Unraveling

  “He says she could be,” Ben agrees. “Because he loves her that much. He’s essentially confessing she has this power over him that he can’t control.”

  “Textual evidence?” Poblete says.

  Ben sighs and leans forward, the front legs of his chair coming back to the floor as he looks down at his paper. “He refers to it as the ‘confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing,’ which essentially means he’s so torn up over what he feels for her that he’s just walking around like he has no brain.”

  A couple of guys in class laugh like they know the feeling. I’m pretty sure whatever is muddling their thoughts stems from an organ south of their hearts.

  “But that doesn’t mean he should declare that she’s the death of him,” I say. “The best thing about love is…” I stop and change tactics, because I’m not sure what the heck I’m trying to say. I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to romance. “Okay, so two people who are in love—they are who they are when they’re apart, but when they’re together, the fact that they’re in love is supposed to make them better. Love and relationships are supposed to make people better.”

  It’s one of my lamest arguments ever, and I can hear Alex laughing at me a few rows back. I have an urge to turn around and throw my pen at him.

  But Ben has an answer for even my lameness. “But he says she could draw him ‘to any good—every good—with equal force.’ So obviously he’s thinking he would be a better guy if they were together.”

  “Yeah, once his feelings overmastered him and he couldn’t resist in vain anymore.”

  “So this isn’t a marriage proposal you would say yes to?” Ben says. He’s giving me that half smile again. Like he already knows the answer.

  I can’t help but smile back. “No, it’s not.”

  “You wouldn’t want some guy confessing his love for you, and saying he’d do anything for you—even die—that wouldn’t be enough for you?”

  My face floods with heat again, and I can’t believe Ben Michaels is making me feel like I’m not smart enough to argue. I think I might hate him.

  “What, you want some guy to propose by putting an announcement on the Jumbotron at a baseball game or something?” Ben asks.

  “Oh please, that’s ridiculous. I don’t want someone announcing to the whole world that he’s proposing to me. It shouldn’t be about the whole world—it should be about just the two of us.”

  “So your perfect proposal, what would it be?” Ben asks.

  “Seriously?” I look at Poblete and she shrugs, obviously enjoying the real-world application. “I don’t know. It would just be the two of us, and I guess I’d want him to say something honest, not overly romantic, not something that would make a great story to tell his friends. I’d just want him to lean over…” As I say it, I lean slightly toward Ben, close enough that I can feel the warmth of his body radiating into the empty space between us, and drop the volume of my voice. “… and say ‘Janelle Tenner, fucking marry me.’”

  A couple of people in the room gasp, probably because I just dropped the F-bomb in AP English, but Poblete laughs. “Interesting. And back to the text. What about our woman in the paragraph. What do you think she says to our speaker’s proposal?”

  I can’t help but sigh in answer. Because I don’t know. I look back at my prompt. “I want to say that she also said no. But it is Dickens. She probably said yes and lived out a miserable existence, because the evils of society pressured her into accepting such a ridiculous man.”

  Poblete nods. “Thank you. That does sound Dickensian.” She looks around the room. “Anyone else care to wager a guess?”

  “I agree with Janelle,” Alex says. “About the response. Most of us were taken with this proposal. What’s to say the recipient of the proposal wouldn’t be swept up the same way? Plus, it’s in the nineteenth century. Most girls didn’t say no.”

  I turn around to smile at Alex, and he nods in response.

  “Thank you.” Poblete looks around the room. “Anyone else?”

  No one responds.

  Poblete turns back to me. No, not to me—to Ben.

  “What?” he says.

  “So what happens?”

  He slumps down a little in his seat. “Why are you picking on me?”

  “Because out of everyone in this room, I know you’ve actually read Our Mutual Friend.” Her smile widens, and my chest burns slightly. I’m jealous—actually legitimately jealous. Of a teacher. Not because I think they have something going on or anything ridiculous like that. But because she knows him. Poblete knows Ben. She knew he was this smart, engaging, charismatic guy, who had—has—something to say.

  Whereas I’d been fooled. Like half the rest of the population at Eastview, I’d thought Ben Michaels was a waste of life.

  “Even though it’s going to undercut the great argument I just staged against Janelle?” he asks. She doesn’t respond, and with an exaggerated sigh, he sits up a little straighter. “She says no.”

  “Why?” Poblete asks.

  Ben shrugs. “Like Janelle said, in the novel this guy is obsessively in love with her, and it kind of freaks her out.”

  “So if we look at this passage and compare it to the one from yesterday…”

  While the class continues the discussion, I can’t stop staring at Ben. I try to be pissed off. We just spent a good fifteen minutes arguing for the sake of debate. Even though I was right. Even though he knew it. But I’m not mad. I’m not even annoyed.

  Because it’s been a while since I lost a debate.

  So when Ben looks my way, that grin on his face, I shake my head slightly and return the smile.

  I have to admit, I enjoyed that. A lot.

  But that doesn’t mean he’s going to get out of answering my questions today.

  15:02:05:07

  When the bell rings and people stand and start filing out of the classroom, I put my hand on Ben’s arm and try to ignore the way that touching him seems strangely intimate.

