Under My Skin (Wildlings) (3 page)

"No way Josh just took off," I say. "He isn't a partier. He doesn't even like crowds. He hangs out with a few people from school and that's it."

Detective Foley takes out a notebook. "Such as?"

"Me, our friend Desmond and sometimes Barry or Dillon. If he had other plans, I'd know. He'd never lie to me."

The cop gives Naomi a wry smile, then tilts his head and looks back at me, a smirk on his face.

"I hate to break it to you, sweetheart," he says, "but
all
boys lie to their girlfriends."

Patronizing bastard, I want to tell him, but I swallow the words and just shake my head.

"It's not like that. He's not my boyfriend."

Before the cop can come out with some other snarky comment, the door opens and in walks Josh, wearing a black skullcap over his beautiful dreads and the goofiest outfit I've ever seen him in. He looks like a Walmart special, but at least he seems perfectly okay. I want to throw my arms around him and never let go, but his mother beats me to it and I manage to keep my cool.

I just smile and lift my eyebrows.

"Good to see you, Saunders," I say. "Nice duds."

Josh

By the time I finish telling my edited version of the facts to the cop, I half believe the story myself. I'm glad that Marina headed off to school. I wouldn't be a very good liar around her. We're so tight, she'd see right through me.

But I do turn out to be pretty good at it when it counts—or maybe that's something else being a Wildling has given me. There's a bad moment when the detective takes me down the hall to my room for some private questioning. He points to my jeans and T-shirt lying on the carpet and asks me why I wasn't wearing them. Turns out the best way to be believable is to embarrass yourself. Good thing Mom is waiting in the living room.

"I was just, you know, looking at some pictures on my computer," I say.

He gets a smirk. I guess he saw the photos of Joanie Jones on my screen when he was first called in to investigate the attack and thinks I was sitting there jacking off when Steve came in my room.

I go on, feeling a flush darken my already brown skin. "Steve comes in yelling about how I broke his laptop—which I never touched—and he hits me across the back of the head and then all of a sudden this giant cat is all over him and I just took off."

"Naked."

"Well, I was still wearing my boxers."

He nods and writes something in his notebook. Good thing he doesn't check because right now I'm going commando. Cory didn't provide me with underwear and I wouldn't have put on somebody else's old skivvies even if he had.

"And these clothes you came home in?"

"They're from a donation box out near the mall."

Cory said to tell the truth as much as possible and it seems to work. I didn't take the clothes from the box, but that's where they came from.

The detective nods again.

"And why did you wait until the morning to come home?"

"I was scared. I knew Steve was already mad at me. I thought he'd find a way to blame me for everything."

"But you finally came back because ...?"

I shrug. "Where else am I going to go? I'm just a kid. And then when I was in this diner, I saw my picture on the news and I thought I'd better come home ..."

"Tell me about this giant cat. What do you mean? Was it a house cat or something bigger?"

Somehow I wasn't expecting this question and I'm sure I probably have guilt written all over my face. What do I tell this cop? Again, I think about Cory's advice.

"It was bigger," I say. "A … mountain lion, I think."

"And did you see it come in the house?" the detective asks.

"No. It just showed up all of a sudden. There was no warning."

The cop looks at me thoughtfully. He makes some more notes, then closes his notebook.

"I think we're done here," he says.

I walk with him back out to the living room. Mom jumps up from the couch and I let her give me a hug. She turns to the cop, her arm still around my shoulders.

"You okay with your boyfriend disciplining your son?" he asks her.

He says it like she shouldn't be and goes up a point or two in my estimation.

"What do you mean?" Mom asks, eyes open wide.

"Well, if you want to press charges for him hitting your boy ..."

Mom presses her lips together and her gaze hardens. She moves back in front of me, grabs both shoulders and holds me at arm's length. She's obviously waiting for me to tell her what happened. I shake my head.

"I just want this all to be over," I say.

"Steve's not going to be a problem," she tells the detective. "Not anymore."

