League of Strays (19 page)

ON SUNDAY, KADE AND I DROVE UP TO LOWELL’S CEMETERY
. I tried not to think about Nora or any other girl. Right then, it was just him and me.

Kade collected handfuls of blue-and-white lupines as we wandered through the maze of gravestones. I waited for him to give me the bouquet, but instead, he stopped in the middle of our walk and hurled them onto the sunken roof of a squat mausoleum.

“Why’d you tell them, Charlie?” His voice was low, like a warning growl of a mountain lion. “Why’d you tell Nora and Zoe about us?”

His fury sucked the excuses right out of my brain. “I … I don’t know.”

Damn Zoe and her big mouth. She’d probably speed-dialed Kade the second I’d left her house. For the tenth time, I cursed myself for saying anything to anyone.

I reached for Kade’s hand, which hung like an anchor at his side. “I couldn’t keep the good news to myself,” I told him.

His pale eyes turned cold. Glacier cold. “I asked you not to tell them.”

“It’s not that big of a deal,” I said. “We’re all friends. They should be happy for us. It had to come out sometime, right?” Whatever logic I tried to summon froze under his glare.

“You’re wrong.” Kade’s words were like a snap of a dog and I pulled back. “Did you consider what I wanted, Charlie? Or were you incapable of thinking of anyone but yourself? Did you consider, for one second, what this might do to the League?”

“It doesn’t bother anyone but Nora,” I said defiantly, “and for all the wrong reasons.”

Kade leaned against a tombstone. His fingers dangled over the etched design of a winged skull. A century of wind, rain, and snow had erased the person’s name from the moss-covered slab.

“What do you mean?” he finally asked.

Was it possible that he didn’t know about Nora? And if not, was it smart for me to tell him?

“What do you mean?” he repeated, slower this time.

I stirred a pile of leaves with my foot, avoiding his eyes. “I think she has a crush on you.”

“Bullshit.” He swung his boot over the dirt. A rock shot out, chipping a tiny gravestone. “Nora and I have nothing in common. You don’t have to be jealous.”

“I’m not,” I said. “She’s the one acting weird about the whole thing.”

I waited for him to say something. He didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t really clear why I should be. “Nora seemed really upset,” I added.

“Don’t worry about her. I’ll smooth things over.”

He moved toward me. Too close. I stiffened, closing my eyes out of instinct. I almost fell over when his lips made contact with my eyelid. I snapped them open.

“I guess it’s not the end of the world,” he said, his mouth parting into a smile. “You’re right. It had to come out sometime.”

His anger had evaporated as quickly as it had come, leaving my mind in free fall.

He started walking, his long legs carrying him twice as fast as me. “This place makes me feel like nothing in the world can touch me,” he said. Our conversation seemed to fade like the names in the graveyard.

I tried to change gears, too, but it wasn’t so easy. “Not even me?”

He slowed down, giving me a chance to catch up. “Present company excluded.” He kneeled down in front of a tombstone and yanked out a weed that obscured a quote:
ONE WHO WALKS IN ANOTHER’S TRACKS LEAVES NO FOOTPRINTS—PROVERB
.

I read the rest aloud,
MARY HUNTER, BORN
1674.
DIED
1706.

Under that were the words
JONATHAN HUNTER, BORN
1663
. There was no date of death.

“What’s the story?” Kade asked.

“Either he’s in
Guinness World Records
as the oldest living male or he’s buried somewhere else.”

“Be specific,” he prompted.

“I don’t know. Maybe something awful—like he drowned on a transatlantic voyage, and they never found his body.”

He nodded, seemingly impressed. “Not bad for a first try.”

“Can you do better?”

“Next to the imagination, reality is usually boring,” Kade said. “The Hunters bought this plot after they married. But Mary Hunter gained a hundred pounds and had one too many kids, so Mr. Hunter dumped her for a younger, hotter Puritan.”

I laughed. “What a cynic.”

I almost tripped over a tombstone the size of a brick. “These are the ones that get me,” I said. “The babies.”

