XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (20 page)

“Yeah,” Janis whispered. “We better stay back until we’re past it.”

They watched the house through the trees as they crept along, following the bank of the creek. The houses always looked different to Scott from behind than from the street—sinister, almost—as though maybe that was the side you weren’t supposed to see. And Scott had never seen
these
houses from behind before. They made it past the Thorntons’ and then the one beyond that. Through the slats of a fence, Scott could make out the aqua tiling of a swimming pool. Though they hadn’t meant to, they were drawing nearer to the backyards, where tangled growth met fencing and barbered lawns. The course of the creek seemed to be pushing them there.

The next house stood large and dark, and Scott couldn’t even remember it now from the street.

“Maybe we should go back,” he whispered.

“Just one more, and we’ll be at the end of The Meadows.” Hoarse excitement scored Janis’s voice. She was always the more adventurous. “We don’t even have to go all the way, just to the edge of the last property line. But we’ll still be able to say we went to the end.”

He wanted to ask her about Samson. One of the houses down there was supposed to have an attack dog, though Scott wasn’t sure which house. His mother was always telling him never to play at the end of the street, in case Samson got out.
Samson
. The name held a grave fascination for him, as if it belonged to a mythical beast. But standing there, Scott felt the fascination turning to dread, like a belt cinching his aorta. He was certain that the tall house with the iron fence was the one—Samson’s house. He looked back the way they had come and then into Janis’s determined eyes.

“Please,” she whispered, squeezing his hand.

He agreed even as his fear centers begged him not to. The thing was, he liked Janis, liked her a lot. And being the only girl he liked—the only girl he really
knew
—Scott just assumed they’d be married someday. Janis smiled and led him forward again. The woods fell under a shadow as palmettos gave way to woody vines and a dim carpet of poison ivy. Janis seemed to know where to step to avoid the ivy without even looking down. Scott followed her until she pulled up.

“Did you hear that?” Her ponytail swished like a flame as she peered from side to side.

Scott listened. “You’re just trying to scare—”

“Shh!”

And then Scott heard it too: a low growl that ended in what sounded like a dry cough. Gooseflesh broke over him until it felt as if someone was trying to lift him by his hairs. Scott saw him before Janis did. And what terrified him the most was not his nearness, but that he had waited until that moment to announce himself. How long had he been watching them?

“Get behind me,” Scott whispered.

“What? What do you see?”

“We need to back away. Slowly.”

He crouched and held the stick out in front of them. Thin and not very long, the stick looked like a wand with which he was trying to cast a warding spell. And in his mind, that’s exactly what he was doing: muttering incantations and hoping beyond hope that Samson could hear him somehow—and would heed him.

Stay right there… We’re leaving… Please… Please don’t come any closer.

He placed one foot behind himself and then, very gently, his other. Janis clung to his shoulders. He could tell by the movement of her breath, first over his left ear then his right, that she still hadn’t spotted him.

“Where?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t afford to become distracted. He would learn later that you were never supposed to lock eyes with an aggressive dog, that the primitive part of its brain would interpret the signal as a challenge. But Scott was certain that the moment he dropped his gaze, Samson would charge. He could see the thought process inside the dog’s obsidian eyes: why bite their arms when he could have one of their throats in his jaws before they knew what was happening?

Scott took another step back. The Rottweiler sprinted from the shadows, barking savagely. In the time it took for Janis to scream, the beast halved the distance and pulled up, his muzzle wrinkling back from scarred gums and a pair of dagger-like canines. The muscles beneath his chest vibrated, as though the least stimulus would set them off. Pound for pound, he was bigger than either of them.

“Shhh…” Scott whispered, not to Janis, but toward the dog. Fear had numbed his body into a shell, like the papier-mâché globes they had made at school the year before with strips of newspaper and flour-based paste. And it felt to Scott as if he was peering out from the inside of his own globe, from that cool hollow where he had popped the balloon and pulled out its flaccid skin. Strangely, his fear was the only thing keeping him calm. He hoped to project that calm onto Samson somehow.

