Need

  While I rub the plate with a dish towel, I think about Ian and all his clubs and all his energy. “Yeah.”

  “And he’s obviously got good taste if he already has his eye set on you.” She points at me with a fork.

  I put the plate away and grab the fork from her. “He’s just being helpful.”

  “Ha. Right.”

  . . .

  I wake up in the middle of the night. There’s a noise downstairs, soft tapping across the floor. I grab the big metal flashlight that’s next to the bed and slip out from under the covers. I don’t turn the flashlight on, though. I grab it like cops do, ready to bash someone over the head. I tiptoe down the stairs and that’s when I see her, Betty, standing by the front windows.

  Her body is fierce, tight, strong. She looks like an Olympic athlete, a warrior, not a grammy.

  “Betty?” I whisper her name, afraid to startle her.

  She motions for me to come all the way down. I stand next to her, peering into the darkness.

  “What are you looking for?” I whisper.

  “Things in the night.”

  “Do you see anything?”

  She laughs. “No.”

  She pulls me against her and kisses the top of my head. “You go on up to bed. I’ve got everything under control.”

  I walk away a step and stop. “Gram? Are you really looking for things in the night?”

  “People are always looking into the dark, Zara. We’re afraid of what we might see. It might be the dark outside, it might be the dark of our own souls, but I figure it’s better to get caught looking than to never know. You get me?”

  “Not really.”

  She steps away from the window, pushes me toward the stairs. “Go to bed. School tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Couplogagophobia

  fear of being the third wheel

  That night I dream about my dad, all night long. He’s standing at the end of Betty’s driveway. It’s snowing. There are giant paw prints on the snow. His mouth is open and moving, but no sound comes out.

  I make myself wake up. The room is cold. The wind blows tree branches against the house, making scraping noises. I turn on the lamp next to the bed, trying not to freak out.

  “It’s just a dream,” I whisper, but the truth is that when my dad died, his mouth moved and no sound ever came out.

  When my dad died, we had just come in from our daily morning run. We always ran before breakfast, before the Charleston heat overwhelmed us and made running too much effort. We were talking about gay marriage. He was the one who got me started on writing letters for Amnesty International. I was maybe in first grade, complaining about writing being boring and stupid and a waste of my six-year-old time, and he sat me down at the dining room table and told me stories about people who were suffering. He told me writing was never a waste of time, and that’s when I wrote my first letter.

  But when he died, we weren’t talking about Amnesty, we were talking about his friends Dave and Don. Don, the artist, needed health care and Dave’s company wouldn’t cover him. My dad opened the door and let us into the house.

  “It’s ridiculous. Get me some water, honey,” he had said, smiling, bending over to catch his breath and leaning on his knees for balance. He’d already taken off his Red Sox hat and his silver hair beneath it was wet from sweat.

  I grabbed two Poland Spring waters out of the fridge and pivoted around, and it was like my dad wasn’t there anymore. That’s the only way I can describe it. He cringed. White and gray erased the normal ruddy color of his skin.

  “Daddy?”

  He didn’t answer, just sort of lifted up a hand to wave me off. Then he pointed toward the sink. “The window. He’s . . . I saw him. Run.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Don’t let him take . . .”

  “Daddy?”

  I started to turn and look at the window but then he fell over on his side, his mouth wide open, trying to grab air. His blood didn’t know what to do because his heart had failed him.

  I dropped the water bottles on the floor. One rolled into his shoe, the other went back toward the fridge, hiding, I guess. I wanted to hide too. My own heart started beating crazy rhythms, out of control, against my ribs. I reached out for his hand and grabbed it. He squeezed back but not hard, not tight and strong like normal. He was weak.

  “Mom!” I screamed. “Mom!”

  She thundered down the stairs and stopped at the entrance to the kitchen. She sucked in her breath and grabbed the big palm plant next to the sink. Her words came out like a whisper, “He’s having a heart attack.”