Kade stepped over it, on the move again. “Back then, it was a miracle if a kid saw his fourth birthday.”

He stopped in front of another mausoleum. Bouquets of plastic flowers lay on the ground, their cheerful colors leeched by time. Kade climbed over the gate, hooked me around the waist, and swung me over. He dropped to his knees, dragging his hands down my sides. I lost my balance and tumbled on top of him. In one fluid motion, he flipped me onto my back.

“Love the hair color,” he murmured, nestling his face in it.

Kade was strong. Too strong. I felt claustrophobic and tried to wiggle free, but he had me pinned.

“I hate to ruin this, um, romantic moment, but my mom thinks I’m at Zoe’s house. She told me to be home soon,” I managed to say with the limited amount of air left in my chest.

“You need to stop worrying about Mommy and start thinking for yourself, Charlie.” He adjusted his weight so that he was fully on top of me.

The alignment of his body with mine sent a shot of excitement—and fear—through my blood. Warmth and chill battled inside me. I twisted my head to the side to get enough air to speak. “Kade, my parents can’t know what’s going on. They might try to keep me from seeing you.”

That wasn’t true. Mom would do cartwheels if she knew I had a boyfriend. Especially one like Kade. Good posture?
Check
. Good-looking?
Check.
Polite?
Check
.

“Screw your mother,” Kade said. He pressed my face between his hands and squeezed a little too hard. I couldn’t turn my head. Then he scooped down, his mouth traveling up my neck to my earlobe. I felt the sharp pinch of his teeth and shuddered from the pain. Somehow, I managed to free my hand. I rubbed my ear until the sting went away.

Kade lifted himself onto his elbows and gave me the kind of smile that destroys any seed of anger before it has the chance to grow. “I can hardly stand being around you, Charlie. You really know how to drive a guy crazy.”

He rolled partially off me as if it were the most difficult thing he’d ever had to do. I inhaled, feeling the sweet rush of air in my lungs. His hand slid under my shirt, tracing a figure eight on my stomach.

A few weeks earlier, the sum of my romantic experience consisted of a soggy six-second kiss from Jake Saunders in the back of the bus during an eighth-grade orchestra trip. Now, Kade slithered down to my belly button, making slow circles with his tongue. I fought for air like a nonswimmer trying to stay above water.

“Kade, I really should—”

“Should, should, should,” he said, flipping onto his back. “
Should
s should be wiped off the face of the planet.”

The world swirled around me as I staggered to my feet. “Really, I have to go.”

“I know. I get it, OK?” he snapped.

My reluctance seemed childish, even to me. I was seventeen. But I didn’t think I was afraid to have sex, I just wasn’t ready for
Kade
. The insight left me confused and more than a little irritated with myself.

“Kade, I’m sorry … I …”

“Just forget it, Charlotte.” He jumped up and started to walk away from me.

I scrambled to my feet, following him down the path to his motorcycle. He handed me my helmet. I took my position behind him and rested my cheek against his scratchy denim jacket. Gravel shot out from the back tire as we sped off.

A block from my house, Kade dropped me off. With a parting nod, he gunned the engine and roared away. I stood there, watching him get smaller and smaller until there was nothing left.

“Charlotte Brody, you’re in serious trouble,” I said to myself.

I walked home, careful to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk like I used to do when I was six years old.

OUR NEXT LEAGUE MEETING TOOK PLACE AT A RUSTIC CAFÉ
on the edge of town, a forty-five-minute walk from school.

Nora and I were the first to arrive, followed by Kade and Richie. We sat at a circular table crammed with every condiment known to man. After we ordered, Kade looked at me. “So what do we know about Tiffany Miller?”

I felt a tug in my stomach. “I thought you said Wanda was next?”

“Change of plans.” Kade turned to Richie for an answer.

“Popular. Beautiful. Ambitious,” Richie rattled off.

“Manipulative,” Nora said. “Slutty. Bitchy.”

“Don’t we want to wait for Zoe?” I asked. “She said she’d meet us here.”

