Need (5 page)

I cruise next to him. He’s some sort of running god, because he isn’t close to being winded. His stride is long, powerful, and quick.

“Hi.”

Why I said this, I do not know. He’s cute. Okay. I am a sucker for cute boys and he [_was _]nice to Issie. Plus, he has good hair and he isn’t as pale as most Maine males. He looks like he works in the sun, or at least has seen the sun once, maybe many weeks ago. Plus, life is all supposed to be about making love, not war. My dad listened to John Lennon: I know this stuff.

“You’re fast,” he says, easy. No huffing. No puffing. No blowing the house down. “So are you.”

We run together, keeping pace. The only one ahead of us is Ian, who is loping around the track as if it’s nothing.

Nick shrugs at me while he runs, which is really something, because when I’m running full tilt it’s hard for me to speak, let alone break form to shrug.

“You can go faster, can’t you?” I huff out.

He just gives a little smile again and then his eyes shift into something cold, like gravestones with just the barest information about a life etched onto them.

“Zara,” he whisper-says.

I lean in closer to hear him. “What?”

My voice is not a whisper. It matches the thudding beat of my heart, the bass of the music that blares out of the speakers. “Awesome job, new girl!” Devyn yells, clapping.

Nick locks his eyes into mine. “You should stay away from Ian.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He’s just… he’s a user.”

“A user?”

We thunder past the jogging/singing girls.

“What do you mean, a user?” I ask again.

We flash by some unhealthy boys, including the onion-smell guy.

Nick sniffs the air. “Smells like they might not make it.” Might not make it. Like my dad.

I gulp and turn my head to look at him. He is oblivious. My dad’s face flashes into my head, the water bottle on the floor, the way I couldn’t do anything to help him. I ache, just ache, and it makes me mad. I start kicking. It’s way too early, but I have to get ahead and get away, like I can outrun death somehow, like I can run away from what’s real.

Might not make it.

Every muscle rebels but I ignore them and push past Mick, closing the distance between Ian and me in the final lap. I pass people but don’t really notice who. Some yell, but I don’t really hear them. With every footfall I increase the distance between me and Nick, between me and bad memories.

Might not make it.

Just Run. Run. Run.

I halve the distance between Ian and me. I quarter the distance.

People yell, I think. People holler. My red running shoes blur as they move over the grainy track. My arms pump. Kicking high to catch up, all power, all speed, and I get so close I can smell Ian, cold and icy like my windowpane this morning. He turns and looks at me.

He isn’t even concerned. A runner never turns to look back unless he knows he can’t be beat.

He smiles kindly-amused, I think-and picks up his pace. No sweat soaks his shirt, no beads on his forehead. Nothing.

God, that’s incredible, to be able to run like that.

He crosses the line three strides ahead of me, standing up, smiling.

I stumble across the line and fall to the ground, gasping for air, clutching my cinched-up stomach, and suppressing the urge to vomit, which is what happens sometimes when I run hard.

“You were great.” Ian bends over me and reaches a hand out to help me up.

I grab his hand, stagger, and the world dizzies around me. Ian wraps his arm around my waist, steadying me. My dad used to put his arm around me like that and I liked it, liked the comfortable feeling. Some part of me notices that his arm isn’t even warm. It’s cold. It makes no sense.

“You’re amazing,” I tell him. “I’ve never seen anyone that fast.”

“I do okay.”

“Okay?”

“Lots of training.”

My eyes lock with Nick’s eyes. He’s not winded, but he is sweaty, musky smelling. He glares at me and I’m suddenly super conscious of Ian’s arm around me.

“Everyone is an amazing runner here,” I pant, bending over again. “I can’t believe how good everyone is.”

“You were too,” Ian says. “You need a little Maine training, that’s all.”

The gym teacher pounds me on the back. “I want you on the team. That time! That’s a minute better than the girls’ Maine state record. I can’t believe it.”

I nod and smile. My heart lifts and starts to settle. The world loses its blurry edges. Ian still hangs onto my waist. He says something, but I’m too tired to hear it. Mick stands near Devyn, hands on his hips. There’s a little sweat on his forehead and he wipes it off with his hand before his eyes sear into mine.

That’s all it takes. I’m hooked.

The PE teacher is tallying up everyone’s times and giving them out. Nick’s eyes are still locked with mine. He mouths the word again, “User.”

