Fallen (10 page)

Arriane yawned, much less horrified by the story than Luce was.

“Anyway,” Luce went on, “afterwards, I couldn’t remember the details, how it happened. What I could remember—what I told the judge, anyway—I guess they thought I was crazy.” She tried to smile, but it felt forced.

To Luce’s surprise, Arriane squeezed her shoulder. And for a second, her face looked really sincere. Then it changed back into its smirk.

“We’re all
so
misunderstood, aren’t we?” She poked Luce in the gut with her finger. “You know, Roland and I were just talking about how we don’t have any pyromaniac friends. And everyone knows you need a good pyro to pull off any reform school prank worth the effort.” She was scheming already. “Roland thought maybe that other new kid, Todd, but I’d rather cast my lot with you. We should all collaborate sometime.”

Luce swallowed hard. She wasn’t a pyro. But she was
done talking about her past; she didn’t even feel like defending herself.

“Ooh, wait until Roland hears,” Arriane said, throwing down her rake. “You’re like our dream come true.”

Luce opened her mouth to protest, but Arriane had already taken off.
Perfect
, Luce thought, listening to the sound of Arriane’s shoes squishing through the mud. Now it was only a matter of minutes before word traveled around the cemetery to Daniel.

Alone again, she looked up at the statue. Even though she’d already cleared a huge pile of moss and mulch, the angel looked dirtier than ever. The whole project felt so pointless. She doubted anyone ever came to visit this place anyway. She also doubted that any of the other detainees were still working.

Her eye just happened to fall on Daniel, who
was
working. He was very diligently using a wire brush to scrub some mold off the bronze inscription on a tomb. He’d even pushed up the sleeves of his sweater, and Luce could see his muscles straining as he went at it. She sighed, and—she couldn’t help it—leaned her elbow against the stone angel to watch him.

He’s always been such a hard worker
.

Luce quickly shook her head. Where had that come from? She had no idea what it meant. And yet, she’d been the one who’d thought it. It was the kind of phrase that sometimes formed in her mind just before she drifted into
sleep. Senseless babble she could never assign to anything outside her dreams. But here she was, wide-awake.

She needed to get a handle on this Daniel thing. She’d known him for one day, and already, she could feel herself slipping into a very strange and unfamiliar place.

“Probably best to stay away from him,” a cold voice behind her said.

Luce whipped around to find Molly, in the same pose she’d found her in yesterday: hands on her hips, pierced nostrils flaring. Penn had told her that Sword & Cross’s surprising ruling that allowed facial piercings came from the headmaster’s own reluctance to remove the diamond stud in his ear.

“Who?” she asked Molly, knowing she sounded stupid.

Molly rolled her eyes. “Just trust me when I tell you that falling for Daniel would be a very, very bad idea.”

Before Luce could answer, Molly was gone. But Daniel—it was almost as if he’d heard his name—was looking straight at her. Then
walking
straight at her.

She knew the sun had gone behind a cloud. If she could break his stare, she could look up and see it for herself. But she couldn’t look up, she couldn’t look away, and for some reason, she had to squint to see him. Almost like Daniel was creating his own light, like he was blinding her. A hollow ringing noise filled up her ears, and her knees began to tremble.

She wanted to pick up her rake and pretend she didn’t see him coming. But it was too late to play it cool.

“What’d she say to you?” he asked.

“Um,” she hedged, racking her brain for a sensible lie. Finding nothing. She cracked her knuckles.

Daniel cupped his hand over hers. “I hate it when you do that.”

Luce jerked away instinctively. His hand on hers had been so fleeting, yet she felt her face flush. He meant it was a pet peeve of his, that knuckle cracking from
anyone
would bother him, right? Because to say that he hated it when
she
did that implied that he’d seen her do it before. And he couldn’t have. He barely knew her.

Then why did this feel like a fight they’d had before?

“Molly told me to stay away from you,” she said finally.

Daniel tilted his head from side to side, seeming to consider this. “She’s probably right.”

Luce shivered. A shadow drifted over them, darkening the angel’s face just long enough for Luce to worry. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe, praying Daniel couldn’t tell anything was strange.

But the panic was rising inside her. She wanted to run. She couldn’t run. What if she got lost in the cemetery?

Daniel followed her gaze toward the sky. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“So are you going to do it?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest, a dare.

“What?” she said.
Run?

Daniel took a step toward her. He was now less than a foot away. She held her breath. She kept her body completely still. She waited.

“Are you going to stay away from me?”

It almost sounded like he was flirting.

But Luce was completely out of sorts. Her brow was damp with sweat, and she squeezed her temples between two fingers, trying to regain possession of her body, trying to take it back from his control. She was totally unprepared to flirt back. That was, if what he was doing was actually flirting.

She took a step back. “I guess so.”

“Didn’t hear you,” he whispered, cocking an eyebrow and taking another step closer.

Luce backed up again, farther this time. She practically slammed into the base of the statue, and could feel the gritty stone foot of the angel scraping her back. A second, darker, colder shadow whooshed over them. She could have sworn Daniel shivered along with her.

And then the deep groan of something heavy startled them both. Luce gasped as the top of the marble statue teetered over them, like a tree branch swaying in the breeze. For a second, it seemed to hover in the air.

Luce and Daniel stood staring at the angel. Both of
them knew it was on its way down. The angel’s head bowed slowly toward them, like it was praying—and then the whole statue picked up speed as it started hurtling down. Luce felt Daniel’s hand wrap around her waist instantly, tightly, like he knew exactly where she began and where she ended. His other hand covered her head and forced her down just as the statue toppled over them. Right where they’d been standing. It landed with a massive crash—headfirst in the mud, with its feet still resting on the plinth, leaving a little triangle underneath, where Daniel and Luce crouched.

