Night Sky (8 page)

“…and then you stopped answering your phone while you were in that bad part of town…”

I looked up. “Wait. What did you just say?”

Mom paused. “I said…”

She'd said I was
in
that
bad
part
of
town
. I didn't want to say it aloud, but we both knew what she'd said. How did she know where I'd been?

I looked at her, and then I looked at my phone.

Mom followed my gaze. She looked nervous.

“What do you have on here?” I asked, and lunged for the couch.

Mom tried to beat me to it, but I was faster. I grabbed my cell phone and shut it off.

From across the room, Mom's cell phone made a little beep.

I turned my phone back on. Mom's cell beeped again.

“Are you
tracking
me?” I exclaimed disbelievingly.

Her guilt was written all over her face.

“I can't believe you're spying on me!” My face got even hotter. I began to walk toward the stairs to my room, because I could not deal with this.

“Wait!” Mom called. “Sky, I'm sorry. I'm just…I'm doing it for your own good!”

“My own good?” I spun around, even more enraged. “How can you say you know what's good for me? It's your fault that we're here in this third-world land of the living dead. I hate it here,” I continued, knowing that I was hurting her feelings but too angry to care. “I loved Connecticut, but you had to go and get a new job—”

“I loved Connecticut too,” she said, but then took a deep breath. “You know that jobs are hard to come by in this economy, considering—”

She was an art investment advisor, which meant she spent about ten hours a week telling rich people how they should spend their next ten million bucks.

I cut her off. “And you couldn't find anything in Connecticut?”

Her mouth was tight. “No, I couldn't.”

That was BS, and we both knew it, and I was furious because once again she was treating me like a baby and withholding information from me. There was a reason she'd yanked me out of school and hustled me down to Florida. God, she hadn't even told me about the move until the trucks pulled up to the house. I'd had to say good-bye to my friends via email. “You
ruined
my
life
! I hope you
know
that
!”

I raced to my room and slammed my door shut. The rage boiling inside of me was too much.

“Aaaaagggh!” I roared as I dove onto my bed, then rolled and took my hairbrush off my bedside table and hurled it across the room.

It hit the opposite wall with an oddly unsatisfying
thunk
.

But then something really weird happened.

The brush didn't fall to the carpeting.

At least for a moment, it hovered there in the air before shooting back across the room and repositioning itself on my bedside table.

Uh

Bill

Uh

Tees.

Abilities
.

“Oh, shit,” I whispered. I grabbed my phone and texted Cal:
U still up?

I rocked a little as I sat there on the edge of my bed, but made myself stop. Crazy people rocked like that. And I wasn't crazy. I wasn't crazy. I wasn't…

My phone beeped, but it wasn't Cal texting me.
Calvin has lost phone privileges for the time being
, it said. It was signed,
Stephanie
. Calvin's mom.

“Shit!” I took a deep breath to try to calm myself. I wasn't crazy. And I wasn't any more a Greater-Than than I was Bigfoot.

I picked up the hairbrush again and tossed it across the room. This time, after it hit the wall, it fell down to the carpeting. Down was a direction I was much more familiar with.

So why did I feel disappointed? This was a good thing, right?

“Sky?” Mom called from out in the hallway, and my face heated up. She was really going to continue this conversation tonight? After all the sneaky crap she'd pulled?

The hairbrush lifted off the ground and spun several times, like a cylinder in a car, before crashing against the ceiling. I watched, eyes wide, as it slid across the smooth surface with the fast precision of an object on ice.

Then it dropped into the air again and did a loopy figure eight before landing once more on my bedside table.

Whoa.

Whoa!

“I'm going to bed. Good night,” Mom called, her voice weary.

Suddenly, I
wanted
her to piss me off.

Because I had a serious theory, and I needed her to help me prove it.

But I listened to her door shut and knew that she was spent.

Instead, I closed my eyes and thought about the argument that my mom and I had just had about the GPS system tracking me via my cell phone—about the way that Mom had belittled me, treating me like a child. I felt my face get hot as I became angry all over again.

I opened one eye just a slit. The hairbrush was still resting comfortably on the bedside table.

