She smiles dreamily at me and nods. “We did. He’s… amazing.”
She’s being coy, but I’m not going to take the bait and dig any further. Those aren’t details I have any interest in hearing.
“When are you going to see him again?” I ask. I shouldn’t care. It shouldn’t make me so uncomfortable, but I tell myself it’s just because she’s my closest friend, and I don’t want to think of what I’m sure happened in that house just next door.
She shrugs.
“I don’t know. I mean, I’ll see him at school. But we didn’t make any plans or anything,” she tells me.
“I noticed you admiring his motorcycle.”
What is wrong with me? Where am I going with this conversation?
“Isn’t it hot? I don’t know if I could control myself seeing him sitting on that thing,” she grins.
“I don’t think you controlled yourself, and you didn’t even see him on it,” I say before I can stop the words from coming out of my mouth.
Samantha narrows her eyes at me.
“What’s that crack supposed to mean?” she asks.
I shake my head. “It was just a joke.”
No, it wasn’t. But it doesn’t matter. She rebounds quickly and goes back to her dreamy eyes.
“He says he doesn’t give rides to anyone. But I’m going to change that,” she says.
“You are?” I ask.
She nods. “It’s just going to take a little bit of persuasion, but I have a feeling I’m going to get on the back of that bike and wrap myself around his gorgeous body. He can take me anywhere he wants,” she sighs.
I wonder if I look as sick as I feel. Adjusting my backpack over my shoulder, I climb the steps onto my front porch.
“I’ve got to get inside and work on a science project. I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” I tell her.
Samantha nods, and I go inside, closing the door and resting my head back against it. I want the thoughts in my mind to go away. They make no sense. Having them makes my skin sting and the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I head upstairs to my room, reminding myself of his rude attitude and demanding ways to push the images of Talon on the back of his bike out of my mind.
8
Talon
Sitting in the open commons to eat lunch among the masses isn’t something that appeals to me. So, I’ve taken to eating lunch either backstage in the theater or along one of the hallways. I’d much rather sit alone with my sketchbook and be able to enjoy eating than have to listen to the teenage drama unfolding around me. But today is a little different. Instead of heading straight for the stage or the corner of the hallway I’ve mapped out for myself, I detour to the library.
The wild-eyed girl in charge of the sets, whose name is Matilda, but I just can’t take that seriously, has gone off the rails. Her descriptions of what she wants for her vision of the sets have only gotten more ridiculous over the last two days. So I’ve decided to make a few changes. There’s a book I studied in my old school that I hope is sitting in the library here, too. If it is, I can copy a few of the pages and translate them into sketches we can apply to the sets.
I only intended to walk into the library, check out the book, and leave. But when I step inside, I see Wren across the room. We haven’t spoken a word to each other in the last two days, and curiosity pulls me into the room. I sit down at one of the round tables and pull out my sketch pad. Absently adding shading to the simple drawing on the page, I keep lifting my eyes toward the girl. She’s standing in the stacks; a large book resting in her palms. Her eyes glance down at it and then flit up again. She’s watching something, but I can’t tell what it is.
Leaning to the side, I try to see what has fascinated her so much. She leans closer to the shelf beside her. Her lips move like she’s talking to someone. A flash of bright green on the other side of the books tells me someone else is just beyond them. A second later, she closes the book and tucks it back onto the shelf. Picking up her bag from where it was sagging at her feet, she swoops around the end of the shelf and into the next aisle where the person she was talking to waits.
The strange behavior brings me to my feet. I tuck my sketch pad back into my backpack and cross the room to the aisle to the far side of the library. This lets me stroll along the ends of the stacks until I end up by the one where I just saw Wren. I stop where she was standing and look up like she was, trying to figure out what she kept looking at.
Halfway across the room, sitting at one of the computers locked down to a row of segmented tables is a scrawny boy in ill-fitting jeans and a t-shirt that stretches almost to his knees. The tip of his tongue sticks out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrates hard on the textbook open in front of him.
It strikes me as odd. I look around to see if there’s anything else she could possibly be looking at. There’s no one else around, and other than a few of the horrible motivational posters every school has that look like they are throwbacks to the eighties, there’s nothing else of note in the line of sight.
Then I hear something. A giggle, somewhere to my side. I look through a gap in the books to see her in the next aisle over. Again, she’s holding a book and peeking up over it in the direction of the awkward guy. Somebody whispers, and she looks through the books beside her, her hand covering her mouth to muffle a laugh.
Easing the books in front of me to the side, I tap on the gray metal shelf to get her attention. Wren looks startled to see me peering back at her.
“Your book is upside down,” I whisper.
“What?” she asks.
She looks confused as if she was expecting me to say something else, and I threw her off with that comment. I point to the book in her hands.
“It’s upside down.”
She looks down, and her cheeks flush. As she’s flipping it over, I walk around the end of the shelf to stand beside her in the aisle.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
I shrug and run my fingertips along the spines of the books in front of me.
“Thought I’d pick up some light reading for the upcoming weekend. Brush up on my,” I glance at the titles of the books, “wild bird knowledge.”
She tries not to laugh, biting down on her bottom lip. She’s beautiful, even with her hair thrown up in a messy bun and wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and a hooded school sweatshirt. Her finger lifts to her lips to quiet me.
“Shhhh. He’ll hear you,” she whispers.
I take a step closer. “One of the wild birds? Is that a particular fascination for you?”
“Shhhhh.”
Another voice comes from my side, and I glance over to see round dark eyes peering at me through the books. I point at the girl.
“Or is that your wild bird? I think I found it in its natural habitat,” I say. “I must say, though. Hiding out in the bird section… a bit on the nose, Wren.”
She presses her lips together and shakes her head. “Hush. We’re watching him.”
She points across the library at the guy on the computer. The longer he works on whatever it is he’s doing, the closer he leans to the textbook. At this point, he is almost lying down on the glossy pages and having to peek up at the screen every time he needs to use the computer.