Kindred

  I walk over and raise my window to let in the breeze and the scent of rain, which has always made me feel calm and closer to nature.

  I part my lips a little, feeling my dry tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, craving a shot of Listerine and toothpaste. And although the breeze drifting in through the window is reviving me some, I know that only freezing cold water splashed on my face from the bathroom sink will fully wake me up.

  After washing up, I head downstairs to the smell of normalcy.

  Breakfast tastes different this morning, probably because it’s not a bowl of cold cereal like it has been since Uncle Carl went into the hospital. Beverlee was up before the sun, running the coffee pot first before cooking a big breakfast of eggs and bacon and biscuits smothered in my favorite white gravy.

  I’m stuffed long before my plate is clean.

  Uncle Carl eats his breakfast in the den. I haven’t seen him anywhere else since he came home. He even slept there last night.

  I hate to see him like this, but I never let the sympathy show on my face because I know that’ll only make it worse.

  I kiss Uncle Carl on his temple before I head out the door where Isaac is waiting for me in the driveway. I notice a small break in the clouds where blue sky peeks through as I make my way toward the Jeep. And momentarily, my hand comes up to feel the contours of the moonstone necklace Isaac gave me yesterday, partly making sure that it’s there, the other part remembering the moment he gave it to me.

  Life at school with Isaac has been fulfilling. For the first time in my life, I am the girl that other girls want to trade places with. I’m not Miss Popularity, thank God, but I’m no longer the Invisible Girl. And I have haters! You’re nothing without haters, right?

  Isaac doesn’t really care for school much since he already graduated—he’s mainly here for me—but he likes going to school because he says it gets him out of the house. Now, the funny thing about this is that it’s not like Isaac doesn’t have more important things to be doing with his day, like consorting with his brothers about pack issues and Vargas issues and other issues like that. But like I said, Isaac has pretty much given up everything for me, including his position as Alpha. I don’t like it, but it is what it is and so far nothing I have tried to say to him has done much to change his mind.

  We don’t have any classes together, but we see each other everywhere: in the halls, the gymnasium, the library and of course outside at lunch. He also admitted to me shortly after he started school that he decided on being a senior to give me some space. He may be almost twenty (next month, actually), but he could still pass for seventeen if he wanted to. A taller, more muscular seventeen-year-old, but nonetheless.

  Also, Isaac’s youngest sisters, Phoebe and Camilla, started school at Hall-Dale last December. Phoebe and Camilla wanted to hang out with other humans and be in ‘human circles’, as they referred to it. Like most of the Mayfairs, even Isaac had been schooled privately by someone they called ‘the Governess’. She and others of her kind are teachers at private schools all over the world. And humans—teachers and students alike that attend these private schools—are oblivious to what really goes on behind the scenes, that the mysterious teacher in the room down the hall that associates with no one is an Elder werewolf, teaching a class of Pure Blood werewolves.

  Isaac graduated at a private school in Upstate New York, but one might think he’s already spent eight years in college and holds several different degrees. He’s highly intelligent, but it’s not something he likes to flaunt. And he’s purposely failing a few classes so that he doesn’t have to pretend to graduate with the other seniors this year—wants to stay in school with me until I graduate next year.

  At school, he’s as quiet and reserved as Sebastian. Of course, this makes Isaac that much more mysterious and appealing to the girls.

  I love it and hate it at the same time.

  “Hi Isaac!” three girls—I call them Blond, Brunette and Red-Head—say in unison as he walks through the hall toward me later in the morning. Maybe it should make me jealous, but it doesn’t. And when Red-Head smirks at me with competition in her eyes, maybe that’s supposed to make me nervous, but it doesn’t.

  Because I know I have nothing to worry about.

