Chapter Ten #2
“I wanted to explain why we didn’t tell you before.
I asked to be the one to tell you, and I meant to,” he said.
He glanced over at her as if to check how Helen felt about what he was saying.
“I just didn’t figure out how to tell you in time.
I didn’t want you to think I was some shady stalker hiding out on your roof. ”
“I’m not going to lie—well, I can’t lie to you, can I?” Helen said with a grin. “I was a little upset, but I’m fine about it now. If your family is willing to protect mine, I guess I can put up with a little shadiness.”
Helen was forced to stop talking because someone was honking out “Shave and a Haircut” in the most intrusive way possible.
She wanted to tell whomever it was to kiss off, but she couldn’t.
These were her neighbors and she had to be polite.
She wasn’t cramping up, but she suspected that she might start to. She stuck a fist into her stomach.
“What’s going on?” Lucas asked intently. “I’ve seen you do that before. Are you in pain?”
“No, but I think I might be soon. Don’t worry about it, there’s nothing you can do. Well, I guess you could go away and never hang out with me again,” Helen answered.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said with raised eyebrows. “But what are you talking about? Are you allergic to me or something?”
“No.” Helen laughed. “I think I’m allergic to attention. And we tend to draw a lot of it when we’re together.”
“But it’s not just me, right? You feel those pains even when I’m not around?”
“Yes. I’ve had this all my life. I don’t know exactly what causes it, I just know that sometimes when people stare at me I get a terrible pain in my stomach.”
“Allergic to attention,” Lucas said to himself, absentmindedly taking Helen’s hand while he thought. He had to let it go to shift as he parked at school, but as soon as they were out of the car he claimed her hand again and rolled her fingers around in his.
Helen watched Lucas as they stood at her locker together. He seemed distracted. His brow was furrowed and his gaze tuned in, but most disturbingly he seemed to be all blurry.
“What is that you’re doing? It’s giving me a headache,” Helen said quietly while she turned the combination on her lock.
“Sorry,” he said as he snapped back into focus. “I’m bending the light. It happens sometimes when I’m concentrating.”
Helen remembered from her reading that Apollo was the god of Light, and at that moment Lucas was doing things with light that were impossible outside of a magic show.
She realized she had seen him do this before in the locker room at his house, but she had taken so many knocks to the head at the time she thought it was just her vision that was off.
“Aren’t you worried someone will notice?”
“Actually, sometimes I do this to make people stop noticing me when I want some privacy to think. People have a hard time forcing themselves to look at things that they can’t see clearly, or things that shouldn’t be possible.”
“Because their eyes slide right off,” Helen interjected, remembering how her gaze was diverted from Lucas’s face in the locker room even though she had really tried to focus on him.
“Exactly. If I look far away or too hard to see, most people just block me out,” he said, and then he gave her a knowing smile. “You slouch to get people to stop staring at you. I blur. It’s useful in a fight, too, only it’s nearly impossible to do when you’re moving fast.”
“Are you giving me all your fight secrets?” Helen said cheekily as she put her books in her bag and shut her locker. “Not so smart, Houdini.”
“Really? Well, come and get me, Sparky,” he said with a grin as he backed away.
Sparky? Helen thought, puzzled. But he was already through the double doors at the end of the hall and she had to go to class.
When the bell for first lunch rang she rushed as fast as she could, intending to get some answers, but by the time she made it to the cafeteria, Ariadne was already seated at the geek table, surrounded by admirers.
Helen shouldn’t have been surprised that Ariadne would join their table, considering she was in all the AP classes.
Unfortunately for Matt, Ariadne’s presence usually attracted an entourage of boys—the little lambs to her Mary.
Helen tried to fight her way into the circle, and nearly gave up before she was spotted by Ariadne.
“Zach? Can you make a little room for Helen, please?” Ariadne asked as she flashed a dazzling smile.