  “Here’s the thing,” I say to Ben. “I know you’re lying.”

  He shifts his weight on his feet. And I wait until the classroom has emptied out, including Poblete, who’s conveniently disappeared.

  “I know you’re lying,” I say again. “And it’s not just the usual tells—the stiffness in your upper body and the evasive eye contact and the slight change in the pitch of your voice. It’s more than that. I have actual proof.”

  His eyes widen as he looks up at me. He’s surprised, but not as much as he would be if he hadn’t done anything.

  “When I was eleven, I did the La Jolla Rough Water for the first time. It’s a three-mile ocean swim from La Jolla Cove to Scripps Pier and back. I didn’t finish, though. I was stung by a Portuguese man-of-war. It was a bad sting. The thing completely latched on to my shoulder and arm, and the venom was so bad, it got infected and left a weblike scar on my left shoulder.”

  Ben’s face flushes with color, and I have the distinct impression he already knows about my scar.

  I grab the neck of my T-shirt and pull it aside to expose my left shoulder, where the skin is completely smooth. The scar I’ve had on my left shoulder for the past six years is completely gone.

  “Whatever you did, you did this, too.”

  PART TWO

  Much madness is divinest sense

  To a discerning eye;

  Much sense the starkest madness

  —Emily Dickinson

  15:02:02:41

  Ben runs a hand through his hair and then tugs on the ends, something I’m beginning to recognize whenever I seem to be making him think too hard about what he’s going to say.

  I fold my arms across my chest. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  He glances up. “And what if this is one of those things that just can’t be explained?”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  He takes a deep breath and cracks his knuckles. I feel light-headed and a little nauseous, because whatever he’s a
bout to say is going to be a game changer. Whatever he did to me, I was dead, and he brought me back, and that shouldn’t be possible.

  Ben opens his mouth, and I hold my breath waiting for him to speak.

  Only he exhales and then says, “You’re not going to believe me.”

  “Maybe you haven’t heard, but a little more than a week ago, I rose from the dead. Try me.”

  He looks like he might deflect again, but instead he sighs. “I’m not sure I know how.”

  “Try.”

  He runs a hand through his messy brown hair again. “I saved you.”

  “How?”

  He shrugs, and this time his voice is barely more than a whisper. “I can do things like that. I can … use energy to manipulate molecular structure.”

  “Manipulate molecular structure,” I repeat slowly, and then bite the inside of my cheek to keep from saying more. If he thinks I’m just going to stand here and accept a load of crap so he can laugh about it to his friends, he’s dead wrong. “Really?”

  “It’s hard to explain, I mean, I don’t even really know the limits of what I can do. I know I can heal other people, though.”

  Something in the way he says that makes all the anger bleed out of me. Suddenly, I don’t think he’s lying. I’m looking at him and I can hear the conviction in his voice, but how can I know for sure? I don’t know what to say. No matter what he tells me, I’ll have no idea if this is actually the truth or if he’s just making up something he thinks I want to hear.

  I gesture to him. “Show me.”

  Ben shakes his head. “Give me your hand. It doesn’t work on me.”

  I offer him my left hand, and a shiver runs through my chest when his hand touches mine. He turns my hand over and exposes a small cut on my thumb. I don’t even know what it’s from. Maybe a paper cut that was deeper than I’d thought, who knows. It’s scabbed over, probably a few days from healing on its own, but Ben touches it. His fingers are warm—no, they’re hot and growing hotter—and I feel a little of that heat transfer to me. It feels like heat is pouring into my thumb. Somehow it manages to be just shy of burning, but the rest of my body shivers, like it can’t figure out why it’s so cold in comparison.

  Then my broken skin begins to knit itself together right in front of my eyes. It starts at the base of the cut and moves up, until I’m staring at clean, smooth skin, and I can’t even tell where the cut was.

  Holy. Crap.

  I feel flushed but somehow too cold at the same time, and my eyes itch like I need to close them and rub them back into reality.

  Because this can’t possibly be real.

  We stand there for who knows how long. I’m staring at my thumb, wondering where the scab just went and how it’s possible. I don’t know what Ben’s thinking. But my heart is pounding so hard that my pulse is ringing in my ears, and as we stand there, Ben still holding my hand in his own, I start to feel self-conscious about my heart rate, like maybe he can hear it or sense it.

  I pull my hand away, and Ben looks down at his shoes as he shifts his weight on his feet.

  “How? How can you do this?”

  He starts to shrug, and I just know he’s about to give some line to blow me off.

  “Don’t bullshit me, you must have a theory.” Any guy who likes to argue for the sake of debate also likes to know things.

  Ben sighs. “I can sense chemical bonds in molecules. It’s like I can feel them somehow. I have to concentrate, but I can feel when they’re broken and visualize fixing those bonds until they’re back together.”

  “So when you healed me?” I try to ignore the way my voice cracks.

  “I laid a hand on your heart,” he whispers. “And sensed the chemical compounds of the cells in your body that were broken or severed, and I fused them back together.”

  There’s no swelling feeling of victory that I was right. That I knew he did something to me even though it defied all logic and reason. Instead there’s a sick tightening inside my body, and it almost hurts to keep standing up straight.