I closed my eyes again and moved on to more global issues. Things that really got under my skin…
bad
drivers, cat ladies, mullets, world wars, racism, hate crimes, poverty, euthanasia in overcrowded dog kennels, corrupt politicians, liars, and cheaters…

I opened my eyes. The brush was still on the bedside table, like a lead weight.

Keeping my eyes focused on the brush, I continued with my silent rant, willing myself into a state of fury…
bullies, homophobes, sociopaths, terrorism
… I focused…
cops
who
don't believe you, kidnappers, conspiracies, the monster who took Sasha, because that poor little girl might never see her mom and dad again—and I swear I will find those bastards and bring them to justice, and you better believe it!

The hairbrush went vertical, and then it launched toward me, landing in the palm of my open hand with a smack.

When I woke up on Saturday, I felt as if I'd been hit by a truck.

I rolled over stiffly in my bed, stretching my arms out to the sides and yawning deeply. Looking down, I realized I had fallen asleep in my clothes for the second time that week.

In fact, I couldn't even remember having closed my eyes.

For a moment I lay there, staring at the ceiling.

The
hairbrush
.

Last night I had moved my hairbrush with
my
brain
.

I sat up quickly, but then just as quickly sank back down as a wave of nausea hit me, along with a dull ache in my back and legs. I felt as if… Oh, Lord,
really
? I was going to get my period
today
? It wasn't due for at least another week.

Before I could even begin to process what had happened last night, both at the Sav'A'Buck with the motorcycle girl and then after, I needed to do some damage control.

I rolled out of bed and, knees pressed together, shuffled awkwardly into the hallway toward the bathroom, shielding my eyes from the sunlight seeping through the front blinds. This morning, everything hurt.

From my bedroom, I could hear my cell phone beeping.

My thoughts shifted to last night's argument. My mom had attached a GPS navigator to my phone!

I moaned, realizing that getting angry was not going to help my current situation. I staggered into the bathroom and pulled a bottle of painkillers out of the medicine cabinet.

Taking two, I stuck my head beneath the faucet and clumsily gulped some water before tipping my head back and swallowing the pills. I rubbed my face and then glanced at my reflection in the mirror.

If I didn't take better care of myself, I was going to start looking like that washed-up police detective.

Mom was up. I could hear her moving around now in her bedroom. I pressed the lock button on the bathroom door, just in case, and then sat down on the toilet.

I looked down. Yes, I had my period. Fabulous.

The cabinet underneath the sink was just far enough away that I had to really reach to grab the tampons. I winced as I leaned over.

I had never been hungover, but it couldn't possibly be worse than this.

By the time that I had showered and started to move around a little bit, I was feeling better, the cramps down to a dull ache. Mom kept to her room, and I grabbed my cell phone-slash-
Where's Skylar?
spy system and headed downstairs.

I saw from my phone that it was nearly two o'clock in the afternoon—I'd slept
that
late. And there was a new text from Calvin:
U doin ok?
Apparently he'd regained his phone privileges. I started to text him back, but then I wondered if my mom received all my texts as well. If she did, I'd have to start keeping things really vague. Better not to respond to Cal until I could tell him, in person, not to send me any messages about jokering Destiny addicts. Wouldn't
that
make Mom's head explode?

Leave it to my mother to turn my life into a Jason Bourne movie. She probably bugged my old teddy bears too. I picture myself tapping Morse code onto the arm of Cal's wheelchair.
Meet
me
under
the
highway
overpass
at
oh-dark-thirty, dash dash dash, dot dot dot
.

“Skylar, I'm going to the store,” Mom said, startling me as she stepped quietly into the kitchen. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah.” I deliberately turned away and poked my head into the fridge so that I wouldn't have to look at her. “You know where I'll be,” I continued, and laughed humorlessly. I pretended I was deciding what to make for lunch, but in truth I wasn't hungry.

I knew, even without turning around, that my mom was standing there staring at me. I also knew that she'd been crying.

Imagine how she would've reacted if she'd known what happened last night, while I was breaking her rules out in Harrisburg. I was still a little surprised that she hadn't grounded me. Yet. That magic could still be coming.

