Ballad (15 page)

“You liked him.” I echoed her words, and I heard my voice—the dull, disbelieving tone—but I didn’t try to change it.

“Fine. I
loved
him. I didn’t want to tell you. I felt guilty. Even though you and I were just friends.” Dee hesitated for a long moment, but I didn’t help her out. “And it’s been really hard, since … since he’s been gone. I
know
I’ll never see him again and I know I have to get over him and I feel like I’m climbing out of this big hole and I just grabbed onto the closest best thing I could find to get out, and it was you, and I was wrong to do that.”

She looked up at me, and now, finally, there were tears, and I knew that I was going to do whatever it was she asked me to do, like always. “Please, James. My head is so screwed up right now. You are my best, best friend, and I can’t lose you too.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” I said. “Do this.”

It felt good, to tell the truth.

For a second she stared at me, letting the words sink in. Then she covered her face with her hand and half-turned away from me. She started crying in that way people do when they don’t care who’s watching, when they’re so done they just can’t give a damn who sees them sob.

I couldn’t watch her do that.

I took her shoulder and pulled her into a hug. The familiar, bright smell of her shampoo was like a time machine, taking me back into unnumbered hugs over the years I’d known her, before Luke, when it was just me that she needed. I rested my forehead on her shoulder and stared at the reflection of us embracing in the window.
Please don’t be thinking of him right now
.

“I’m not,” Dee whispered, and pushed her face into my shoulder, tears dampening my T-shirt.

I didn’t know if I was helping Dee climb out of her hole or if she was dragging me into it.

“I know I’m crazy.” Her voice was quiet against my shirt. “Just stick with me, James. Okay? Until it’s been longer, you know, since the summer—and maybe—maybe we can try again. And this time it will be right. Not messed up.”

I didn’t know if she meant trying to be friends or trying to kiss or trying to breathe, but right now, all of them seemed colored by the effort of me trying to believe her. I pressed my hand against her hair, holding her to me, filled with the certainty that she was going to hurt me again and that I didn’t have the strength to push her away before she did.

Nuala

What’s this I feel, that clots in my throat?

The taste of nectar, the feel of wasp stings

The fond attention that makes me note

The shape of your hands and other things

That do not matter
.

—
from
Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter

When I look back at that afternoon, I think of all the ways I could’ve kept Eleanor from seeing how I felt about James. I imagine how I could’ve kept her from seeing me at all. Or, if I couldn’t hide, there must’ve been a way to hide our association.

James was waiting at the bus stop with Roundhead. Stupid Dee had gone back to the school. Apparently, making James feel like shit took a lot out of her and she needed her beauty rest. Roundhead knew some magic tricks—seemed he had hidden depth—and he was making paperclips appear in his hands and disappear. It was easy for
me
to see the sleight of hand he used to accomplish it, but I had to admit that he didn’t suck at it. He presented his tricks in a sort of perfunctory, unaffected way, like
so, of course magic exists
.

And James was smiling at it in a sort of ironic way that I was beginning to get awfully attached to. He smiled because he knew magic existed and he knew also that what Roundhead was showing him was
not
magic, but he was still being fooled, and he liked the dichotomy.

I sat several yards away from them, in the grass, far enough away that James couldn’t sense me but close enough that I could hear what they said. James burned from within, as usual, with a fierce gold, and for the first time in several months, I realized I was
hungry
.

It was the first moment I realized that not making a deal with someone before Halloween was probably going to be painful for me.

It was also the first moment I realized I didn’t think I wanted to take any of James’ years away from him, even if he’d said yes.

I felt like I was floating. I didn’t know who I was anymore.

“Waiting for your bus?”

I didn’t recognize the smooth, moss-green shoes that stood in front of me, but I recognized Eleanor’s voice. I looked up from where I sat and saw Eleanor’s nameless human consort at her side. He inclined slightly at the waist and held out his hand as if to help me up, but Eleanor slapped his fingers lightly and he withdrew them.

“Tsk. That’s not a good idea, love. She’s hungry and you, as you know, are delicious.” Eleanor looked down at me and held out her hand instead. Each of her fingers had a ring on it, and some of them were linked together by long gold chains that hung in loops beneath her palm. I stayed sitting. Eleanor frowned at me, an expression of delicate and excruciating pity. “Do you not stand for your queen, dear? Or are you too faint?”

I looked up at her, and I knew my voice was petulant but I didn’t try to hide it. “Why? Will you have me killed if I don’t?”

