I nodded, pretending I believed her.
“I’m serious,” she said, reading my ambivalence. “I even bathed it in the healing powers of the waterfalls.”
I didn’t want to patronize her, really I didn’t. But I didn’t believe all the stuff about the “mystical” waterfalls like she did.
Our town, Serendipity Falls, was named for the nearby waterfalls of the same name. They were our town treasure—our tourist bait. Not only were they gorgeous, but there were several old legends attached to them, enchantment being one of them. Water nymphs, healing powers, love potions—the pool fed by the cascading water was said to have all that and more.
“Put the crystal in your bra,” she suggested, knowing I would do no such thing. “How are things with your dad?”
“Same as always, I guess.”
Amelia always felt it was incredibly sad the way my father overcompensated for my lack of a mother. She made excuses for his irrational behavior based on his losing his one true love. I guess she’s the romantic of our trio. Donny pretty much thought my father was the devil. It never occurred to me to think of him one way or the other. Father was who he was.
My mind wandered back to my strange dreams from the last two nights. They were, of course, dreams. Though I wouldn’t rule out sleepwalking, as I now had two ruined nightgowns that proved I’d been outside. Which was really disturbing. I thought maybe I should ask Father’s secretary to make me a doctor’s appointment. Sleepwalking outside was dangerous.
As we walked down the hall, I pulled the band out of my hair to ease my growing headache and finger-combed my curls. As we passed the windows of the admin office, time blurred into slow motion. I shivered and a rush of cold seeped into the marrow of my bones as if someone had just stepped on my grave. And danced on it as well.
It was him.
He’d traded his coat and tails for jeans and a tight Abercrombie and Fitch tee, but it was him. I would have known him anywhere.
I blinked slowly, believing he was a mirage. A very handsome mirage. But I didn’t have the power to dream cute boys into life. When he didn’t disappear, part of my heart sang and part of it worried that I’d never be the same again.
He looked right into my eyes. He didn’t smile, but he didn’t drop his gaze either. Life carried on around us, but we were trapped in a different moment than the rest of the students in the crowded hall and office. The noisy corridor suddenly quieted, like someone had clicked the MUTE button. Though he didn’t physically move, I felt him take a bow, deeply, like he had the night before.
Oh, I never would be the same again.
His presence in my waking world stirred all my senses. Still in slow motion, I kept walking, warmed wherever his eyes touched me. When I finally dropped eye contact, the world caught up with me—or the other way around.
Ame grabbed my arm. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Please keep walking,” I squeaked.
She slung a protective arm around me and ushered me into the nearest bathroom. I slumped against the wall, trying to catch my breath, but my lungs didn’t want to work, and I exhaled when I should have inhaled.
“What is wrong with you? Do you need the nurse? Should I call your dad?”
I shook my head, which did nothing for my already poor balance. “No. I just need a minute.”
The door burst open and the surge of energy that always followed Donny came in with her. “Oh, my God. Tell me you saw him. He is undeniably . . . hey . . . what’s wrong?”
Amelia answered. “She just freaked out. It was the weirdest thing. We were walking down the hall and everything was fine. Then she—”
“You saw him, right?” My voice sounded foreign to me—desperate. I still wasn’t breathing right. “The boy in the office? He was really there?”
“The smokin’ new guy? Yeah, I saw him—” Donny’s face lit up. “Oh, wow! Finally you get the hots for someone. I was beginning to think you might sway the other direction, if you know what I mean. This is great. I mean, I’m a little perturbed that I don’t get him first—but, you know, I’m willing to sacrifice one boy for the greater good if it means you’ll finally get laid.”
“You are the opposite of classy, Donny.” Amelia was still rubbing my arm. “Is that what this was about? Love at first sight?” Ever the romantic.
“Oh, Jesus, Ame.” Donny opened her purse, pulling out makeup. To me, she said, “We are going to get a little color back on your face and then you are going to talk to Hottie McTightPants before some other ho snags him.”