The detective shrugs. "If your son had any obvious injuries, we would be pressing charges, Mrs. Saunders. It's the law."

"So would I, officer, but he seems to be all right. For the moment, anyway."

Mom walks the detective to the door. When she comes back, she gives me another hug.

"Tell me everything," she says. "God, the things I was imagining ..."

I feel guilty about lying to my mom, but I've had some practice with the detective, so the story rolls off my tongue pretty easily, even though I'm squirming inside. Mom's always trusted me and I've tried to live up to that trust. But I'm just not ready to tell her I'm a Wildling. Up until yesterday, I thought they were freaks. But now I'm one of them. What does that say about me?

"Josh, I'm so sorry about Steve. I can't understand what would have gotten into him that he would actually hit you."

Like I said, she's got this blind spot. I can tell she's feeling kind of mad and depressed at the same time.

"I swear, Mom. I really didn't touch Steve's computer."

"I know you wouldn't do anything like that. He's been under a lot of pressure at work, but what he did was completely unacceptable. That's the end of it. He doesn't get a do-over."

"Thanks. I'm going to go take a shower if that's okay."

"That would probably be a very good idea," she says, smiling sadly and wrinkling her nose. That's what I get for sleeping behind a Dumpster in an alleyway.

I grab some fresh clothes from my room.

When I'm inside the bathroom, I strip down and look at myself in the mirror. I don't look any different. I guess I thought maybe I'd be a little more buff or something, but I'm still the skinny kid I've always been. Or, as I like to say when Desmond rags me, I'm wiry.

I lean on the sink and give my reflection a closer look. Okay. Cory said that you just have to think about it to change. I've been wanting to do this ever since he started filling my head with all this stuff. Is it really true, or just some weird-ass delusion?

I figure it's safe in here. The window's too small for me to squeeze through, never mind a mountain lion, and the door's locked. Nobody can get hurt.

So ...

As I will the change, I keep studying my reflection, looking for whatever telltale sign is going to show it starting to happen. I never get the chance to see it. As soon as I make the decision to change, the mountain lion's face is glaring at me from the reflection.

I panic, pushing on the sink to get away because, for one long second, I don't realize that's me in the mirror. Me, in my Wildling shape.

The mountain lion's powerful muscles shove down hard on the sink and the plumbing breaks away from the wall. Water spews out of the broken pipes, drenching me.

I think the water spraying me in the face is all that saves me from completely losing it. It kicks me out of the mountain lion's point of view and, just like that, I shift back to myself. I scrabble in the debris of the sink, which is half hanging from the wall. Water's gushing everywhere until I finally find the shut-off valves and twist them closed.

I sit back on the floor, water pooling all around me, my heart drumming in my chest. Then comes the banging on the door that almost shifts me back into the mountain lion.

"Josh! Joshua! Are you all right in there?"

It's Mom.

I look at the mess I've created.

"Joshua!"

"I'm okay," I call back. "I was just leaning a little too hard on the sink and it kind of broke away."

I get up and wrap a towel around myself before I unlock the door.

"Oh, God," Mom says, taking in the mess. "What were you
doing
in here?"

"Nothing. I was just leaning in close and it came away under me. Honest. I'll clean this all up."

"But the sink ..."

"I can fix it."

"When did you become a plumber?" she asks.

"I'm not. But I'll look it up on the Internet. How hard can it be to fix?"

She looks like she's going to say something else, but then she shakes her head and turns away.

"Just finish your shower," she says in the same tone of voice that she had when I hit a baseball through the front window a couple of years ago. "At least you weren't hurt."

I close the door slowly and look in the mirror again. I can't see any trace of the mountain lion. It's like it was before, just me, except this time I'm soaking wet. Finally, I turn away. I drop the towel and get into the shower.

Marina

I really don't want to leave Josh's place, but the detective won't let me stay. I think about hanging around until after he's gone, but who knows how long that'll be? From where I stand on the sidewalk, I can look in through the living room window and see them talking. I'm dying to hear what they're saying, but then the detective glances in my direction. He's got that smirk on his face again, so I turn my back to him. I drop my skateboard on the pavement and push off, heading for school. I'll just be a little early for my first class.