“Don’t worry about it, Zach. She can have my seat,” Claire said in a caustically cheerful voice, vacating the place next to Ariadne.
Claire brushed close to Helen as she passed, whispering something about the “old friends” not being cool enough to sit at the same lunch table when someone suddenly has a popular boyfriend.
Before Helen could get into a well-deserved fight with Claire, Ariadne pulled Helen down next to her to stop one of the hormone-infested boys from getting any closer to her.
By the time the bell rang for classes, all of Helen’s normal friends had been driven away from the table—a table that had been theirs since freshmen year. Matt’s sad look made Helen wonder how long it had been since the two of them had been able to talk. It must have been months.
Claire wasn’t waiting for her at the trail when track practice started.
It was silly for her to try to avoid Helen by leaving without her, because they both knew that she could catch up with Claire no matter how far behind she was, but the intent was clear.
When Helen came jogging up, Claire didn’t even turn to look at her.
“Just keep running, Hamilton. I am so not into you right now,” Claire said as she veered away and raised her arm in a “talk to the hand” gesture.
From many years of experience Helen knew that Claire needed to punish her a little before she’d be ready to move forward.
Then they’d talk on the phone, make up, and the next day everything would be back to normal.
Just this one time, Helen wished they could skip to the end of the fight, especially since she hadn’t done anything, but she knew better than to rush Claire. Instead, Helen dutifully ran past her.
After a few minutes of running alone, Helen started to get bored with the mortal pace.
She looked at her watch to calculate exactly how much time she would need to kill before making her way back to the trailhead, and took off across the moors at an impossible speed.
She knew Lucas could simply step up into the air and start flying, but so far that approach hadn’t worked for her.
Maybe she needed to be running to get airborne, kind of like an airplane. Here was a chance to test that theory.
As Helen struck out off the trail and through the marshy land surrounding Miacomet Pond, she began to sense the lightness she associated with flight.
There was a fluttery feeling in her stomach, a barely contained wildness that she assumed was an expression of Scion power.
She felt static energy running over her skin.
It was as if she had rubbed a balloon over her entire body and then held it just far enough away so that her whole surface felt the outward tug of an electrical field.
Taking an experimental leap, Helen soared up into the air.
At first she thought she had done it, that she was flying, but she soon felt herself reach the top of a very large arc and begin to descend.
She had merely jumped higher than ever before—too high—and her brain was still hardwired to believe that when she hit the ground she would go splat and die.
She tried to grab at the air, and although there was a part of her that knew how to make it hold her, she was either too scared or not scared enough to do the trick in time. She hit the ground at an angle and went into a skid, her feet digging up two loamy troughs in the mud.
She was fine, of course, but still deeply shaken.
Her knees were wobbly and she had to laugh to let out the crazy feeling flapping around inside her chest. After she had calmed down a bit she hauled herself up off her butt.
She pulled her feet out of the mud and started to walk back toward the school, feeling like a jackass.
She was covered in smelly muck up to her waist, and in her head she pictured how she must have looked as she came down from her leap, her arms pinwheeling frantically like a cartoon character falling off a cliff.
She glanced around to make sure no one had spotted her in her moment of foolishness, just out of habit, but she wasn’t expecting anyone to be near.
Her heart turned over when she saw a dark smudge turn into a man’s shape.
Then he suddenly stopped and changed direction just over the next rise.
He had seen her get up and walk away laughing after falling from fifty feet high.
Worse than that, Helen could see there was something wrong with the way he moved. He was going much too fast to be human.
Her entire body tensed instinctively. Without even thinking about it she took off after the dark shape.
Whoever he was, he was headed back toward the high school—back toward Claire, who was probably huffing and puffing along, slow and small and human.
The image of Kate lying unconscious on the ground flashed through her head and spurred Helen to run faster.
She skipped over massive swaths of landscape, bounding recklessly over hillocks and cranberry bogs, unable to think of anything but catching him.