The Elementalists Page 25

  “I don’t get it,” Kendra whined. “I mean, what’s so special about her?”

  Chloe was transfixed, unable to move, despite the fact that her shoe had been successfully double-knotted for more than a minute. Yes, what is so special about me?

  Before she could hear the answer, Kirin took her by the shoulders and marched her away toward the stairs. “Hey, remember me?” he whispered in her ear.

  The hair sprang up along her neck as a delightful little shiver traveled down from the spot where his lips grazed the fabric against her earlobe. “I’m, uh, sorry,” she sputtered, suddenly feeling a little exposed despite the mask. “That was kind of hard to walk away from.”

  Kirin smiled. “He’s right, you know; you are real… I’d say you’re more authentically yourself than pretty much anyone else I’ve ever met.”

  “I am?” She wasn’t totally sure that she even knew what that meant. “I usually feel like a fraud,” she muttered under her breath.

  “See, there it is again.” He took her hand again and stepped into the lead as they skipped down the stairs. “So where are we gonna find these milkshakes?”

  Chloe relaxed into the surprising warmth of his grip and met his eyes. Instantly her burdened thinking washed away. It was true that Ezra helped to keep her grounded and sane, just as he claimed she did for him, but with Kirin she felt loose and unstoppable, as if anything was possible if she simply allowed herself to go with the flow. She never wanted this night to end.

  “Follow me,” she said, retaking the lead.

  • • •

  Chloe and Kirin sat at the Positive Pete’s counter and slurped greedily at a couple of black-and-white shakes. Chloe had lifted her mask just long enough to surprise Audrey and order “the usual,” but she’d lowered it again as a handful of kids she recognized from school clustered into one of the tables behind her.

  Kirin rolled his eyes at her presumed need for anonymity and joined her close watch of the diner through the mirror above the coffeemaker. With the harsh jangle of the little bell above the door, a quartet of super preppy boys strolled in like they owned the place. The one in the lead looked like he thought he was God’s gift to women and the world as he scanned the restaurant with his cocksure gaze. His eyes didn’t even hesitate on Chloe and Kirin, locking instead on Audrey as she walked by with a tray of drinks. Chloe watched as he dropped his gaze to her mom’s behind and made a ‘look at that’ nod to his idiot friends. Men are disgusting!

  She considered walking over and “accidentally” spilling her entire milkshake down the front of his pants…

  “I bet you that the greatest story of that guy’s life will come out of his time as the captain of his high school lacrosse team… And one day, he’ll have a wife that’s going to cheat on him,” cut in Kirin.

  Chloe burst out laughing with an unseemly spray of milkshake.

  “I bet his name is Brock,” he added.

  Chloe wiped shake from the edges of the mouth hole in her mask. “He probably drives a Hummer and has a really small penis.” Christ! Did I just say that?

  “I don’t know, I drive a Grand Wagoneer, but I’m HUGE,” Kirin stated with an exaggerated smirk.

  Chloe laughed again, this time with a little involuntary snort. Kirin looked very proud of himself as Chloe glanced up to catch his eyebrow pump in the mirror. Both their gazes moved back to the door as the lacrosse boys were led to their table and a trio of glassy-eyed college kids ambled in.

  The two guys were dressed up like a tinfoil robot and a convenience store pirate. They flanked a tall, borderline sloppy girl wearing a Little-Bo-Peep-gone-bad costume, complete with a shepherd’s crook and a skirt so short that Chloe could almost see her underwear.

  “What about them?” Chloe asked.

  Kirin gave them a hard look. “The pirate and the robot are best friends, but the friendship is going to end tonight when one of them winds up with Bo Peep there… They’ve both had a thing for her for a while, but neither has ever had the guts to do anything about it.”

  Chloe watched as Bo Peep walked ahead, ignoring them both as she drunkenly scanned the crowd. “Yeah, but Bo Peep is playing them off each other. She thinks they’re both losers and is just using their fawning attention to attract a third option.”

  Kirin gave Chloe an appreciative nod. “Well played, Miss McClellan.”

  Chloe sipped at her shake and tried to subdue the building urge in her gut to giggle joyously.

