“Sophia,” she says, casually glancing at my leg.
It’s been a week since the grizzly attacked me. To explain my limp, I told her I tripped on the way to Charlotte’s.
“Yes?” I say innocuously.
She taps her fingers on the tabletop, pursing her lips. “You can’t run around Waterford with a 5-7,” she eventually says, “but you can at least take your Ladybug.”
I stare at her inquisitively; I lost my Ladybug at the Sport Club in Beirut.
She walks to her handbag and retrieves a delicate five-centimeter blade.
“You said I wouldn’t need a weapon here,” I say.
My mother walks behind me and pushes aside my hair. She reaches her hand into the back of my new blouse and lifts out the price tag. Snip.
Clicking the Ladybug closed, she leans over my shoulder and puts it on the table beside my glass dish of muesli and yogurt. “Who said it’s a weapon?”
Charlotte dumps her precalculus textbook onto the cafeteria table, “I loathe Krenshaw!”
I check my silver Skagen watch and groan. “I forgot Krenshaw’s assignment in my locker.” I stuff my thermos into my backpack. “See you guys later?”
“You better hurry!” Charlotte warns through a mouthful of pizza as I run out of the cafeteria and into the corridor.
Approaching the glass-walled vestibule connecting the cafeteria to the north hall, I notice something out of the corner of my eye—someone.
He is here?
Crossing the lawn with long, lithe steps, Aksel keeps his head bowed against the damp wind rushing in from the canyons.
One second, he is bounding up the stairs two at a time; the next, he is opening the door and stepping inside.
Aksel doesn’t stop casually when he sees me. He comes to a deliberate halt a meter away from me—like I am either contagious or dangerous.
Aksel Fredricksen hasn’t been at school all week. I’d know. Because harder than catching up on eighteen months of missed schoolwork has been trying to not constantly scan the halls, curious if I’d see Aksel at school—which is why it actually seems weird that I haven’t seen him. Not once. Until now.
He’s even more strapping and formidable than I remember.
Strikingly handsome, his features are angular, with broad cheekbones and full lips. He looks like he’s been outdoors all morning. His light bronze skin is flushed and tan. In daytime, his deep-set eyes are even brighter—a pulsing, electrifying shade of green.
Why am I standing here—staring?
“So you do go to school here?” I blurt out.
I look down at the physics book in his hand. Obviously.
His face remains impassive. “Yeah. Of course.”
“But you’ve been gone.”
“Vacation,” he answers easily.
“All week?” I prod. My cheeks redden. In Waterford, I’m supposed to stop noticing things—details—people don’t like being inspected.
His piercing eyes don’t leave my face. “How’s your leg?” Aksel asks. His voice is deep, slightly hoarse; his lips are round and full and why do I keep looking at them?
Flushing, I bite my lip. How can he make me nervous?
“Healed mostly. It was only a small bruise.” I wring my fingers together. “I’m Sophia, by the way,” I chatter. “I didn’t really thank you previously, so thank you. You’re a good shot. My father would be impressed. He’d say only military snipers would have made those shots …”
As I speak, Aksel’s entire demeanor subtly shifts. His posture stiffens, tensing, like I’ve startled him. Momentarily, his brow furrows.
He looks like he’s inspecting me.
I’m hit by an unexpected sensation of familiarity.
“… Where did you … learn?” I finish lamely.
Aksel watches me uneasily. A sharp tingle rolls up my spine.
Leaning fractionally away from me, Aksel arranges his mouth into a slight, forced smile. “Hunting,” he answers reticently.
Brrrriiiiinnngggg!
The corridor crowds with students.
It’s as though an invisible barrier has descended between us.
Easing his hands into his pockets, Aksel slips back into a composed posture and says, “See you later,” before striding past me down the hall.
What was that about?
Ruffled, I dart to the north hall, collect my assignment, and reach Krenshaw’s class as the tardy bell rings. At the whiteboard, Krenshaw clears his throat and presses out the sleeves of his tweed coat.
The door creaks open. It has a broken hinge, so it swings into the wall with a thud.
Krenshaw’s eyes dart to the doorway, along with everyone else’s.
Aksel strides into the classroom. Our eyes lock. My cheeks ignite.
Mortified, I spin back in my seat and inspect the calculator on my desk.
“Today is your midterm,” Krenshaw declares.
Aksel sits down two seats over.
“No fair!” shrieks a girl to my left. “It’s supposed to be next week!”
Krenshaw raises his arms, silencing the class, before distributing the exam. “Remember, midterms are a third of your grade.”
I’m hyperaware of Aksel’s presence, his movements; beside me, he is seated at an angle, drumming his pencil against his desk.
As the exam begins, I keep my head down, scribbling out factorials.
Yet, my pencil quakes in my hand.
There is something unsettling about the way he looked at me—for a second in the woods and that flicker just now—like he knew me, and I can’t push it aside, explain it away.
I don’t need to be on alert. Aksel isn’t familiar. He lives in Waterford.
The shrill whiz of an electric pencil sharpener knocks me back into reality.
Forty minutes left and I haven’t finished the first page.
However, I didn’t study in bombed-out Crimean hotel rooms, without electricity, only to fail an American high school math exam. I desperately push aside my curiosity and focus.
With ten minutes left, Aksel stands, walks to the back of the classroom, and drops his exam onto Krenshaw’s desk.
Surreptitiously, I watch Aksel beneath my lashes. He strides out of the classroom … without a look in my direction.
“Six o’clock good?” Charlotte asks, hauling open the heavy school door a few days later. “We’ll get ready for the Stomp at my house.”
My eyes have strayed behind Charlotte, watching Aksel stride down the main steps two at a time.
Since the exam, I’ve seen Aksel frequently at school, usually in Calculus and often leaving Physics alongside a ski racer named Henry. We say almost nothing to each other. He’s not mean, he’s just cordially indifferent.
Yet despite the impermeable distance between us, there remains a gnawing in my chest each day as I turn a corner or enter Krenshaw’s classroom. I’m not sure whether I dread Aksel’s presence or desire it.
It’s nagging me that I can’t figure him out, that I’m flustered around him, that if we make eye contact, my stomach inevitably churns like a baby goldfish is swimming around inside.
Like now. And he’s barely out of view.
I snap my eyes back to Charlotte. “You mean a dance?”
“No, a stomp,” Charlotte says, treading over brittle ocher and scarlet leaves piled at the curb as we skirt the crowd stampeding to the parking lot. “You do not go with a date, and if Ryan Rice asks you to see the hay rafters, say no!”