I open my own mouth to say something. But before I can he turns his back to me and walks away.

Ian scowls and points at Nick. “He bothering you?”

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly, pulling away.

Ian’s face clenches. “Ignore him, okay? He’s a jerk. He’s got this cop-complex thing going on”

“Cop complex?”

“Thinks he knows everything. Thinks he’s better than everybody else. He isn’t. He’s just an overgrown thug who can run. He’s been a freak ever since Devyn’s accident, and then this other kid ran away last week and Nick’s all ‘there could be a serial killer.’ I swear he watches way too many crime shows. It’s no wonder his parents took off”

“Took off?”

“Supposedly on some photography work. They do nature movies, I don’t know. I like your shirt.”

I glance down at my U2 T-shirt. Sweat mars the light gray of it and it seems crumpled, all used up after a hard run. The title of their old album, [_War, _]has started to flake off. I can’t stop thinking about Nick. “He seems so… I don’t know… stressed.”

Ian takes me by the shoulders. Maine people are way too intense. I try to back away. His fingers sink in and hold.

“Zara, just ignore him,” he repeats. His fingers relax and he flicks some lint off my shoulder. “He’s a jerk. Okay?”

Nick stands by Devyn. He taps the wheel on Devyn’s chair with his foot. I meet his eyes.

“Okay,” I say to Ian.

But I know I’m lying.

I know I don’t want to stay away.

The rest of the morning goes fine, as far as the first day in a new school goes. There’s a lot of gawking at me and whispering. Issie tries to explain who everyone is, but the names and connections don’t stick, I can’t remember anything.

“Is the blond guy Jay Dahlberg?” I ask Issie as we charge down the stairs to the cafeteria.

“No, that’s Paul Rasku, who makes the pumpkin bombs,” Issie explains for the eight hundreth time. “Jay Dahlberg is the skater who made this sound-cannon thing out of a nine-foot-long cardboard tube. It’s super cool. He trumpets through it during basketball and soccer games and stuff.”

“I give up.”

“You’ll get it,” Issie reassures me.

I can’t believe I live here now.

But Issie is terribly sweet. She and Devyn sit with me at lunch, which, having watched enough Disney tween movies, was what I worried about the most. The whole “new girl alone in the lunch room” thing.

I’m pretty content, actually.

I bite into my veggie sandwich and stare at Devyn’s happy face. “So, you guys have always lived in Maine?”

Devyn nods. “Yep. But Issie moved up here from Portland.”

“In first grade,” I remember.

Issie laughs and points at Devyn with her carrot stick. “I already told her.”

She yawns a ferocious yawn-I can see down to her tonsils-and stretches her arms over her head.

Devyn reaches over and covers lssie’s mouth as she yawns. “I wonder where Nick is?”

I must have made some sort of frightened face because Devyn explains, “Nick’s cool. He just has this weird protector thing going on.”

I open up my sandwich. The lettuce is limp against the bread. I shut it again and twirl the string on my finger.

“Do you have an Amnesty International chapter here?” I ask, changing the subject. I wipe my mouth and pluck a cucumber out of my sandwich.

“I have [_always _]wanted an Amnesty chapter. Are you in Amnesty?” lssie pops up. She’s been staring at her pizza slice, picking off the pepperoni. Devyn scoops them off her plate and gobbles them down. She smiles at him. “He always does that. He’s so into protein. He eats raw meat.”

“Like sushi?” I ask.

“Yeah, like sushi…,” Issie’s voice trails off.

“Some people are afraid of fish. It’s called ichthyophobia,” I say, and then cover my mouth with my hand. I try not to give people useless phobia information, but Devyn is into it.

“Hey, that’s better than ideophobia,” he says.

My hands drop down. “You know what ideophobia is?”

lssie answers for him. “Devyn knows everything about phobias and mental conditions.”

“My parents are psychiatrists,” he explains. “Ideophobia is the fear of ideas.”

“Duh, even I could get that one.” lssie wiggles her nose at him “But anyway, about Amnesty. We should start a chapter, shouldn’t we, Devyn?”

He nods and wipes the pepperoni grease off his fingers.

Life here could be okay after all, really, if it weren’t so cold.

Then Devyn tenses up, a low sound comes from the bottom of his throat, almost like a whimper. Issie puts her hand on his arm.

