The Elementalists Read online

  “I’m sorry you had to run into Kendra, honey. But if you’re gonna have to start off this school year with an enemy, for what it’s worth, I think you picked the right one.”

  “Loraine’s here,” Chloe said, meeting her mom’s eyes for a brief moment of understanding.

  “Yeah, I saw that too,” Audrey admitted with the barest hint of a nod.

  “I’m really sorry,” Chloe said.

  Audrey put down the pen and held Chloe’s chin for a gentle moment. “Me too,” she said with glassy eyes. “Now go get dressed; it’s a school night after all.”

  • • •

  The tired, little horn honked twice as Audrey puttered away from the school parking lot with a few unwelcome lurches of the transmission in the twelve-year-old Honda CR-V. As if linked to the bottomless reservoir of Audrey’s energy, the car simply refused to stop—now 210,000 miles and three fender benders since Chloe’s dad had purchased it. Audrey always joked that, aside from Chloe, that car was the best thing that Ray McClellan had left her.

  Chloe watched it idling at the stoplight a hundred yards down the road and considered taking off after it at a dead sprint. If she was going to be the future state champion of distance running, shouldn’t she start practicing now? The light changed and the car disappeared around the corner as Chloe sighed and turned to face the long gauntlet of cars and kids that stood before her and the entrance to Day 2 of high school… Crap.

  Heat waves radiated off the blacktop of the senior parking lot. The first bell wouldn’t ring for another fifteen minutes, but the 150 prime spots reserved for students, mostly seniors, were just a couple cars shy of filled to capacity. Three times as many kids clustered and milled about: laughing, posturing, and blaring music. Chloe clutched her brown-bag lunch tightly, despite the bandaged cuts across her hands, and she made a mental note to have her Mom drop her off at the side entrance from now on. She rolled her neck and stepped from the sidewalk to the blacktop, wearing last year’s running shoes, now brought out of retirement. She’d survived lightning; she could survive this.

  A huge boy nearly took her out as he lunged past her to catch a football that torpedoed in from across the lot.

  “Sorry,” said Ezra Richardson without much more than a glance before he wound up and rocketed the ball back over the swarm of cars in a perfect spiral.

  Ezra had been the starting quarterback of the football team for the last two years and was expected in this, his senior year, to lead the team to a state championship. He stood about six foot four and was a perfect specimen of African-American male physical beauty: perfect skin, chiseled cheek bones, statuesque muscles, and a Hollywood smile. He had his pick of colleges, made everything look effortless, and was completely self-absorbed. Chloe was mesmerized for a moment by the definition in his throwing arm and decided then and there that she hated him. She shuffled on quickly.

  She passed an old, busted van with a slapdash industrial orange paint job and caught a whiff of illicit smoke mingled with tobacco plumes wafting from the cracked windows. Jam band music and laughter rose from within just before the side door banged open and Stan tumbled out in a guffawing heap.

  “Brian, you total A-hole, this is my van, dude!” he declared while regaining his feet. He looked around at the handful of other students who snickered and stared. “And once again, you are totally making an ill-advised scene on school property!” He flashed a toothy smile before catching sight of Chloe walking by.

  “Hey, Cool Chloe!” he shouted with a point and a wave. He took his cell phone from his pocket and hit a couple buttons before holding it up with the hospital bathroom pic that Kendra had taken the night before on the screen. “Lightning Girl! Awesome!”

  Chloe put her head down and kept moving, but now a few other students were glancing in her direction as well. More than once, she glimpsed her picture displayed on the phones of random strangers. You’ve got to be joking! Kendra had been busy.

  Chloe spotted her new enemy surrounded by the soccer posse the next aisle over. Kendra was holding court beside Paul Markson’s silver BMW, draped across the hood as she let out one of her shiver-inducing cackles. Chloe just stared, willing the car to explode and silence Kendra with a jagged shard of metal through her skull and a brilliant fireball to finish off her friends… But her pyrokinetic powers failed her once again.