  My own heart stopped then, and my dad’s eyes widened and he looked at me, pleading. He had never looked at me that way before. His mouth moved. No sound came out.

  At school Issie and I sit together at lunch and in all the classes we share. Devyn sits with us in the cafeteria too, and he and Issie laugh so much about the stupidest things it’s hard not to laugh with them, even as I check to make sure I haven’t gone transparent.

  It’s actually hard to get annoyed by them because they are so cute together.

  “So,” I say. “I think I might believe you about the pixie guy.”

  “Why?” Issie asks.

  I chew on my bagel. “I got stuck in the ice yesterday. I went off the road.”

  “Nick told us,” Devyn says.

  “Did he tell you about the dust, too?” I ask, watching Devyn rip into a roast beef grinder.

  “Yep,” he says with his mouth full.

  “It’s weird,” I say. “Especially with the boy that went missing last week. I think they might be connected.”

  “You know about the Beardsley boy?” Issie asks.

  “Betty told me that it happened before,” I say. “I’m thinking about going to the computer lab and looking for info.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Devyn says, mushing the rest of his grinder in.

  “Me too,” Issie says, collecting his garbage and her own.

  “You should be a couple,” I tell Issie as we throw away our trash. “You aren’t already a couple, are you?”

  “Me and Devyn?” she squeaks.

  “Yeah, you and Devyn,” I say, elbowing her in the side. “I think he likes you.”

  She drops her soda can into the recycle bin and turns to stare back at Devyn.

  He waves.

  Her smile is huge.

  “Really?” she asks.

  I toss my apple core into the garbage bin. “Really.”

  She links her arm through mine. “I’m so glad you’re here, Zara. I’m glad you aren’t hanging out with Megan and her people.”

  She glances over at Megan, who is holding court over a throng of admirers.

  Megan lifts up her eyes and meets mine. I swear if she could shoot fire at me she would, or at the very least, laser beams.

  “She hates me,” I say. “No big loss. I’d rather be your friend any day.”

  This is so corny, but Issie eats it up.

  “Really? You have to come over again, you know. There’s so much stuff I want to tell you.” She pulls me back to the lunch table, almost hopping the entire way. “Devyn, guess what Zara just said.”

  “That she adores snow?” Devyn asks. “And is no longer a victim of cheimaphobia?”

  Issie licks some honey that’s run off her sandwich and onto her fingers.

  “No.”

  “That she has called her mother and no longer resents her for sending her to Maine, thus ending future decades of therapy and massive loss of revenue for my revenue-hungry parents?”

  “No.”

  I stick out my tongue at him.

  “That she has indeed freed all the political prisoners throughout the globe?”

  “Devyn!”

  He laughs. “Okay. Okay. I’ll play nice.”

  He turns to Issie and says all sweetly, “What did Zara say?”

  “She said that she’d rather be my friend than Megan’s,
any day.”

  “Zara’s no idiot,” he says. He raises his eyebrows at me. “I knew you had it in you.”

  I’m totally confused. I take a sip of my soda. “What do you mean?”

  “To make good choices,” he says. “You’d choose Issie even if Megan didn’t hate you, right?”

  I glance at Megan and her frosty eye shadow, her perfect hair, her happy laugh, and her group of admirers. “Megan is cold.”

  Devyn nods. “Exactly.”

  We google like crazy. Most of the pixie hits are crap about role-playing games. Then we hit paydirt.

  People believe pixies are tiny, happy fey with just a streak of mischief. They are not. Closer to the vampire’s callous disdain for the sanctity of human life, pixies should be avoided at all costs. The only protection against their wrath is their mortal enemy, the were.

  “The were?” I say.

  Devyn and Issie exchange a look and then Devyn turns to me. “Not were as in the verb ‘we were’ but where as in ‘where the heck have my sunglasses gone.’ It’s werewolves, werebears, that sort of thing.”

  He smiles like it’s no big deal.

  “You are kidding me.” I rock back in my chair, shaking my head.