I'm not sure whether Josh will even show up for school today. I know he'll tell me everything that happened when we do see each other and that's bound to be soon—after school at the latest—but the idea of having to wait is hard. We're never far apart for long, even though I'd like to be close in a different way. I'm just not sure that he feels the same toward me.

Desmond rolls up on the sidewalk outside school at the same time as me.

"Dude!" he yells, even though I'm right in front of him. "Did you check the newsfeeds this morning? Josh got himself kidnapped by some big-ass tiger or something! We've got to put a posse together and find him."

"Jeez, chill, would you?" I say. "He's okay. I just came from his house. He walked in the door ten minutes ago, all on his own."

"What? Crap, I hate being the last to know. How is he? Is he all scratched up? What happened?"

"Who knows? Other than wearing a ridiculous pair of sweats and a Hannah Montana T-shirt, he looks fine. There's not a mark on him. But there was a cop at the house and he made me leave before I could find out what happened."

"You should have texted me."

"It all happened so fast I didn't think of it."

Desmond nods, then he grins. "Oh, man. Hannah Montana. That's pure gold. He's never going to live it down."

Seeing the look of anticipation on his face, I wish I'd never mentioned it. He's going to rag Josh mercilessly.

"Dial it down, Wilson. We don't know what he's been through. We shouldn't assume that everything's fine until he tells us so himself."

He grins. "Overprotective much?"

I know he's teasing, but I bristle all the same. Des is a sweet goof, but sometimes he makes me want to smack him. Like right now.

He catches my look and pretends to cringe.

"Sorry," he says. "I get it. Let me buy you a slushie at lunch to make up for it."

"That's more like it, gringo."

We head up the walk and through the main doors, our boards under our arms. The school lobby is buzzing with gossip about Josh. Kids are standing around in little groups trading stories, trying to figure out what happened. Josh would hate this. He can't stand being the center of attention.

As soon as the other kids notice Des and me in the lobby, we get a few stares because they all know we're best friends with Josh. The volume goes down some, but it doesn't matter. Every second word is still cougar, tiger, lion.

I know, because my Wildling hearing is so acute.

Josh

I'm sitting in front of my computer looking at a list of plumbing sites that I Googled. So far, I haven't found anything useful to my real problem. Getting the sink fastened back to the wall and the pipes reconnected—that doesn't look too hard. It's the plaster that broke away from the wall that I need to figure out how to replace.

I'm about to click on another link when my cell rings out the theme to that old TV show
The Twilight Zone
, played by The Ventures. Considering how things have been going for the past twenty-four hours, it seems all too appropriate.

When I check the display, I see there's another text from Desmond:
Dude yr back? Call me
.

It's the latest of a bunch from him. There's also a couple from Marina. I send them both a message to meet at the parking lot by the pier after they get out of school, then I turn off the phone, close down my computer and go out to the garage.

Mom's parents own our house, which is why we can afford to live here, just a couple of blocks east of the boardwalk and the beach. Gramps was in on the whole Silicon Valley dot-com thing, but he got out before the bust, so he didn't lose his shirt like so many others. He bought this place because he always loved Santa Feliz—I think he used to vacation here when he was a kid—but he and Gramma live in Costa Rica now, which I guess they love even more. When Dad walked out on Mom and me, they insisted that we move in.

I wasn't even in kindergarten yet, so living here is all I know. But even though we don't own the house, Mom insists we look after it like it's our own. I've learned how to do all kinds of things—from rebuilding a stone wall to replacing window panes.

In the garage, I check under the workbench and sure enough, there's some screening left over from when we redid the windows last summer. I may not know how to fix big holes in plaster—yet!—but I know how to fix the damage I did to the screen door yesterday. I grab the roll of screening and some tools and step out of the garage on my way to the backyard.