  Liz moved between cars to intercept her.

  “Chloe, are you all right?” asked Liz with a worried glance to the bandages on her hands. She, too, held a portable phone with Chloe’s picture on the screen.

  Chloe reached out for the phone, and Liz reluctantly handed it over with a grave look. Sure enough, there was Chloe in her hospital gown, covered in dirt, with matted hair and bug-eyed surprise. The text below read: Beware crazy person in our school! STAY BACK, you might get shocked! Approach LIGHTNING GIRL at your own risk!

  At first, Chloe was too pissed off to answer. “Why don’t you ask your new friend?” she seethed.

  “I’m sorry about the picture, Chloe. That was a really bitchy thing to do.” Liz looked down at her shoes. “I just heard about it this morning; I would have called. I was worried about you.”

  Chloe handed the phone back. “Yeah, I’m sure you’ve been dying for an excuse to call me again all summer, and now you’ve missed your chance, is that it?” Chloe wished she could take the words back or silence those that would follow, but she was just too far gone to stop. “No worries, Liz, I’ll probably either get run over by a bus or be attacked by a pack of dogs later today, and then you’ll already have credit for caring for old times’ sake, and you and your cool friends can have enough fodder to make my life hell for the next three years.”

  Liz looked like she was about to cry. “Chloe, that’s not fair,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve come to realize that life is pretty freaking unfair in general, so I guess we can all look at this as a learning experience,” Chloe spat. “And you can tell Kendra that I was the most unassuming kid in her class. I was gonna keep my head down and stay out of everyone’s way. But if she wants an enemy so badly, then so be it—she’s got one.” She was shaking.

  Chloe stormed past Liz without another glance, only half-aware that she was gripping her lunch so tightly that she’d mashed her peanut butter and honey sandwich into a pulpy ball. She felt the cuts on her fingers opening again, but she was too angry to care. Other kids saw her coming and got out of her way. She silenced both the laughter and their whispers with every shift of her furious eyes.

  Day 2, and already she’d gone from “brownnosing freak” to crazy and dangerous. For a moment, she imagined the entire school leveled to a pile of indistinct rock with the parking lot turned into a broken field of twisted metal and scorched bodies. She envisioned herself walking over the shattered remains, calling deadly claws of lightning down upon anything that moved around her. She was destruction—the fury of the elements at her grasp, returning the earth to its wild and natural state.

  She caught the partially detached sole of her shoe on a speed bump and fumbled to keep her feet. Nope, she was still just Chloe: skinny, friendless, sophomore girl, without a hope or a clue. She wrestled back the flood of tears that threatened to break free from her thundering skull, eyes locked on the entrance to school, the last place she wanted to go.

  “Lightning Girl,” someone called.

  Don’t look; don’t even give them the satisfaction of a response.

  “Hey, Chloe!” he persisted.

  She turned, ready to bite. “What!” she snapped, seeing Kirin getting out of a dark blue, classic, woody-sided Grand Wagoneer.

  He walked toward her, casual and smiling. “You look pretty good for being a victim of the elements,” he offered, taking her off guard.

  “Oh, thanks. Just lucky, I guess,” she mumbled.

  “Lucky? I think it’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard.” There was no noticeable mockery as he held up his phone with the picture blazoned across the screen.<
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  “I’m dangerous, you know; you might not want to get too close.”

  “I like living on the edge.”

  “How did you even get that text? You don’t even know anyone at this school yet,” she challenged, feeling her anger dissipating.

  He smirked, “I told you, I’m aloof and mysterious; I have my ways.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m glad it’s going so well for you.” She remembered then the missing grandmother. “No, I’m sorry. Have you heard any news about your grandmother?”

  Kirin smiled sadly. “Not yet, but thanks for asking. My uncle is going to try and get to Xining to see if he can find her, but for now we all just have to wait. It’s pretty bad over there; the whole city was leveled to dust and debris.”

  Chloe thought about her angry fantasy for the school and felt stupid.

