The Reaping of Norah Bentley (15 page)

I shrugged, and turned my gaze toward the tops of the hedges lining the patio. “Just, you know, enjoying nature and stuff.”

“You hate nature.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yeah huh.” She took another sip of beer. “Remember when we went camping with the girl scouts?”

“I’ve tried to forget most things about our time as girl scouts.”

“Well
I
remember that spider that crawled across the top of our tent. And your scream that woke up most of the forest.”

“It was a spider,” I said. “Not the same as nature.”

“But then you ran out of the tent yelling about how much you hated nature.”

“Okay, fine. I hate nature.”

She smiled victoriously and then turned her attention to the bottle of beer in her hand, squinted one eye shut and peered into the top of the long neck, then held it up to her ear and shook it. It sounded empty.

“So what are you
really
doing out here by yourself, then?” she asked. “And what was up with Luke? He seemed weird when he came back inside.”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“He seemed kind of weird all night.” She hesitated, started peeling back the label on the bottle. “You both did, actually. What’s going on between you two?”

I sighed, leaned back in my chair. “It was that obvious?”

“Of course it was obvious—to me at least.” She grinned and stuck her hand toward me. “Hi, I’m your best friend. Nice to meet you.”

I pushed her hand away. “I thought we hid it well.”

“To the untrained eye, maybe.”

I shook my head and looked back out over the yard again; I could feel Rachel watching me, waiting for me to fill her in on what had happened. I didn’t really feel like talking about it, but I knew Rachel well enough to know she’d find out every word of me and Luke’s conversation, one way or another. And I decided I’d rather her hear my version first, before she got a chance to talk to Luke again.

“He kissed me,” I said.

“Well it’s about damn time.”

I kept quiet for a minute, until it was obvious that was all she was going to say. Then I spun back around to face her.

“Really? That’s it?” I’d been expecting a girlish squeal, or at least a dramatic “no way!”. I mean, this
was
Rachel we were talking about. Maybe she’d drunk more than I realized, and the alcohol had started to dull her brain.

“How much have you had to drink tonight?” I asked.

“I’m perfectly sober, thank you very much,” she said. “But even if I wasn’t, even a drunk person could tell that Luke’s in love with you. That he’s been in love with you since—well, pretty much since forever.”

“
I
couldn’t tell,” I said. “Why hasn’t anybody bothered to tell me?”

“Well for one thing, Luke made me swear on my life that I wouldn’t. And really, Norah, I thought you’d figure it out on your own. It’s been so obvious for so—”

“No.” I couldn’t stand to let her finish. “No—he can’t be. Not now, not like this.” I got to my feet, stood up so fast that my chair went flying out behind me, crashed into a ceramic vase filled with dead tulips and sent it spinning dangerously across the concrete patio. “Why now?”

“Why not? Now, or next week—what does it matter?” Rachel was starting to look anxious, her eyes darting back and forth between me and the dark window of her parent’s room. “It was going to happen eventually,” she said.

“This is just really bad timing.”

“Bad timing? What’s so bad about it?”

“I just have a lot going on right now.”

“What, like with school and stuff?”

“No. Just…other things.”

Her eyes narrowed, searching my face for clues—clues I didn’t know how to hide from her. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when her face brightened with realization a second later.

“Oh,” she said. “
Oh.
Is that what’s going on here?”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s someone else, isn’t there?”

“How did you—”

The guilt from earlier was back; I don’t know why, but suddenly I felt like a child who’d just been caught sneaking candy before dinner.

“It’s not like that,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean yes—there is someone. Sort of. But my God Rach, don’t make it sound like I’m cheating on him or something.”

“I never said you were.”

“…Because it’s not like Luke and I were ever a couple.”

Rachel folded her arms across her chest, her face suddenly solemn. “But you might as well have been, you know,” she said.

“No. Luke is my best friend, and I would
never
have risked us…we never should have…” I had to stop for a second and swallow the shout I could feel building in my throat. “How could he have done something so stupid?”

Rachel heaved a heavy sigh—so dramatic sounding you would’ve thought the entire weight of the situation was resting on her shoulders instead of mine.

“You need to go talk to him,” she said.

“No way in Hell.”

“So you’re just going to ignore him?”

“I think we’d both be better off if I did.”

“You don’t believe that.”

I didn’t know what I believed anymore. So I didn’t say anything.

Rachel reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out her cell. The pink metallic case shimmered in the moonlight as she handed it to me. “Call him,” she said. “Call him and tell him to come back so you can talk to him. Otherwise this is going to get ugly.”

“It’s already ugly.”

“Well it’s going to get worse, and guess who’s going to get caught in-between?” She jabbed a finger into her own chest. “This girl, right here. You two are
both
my best friends, and I’m not going to be forced to take sides here. Call him.”

I stared at the phone like it was a ticking bomb, one that might explode at the slightest touch.

“I can’t talk to him right now,” I said.

Rachel shoved the phone at me anyways, put it in my hand and closed my fingers over it. It didn’t explode, but I think I felt it tremble a little. Or maybe that was just my hands.

“I think I need another drink,” Rachel said. “I’m going back inside.”

I didn’t think she needed another drink, but I was kind of glad she was leaving. We parted in silence. I walked over and sat down on the steps of the patio, leaned against the cool metal handrail running up the left side of them.

I poked at random buttons on Rachel’s phone for a while, changed her ringtone and then changed it back, scrolled through her recent calls just because. I thought about changing her language setting to Spanish, or maybe Japanese to really piss her off.