“Shhh…” Scott whispered again, the stick still held up in front of them. With his other hand, he felt behind for Janis.

Samson growled from the pit of his stomach.

Can I have your attention, please?

* * *

Scott started and found himself on a couch, Janis beside him. But she was a more mature version of the Janis he had just been with in the woods, a stunning version.

And then, with the same rapidity with which the party sounds and a Madonna song climbed around them, Scott remembered where he was,
who
he was. He straightened himself. Janis was looking down between them, and when Scott followed her gaze, he found his hand holding hers.

“Oh!” He fumbled to release her. “I’m so sorry—I didn’t—”

Someone whistled sharply. “Hey! Can I have your attention?”

They looked up to where Britt, Gamma’s sergeant at arms, stood. (He was also Scott’s older Gamma brother, who, as older brothers went, had turned out to be indifferent more than anything.) He was wearing a white tuxedo, which might have explained why he was speaking with more than his usual refinement.

Behind Britt, someone turned down the music. Voices fell.

Britt smiled. “That’s more like it.” He waved the pledges into the dining room. “The presidents of Alpha and Gamma would like to make a toast.”

“I’m all right,” Janis whispered to Scott, holding her own hand now.

When their eyes met, perplexity wrinkled the space between her brows. She stood and, with a backward glance, joined the other pledges filing up the three steps. Beyond their heads, Scott could see slices of Grant Sidwell and Margaret Graystone standing in the center of the dining room, drinks in hand. Scott followed the pledges but at the last moment veered down the hallway.

Squinting against the bright lights of the bathroom, Scott locked the door and leaned his arms against the marble countertop.

What in the world just happened?

That day in the woods—he hadn’t been just remembering the experience, he had been inside of it, reliving it. Had he just completely zoned out? Had he slumped there like a zombie while Janis sat watching him? He must have. And why was his hand holding hers? How had
that
happened?

He filled the sink with cold water and scooped it against his face, trying to drown the memory of that final bewildered look Janis had given him.
Way to go, Sport. Way to freak her out.

Through the door, he heard shouts of “Hear! Hear!”

“All right,” he told himself as he toweled his face off. “This thing goes until eleven. There’s still time. There’s still time to fix this.” He cleared his throat and spoke into the huge mirror. “Oh, hey, Janis. Sorry about blanking out on you a minute ago. I’ve got this weird epilepsy thing I contracted while, um, watching an episode of
The Space Giants
. No, no, I’m fine. And don’t worry, it’s not contagious or anything.” He forced a weak laugh.

When Scott emerged, he found Janis across the living room. For a second he thought she was raising her hand toward him, but she was only pushing a strand of hair behind her ear, her gaze fixed on whomever she was talking to. It was not until he skirted a group in the center of the room that he saw the person in Janis’s company: Blake Farrier. It was a bye week, Scott remembered—no football game.

Scott took another step nearer, but something about their closeness and the angles of their bodies told Scott that their conversation would not be welcoming of a third party. He’d get no points for barging in and spilling a drink this time. And Blake looked so solid standing there, so self-possessed. When Janis’s lips turned up at something he said, Scott’s heart crumpled into a wad.

He retreated to the refreshment table, where Sweet Pea was encamped, a plate piled high to either side, and watched their faces from across the room.

Blake and Janis were still together when, an hour later, Scott went to the kitchen to call his father. As he returned through the pillars of the front hallway, he raised his hand to the living room, to no one, then went slouching out into the night, toward the house where his father had dropped him off.

16

“Blake asked me out,” Janis said.

Margaret turned toward her. “
Out
out? Like on a date?” She smirked and returned her gaze to the road. “I was wondering why you were being so quiet.”

They had just dropped Feather Heather off, and the Prelude’s headlights were sweeping an arc past the Oakwood sign. The Alpha-Gamma gala had gone until almost eleven o’clock, and Margaret and Janis had stayed late to help Kelly and her parents clean up.

“How did he ask you?”

