A Night Without Stars (5 page)

Zeroing in on Travis I slid into the orange plastic chair next to his, slapped my number two pencil and notebook on the desk, and spun to face him.

“Tell me again what happened after I left,” I demanded.

He lifted his head slowly, as though the weight of it was heavier than he was used to. His eyes were bloodshot. His skin pale. Well, his skin was
always
pale, but today he was extra pale. Like ghost pale. The freckles on his nose and cheeks stood out in sharp contrast to his white skin, and when he frowned the freckles pulled and stretched, moving across his face like little fleas. “I told you what happened. Mr. Livingston saw us trying to steal his car and he decided to scare us to get even. When you left he sat me down, gave me a lecture, and let me go. That’s it, Lola. There isn’t anything else to tell.”

Unfortunately for Travis, he’d never been a very good liar. I knew he wasn’t telling the truth. What I didn’t know is
why
he wasn’t telling the truth. “Mr. Livingston isn’t some stupid teenager. If he wanted to get us in trouble he would have called the cops, not pretended to be someone he wasn’t.” I slid to the edge of my seat. My knee bumped against Travis’ thigh and he jumped, drawing back as though the harmless contact had caused him physical pain.

“Tell me what really happened,” I whispered urgently. “Come on, Travis. You know I won’t say anything.”

“Why do you care?” he bit out.

The acid in his tone caught me by surprise. I stared at him wide-eyed and said, “Because I want to know what happened to you.”

He looked down at his desk. Picking up his pencil he began to draw long, hard furrows down the length of his notebook. I flinched when the lead on the pencil broke off with an audible
snap
. Flinched again with Travis threw the pencil down on the floor.

It bounced on the carpet and rolled up against the leg of his chair. He bent to retrieve it, frowning as he stared at the broken tip, as though he had no idea what had happened to it.

“You don’t get to know what happened to me,” he said softly, still gazing at the pencil. When he turned his head to glare at me I felt the air wither and die inside of my lungs. Travis had never looked at me like that before… Like he hated me. Like he loathed me. Like he wanted to take the broken pencil and stab it through my eye. “You ran away, Lola. You left me all alone and you. Ran. Away. So you don’t get to know. And you don’t get to ask. And I do not want to talk about it anymore. Do you understand?”

My mouth opened and closed. “I… You…”

I was saved when the teacher walked in. He went to the front of the classroom, cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention, and picked up exactly where he’d left off last week.

As he droned on about integers and prime numbers I knew I should have been taking notes, but all I could think about was a man with silver fangs and a cold room filled with bodies and the horrifying blankness in Travis’ eyes as he told me what I already knew: I’d abandoned my best friend, and now both of us were paying the consequences.

CHAPTER SIX

Everett James

“Lola you should… have seen… your… FACE!” Doubled over in the senior parking lot behind the school, Travis clutched his knees and howled with laughter.

I was not amused.

“You’re an asshole,” I said flatly. “I can’t believe you would do that to me.”

Wiping at the tears in his eyes Travis slowly straightened up and grinned his familiar, goofy grin. Gone was the blankness. Gone was the meanness. It had all been an act to get even with me for making him steal a car.

“You were scared,” he snickered. 

“I wasn’t scared.”

“You were too.”

My shoulders jerked defensively. I kicked at a rock on the ground and sent it bouncing across the empty, pitted up parking lot. A lone trickle of sweat dripped down the middle of my back. I swiped at it absently before I spun to face my so-called “best friend” and leveled him with a stare that would have made Barbie Bitch tremble in her designer heels. “It wasn’t nice, Travis. I was really worried about you.”

The sincerity in my tone must have caught him off guard because he gaped at me for a few seconds before he recovered enough to say, “Geez Lola, it was only a joke.”

“Well, it wasn’t a very funny one.” I kicked another rock, hard enough to send it spinning up over the curb and onto the lawn.

Silence stretched between us, as uncomfortable as it was unfamiliar. Maybe it was because we were always careful never to discuss touchy subjects, but in all the years we’d been friends Travis and I had never fought. Not once. At least not over anything meaningful. This was as close as we’d ever come, and I didn’t like the heavy weight in the bottom of my stomach or the feeling of tightness in the back of my throat.

