“Samuel,” I breathe as his hand slowly inches upward.
“Do not use that name,” he commands as his mouth ravages my neck, making me ache for more.
“Darius, stop.”
But he doesn’t stop. His hand continues until he reaches my center, caressing me in a place where no one, not even I, have ever been.
“Mara,” he whispers gruffly in my ear. “Your body,” he continues as his fingers stroke my flesh, stirring inside me a sensation so completely alarming and pleasurable, I feel as if I might faint, “and your spirit belong to me now. No one can touch you the way I touch you. No one can see you the way I see you. No one can love you the way I will love you tonight. Is that understood, Mara?”
His hand is frozen between my thighs, his gaze penetrating me as he awaits my answer. I writhe against his hand, yearning for his touch.
“Yes,” I reply. “I am yours, Darius…. Forever.”
The concerto ends and I open my eyes just as Conor sits back in his chair to admire his sketch. I step forward to get a better look.
It’s me.
Chapter 25
Conor calls me every night at exactly ten o’clock to say goodnight and I text him every morning before first period to say good morning. If Frankie knew this he would probably vomit, and I convince myself that this is the reason I still haven’t told him about Conor—even though it’s been five days since the bonfire.
Mara has been away. She’s either planning Frankie’s demise or stewing over the fact that I forgave Frankie so quickly. I didn’t really forgive him. He didn’t do anything to me other than keep an enormous secret, which he had plenty of justification for keeping to himself. I don’t understand how Mara could expect me to turn against Frankie after thirteen years of friendship for something he did to her 372 years ago. Besides, he already “restored the balance.” He paid his dues.
Frankie and I walk through the cafeteria and I take a seat at the green lunch table that looks as if it were cobbled together from old chalkboards. I break off a chunk of the sugar cookie I snagged from the vending machine as Frankie takes a seat next to me. He breaks off a piece of my cookie and pops it into his mouth without asking. I grab his bottle of peach iced tea and take a swig. Everything is as it was before. Except for one thing.
“Want to come with me to a SurfRiders meeting tonight?” he asks as he pulls a peanut butter and jelly sandwich out of his backpack.
Frankie has eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch every day for the past four years. It started shortly after his mom left and he claims he only eats them because they’re easy to make, but I think it has more to do with the fact that it was the first sandwich he learned to make when he was seven. I’m the one who taught him.
“You’ve never invited me to a SurfRiders meeting before,” I reply.
I don’t bother mentioning that I already have plans to study at Conor’s house today. Conor has some more drawings he wants to show me and I think he’s finally going to tell me about his big post-graduation plans. Graduation is just a week away for him.
Frankie offers me half his sandwich as usual. I take a bite and something tastes off. The peanut butter tastes sour. I swallow it reluctantly and hand the rest back to him.
“What’s wrong?”
“That peanut butter is rancid,” I reply. I guzzle down a few gulps of iced tea and push my cookie across the table toward him. “You can have the rest.”
Frankie gladly accepts my cookie and eats the rest of his sandwich without so much as a grimace. Frankie is a human garbage disposal. My mom loves it because he’ll gobble up whatever she cooks no matter how terrible it tastes. It’s all the surfing; it gives him an insatiable hunger.
“So do you want to come tonight?” he asks.
The SurfRiders is a club Frankie belongs to. They meet every week to discuss the surf conditions, the wind, the tides, the sun, the moon…. I’ve always gotten the impression that it’s just a bunch of hardcore surfers listening to reggae music while discussing every microscopic detail that could possibly affect them. Occasionally, they organize surfing competitions to raise money for charitable causes. Even though SurfRiders is really important to Frankie, I’ve never asked him if I could attend a meeting and he’s never asked me to tag along.
“I can’t,” I say, and leave it at that. Maybe he won’t ask for more of an explanation.
“Why not? Are you giving up on surfing already?”
I shrug. “I have plans.”
I don’t have to say anything further. I think of the split second when I thought I saw Frankie standing under the pier on the night of the bonfire. I know it’s not possible for him to disappear that quickly, but I can’t help but wonder if he already knows about Conor and me.
He’s silent for the last twenty minutes of lunch before he leaves for fifth period French. I wish I knew the French word for sorry.
Part of me wonders if I’m falling for Conor because he’s so sweet and adorable or if I’m just trying to fulfill Mara’s wish. Frankie tells me I have a “Mother Teresa complex,” but he knows why I feel this intense need to help others. And it’s not because I’m a great person.
My father gave his life helping a woman out of a burning truck. He had worked as a fireman for fifteen years, hardly incurring a scratch. His station got the call at three in the morning. A woman’s brakes went out and she was barreling down the highway at close to one hundred miles per hour. She was going to attempt to exit the freeway and make it to the beach to slow the car down on the sand.
She didn’t make it past the jewelry store next to the freeway exit. The fire trucks were already waiting for her when her truck crashed into the storefront at nearly seventy miles per hour. My father attempted to pull her out of the car. She was still alive. It took less than ninety seconds for the truck to explode. Sometimes I imagine the explosion in the jewelry store, diamonds and sapphires blasting into the street, raining over my father’s charred body.
