Sage's Eyes (26 page)

“I swear. I don't understand it myself!” he shouted.

Jason continued to grimace in pain. Some of the other boys helped him make his way back up the stairs, with Skip following, his head down.

Summer stepped up beside me. “Happy?” he asked.

“What?”

He nodded at Ned Wyatt, who had come to see what had caused the commotion.

“Poetic justice, right? Ned Wyatt can have the last laugh.”

Teachers were rushing out to see what was happening. More students gathered. Mr. Jacobs was charging down the hallway. Jason was very important to the basketball team, and the season was going to begin in two weeks.

“Come on,” I heard Summer say. “We'll be late for class.”

I looked back at the scene at the bottom of the stairway and then at Summer.

He smiled. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, catching up, but deep down in my stomach, I felt as if I had swallowed an icicle whole. I felt a dark cloud swirling around me. Something very strange had just happened. I was sure of it.

The bell rang just before we entered. Half the class was still out in the hallway. The tumult wasn't subsiding quickly. In fact, the shouting and screaming got louder. Mr. Leshner hurried to the doorway to
look out and then hurried out, so those of us who had taken our seats rose to look out into the hallway, too. Nick and Ward were infuriated by what Skip had done “accidentally.” They were claiming he was jealous of Jason's position on the basketball team and had deliberately shoved him down the stairway. Ward claimed he could see it was deliberate. Other students were standing by watching the verbal argument metamorphose into something physical.

Summer stepped up beside me. I saw the way he narrowed his eyes and tucked in the corners of his mouth, forming a strange, wry smile. Skip broke free of the boys who had been holding him back and punched Ward in the face hard enough to drop him to one knee. Nick shot forward and tackled Skip. Everyone was shouting, some cheering them on. It took Mr. Leshner, Mr. Hardik, and Mr. Taylor to pull the three apart. They were directed to go to Mrs. Greene's office, and the crowd was told to go to class. It broke up slowly. Mr. Leshner headed back, and we returned to our desks.

“Get in your seats,” he ordered.

“See?” Summer said.

“See what?”

“Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it,” he said, then smiled and opened his textbook.

For a long moment, one of those times when I would certainly be accused of leaving my body, leaving the here and now, I wondered if somehow Summer was right. Maybe I had done something.

Luckily for me, Mr. Leshner determined it was necessary to quiet things down by giving us an assignment of reading, followed by the questions at the end of the chapter. There was no verbal give-and-take. Everyone was into the textbook. Gradually, I came back to reality, and no one had noticed I was gone.

When the bell rang to end the day, most of the kids were hurrying to find out what had happened to Nick, Ward, Skip, and Jason. In less than fifteen minutes, more than half of the varsity basketball team was in trouble. Mrs. Greene was very strict about physical violence in the school. It almost didn't matter who was responsible. Whoever participated was suspended for ten days and put on serious probation. Privileges like being on a team could be revoked.

“Mr. Jacobs is going to be in a state of deep depression,” Summer said when we started out. “But no worries,” he added as we stepped into the hallway.

“What's that mean?” I asked.

“Now Jason will definitely be left home and will have his party.”

“I don't think that's at the top of the list of things to be concerned about, Summer.”

“It's all relative,” he said as we continued walking toward the building exit. “What makes one person happy can make another unhappy. What's good for some is bad for others. There is no good and evil. There's only happiness and unhappiness.”

“I don't want to believe that,” I said.

He shrugged. “So don't. That's my point.” He smiled and paused. “ ‘Why, then, 'tis none to you; for
there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' ”

“That's from . . .”

“
Hamlet
,” he said, and then he leaned over, and before I could pull away even if I wanted to, he kissed me quickly on the lips. “That was good. I'll call you,” he whispered, and hurried off.

I stood looking after him and brought my fingers to my lips.

It was as if his lips were still there, still gently touching mine and sending tiny sparks rolling from the base of my throat, around my breasts, and down to the pit of my stomach, where they gathered and filled me with the sort of warmth I had felt only in fantasies.

“What's wrong with you?” I heard Ginny ask as she and the others came up behind me. “Did you have a fight with him or something?” She watched Summer hurry out of the building as if he was being chased. I didn't understand his quick exit myself.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Jason definitely has a fractured wrist,” Kay said. “Marge Lungen told me Mrs. Mills took him to the doctor. He'll probably miss the whole basketball season.”

“And he could have used that to help get him college financial aid,” Darlene said.

“Nick and Ward could be suspended for ten days, and there's only two weeks till the first game. They might not be able to play for at least a month, if they can play at all,” Ginny said.
“We saw their parents arriving just a few minutes ago.”

“They knew what could happen,” I said.

“Excuse me,” Darlene said. “That's it? ‘They knew what could happen'?”

“Well, didn't they? You guys were the ones who told me how strict Mrs. Greene could be. Didn't you call her the Iron Lady, Mia?”

“That's not the point,” she said. “We should feel sorry for them and for the school. Maybe you haven't been here long enough to appreciate it.”

“You've got your boyfriend, so maybe you don't care about anything else,” Kay said.

“Of course I care about the school, and I do feel sorry for them, but—”

“But they knew what could happen,” Mia mimicked.

