Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(23)
“Did you even read the play?” she says.
“No.” He closes his eyes. That helps. “I want to. I just haven’t been able to concentrate.”
“Because of what you’ve been through.” Not a question.
“Yeah.”
He waits for her to give him a sympathetic nod, to touch him on the shoulder, to ask him a million questions about what it was like to hear all of those people dying around him while he hid under a body like a blanket. She doesn’t. He figures this is a good sign. “So you know me?”
“Everybody knows you, even if they pretend not to.”
Lockers slam. Voices call around them. Bodies mash them closer together. Every other hand with a cell phone in it. Patrick isn’t even sure where he’s going—he’s just walking.
She says something, but he doesn’t hear her. “Sorry?”
She leans in to his ear so that he can feel her breath. “You’re a celebrity.” She overenunciates the word, making it sound like many words.
He almost says, “I wish that wasn’t the case,” but doesn’t want to sound like a whiner. Instead he says, “You know me, but I don’t know you.”
She says her name and holds out a hand, the same hand, for a shake.
“Malerie?” he says.
“Malerie.”
“Malerie.”
“Yeah.”
He repeats the name three times, making it into a song.
“Is something wrong?”
“It’s just that I’ve never met anybody with that name, Malerie.”
They talk for another minute—about what, he isn’t sure—school probably, the town maybe. His mouth is moving and words are coming out of it. Then the bell rings.
He has never liked saying good-bye. On the phone, after someone says, “All right, I guess I got to—,” he throws out a question to keep the conversation going. And in person, after raising a hand to wave so long, he can never depart more than a few paces without looking back. It always surprises him how easily other people hurry away, their faces already different, walled off and occupied with the next place they will go, the next person they will meet.
But she is different. When he walks five steps, he pivots on his heel—not to stare at her ass, just to watch her, he likes watching her—and at that same moment, as though she can sense him, she slows her pace and turns and smiles but casts down her eyes as though he has caught her doing something forbidden.
“It’s French, you know,” she yells to him. “My name. It means bad luck!”
Chapter 9
CLAIRE FELT SO CLEVER when she realized the note revealed a string of constellations. And she feels so stupid now, two weeks later, with no better understanding of what they mean, what her father was trying to tell her. She knows they can’t be directions—a map written in the night sky—for if she were to follow them, she would go nowhere, turning this way and that, wheeling along with the stars. She tries spitting out the names in a hurry—“Grus, Octans, Taurus, Orion”—thinking their sound might hold a secret. She brings the paper directly before her eyes and pulls it slowly away, as if a picture might reveal itself. She considers the mythology of each constellation, overanalyzing them like lines of some sonnet assigned to her in English. She scribbles out page after page of theories in her notebook—the one with the cartoon football on the cover—until her fingers ache from gripping the pen.
It’s enough to make her want to tear the note in half, and in half again, letting the wind carry the pieces away like the snow that fell the night this all began. And then, with her hands and her mind empty, she will crawl under some porch and curl up in a ball and close her eyes—which feel as poisoned as her wrist from staring endlessly at the note—and wait to die. That would be easier.
The landscape here is flat, parceled up into brown and yellow squares edged by barbed wire, so that Claire feels she is crossing a giant board game. The shape of the wind is visible in the fields of trembling wheat and soybeans that stretch to the horizon. Trees appear only when clustered around houses as a windbreak. The distance between towns grows greater. Yellow-bellied marmots poke their heads out of their burrows and chirp at her, as if to say, Where do you think you’re going? and Why bother?
She has felt, these past few years especially, like the center of something. Her shoes mattered. Her jeans and jackets. Her grades. Her friends. Her text messages. Her opinions about movies and music and television shows. Her love and hate for certain boys. All of that is gone now. Especially in these northern plains, where the wind never stops blowing and the sky seems bigger than the ground beneath her feet, she feels smaller and more insignificant than ever before. A tiny harmless thing that could be swallowed up and no one would notice.
She asks for a ride outside a grocery store from a gray-haired, one-eyed woman pushing a shopping cart full of frozen dinners. She asks if she can sleep on the covered porch of a squat white house where four children race around the front yard, capturing grasshoppers to toss into a fat-bodied spider’s web. She asks for directions at the edge of a field where two men wearing seed caps and heavy leather gloves toss hay bales into the back of a pickup. But mostly she keeps to herself, afraid that someone will squint at her and say, You’re that girl I heard about on the news?