Tortall (36 page)

After all that, ninth grade still wasn’t exactly a popularity explosion. It was made clear to me that while I had a scholarship to run, ninth graders did not show up the upperclassmen. They trained and they waited for their turn, their chance. They ran with the team. If I heard it once during those first weeks, I heard it a dozen times: I belonged to the Christopher
team
, the Christopher tradition, the Christopher way of doing things. I warmed a bench and kept my mouth shut.

And there was another problem. Things had changed. I had changed. It wasn’t easy for me to make friends since I’d stopped trying years ago. I still waited for whispers to begin, though months passed without them. It was like I thought the gossip was weeds that would sprout when my back was turned.

I did make two ninth-grade friends from the track team. We had lunch together, walked home together, sat together on the way to meets. We ran when Coach told us to. We cheered the upperclassmen and held down a leg on the relay team. We raced other ninth graders from other private schools, and we envied the older runners. The seniors
weren’t that interesting. Their eyes were locked on the Ivy Leagues. They didn’t draw our attention the way a certain junior did.

Felix soaked up light in the halls and gave it off again, from his bronze and gold gelled hair to his tanned calves. He was so right, so perfect, that no one ever gave him a hard time for the long, single braid he wore just behind one ear. People gave him tokens to wear in it—beads, or ribbons, or chains—but he didn’t take just anything. Just because he accepted someone’s token one day didn’t mean he wouldn’t give it back to them the next. He wrote his own rules for the school, too. The staff let him do it most of the time, maybe because the auditorium had his last name over the doorway. It was listed five times on the brass plaque that announced the different heads of the school. Felix was what Christopher Academy was about, and his crowd was Christopher Academy, just like track was Christopher Academy.

He ran, but he didn’t care about it. He’d slide out of boys’ warm-up laps to come over and flirt with his sophomore and junior girls, or his “lionesses,” as he called them. The first time I heard him say it, in April of my ninth-grade year, he said it to our coach as we circled the baseball diamond in our section of the park, our feet thudding on wet dirt.

“What do you think of my lionesses, Coach?” he called, keeping pace with his girlfriends in the middle of the pack. “Let’s take them to the Serengeti, get some blood on them, show them how to hunt.” He fiddled with a strip of camouflage cloth that was wound into his braid, running a finger over a dark spot on it.

“Ewww, Felix,” cried Han, a Chinese girl who’d been lip-locked with him before practice. “Blood? No thanks!”

“Can’t break oaths sworn in blood, sweetness,” he told her, falling back as we ran by. “Isn’t that right, Corey?” he asked, slapping me on the arm.

He knew who I was. He called me by my last name, like I was any other member of the team, any other rich Christopher kid.

I forgot to be careful. I forgot that I was new, that I had to be one of the team and earn my place. Trying to outrun the blush that burned my cheeks, I sped up. I cut through his precious lionesses as they jeered at him, telling him he scared me. I stretched my legs until I caught up to the senior girls. They glanced over, saw me, and glared. “Back of the pack,
freshman
,” one of them grumbled.

So I stopped being sensible. It was only practice. “Afraid you’ll have to work for it?” I asked, and picked up my pace. They weren’t really trying: it was a warm-up run. My cheeks burning now because they thought first place would be handed to them, I skittered behind the seniors, looking for a way through their bunched-up group. When they closed in tighter, I powered around them in the turn. By the time it dawned on them that they ought to show me who was boss, they couldn’t catch me.

Stupid, I told myself, slowing after I thudded past the finish, my temper burned off. Stupid when you want friends, stupid when you don’t want to stand out. Stupid when you’re “with the team.”

Across the field the boys were hooting at the runners. I turned around to see the lionesses, juniors and sophomores
together, cut through and around the red-faced seniors. Redheaded Reed looked back at the seniors and yelled, “You snooze, you lose.”

Coach glared at me, then walked toward the seniors, clapping her hands. “You thought it was going to be easy, these final meets of the year?” she yelled to the seniors as the lionesses caught up with me. “You’d catch a break because it’s your last year in the high school leagues? Nobody cares! Younger girls are waiting to make their names, and they’ll kick your asses. Two more laps before you quit for the day!”

“Showin’ them, Corey,” Reed said, tugging my braid.

“You rock,” another one muttered.