Eleanor pursed her pale lips. “Oh, so
you’re
the one who refused to help the other night. I told you before there were things we were doing here that we didn’t need meddled with.”

Her consort looked at me. His face said
stand up
in a very blank sort of way. His thoughts were still very hard for me to read, but I could see that he’d seen death recently and he didn’t want to see it again.

I stood. “I’m not meddling with anything of yours.” I didn’t
think
I was. I guess I didn’t really know. I looked at James, and Eleanor looked at him too. By the bus station, a woman was approaching him, arms already outstretched for a hug from several feet away. James’ face was lit with genuine happiness. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him happy before.

Eleanor started to laugh, and she laughed so hard that even the humans, yards away, shivered and glanced around and remarked on the storm that was supposed to arrive later. Eleanor dabbed at her eyes—as if she could cry—and shook her head at me, smiling disbelievingly. “Oh, little
leanan sidhe
, is that your chosen, there?”

I didn’t like her laugh, and I didn’t like her looking at him.

“What an odd and appropriate choice you’ve made. I nearly killed him a few months ago, and the
daoine sidhe
brought him back to life for the cloverhand. And now you will finish him off. It’s got a lovely circular feel to it, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t say anything. I just crossed my arms and stood there watching James smile proudly at his mom hugging Roundhead, like he had invented both hugs and his mother.

“Oh.” Eleanor’s hand flew up to her mouth. She leaned toward her human and her delight was hard to bear. “
Oh
. Do you see that, lovely?” Her consort made a noise of consent. Eleanor said to me, “So
that
is why you tremble with desire, little whore? Because you have been going without?”

Bullshit I was trembling. I was fine. It hadn’t been that long since Steven. “It’s none of your business.”

“Everything is my business. I care deeply for all my subjects and I hate to think of you wanting for anything.”

“Is that so?” I sneered.

“You need only ask,” Eleanor said. She turned toward James, smiling distantly, like she was remembering. “What’s wrong? He won’t make a bargain with you? I can make him more pliable for you. He was very easy to break, the first time.”

In her head I saw the memory of him, broken and gasping, so clearly that I knew she’d meant for me to. My voice was fierce. “I don’t want to make a bargain with him. My bargains are my own business. You have your business and I have mine. I don’t meddle in yours and you don’t meddle in mine.”

I’d gone way too far, but that image of him had ripped something open inside me. I turned my head, waiting for her wrath.

But she just placed a hand on my shoulder and shook her head, clucking her tongue. “Save your strength. If you mean to last until the day of the dead without making a bargain, you’ll need every bit of it.”

I looked up into her face, and I saw that she was smiling. She was smiling in an awful way that told me she knew exactly how I felt about James and she thought it was interesting. Eleanor, like all the court fey, liked to break interesting things, especially things she’d broken before.

I pushed her fingers off my shoulders, and when I turned to face her, she was gone.

James

In most of my classes at good old TK-A, there were about eighteen students. With the teacher presiding at the front of the classroom, the rest of us had, over the weeks of class time, conveniently arranged ourselves by personality types. Front row: suck-ups and over-achievers like myself. Second row: Friends of suck-ups and over-achievers. And wanna-be friends. And wanna-be suck-ups who were too slow to grab a seat in the front row. Third row: People who were neither suck-ups nor screw-ups (latter parties belonged in the back row). Third row people didn’t interest me. Or anyone else, I think. Too good to be bad and too bad to be good. Back row: as mentioned before, screw-ups, trouble-makers, and those who just didn’t give a damn.

Funny how I really belonged in both the front and the back rows. Didn’t seem like it ought to be possible.

Anyway, our normally cozy class structure was all shot to hell this morning, as Sullivan’s class had been thrown together with Linnet’s dramatic literature section for some nefarious purpose undoubtedly to be revealed later on in the period.

So we’d taken over a larger, brilliantly sunny classroom down the hall that could accommodate the lot of us and suddenly we had to fight for our previous seat/personality assignments. Which is how Paul and I found ourselves in the back row, a place I probably belonged and a place Paul could probably make himself belong by sheer virtue of hanging out with me. What I didn’t expect was to end up sitting next to Dee, who belonged in the back row about as much as I belonged at Thornking-Ash in general. I didn’t have a single class with her and it took me way too long to figure out that she was there because she was in Linnet’s dramatic lit class.

I sat there for several moments, while the autumn breeze blew in the big windows on one side of the room and fluttered the papers on the desks, and thought of things to say to her that were all various stages of funny, informative, or questioning. In the end I just said, “So you really do take classes here.”

