Search for Senna

  Everworld #01

  Search For Senna

  K.A. Applegate

  Chapter

  I

  The fight started at the Taco Bell where a lot of seniors and some juniors went for lunch. I’m a junior. I fit in there as well as anywhere. Which is not very well.

  I’m new, in a school where almost no one is new. Not just

  “a” new kid. I was “the” new kid. Worse yet, I was the new kid who’d been seen with Senna Wales in his car on Sunday.

  Down by the lake. Lake Michigan.

  It was stupid of me. I shouldn’t have rubbed Christopher’s nose in it. I didn’t know for a fact that he’d be down at the lake.

  I didn’t know for a fact that he’d seen us. But when you have an unusually warm, sunny Sunday right in the middle of a rainy late September, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that kids will be hanging out down at the water.

  I drove Senna down there. Top down on my big old Buick.

  Senna on the cracked, white leather seat beside me. Long blond hair whipping in the wind. Pale face with Julia Roberts lips. Eyes the color of rain clouds that had stayed for weeks and would return the next day.

  I drove down there knowing that people would see. I don’t know what the point was. Probably just some lame “look at me!”

  thing. I was with Senna. I wanted people to know it. I wanted them to say, “Whoa, that new guy David Levin is going with Senna.”

  Like that really meant something.

  Maybe I just wanted Christopher to see. Christopher, who’d been with Senna ever since the last week of sophomore year.

  Christopher, the wit, the comedian. He’d left half my English Lit class peeing themselves from laughing so hard. At me, as I read aloud a poem I’d written as a class assignment.

  Christopher is a funny guy. I mean, he has a real talent that way. You know a guy is funny when a week later you can still feel the little knives he stuck in you.

  Senna wasn’t the most popular girl in school. Not even the most beautiful. A lot of guys were scared of her. Truth. There was always something about her that seemed remote, cool. Like she lived behind a veil. Like she could see you but you couldn’t quite see her, not really her, just a shadow.

  So she scared some guys. But me? First time I saw her I knew that everything that had ever mattered to me just didn’t anymore. I could feel the course of my future suddenly swerve. I was like a planet drawn into the gravity well of a black hole.

  No escape. No desire to escape.

  Surrender, David.

  I didn’t walk the three blocks to the Taco Bell that Monday lunch, I drove. So did lots of kids, so they could roll down their windows and crank their stereos. Or sneak a smoke. Or sneak whatever.

  My old Buick’s stereo was just an AM radio. The FM was broken, and I only got three stations on the AM: some political talk station, some religious talk station, and a classic rock station.

  Hard to tell which I wanted to listen to least. The car’s a beast, but I wanted a convertible, had to have one. I hate the feeling of being all cramped in. And this was all the convertible I could afford.

  I drove the few blocks with the top down and elbow stuck out, driving with one hand, praying I wouldn’t stall out at the stoplight and have to get out and push the old beast over to the curb.

  By some miracle, there was a parking space. I slid in and jumped out. It didn’t take long for Christopher to spot me.

  People figure a guy who’s class clown is probably a wimp.

  Maybe Christopher is. But he had a lot of friends. So when the door of the Taco Bell blew open and Christopher came out, bristling and scowling, he had three other guys helping him hold up that bad-ass act.

  I didn’t pretend not to see him. I stopped walking and waited. He came right up to me. I gave him credit for that. I have a rep as a fairly tough guy. Maybe I deserve it, I don’t know.

  Would he have confronted me without his crew along? Don’t know. He looked mad enough to.

  “We have a problem,” he snapped.

  “Do we?” I asked.

  Then, wham!

  I never saw the blow coming. It wasn’t Christopher. It was one of his boys. Just loaded up on me and nailed me with a left hook that connected with my right cheek. I staggered. I went down on one knee. My knee crunched a soda cup someone had dropped. Pepsi or whatever soaked into my jeans.

  Then, wham!

  The punk’s knee came up and caught me in the nose. It was like someone exploded a hand grenade in my face. It was stars and Tweety birds, just like some old Looney Tunes cartoon.

  I heard a lot of shouting. A lot of it was Christopher. He was dragging the guy off me and yelling,

  “I didn’t say hit him, you moron! Get out of here or I’ll kick your butt.”

  Someone, or several someones, dragged and frogwalked me away around to the back of the Taco Bel . Back to the greasy Dumpster.

  “Leave me alone!” I yelled, trying to stand up. I stood up for about three seconds before I tottered back into the wood fence that surrounded the Dumpster.

  The rain decided this would be a good time to start pouring.

  So down it came. It was a blessing. It helped me straighten out my whirling, loopy head.

  It was Christopher himself holding me upright. And beside him, this girl named April. She’s Senna’s half sister. Three months and a universe of difference separate them. Senna is cool, blond, and remote. April is all green eyes and auburn hair and big, mocking smiles. Be with Senna for a million years and you won’t know her. Be with April ten minutes and it’s like you grew up together.

  Jalil was there. I knew Jalil from school. The poem I’d had to read that Christopher ridiculed? Jalil came up afterward and told me exactly, precisely why it sucked. But with no rancor and no ridicule, just because he knew.

