Cold Kiss Page 3

  For the first time, though, it’s tempting to turn around and focus, to pull whatever it is that’s inside me into a tight glowing ball, and blow a nasty little kiss that would knock them over. Instead, I simply step on the hot pink strap of one of their backpacks as I run up the steps.

  Inside, I head right to the 130s in the stacks. No one’s ever in this particular aisle—I guess no one really cares about metaphysics or Western philosophy anymore, if they ever did in this town. I’m still not sure who decided the paranormal should be sandwiched between them, but whatever. That’s what I need—information on the paranormal, emphasis on “para.” I always knew I wasn’t totally normal, but it’s a little weird to see it right there in print, you know?

  It always makes me wonder which part of me would pass if they gave a test.

  There’s nothing new on the shelves, and for a minute I just stand there, my backpack heavy on one shoulder and the dusty, unused smell of the books in their plastic covers strong in my nose. Across the aisle, three middle-school boys are spread out at a table, flipping through old copies of Maxim, and story time is starting in the children’s section—I can hear Mrs. Hodge shushing the kids. It’s mostly quiet and a little too warm, and so overwhelmingly ordinary I want to scream.

  How am I supposed to figure out what to do about Danny here? The books on the shelves lean more toward histories of the Salem witch trials than anything practical, except for a few books on Wicca, which have more to do with worshipping the Goddess than how to keep from shattering lightbulbs. At any rate, I have books at home that are more specific about spells and the craft, even if they don’t tell me why I can do what I do, or how to control it better.

  Or not to do certain things at all, even if the spell is right there.

  I don’t even know if there’s a word for what I am, what the women in my family are. I asked Aunt Mari about it once, about a year ago.

  “You know how electricity is just out there?” she’d said. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling as if the answers were written up there in the dingy off-white paint. “But to use it, you have to know how to harness it? That’s what this is like. What we are. What we can do. Just like some musical prodigy can play Mozart at age three or whatever, we can tap into a kind of energy that other people can’t. That’s all.”

  That’s all. Like it’s no big deal that my mother can make flowers grow, and Mari can change the color of her hair at will, and I can (almost) lift myself off the ground and set things on fire. And, you know, raise my boyfriend from the dead.

  Mari practically jumped up and down the first time she saw me make my old stuffed penguin dance, like it was this huge achievement. But I never told her when I started seriously experimenting with my power on my own. The whole subject was so off-limits, it felt like the one thing I had to hide from everyone. And I was trying things a little more complicated than making a pencil spin on my desk, or making the pale yellow daffodils hot pink.

  Once I made it rain in Robin’s bedroom, right over a pile of her dirty sweatshirts and socks. Another time I folded a piece of white lined paper into the shape of a bird and brought it to life. I was so terrified, I opened the window and let it go, once it had stopped flapping around my room in panic.

  You’d think I would have learned my lesson.

  I can’t tell Aunt Mari about Danny. I can’t tell anyone.

  Standing in the library now, I can see him in my head, setting his jaw, starting down the stairs, and my pulse kicks so hard, a loose book on the edge of the shelf hits the floor. The kids across the aisle look up at me, and I glare until they shrink down into their sweatshirts and hold up their magazines again.

  I’m not going to find anything here. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for anymore, and suddenly it’s so hot, so close, I’m starting to sweat. I stumble past the kids and the ancient reference librarian, who frowns at me from behind his thick black plastic glasses, and out the door into the shockingly cool air.

  Where I walk right into the one person I really don’t want to see.

  “Whoa, sorry,” Gabriel says, catching me with both hands on my upper arms. “I didn’t see you coming.”

  I’m positive he’s lying. “Yeah, well.” I shrug him off and start walking, but I can hear him following me, feet heavy on the sidewalk. I scan the quiet street and run across it, toward home.

  “You don’t like me,” he says as he falls into step beside me, dry leaves and grass crackling underfoot. It’s not a question.

  “I don’t know you.” It’s true, even if what he said is true, too.

