One (One Universe) Page 7

  “That’s cute,” one of her friends — another cheerleader, I assume, with shining brown locks — says.

  “Is she crushing on Elias?” another brunette asks. “Save your energy, honey. Elias VanDyne has only dated one girl at this school, and that was back when we were little freshmen.”

  I raise my eyebrows at her, silently questioning — I can’t help it — and she suppresses a grin and points at Leni, her index finger making a circle in the air.

  “Yep. Helen and Elias, sittin’ in a tree…”

  Leni rolls her eyes, pushes the girl lightly on the shoulder, and says, “Quit it. You know I was too good for him.” She laughs, and all the other girls eye each other, responding with lighter, shorter laughter.

  So Leni’s the ringleader of this group. That could be really good or really, really bad. Depending on how much she feels like sticking up for me.

  “Yeah. Too good for all the boys at this school, apparently.”

  “You know it.” Leni’s smiling, but it’s the same smile I’ve seen on her before — and on Elias. Faking it.

  One of the brunettes points at me. “She’s not really going for Elias, anyway. Not dressed like that.” My chest burns, and I’m sure my cheeks do, too, but once again I’ve got nothing to say. I don’t want to be the Girl Who Stomps Out of the Lunchroom. Not if I’ve got three more years here. I concentrate on feeling heavy, on staying in my seat.

  “Oh, lay off, girls. I’m trying to save Merrin from eating lunch in some classroom and being hassled by the janitor.” Now they laugh on cue.

  I manage a smile at Leni, grateful that she’s deflected the attention from me. She reaches down and squeezes my knee. The contact surprises me, but it’s not too bad.

  It’s an art day, and I’m sure I’ll see Elias in that class, but he’s not there, either, or at our lockers afterward.

  All the students seem like they’re normal height now without Elias’s head bobbing around the hallways above everyone else’s. It’s weird, and I don’t like it.

  After I fidget through the rest of my classes, it’s like I’m on autopilot. Get in the car. Text Dad: “Going to study again.” I already finished all my mindless homework in sixth period study hall anyway.

  I tell myself I’m just going to drive by his house, see if his car is there. I don’t know. Make sure he’s okay.

  I zoom in one side of Superior’s suburbs and out the other, feeling lighter and freer when my car hits the dirt-and-gravel roads of the bonafide country.

  Even though it’s only a couple miles out of town, everything feels so huge out here. Like it’s mine to reach up and grab if I want it. The clouds roll across the gray-blue autumn sky in billowing mammatus puffs, and for a second, I’m not thinking about Elias, but about the pictures I used to draw as a kid — illustrations of myself stretching out across the clouds like they were pillows.

  I spot the glass walls of the VanDyne house reflecting bright patches of sunlight out into the road. The glare blocks my view into the house, but my eyes train on the music room at the end of the wing anyway. I think about the drums in there, waiting for me to play them again.

  What I’m really wondering, I admit to myself, is whether Elias is in there too, thumbing over the guitar strings, remembering what it was like to play with me, missing my angry, loud pounding.

  Because I know I’m thinking about the way his fingers looked playing that guitar, the relaxation on his face when he looked up at me. Like, in that moment, he was really home.

  No, I realize, as I pull into the driveway without really realizing it. He’s not in there. He’s not here at all. His sleek blue car isn’t in the driveway, and neither is anyone else’s.

  Perfect.

  Suddenly, I feel very brave. I crank up the brake on the car and trudge toward the step we walked down last night.

  I plunk myself down and let my hand wave through the grass, resting my chin on my knees. I can see my drum set gleaming in there. I look up at the handprint sensor panel and wipe my palms against my skirt to wipe off the sweat. But I can’t make myself go in. It doesn’t feel right somehow. Not without him.

  My chest aches, and it feels like loneliness and emptiness and missing something, which I suppose are all kind of the same thing.

  The swaying blades of grass make breathy rustling noises in the late afternoon breeze — it must be five o’clock by now — and I can almost hear them talk to me. You don’t belong here, they say.

