“Thanks, Mabee. I mean, I probably won’t use half of this shit, but . . . yeah. Hey, that was nice,” he says, lightly laughing out his words. He opens his arms, welcoming me in for another hug, so I accept, resting my cheek on his hard chest and wrapping my arms around his body as far as they’ll go. I look right at Lucas while I’m there, eyes hazed and smile daring him to do his worst.
“You’re welcome,” I say, letting my hands run along his sides while I let go. Tory tilts his head and looks at me sideways, and that little motion sends a chill through my chest. I’m flirting with fire now, and mixed signals aren’t really part of who I am. I ball my hands into fists, shove them in my pockets, and take in my surroundings one last time. Both Tory and his brother watch me with puzzled expressions, Lucas, with his mouth a hard, flat line and eyes frozen cold.
I lift my hand to wave good-bye and turn to head back to Abby, focusing on the pattern her feet make as they kick back and forth from where she sits on the hood of my car. I imagine laughter behind me, partly because I expect it, but it’s not real. When I focus, I hear nothing, not even the sound of people walking close behind. My body feels hot and my pulse is pounding in all parts of my body—fingertips, throat, ears, legs. I’m nearly jelly when I reach my friend, and she slides from my car and hands me my black and white checkered backpack, fully stocked with my “school shit.”
“That went well,” she says, an eyebrow raised. I can’t feel my feet.
“I don’t know if I have a barometer to measure how that went,” I say.
“I don’t know what that means.” She shrugs. I twist my head to meet her eyes as we walk toward the main doors of the front building. The longer I look at her, the harder it becomes to hold in my laughter. When it breaks free, Abby joins in, and I’m pretty sure she thinks we’re laughing because she doesn’t know what a barometer is, but that’s not what’s funny at all. Nothing’s funny, really. Things are nuts, way out of my comfort ballpark, but funny? Certainly not. Nervous, tenuous, doubtful, sad—that’s what things are. And they’re that way because of Lucas Fuller and what he is and was to me.
I part ways with my friend after the first building and begin my trek to the science area, the burning hole in my chest growing hotter the closer I get. My pace is quick enough that I get settled in my seat before Lucas arrives. I’m well into my act of being distracted by reading when I feel him shove his large body into the seat behind me. I jerk forward when his desk bangs into my chair, but grit my teeth instead of engaging him.
“Oops, sorry.” His tone is flat and purposely cold.
I put the end of my pencil in my mouth, my teeth squeezing at the eraser with light pressure that takes all of my attention. Most of my attention. Not nearly enough of my attention.
“My dad says you’re unhinged.” His face is close to the back of my head. My hair is pulled back into a messy bun today, which means every bit of his breath slithers around my bare neck.
“Your dad’s a real good judge of character, I bet,” I say just loud enough that I’m sure he hears me. I chomp down on my pencil hard enough to bend the metal band around the eraser and stare toward the door. Our teacher stands outside waiting for stragglers to rush in before he closes it. Being early was the wrong choice. It would have been better to just come face-to-face with him once than having to sit here in this cone of silence where I swear I can hear every breath he takes. I wonder if he can hear my heart thundering.
My chair shifts with the weight of his foot, which is now balanced on the back leg. He taps his toe against the metal a few times, and I refuse to believe he’s unaware of how annoying that is. The door finally closing behind our teacher, I bend to my side and unzip my backpack, pulling out my new pack of folders and a notebook.
“You get Tory pink ones too?” Lucas chuckles out his lame tease as he leans forward, his hands gripped around the front of his desk to pull his body close. Rather than respond, I smile with my lips pressed together tightly and meet his glare blink for blink. He eventually leans back in his seat, laughing quietly while stretching his arms over his head, fingers woven together. I wait for him to look away before turning around.
Lucas’s little digs stop as soon as our teacher’s lecture begins, and the next hour is a blissful lesson on velocity. I’m almost free, the minutes nearing the top of the hour signaling the end of class, when Mr. Slatvka drops a bomb in the form of a giant Ziploc filled with Hot Wheels track and a few cars on my desktop.
“Mabee and Fuller, partners,” he says, waggling his finger in a motion to nonverbally link us together. He moves down the line to the next pair before I register what just happened.
“Fuck,” Lucas breathes out in a whisper behind me. I turn to match his groan with one of my own.
“I don’t like it either,” I say, lifting my hand to request to work with anybody else. Before our teacher turns to notice me, though, the bell sounds and the classroom erupts into chaos. The final bag in his hand is given to a group of three, the benefit of being near the end in a world of odd numbers. I lower my hand slowly and wonder why all of this is happening to me.
“It’s fine. Just give me the bag and I’ll do everything for us,” Lucas says, pulling his backpack from the side of his desk and slinging it over his shoulder as he stands. His T-shirt lifts up a little when he weaves his other arm through his shoulder straps, and my eyes zero in on the tanned line where his dark jeans rest low on his hips, a red band from his boxer briefs showing above the waistband. At least, I imagine they’re briefs. Shit, I’m imagining him in briefs.
“No, I’ll do it. Screw you,” I say, tossing the bag into my backpack and zipping it inside before standing and sliding my bag over my shoulder.
“Fine, whatever,” he says, looking off to the side as he brushes by me and moves out the door. I let the rest of the class filter out to form a human wall of space between us, but my eyes still lock on his position the minute I leave the room. He pushes through the double doors, and the tinted glass does little to dissuade me from stalking him with my eyes until I’m outside, too. I follow in his steps around the media center, toward the gym where I expect he’ll peel off and duck inside for weights or some other stupid jock thing, but instead, he fishes out his keys from his pocket and continues toward the front of the school.
He’s leaving. And judging by the way he scans to his right and left, he’s timing his steps perfectly to catch the front gate before it locks and forces him to exit through the office. He slips out undetected and jogs into the sea of student parking spots, stopping at a red sports car about four rows deep where he ducks inside the passenger door and fades in with the rest of the mundane background.
We’re seniors now. Almost eighteen. Adults.
Different people than we were.
I wonder who Lucas has become.
Chapter Six
I’m two days back at my old school and already doing a boy’s homework for him. Granted, this is technically my homework, too, but still, there’s some tragic irony in this.
It’s taken me an hour to rig the tracks in a way that this experiment will work with only one person. By the time my mom walks through the door from a quick grocery run, I’m sweaty and trigger-happy irritable. In case she couldn’t tell by the cold shoulder I gave her when she walked in, I drop a big fat F-bomb when the tape gives way under the weight of the cars I carefully balanced on the makeshift bridge from the wall to the table. The only car to make the full trip before the bridge collapses is sailing off the end of the table as my mom steps into the kitchen. It ricochets off of her shin.