Death, and the Girl He Loves

“What?” Kenya asked.

Cameron had settled onto the window seat and Jared sat on the floor beside me, scrolling through the pictures on my phone, his shoulder against my knee.

“She doesn’t know?” Brooklyn asked me.

Glitch spoke up then, happy to fill her in. “Lor can go into pictures and see what happened when they were being taken. It’s part of her superpowers.”

Superpowers. If only.

“Wow. Okay,” Kenya said, folding her arms across her chest. “That’s cool.”

“But I can’t go into drawings.”

“No,” Brooklyn said, folding her arms across her chest as well, “you don’t know that. Try.”

After rolling my eyes so far back into my head, I almost fell backwards, I refocused on the drawing I’d done. It was disproportionate. The eyes too wide-set. The nose not quite centered. “I don’t think this will work.”

“You didn’t think the other would work either. Concentrate.”

I scanned the room. Brooke and Glitch looked on expectantly. Kenya curiously. And Jared humorously. Even Cameron seemed interested. “There’s way too much pressure. You guys have to stop looking at me. I can’t do this if you’re looking at me.”

Suddenly every gaze in the room had someplace else to be. It was silly. And it didn’t help. I would never be able to do this. My shoulders sagged in defeat until Jared looked up at me and winked, his dark eyes sparkling with mirth. That one gesture, that one act of kindness, made me feel like I could do anything. Or at least give it my best shot.

I filled my lungs to capacity and laid my fingers across the page. Let them slide along the image. I focused on the primitive lines and the adolescent shading, and relaxed my body so it could fall through space and time. Not expecting much, I flinched when I felt something tremble beneath my touch. It surprised me and I snapped my hand back.

Thankfully, my guests were still minding their own business. Brooke was examining her nails. Kenya was cleaning hers with her switchblade. Glitch was playing Asteroids on my computer. Cameron was playing with his shoelaces and Jared was back to scrolling through my pictures.

I stared at the image again. The drawing was so rudimentary, surely I couldn’t do something like go into it. Not in the same way I could a picture. I’d been going into them for weeks now, looking into a time past, seeing what was happening when the picture was taken, swimming through the moments it captured, but that was different. It was a photograph, a true copy of reality. This was nothing more than scribbles on paper.

“Well?” Brooke asked, her impatience shining through.

I tossed the drawing onto my desk. “Nothing. Just as I thought.”

“Well, darn,” she said, biting a nail to the quick. “This plan sucks.”

“What plan?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

THE WARM FUZZIES

I listened to the sound of my best friends breathing as they slept. I could tell everyone was unconscious except Cameron. He sat at the window seat, looking into the darkness.

Since it was just us, I decided to look through the journal my grandmother Olivia had taken from the nephilim again. Just as before, I saw nothing to indicate it was anything more than an ordinary sketchbook. It was full of drawings, mostly abstracts of people or still lifes. Some I could make out. Some I couldn’t.

“You don’t sleep much, do you?” I asked Cameron.

“Not really,” he said, refusing to look my way.

“Well, I can’t sleep, either. I’m going to get some water. Want anything?”

“Nope.”

I wrestled my sheets down and climbed out of bed. He was sitting close to Brooke. Her bed was right by the window, so he had little choice, but in the moonlight, I could see his hand resting on her pillow, mere inches from her head as she slept. His thumb stroked a lock of her dark hair absently. He had pretty much everyone in town fooled, but not me. He had genuine feelings for Brooke. Probably had them for a long time. And it was me he was mad at, not her.

I tiptoed past Glitch, who was in his usual sleeping bag, and stepped right up to Cameron so I could whisper to him. He finally spared me a glance that was full of anger. Just as I thought.

I leaned in and he leaned back to get away from me.

“Not this time,” I said. I leaned in farther and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

The next look he gave me almost made me laugh out loud. Confusion with a healthy side of horror had taken over.

I grinned and said, “Thank you for being everything that you are.”

“I’m still mad at you.”

“Exactly. Now get over it and tell Brooke how you feel.”

He turned away. “She knows how I feel.”

But he didn’t see what I saw. He didn’t realize that this was about as real as it was going to get. We were all about to die, and this little tiff between the two of them was an utterly useless waste of time.

I took his face into my hands and drew his gaze back to mine. “No matter what happens,” I said, fighting back the emotion that suddenly took hold, “I appreciate everything that you’ve done for me. And for Brooke.”

“Yeah, no problem,” he said, wary.

“Cameron, I love you. And, if you ever want to make out with me, you know like after school tomorrow, just let me know.”

“Lorelei McAlister!”

I startled and turned toward Brooklyn, who had bolted upright on her bed. Her breathing had quickened when I stepped over and I knew she was awake. How could I let my last fleeting chances to punk her go to waste? We didn’t have much time left, and I’d wasted a lot of that time in Maine with no one to harass. I had to get the jabs in while I could.