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Helen followed her stubborn friend down the hallway, feeling her shoulders slump more with every step. She hated the thought of going against Cassandra, but when Claire set her mind to something there was no point in arguing with her. Helen just hoped that whatever Claire was planning didn’t get her permanently cursed with boils or lice or something equally horrid. Claire could get seriously hurt.
The bell rang just as Helen and Claire scooted into homeroom. Mr. Hergesheimer, or “Hergie” as he was called behind his back, gave them one of his most disapproving glares. It was almost like he could smell the trouble brewing inside Claire’s head. Hergie assigned both of them two words of the day for the next morning as preemptive punishment for whatever it was they were so obviously up to. From that moment on, Helen’s day got progressively worse.
Helen had never been the most attentive student, and now that she was spending her nights slogging through the Underworld, she had even less interest in school. She was scolded in every class, but at least one of her peers was doing even worse than she was.
As their physics teacher tore into Zach for not writing up his lab, Helen wondered what had happened. Zach had always been one of those guys who looked awake and alert no matter what time it was. Usually, he was a bit too alert, sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Helen had never seen Zach looking so washed out and disconnected. She tried to catch his eye and smile at him in solidarity, but he turned away.
Helen sat staring at his blank face until it finally sank into her sleep-deprived brain that about a week ago she had heard someone say that Zach had quit the football team. Zach’s dad, Mr. Brant, was the football coach, and Helen knew that he pushed Zach to be perfect in everything he did. There was no way Mr. Brant would allow his son to quit without a fight. Helen wondered what had happened between them. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been good. Zach looked horrible.
When the bell rang at the end of class Helen tried to touch Zach’s arm and ask him if he was okay, but he acted like she wasn’t even there and walked out of the room. There was a time in their lives when Helen and Zach had been friends—he used to share his animal crackers with her on the playground—but now he wouldn’t even look at her.
Helen had just resolved to ask Claire about Zach and his mysterious condition at track when she caught a glimpse of Lucas from afar. Everything else dissolved like a chalk drawing in the rain.
He was holding a door open over someone’s head, politely making a bridge so that a smaller underclassman could walk beneath his arm. He glanced back down the hallway at nothing in particular and spotted her. His eyes narrowed in anger.
Helen froze. It felt like someone was kneeling on her chest again. That’s not Lucas, she thought, unable to breathe or move.
As Lucas disappeared in the throngs of rushing students, Helen made her way down to the locker room to change for track, her mind wiped clean, like the sky after a thunderstorm.
When Claire showed up, Helen immediately started asking her questions. She’d stumbled across this trick a few weeks back when she realized that if she peppered her best friend with questions, Claire wouldn’t have time to ask how she herself was doing. This time, Claire really did need to talk. Jason was having a bad day and Claire was worried about him.
Jason and Claire weren’t officially dating, but ever since Jason had healed her they were obviously more than just friends. They had become very close very quickly, and now she was Jason’s closest confidante.
“Are you going over to his house after track?” Helen asked quietly.
“Yeah, I don’t want to leave him alone right now. Especially since Lucas is still MIA.”
“What do you mean?” Helen asked, alarmed. “He hasn’t been home at all since . . .” Since he told me to go to hell, hit his father, endangered his mother, and got thrown out of his house? Helen finished in her mind.
Claire seemed to know exactly what Helen was thinking, and she squeezed Helen’s hand in support as she explained.
“No, he’s been home a few times since then. He apologized to his parents and they forgave him, of course. But he’s never around anymore. No one knows where he’s been going or what he’s been doing, and honestly? Everyone’s too afraid of him to ask. He’s changed, Lennie. He doesn’t talk to anyone, except maybe Cassandra. He vanishes right after school, and sometimes he doesn’t come home until one or two o’clock in the morning, if he comes home at all. His parents are letting him go because, well, without Hector around, no one can really stop him. Jason is worried,” Claire said before glancing sideways at Helen. “You haven’t seen him lately, have you?”
“Today. But only for a second, way down the hall,” Helen said, ending the line of questions before Claire could ask her how she felt. “Look, I gotta pick up the pace. Are you okay, or do you want to talk some more?”
“You go ahead,” Claire said with a troubled frown.
Helen gave Claire a little smile to let her know she was okay, even though she kind of wasn’t, and then sped up to finish her run in a time that Coach Tar would think showed initiative.
Lucas saw Helen at the end of the hallway, and forced his face into an angry shape, willing her to hate him or fear him—whatever it took to get her the hell away from him. For her own good.
But Lucas didn’t see hate or fear in her eyes. She didn’t turn away from him like she was supposed to. She just looked lost.
It felt like chewing glass, but Lucas forced himself to turn his back on her and continue down the hallway.
All he had intended was to push Helen away.
But then things got out of hand: striking his father; his mother, bleeding; the blind rage he felt. Lucas knew what anger felt like. He and Hector had been fighting tooth and nail since they were big enough to stand. But this was like nothing he had experienced before. He’d woken something up inside of himself, something that he’d had no idea existed in him.
The genie was out of the bottle and it wouldn’t fit back in.
Finishing her run long before Claire, Helen decided that she wanted to walk to work so she could think. She sent Claire a text explaining that she didn’t need a ride to the News Store that afternoon and stifled the suspicion that Claire would probably be pleased with Helen’s decision to go it alone.
They had never avoided each other before, but things had changed. Their lives were pulling them in different directions, and Helen was beginning to wonder if their friendship would ever be the same again. The thought made her want to cry.
The temperature started to plummet as Helen walked up Surfside Road toward the center of town. Her jacket was unbuttoned and the straps from the book bag over one shoulder and the gym bag over the other pulled the two sides of her jacket apart so she couldn’t close the front properly. With an exasperated cluck of her tongue, Helen unslung her bags. As she bent over to put them down on the ground, she experienced a strange vertigo. It seemed for a moment that the sidewalk didn’t quite match up to the street, like there was something terribly wrong with her depth perception.
Straightening up with a gasp, Helen put an arm out to the side in case she fell over, waiting for the rush of blood to her head to end. The vertigo was gone in a moment but an even more disturbing sensation replaced it. Helen felt like she was being watched, like someone was standing right in front of her, staring directly into her eyes.