Dee did me the favor of laughing, even though it was possibly my lamest line ever, and leaned across her desk to whisper to me, “I’m sorry I was so bawly yesterday.”

On the other side of me, Paul took my hand so that he could write on it. I felt him carefully printing on my skin while I tried to think of something coherent to say to Dee. She was all large-eyed and beautiful as usual but I was missing some of that gnawing urgency to be funny and wanted, which I normally felt when I was around her.

I thought,
maybe I can get over her after all. Maybe it doesn’t have to hurt
.

“Before we get started, I’m going to need you all to pass forward your composition outline,” Linnet called from the front, sparing me from saying my second lamest line ever. Linnet looked even smaller and more breakable from way back here in the loser-screw-up-don’t-give-a-damn row. “I’m also collecting papers for Mr. Sullivan. I understand you have outlines due for him as well.” There was no sign of Sullivan at the front; usually he was perched on top of the desk by now.

Beside me, Dee flipped open her notebook to pull out her outline and, as she did, I saw the piece of paper underneath it. Some sort of exam. With a big red
42
on it, circled. And
F
written beside it, in case she’d missed the concept of 42 being a failing grade.

Straight-A front-row beautiful-lost Dee looked over at me as if she knew instinctively that I’d seen the exam and that I’d know right away what that 42 meant to her. Her eyes were wide and frightened and pleading for a second, and I just stared at her, not bothering to hide my shock. Dee laid her hand down on the exam, very carefully, to stop the breeze from catching the edge of the paper. Her fingers covered the grade.

But that didn’t change the
wrongness
of it.

“Back row! Pass them up
please
,” Linnet said, her voice unpleasant and hard around the edges.

We snapped out of it. Dee passed her paper to the desk in front of her and Paul and I sent our identical outlines for
Ballad
up our rows. I folded my hands back on my desk, and as I did, I saw Paul’s slanted handwriting standing out against my blocky, square printing on my skin. He’d managed to find room to squeeze in the words
females hurt my brain
on my left hand. I raised an eyebrow at him and he gave me a look like,
well it’s true, isn’t it?

A 42. Damn. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Dee get anything less than a B plus, and I remembered that one because she’d called me about it. She’d been programmed for technical perfection at birth; a grade like that had to be causing short-circuits and malfunctions across her system.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“I’d like for you to make your desks into groups of four,” Linnet called from the front. “Both sections have just finished reading and watching
Hamlet
and I’d like you to discuss it in small groups. I’ll be watching your participation and I’ll let Mr. Sullivan know how active you were in the discussion when he returns this afternoon.” She started rambling on about discussion questions on the board and she’d be reading our outlines while we talked and what
ever
, just get on with it, so we just started dragging our desks into circles which completely drowned her out with scraping metallic legs on the floor.

We ended up in a group with Paul, me, and Dee from the back row, and a third-row student who looked less than pleased to have been assimilated into a greater-than-fifty-percent-back-row group.

The less-than-pleased student was a girl named Georgia (who played the trumpet—I tried not to hold that against her) and she decided to take charge by reading the first question off the board. “Okay. First question. Which character from
Hamlet
do you identify with the most?”

I looked at Dee, really hard—the sort of look that not only forces people into one spot but also burns holes into them big enough to stick pencils through—and said, “Ophelia, because no one told her what the hell was going on, so she killed herself.”

Dee blinked.

Georgia blinked.

Paul started laughing.

Linnet, at the front of the room, looked suspicious, because let’s face it, when it’s five minutes into a discussion about a play where practically everyone starts out dead or ends up that way, hysterical laughter sort of draws attention.

“This is a time for discussion, not conversation,” Linnet said, glaring at us. She drifted ominously in our direction, like a jellyfish. She kept trying to not look at my hands.

“We
are
discussing.” I looked back to Dee, whose eyes darted between me and Linnet. “We were talking about the real-world implications of the lack of communication between Hamlet and Ophelia and what an ass-face Hamlet was for keeping Ophelia in the dark about what he was thinking.”

Sullivan would’ve appreciated my off-the-cuff analysis of the material—hey, at least I’d done the reading, right?—but Linnet frowned at me. “I’d prefer if you didn’t use that sort of language in my classroom.”

I turned my attention to her and tried to sound like I cared. “I’ll try and keep it PG-13 from now on.”

“Do that. I’m sure Mr. Sullivan doesn’t allow that in his class.” The way she said it had a distinct question mark on the end, as if she wasn’t sure.