  “How about this guy,” said Kirin. “The one getting out of the black SUV… President of the Chuck Norris fan club?” he suggested as former officer Brent Meeks removed his mirror shades and stepped into the diner.

  He was wearing his black-on-black tough guy ensemble and quickly picked Audrey out of the bustle on the other side of the restaurant.

  “I know him,” hissed Chloe.

  Brent marched over to the bar without waiting to be seated and took the stool beside Chloe. He took out a toothpick and started chewing on the tip as he waited for Audrey to notice him. Despite his outfit, he looked nervous and unsure of himself as his eyes tracked her progression toward the kitchen window.

  Chloe hunched her shoulders and tensed as her mom approached. Audrey’s lips went very thin as she saw who was there. She walked over deliberately, sharing a quick glance with Chloe as she passed.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered to Brent. “You know Loraine isn’t working today.”

  “I’m here to see you,” said Brent.

  “Why?” Audrey challenged with a frown.

  Brent chewed a little more intently on the toothpick. “I got a new job, for a lot more money and really good benefits,” he said lamely.

  “Yeah, I heard,” snapped Audrey. “So?”

  “So…I could help you. I mean, I miss you…and now I have more of a future and stuff,” he stammered.

  “Wow,” said Audrey. “Did you rehearse that?”

  “Come on, Audrey, I’m sorry,” he flared. “I’m just saying, you could really use the help, and you could do a lot worse than me.”

  “Gee, Brent, that’s really sweet,” she said icily. “You always knew just what to say to the ladies, didn’t you?”

  “Dammit, Audrey, what are you going to do when Chloe goes to college, huh?” Brent was breathing hard now. “How are you gonna pay for it? You gonna get a third job on your day off, or are you just gonna cut out sleeping altogether?”

  Audrey glanced back to Chloe, whose eyes were still locked on the shake. “I don’t need your help, Brent. Now please just drop it and go,” she said before turning to leave.

  “Do you even know what Chloe is up to while you’re off at work all the time? Do you know where she goes? Did you know that I caught her trespassing on private property a couple weeks ago?” said Brent, freezing Audrey in her tracks. “She was making out with some stoner kid on the same hill where she got struck by lightning, and there was some pretty serious vandalism done to some expensive equipment on-site.”

  Audrey slowly spun back around with her furious gaze passing across Chloe’s deer-in-the-headlights response. Audrey leveled her gaze on Brent, like a mother bear readying to charge. “If you’d been paying any attention at all while we were together, you’d know the one thing you never do with me is try to come between me and my daughter.”

  Brent leaned back from the bar and actually looked a little scared. “I’m not trying to come between you,” he stammered defensively. “I care about Chloe, too; I’m just trying to look out for her, you know, when you’re not around.” He put his hands up as if he was readying to ward off an assault.

  She took a step closer and snatched away the menu that sat on the counter in front of him. “Thanks for that, but you’re gonna have to go now. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t come back when I’m on shift, you understand me?”

  He could only nod and swallow his pride in silence before getting up, putting his mirror shades back on and storming out the door.

 
Audrey walked over to the kitchen window and handed over her most recent ticket before glancing back to Chloe. “We’ll talk later tonight,” she said curtly before heading back out to the floor.

  Chloe was a little shell-shocked as she turned back to see Kirin’s raised eyebrows.

  “I didn’t make out with any stoner kid,” she finally offered in her defense.

  “Uh-huh,” he said with a skeptical little smile.

  “I swear,” stammered Chloe. “Stan is…a friend.”

  Kirin scratched the side of his nose. “At least this time while you’re grounded, I’ll be away in China anyway.”

  Chloe leaned in to fill her scowl with shake, but all that came out was the hollow slurp of an empty glass. Maybe wearing a mask isn’t so helpful after all.

  • • •

  A heavy plume of smoke billowed out from under the hooked beak that covered Stan’s nose. He sat in the shadows on the front porch with a mostly empty bowl of candy at his feet—no longer open for business. The butt-end of a joint hung from his lips as half-closed eyes trailed the last few costumed kids that skittered away down the street.

