The Reaping of Norah Bentley (28 page)

“What’s with all the groceries?” Eli asked. He picked the cheese up, put it back in the bag and then took the bag from her.

“We’re cooking dinner,” Rachel announced excitedly.

My eyebrows lifted. “Do you remember the last time we tried cooking?” I asked. “Our kitchen smelled like burnt chocolate chip cookies for a week. Helen was not pleased.”

“Well Helen’s not here,” Rachel said. “And
this
time I’ve got a recipe and everything, and there are four of us, so surely we can manage to not catch anything on fire.”

“You mean there are three of you,” Luke said, reappearing behind her. “I told you—I’m not going anywhere near that stove. I’ll carry the groceries in. That’s my contribution.” Rachel punched him in the shoulder as he walked by, but he just laughed and kept going, over to unlock the door. We followed him inside, Eli with a quiet smile and an arm around my shoulders, Rachel with a sour look on her face.

Her smile came back quickly though, after we made it to the kitchen and started pulling things out of the bag, lining them up on the porcelain countertops. She spun from drawer to drawer, taking things out and organizing ingredients and measuring cups and bowls and pans according to when we’d use them. Eli was standing off to the side, leaning one shoulder against the wall and looking entertained by Rachel’s enthusiasm. I was by her side, trying to help her—but mostly feeling like I was just in the way. So I wasn’t too upset when Luke abandoned his post over by the sliding glass doors, walked over to me and asked if I’d go outside with him for a minute.

“I got you a present in Wilmington,” he explained. “But I left it in the jeep.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eli straighten up and step away from the wall.

Rachel stopped dicing tomatoes, looked up at me with a smile and in singsong voice she said, “I’ve already seen it—and you’re going to like it.” And that made me curious, so I followed Luke out the back door. I tried not to look at the frown on Eli’s face as I walked by him.

I was still trying to convince myself that there was nothing unsettling about the way Luke was acting; that Eli had nothing to frown about. That yesterday hadn’t actually happened, and this was the same Luke I’d always known—the one I could say anything to, go anywhere with. So when he slipped back out of the jeep with my wrapped gift in hand, and then suggested we go for a quick walk on the beach to get away from Rachel the Kitchen Nazi for a while, I just laughed and said, “Sure.”

Ten minutes later, I was still convinced that ‘sure’ was the right answer. We were almost to the pier now, and Luke hadn’t gone crazy on me yet. He was still smiling, actually, his walk slow and easy next to mine, his arm casually draped around my shoulders. Every once in a while he’d wander down towards the water, pick up a shell or a piece of glass or some other debris that had washed up with the rain, and fling it back into the foamy waves.

I stopped and watched as he bent to pick up a shell the size of my fist, drew his arm back and hurled it towards the water. It flew half the length of the pier before it faded out of sight, blending into the grey expanse of the overcast sky.

“That one probably reached Africa, I think,” I said.

He angled his face back towards mine, brown eyes squinting in the hazy sunlight. “Probably further than that, thank you very much,” he said. “I was aiming for California.”

“Wouldn’t it have easier to throw it the other way?” “When have I ever done things the easy way?”

I laughed before I could help myself. “…Never,” I said. “You do like to make things difficult.”

He walked back to my side, smiling. “You know your life would be boring without me.”

“Here lately I probably would have settled for boring,” I said dryly.

His smile faltered a little, and he started towards the steps of the pier. There was a no trespassing sign at the top of them, faded and dog-eared in one of the corners. It was hung on a make-shift gate of old, splintered driftwood that had somehow managed to survive through years of storms and crashing waves. Not that its endurance paid off. We jumped the fence all the time anyway, and we weren’t the only ones who did; right now, even with the skies hinting at more rain, there were a handful of people out walking on it and still more fishing off the sides.

Luke took the stairs two at a time, and at the top he paused and started to straighten the sign, used a scrap piece of driftwood to hammer in one of the loose nails in the corner.

“Feel like breaking the law today?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at me as I made my way up the steps.

“Always,” I said with a smirk. But on the inside, something started to pull. A weight had perched on my chest and started to settle there, growing heavier and heavier, sliding down into my stomach and twisting it into knots. It was strange and familiar at the same time—the same kind of nostalgic tugging I’d felt at Eli’s house yesterday.

Then I heard Eli’s voice. Barely an echo at first, then getting louder, and louder—until his words were clear and unmistakable:

I have to save her. I can’t just stand here. I have to save her.

I turned around, searching, but he was nowhere in sight. Instead, I saw a blurry crowd of people gathered at the edge of the water, shouting and pointing at something tumbling in the waves.

Another person.

I’d sprinted several steps before I realized what I was doing, before Luke shouted my name and I stumbled to a stop.

“Norah, hold up, what are you—”

“Look—” I gave him a frantic look, jabbing my finger towards the crowd. He jogged to my side and grabbed my arm, stopping me from taking off again.

“At
what?”

“At the…” I followed his confused gaze myself. “At the…”

At the empty beach. There was no one there, and there was no one in the water. I probably should have seen that coming.

I closed my eyes, and gave myself a hard shake. I looked down the beach— back towards the house and Eli—and thought about racing to him and demanding an explanation. Why had I heard his voice just then? What the heck was going on
now?

I was still staring at the dollhouse-size blur of turquoise when I felt Luke’s hand close over mine.

“He’ll survive without you for a few more minutes,” he said with a thin, empty smile.

“I know, I just—”

“Come on.”

I couldn’t tell him what I’d just seen, so I just gave him a pleading look and said,

“But Rachel too—you know how she gets when there aren’t enough people around to focus their attention on her. We should—”

“Rachel is probably so caught up in thinking she’s a gourmet chef that she’s completely forgotten we even exist.” He pulled me a little closer to the gate.