“I’m sorry I left you behind, okay?” I muttered, not quite able to look him in the eye. “Maybe I was scared. But only a little.” I lifted my head and found him watching me, his brow furrowed and a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth. “That guy really freaked me out, Travis. Like, a lot.”

“He freaked me out too,” Travis admitted after a pause. “I shouldn’t have gone in the house. It was a stupid thing to do. But seriously Lola, nothing happened. He was just being a jerk, trying to scare us. Let’s forget it ever happened, okay?”

Forget it ever happened? Somehow I didn’t think it would be that easy. Still, I nodded my head and managed to smile. “You got it.”

We left the parking lot and headed downtown towards Chubbie’s Ice Cream Parlor, a hot spot destination for anyone too young to get a beer to help fight off the choking summer heat.

It was almost noon. Usually the sidewalks would be swelled with traffic (for some reason tourists
loved
Revere; apparently they thought it was quaint or some shit like that) but today, for whatever reason, the entire town was strangely empty.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

Travis coming up with some lame excuse to cover his behavior, a normally bustling town reduced to a few locals, and let’s not forget the guy with the silver fangs or my freaky dream. I mean, could it be any more obvious that something really bizarre was going on?

I suppose I could have put two and two together then and there, but sometimes you only see what you want to believe… and I wanted to believe everything was fine.

My life was falling to shit – an absent mother, a drunken father, a dead end future – but at least everything else was fine. Travis was fine. I was fine. The town was fine.

Oh please. Don’t act like you’re any better. Our planet is literally
dying
and you’re still turning up your air conditioners and putting gas in your big cars and tossing out plastic water bottles by the dozen (it’s called recycling, people). If that isn’t denial I don’t know what is. So yeah, maybe I was in denial. And yeah, maybe if I’d reacted sooner I could have saved a few hundred lives.

Don’t worry.

It won’t be my last mistake.

We ate our ice cream on a wooden bench facing the used bookstore, a four story Victorian townhouse stuffed to the gills with old, dusty paperbacks. I licked my small plain vanilla cone slowly and tried not to be too jealous of Travis’ large mint chocolate chip.

What would it be like, I wondered, not to worry about stretching five dollars to the end of the week? I bit into the edge of my circular wafer cone. Chewed it thoughtfully. Did Travis even know how lucky he was? Sure, his parents were divorced, but they still lived in the same state and he saw his dad every other weekend. His mom may have been a bit of a hard ass, but at least she cared enough to worry about where he was and what he was doing.

I knew Mrs. Henderson didn’t like me. She tried to hide it, but I was pretty good at reading faces and hers said
stay the hell away from my son
. She thought I was a bad influence. She was right.

“One more month and then we’ll start our last year of high school.” I glanced sideways at Travis and nudged his sneaker with the toe of my flip-flop. “Are you excited?”

“Sort of. I mean, yeah, I am. But I’m kind of nervous too.”

“Nervous?” I repeated incredulously. “Why the hell are you nervous?” A white sugary trickle of ice cream slid off the cone and onto the back of my hand. I licked it clean with the tip of my tongue and caught Travis staring out of the corner of my eye. “Ew, don’t look at me like that.”

He tried to pass it off like he had no idea what I was talking about, but the blush in his cheeks gave him away. “Like what?”

“Like
that
. Check your teenage hormones, okay? That’s what the Internet is for. Porn,” I whispered. “Everyone is watching it.”

“Did someone say porn?” Everett James, resident bad boy of our high school and my occasional make-out partner behind the bleachers during last trimesters’ fifth period (like I was supposed to take home economics seriously) sauntered up and stopped in front of us, blocking the used bookstore with his tall, lanky body.

Everett was cute, if you were into the eyeliner/piercing/black clothes/long hair look coupled with a don’t-give-a-shit attitude. I’d been mildly obsessed with him at the beginning of last year, but my interest quickly waned after our first few sloppy kisses. The guy may have put on a good show, but he was a tongue jabber.