  I guess I do gloat a little, but never visibly. The only thing I don’t particularly like about being in a relationship with the hottest guy in school is that it has drawn more attention to me than I ever wanted. And being popular, as I’ve mentioned, is territory I have always stayed clear of. There are four kinds of popular: the obvious, ‘beautiful’ kind, the inherited kind because one has money and their parents drive sixty thousand dollar cars, the likable kind—Harry fits in here—because someone was lucky enough to be born with a totally lovable personality that few can resist, and the popular-by-association kind, where I became a member the day Isaac started school here and it was quickly known that I am his girlfriend.

  He stops in the hallway full of students, just long enough to kiss me softly on the lips so that Blond, Brunette and Red-Head can watch. And then he walks past me grinning, letting his fingers brush against the palm of my hand. They fall away and he leaves me standing here with Harry and dozens of eyes furtively observing me and maybe wondering what I have that Isaac Mayfair likes so much.

  Red-head is red all over.

  I can’t lie and say I don’t love it when he does that, but when everyone is watching it still manages to make me shrink inside myself, too.

  Nothing comes without a price.

  “I think I lost my phone,” Harry says, patting his pocket and then the other. “Oh great—I’ll catch you in the library,” he adds, already walking away in the direction of the classroom he just left. “Call me a few times, okay? It’s on vibrate. I might be able to hear it.”

  I nod and slip through the library doors, pecking the chiclet keys on my smartphone to dial Harry’s number and I head over to my favorite table closest to the wooden magazine shelf.

  Genna Bishop is sitting there, looking across at me as if she’s been waiting for me. Her bright red sling-bag sits on the center of the table, pushed against the spider plant on display in its pot.

  At first, I hesitate but then walk over and join her, setting my purse, two notebooks and a study book on the table near her bag. This is the next to last week of school, but I promised my English Lit. teacher I would reread Jane Eyre and do my paper over to bring up my final grade.

  I remind myself that Genna’s not clueless like everyone else in the school, and in some enigmatic way she makes me leery of her now, despite being human.

  “How are you feeling?” she says, smiling up at me.

  Finally, I sit down and slide the book over, opening to a section with multi-colored Post-It’s jutting out from various pages where I had been making notes. “Much better,” I say in a low voice. I glance down to notice Harry’s number had picked up and so I put my ear to the phone. It’s just the voicemail. I hang up and dial his number again.

  “Where did you go yesterday?” I ask Genna, setting my phone on the table. “I guess I can’t blame you though.”

  Genna smiles. “I know, I’m sorry,” she says. “But you feel okay now and that’s all that matters.”

  Already this conversation is weird.

  I lick my lips and swallow, not really knowing what to say to her, or why she’s here. I get the feeling it has nothing to do with books and studying.

  “Genna,” I say and pause, thinking of how to word the question, “how exactly did you say you knew the Mayfairs again?”

  Genna leans back in the chair and rests her folded hands on the table in front of her. Today her fingernails are midnight blue, adorned by tiny silver stars. There’s a small circular tattoo on the hollow of her right hand, but it’s mostly covered by the index finger of her left hand for me to make out exactly what it is.

  “I’ve known Nathan for a little while,” she says, “since I stopped in Finch’s Grocery one day.”

 
“Sorry, Genna but I know, you already told me where you met him,” I say, shaking my head. “I guess the real question is how do you know about them?” I glance around now, going through the slight paranoid motions, hoping no one is listening in even though I know that if someone were, they’d really have no idea what we were talking about.

  She moves her hands and I finally get a brief glimpse of her tattoo in its entirety. Some kind of weird symbol I’ve never seen before.

  Her emerald eyes flash and it catches me off-guard. I blink and look upward at the ceiling where a light washes over us through a large rectangular cover.

  I feel like I’ve forgotten what we were talking about. My gaze moves toward the white beam that holds the ceiling up between the magazine shelf and our table. I think about what I’m supposed to say next. I can hardly recall the moment I sat down.

  “I moved here last year from New Hampshire,” she says. “My dad took a job in Augusta—thought we were going to get to move to California, but unfortunately we got stuck with cold, foggy Maine.”