  “I don’t think I can deal with this place today,” Kirin admitted. “I’m thinking about taking one of those ten sick days…if maybe you wanted to come along?”

  Chloe’s heart was racing again, but this time for a different reason. “It’s only the second day,” she answered feebly.

  “So what? The first day sucked.” He got back into the driver’s seat, having clearly made up his mind. He shut the door and leaned out the open window. “Come on. You got struck by lightning yesterday, and I don’t know anyone else in town.” He nodded his head toward the passenger door. “Get in, you can show me around.”

  Chloe stood in silence with her thoughts racing. Against all intentions, she’d already become the most famous person in school, and for none of the right reasons. Despite it all, in that moment, she couldn’t contain the grin that blossomed across her face.

  Chapter 5

  The Lost Shoes

  For seven years, Chloe had tried to do everything right: perfect grades, an unflagging dedication to her chores, and an acute sensitivity to the needs of her mother. She’d led a contained, squeaky clean existence—ditching class, let alone on the second day of high school, made her feel a little like a criminal. It felt pretty good, too, and around Kirin, her usual cascade of minor anxieties and racing thoughts was blissfully stilled.

  There was something about his presence that had the same calming effect on Chloe as the few times that she’d stood before the ocean. She was inclined to say things she had intended to keep bottled away. “I’ve never skipped school before.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I guess I’m kind of a nerd,” she admitted before biting her lip in the hopes that it might make her stop talking.

  Kirin glanced at her for a moment and then returned his eyes to the street. Like everything he did, his driving was fluid and effortless. “So where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want to see?” she shot back.

  “Hmmmm,” Kirin pondered. “What does this town have to offer?”

  Chloe thought about it for a moment, looking out the window so he wouldn’t see her barely contained excitement. They passed a sign for the UVA campus. “The university is really pretty? It was founded by Thomas Jefferson—”

  “Seen it,” he cut in. “What else?”

  “Uh,” she thought. “The downtown area has some pretty cool stores and a nice outdoor mall—”

  “Skip it,” he silenced her playfully. “Santa Cruz had cool stores and an outdoor mall. I want something I can’t find everywhere else.”

  She looked out the window at a stoplight and hoped for inspiration. A couple of college kids lounged on an old stone wall and drank coffee by the side of the road… What do the locals do? “There’s an abandoned quarry where a lot of kids go swimming,” she suggested, unsure of herself.

  “Is that where you go?” he asked.

  “No, there’s usually too many people in bathing suits, and I don’t have a car to get there,” she admitted.

  “So where do you and your friends hang out?” he asked.

  Chloe shrugged. “Maybe you noticed this morning, but I’m not exactly swarming with friends right now.”

  “Right, the dangerous Lightning Girl,” he remembered with a chuckle. “So then, where’s the Lightning Girl’s secret lair?” It would have sounded mean coming from anyone else, but Kirin seemed genuinely interested. He was one of those people who made whoever he was with feel as if they were the center of the universe.

  “I guess that would be the pond in the woods up in the hills near my house,” Chloe offered. She’d never brought anyone to the pond but Liz. It seemed almost sacrilegious to speak of it now, but she couldn’t contain the giddy roll in her gut.

  “That’s where we’re going!” Kirin declared.

  Chloe winced. “I’m not so sure. It’s about a mile walk from the road, and my Mom kind of forbade me to go there again after the whole lightning incident.”

  “Yeah, my dad forbade me from skipping school,” Kirin countered with a challenging glance. “But I want to see the spot where Lightning Girl got her special powers,” he ribbed.

  “So far, my only powers seem to be human repulsion and extreme embarrassment.”

  “You’re stalling,” he sang.

  She tried to shoot him a disapproving look, but her smile couldn’t hide for long. “You’re kind of a pain in the ass, huh?”

  “That’s my special power,” he pumped his eyebrows.

  Chloe laughed. “Make a U-turn.”