They were just looking for reasons to go at me, I thought. Summer had quoted Shakespeare. So could I.

“ ‘O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on,' ” I said, and walked ahead, leaving them behind wrapped in stunned silence.

From the look on her face and the way her eyes shifted from me to the school building, I could see that my mother sensed something was wrong the moment I got into the car. I knew I would be forced to explain and hoped I could get away with half the story.

“What is it?” she asked as soon as I closed the door. “What's happened today? Something has,” she said quickly. “It's written on your face.”

I shouldn't have been surprised or hoped I could hide what had happened. I knew that with anyone else but my parents, I could conceal any emotion or thought with a false smile or a blank expression. There was no blood connection between my mother and me, but she was often so in tune with my feelings and thoughts that I believed our hearts beat simultaneously. It was why I always feared lying to her. No other eyes could read my every gesture, the slightest movements in my mouth, or the shifting of my gaze as
quickly and accurately as she could. It happened so often that I could understand why someone would question the fact that I was adopted. The bond between us was more like the bond of a child and her birth mother, who could say, “She was part of me. I know when she's upset, angry, or afraid.”

“There was a fight in school just before the last period. One of the star basketball players fell down a stairway and fractured his wrist, and three others started punching and wrestling. They're all on the team, so everyone's upset because they could be suspended and prohibited from playing for a month or the whole season.”

Any other mother would have been satisfied with that response and prodded no further, but not mine. “And?” she said, driving away. “There's something more than that bothering you, Sage. I can see it's something more personal. What is it?”

“I annoyed my new girlfriends by saying the boys knew what the consequences could be for fighting in school. I didn't mean I was happy about it,” I quickly protested. “I just meant they should have realized the consequences and restrained themselves.”

“Not everyone sees the future as clearly as you do,” she said, sounding like it was a sin to do so. She thought a moment and then smiled. “So now they don't want you to meet them Friday night, is that it, these new best friends of yours?”

“I didn't say that. I just said they were annoyed with my tone of voice.”

She drove on in silence for a while, and then, when we stopped at a red light, she turned to me. “Did you have anything to do with the fight?”

“What?”

“Did you instigate it, egg them on, do anything I will hear about later, Sage? You might as well tell me now. I don't like those sorts of surprises.”

“Absolutely not. Why would I do that? How could I do that?”

She smirked as if I had asked a very dumb question. “You didn't claim to see some terrible thing in any of their futures caused by one of them and tell them? You weren't whispering in their ears about ugly visions?”

“No,” I said firmly. “I would never do that.”

“You didn't do that at your old school?”

“That was different. The boy was trying to get me to like him. I knew what kind of boy he was. The girl he abused just didn't want to be embarrassed about it, so she accused me of spreading stories about her. I don't deliberately hurt people, Mother.”

The light changed. She was silent again for a while. “What about the new boy you're so fond of?” she asked.

“What about him?”

“Was he part of the ruckus?”

“No. He was with me watching it all happening.”

“With you? So he is showing you more attention than he's showing any of the other girls?”

“It's only his second day,” I said.

“You're not answering my question.”

“I suppose he is.”

She nodded, a knowing smile sitting comfortably on her face. “And because of that, from what you told me about the reactions other girls have to him, there is some jealousy fomenting. Right?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“You should have anticipated it. What happened to your amazing foresight? Is it blinded by your own emotions? Your hormones starting to scream?”

“My hormones?”

“You know what I mean, Sage,” she said. “Don't play dumb with me.”

My mother and I had yet to have what anyone might call a mother-daughter conversation about sex and boys. It was odd in a way. She was so in my face about everything else. I knew it wasn't because she was a prude. It was more like everything else that happened to me. She was waiting to see how I would react, how I would turn out, and what I would do. Sometimes I felt confident that she was determining if I was going to be worth the effort involved in her taking on a more motherly relationship with me. Sometimes I felt as if my parents had just brought me home from the orphanage yesterday.

“I don't know. Maybe,” I admitted.

She looked at me and nodded. “That's good. The more aware you are of your own weaknesses, your own vulnerabilities, the stronger you will become. Peer pressure especially can smother good instincts. Judgments are clouded. Self-control starts to slip away.”

“Did
something similar happen to you? I mean, your best girlfriends liking the same boy and resenting you for attracting more of his attention? Is that why you're saying all this?”

“No,” she said sharply. Then she thought a little more and added, “Not all my friends liking the same boy. Well, perhaps one or two others did. No boy I knew was so attractive that he captured every heart. He sounds . . . too good to be true. Maybe there's too much fantasy going on. When you and your girlfriends get your feet back on the ground, it could be a hard landing. Be careful of getting too close to him too soon.”

“You make him sound like a disease,” I said.

“Just be careful,” she said. Then she added, “Maybe of yourself more than him.”

I guessed having him come pick me up wasn't the better idea right now, I thought. I didn't say anything, and she said nothing else until we got home, when she reminded me about Uncle Alexis and Aunt Suzume's visit on Saturday. I didn't know why she thought I might forget, but it was clear that she was just as intense about my meeting them as my father was. In the back of my mind, I thought this was another one of their tests for me. I was beginning to feel like I couldn't breathe in this house without their measuring how much oxygen I used.