  “I was dead. I was, wasn’t I?”

  He hesitates. And my heart somehow hammers louder and harder in my chest, and this time I’m sure he has to be able to hear it.

  “Tell me.”

  “Not for long,” he whispers.

  My whole body throbs with the beat of my pulse, like someone’s fist is pushing against my skin. I feel breathless and dizzy, a little like the blood just bottomed out of my head.

  “And my back was broken?”

  He nods.

  I believe him. And that means there’s a lot more than quantum physics that I don’t understand.

  “What are you?” I ask, and then wish I’d phrased that better. It sounds like I’m asking if he’s something ridiculous. Something not human.

  Even though I was convinced he brought me back to life, I’m just not sure what I expected. How is something like that possible? It’s not, at least not in the human scope of possible. I was so focused on getting the truth out of Ben, I didn’t stop to speculate on what it meant.

  I look at Ben and wait for some kind of answer.

  But he shrugs. “Just a guy who’s kind of a freak.”

  “Do people know that you can … can just bring people back from the dead?”

  He smiles. “It’s not like you’re a zombie or something. I wouldn’t be able to, like, reanimate a corpse or anything. It only worked because it happened so fast. Like when paramedics save someone from dying—or a hospital.”

  So Ben Michaels is a one-man emergency room. Some people would think that’s sort of a neat trick.

  “Janelle, you … you can’t tell anyone,” he murmurs.

  I nod, because the logical part of me knows that makes sense, but I can’t help but sway a little on my feet at the weight of this secret. I don’t even like science, and my brain is already putting together a list of questions about what else “manipulating molecular structure” can do.

  “Can you do more than heal people?” I ask.

  Ben nods. “I can manipulate physical matter. Um … hold on.” He looks around and then runs to Poblete’s desk and grabs something. When he comes back, I see it’s a number two pencil.

  With two hands, he holds the pencil in his palms.

  I stare at it, waiting for a movielike glow or something, but nothing happens. I look up at Ben’s face—he’s flushed, and a fine line of sweat covers his forehead.

  “Look,” he says, and I glance down in time to see the pencil disintegrating in front of my eyes.

  Until it looks like a pile of sand.

  I reach out to touch it—to see if it’s real.

  It is.

  Ben Michaels is a scientific miracle.

  “What else can you do? I mean, could you turn the pencil into water?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not an exact science. I have to focus, sense the cells, and changing the bonds takes concentration and practice. It tires me out.” He pauses. “And I can manipulate the molecular bonds, I can’t create or destroy or even substitute them with something else.”

  He won’t look me in the eye. His face is pale, and his movements are tense and jerky. It looks like he might be getting ready to manipulate the floor so it will swallow him whole and get him out of here.

  “So you can’t read minds, start fires, or turn invisible?” I ask, trying to make light of this whole … thing. “That’s lame.”

  Ben’s eyes lift to mine, and he cracks a smile.

  “If the universe was going to give you superhero powers, they could have at least given you the ability to fly or something,” I add, because apparently I don’t know when I’m taking things too far.

  He shakes his head, and his voice comes out barely above a whisper. “I’m not a superhero.”

  But he saved me.

  I’m still trying to process everything when the door to the classroom opens and Poblete comes walking back in with a chocolate cookie and a coffee from It’s a Grind. When she
sees us, she actually jumps slightly. “Oh my God, you scared me to death!” she says, breaking into a laugh as she goes to her desk.

  “Good thing you didn’t spill the coffee,” Ben says.

  “There is a God, huh?” she answers with a smile before she looks back up at us, recovered from her surprise. Her expression changes. She’s suddenly more serious as her gaze moves from Ben to me. “Miss Tenner, is everything all right?”

  I realize too late how I must look. I can’t tell if I’m flushed or pale, whether I’m breathing too hard or too shallow, but I know I’m swaying a little on my feet, and I probably have some kind of weird dazed look on my face.

  I force myself to nod. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  She stares at me, and it takes me a second to realize she must be wondering why the hell I’m not in class, since it started probably five or ten minutes ago.

  “I’m going to head to Spanish,” I say, wondering when I got so lame. I grab my backpack and tell myself to breathe in and breathe out and put one foot in front of the other until I get outside.

  “And Ben, I assume you’ve conveniently managed to have no class this period,” Poblete says as I open the door.

  “You’ve always been good with assumptions, Miss P,” Ben says.

  Pausing in the doorway, I turn back to look at him in time to see him glance at me. I don’t know what he sees, but as the door shuts, I hear Poblete say, “Excellent, because I’m assuming that you’re still here because you want to make photocopies and check out some books from the library for me.”

  And I see Ben, face flushed, jaw set, staring. There’s something about his expression. I’m usually pretty good at reading people, but I can’t tell if he’s relieved to see me go or if he wishes we hadn’t been interrupted.

  15:01:01:19

  After school, Alex and I drop Jared off at water polo and head back to my house. Alex’s left hand rides the steady stream of wind pouring through his open window. His black hair, cut short enough that it’s not really a style, barely moves—unlike mine, which is determined to whip all over the place.