  “Gabriel,” he says, and turns around to walk backward, holding out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “God, what is your problem?” I’m trying for casual, dismissive, but my face is already hot, and I know he can see it. “Go find some other girl to bother. Believe me, they’ll all be thrilled to have fresh meat to chew on.”

  “Not interested,” he says, and steps easily over a dead twig, still walking backward, eyes fixed on my face.

  “Not my problem,” I tell him, and try to ignore the way my heart is pounding again. I can control myself, I can, I just have to concentrate. I walk faster, trying to pass him, but he matches me step for step.

  “I can feel it, you know,” he says, and suddenly stops dead, grabbing my arm so I stumble to a halt beside him. “What’s inside you.”

  My blood is racing so hot through my veins, my skin is tight, tingling. He can’t know, no one knows, it’s not something you can see.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I manage, even though my tongue feels too thick in my mouth, huge and clumsy.

  I break into a run before I’m even conscious that my feet are moving, and all I can hear over my thudding footsteps is him calling, “Yes, you do.”

  I run right past my house, through the overgrown yard to Mrs. Petrelli’s garage. I’m sweating, panting, completely out of breath, my backpack banging against one hip, but I don’t care. I scramble up the stairs, and all I can think about is Danny holding me.

  He’s waiting, tense and blinking, standing at the edge of the makeshift bed. “Wren.”

  I don’t—can’t—say anything, I just drop my backpack with a thud on the dusty floor and walk into his arms, burying my head against his chest.

  His arms tighten around me, fingers tangling in my hair. “I heard you coming. I missed you,” he whispers, and sits down, pulling me into his lap.

  He leans his cheek on my head, runs his hands down my spine and then back up, underneath my hoodie, and it’s just like the million other times we’ve sat together like this.

  It’s what I wanted, but it’s all wrong. He’s cold and white as a bone, too hard, and when I lay my cheek against his chest, the silence is awful. I used to lie with him on the sofa in Becker’s basement, or upstairs in my bed when Mom wasn’t home, and count his heartbeats, a sturdy thump-thump I could feel beneath my palm, even through his T-shirt.

  “What’s wrong?” he says. “You’re shaking.”

  There’s no way to answer him. Not honestly, anyway. You’re wrong, I want to say. This is wrong. I was so, so wrong to think I could do this. Or hide it.

  Instead, I simply whisper, “Cold.”

  He holds me tighter, strokes my back. It doesn’t make me any warmer, but I sit there anyway until it’s dark, because he likes me there. He always seems more centered as soon as I come up to the loft. Whenever I manage to get up the stairs without him hearing me coming, he’s sprawled so loosely on the bed that he looks a little bit like a marionette whose puppeteer has tossed him aside.

  I can’t run from this. I can’t hide from him. Not in the library, not anywhere.

  What’s just as scary is that I guess I can’t hide from Gabriel, either.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PEOPLE ALWAYS SAY THEY FEEL NUMB AND empty when they lose someone.

  I feel that way now sometimes, when Danny and I are curled together on his bed in the loft. But in
the days right after he died? At his funeral? I felt like I’d been stuck under a glass, so that everything inside me—rage, grief, terror—resonated louder, harder, clanging together until I could feel it in my bones.

  As we stood there beside his grave, the only sound other than the minister talking about eternal peace was Danny’s mother, sobbing. Danny’s dad had his arm around her, holding her up, but his jaw was clenched so tightly, I was pretty sure he was going to lose it any minute.

  We all just stood there, our heads bowed and hands folded, listening, waiting for it to be over. Nothing was right—instead of gray and rainy, the way it was supposed to be, the way it always is in movies, it was a bright, hot July day. The sun poured through the leaves of the giant maple beside the plot.

  But at Danny’s grave that day I thought the crowd of football players and the stoners from his art class were probably glad they had a legitimate reason for their sunglasses, even though everyone knew they would have worn them anyway. It was hard not to choke up when you heard Danny’s mom and little sister, Molly, sobbing, when you saw his older brother, Adam, choking back tears as their dad patted his back. None of us were supposed to die. Life was supposed to be what we were waiting for, not something already over.

