relax. I’m going to give you the name of a great new doctor in town, he specializes in neurosurgery but he’s also a neurologist and he might be more thorough.”

“Harlow Briggs’ father?”

“Yep. He’s the best of the best.”

“Was Harlow Briggs really getting PMS pills?” I asked. I didn’t know why, but it didn’t ring true to me. Probably because Harlow was a lying—

“I’m not at liberty to say,” Callie said with a smirk. “But if I was, I would say yes. Don’t tell anyone I told you this, honey, but the underground drug trade has gotten pretty bad lately, so no one is allowed to take their meds without coming down to the office. Now you lie back and rest while I go call Hugh.”

I settled back on the coat, staring up at stickers of jungle animals someone had plastered to the ceiling. Why did I have the feeling that everyone was lying to me?

###

I kicked my feet against the exam table nervously. I wasn’t just worried about my brain—although that was a source of vexation, to be sure. I was worried because the doctor was Harlow Briggs’ father. Odds were he’d be a tremendous jerk.

“Don’t worry, Ariel,” Hugh said from beside me. “We’ve already had you checked out once. Callie just thought it would be a good precaution. Why didn’t you tell me you were having fainting spells?”

“It’s only happened a couple of times a year,” I hedged carefully.

“Still, you should let me know when anything is wrong,” Hugh said, looking more upset that I hadn’t been honest with him.

I never would have brought Claire; she hated the idea of anything being mentally off with me. She had taken me to a psychiatrist last year for the simple reason of getting me on medication. Just the potential for crazy made her scared.

I tried to get my mind off of things before I had a stroke from nervousness. “Are you decorating your apartment this year for Halloween?”

Hugh shrugged. “I don’t know. All my decorations are in the shed at the house. I don’t really feel up to it.”

“You, not feeling up to tacky-fying your digs? Now I know you’re not my real father. Admit it, an alien replaced you while you slept.”

“Hey, I carved a pumpkin,” he said defensively.

“One pumpkin?” I quizzed.

He looked embarrassed. “From a stencil.”

I mocked a horrified expression. “And you call yourself a man.”

He chuckled at me. There was a rap at the door, cutting short the moment. We hadn’t had a laugh together in quite a while.

“Come in!” I yelled.

Dr. Briggs, entered the room, wearing a crisp white lab coat with a nametag. He was taller than he’d looked at Thornhill’s office. He immediately smiled at me, and shook my father’s hand.

“Hi, Ariel. Nice to meet you. What brings you to the office today?” He shook my hand too and took up a seat on a rolling chair, sliding it closer to the exam table. “Not often I see a patient your age. I think my daughter goes to your school.”

In one burst, my nervousness left me. He was nothing like I imagined him to be—the cold, calculating mannerisms of Thornhill people. My shoulders relaxed and I sat forward.

“My school nurse wanted me to come. I passed out in class.”

“Kind of a jump to head straight for neurology,” he said. “Did they test your blood sugar? Blood pressure?”

“Your nurse did.”

He looked over the results, then asked me more questions. I explained about my past history with head injuries. Listening patiently, he jotted down notes with his left hand. Finally, he slid his pen into the breast pocket of his lab coat. He still didn’t look convinced, and that made me feel better, like he was on my side.

“I don’t want to go through the trouble of a CT without further evidence,” Briggs said after he was done giving me an exam. “The radiation is trace, but it’s still an unnecessary risk. So, we’re going to hold off on that for now, especially since you’ve already had one. Let’s watch what happens, and if you have troubles in the future, come back.”

I should have kept my mouth shut, but being at the doctor’s office somehow made me feel as though there had to be something wrong with me. “I have really vivid dreams. Is that normal? Because my grandma had something like that and she had mental problems.”

I felt Hugh’s eyes immediately dart towards me. They were practically burning a hole into my skull.

Briggs frowned and shut my chart. “What are the dreams about? How frequently are you having them?”

“They’re more like nightmares, about random people and events,” I said vaguely. “Not super frequently, but at least once a month.”

“Do you ever have trouble moving afterward? Any loss of feeling? Incontinence?”

“The trouble moving, a few times. And twice I woke up sort of numb and out of it”

“You never told me about that, Ariel,” Hugh said, the words drifting off of his lips.

Dr. Briggs looked troubled. “Let’s keep an eye on that. We might want to run an EEG for abnormalities. If it happens again, call my office immediately.”

The doctor left the room with a final goodbye. My father’s polite grin dropped away the instant the door shut. He spun towards me.

“Why didn’t you tell me about these dreams?” he demanded.

“I didn’t think you’d understand,” I said truthfully. I saw the worried, unsure look on his face, and tried to comfort him. He wouldn’t believe the truth. “It’s not a big deal. Callie just told me to make sure I told him all the details. Everyone has nightmares.”

CHAPTER 21

“ALL OF YOU
, up and
out into the hall,” Principal McPherson said as he stormed into my homeroom on Monday morning. I’d wondered what was up when he had come on the morning announcements and told us homeroom would run long. Two beefy, preppy goons in plaid shirts hovered behind him, looking suspiciously eager.