  “Weres are protectors of humans and each other,” Issie explains. “It’s like their sacred duty or something.”

  “And we know this how?”

  “Eighth-grade cryptozoology project.” She turns back to the screen. “Does it say anything else, Devyn?”

  We all read the page silently. Devyn must read faster than we do, because he points at a far-ahead paragraph.

  Pixies tend to congregate in wooded places. Some pass as humans and interact with humans under the benet of a spell often known as a glamour. They should still be avoided. When not mated with a queen for an unspecied amount of time, the pixie king will demand tributes given to him in the form of young human men.

  Devyn reads the next part. “ ‘Whom they kill after using them for their blood-hungry pleasures.’ ”

  “Not cool,” Issie says.

  “Not cool at all,” I agree.

  I read a tiny bit more, “ ‘The tortured boys gradually fall prey to hysteria’—Duh? Wouldn’t you?—‘and then they lose pieces of their souls, gradually becoming an inhuman husk prior to death.’ ”

  “That’s so freaky awful,” Issie whispers, grabbing onto Devyn’s arm.

  His eyes get sad and scared but his voice is brave. “It’ll be okay, Is.”

  “What if that actually happens?” I whisper. “What if it’s already happening?”

  I look into their pale, motionless faces. I try to brave myself up. “But it’s just a Web site, right? Anyone can write something on the Web.”

  The bell rings.

  “Right.” Devyn erases the history on the Web browser.

  Everyone looks so disturbed I decide to make a joke. “I guess the weres around here aren’t doing a good job.”

  They don’t even crack a smile.

  “Come on,” I say. “You don’t actually believe this, do you?”

  Issie rubs at the bridge of her nose with the side of her hand. “Kind of.”

  I stare down Devyn. “You believe in werewolves and pixies? Like there’s not enough real-life badness to be freaked about, you what? You want more?”

  “Zara. Can you explain the dust?”

  I pull in a breath, remember it by my car, near the woods, on Nick’s back. “No.”

  “Do you think people are so brilliant we understand everything?”

  “No,” I say, and I stare at him. “What does Nick think about this? Does he believe that guy was a pixie?”

  His voice comes from behind me. “Oh, I’d say I believe it.”

  Devyn clicks off the screen while I stare at him.

  “Your mouth’s wide open, Zara,” Issie whispers.

  Nick reaches down and hauls me up. “Have you guys eaten yet?”

  I nod.

  “You want to come with me anyway?” he asks.

  I nod again, staring at my hand touching his hand. Issie starts giggling and Nick lets go.

  The snow has mostly melted, so the cross-country practice is held outside. The trail is what you’d expect in Maine. You run across a big field and then on a narrow winding path that loops through the woods, where the pine trees seem to hover over you, ready to grab at you. It would be a perfect place for some kind of freak guy to jump out and grab you.

  But that is not going to happen. Still, I kind of wish I had some pepper spray or something. We all huddle around the coach, who puffs up his body like he’s terribly important, like some sort of dictator making laws, which I guess he is. It all smells like Christmas and deodorant and baby powder. I think Megan’s the baby powder.

  “We’re going to buddy up,” he says. “Megan, you go with the new girl.”

  She looks horrified. “No way.”

  “I’ll go with her,” Ian and Nick both say at the same time.

  “Oh, so popular,” Megan snarks while the coach shakes his head.

  “Fine,” he says. “Colt, you go with her.”

  Nick nods. I bite my lip. Coach says, “What? That not okay with you?”

  “No,” I mutter. “It’s good.”

  Everyone else partners up and Coach Walsh sets us out two-by-two. “Easy runs today. No PRs.”

  “That means personal record,” Megan says.

  I touch my toes. “I know what it means.”

  We’re the last group to go. Nick stays a step or so behind me the whole time and it drives me crazy, like I’m not good enough to run alongside or something.

  “Do you have to run behind me?” I finally say when we’re long-legging it up a hill that twists through the forest.