  “You don’t like it here?” I say, though the conversation still feels off because I don’t remember where it came from.

  “It’s alright I guess,” she says, leaning back up from the chair and propping her arms on the table at the elbows. “What about you?”

  “I, umm…,” I just go with it; “I really like it here. Not so much the snow, but I’ve grown to tolerate it at least—it’s a shock to the system coming from Georgia.”

  Genna laughs lightly; her pretty cream-colored face appears to glow under the fluorescent light. “Yeah, that’s like New Mexico and Montana, or Florida and Washington State.”

  I smile, agreeing, but am distracted by Tori and her two sycophants walking toward our table. I glance over briefly. Their pace slows as they get closer; all three of them are looking at me with suspicious, slanted eyes. The two behind Tori whisper something to each other then look right at me again, smirking. Tori stops at the end of the table, a book pressed to her chest. “What’s wrong with you?” she says looking down at me over a crinkled nose.

  I glance at Genna briefly, but then look back up at Tori who’s staring at me like I’ve got bird crap in my hair. “Nothing’s wrong with me,” I say, but then I go into defensive-mode, “I’m having a conversation, if you don’t mind.”

  Tori’s eyes widen and she twists around just a bit at the waist to meet the eyes of her friends who share the same baffled expression as she does. But Tori never takes her eyes fully off me, as if I’m something strange and risky that she shouldn’t turn her back on. I watch her gaze stray toward the table, over at Genna and then to me again. Her friends burst into a fit of subdued laughter.

  “I see,” Tori says with that look of sarcasm in her eye, “well, I’ll leave you to it then.”

  She walks away and her friends follow; quiet laughs and whispers carry on the air.

  I look at Genna again, who doesn’t seem affected by Tori’s visit. “How seventh-grade can she get?” I say, shaking my head. I go into Bully Defense now, feeling bad for Genna and the way Tori looked at her as if she were the bird crap in my hair.

  “I wouldn’t worry about them,” I say, “Tori’s still jealous over a stupid guy thing.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried at all,” Genna says, smiling confidently, and I get the oddest feeling from it. “And you shouldn’t either. Just calm down.”

  Calm down? “You said that to me before,” I say, “at Isaac’s house.”

  Okay, maybe I do need to calm down. This is driving me nuts! I know something is off about this entire exchange. I feel it in my gut. I begin to shift in the seat, not sure about how to act around this mysterious and extraordinarily gorgeous girl. I feel something in the air around us, something amiss as though we were copied from somewhere else and pasted into the scene and the edges haven’t been lined up properly. I notice people walk by, but all of them glance at me as if I don’t belong here. Now that I think about it, everyone is looking at me a lot like Tori did, but without laughing.

  Am I naked?

  I look down at myself, relieved that I’m fully clothed, but at the same time thinking how ridiculous it was to even entertain that.

  Uneasiness starts to twist my insides into knots.

  I lean my stomach over the table and move closer to Genna and whisper impatiently, “Please tell me how you know the Mayfairs?”

  The smile drops from her face and she reaches across the table a few inches to touch my hand, but I slide back and pull away, resting my back against the chair.

  “You’re very strong, Adria,” she says and I feel like she’s looking right into my soul. “Stronger than I could tell, but not strong enough to fight this on your own.”

  “What?” I feel completely baffled and I want to just get up and walk away from her but I can’t. I’m skeptical to the point that I almost feel in danger, but I’m also mesmerized by her and can’t force myself to leave.

  “I have to go,” she says suddenly and pushes the chair back across the floor.

  I just stare up at her, my mouth partly open.

  “Adria,” I hear Harry say from across the room. I tear my eyes away from Genna and turn to see Harry walking briskly toward me, cell phone waving above him in his fist.

  When I look back at Genna, she’s already disappearing around a table and past a series of bookshelves. I watch her until she slips around a corner and out of sight.