  Yeah, I think. Except I don’t belong anywhere else either.

  The sound of a rolling crunch interrupts my conversation with the freaking weeds. Dammit. Someone’s here. I look up and see a flash of blue. It’s Elias.

  The tension in my chest deepens to a knot, and now it feels something like excitement. I tamp it down, willing it not to push my face into a smile. Last night with Elias was a dream world, and I’m still not sure whether I can imagine it into a reality.

  I watch him unfold himself from the car’s seat, see me sitting there, and grin. The slowly setting sun throws a sharp shadow of him across the driveway, exaggerating his height. As he gets closer, the shadow almost touches me. When it does, I stand up.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey,” he says back, still smiling and watching me. “I see you came prepared today.” He reaches out and flicks the hood of my sweatshirt. He doesn’t stand that close to me, but his arms are so freaking long it’s easy. Not threatening.

  “Oh. Yeah,” I say, motioning toward my car. “Yours is in there.”

  “Keep it,” he says.

  “Uh…” I really don’t know what to say to that.

  “My parents aren’t here.” He says it tonelessly, implying nothing. Just wanting to let me know.

  I shrug.

  “Want something to drink?” he asks.

  I smile, relieved, and nod.

  “Good.” He grins. “Wait here.”

  The sun dangles over the horizon, orange and glowing. It protests like a kid who doesn’t want to go to bed, angrily flinging its light at anything it can.

  Elias walks out with something in mugs. The steam coming from it wafts, fruity and spicy, toward me — hot cider. He’s framed in bright-against-dark shadows that make me blink into the sky and tent my hand over my eyes to look at him. Something about his fingers wrapped around the handle of a mug for each of us makes my heart swell.

  We sit there, blowing ripples across the surface of the cider and letting the mugs warm our hands.

  “You weren’t in school today,” I say. Thank you, Captain Obvious.

  “Doctors’ appointments. Uh, physicals. For basketball. Starting practice soon.” He eyes me curiously.

  Then I feel brave. “Well, come back tomorrow, okay? Leni’s friends are a pain in the ass.”

  He laughs again, and this time the smile lingers for a second. Then he nods, looking out across the farmers’ fields that stretch miles and miles in front of his house. Like he knows what I mean.

  “They don’t matter,” Elias says, staring at his hands, his fingers gripping each other. “I learned that a long time ago.”

  Suddenly, I’m angry at his passivity, like I want to shake him by the shoulders and scream some sense into him. He’s a One. He’s a freak. He should be suffering just as much as I am.

  “Yeah? Well, if your One doesn’t matter and they don’t matter, what does matter?” I clench and unclench my jaw over and over again, wavering between feeling bad about saying that to him and feeling powerful for finally unleashing this on anyone besides my poor parents.

  He doesn’t respond right away. Oh, God, he must hate me. But then he speaks, and his voice is soft and patient. “There’s something beyond Superior and the Hub, Merrin. Someplace where no one expects anything from me. From people like us. Somewhere I could be myself, without the One and without the stupid school and basketball team. Those are just things I’m using to get by. Leni…she really fits in there at Nelson. But I don’t.”

  “Somewhe
re you can be just like a Normal, you mean. But your One will never leave you.” The words come spilling out, like I couldn’t stop them if I tried. Still, I don’t look at him, focusing instead on twisting a long blade of grass into a knot over and over. “You can always leave Superior, leave other Supers, but you’ll always be half like them.” I can’t keep my voice low and measured like he can. “You’ll always be doing…whatever it is you can do…and wondering if there’s more. Don’t tell me you would ever give it up, that you’d give up practicing whatever your One is. We’re meant for more than Normal life.”

  A smile teases at his lips, like he wants to tell me about his One but knows there’s no point. Like he doesn’t even care whether I know or not. And because of that, I really do want to know. Finally.

  I can’t stop my legs from fidgeting. They bounce up and down, making my skirt swing against my calves. But I can’t make myself leave him. Even though he makes me feel like screaming at him and sobbing into his shoulder at the same time.