  “It bother you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not checking out your butt or anything.”

  I stop. He rams into me and we both topple down. My arms go to break my fall, but I don’t have to. His right arm loops around my rib cage and he rolls us so that his back takes most of the fall. I’m on top of him. For a second his arm doesn’t move. When it does I push myself up. He stands up too, turning around, trying to figure things out, I guess.

  His voice is a bark. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking out your butt,” I tease, and then I leave him behind me, sprinting across the field so the coach can register my time and I can go home.

  We all hang around, stretching, sort of, while the coach does coach things that involve muttering beneath his breath and checking his clipboard.

  Ian walks over next to me and smiles. He pulls his leg up toward his butt, stretching out his quads. I reach for my toes but don’t actually touch the ground because it’s cold and snowy.

  “Nick giving you a hard time?” he asks.

  I grunt and reach up toward the sky.

  “I think he likes you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He’s a loner though. He’s never had a girlfriend.”

  “Seriously?”

  Ian raises his hand. “I swear.”

  “Good.”

  “Good?”

  Ian’s foot thuds back to the ground. I glance over at Nick. He’s walking in circles, not even pretending to stretch. Nick stomps over, doesn’t even glance at Ian.

  “I think I should follow you home, make sure your car doesn’t slide off the road,” he says.

  “I’m not going home.”

  Nick cocks his head to one side. “What?”

  “I’m taking her to the DMV, so she can get her car registered,” Ian says. He’s standing right next to me, smelling like cologne.

  Nick’s nostrils flare. He looks at me. “Oh. Okay. I’ll see you later then, Zara. Be careful on the road, okay? It’s icy.”

  “But the snow was melting earlier.”

  “It melts for, like, a second and turns to water and then it freezes. It’s called black ice. It’s dangerous, so just be careful, okay?”

  “
Okay.” I watch him walk away. Every single cell in my body wants me to run after him, no matter how tired I am.

  Philophobia

  fear of love

  That night I pad down the stairs into the living room and there’s Grandma Betty standing at the front window again. Her hand holding the drape shakes. She stares outside into the dark.

  “Oh, Jesus . . . ,” she mumbles.

  I touch her shoulder. She jumps, whirls around, almost growls, eyes flashing.

  “Gram? What is it?”

  “You scared the bejesus out of me.”

  “Sorry.”

  She puts her hands up to her heart.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” she says. She forces a smile. “I have to go call your mother. We owe her a call. How about you get started on dinner? I bought one of those precooked rotisserie chickens from Shaw’s and a box of stuffing.”

  “Gram?”

  “Everything is under control, Zara. Don’t you worry about a dotty old woman staring into the night.”

  Yeah, right. I peek out the window. Darkness greets me.

  “Why isn’t Nick hanging out with us?” I ask Issie and Devyn in PE.

  Issie and I are lounging around waiting for the PE teacher, Coach Walsh, to show up. According to Devyn, he’s in the locker room, hollering at Ian about something. We just sit on the lower bleachers and wait.

  Devyn’s fingers tap against the side of the chair. “I think he’s just trying not to draw attention to you. You know if he likes you then everyone notices you. Plus, it’s just part of his image. He’s all bad boy.”

  “Sexy stud with a heart of stern,” Issie banters. She starts tying her sneaker.

  Her fingers fumble around. I kneel down in front of her and start tying them for her. “You guys are cute,” I say.

  Devyn laughs. His dimples show. Whenever his dimples show Issie starts blushing like crazy.

  “Sexy stud with a heart of stern,” he repeats what Issie said while I start on her next shoe. “That’s brilliant.”

  “He’s never even kissed a girl, so I don’t think that one works,” Issie says.

  My insides stop working for a second. “Seriously? C’mon, how would you even know that?”

  “He told Devyn. Devyn told me,” Issie says. “So that one doesn’t work. Okay. Moving on. How about hometown hero with high standards?”