I held in a sigh, and nodded.

“…Okay, okay. I’m coming.” The thought of hurting Luke’s feelings was the main reason I forced the strange vision to the back of my mind. We were finally getting along again, and I didn’t want to screw it up. I’d just have to talk to Eli later.

Luke braced his arm so I had something to steady myself against, and I managed to make it over the rickety gate without falling on my face. Quite the accomplishment, considering I was only about a head taller than it was.

I’d always been secretly afraid, every time we walked out here, that I was going to get blown off the narrow walkway and into the ocean if I wasn’t careful. It just seemed so unstable; I always felt like one of us—me or the weathered, ancient wood—was swaying entirely too much. So I didn’t mind how close Luke kept to my side, since he was big enough to block most of the wind threatening to knock me off-balance. I didn’t object, either, when he saw me shivering, teased me about how I was always cold, and then took off his jacket and handed it to me.

Even then it was still cold though, so I was glad when the sun punched through the clouds for a moment too, sent billowing waves of color spilling over the wind-tossed waves. A man jerked a fish from the water as we passed him, and its scales caught a flash of the sunlight before its wriggling death-dance pulled it back underwater one more time. I pulled my gaze away from it, focusing on the distant horizon, on anything but the thought of the hook in that fish’s mouth. All of a sudden, I felt sick.

“Fishing is kind of cruel,” I said, once we were well out of the fisherman’s hearing range.

Luke laughed. “What?”

“It just seems like a really unpleasant way for it to have to go, with the hook, and then in and out of the water, struggling like that. Nothing quick and painless about it.”

“Well, sometimes they get away,” he pointed out.

“But they’ve got to be traumatized, anyway.”

He put his arm around me, pulled me close while still laughing to himself. “You’re a strange kid,” he said.

“I’m serious!” I insisted. But his laughter was contagious, and now I was smiling too, wondering myself why I was saying this crazy thought train out loud.

“I know you are,” he said.

“Then why are you laughing?”

“I don’t mean to.” He tried—and failed—to make his face very serious as he said, “I care just as much about the poor little fish as you do.”

“You’re a liar, Lucian Christopher Stone.”

Hearing his full name made his laughter pause for a second. “I’m not lying,” he said. “Really. I think we should start an awareness group. We could have t-shirts and everything. And they can say S.O.F.—Save Our Fishes—”

“You see that ocean right there? I’m going to push you into it.” I gave him a playful shove towards the edge, but he grabbed my arm and spun me around so that I was the one close to the edge.

“And I’ll drag you in with me,” he said. He grabbed my other arm and acted like he was going to pick me up and toss me in, and I let out an involuntary squeal that made one of the fishermen turn and shake his head at us.

“That is
not
funny, Luke!”

“I think it’s sort of funny,” he said. Then he did it again, and this time he ended his mock toss by leaning me out over the water just a little bit, my head tilted back toward the water so it looked like we’d just been dancing, and he’d dipped me and was holding the pose through the last note of our song.

“I am going to
kill
you.” My face was burning, from trying to laugh, and breathe, and threaten him upside down and all at once as the wind whipped my hair across my face.

He pulled me up after a few seconds, still laughing, and steadied me against him.

“You jerk,” I said, trying not to smile. I didn’t want to encourage him.

“Like I would let you fall,” he said. His voice was a little quieter, a little more serious towards the end. Our eyes met, and we both looked away just as quick.

I cleared my throat, since it was dry from all the squealing, and took a step away from him. I shoved my hands in the pockets of his coat and felt the smoothly wrapped little present, the grooved ribbon tied around it.

“Almost forgot about that,” Luke said as I pulled it out.

I studied the neatly creased silver paper, the intricate purple bow on top. “Rachel wrapped it?” I guessed.

“I wanted to just hand it to you in the plastic bag,” he said, his smile from earlier coming partway back. “She said that would be tacky.”

I laughed. “Maybe a little. But I wouldn’t have cared.” I started to unwrap it, feeling sort of awkward— like I always did whenever people gave me things. I never knew what to say, never thought my ‘thank you’ sounded heartfelt enough.

The first thing I saw when I ripped the paper apart was that infinity symbol, carved out of some type of dark wood.

“You seemed really interested in that drawing yesterday,” he said. “So I thought this would be appropriate.”

I lifted the little wooden charm, saw that it was attached to a circle of hemp—a bracelet.

“You like it?” Luke asked.

“It’s awesome.”

“I got it at that hippy store you always want to go to when we’re in Wilmington.”

I looked away from the bracelet long enough to give him a crooked smile. “It’s not a hippy store,” I said.

“The guy at the cash register had a pony-tail longer than yours.”

“They have neat stuff,” I said with a shrug. “Cool guitar picks, and cool things like this.” I held up the bracelet. The wind caught the charm and sent it spinning in circles.

“And incense, and bowls ‘for tobacco use only’” he said, using his fingers to make air quotes around that last part.

“So it’s a hippy store, then,” I said. “What’s wrong with hippies?

He shrugged. “Nothing. You’d make a good hippy,” he said. “You could change your name to something cool like ‘Flower Petal Dust’, maybe get some dreads. That could be pretty hot.”

“You are such a dork,” I said, shaking my head.

His laugh was cut short by a rumble of thunder in the distance.

“We should head back,” I said.

He took the bracelet from me and unhooked it, put it around my wrist and fastened it back without taking his eyes off the sky. “I don’t know,” he said. “The worst of it looks like it’s moving away from us.”