  Jalil doesn’t believe the truth should piss anyone off. Or maybe he doesn’t care if it does. He just cares that it’s true.

  That’s giving him the benefit of the doubt. Take away that grace and maybe he’s just a condescending know-it-all.

  He was one of the first kids I got to sort of know at school.

  Not friends, exactly. More like two off-center loners who recognized a bit of themselves in the other person. We were guys who nodded at each other. Once he stepped over and just sort of made his presence known when I was getting hassled by some black kids. Once I did the same for him when he was getting some grief from some white guys.

  Jalil has this habit of not turning his head much, just moving his eyes, skeptical, appraising, not impressed by much. It takes him a while to talk and you might think he’s slow. But you get to know him you realize he’s slow to talk because his brain’s already jumped ahead three spaces and he has to back up to deal with you.

  Me, I’m not that smart. Not schoolbook smart, anyway. I don’t have the focus for that. When I was a kid I had that attention deficit disorder thing. I was always jumping around, looking at all the wrong things, missing what I was supposed to get, and getting the things no one else thought were important.

  Here’s my entire childhood: “David, settle down!”

  By the time I was thirteen I was a confirmed skateboard freak. Pants so big I could have had another couple of people in there with me. My board was, like, surgically attached to me.

  Could not be without it.

  Here’s my entire junior high existence: “Hey, kid, get offa there!”

  Now I was older. A year away from college or a job or the military. Now I didn’t know what I was.

  Oh, wait. Yes, I did. I was a chump with a piece of raw burger where my nose used to be.

  “What are you all staring at?” I raged.

  “I can’t speak for any of the
others,” Christopher said, “but personally, I’m looking at a guy who got suckerpunched and looks like he needs a new nose. I mean, damn, what are you going to breathe with?”

  I felt my nose. Gingerly. It didn’t hurt. Not yet, but it would.

  “You let that punk do your fighting for you?” I demanded.

  Christopher shook his head. “Uhuh, don’t lay that on me.

  What you and me have going on, you and me can deal with.

  That wasn’t my idea, what happened back there.”

  “What the hell is the matter with you two?” April demanded, but in a tone that was at least half amusement. “Let me guess.

  This had to involve Senna.”

  I glared at Christopher. He glared back at me. Some of my blood was on his shirt. He’d helped me stand up.

  “We should move on,” Jalil said. “Someone may have called the cops.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, intensifying my glare at Christopher.

  “Who cares about you?” Jalil asked blandly. “I’m a young black male. The cops show up, they’ll bust me on general principle. So come on, let’s take this show down the road before I end up playing Rodney King over your problems.”

  That was how we all came together the first time. Me wobbling along holding my face, Christopher propping me up and showing no sign of guilt as he made jokes at my expense, April thinking the whole thing was amusing and touching and idiotic, and Jalil looking out for himself even while he helped me out.

  That’s where it all began: around a girl named Senna who wasn’t even there.

  Chapter

  II

  “You look terrible,” Senna said.

  “Thanks. So do you.” A lie.

  It was later that night, after the Taco Bell Incident. We were in my car. The top was down. We were driving. Driving nowhere. Just driving.

  We stopped at a light. She slid across the seat. Her bare knee pressed against my jeans. She reached with long, sensitive fingers to touch my swollen, smashed-plum nose.

  Her eyes were glittery in the neon of city night. She looked at my messed-up face. She looked a little too long, maybe. Her expression was… I don’t know what it was. It made me look away.

  I guess she spaced, because suddenly her fingers were pressing too hard. Pain shot through my nose.

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry,” she said. She pulled her fingers away. There was blood on her fingertips. She looked at it and did not wipe it away.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “You were fighting over me,” she said.

  Green light. I pulled away slowly. Too slowly for the cab behind me. He gave me three seconds of horn.

  “I would have been. Fighting for you, I mean. If I’d given Christopher half a chance. But instead I decided to grab that punk’s knee and use it to beat the hell out of my face.”

  She smiled, teeth blue and gold from a Blockbuster sign we were passing.

  She slid closer still. “Christopher wouldn’t have fought you.

  He’s not that way.”

  “You don’t have a very high opinion of him. Why’d you go out with him?”

  “I liked him. I still like him. He’s smart and funny.”

  That stung. “Yeah? So why aren’t you still seeing him? Why are you with me?”

  “Don’t tell me where I am or who I’m with, David,” she said.

  I shot a look at her. Red light. She considered me, her eyes roaming over my face. Not at the injured nose anymore, but at my own face. My chin, like she was judging it. My eyes, but without making contact.

  Then she kissed me.

  Green light. This time I took off a little faster.

  We drove to a place where we could watch the moon come up over the lake. I parked the car.

  I looked at her. I knew nothing about her. I knew her face, her eyes, her hair. Nothing.

  What I knew about Senna Wales was really about me, not her. I knew that if only I could have her, if only she could somehow be with me, be a part of me, if only I could get up each day knowing she’d look at me, see me, smile at me, then she would be a wall to block out everything, a chasm between past and future.