  A few lone fireflies flit around a bit too early. The top three-quarters of the sky are only slightly dark. I reach out to swipe one from the air and watch as it staggers across the back of my hand, testing its legs after a stretch of flight.

  I wish walking felt more foreign to me than flying.

  It flicks its wings out, and they tremble. Green-yellow light sparks at its back end. It pulls them back in, waits to be encouraged by the slightest bit of wind. A breeze curls through the air. The bug pushes its wings out and is off, victorious.

  Nice work, I think at it.

  I look over at Elias, and he’s doing the same thing, catching lightning bugs and letting them go. The tendons in the back of his hand flex lightly, coaxing the one teetering there to fly. He looks up at me, his eyes gentle.

  “Hey. You know how to smile,” Elias says, and there’s something different about his voice, something distracted.

  “You knew I could smile,” I say, leaning and nudging into him with my shoulder. I sit up straight, my back rigid, as soon as I realize what I just did.

  “You’re right. The drums made you smile for sure. Now I just have to figure out how I can do it.”

  For a second, I can’t find my breath. A few ideas flit through my head about how he could make me smile, but they are vague and terrifying — Elias’s arm around me, his lips against my skin, his voice speaking softly in my ear.

  Our breathing is the only sound besides the crickets’ chirps, and I try to force my breaths into a steadier, slower pattern, one that shows a calmer me than my erratic heart rate would betray.

  We sit silently for a while. The harsh shadows have softened into a burning golden light that sets the tips of Elias’s hair on fire and casts a glow over everything — the porch, the glass walls of the house, and the waving wheat and rigid cornstalks in the fields beyond.

  “Wanna walk?” Elias asks.

  No. I want to fly. “Yeah,” I say and hoist myself up from the step before he can help me up because I feel like touching him, just having his skin against mine, would really put me over the edge. What edge, I don’t exactly know. But I’m terrified of finding out.

  “Let’s head down this road. The fields are beautiful this time of year.” Elias motions down the dirt road that passes his house, framed in barbed wire that I always thought was ugly. But now that it’s glinting gold-orange, it’s actually breathtaking.

  The fields call to me, too. I’ve imagined soaring over them a million times, how the burning gold of the sun would scoop down into the husks and bounce back in curves, how the lazily turning turbines would shrink to the size of pinwheels.

  Someone’s bonfire, miles away, scents the air with a sharp smokiness. A chill settles over everything as the sun retreats, making way for frost. For the first time this year, I realize it’s solidly autumn, and I shiver, fighting it.

  He’s so close to me, so very close. Maybe a foot away. I really feel it — his closeness — but it’s not scary. The slender shape of his body feels familiar, feels just like mine. Only a foot and a half taller.

  “Is there a reason you still won’t tell me?” he asks.

  Our hands swing past each other as we walk, not brushing but close. I want to memorize the arcs they make through the darkening light.

  “What else do you really need to know about me besides my mad drumming capabilities?” I push my eyebrows up at him and smile a tight-lipped smile.

  “There’s more to you than being a drummer,” he says, watching his hand too, not moving closer. “Yeah, you’re cute and smart. Everyone knows that. You’re also angry, and I get that. But I want to know more.”

  He stops dead in his tracks, and so do I, turning to face him as if by instinct.

  “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” he whispers.

  I can’t tell if it’s a tease or a challenge, so I press my lips together, waiting for his face to tell me what to say next.

  He looks down, right at me. There’s this weird feeling in my chest, and I’ve honestly never felt it before. It seems ridiculous, even to me, that a sixteen-year-old girl never felt her heart beat like crazy, but I am not kidding, this is the first time. I stare back at him. My mouth hangs open, waiting for my heart to fly out of it.

  He drops his gaze to the ground. I thought that was all I wanted him to do because at least it would stop my heart from running circles inside me, but now the damn thing thuds to a stop and drops into my stomach. Now I’d give anything for him to look back at me, say anything. I honestly think my life depends on it.