They were panting, nose to nose, Daniel’s eyes scared. Between their bodies and the statue, there were only a few inches of space.

“Luce?” he whispered.

All she could do was nod.

His eyes narrowed. “What did you see?”

Then a hand appeared and Luce felt herself being pulled out of the space under the statue. There was a scraping against her back and then a waft of air. She saw the flicker of daylight again. The detention crew stood gaping, except for Ms. Tross, who was glaring, and Cam, who helped Luce to her feet.

“Are you okay?” Cam asked, running his eyes over her for scrapes and bruises and brushing some dirt from her shoulder. “I saw the statue coming down and I ran over to try and stop it, but it was already … You must have been so terrified.”

Luce didn’t respond. Terrified was only part of how she’d felt.

Daniel, already on his feet, didn’t even turn around to see whether she was okay or not. He just walked away.

Luce’s jaw dropped as she watched him go, as she watched everyone else seem not to care that he had bailed.

“What did you do?” Ms. Tross asked.

“I don’t know. One minute, we were standing there”—Luce glanced at Ms. Tross—“um, working. The next thing I knew, the statue just fell over.”

The Albatross bent down to examine the shattered angel. Its head had cracked straight down the middle. She started muttering something about forces of nature and old stones.

But it was the voice at Luce’s ear that stayed with her, even after everyone else had gone back to work. It was Molly, just inches behind her shoulder, who whispered, “Looks like someone should start listening when I give advice.”

“D
on’t ever scare me like that again!” Callie reprimanded Luce on Wednesday evening.

It was just before sundown and Luce was folded into the Sword & Cross phone cubby, a tiny beige confine in the middle of the front office area. It was far from private, but at least no one else was loafing around. Her arms were still sore from the graveyard shift at yesterday’s detention, her pride still wounded from Daniel’s fleeing the second they’d been pulled out from under the statue. But for fifteen minutes, Luce was trying hard to
push all that out of her mind, to soak up every blissfully frantic word her best friend could spit out in the allotted time. It felt so good to hear Callie’s high-pitched voice, Luce almost didn’t care that she was being yelled at.

“We promised we wouldn’t go an
hour
without speaking,” Callie continued accusingly. “I thought someone had eaten you alive! Or that maybe they stuck you in solitary in one of those straitjackets where you have to chew through your sleeve to scratch your face. For all I knew, you could have descended into the ninth circle of—”

“Okay,
Mom,”
Luce said, laughing and settling into her role as Callie’s breathing instructor. “Relax.” For a split second, she felt guilty that she hadn’t used her one phone call to dial up her real mom. But she knew Callie would wig out if she ever discovered Luce hadn’t seized her very first opportunity to get in touch. And in a weird way, it was always soothing to hear Callie’s hysterical voice. It was one of the many reasons the two were such a good fit: Her best friend’s over-the-top paranoia actually had a calming effect on Luce. She could just picture Callie in her dorm room at Dover, pacing her bright orange area rug, with Oxy smeared over her t-zone and pedicure foam separating her still-wet fuchsia toenails.

“Don’t
Mom
me!” Callie huffed. “Start talking. What are the other kids like? Are they all scary and popping diuretics like in the movies? What about your classes? How’s the food?”

Through the phone, Luce could hear
Roman Holiday
playing in the background on Callie’s tiny TV. Luce’s favorite scene had always been the one where Audrey Hepburn woke in Gregory Peck’s room, still convinced the night before had all been a dream. Luce closed her eyes and tried to picture the shot in her mind. Mimicking Audrey’s drowsy whisper, she quoted the line she knew Callie would recognize: “There was a man, he was so
mean
to me. It was
wonderful
.”

“Okay, Princess, it’s
your
life I want to hear about,” Callie teased.

Unfortunately, there was nothing about Sword & Cross that Luce would even consider describing as wonderful. Thinking about Daniel for, oh, the eightieth time that day, she realized that the only parallel between her life and
Roman Holiday
was that she and Audrey both had a guy who was aggressively rude and uninterested in them. Luce rested her head against the beige linoleum of the cubby walls. Someone had carved the words
BIDING MY TIME
. Under normal circumstances, this would be when Luce would spill everything about Daniel to Callie.

Except, for some reason, she didn’t.

Whatever she might want to say about Daniel wouldn’t be based on anything that had actually happened between them. And Callie was big on guys making an effort to show they were worthy of you. She’d want to hear things like how many times he’d held open a door for Luce, or whether he’d noticed how good her
French accent was. Callie didn’t think there was anything wrong with guys writing the kind of sappy love poems Luce could
never
take seriously. Luce would come up severely short on things to say about Daniel. In fact, Callie’d be much more interested in hearing about someone like Cam.

“Well, there
is
this guy here,” Luce whispered into the phone.

“I knew it!” Callie squealed. “Name.”

Daniel.
Daniel
. Luce cleared her throat. “Cam.”

“Direct, uncomplicated. I can dig it. Start from the beginning.”

“Well, nothing’s really happened yet.”

“He thinks you’re gorgeous, blah blah blah. I told you the cropped cut made you look like Audrey. Get to the good stuff.”

“Well—” Luce broke off. The sound of footsteps in the lobby silenced her. She leaned out the side of the cubby and craned her neck to see who was interrupting the best fifteen minutes she’d had in three whole days.

Cam was walking toward her.

Speak of the devil. She swallowed the horrifically lame words on the tip of her tongue:
He gave me his guitar pick
. She still had it tucked in her pocket.