“For what?” one boy asked.

“Locker inspections.”

Everyone was still drowsy from the weekend, but we got up and started slogging out into the hall. I slung my backpack over my shoulder and shuffled out. I had nothing incriminating in my locker, but I still didn’t like the idea of McPherson or his cronies pawing through it.

We lined up against the wall opposite our lockers. A few students went green and whispered about their personal paraphernalia.

“Did anybody have any idea he was going to shake us down today?” asked one of the students. No one said yes.

“He wanted to surprise us,” said another. “If we knew he was coming, we could hide whatever he’s out to find. I bet it’s pills. Literally, man, I bet you five it’s that.”

The boys shook on it and I rolled my eyes.

McPherson started from the left, opening the lockers with the master keys. He didn’t even do the dirty work—his cronies were the ones carelessly digging through the lockers and tossing things on the floor.

“I think that’s against school code,” I spoke up.

McPherson just sneered at me. He made no attempt to disguise it, his eyes angry red coals. “What’sa matter, Ms. Donovan? Worried I’m going to find something that doesn’t belong? Take it up with the school board.”

“I’m more worried you’ll never find those marbles you lost.”

The smile dropped off his face. “Which locker is yours?”

I pointed to mine. He pushed the large frames of his recruited bullies aside, fiddled with the keys and wrenched my locker open.

He dug through both shelves, chucking all of the contents on the floor. Watching him completely disregard my meager property pissed me off royally, but I choked back the complaint. I’d already done enough damage.

I wanted to text Henry or Theo, wondering how many homerooms they were hitting or if they were targeting ours. On second thought, I knew they were—McPherson thought I had something.

He finished with my locker, slammed it shut and handed the keys over to his henchmen. Then he limped over my belongings, sweat pouring down his greasy forehead.

“You could pick that stuff up,” I snapped angrily.
A little more damage won’t hurt.

“Don’t push it with me, young kettlefish. Boys, search her pack.”

The two goons lurched over to me. I protested, but they wrenched the backpack off my back. The stockier of the two broke the zipper and dumped the contents on the floor. He shook his head at McPherson.

Not wanting to risk expulsion, I resisted the urge to claw his face off. At least I’d had the lucky idea to take embarrassing personal feminine hygiene products out a couple of weeks ago; a scattered bouquet of tampons would be just the thing to make me live in infamy forever.

I was on the verge of crying, shocked by the invasion. Any minute now people would start laughing at me. Instead, a couple of classmates silently helped me while I bent down and shoved things back into my broken backpack and locker. I felt violated. McPherson didn’t seem as smug anymore, though, as though the wind had been knocked out of his sails. As though he didn’t find what he was looking for.
My necklace.
As soon as the thought bloomed, I was sure of it.
I’d left it at home beneath my mattress that morning and was now thankful for my bad memory.

They worked down a couple more lockers, but McPherson didn’t follow them. Suddenly, the henchmen paused, conferring with each other.

“Principal McPherson, we found something,” the thinner boy said.

McPherson, who had totally lost interest when my locker hadn’t held a Colombian drug lord’s stash, went over to the open locker. He pulled out a rather large bag of green herbs.

“Whose locker is this?” he said, looking in that moment just like the Grinch about to invade Whoville.

Someone pushed Charlotte Gary forward and she stumbled out. She looked down at the floor, monochromatic from her pale face and dark makeup.

“Nice Halloween costume,” one of the goons said. She was just dressed like she normally was and he knew that. We all knew it.

“Is this yours?” McPherson barked, jamming the baggie under her nose.

Her eyes darted around. “It’s my locker, but that’s not mine. Somebody planted it in there.”

McPherson chuckled. “Nice try. You know this isn’t the first time you’ve tumbled in trouble even this week. Such a let down. You’ve punched all the holes on your ticket, Lotte. I think it’s finally time to take out the trash.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“To my office. Now!” She began marching with little choice since the henchmen were behind her, literally laughing behind her back and imitating her stiff, masculine walk.

To the rest of us, McPherson said, “Back to class. The bell will go off in five minutes and you’ll be able to zip to first period for a shortened clock.”

We shuffled back into class. Charlotte was finally going to get the punishment that had been evading her, at least I assumed so. But I wondered if McPherson was going to stop with me, or if, since he hadn’t found the necklace, he’d keep digging. Like a dog in a pile of dirt.

###

As fall continued, my nose was buried in my studies for a while. Jenna and I had spoken about different ways that we could find out more information, but all of them required work and time that I didn’t have. All the while, the necklace seemed to invisibly call to me from the hollow spot in my mattress where I now stored it. I couldn’t find a lead-lined box, but a small tackle box had seemed to help.

For our last Halloween in Hell, Alex, Theo and I were planning on going trick-or-treating. We hadn’t been in years, but we didn’t want to miss this last opportunity.