No one likes a tongue jabber.

Still, we all had our parts to play. If Everett was the bad guy, then I was the bad girl, and Travis was… Well, Travis was better than both of us combined.

He was going to graduate high school and make something of his life. He was going to go to college and graduate top of his class and get a great job and have a successful career. He was going to be big, which meant right now his part was small.

Even though he was my friend, my best friend, my
only
friend, Travis was also the geeky guy. The picked on guy. The bullied guy.

Everett and I both hit our stride early on. We figured out the political game of high school before anyone else, and we’d chosen our personas while the other kids were still trying to choose what teacher to take for Basic Algebra.

We weren’t popular. Not like Barbie Bitch and her small army of blonde clones. But we
were
Untouchable, and that was just as good. Better, since it meant I didn’t have to wear polo shirts. 

No one shoved our faces into lockers. No one laughed behind our backs. They left us alone because they were scared of us, and – more importantly – they envied us. They envied our poise and our confidence and our don’t-give-a-shit attitudes, never imagining that when real life came they would rise and we would fall, stuck in a town that didn’t give a damn about us.

So no, I didn’t particularly like Everett James. But when Travis became big and I turned small, he was all I’d have left.  

“I did. I said porn.” I stood up, took a long, deliberate lick of what remained of my ice cream and tossed it in a trash bin next to the bench. Travis remained sitting, his mouth a firm, flat line of disapproval.

“Those are the conversations I like to walk into.” Everett chuckled; a low, husky sound he’d achieved from smoking two packs of cigarettes a day since he was fourteen. He lit one up now and took a slow drag before offering it to me. I shook my head.

“Smoking kills.”

His blue eyes rolled. “So what? We’re all going to die of something sooner or later.”

Oh, Everett. You were wrong about so many things, but you were right about that.

You were so right.

“A couple of us are going down to the quarry for a quick swim.” His teeth flashed, surprisingly white given his nasty habit. He reached out to trail a fingertip down my bare arm. “What do you think, Lola? You up for a quick skinny dip?”

“Yeah, sure, why not?” I agreed not because I wanted to, but because it’s what was expected of me. “What about you, Travis? Want to do a little naked swimming?” My grin was mischievous; only Travis would recognize the strain at the corners.

“No,” he muttered under his breath. “I, uh, need to go to the bookstore. To find a book.”

“Nerdy wants a booky book,” Everett crowed.

I turned neatly so I standing beside him, drew my elbow up, and plowed it back into his stomach. “Leave him alone, asshole.”

Everett grunted and doubled over. “I was just giving him some shit. Christ, Lola.” But when he straightened up his eyes gleamed and I knew, as disgusting as it was, that the physical violence had turned him on.

So why was I going skinny dipping with a huge jerk over staying behind with my best friend and checking out a bookstore I secretly loved?

Because I can
.

Because I was addicted to the danger.

Because I craved the challenge.

Because I knew it was where I really belonged: causing trouble with Everett James and his ilk, not sitting on a bench eating ice cream with the likes of Travis Henderson.

I slung my arm around Everett’s shoulders. Leaned in and pressed a smacking kiss to his cheek. “Let’s go.”

When we were halfway down the block I snuck a glance back to the bench. Travis was still sitting on it, calmly finishing his cone. For the briefest of moments our gazes caught, and the furious rage I saw burning in his eyes took my breath away.

“Everett, wait.” I dug in my heels. Twisted out of his grasp.

“Lola, what the—”

I looked at Travis again. This time he grimaced, but his brown eyes were soft and gentle. The anger was gone, as though it’d never existed at all.
Be careful
, he mouthed.

Everything is fine, I assured myself.

Everything is normal.

Except for the first time I knew that it wasn’t, and I had a sneaking suspicion it never would be again.

The quarry was an old gravel pit two miles out of town that had been created – and quickly abandoned – in the late seventies. Nature had swallowed it back up, but the path leading down to the jump off point was well worn and easily navigated by those who knew it was there, myself included