Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(22)
The students around them hurry their pens across their notebooks and Mrs. O’Neil scratches her chalk across the board and her shadow capers along the wall, like a dancing crow, and the dust motes twirl in the sunbeams cutting through the window and the girl moves her hand faster now, and faster yet, her eyes fixed straight ahead, her arm appearing still, all of the movement in her fingers, her wrist—and Patrick can feel the building pressure, can feel himself losing control, can feel the heat of the sun inside of him, the wonderful heat, and the sudden pressure that gives way to a loosening, a surge.
He coughs into his fist when he finishes. He can’t not make noise.
While he sits there—his posture slumped, his breath whistling fiercely through his nose—she wipes her palm on his jeans, retrieves her pen, and begins to take notes. He watches her hand, its glossy fingernails, its faint green veins, for maybe five minutes, and then the bell rings and she rises from the table without a word or parting glance and leaves him.
Patrick takes his packed lunch to the gym, to the mirror-walled room with the rubber floor, located off the basketball courts. His father kept a bench and some dumbbells in their garage, and in the afternoons, they would lift together, not saying a lot except to shout encouragement on those final wobbly reps, simply taking pleasure in each other’s company. That used to be their routine anyway. His father, in the months leading up to his deployment, spent more and more time alone in his home-brew lab, more and more time on the phone with his friend Neal, an old college pal, now a researcher based out of the University of Oregon. They were working on something—that’s all his father would say—a biochem problem. Making beer better, Patrick assumed.
In the mirrors of the high school gym, Patrick sees himself reflected endlessly and imagines one of those far-off figures as his father when he works out—chins, benches, dips, rows, military presses, curls—as much as he can fit into thirty minutes, taking breaks between sets to snap bites from his apple.
He never asks anyone if it’s all right. And when he first senses a figure in the room—when he pumps away at the bench and hears the cludding footsteps, catches movement at the bottom of his eye, he guesses he’s in for a lecture. You can’t be in here without a spotter, the teacher, hands on hips, will tell him. Or, You’re never going to fit in if you isolate yourself like this.
Patrick racks the weight and rolls into a seated position and sees, not a teacher, but a boy. He is tall and plump, baby faced, which makes it difficult to tell how old he is, fifteen, nineteen. His head is shaved-down brown bristle. He wears a white T-shirt tucked into khakis, combat boots. On the back of his hand, the bullet-shaped tattoo.
The boy stares, his eyes wide and damp and gray, but says nothing. A moment ago Patrick was thinking about the girl—about what compelled her to reach out for him, about how nothing like that has ever happened to him and whether it even happened, whether he imagined it, and what he should say the next time he sees her—and now this, all those good anxious thoughts interrupted by some skinhead who won’t blink.
Patrick doesn’t know what to expect, another fight maybe? But fights like an audience. Fights feed off the energy of a crowd. And they are alone except for their hundreds of reflections. Then what? Patrick grows tired of the staring contest, stands and slides on another twenty pounds of plates, and says, “You guys have some sort of problem with me?”
“We don’t have a problem with you, Patrick.” The boy’s voice has the surprising clarity and resonance of a radio announcer’s. An adult’s voice.
“Then what?”
His name is Max, he says, and he has some friends he wants Patrick to meet. “Let me ask you something,” Max says and shoves his hands in his pockets as though sleeving a weapon, offering a truce. “What are you doing this Friday?”
Nothing. He has nothing going on, but he doesn’t want to say as much. This might be a gesture or might be some kind of trap, him walking through a door to greet a roomful of guys swinging lead pipes and baseball bats. “Friday,” Patrick says. Friday there is no school for the full-moon Sabbath. A law that has been around so long no one knows its origin: nobody is to work, nobody is to go anywhere except in the case of an emergency. He says as much.
“You’re not a lycan,” Max says, “so what’s the problem?”
“No problem.”
Talking to girls has never come easily to him. Sometimes, at the mall, the bowling alley, a restaurant, he’ll dream up a bad line—“I’ve seen you around, right?” or “If I hear this song again, I might rip my ears off”—good enough to make them look his way, get them talking, but after that, he’s worthless, smiling, nodding his head, letting his eyes drop to his shoes. So usually he doesn’t bother.
She makes it easy on him, surprising him that afternoon, appearing out of the river of students flowing down the hall, her shoulder brushing up against his. “Did you hear a single thing Mrs. O’Neil was talking about today?” she says.
At first he has no words. He can only think of her hand, the heat and pressure of it. “Not really.”
“That’s what I thought.”
He tries to control his bewildered smile. He tries to come up with something more to say, but he is too busy studying her, her yellow V-neck and dark jeans slung so low he can see the blade of her hipbone.