Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (6 page)

But they did. It was different, though. This time it was different. Because despite my unwanted reaction to how good he looked—even in the drab school uniform of navy pants and a white golf shirt—disappointment and betrayal ran through me like ice water.

Pushing away from the tree, he started toward me, his eyes on mine, making it impossible to look away. And, even though he was still fifteen feet away, he held me somehow, held me so very still, preventing me from so much as breathing.

“Tell her I was here … and that I’m sorry.”

“Trinity.”

I barely had time to glance over my shoulder before Pitre jogged up beside me.

“Hey.” Despite how tough Chase’s favorite receiver looked with the coiled snake tattoo around his bicep, he hesitated, as if not sure what to say. “Almost called you yesterday—”

I found a smile. It was tight, but real. “No need,” I said.

His gaze flicked down to a faint scrape visible just below my skirt, then back up. “Wasn’t sure—”

I cut him off. “I’m fine.”

“If I’d had any idea,” he muttered, frowning, “I would have stopped her.”

Him, I believed. He was one of the last people Jessica would have drawn into her vicious little game. “No harm.”

“One of these days it’s going to catch up with her. She’s going to screw over the wrong person,” he said, his gaze fixed beyond me.

“Somehow,” I said, turning to see what he was looking at, “Jessica doesn’t strike me as being too worried about—”

The girls stood in a tight, closed group beside the angel fountain—Jessica and Amber and several others—laughing, whispering so that their voices carried, but the tinkling of the water drowned out their words.

“Karma,” I muttered.

The sun shone, but for a split second everything turned cloudy, distorted like a smeared watercolor painting.

And the water turned red.

I stood frozen as the crimson tide gathered, spilling over the angel with the lifted arms and streaming down her robes, splashing all over Jessica. She kept talking, kept laughing, made no move to step away or wipe away the blood …

“Trinity?”

I blinked and the fog cleared, and Pitre was staring at me again, much like the night at the house.

“You can’t let them get to you like that,” he was saying, and with his words I looked beyond him, to the girls by the fountain. There was no red. Once again the water ran clear, trickling gently against the angel.

“… better get going,” Pitre said. “Can’t afford another tardy.”

I made myself smile, because despite his tough-guy exterior and the fact he sometimes drank too much, on the inside I was pretty sure he was a cupcake. I’d heard about a dad in prison and a mom who worked two jobs to keep him in school, a brother who was a rookie cop, but I didn’t know if they were true. I hoped they weren’t. Pitre had been one of the first to make me feel welcome.

Maybe that’s because, like me, he was an outsider.

The bell rang, and Jessica and her friends scattered. I knew I had to get going, too, but had no desire to—

I turned back toward the beautiful old oak, with its draping branches and swaying Spanish moss.

Chase was gone.

Relief, I told myself. That’s what I felt. But the sharp edges felt more like disappointment.

Annoyed, I hurried to Building A and retrieved my chemistry text from my locker before heading to homeroom. The routine was starting to feel familiar, even if I still saw more strangers than friends. Until Enduring Grace, I’d never stepped in a school, public or private. In Colorado, the nearest had been over thirty miles away, so Gran had taught me herself. She’d done a pretty good job, too. According to the state of Louisiana, I was a junior. But I could have tested out of high school altogether.

I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be a prodigy, or special. I wanted to be like everyone else. And that meant going to high school even if I’d already learned most everything they were teaching. I wanted to hang out with kids my age, to walk the crowded halls and eat in the cafeteria (even if the food sucked), to go to football games on Friday nights and—

Have a boyfriend.

It was ridiculous all the things I’d never done, considering I would turn seventeen in the spring.

My steps slowed as I neared homeroom. But my thoughts didn’t. Because I knew who would be in there. I’d gotten lucky in the courtyard. I’d managed to avoid him. But once I stepped inside the classroom, there’d be no escaping the inevitable.

Instinctively I lifted a hand to shift my hair over a small cut at my temple. Makeup hid the greenish bruise. Then, as the final bell rang, I raised my chin and swung into Coach Cameron’s room.