“Wait. There’s more. . . .” Ame and Donny exchanged glances, worried glances. I guess I was being a touch dramatic, but who wouldn’t be? “I had this really weird dream last night. And he was in it.”
“You dreamt about him. Oh, that’s wonderful. You’re so lucky.” Amelia practically swooned. “It’s like a fairy tale.”
“You’re so retarded.” Donny thrust her purse at Ame and pushed her to the side so she could grab both my shoulders. “Tell me all about the dream. Was he kinky?”
“No, he wasn’t kinky. Well, maybe he was—I don’t know, he was kind of weird . . . but you’re missing the point. I dreamt about him before I saw him.”
Amelia was going to need a chair. “That’s so amazing. Maybe you knew each other in a former life and you just now found each other again.” Amelia wasn’t just a romantic; she was also a metaphysical junkie. Tarot cards, dream interpretation, crystals, past-life regression—if it made it to the shelf of the metaphysical bookstore, Ame was a rapt pupil.
Donny wasn’t fazed by my revelation—or Ame’s. “He’s probably been in town a day or two before he started school. Maybe you saw him when we were getting gelato or something.”
I exhaled and the tension whooshed from my body. “You’re right. I’m sure you’re right.” That made much more sense than dreaming up a guy from thin air. Which reminded me of the burning man, and suddenly I felt not good again. “I feel like my life has taken a turn for the strange.”
Donny was applying blusher to my cheeks even though I tried to move my head away from it. “Stop squirming. Deciding you like boys doesn’t mean your life is getting strange. It means you’re finally growing into your hormones. Let’s go out there and get him, tiger.”
She and Amelia each grabbed an arm and took me into the hall, despite my dragging feet. Once we got to the office, my heart plummeted. He was surrounded by students—two of them cheerleaders, one of them holding his new schedule, obviously ready to show him to his class. As much as I hated to admit it, he looked natural at the center of the beautiful people.
“Oh, God,” Amelia said, scrunching her face. “He’s crawling with sneetches.”
How long could my heart keep falling? It just dropped further and further, turning everything around me to a shade of gray. “It doesn’t matter.” I said it, but I didn’t mean it.
Everything about him suddenly mattered very much to me. Too much. The hole where my heart used to be ached. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone so attractive. I willed his dark eyes to look at me. I wanted to pull the other girls off him and be the only girl he shared that smile with. I wanted to know his dreams, his secrets . . . his name.
Donny gave me a little squeeze. “I’m as morally opposed to the sneetches as you guys are—but let’s cut him a little slack. He’s new—he doesn’t know how vile they are. Plus they probably descended on him like a pack of wolves on a rabbit.”
At that moment, the rabbit looked up and right into my eyes. He wasn’t helpless prey. Far from it. His eyes were nearly black and made him look more dangerous than any predator in the forest. An involuntary shiver racked my body—he actually smiled at my reaction. It wasn’t a happy smile, or even a pleasant one. It was an expression of pride, like he’d accomplished a strategic move on the chessboard. Or maybe trapped Bambi in a corner.
I became spoils of the hunt.
Even as he looked at me, he looked through me
. And then he put his arm around a sneetch and whispered something in her ear without dropping his gaze from mine.
And I felt it.
I gasped at the sensation. As surely as if I were the one standing next to him, I felt his breath against my face, hottest near my ear.
He watched her.
Theia didn’t move like the other students. She considered every movement carefully, as if she was concerned that her body might do something without her. Like she was always reining something in.
The kind of control he would never have.
She dropped books off at her locker, glancing over her shoulder occasionally. No doubt she felt his presence. He checked his impulse to get her attention. He didn’t know if he could stand another interlude like the one this morning. Not without losing control.
He half hoped she would untether her hair again. The amber and honey curls were such a contradiction to her carefulness. They caught the light, spinning the colors in a whirling dervish of caramel and brown sugar.