My father died trying to save someone he had never met. The least I could do is try to live by his example. Even if volunteering at the library and the woman’s shelter are minor blips on the radar of good deeds. Maybe helping Mara will make my father proud of me, wherever he is.
I told Conor to pick me up on the north side of the campus, near the baseball diamonds, so Frankie doesn’t have to watch as Conor whisks me away in his BMW. Frankie always heads south toward the beach after school.
As soon as I make it to the baseball diamonds, I see Conor’s car sitting next to the curb with his windows down. He sees me across the grassy field and steps out of his car. I expect him to try to open the passenger door for me, but he shimmies through the gap in the rolling chain-link fence and walks across the baseball diamond toward me.
We meet on top of the pitcher’s mound and he reaches for my backpack. “I’ll carry that,” he says as he plants a soft kiss on my cheek.
I sigh as I hold tightly to the straps. “I’m not handicapped,” I reply with a smile as I continue toward the fence.
“Oh-ho…. Belinda’s an independent woman,” he says with a grin, kicking up some of the red dirt on the pitcher’s mound as he grabs my hand. “I like that,” he whispers as he plants a kiss on the inside of my wrist.
Helen Neubauer and Julie Braga walk past Conor’s BMW, craning their necks to check out the interior through the open windows. After they’ve passed the car, Helen turns around and her eyes lock on Conor and me as we walk toward her. She blinks a few times as if the sight of me with anyone other than Frankie is ludicrous. She turns to face forward as she continues walking and I wonder if she’s going to tell Frankie what she saw.
It doesn’t matter. After rejecting his invitation to the SurfRiders meeting, Frankie already knows.
I breathe a sigh of relief when we enter Conor’s air-conditioned house and we discover his mother isn’t home. His sparse bedroom is a little messy today with the bed unmade, a pile of laundry in the corner, and stacks of drawings
fanned out across the top of his desk.
“Sorry about the mess,” he says as he peels a slightly damp towel off his bed and tosses it into the corner with the dirty laundry. “I was running late this morning.”
“I like the mess,” I say. “It makes me feel less out of place.”
“Trust me, you look very out of place in this mess,” he says, and he tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear. “In a good way.”
He moves toward his desk and I feel Mara enter my body as I set my backpack on the bed and begin pulling out my binder and math book.
“Do you want to see my drawings?” he asks.
I set down my math book and move toward the desk. It’s more flowers and a few more drawings of me, but there’s another face there today. A girl.
I reach down and lift the corner of the drawing. I slip it out of the pile and stare at the girl’s face. She’s definitely prettier than I am, but she has blonde hair pulled back into a knot at the base of her neck.
He quickly yanks the drawing out of my hand and I get a sickening feeling in my gut as I realize I may have fallen for a player. I made a mistake blowing off Frankie to come here.
“She’s pretty,” I say, and I hope Mara will take pity on me and ask Conor to take me, to take us home.
“I don’t know who she is,” Conor says as he slips the drawing underneath a pile of other drawings. He looks distressed, as if the mere sight of the drawing bothers him.
“Did you see her somewhere and decide to draw her?” I ask, not sure why Mara wants to press him about the drawing when he’s obviously troubled by it. Maybe she also suspects Conor is seeing someone else.
Conor shakes his head. He doesn’t look bothered anymore. He looks ashamed. Suddenly, his face changes and the shame melts away leaving behind the same boyish grin I’ve come to see in my daydreams.
“I’m only kidding,” he says. “I saw a picture of this girl on the internet and she looked so sad as if she had lost the love of her life…. So I decided to draw her.” He pulls the drawing out of the pile and holds it up. “I think she’s pretty, too. Not as stunning as you, of course, but she has her qualities.”
Mara must be satisfied with this explanation because she chooses this moment to leave. With Mara gone, I can see the detail of the drawing better. Something about her looks familiar. I think it’s the slight frown. They look nothing alike, but somehow this girl’s frown reminds me of Mara.
Chapter 26
Conor insists on walking me to the front door tonight. I approach the white door with the brass knocker my dad installed more than ten years ago. I stand on the porch, my eyes glancing around the garden on either side of the steps. Conor lifts my chin with his finger.
His dark eyes reflect the glow of the porch light. “Thanks for helping me with that essay,” he says.
“Thanks for helping with my Trig homework,” I reply.
I try to remember to breathe as he leans toward me. Frankie’s disappointed face flashes in front of me and I jerk my head back. Conor notices this twitch and he stands up straight.
“Are you okay?”
I nod quickly. “I thought I saw a mosquito,” I say, waving my hand across the empty air in front of my face. “Must have been the light.”
Conor cocks an eyebrow. “Is it my breath?” he asks and my heart sinks.
I’m trying to think of a comforting response when Mara enters my body. I reach forward and clasp my hand around the back of his neck and pull him toward me. I kiss him gently, but with the kind of confidence I could never conjure on my own. I wish I could feel it. I wish I could taste it.
I pull away and Conor’s eyes are still closed. He appears dazed.
“Stunning?” I ask, and Mara has colored my voice with a definite caustic inflection. Maybe Conor won’t notice it.
His face is serious as he opens his eyes. “Are you mad at me?”