But after a moment, she walked over to the kitchen counter and poured some coffee into her travel mug. “You know,” she said, “your science teacher's in the hospital.”

I turned around, leaning against the open refrigerator door. “Mrs. Wilson?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Mom replied. “She has a terrible case of pneumonia. It came out of nowhere Thursday morning. It hit her really hard. You and your friends might want to send her a get-well card.”

I realized with a jolt that Thursday had been when I'd gone to the CoffeeBoy with Calvin because I'd
known
that Mrs. W wasn't going to be in school. And sure enough, she'd been absent Friday too. How had I known that? I hadn't given it much thought before this, but it was
weird
.

Abilities
…

No. If there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that I wasn't—
was
not
—a Greater-Than. Whatever had happened last night with the hairbrush had been a fluke.

Please
God, let it have been a fluke…

Mom took a sip of coffee. “All right,” she said, moving forward to kiss me on my cheek. I shied away, and Mom nodded. “Okay. Be careful today. I love you.”

“I know,” I said.

I felt her lingering in the room for another moment, and then she left without grounding me.

Whoopee.

—

Trudging up to my room, I considered just going for a run and getting away from everything for a while. Maybe doing something normal would make me feel better.

I sighed and pulled out my red-and-blue racerback sports bra and a pair of running shorts. I slapped on some sunblock and tied my hair up into a high ponytail.

As I smoothed down a few flyaway curls, my gaze fell on the hairbrush on my bedside table. As far as I could tell, the brush—and the alarm clock and the cat poster—hadn't moved since I fell asleep last night. I halfheartedly tried to move my hairbrush again, but it just sat there like…a hairbrush. Of course, I was tired and crampy and not very angry. I sighed, wondering about my hairbrush theory. Another good theory was that maybe I'd dreamed the whole thing, but I knew that I hadn't.

I had a sudden vision of the clock, the brush, and the poster all dancing together in my room like something out of
Fantasia
, swooping and spinning over my bed while I slept. It was definitely disturbing, but way less creepy than another sharp vision I suddenly had. In this one, the shadowy gray creature I'd imagined in Sasha's room—the one who could've been a body double for the wicked witch from
Hansel and Gretel
—was climbing
into
the window.

And this time the window was mine.

The creepiest part was that the picture in my head was the mental equivalent of scratch-and-sniff, because I could smell it. That awful sewage smell from Sasha's bedroom. It was there, faintly, in the back of my throat like a visceral memory, nauseating and dizzying and awful.

The doorbell rang, startling me, and I jumped and squeaked. And just like that, it was all gone—the image, the smell, the sense of impending doom. Well, the sense of doom may have lingered, but I immediately laughed and made myself imagine that same gray witch-thing on my doorstep in the bright morning sunlight. In a Brownie uniform, selling Thin Mints.

I clattered down the stairs to the front door. I wasn't expecting anyone, but Mom did a lot of her shopping online, and we received packages pretty regularly. I opened the door and…

The front stoop was empty.

Frowning, I peeked my head out into the morning heat. Nobody was there.

“Hello?” I called. No one answered.

Across the street, a woman in a tennis outfit walked her three little dogs, all yipping gleefully on the ends of three long leashes. It was a beautiful, clear day, and the sun warmed the back of my shoulders as I stepped outside.

So why was a chill running through me?

I took another step toward the stairs so I could see down the street, all the way to the big palm tree in Sasha's front yard.

And that terrible, horrible stench of backed-up sewage—not distant and not a memory this time—filled my nostrils.

Gagging, I dashed inside and slammed the front door shut, locking it with one swift movement.

Why was I scared?

Because something evil was out there. Of that I had no doubt.

I sank onto the cool tile floor, dizzy and nauseated and needing to put my head between my legs so I didn't yuke on Mom's palm-treed welcome mat. But I grabbed for my phone, filled with an even stronger need to call someone for help.

But who? 9-1-1 was unreliable these days. And even if I got through, when I frantically claimed that a mysterious sewage smell was in my front yard, the operator would probably respond the way Calvin had. She'd laugh in my face.