The lionesses collected me after practice. I looked at my two friends, but they shook their heads and grinned. They wanted me to go, so I could tell them what it was like in the morning.

The way the lionesses acted it was no big deal, drinks and French fries at a diner on Madison Avenue, a sour-faced waitress watching as six of us jammed into a corner booth.

“Why don’t you split up?” she wanted to know. “Make it easier on everybody?”

The older girls fell silent, staring at her. The air went funny. The waitress looked at them, then threw down the menus and left. The minute her back was turned, they began to laugh and nudge each other. “Shut
her
up,” Reed said.

“Like that dealer,” another muttered.

“Only he
ran
,” Beauvais, a platinum blonde, whispered. Reed elbowed Beauvais hard. She elbowed back but didn’t say anything more as the waitress—a different waitress—came for our order.

I don’t even remember if I talked very much, but I was there, with the kids everyone looked at. And the guys showed up, even Felix. I learned then that the guys were lions, to match the lionesses. Felix called them his “Pride” and said casually, “You should see them hunt.”

Half of me wanted to stay, but half knew I was supposed to be home fifteen minutes ago. I had to run to be there when Aunt Lucy, who watched me while Mom worked, put dinner on the table. I expected a reaming, but my aunt was so happy I’d been with kids my age she didn’t even yell. I pretended I didn’t see her light a moon candle in thanks while I cleared the table. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought I was going to be a hermit all through high school.

After supper, we went for a walk. We talked with the neighbors for a while outside the building. I was playing with the baby of the couple downstairs, so I don’t know how it started, but I heard the old guy who lived across the street say, “—just a dealer, so excuse me if I don’t cry.”

“Was it an overdose?” asked the baby’s mom.

The old guy shook his head. “The cops say people were chasing him last night after dark, and he grabbed his chest and fell into the lake near the Ramble. Heart attack. A drug dealer, having a heart attack.”

“Good riddance,” said the baby’s father. “But how could anybody see to chase him?”

“It was a full moon,” Aunt Lucy and I said at the same time. She smiled at me and said, “Jinx,” because we had echoed each other. She looked at the other grown-ups. “Plenty of light for a chase.”

I shivered. The baby’s mom saw and collected her from
me. “It’s getting cold,” she said. I didn’t argue, though I don’t think I had shivered because I was cold.

When I got to school in the morning, my life had definitely improved. Suddenly my two friends and I had more company at lunch. They liked that. I did, too.

I didn’t exactly like it when, at the next meet, Coach pulled me out to run with the juniors and seniors. “You started this, you finish it, Corey,” she muttered as she changed my place in the lineup. So I ran the way I did alone and made the two best runners sweat to beat me. The Pride thought it was cool. They cheered for me at meets. At the all-district competitions, when I had the hundred-meter and the three-hundred-meter events, Felix gave me an ornament from his braid to wear, a little golden sun. I came in second in the hundred, first in the three hundred. He wouldn’t take his sun back. He kissed me and told me to wear it instead.

I told myself he kissed all the girls. Then I went out and got a top-of-the-ear piercing done just for that earring. Once it was there, I looked at myself in the mirror and let myself dream about him.

The night after the last practice, I was on my way home when I saw one of the Neighborhood Watch people taking down the sketch of a rapist who had been working the Upper East Side. This one, with his spiky eyebrow piercing, had given me the shivers for weeks. “What happened?” I asked her. I was going home to an empty apartment—Aunt Lucy had finally convinced Mom a girl who was almost sixteen didn’t need a babysitter—so I was being lazy about getting there. “They caught him?”

“They caught him,” the woman said with a grim smile, like she had been there. “The cops got an anonymous tip. He was at the bottom of Bethesda Terrace with a broken leg and a broken arm.” I winced. That was a long, hard marble stair around the big fountain in Central Park. She told me, “Bastard said he was out for a run and he tripped. They found his rape kit under him, complete with souvenirs. He said a gang chased him. Good for them, that’s what I say.” She waved the flyers she’d already collected at me. “One down, plenty more to go.”

I went on home, shaking my head. Who ever heard of a gang that chased somebody until they fell, then ran away? And who tipped off the cops? How did they know who he was?

I told the Pride about the rapist at lunch the next day.

“Cool gang,” said Felix, laughing. He had a new addition to his braid that day, a spiky bar that could have been for an eyebrow piercing. “It captures criminals. A superhero gang. Maybe I can join. Do they wear cool jackets?”