  Mr. and Mrs. Strakowski were out for the night at a law firm Halloween function. After Chloe cancelled, Stan had opted to stay home and greet trick-or-treaters rather than attempt to chase down Brian and the crew. The van was still sitting untouched since the accident in the back lot of an auto body shop run by his older sister’s ex-boyfriend, Tad. The deal had been a bag of weed and carte blanche to make whatever alterations Tad felt inspired to make, for an otherwise pro bono fix-up and an open-ended work schedule. Stan would be lucky to have his ride back by Christmas.

  Without the wheels, and now that Brian was dating Rosalie, Stan found himself stranded at home more and more often. But he didn’t care about that anymore. Now he just wanted to hang out with Chloe. There was something about her that made him feel at home in his skin for the first time in his life—more than just the fact that she was the only one who knew his secret. She’d even started to show up in his dreams, which had begun to get increasingly…strange.

  With his eyes closed, Stan could still feel the sensation of traveling above Charlottesville as the wind itself. It was the most spectacular feeling he’d ever had, and he wanted more. Soaring above the trees in whipping bursts as Chloe’s wild laughter crackled and sparked around and within him—it had come every night for the past week, getting more vivid every time.

  His lids opened back to half-mast, and he took a last unnecessary toke from the joint. It burned the tips of his fingers as he inhaled before he leaned over to tamp out the dregs against the side of the brick stoop. The lazy spill of smoke rose from his beak once more, and for a second, it climbed into the cool air in what looked like the ethereal form of a winged serpent. Stan smiled, and his gaze drifted up to the watching moon. Something in the dark hemisphere held his attention. After a moment, he almost expected to see a pair of glowing eyes staring back from the shadow there as a disconcerting tickle crept up his spine.

  He shook off the creepy feeling when the headlights of a car streaked by as it rounded the corner. He couldn’t tell if it was a station wagon past the glare. Don’t be my parents. Don’t be my parents. It was a hatchback, and it kept going.

  Still, they could return any minute now. He checked his ironically cool calculator watch: 11:19 p.m.—the sanctuary of his bedroom was calling. He reached into the plastic pumpkin bowl and plucked a last mini box of grape Nerds for the road.

  Even in his lucid moments—this not being one of them—Stan couldn’t explain why the idea of a dragon living in Charlottesville seemed right to him. Something about the alleged monster, and Chloe, and the dreams—all strangely believable, all connected, like how it felt in the dream.

  Despite the sugar overload, he yawned hard and turned toward the door. He’d be flying again before long… Dude, Chloe’s hiding something. I’m gonna find out what it is.

  Chapter 20

  The Big Stink

  Chloe did not race well on Saturday afternoon. It was a regional away meet against two other schools, one of which was likely to be a strong competitor for the state title. She came in seventh place overall. Angela won it, as always, but four of the Richmond Raiders girls came in before Chloe. Worse still, another rising young sophomore at Monticello High had crept by her at the end as well. Charlottesville got second place at the meet, and Chloe felt like she’d let the team down.

  The mood was jovial on the bus ride home, but Chloe imagined an undercurrent of disappointment around her. At one point in the race, she’d actually tuned out to the degree that she ran ten long strides in the wrong direction. She probably would have kept going if not for one of the opposing girls who’d screamed for her to turn around in a further humbling act of sportsmanship. After that, Chloe hadn’t been able to recover before the final hill, and she’d had nothing left for the sprint toward the finish.

  Chloe’s head hadn’t been in the race; there was no one to blame but herself… Audrey had come home the night before ready to fight, and Chloe had been foolishly willing to oblige. Chloe couldn’t remember ever seeing her mom that pissed before.

  She wasn’t mad about her daughter allegedly making out with a stoner on a hill; Stan had set off Audrey’s fairly reliable gaydar both times she’d met him. BUT she was furious that Chloe had betrayed the hard-fought sense of trust between them. In fact, according to Audrey, Chloe had betrayed that trust twice—once when she’d returned to the banned site of her electrical mishap and again when she’d demonstrated a “complete lack of judgment” when she hadn’t told her mom about the latest incident that had occurred there. Breaking the often flexible rules was one thing if you owned up to it, but keeping secrets and lying to cover it up was something else altogether.