SIX

“Lucas said he got hurt.”

I looked up from my backpack as Victoria, the first person who’d invited me to eat lunch at her table, dropped down beside me on the concrete bench. She was in Coach Cameron’s homeroom, too. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend Lucas played tackle on the football team.

“That’s why he wasn’t in homeroom,” she said. “Lucas said Coach C. wanted Chase to get treatment.”

I absorbed the information, tried to play it cool. The last thing I wanted was Victoria to know how hard my heart started to pound.

But despite how many times I told myself I didn’t want to see him, despite all the ways I’d fantasized about blowing him off, the second I’d swung into homeroom and found Chase’s desk empty, it was like someone had let the air right out of me.

“Oh.”

Victoria took a swig from her water bottle. With her long blond hair and killer green eyes, she was one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen. She had this exotic look to her, and from what I understood, she was an amazing gymnast.

“Oh?” she repeated. “That’s it? That’s all? ‘
Oh?
’”

I shrugged. “What else would I say?” I wasn’t about to ask any of the questions tripping through me, like when did he get hurt and how bad was it?

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you’d give me a few details, since you were with him when it happened.”

A warm breeze blew through the oaks crowding the courtyard. The trees here were a little smaller, not as old, but they still had moss dangling from them. Even on the few occasions I’d been alone, it was always as if someone else was there—or a lot of someones. Because of the shifting moss, I told myself. It created an … energy.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about—” I started, but Victoria’s wide smile stopped me.

“Come on,” she said. “I
saw
the pictures.”

I felt myself still. “Pictures?”

“On Jessica’s Facebook page. That’s where it happened, right? At that old house?”

I blinked. Tried to focus. Didn’t know what question to ask first.

Victoria spared me that decision. “I can’t believe you went there,” she said in a rush. “I mean, there’s just no way. You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to go there—”

“Why?” Watching Victoria, I fumbled for my thermos. The water inside would be warm enough to break the growing chill.

“Oh, I don’t know … because people who go there die?”

That got me. I mean, that really
got me
. I found my thermos and unscrewed the lid, pretended like my heart was not hammering so hard it hurt. “That’s a pretty blanket statement.”

“Chase got hurt, didn’t he?”

“Hurt isn’t the same thing as dying.”

“Then why was everyone running?”

Clearly I needed to see the pictures Jessica had taken it upon herself to share with the world. “We were just playing a game,” I said.

“Ha-ha then. Looks like it was so much fun.”

I took a swallow, waited for the warmth. I mean, holy crap. This was New Orleans. It was early October. The temperature was hotter than the dead of summer in Colorado, and the humidity made everything feel like a steam bath. I was so-o-o tired of being cold. It made no sense. I could hang with subfreezing temperatures and blizzards, but here in the sauna of the Deep South, I couldn’t stop shaking.

“Don’t look now, but there he is.”

What was it about someone telling you what not to do? As soon as someone says not to turn around, that’s exactly what you do. Foolishly I looked toward the gym as Chase, Drew, and Victoria’s boyfriend Lucas came around the corner. And for the first time, I noticed the limp.

When had
that
happened?

And why hadn’t
I
noticed?

“What’s with you two anyway?” Victoria asked.

I looked back to the knobby roots of the old oaks. Chase had been running, I knew that. Through the darkness, I’d heard him shouting, seen him come rushing from the house …

“Nothing,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess that’s why he won’t stop looking over here, huh?”

I would not let myself look. If I had, I would have seen Jessica closing in.

“Trinnie!” she said, descending on me like we were long lost friends. “There you are! I’ve been trying to find you all day!”

Jessica Morgenthal was the last person I wanted to see, but no way would I give her the satisfaction of acting like I cared one way or the other—or to remind her that she’d already seen me at least four times.

I stood.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she shocked me by saying. Then she blew my mind. She wrapped her arms around me, smothering me in the thick scent of hair spray and expensive perfume. “I was so worried.”