  • • •

  They parked at the side of the road a few miles from Chloe’s house. Getting caught sneaking back from the one place she was forbidden to go during second period was not on her list of ways to turn the first calamitous week of high school around.

  Kirin had picked up a walking stick a couple hundred yards from the road and strode through the woods as if there was nowhere else in the world he’d rather be. Chloe was in awe of him—watching as he marched ahead and whacked the stick against trees as he passed. How could anyone be so comfortable in their own skin? For a prolonged moment, her eyes held on the ripple of definition that outlined his tanned calves with his every assured step.

  Out of the car, the quieting effects of his presence on her inner monologue had begun to dissipate. Though this had long been her terrain, she now moved under branches and around the rocks with a growing disquiet in her gut, and only partly because of the impromptu rule-breaking journey with the freakishly cute senior.

  Why did violent storms come the last two times I was at the pond? What bubbled up beneath me as I swam yesterday? Who was the blue-eyed man that saved me? Where are my shoes? The questions had returned in a constant cycle. She walked faster to catch up with Kirin’s latest charge up a hill.

  “There’s no path at all?” he observed, glancing over his shoulder.

  “The pond doesn’t even show up on surveyors’ maps of the region,” she answered.

  “Cool,” he offered. “How do you know about it?”

  “I found it running in the woods a few years ago.”

  “Ah, yes, the wild Lightning Girl, sprinting through the hills on her secret missions.” He was clearly pleased with himself.

  This time, Chloe gave him a glare when he glanced over his shoulder. He grinned and turned back to the steady advance through bush and branch, whacking a shrub with his stick as he passed.

  “Are you gonna attack all the plants until we get there?” she challenged, looking to distract herself from the cascade of doubt.

  “Nope, just the ones that get in my way.”

  What a boy thing to say, though she noticed that he peacefully strode around the next sapling that stood in his path.

  “So, if you’re such a runner, are you going to join the cross-country team or something?” He scaled a rocky jut with only a few well-placed bounds.

  “I’m not really much of a joiner, but I guess I was thinking about it,” she admitted for the first time out loud. “What about you? You seem like one of the few who is still capable of interaction with the real world, rather than just video games and online chats.”

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nbsp; “My dad wants me to join the swim team, but I don’t think so. It’s one thing swimming in the ocean, but what’s the point of going back and forth in a little segmented box?” He leapt off the rock and landed out of sight on the other side.

  Chloe circled around but didn’t see him anywhere. She advanced hesitantly, searching the trees. She couldn’t let him get the better of her and kept talking like he was right beside her. “I guess just to prove that you’re the fastest.”

  He appeared at her shoulder from behind, no sound, same cocky smirk. Chloe’s heart jumped.

  “I was born for the water; I already know I’m the fastest. Why should I have to prove it to anyone?” he said.

  The pond was just over the next ridge, and her fear of what she might find there returned in a drenching wave. She glanced at the cuts on her hands and remembered the roar of thunder and the quake of the earth. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

  But Kirin charged past her and stopped at the top of the ridge with a growing smile. “Now we’re talking! No wonder you’ve kept this to yourself!” he declared with his eyes locked on the perfect sheen of water below, glittering in the sunlight and reflecting the blue cloudless sky above. “This place is awesome!” he yelled before taking off at a run.

  “Wait!” cried Chloe without effect. “It’s not safe!”

  Kirin dropped the stick and shed his shirt and shoes without stopping, carelessly discarding them in the grass as he approached the pond. Chloe could hear his laughter, and she was momentarily distracted from her worry by the look of the sunlight on the golden-brown muscles across his back and shoulders.

  She knew she should be chasing after him with her arms and voice raised in warning, but she could only watch with dumbfounded admiration as he reached the edge of the pond and launched himself into a graceful, arching dive. He slipped into the water with barely any splash and disappeared beneath the surface.

  Chloe was moving again, watching the water for the fountain of mud and glancing to the sky for the gathering clouds while she counted the long seconds that Kirin stayed under. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—something is wrong! She started to run.