Kade glanced out the window. “She can catch up. Back to Tiffany.” He rested his chin on a thumb, tracing a finger back and forth above his lip. “Vice president of the cheerleading
association, co-captain of the swim team, part-time clerk at the Beauty Emporium … Charlie?”

“Prom queen wannabe?”

“Right. Good one. How could we forget her deepest ambition?”

I couldn’t keep my eyes off his finger. He caught my gaze and smiled. My cheeks flamed.

“Tiffany’s the kind of person who steps on other people’s heads to climb the social ladder,” said Nora. “I’ve never understood how popular and cruel can go together.”

Kade tipped his chair back against the wall. He extended his legs, which didn’t fit under the table. “Any ideas?”

“Tabasco sauce in her mascara?” Nora suggested.

The bell above the door jingled. Our heads turned in unison. Zoe stood there, hair hanging in strips, an open umbrella at her side. I looked past her, to the wall of rain outside the window. It was going to be a long walk home.

“You’re late.” Kade drained his espresso, then pitched the empty paper cup into the nearby trash can. He eyed the tiny puddles dripping from the spokes of Zoe’s umbrella.

“Yeah, well, my mom was too sick to drive home from the movies, and her car was out of gas, so I had to take the bus to pick her up.” She snapped the umbrella shut. “And then I had to walk all the way”—she looked at the log cabin walls, the remaining tower of biscuits and gravy that Kade and Richie had shared, the collection of tin coffee cups fixed to the wall—“here.”

“You’re always around for your mother, aren’t you?” Kade asked. It didn’t sound like a compliment.

“We were just talking about Tiffany,” Richie got in before Zoe had the chance to sling a comeback. “We’re going to do something to embarrass her, like she did to Charlotte at All-State.”

Kade turned back, Zoe seemingly forgotten. “Good, Rich, good.”

I looked away, thinking about the story I’d told. Yes, Tiffany had been mean, but nowhere near as cruel as I’d led them to believe. I looked at Kade and wondered if the truth would even matter now.

“Girls like her need to be brought down a few notches,” Richie said.

Kade scooted to the edge of his chair, interested. Bolstered by the attention, Richie went on. “Maybe we can shake her confidence. You know, like in public.”

“That stuff happened a while ago,” I said, forcing the words out. “I’ve been thinking, maybe we should skip my turn.”

“How can you say that after she ruined your chances for All-State?” Nora asked. She reached across the table to swipe Kade’s toast. “It should be someplace where we can watch, that’s what I think.”

Kade bolted up in his chair. “The prom parade! It heads down Jefferson and turns onto Main Street.”

The annual Kennedy High parade was this Saturday, April 28th—one week before prom. I looked down at my cranberry muffin, which I’d unconsciously mangled. The crumbs rolled off my fingers and onto the floor. “Isn’t that kind of soon? You know, to plan and everything?”

Kade dismissed my concern with a wave.

“How come you always know so much?” Nora asked him, ruffling his hair.

I bit the fleshy inside of my lip. Now that she knew about Kade and me—and I knew how she felt about him—every touch was suspect.

Kade scooted away. Nora was too clueless to realize that he didn’t like anyone messing with his hair. “They pass under my apartment every year,” he said, repairing a spike. “It’s a lot of obnoxious honking and waving from daddies’ sports cars. I lock myself in the bathroom and try not to barf.”

For the next ten minutes, they outlined ideas with a disconcerting amount of detail. “If we use the roof on the apartment at the corner, Reid can’t tie it back to me,” Kade said. Then he added, “Or you guys.”

The new plan was based on his favorite horror novel by Stephen King, named for its main character, Carrie—an unpopular girl who becomes a school joke when she’s elected prom queen. While she stands onstage, wearing a tiara and smiling, some of her classmates douse her in pigs’ blood. Thankfully, we didn’t have to slaughter a harmless farm animal—not when you could buy red paint on clearance at Grodin’s Hardware.

Kade called his plan “Carrie’s Revenge,” because this time, it was the popular girl who was going to get it.