He heard it.
Get out of here! I shout at Mara from inside my head. I gather all my mental strength to try to push her out and I can feel her fighting me as my fists clench at my sides.
Conor glances at my clenched fists. “It was the drawing of that girl, wasn’t it?” he asks, and the shame returns to his face as he nervously runs his fingers through his hair. “There’s… there’s something I think… I really want to tell you, but….”
Can’t you see you’re upsetting him?
But Mara holds her ground inside me. I attempt to force Mara out of my body when a rattling noise grips my attention. The brass knocker on the door is vibrating. Conor stares at it as I feel Mara leave my body and the knocker gives a final rap on the door. My mom definitely heard that.
“Um… Can we talk about this later?” I say, my heart pounding. I don’t want Conor to meet my mom yet. “I should get inside before my mom starts to worry.”
“It’s eight o’clock.”
I can hear movement inside the house. “Yeah, but I didn’t tell my mom I was going anywhere after school,” I reply in a panicked shriek as I reach for the doorknob. “I’ll call you later.”
I turn the knob on the front door and my mom is standing on the bottom step of the staircase. Her eyes immediately flit toward Conor.
“Was that you knocking?” she asks as she steps forward. “Who’s that outside?”
Conor looks confused by my attempt to ditch him on the porch just as he was about to confide something in me. I push the front door all the way open so Conor and my mom can get a better view of each other.
“Mom, this is Conor,” I say. I probably should have said this is my boyfriend Conor, but my mom would freak. “Conor, this is my mom.”
Conor flashes her a dazzling smile as he reaches out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Stiles.”
My mother tilts her head as she takes his hand. She can tell this is not just any boy. “Nice to meet you too, Conor,” she replies then she looks at me. “Belinda?”
This is what I was dreading. That questioning look. My mom refuses to believe that anyone other than Frankie is right for me. “You’ll figure it out someday.” She’s used this catchphrase at least a hundred times in the past three months.
“I should get going,” Conor chimes in to ease the obvious tension.
“I’ll call you later,” I repeat this as if it’s going to make him feel any better.
He nods as he takes the steps down to the front walk. “Good night, Mrs. Stiles,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Good night, dear,” she replies with a wave.
As soon as Conor’s car pulls away I squeeze past my mom and head for the kitchen. My mom follows closely behind me and stands next to the sink as I grab some string cheese out of the refrigerator.
“What?” I ask as I peel off a ribbon of cheese.
“Are you and that boy dating?” she asks.
I scoot around her to toss the string cheese wrapper into the trash bin beneath the sink. “Yes, we are. And don’t say it.”
“What college is he going to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he know you and Frankie are both going to UCSB?”
I try not to laugh as I finally realize why Frankie chose to major in History.
“No, Conor doesn’t know what college I’m going to yet.”
She shakes her head. “Does Frankie know about him?”
“He’s my best friend. Of course he knows.”
“Best friend? Pfft!”
“Mom, can you please get over it? Frankie and I are friends. I really like Conor. I’m trying to balance these two things right now and I’m not doing a very good job. This isn’t helping.”
“You have a guilty conscience,” she says, crossing her arms.
“Why don’t you tell me what you really think?”
“I think you’re lying to yourself.”
“I was being sarcastic. I don’t really want to know what you think,” I reply, aware I sound like a bratty teenager, but I can’t stop myself. “At least get to know him before you s
tart hating him.”
“He’s obviously handsome and polite, but he’s not for you,” she says in a softer tone.
“You’ve spoken to him for five seconds.”
“You’ll figure it out someday,” she says with a satisfied grin before she turns on her heel and strides toward the staircase.
I hope I figure it out before Conor does.
Chapter 27
Connecticut, 1706
Samuel disappears from the dock and reappears a moment later on the beach next to me. His sandy blonde hair reflects the afternoon light as he holds out his arms. Disappearing and reappearing: an extraordinary trick. Now it’s my turn.
“Impressive,” I remark as I scoop up a handful of dry sand.
I hold the handful of sand out toward Samuel and he stares as a few grains of sand float upward, revolving around each other like dancers. I focus all my energy and more grains of sand drift upward to join the others. Soon a miniature tornado of sand rotates in the palm of my hand and Samuel’s eyes widen with awe.
“Teach me,” he whispers.
I let the sand fall at our feet. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“Please teach me and I’ll teach you how to disappear,” he says as he bends down and grabs a handful of sand. “How did you do it?”
I close my eyes and try to think of what happens when I move something with my mind. It first happened when I was six and I got so angry with my mother I sent her favorite teacup hurtling off the mantle. She thought it was a ghost. I guess in a way I am a ghost living inside the body of a girl named Lily Porter just waiting for my chance to die; to be set free.
I open my eyes and Samuel is still staring at me intently, clutching tightly to his handful of sand. “Close your eyes and relax your hand,” I say. “Imagine the sand and everything around it as a colorless, flat, two-dimensional picture.” His eyes twitch beneath his eyelids as he concentrates. “Now imagine the picture being pinched and pulled upward, like a thin handkerchief. Imagine the space inside your hand being pulled up, bending like that handkerchief.”