Death, Doom and Detention

Cameron broke, chuckling before he headed toward the back door. “Are you kidding? I now have your grandma’s famous recipe for chile con queso.”

“Sweet,” Brooke said, scooping up her jacket and backpack and following him out. “You can make some later.”

I took an apple to eat on the way to school and grabbed my jacket and backpack as well.

“Can we talk to you, pix?” Granddad asked.

I paused but didn’t look back at them. “I’ll be late for school.”

“We’ll talk later, then,” Grandma said, her voice soft and sad.

It made my throat constrict. I nodded and headed out of a perfectly warm house into a cold, frigid wind that whipped my hair about and took only seconds to convince me I’d underdressed for the occasion despite Cameron’s warning. Bummer that insulated work coveralls and ski masks weren’t in fashion.

We hurried into Cameron’s beat-up Chevy. He’d kept it running, and it rumbled and shimmied as we climbed in. Despite its haggard appearance on the outside, the inside boasted a toasty warmth that kept the chills at bay. That was all that mattered at the moment.

“I think you should look for Jared today while we’re in class,” I said to Cameron as we drove to school.

He shook his head, and disappointment rushed over me.

“But why? It’s not like you’ve never skipped.”

With a sigh, he leveled a hard stare on me. “He’s not my concern, Lorelei. You know that.”

Of course he wasn’t. I was. And because of that, Jared’s best hope was lost.

“But what if he’s hurt?”

“Not likely,” he said, pulling into the parking lot.

“But what if he is?”

He turned off his truck and said, “Then I’ll pay the guy who hurt him fifty bucks to tell me how he did it.”

I turned away from him. “That’s not nice.”

“The truth rarely is.”

The icy wind cut through our clothes and had my teeth chattering before we got to the door. Still, I loved the weather. Cold and promising as a thick wetness permeated the air. Maybe it would snow. Few things trumped snow days. Hot chocolate with marshmallows, maybe. And Jared’s eyes.

Glitch met us at the side door of the school with a box of his mother’s homemade cinnamon rolls, but not even the warm scent of cinnamon and melted butter could bring me out of my misery. Though they did their darnedest.

We dived in, and Brooke moaned when she took a bite. Glitch glared at Cameron when he took two.

“Who’s that?” I asked, licking my fingers, then pointing to the side.

“Oh, that must be the new kid,” Glitch said. “I heard we were getting someone new.”

We stopped to take a look. He dressed in retro attire with thespian undertones. Tweed gray coat, long and loose. Sandy brown hair under a black beret. And he was really, really tall.

At the exact same moment, Brooke and I turned to look at the other really, really tall guy in school. One of them, anyway. There was tall, then there was really, really tall—and the new guy, like Jared and Cameron, was really, really tall.

“Not another one,” I said under my breath.

Brooke looked up at him. “Relative of yours?”

But Cameron was also staring at the new guy, his expression guarded. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was taken aback.

The new guy stood talking to Mr. Davis. As the principal pointed down the hall, apparently giving directions, the new guy turned and looked right at us. Right at me.

His face, while handsome, was somehow disproportioned. There was something strange about him. Something out of place. His face was a little too long, perhaps, or the angles a little too sharp, the eyes a little too close set.

The polite thing to do would have been to look away, and yet there we stood. The lot of us. Staring as though we had never seen another human being in our lives. Surely we looked like something from one of those Twilight Zone reruns. The guy looked from me to Brooke to Glitch. Then slowly his attention meandered up the length of Cameron, and their gazes locked for a long, tense moment.

Cameron’s expression wasn’t derisive, exactly. More like wary or just plain surprised.

The kid nodded, an almost imperceptible grin lifting one cheek, then headed out in the direction Mr. Davis had pointed.

Glitch turned toward Cameron. “Do you know him?” he asked.

But Cameron was stunned. I could tell. Brooke raised her hand and waved it in front of his eyes. He blinked back to us.

“Is everything okay, Cameron?” I asked.

“Let’s get to class.” The brusqueness in his tone should have convinced me to comply without any more questions, but I wasn’t feeling particularly compliant.

“Cameron, what is going on?” I asked him when he took off down the hall. It was hard to follow a super tall guy when you had only enough leg to accommodate a five-foot frame. “I get so tired of your cryptic personality.”

He regarded me, his expression worried. “There’s a disturbance in the air, and that guy is disturbing.”

“Really?” Brooke asked. “In what way?”

“In a disturbing way.”

She’d had enough as well. She grabbed hold of his jacket sleeve and pulled him to face us. “Who was he?”

Cameron studied her before saying, “I don’t know. He was just different.” When she scowled at him, he added, “He was fuzzy around the edges.”