  “I float,” I say, and he turns to look at me again, but oh my God, now he’s looking up at me because I’m freaking floating. This is the first time this has happened in forever, and it’s because I let my stupid head get away from me and my stupid heart drop into my stomach and this stupid, stupid boy get to me. “I just…”

  And then he reaches his hand up to me. His fingers make a ring around my wrist. They barely touch my skin, but where they do, there’s this electricity, warm and melting and vibrating through my skin. And then my face follows his up because now he’s floating, too.

  My heart really pounds now, so hard that blood thrums through my veins. The sensation is so horrific and so energizing at the same time that I can hardly stand it.

  “Another One who floats?” I whisper.

  He shakes his head, staring at the place where his fingers meet my wrist. He breathes in so deeply that his chest pushes out, making him even closer to me, and brushes the underside of my forearm with his fingers.

  He wraps one arm around my waist, then the other, and pulls me close to him. His heart races against mine.

  And then we’re moving. The wind brushes my cheek so gently it’s a whisper, but I watch as the gravel moves a foot below us. The pebbles all blend together, into stripes, then into a big gray blur. The wind pushes out from my face, making a bubble all around my skin, and the tension of it pushes my body to the side, so gently that if it weren’t for the gravel stripes I wouldn’t believe it was happening.

  We go higher — four feet off the ground, then six, then ten — but now we’re really moving, too. My hair whips around my face, and we start going so fast the corn stalks blur into a striped gold-and-green backdrop.

  I hold onto him so tight, my arms around his waist and my fingers bunching up his shirt. It’s not because I’m afraid or even because I need to. It’s because that’s what my body wants to do.

  I start laughing, and I haven’t laughed like this in so long, not since I was a little kid, that we fly even higher, so high the air tastes thin.

  Then I shriek like a freaking sixteen-year-old girl, and when I stop to realize that’s exactly what I am, I laugh even harder.

  Elias whoops, and my heart stops pounding and soars with his joy. His sad smile is gone, replaced with the real Elias smile. This is really him, I know, suddenly and completely.

  He’s taken us in a circle, around a corn field that must have been four miles square
at least, and my skin buzzes from the feel of the air whipping against it, like when I was a kid and I stuck my hand outside the car window on the highway. I used to imagine that’s what it felt like to fly. I laugh one more time when I realize that, aside from his body keeping mine from the wind on one side, I was right.

  When we land, the ground underneath my feet buzzes, too, like it’s too solid to handle me, like I don’t even belong there. Not anymore.

  We’re standing so close together. His shirt is bunched together at the sides, right above his hips. The wrinkles are lined with sweat from where my hands held on to him. I should feel mortified, but I don’t.

  It’s getting dark. Since we walked out here, someone’s painted the sky with broad, bright strokes of cotton candy pink, glowing amber, and deep purple. Fireflies dot the musty air with bursts of glowing green. This is just like a movie, it’s so perfect and magical. Which makes it all the more impossible that this is actually happening.

  We look at each other for a long minute, grinning like idiots, like the people in the movies do when they’ve just kissed for the first time. Not that I would want to do anything like that.

  Except, now that I think of it, I really, really would.

  He looks at me with mischief in his eyes, and I wonder how I look, with my hair even more messed up than usual. I’m sure my cheeks are red. I know I’m blushing, but hopefully, he just thinks they’re windchapped.

  He looks right into my eyes for a moment, then nods, like he’s decided I’ll be able to handle what he’s about to say. “I push the air. Only from around me which is why it’s my One. I can’t control it from far away.”

  “But you floated,” I say. I furrow my eyebrows, glare at him. “You flew.” But that doesn’t make sense because, in order to take me with him, he would have to be super strong, too. Or maybe I’m so light that my weight doesn’t matter at all.

  He shakes his head, still looking right at me, and I swear his gorgeous freaking eyeballs are going to burn a hole right through me. “Only with you. I saw you go up, and I…I wanted to touch you. Again.” He looks down, then back at me, his eyes wide. “And when I did…” He makes a swooping motion in the air.