I actually hit the button that brought up her contacts list by mistake, but once I was there I couldn’t stop myself from flipping through the names. I did pause at Luke’s number for a second, almost like I was trying to fool myself into thinking I actually had the guts to call him. But then I moved on to another name—mine. Or actually, what I was listed as in Rachel’s phone; as “Bestie”. She was the same in mine, had been since we were in middle school and thought those were really cool, original nicknames for each other.

I hit call.

The phone rang once, twice, three times—rang and rang until I finally heard my own voice telling me sorry, but I couldn’t answer the phone right now. Please leave a message. I pulled the phone away from my ear and made a face at the illuminated screen; was that what my voice really sounded like? I hit end before I could finish talking.

Would Eli even have known how to check it, if I’d left him a message? Probably, I decided. He’d probably had a cellphone when he was alive; that wasn’t so long ago.

When he was alive. What a weird thing to say about a person. About the ‘other guy’ that Rachel was so worried about. I laughed— a defeated sound that resonated eerily off the vinyl siding of the Molongoski’s quiet house. If only Rachel knew. If only I could tell her, if only I could explain everything that was happening to me. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her, and I couldn’t tell Luke everything, either. So there was no point in calling him.

There was only one person who could know everything about me now. I could only hope he’d be there when I got home.

#

Rachel didn’t want to let me leave, didn’t want me walking home by myself at this time of the night. I wasn’t worried about it though. This was Sutton Springs we were talking about— crime was pretty much non-existent here. The few cops that patrolled the town were on a first-name basis with everyone, and they spent most of their night shifts either at the Waffle House or at Drips Coffeshop. And besides that, what could really happen to me? I couldn’t die. Eli had been adamant about that; most of what he’d said earlier might have been a blur in my mind, but that particular part stuck. He was the only one who could take me. I was more or less immortal.

Rachel didn’t know that, though, so she’d watched me go with a worried frown, made me promise to call her when I made it home so she’d know I wasn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere. It was nice to know she cared. I was sort of hoping she’d forget about me and pass out pretty quick after I left, though, since I’d decided I didn’t actually want to go home. As far anybody at my house knew, I was staying the night at the Molongoski’s anyway. So there was no point in rushing to the last place I wanted to be.

I’d tried calling my phone one last time before leaving Rachel, with her ample supply of booze and the next Freddy Krueger movie, and this time I left a message telling Eli to meet me at the park. He might not get it, but the park was where I was heading anyways, hoping that the familiar sanctuary of trees would help me calm down, maybe sort some things out.

I had to take the long way to avoid passing by Luke’s house, and it took me almost thirty minutes to reach downtown. It was kind of nice, though; the crisp breeze on my face, nothing but my own shadow for company, and I already felt a little better by the time the park’s sign came into view.

I was still distracted though, my mind still flooded with the thoughts of everything that had happened tonight; so I was only half-paying attention to that sign, and even less attention to the person walking behind me—until they were suddenly right beside me.

“Excuse me.” I spun around and came face to face with a young man, early twenties maybe. He was clean-shaven, with dark hair and even darker eyes—eyes such a dark blue they might as well have been black. There was something regal in the way his jaw curved, the way he held his shoulders back when he stepped toward me. He held his posture perfectly as he moved, arms lowered by his side, palms turned up toward me as if to say he meant no harm; and he didn’t
look
especially malicious, I decided. Lost, more like—a noble out of place in the common streets of Sutton Springs.

“Can I ask you a question?” He spoke softly, with the air of a southern gentleman. “If you have a second?”

“Sure?”

“I’m looking for the bus stop. I was told it was at the corner of Westminster and First Avenue—”

“Not First Avenue,” I said. “First Street. Every road on this side of Main Street is an Avenue. You have to go to the other side of Main—” I pointed him in the right direction “—to get to the streets.”

“The other side of Main?”

“Yeah…It’s sort of confusing.”

“I see.” He nodded slowly, squinting in the direction I’d pointed. “Yes,” he said. “That truly
is
rather confusing.”

“I’m not sure why they named them like that.”

He smiled a little, his dark eyes shining. “At times I think humans just like to complicate things,” he said. Something about his tone made me uneasy.

“Yeah…yeah I guess maybe we do.” I averted my eyes and shoved my hands into the pocket of my coat, felt the warm metal of my house keys, and ran my finger down their jagged edge. Not much of a weapon—if it came to that— but it was better than admitting I was completely defenseless.

“So this is Westminster here, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And if I continue down this way—”

“You’ll come to it,” I said quickly. “Big blue sign, right across from the post office. You can’t miss it, really.”

“Thank you.”

“Welcome.” I turned without another word and started to walk.

“…You’re going back the way you came.”

I slowed to a stop, not because I wanted to, but because his voice was like a wall; my thoughts slammed into it and suddenly my brain couldn’t control anything my body was doing.

“What?”

“You were walking the same way as me, before,” he said. “But now you’ve turned back—I hope I haven’t made you uncomfortable?”

“Me? No—no, not at all. I’m fine. I just…I just realized I forgot something at my friend’s house. I need to go back and get it.”

He smiled again, but it wasn’t that same friendly, yet superficial smile of a stranger. There was nothing stranger-like about it.

“Don’t lie to me, Norah,” he said.

“I’m not…” My voice weakened into a whimper, and my thoughts backed away from the wall they’d hit, collected themselves again. I swallowed hard, my gaze darting wildly around, up to the houses with their dark windows and smokeless chimneys. Lifeless. Could I scream loud enough to wake anyone up? Probably not.