“He said he was getting his driver’s license this week and invited me to a movie next Saturday.”

“And you said…?” Margaret was watching her from the edge of her vision, ready to critique any missteps in her answer.

“I said that it sounded nice but that,
yes
, I would have to check with Dad.”

Margaret nodded her approval. “You always want them to know you have a father looking out for you. That’s very important. It separates the ones who are serious about you from the sleazeballs.” She patted Janis’s knee. “But I happen to know that Blake is one of the good ones. I’ll be happy to put in a word to Dad for you.”

“Thanks.”

“He’ll still want to meet him, of course.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well, how does it feel,” Margaret asked, steering them into The Meadows, “your first time being asked out in high school? You seem sort of, I don’t know, blasé about the whole thing.”

Janis watched the road. How
did
she feel? In the moment it happened, it had seemed surreal. Blake had found her after the toast and congratulated her for making the varsity team that day. (She was the first freshman in eight years to be selected—and he knew that as well, somehow). From there, they had fallen into the kind of conversation people have when they both know they’re interested in each other and, for the first time, they’re beginning to suspect that the feeling might be mutual: conversation that’s intimate and excited but a little guarded at the same time, a little frightened. Then Blake was telling her about his driver’s license. He was asking her about a movie together. And as Janis wrote down her number on his invitation, she realized that if they had still been in middle school, if it had been only a year or two earlier, she would have written it down on the palm of his hand.

Yes,
surreal
was definitely the word for it.

But with a little distance, Janis wondered whether the sphere of their conversation, his asking her out, had felt that way for the very reason that it was so far removed from the fear and strangeness that was becoming her life, her
reality
.

That week, Janis had become more attuned to the news during dinner. The bulk of coverage dealt with the presidential election. (Mondale wasn’t seen as having a spitting chance in November, and even though her mother didn’t say it, Janis could see from the cast of her eyes the news depressed her.) Janis paid closer attention to the international stories, the coverage seeming to fit with what her father had told her. U.S.-Soviet relations were as tense as they’d been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Reagan was talking about building a missile defense system in space—“Star Wars” they were dubbing it. Even Reagan’s call for an arms reduction treaty seemed to fit. After all, why try to change the rules of the game unless the other team was winning under the old rules?

And during P.E. that Monday, Janis had overheard a fellow student—a nerd, she supposed—telling another student that “the Doomsday Clock” had been moved to three minutes until midnight that year.

“What does that mean?” she’d asked, her shoe still propped on the gym bleachers where she’d gone to tie it.

At first, the student, seated on the bleachers, had only responded by stroking his frayed mustache, grinning up in a way that made his smallish eyes press together. When he spoke, his voice was thin and arrogant. “Well, well, a neophyte doth seeketh a sip from the fountain of knowledge.” He turned to an Asian student beside him. “What say you, Chun? Is this one worthy?”

“Oh, forget it,” Janis muttered.

He spoke rapidly to her back. “The Doomsday Clock is a feature of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
put out by the University of Chicago. The minute hand represents the statistical probability of global nuclear war.” He gasped for breath. “The scientists adjust it depending on how far or close we are. I was just telling Chun that they adjusted it up another minute this year.”

“Is three until midnight really close?” she asked. “Is it bad?”

“Put it this way.” Now that he had her attention again, arrogance crept back into his voice. “It’s the closest we’ve been since 1953, when things were really looking hairy. Two til midnight means we’ve probably crossed the point of no return. One til midnight, and we’ve actually punched the launch codes and are on alert for the final executive order before…” He traced out a trajectory with his finger while he whistled, then he threw his hand open. “Good night, sweet princess.”

Beside him, Chun had nodded. “Affirmative, it’s bad.”

So maybe that’s what it was, Janis thought, sitting beside Margaret. At the beginning of the school year, she had tried to leave her nighttime experiences for the normal, the everyday, only to learn in the last week that “the everyday” was three minutes from being blown to shit. But with Blake, she had a place she could feel normal and safe again, even if she knew it was illusory.