We all cracked up. Maybe they called themselves the Pride, but I thought of bandannas and leather jackets and box cutters and low-rider cars when I thought “gang.” These were trust fund babies. They were a world away from the ugly street and the gangs in the projects like the ones I knew. They were strong young animals dressed in light and fresh air, not dirt and blood.

“Hey, maybe it was us. We hang in the park when school’s out,” black-haired Jeffries said, tossing a rolled-up napkin from hand to hand. “Sure, it coulda been us. Except
I’d probably just give a rapist my dad’s card. He’s always telling me even slime deserves a defense, right?”

Beauvais shoved him. “Like your dad would defend a
rapist
.”

“One with money,” Han said with a laugh.

I smelled mint as Felix leaned back and whispered in my ear, “Sometimes we hang out after dark.”

I reached down for my backpack, hiding my chest so he wouldn’t see his effect on me. “Isn’t it dangerous?” When I sat up, I cradled my pack, just in case he looked at my too-perky tits.

“We go as a group,” Jeffries said. “Our gang, remember?”

“Have to be safe,” Reed told us, sprawled over her section of the table. “Parental units throw a fit if they find out you’re out in the scary old park.”

Felix ran a hand down my arm. Of course the bell rang and monitors came out to move us along to class. Felix grabbed my wrist and tugged me down till his lips brushed the little sun in the top of my ear. “The next full moon, come out with us,” he whispered. “We meet at the East Ninety-seventh Street entrance and go for a run to the Loch, just the Pride. You want to really be one of us, be one of my lionesses, right? You’d maybe even replace Reed one day as queen of the hunt. So come. Not a word to anybody, Corey. Pride business. Nine o’clock, the night of the full moon.”

I had laughed at the idea of the Pride as a gang. But as a way to erase the misery of the last few years? It was pure gold. The presidents of the new senior and junior classes for
next year belonged to the Pride, as well as the captains of both track teams and both soccer teams. Okay, so Felix seemed to be the boyfriend of almost all the girls off and on. The guys didn’t seem to mind. Rich kids were different. A little of Felix was better than none, maybe. Or maybe he’d settle for only me.

I wouldn’t be alone anymore. I wouldn’t be weird or strange. I’d belong, not as a happy outsider, like Mom and her family, but as a happy insider, smooth and tan and laughing, like my dad and his new family. As choices went, this one was easy.

So I was there, the night of the full moon, dressed to run, but dressed for Felix, too, in a black tank top and running shorts that hugged what I had. I thought about leaving my crescent pendant at home, but left it on. How many people knew what it was anymore? A lot of girls wore them as jewelry without knowing they had a religious meaning, or caring if they knew. I added a snake earring and a couple of gem studs, fixed a gold chain in my braid, and was ready to go. No bracelets, no ankle bracelets, not when I ran. I carried my phone, my water, a towel, and other things I hoped I might need in my backpack.

Felix and some of the other guys of the Pride looked me over and made happy noises. Felix backed a couple of them off with slaps on the chest that could have been serious. The lionesses wore shorts like me, or cropped cargo pants, short blouses, running shoes. The guys wore shorts and T-shirts, summer wear. When Reed finally showed, wearing cargo pants, we set out across the park, a group of about seven girls and eight guys. Other people were out; it was still early
enough and the moon was starting to rise. We passed dog walkers and other runners, bicyclists, skateboarders, Rollerbladers, men sitting alone on benches with paper bags beside them, men seated alone on benches waiting, arms stretched out on the backs of the benches, legs spread wide, a warning in flesh not to come too close. The girls of the group moved inside, the guys outside, though no one seemed nervous or even like they paid attention. I wondered what Mom was doing now.

There were peepers chirping all around us from the trees that circled the meadows. We moved out onto the grass and toward the rocks that led to the oldest part of Central Park, where trees from the old island had been left to grow beside Olmsted’s carefully chosen plantings. I could hear an owl somewhere close by. There were bugs everywhere, big ones, some of them. A moth fluttered past. A rippling shadow darted after it and surrounded it. The bat moved on, but not the moth. Central Park, which seemed so people-friendly when we did our practices there during the day, was showing its real face now. I touched my snake earring, thinking about the hidden world, the one my family knew.