I smiled at her.

Linnet’s frown deepened and she jellyfish-drifted her tentacles toward another discussion group.

Georgia glared at me, tapped her pencil on her notebook, and said, “I think I identify most with Horatio, because—”

“Maybe Hamlet knew Ophelia wouldn’t get it,” Dee interrupted, and Georgia rolled her eyes in disgust. “Ophelia would’ve told Hamlet right off that what he was doing was stupid, without knowing the context.”

“You’re assuming that Ophelia didn’t know anything about what Hamlet was going through,” I said. “But Ophelia was
there
the first time, remember? She knows what back-stabbing freaks Gertrude and Claudius are. It’s not her first time around Denmark, Dee.”

“Hello, what are we talking about here?” Georgia asked. “Ophelia doesn’t know anything about Gertrude and Claudius. Hamlet only knows about Claudius murdering his father because of his father’s ghost, and Hamlet’s the only one the ghost spoke to. So Ophelia doesn’t know anything.”

I waved off Georgia and said to Dee, “Ophelia’s only clueless because Hamlet doesn’t trust Ophelia enough to confide in her. Apparently, he thinks he can do everything himself, which wasn’t true the first time and is definitely not true this time either. He should’ve let Ophelia help.”

Dee’s eyes were a little too bright; she blinked and they cleared. “Ophelia wasn’t exactly a great judge of character. She should’ve just stayed away from Hamlet like Polonius told her to. People only got hurt by being close to Hamlet.
Everybody
died because of him. He was right to drive Ophelia away.”

Georgia started to talk, but I leaned over my desk toward Dee and said, teeth gritted, “But Ophelia was in love with Hamlet.”

Dee stared at me and I stared back at her, sort of shocked that I’d said it, and then Paul broke the mood by saying, “I just figured it out. The whole gender-opposite metaphor was throwing me off. Sullivan must be Polonius. He’s got that whole father-figure to Ophelia thing going on.”

“Thank
you
, Captain Obvious,” I told him, thumping back in my seat.

Georgia gestured at the board. “Does anyone want to talk about the second question?”

No one wanted to talk about the second question.

I crossed my arms over my chest. I felt a sort of beautiful detachment from the scene, a sort of objectivity that I never seemed to have when Dee was around. I was getting over her. I could actually be getting over her. “I just don’t think Hamlet should be taking Ophelia’s calls if he’s only going to lie to her,” I said. “Ophelia’s slowly coming to grips with Hamlet tearing out her heart and being just friends, but even just friends
don’t lie to each other
.”

Georgia made a face and started to speak, but Paul put a finger to his lips and watched Dee.

Dee’s voice was very quiet, and it wasn’t her school voice anymore. You know how everyone has two voices—the voice they use in public and the voice that’s
just
for you
, the voice they use when you’re alone with them and nobody else can hear. She used that one, the one from last summer, back when I really believed we’d have summer upon summer without change. “Hamlet can’t stand to see Ophelia get hurt again.”

She looked at me. Not at my eyes, but at my scar above my ear.

“Oh,” I said.

For some reason, I never realized until that moment—when Dee looked at my scar and used that old voice—that she really did love me too. All along, she’d loved me, just not the way I’d wanted her to.

Well, crap.

The autumn wind that came in the tall windows along the wall seemed colder, scented with incongruous odors: thyme and clover and the damp smell that appears when you turn over a rock. I sort of sat there and didn’t say anything for way too long.

“Could James and Paul come up here and see me for a moment, please?” Linnet was at the front desk, face ominous. She looked much more teacherly than Sullivan did, sitting behind the desk instead of on it. I made a note to never sit behind a desk. “Deirdre and Georgia, you two can keep discussing.”

I stood up, but before I went up to the front with Paul, I touched the back of Dee’s hand. I don’t know if she knew what I meant, but I wanted her to understand that I—I don’t know what I wanted her to understand. I guess I somehow wanted her to know that I finally got it. I didn’t get to see her face after I touched her hand, but I saw Georgia frowning after me and Paul.

Up at the front of the classroom, Paul and I stood before Linnet’s desk like soldiers waiting to be knighted. Well, I did, anyway. Paul fidgeted. I didn’t think he’d ever been in trouble before.

“Are you two friends?” Linnet asked. She was a tiny bird behind the desk, her hair ruffling like blonde feathers. She blinked up at us, eyes dark and wary.

I was about to expound upon the near blood-bond between us when Paul said, “Roommates too.”