  When someone’s cell went off a few feet behind us, my head went up so fast, I nearly lost my balance. My mother put a hand on my shoulder. I wanted to shrug it off, but I couldn’t—any minute that glass around me was going to shatter, and all that furious energy was going to explode out of me. I had to shut my eyes for a second, trying not to imagine the carefully manicured lawn around the pit of Danny’s grave going up in flames, or a sudden wind ripping through the cemetery, hurling the mourners against the headstones.

  I couldn’t let that happen, not to Danny’s parents, and Ryan, and Danny’s other real friends. Not even to Danny, although I knew that the boy I loved wasn’t really in that casket. Not the part that mattered, anyway.

  At home later, I went down to the basement. I figured I could do the least damage there—or maybe the most, without consequences anyway. Getting through the reception at Danny’s house had taken more self-control than I thought it would, even though I hadn’t managed to do much more than stand against the wall in the living room with a paper cup of punch in one hand, nodding at the people who came over to hug me.

  I didn’t even change my clothes before I ran down the basement steps, and I had fistfuls of my black shirt in each hand as I stared at the accumulated junk that we had let pile up over the years.

  I had no idea what I expected to do. What I wanted was to blow a hole in the sky, explode a star, let the burning embers scorch me and everything they touched.

  I jumped when my mother’s hand landed on my shoulder again, warm and firm. She rested one palm against my cheek and handed me a chipped dish from a pile on a shelf. “Go on,” she said. “It works just as well.”

  I stared at her, not understanding, every vein throbbing with the need to let all that energy out. But that wasn’t what she meant. She picked up another—a cracked bowl from a set of green-striped dishes we used when I was really little—and smashed it against the dull gray cement floor.

  I jumped again as the sound of it echoed inside me, and then I let the dish in my hand drop. It crashed among the broken shards of the bowl, pale blue pieces as sharp as the noise.

  “Harder,” Mom said, and handed me a mug without a handle. FIRST NATIONAL SAVINGS BANK was printed neatly around it in bright red letters. I hurled it at the bare spot on the wall beside the dryer, and it shattered so violently, pieces of it bounced over the floor to land between our feet.

  In fifteen minutes we managed to break every old piece of dishware down there, until the floor was a jagged carpet of smashed pottery, When there was nothing left to throw, I sank to my knees and started to cry, the kind of huge, gulping, embarrassing sobs that make you blotchy and shaky. Mom settled down beside me, pulling me into her body until my face was pressed against her shoulder, and I had to wonder if she’d thrown things when Dad left, if she’d felt this alone and helpless.

  I felt better afterward. Not right, not good, but not tied up in so many emotions I couldn’t untangle them all.

  There was a lesson there, I realized later. I didn’t learn it, though.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  It’s almost eleven, and Danny and I are lying on his bed, legs tangled together under an old blanket. I had to wait till Mom was asleep to sneak back to the loft tonight. I didn’t stay long the first time, after I let Danny smoothe all the rough edges from running into Gabriel. This time Mom was in bed, the little TV on her dresser flickering softly in the dark. Robin was snoring in her room, one hand on Mr. Purrfect, her orange tiger cat. He blinked at me in the dark when I peeked through the crack in her door, yellow eyes cold and uninterested.

  I never know what to tell Danny when he asks questions like that. Your funeral? The fact that Becker still hasn’t come back to school because one of his legs doesn’t work right, and he’s flying on painkillers most of the time anyway? The way Ryan can barely look at me anymore? How much I really hate running into your mom in town, and how often she still looks like she just finished crying?

  “Wren?” Anxious, almost pleading. Needy. His fingers tighten around my arm.

  “French,” I whisper, letting my lips brush the cool smoothness of his cheek. “Madame Hobart’s been on the warpath lately. And I still fuck up pluperfect conjugations.”