  In what had become a rare act of emotional weakness since the year after Ray McClellan had left, Audrey had actually started to cry as she was expressing her disappointment. Chloe had, in turn, started to cry as she acknowledged her mother’s side of it and asked for forgiveness, and before long, the two of them were wrapped in a prolonged hug while laughing and weeping at once… Of course, Chloe still didn’t mention the ongoing interaction she was having with the giant mythological beast. She figured that there was only so much honesty her mother could take in one night.

  Despite it all, Chloe still couldn’t get her mind off Kirin. She wouldn’t see or speak to him for eight more days, and just as he’d predicted, she would be grounded for all of them.

  It was already dark by the time Audrey picked her up from the bus at the school parking lot, and as the rest of the team said their good-byes and waved, Chloe got in the CR-V with a hangdog expression. They drove in silence for a while.

  “That good, huh?” Audrey finally asked.

  Chloe shrugged. “I came in seventh and the team got second.”

  “Is that bad?” Audrey asked. “Sounds pretty good to me.”

  “I could have done better,” Chloe muttered, looking at the flutter of dark trees out the window.

  The engine lurched into a higher gear and started to groan as they climbed the winding hill toward the Daedalus Group turnoff to Chloe’s pond. I guess it was the dragon’s pond all along. Then she remembered the way Kirin had looked, sun-drenched and shirtless as he’d pulled himself out of the water…

  “Is there something else bothering you?” Audrey asked with a quick glance to her daughter. “Anything you want to talk about?”

  Chloe shrugged and pressed her lips together.

  “Didn’t Kirin leave for China today?” Audrey pressed.

  Chloe deflated. “Mom, I’m not supposed to feel like this!” she blurted. “I can’t stop thinking about him. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me!”

  “You’re only fifteen! You have no idea what sort of things are going to happen to you,” Audrey cut in. “But you need to learn to be open to whatever comes because life is going to throw you some curve balls, and not all of them are going
to be as easy as a cute boy who likes you.”

  “How do I even know if he likes me?” Chloe asked. “I’m basically just holding my breath and waiting for him to lose interest and stop talking to me altogether.”

  “Not all men are like your dad, Chloe,” said Audrey.

  Just the mention of Ray McClellan rendered them both temporarily frozen. “Sorry, but that’s a little hard to believe coming from you,” Chloe mumbled.

  “Hey, I’m not pretending I have all the answers or that I’ve found my soulmate, but I’m still out there trying, despite all the duds that have come in and gone back out the door,” said Audrey with a sad little smile. “But from what I’ve seen and what you’ve said, Kirin, Ezra Richardson, and even Stan seem like pretty solid guys to me.”

  “Ezra’s an egomaniacal man whore, and Stan’s gay and has a bit of a drug problem,” Chloe admitted.

  Audrey shot her daughter a hard look but then eased it back into a shrug. “I know, but they’re good people, and I think they really value you as a friend.”

  Chloe suddenly felt a swell of guilt as she realized how lame she’d been toward them this week. She groaned and buried her face in her hands. “Yeah, but what if I’m not a good person?” she asked through the muffle of her fingers.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Chloe, you’re one of the best people! You’re my favorite person, and outside of my own failed romances, I think I’m a pretty good judge of character,” she said with her eyes locked on the road. “People are drawn to you without you even trying… You’re like your father that way—a natural-born leader.”

  Chloe looked up just in time to see the headlights pass over the Daedalus Group sign as her mother shot a glare that way. “Mom, what happened with Dad and the Daedalus Group?” Chloe asked hesitantly.

  Audrey looked at her through the dark and then back to the road. “He worked for them about nine years ago; I guess it was about a year and a half before he left,” she said quietly. “Your dad was a pretty impressive talker when he wanted to be. I used to joke that he could sell ice to an Eskimo if he put his mind to it… Well, Richard Roberts recognized his talent right off and hired him to work in the PR department at the new company headquarters, trying to build a corporate brand image for the community.”