Besides, when I accessed my phone, I immediately got the standard “Service is currently unavailable” message. Which meant I couldn't call anyone. I could only text.

I thought for a nanosecond about texting my mom, but rejected that instantly. She'd never leave me home alone again. Her imaginary fears were restricting enough without mine being added to the list.

Despite knowing that Cal would laugh at me, I'd just decided to text him, cryptically telling him to come over
right
now
and then quickly turning off my phone, when someone banged on the door three times.

Boom
boom
boom!

And I screamed.

“Skylar?” The male voice was muffled through the closed door.

I scrambled to my feet to look through the door's small stained-glass panel.

Garrett Hathaway?

I flung the door open, as glad as I'd ever been to see him.

“Hey!” he said, looking confused. No doubt he'd heard my horror-movie-worthy scream of terror. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine!” I said, forcing a smile and willing my heartbeat to return to normal. I gave him the age-old excuse. “Giant spider.”

I took a tiny whiff of the air outside. No more sewage smell. Garrett's car was in the driveway—a little cream-colored roadster. Calvin and I had joked about those kinds of convertibles, calling them the
universal
midlife-crisis
car
. I wondered if this one belonged to Garrett's dad, or if Garrett was already in crisis at the tender age of eighteen.

Garrett, meanwhile, was looking at me. “Wow. You look hot!”

Oh, please. I didn't share the fact that the nasty-ass sewage smell had made me throw up a little in my mouth, and that if he kept up the BS, I might do it again—and this time not be able to keep it contained.

He must've sensed my disbelief because he added, “I'm serious. I've never seen you in anything besides jeans and a T-shirt. There is a
lot
of bare skin going on right now, and I am totally okay with that.”

Ew.

“I'm about to go for a run,” I explained, then asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood,” he said, “and I thought you might want some help, looking for Tasha.”

“Sasha,” I corrected him.

“Right,” he said, and gave me another of those meant-to-dazzle smiles. “So, can I give you a ride?”

He was seriously exhausting. I pointed to myself. “Going for a
run
?”

“Well, you're going to run on the beach,” he said. “Right? I mean, how could you not run on the beach?”

You could totally not run on the beach if your crazy mother didn't let you get your driver's license and you didn't have an ultra-rich daddy to provide you with his midlife-crisis car. I stepped back inside to grab my keys off the table.

“We could look for Sasha while we're there.” Garrett gave me another smile. “Let me help. I could also be your running buddy. Coach you, give you some tips. You know, I'd run cross-country if I wasn't the MVP of the football team.”

I liked the idea of searching for Sasha down at the beach. Calvin and I hadn't done much more than drive by. Soft sand and wheelchairs didn't exactly mix.

Still, I couldn't help but think about what Calvin had said, warning me about Garrett's
douche-tastic-ness
.

Douche he might have been, but Garrett was a douche who was asking to help find Sasha.

I used my key to lock the door. “Okay. Thanks.”

—

“I hope you're ready for some track lessons,” Garrett said. “I've been running since I was, like, ten years old, so I can teach you a lot if you let me.”

There was a double meaning in his words, and he leaned in as if he was going to kiss me.

So I got out of his car, hoping to avoid the awkwardness by pretending I was clueless. We were here to run, right? So let's run. I wanted to get this over with so I could get back to looking for Sasha.

“Usually,” Garrett said as he followed me, “I like to go for a pretty long run. I'll head all the way down to the wall, which is three miles that way”—he pointed to the right—“and then back again.”

I'd needed about point five seconds to recognize that getting into Garrett's car was an enormous mistake. Not only had I been forced to endure another fifteen minutes of really bad, really loud music and lots of engine revving, but I'm pretty sure Garrett checked himself out in the rearview mirror at least twenty times. I'd lost exact count around the third stoplight.

The icing on the already unappetizing cake was that Garrett had blown past the road leading down to the public beach, instead taking me here to this private strip of sand that abutted his dad's vacation “cottage,” because it was “prettier and way less crowded out here.” We'd look for Sasha, he promised,
after
we'd had our run.