  But that was about me. That was all about the twists in my head. About her, I knew nothing.

  “Sorry the radio sucks,” I apologized.

  “I like it quiet.”

  So we sat there, side by side in silence, and listened to the breeze and the not-so-distant sound of traffic and the mellow lapping of water at the shore.

  I was trying to work up my nerve to kiss her again. But there was a wall around her.

  Untouchable.

  “Something is going to happen,” she said, gazing out at the water.

  For a moment I didn’t know if she was done talking or not.

  And then I didn’t know if I should say anything.

  “What do you mean? What’s going to happen?”

  Slowly, very slowly, she shook her head. “I don’t know. I only know something will happen. Soon. Something… terrible.”

  I shivered. I don’t shiver. I don’t scare that easily. I shivered.

  She turned and smiled at me. “Sometimes I know things before they happen. Sometimes I can see a scene in my head.

  Like watching a movie. And then it will happen. I think, did I make it happen? Or did I just see it somehow?”

  I shrugged, helplessly confused. Not wanting to make her turn away, wanting to keep her eyes looking at me. “I don’t know. Maybe a little of both.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. But she acted like I did.

  “Yes. Maybe,” she said. Then, almost shyly, she asked the question that would enslave me.

  “David, when it happens… when it happens, David, will you save me?”

  I don’t know what I thought. That she was crazy. That I didn’t care if she was crazy.

  “Yes, Senna. I’ll save you.”

  She kissed me then, and then again. And each time she opened her lips to me I felt another part of myself drained away. And I didn’t care.

  Chapter

  III

  I dreamed about Senna that night. I almost always remember my dreams, although I always pretend not to. There are some things that pop up in my dreams I don’t want to remember. Stuff from a long-gone, faraway time, rising up to torture me.

  But I dreamed of her that night. And that dream I wanted to keep forever.

  She came to me. Right there in my room. She just appeared.

  Even before I’d opened my eyes.

  She wasn’t smiling. She looked distant and distracted and wary.

  But she came to stand beside my bed and took my hand in hers. I felt something like electricity, only, no, no, not electricity.

  Electricity would travel from her into me, and that’s not what I felt.

  I felt her hand and it was cold. Not death cold, steel cold.

  Emptiness cold. My own hand, hot, could not affect her. My heat could not raise her temperature by one degree, and that fact, that physical fact made it seem that my own hand was burning.

  She looked at me but there were other eyes looking out through hers.

  She scared me. I felt she could reach down and take my throat and squeeze and I would be helpless, helpless, batting at her with weak arms, unable to so much as bruise the liquid steel of her delicate body.

  She waved her other hand, and all at once the walls of my room were gone, and we were outside in sunlight, in a field of wildflowers. All fake, I knew that right away. I knew it and it made my insides churn. An illusion she had created, that was it, a movie backdrop for the big scene.

  She bent low then, low to me sprawled on the grass, and pressed her lips to mine. Her hair whipped my face, stinging. I flinched but she smiled and I smiled, too, a different smile as she kissed me, and now I was screaming in silent pain as the burning in my hand spread through my body.

  I reached for her to pull her down, but I might have been tugging at a mar
ble statue.

  No control, David. You have no control. She said that. Or was it me? Or was it some voice from someone watching, unseen?

  She laughed. David the Dragonslayer, she said. General David. David the Fool. Lord David. And more names, more titles, all mocking, but as she went on, more bitter, more angry. Like she was seeing a list reeled off, a list she liked less and less.

  Then her eyes saw something that made her mouth form into a snarl.

  Plans within plans, she said thoughtfully, wary again. Secrets within secrets.

  But you will never betray me, will you, David?

  No, no, no! I cried, as if someone were ripping the words from my throat.

  You will always be mine, she said.

  She kissed me again and pressed her body against mine, and now at last she was warm and real. And then she disappeared.

  Chapter

  IV

  It happened the next day. The terrible thing.

  It was early. Gray dawn. More gray than dawn, really, because the clouds were hanging low over the lake. It was chilly, which is how I like it when I go for a run. I run maybe three times a week. I’m no athlete; it’s just that sometimes I’ll wake up way too early and be full of this dangerous energy.

  The kind of feeling that makes you go looking for trouble.

  Maybe it was some hangover from my dream. Maybe I just hadn’t slept well.

  All I know is I woke up tingling, teeth grinding, eyes way too clear and alert. So I got up and ran.

  I rolled out of bed and pulled on a pair of gray shorts, a faded Radiohead T-shirt, and a sweatshirt with the arms cut short. I dug in my drawer for clean socks and laced up my shoes.

  I crept down the stairs past my mom’s room. Her door was partly open. A man’s leg was sticking out from beneath crumpled sheets. I looked away.

  We have a house in a kind of old neighborhood. It’s a nice house, with a standard lawn and a fence around the backyard.

  The street is quiet. It’s eight, nine blocks to the lake and downhill all the way.

  I headed toward the lake. No warm-up. I wasn’t planning a long run. Through the still-sleeping downtown, past the Breugger’s and the Barnes and Noble and the health food store.