I focused on the sky. It was blue, a really vivid blue, with thin, swirling clouds. I focused on that, on the song of the birds from somewhere unseen, determined not to allow the—

But even as the edges blurred, I knew it wouldn’t work. Once the visions began, once the invisible lightning struck, they never went away.

Not until what I saw happened.

*   *   *

No one knew. Despite the disturbing images playing through my mind, I went through the right motions, pulling back from Jessica and taking the phone she offered me—my BlackBerry, which she allegedly found when she’d gone back inside the house. I even think I said “no big deal” when she apologized for freaking me out.

“It was just a game,” she’d said with a beautiful, model-perfect, fake-as-her-tan smile. “Truth or dare. I thought you knew that.”

Twelve hours later, I wondered what she’d been trying to prove—or who she’d been trying to impress.

Aunt Sara was already in bed. She had a meeting in the morning and wanted to be at her best. I had a history test and should have been asleep, too—or at the very least studying—but I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures. The social network thing was crazy addictive.

I’d been playing on Facebook ever since Victoria insisted I join. At first, she’d been my only Facebook friend. But gradually my list had grown, so that it now included over two hundred people I didn’t even know.

How did
that
happen?

Anyway. I didn’t post much, didn’t really know what to say:

Trinity Monsour …
saw Brad Pitt on Magazine Street.

Trinity Monsour …
had the most amazing dream last night.

Trinity Monsour …
wishes things were different.

Trinity Monsour …
can’t get warm.

Trinity Monsour …
knows something bad is about to happen.

I couldn’t see myself announcing any of that to the world.

But Jessica didn’t have the same misgivings. She posted
everything
. And I do mean everything.

Jessica Morgenthal …
is having a bad hair day.

Jessica Morgenthal …
loves kissing Chase Bonaventure.

Jessica Morgenthal …
got a new pair of jeans.

Jessica Morgenthal …
can’t wait to go out.

And, her most recent post, from early Sunday morning:

Jessica Morgenthal …
just had some serious fun.

The pictures were all there, in an album titled,
TRUTH OR DARE PRYTANIA STYLE.
She must have taken them with her phone—that’s why I hadn’t realized what she was doing. Some I recognized. The rest I was pretty sure she’d taken after I left. And I’m not sure what unnerved me more, the pictures of the votives surrounding the bloodstained mattresses—or those of me and Chase.

All along I’d been telling myself it was nothing. Just a casual flirtation, an unreciprocated crush. He was the big guy on campus, a gifted athlete and good student, totally hot, but oddly approachable. Because of his movie-star smile, the way I imagined that he looked at me.

Saturday night, I’d realized my mistake.

Now I had to wonder. And apparently, Jessica was, too.

It was all there in her photo album, for me and her two thousand other “friends” to see:

1.   Chase standing close to me, his hand brushing mine.

2.   Chase looking at me with quiet apology in his eyes. (Realistically, no one else would know he was looking at me, because I wasn’t in the picture. But I knew. I remembered. And I bet Jessica did, too.)

3.   Me, unable to hide the longing on my face (again, most people would have no way of knowing I’d been watching Chase…).

4.   Me running from the house, pale and terrified.

5.   Chase standing still as a statue, with murder in his eyes. (In truth, I had no idea when this picture was taken, or what was going on. But sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop dragged close, I had this little fantasy…)

I’m not sure when I drifted off. One minute I was staring at Chase, wondering, and then the next thing I knew I was in the upstairs room of the house on Prytania.

The candles were lit. They were white, giving off flickering light. They surrounded the mattresses and smelled of vanilla. That was odd. Amid all the darkness and grime, the scent of vanilla. Then she screamed.

I spun. Or at least I tried to. My body didn’t want to move. It was like an invisible spiderweb held me in place, and no matter how hard I struggled, I couldn’t move. Couldn’t turn. Could only stand there, trapped, listening to her scream …

“Help me! Please! Someone help me!”

I fought harder.