  “I told you, you should’ve taken Spanish,” he says, and he almost sounds like the old Danny when he laughs. “I think Mr. Hill is stoned most of the time.”

  I can’t help but smile at that, because he’s right. Mr. Hill wears the same tie for days at a time, and blinks like a startled owl when anyone asks him a question. Danny was always talking about him, back when he was … well, still in school.

  And still alive, a voice in my head whispers. A nasty, accusing voice, even though I wasn’t the reason he died. That was his fault, his and Becker’s, for being assholes and taking Becker’s car out to the park way on the west edge of town after they’d been drinking. The roads there, a giant spiderweb through the walking trails and trees, are narrow and twisty enough when you’re sober and it’s daylight.

  After I saw a photo of the crash site, Becker’s hand-me-down Celica accordioned into the broad base of a chestnut tree, I realized how likely it was that I could have been in the car with them. Give me a beer and I don’t make the greatest decisions either.

  What was scarier, though, was realizing that, for a minute, I wished I had been in the car. That I was gone, too, wherever you go after you die, with Danny.

  That’s when it started. Knowing that I couldn’t turn back time and climb into the backseat the way I had so many other nights, but wanting Danny with me again so much that I started to give serious thought to whether or not I could make that happen.

  When I remembered that fluttering white paper bird, I was convinced.

  I look at Danny now, just as pale, just as delicate somehow, and he smiles at me. Reaches out to stroke my cheek, tucking hair behind my ear. Snugs his hips closer, all lean, hard bone beneath the jeans I convinced his mom to give me. “He wrote my name on them,” I’d told her, pointing to where he’d written it in Sharpie on the inside of one calf, and she’d swallowed tears before she kissed my forehead.

  He’d been buried in a dark gray suit and a white shirt with an ice blue tie knotted at his throat. I’d burned it all the day I brought the jeans home. I’d picked up a couple of shirts at the thrift store downtown. The suit smelled like the graveyard, dark and sour, and in it he looked nothing like the Danny I knew.

  He brushes his mouth against my hair now, and strokes along my hip, fingers curling in my belt loops, pulling me closer still. I swallow hard, trying not to shudder.

  He’s so cold now. Always so cold, skin icy smooth. And his body is so quiet—the distant bump of a heartbeat, the thrum of blood flowing through
veins, never seemed noticeable until it was gone. I wriggle around to tilt my head up and kiss him, hoping it will be enough.

  It never is anymore. For a little while he’ll relax, kiss me slowly, lingering and tasting, but it doesn’t last.

  It’s hard to go backward, after all. Even for me, because I can remember what it felt like to let our kisses wander away from our mouths, to peel off clothes to reveal new places to touch, to taste.

  I remember the way I could feel his heartbeat in the pulse at his throat, racing and stuttering. How warm he was, his cheeks fevered, his hands hot and firm.

  But it’s not like that anymore. Not for me, anyway, and every time I have to pull away I’m aware of how strong he is, how much he wants something I can’t give him. I can’t believe he can’t sense the way I tense up, stiff and panicked, or the jackrabbit thump of my own pulse, poised for flight.

  Gabriel would. The thought hits me out of nowhere, so unwelcome that I blink and push Danny away too roughly as I struggle to sit up.

  Gabriel has no place in my head, and definitely not here in the loft. It’s hard not to glance around the dark room, as if, wherever he is, Gabriel can hear what I’m thinking even now.

  “Wren,” Danny starts, sitting up with me and sliding his arm around my waist. “Don’t. Don’t … stop. You always stop now.”

  Every word is weighted, heavy with confusion and frustration, and I give in a little and lay my head on his shoulder. It’s all my fault, every bit of this. It’s like one of those hedge mazes. Once you’re in, turned around without any landmarks, there’s nothing to do but keep going until you find your way out.

  I have a long way to go, I know. Until then, I can only do this: gently push him onto his back, kiss his cheeks, his forehead, his jaw, and whisper, “Sleep now, Danny. Sleep. I want you to sleep.”