“Is?” he says quietly. She doesn’t answer.

When I follow her gaze out the big cafeteria windows, I see what it is that’s freaking him out At the edge of the woods there’s a man.

“Crap,” I say.

lssie snaps out of it. “You know him?”

She and Devyn both focus their attention on me. I try to shrink myself down even more. I’d like to stare back at them, but I’m too busy watching the man lift his arm and point, point into the cafeteria, at us, at me.

“He’s pointing at me,” Devyn says, almost curling up into himself. Fear changes his voice into something frozen and brittle, lssie grabs at him. “He’s pointing at me, Is. Oh God…”

“No. He’s pointing at me,” I say, muscles tensing. “Jesus. Who the hell is that?”

A dog hurtles across the snowy field toward the guy. At the same time, I jump up and start toward the fire-exit door, smashing past people carrying green lunch trays and Cokes, flying by Megan and her little posse all drinking water. I push the big metal handle of the door open. An alarm sounds. Like I care.

“Miss! Miss!” Some random teacher hauls me back inside, whirling me around and spitting in my face as he talks. “What do you think you’re doing?”

lssie and Devyn’s mouths are hanging wide open.

“I, urn, I was feeling a little claustrophobic,” I lie. “I get lightheaded.”

“Mr. Marr… she has sugar issues,” lssie interrupts.

“That’s not her only issue,” Megan snarks at her table. People laugh. I ignore them because the man outside has gone, vanished into the woods or something. The dog is gone too.

Issie keeps going, keeps explaining. “Her grandmother told me. Her grandmother is Betty. You know Betty. She works for Downcast Ambulance.”

I flash her a thank-you look.

Mr. Marr’s got the comb-over thing that some bald men try to pull off. It flaps in the wind. He slams the door shut. “Well, you better go get some sugar then, miss.”

Issie brings me back to the table. Once I sit down, pretend to take some sugar via a caffeinated cola beverage, and Mr. Marr no longer stares, she goes, “Why did you do that?”

I shrug, “He’s been following me.”

“He’s been following you?” Devyn says. “The man outside?

Are you sure?”

“I know it sounds weird.” I’m all flustered, folding my napkin into smaller and smaller squares. “I swear it’s true, though. I saw him in Charleston. I saw him at the airport. And now he’s here. Something is seriously going on. It is not normal, This… this is not normal.”

Devyn shakes his head. “That can’t be good,”

“What do you mean?”

The bell rings. Issie stands up, but Devyn doesn’t push away from the table. “Let me do a little research on that, okay? Then we’ll talk.”

I stand up. “What? Do you think he’s a serial killer or some kind of stalker or something?” Devyn nods slowly.

“It makes no sense. I don’t know why he’d be where I am You don’t think this is connected to that boy who went missing, do you?” I stare at the top of his head. His hair swirls around like a whirlpool. But it’s his eyes that get me. It’s like he’s holding something back. “You thought he was pointing at you.”

A muscle twitches in his cheek. His head turns away, just a little bit. “I guess I was wrong.”

“You were scared.”

He faces me again. His eyes flash like he’s recognizing something. “So were you.”

I spend the rest of the day looking out windows, searching for the man. Every class I stare into the woods, watch snow fall off tree limbs, but I don’t see him. I’m so psyched out that just getting up from a chair makes my heart beat fast, like I’ve been running. So when someone’s hand clomps down on my shoulder in the hall right when I’m putting stuff in my locker, I whirl around and scream.

The coach jumps back. His yellow-tinted glasses slip on his nose. “Zara? It’s Zara, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You jumpy? Did I scare you?” He says things bullet-fast, which does not seem like the Maine way.

“Sorry.”

His hand waves away my words. “Whatever. Listen. I know there’s not much time left in the season, but I thought you might want to join.”

I rub my elbow. “Join?”

“Cross-country.”

People meander by. They stare at us. Face after face that I don’t recognize. “Yeah, I’ll join. That would be great.”

“Don’t smile too big.” He laughs and points at my mouth. “Bugs’ll get in there.”

I clamp my jaws shut as he coach-punches me in the shoulder.

“Just kidding.” He laughs again. “See you tomorrow, kid.”

“Cool!” I manage to say once he’s halfway down the hall, his buzz-cut head almost lost in a mass of fully haired Mainers. I yell, “Thanks!”