Instead, she left the band around her ringlets, pulling the hair tautly away from her oval face. Her eyebrows were highly arched over her wary eyes, eyes the color of slate. The depth of her eye color changed with her emotions. Sometimes her eyes reminded him of the seas violent with storm. Other times they were as gray as a cemetery headstone.
He closed his eyes. Whatever had made him think coming here was a good idea abandoned him just as surely as his good sense had. Last night had been a mistake. One he hoped he’d be strong enough not to make again. She had no place in his world, just as he had no place in hers.
He hung back but kept her in his sights, wishing that his weakness didn’t make him feel like a common stalker. Even that would have been better for her than he was. Safer.
There were things to be done and his purpose was clear. He couldn’t afford this distraction; the price would be more than he could bear, and it wouldn’t be his alone.
For her sake, he needed to end this dalliance quickly. If she hated him, all the better.
But still he watched her. The heart that he wasn’t supposed to have blossomed in his chest, reaching for her even though the rest of him knew it could never be. Would never be.
His carefully planned strategy had changed because of her. He would spend his last breath making sure he never tainted the one true thing he’d ever really known.
The usual silence of dinner with Father had given me the opportunity to push my food around my plate listlessly and relive the moment when the new boy, whose name turned out to be Haden Black, touched me without touching me. No matter how hard I tried to put it out of my mind, the feel of his breath against my ear as he whispered to another girl kept me riveted to the same memory, over and over. The way he looked at me while he did it . . . I could have sworn he knew what he did to me.
Even as he frightened me, he intrigued me.
Thankfully, he had been easily avoided for the rest of the day. We had only one class together and our desks were on opposite sides of the room. Not that I hadn’t been hyperaware of him, but at least I couldn’t see him.
Father took a business call at the table. He rarely did that. Sometimes when I watched him talk to strangers, I noticed he didn’t look so much like my father. With me, he carried himself so severely, so guarded.
When he spoke on the phone, even though he was businesslike, he relaxed. His features softened. His brown eyes warmed. My father had impeccable taste in clothes, his hair, though thinning, still had a bit of wave and only a little gray, and I always thought his hands were almost elegant the way he used them in conversation. But it was only when he wasn’t talking to me that I thought he might actually be a handsome man.
“Please pass the carrots,” I said when he finished his call.
Father shot me a perplexed glance as he handed me the bowl. For all our estrangement, he knew my eating habits, and carrots were never my favorite. Mostly I just wanted a reason to interact with him.
“Thank you.”
“Hmmm,” he answered.
Perhaps it was the lack of sound sleep that clouded my judgment, but a small ball of anger fizzed in my chest at the way he treated me, and I wanted to provoke him into something—anything—besides this stoic cordial acquaintance association we had. So I asked, “Did my mother like carrots?”
He reacted, like I’d known he would, as if I had slapped his face. Shock paled his skin, and then red replaced it. “What does it matter what kind of food your mother preferred?” He punctuated each word with a punch of mettle. Father didn’t appreciate things that came out of nowhere.
“I just . . . I just want to know her better.”
He’d recovered himself and masked his face in cool indifference once again. “I loved your mother, Theia. It pains me to talk about her. She did not like carrots, as I recall.” Father wiped the corners of his mouth, though it wasn’t necessary, as he ate with a precision that a surgeon would envy. “Your mother didn’t like much that wasn’t junk food.”
I’d gotten that from her, my love of junk food. That made me smile.
Father pushed away from the table. “Perhaps if she’d learned to take better care of herself, you could be asking her these questions.”
My smile was quickly replaced with a tug of longing at my heart. He’d known that would hurt. I deserved it, I suppose, for bringing her up. My mother was a forbidden subject unless to provide my father a cautionary tale in order to bring me to heel.
He blamed her for dying. I suspect he blamed me for killing her.
He left me sitting alone at the table, though I was no lonelier than I had been when he was still in the room.