  What just happened? I can’t even form a sentence in my mind, much less speculation. I feel a lot like I did in the grocery store once when this woman pushed her cart in front of my mom’s while standing in line to cut in front of us. My mom and me just looked at each other wondering, “Did that really just happen?”

  “Found it on the floor beside my desk,” he says as he plops down in the chair that Genna just left. “Who were you talking to anyway?” He looks at me suspiciously while setting his phone on the table. “I couldn’t make it all out,” he goes on, “but I did hear you say something about the Mayfairs and, y’know, that’s a little weird, considering.”

  He’s going through the paranoid motions now, which he never does because we never talk about this.

  “How do you know what I was talking about?” I don’t want this to get any stranger and already it looks like it’s going to.

  Harry picks his phone up by the edges with his fingers and shakes it side to side as if to show me. “My voicemail recorded your conversation—well, if you want to call it that.”

  I’m a little relieved. For a second, I thought Harry was going to tell me he could read my mind, or that he had been sitting here all along.

  I would need to see a psychotherapist, if that was the case.

  “I was talking to Genna Bishop,” I say. “And obviously it’s okay to bring up the Mayfairs because she knows what they are. Oh, and then to Tori for a second—thankfully that didn’t go on longer.”

  “Genna who?”

  “Bishop,” I say, “she sits to your right in Mrs. Schvolsky’s class?” I turn my chin at an angle and feel my eyes slant disbelievingly. Even a guy as loyal to his girlfriend as Harry wouldn’t be able to forget someone like Genna Bishop. She’s the type of girl so gorgeous that everyone knows her by name even if they’ve never met.

  Harry’s gaze studies me skeptically. “Anna Johnston sits to my right in Mrs. Schvolsky’s class,” Harry says. “And I’ve never heard of Genna Bishop.”

  11

  I SNAP MY HEAD the rest of the way around. “Harry, don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  I let a long and heavy breath out through my nose and roll my eyes at him. I flip several pages in my book, opening it to the blue Post-It note. Harry’s still looking at me like he really has no idea what I’m talking about, or who Genna Bishop is. That’s completely ridiculous and I refuse to play along with this.

  Harry’s big hand slaps down on the pages in front of me and he slides the book out of my view and toward him.
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  “You’re acting weird,” he says, his thick, dark eyebrows knotted rigidly against his forehead. “Who is Genna Bishop?”

  I trust Harry, that sincere look on his face, but the part of me that doesn’t want him to be telling the truth because it will mean something is wrong with me is still in denial.

  “She’s been sitting next to you in Geometry all year,” I say snappily, “and you can’t tell me you don’t know who she is.”

  “Adria,” he says, gaping at me intensely, “honest to God, I don’t know who you’re talking about. Anna sits on my right—she’s borrowed a pen from me twice this year and Jake sits to my left—chokes me to effing death with that cologne.”

  I’m staring down at the patterns in the wooden table. I’m starting to feel slightly dizzy again, but this time it’s because my head is spinning trying to figure out what’s going on. I look up to test the air again. It feels normal now, unlike things were when Genna sat here and I felt like the two of us somehow didn’t fit properly into the picture. My gaze moves around the library and people still look in my direction every now and then, but now it seems natural even though a few still give me more attention than what is normal.

  “Harry,” I say, reaching out for his phone, “let me hear the voicemail.”

  He’s trying to figure me out, watching me carefully like he’s worried about something. But I’m worried, too. I just can’t tell him why yet.

  Harry nods and I pick up his phone, sliding my thumb across the unlock bar on the touch screen. The phone clicks and I move my finger over the little green phone icon that takes me to the voicemail. I put it on speaker, but turn the volume down enough that only we can hear it.

  And I listen closely.

  My voice is mostly distinct. Only a couple of times when I was farthest away from the phone and whispering to Genna are my words a little harder to make out.

  I can’t hear Genna at all.

  And when Tori came up to the table, I can hear her voice as clear as my own though she had been farther away from my phone than Genna was.