I resolved to practice violin for an hour after dinner. I promised myself an hour of whatever I wanted to play instead of what had been prescribed for me to practice. Getting lost in music meant I wouldn’t have to think about my father, the burning man, my strange dream, or Haden Black.
As a child, I took to music quickly and with what seemed to everyone else very little effort. I could never explain to them that the hard part of playing the violin was not the notes or the finger placement, or even the calluses. It was the pieces of me I had to sacrifice when I pulled the songs out. When I played for myself, I belonged to the song, and the song became the real Theia. Without a tutor or an audience, my own world opened up. A world richer than the one where I lived. A place where I didn’t feel bound to expectations or fault. When I played for others, the opposite was true. The songs I played for them weren’t to unlock my world; instead, I disappeared in a way, and was able to open up theirs.
It was a heady thing, to be told as a child that I touched people so deeply. Strangers. I’d been told I was gifted, but so often it seemed that what I was given was a gift for others.
And so I used to long for the time alone with my violin, to escape and release the girl I wanted to be from her captivity inside the girl I really was. Used to. Lately, I no longer felt compelled to make my own music, but the last two days had wearied me. I needed a holiday from me.
As the sun sank into the horizon, I played from memory the melancholy tune that had lured me into the labyrinth the night before. I’d chosen the sunroom off the kitchen, with the wicker furniture and ferns, because it had the best view of the setting sun; I’d chosen the song without realizing I’d done so until I’d been playing for ten minutes.
By then, I also realized I was crying. Real tears rolled down my cheeks, plopping onto my violin, but I didn’t stop playing. The song took root inside of me, like an invasion. Each note I played felt like I was searching for something; if I could whittle to the core of the song I would have it. Yet the more I played, the more mysterious and elusive whatever I was searching for became.
As I played, I became one with the song and unburdened of my life. The further I reached for the tune, the more the world fell away. Suddenly, I walked through the hedges and smelled the night air. A waking dream. Part of me knew I was still in the house, but part of me had been se
t free.
I stepped on a twig and it snapped beneath my foot. The noise startled the birds that had been hiding in the hedge and hundreds of black-and-white doves ascended from their perches at once. The sound of the multitudes taking flight thundered deep in my ears, and the mass of the birds covered the moonlight. Leaving me in the dark.
I covered my head and crouched low, trying to shield myself from the swarm. The lack of light disoriented me and chilled the evening by several degrees. That the moonlight was warm in my dream struck me as odd. My heartbeat accelerated and so did the song. It got faster and faster until the sound made me dizzy.
“Theia, stop at once!”
I was back in the sunroom, sweat pouring off my body. My father stood in the door, bellowing at me to stop playing.
I couldn’t pull myself out of it, even though he bade me stop. My whole body jerked, and what I played sounded more like noise than music, but I couldn’t stop. Faster, faster. I must have looked like I was having a seizure. My violin started to smoke—that was when Father crossed the room and forced my arm still.
“Theia, what the hell are you doing?” He wrenched the instrument from my hand and I slumped into the chair.
I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t even be sure I was really in the room with him. I’d been possessed by something. Something unforgiving in its quest to take over my life.
My father stared at me for a few seconds. I wonder what he saw, what he thought. I’m sure my face was flushed and my eyes were wild. A person doesn’t play an instrument so fast that it begins to smoke without her appearance changing too.
Maybe I’d imagined the smoke—it couldn’t really do that, could it?
I met his eyes.
“Theia,” he began, and then guarded his face again. “For heaven’s sake, sit up straight.”
And he left the room.
CHAPTER THREE
That night, the labyrinth wasn’t a hedge of green, but instead walls of twisted branches barbed with thorns, and no signs of vegetation . . . or life. The gnarled, sharp sticks were plaited together so tightly that no light poked through the walls, but some of the sticks stuck out and scraped my skin if I passed too close.