"I didn't know you ran," Paul said, but I was already gone.
I sprinted across the parking lot, past the square dorms, past
Yancey Hall with its buttercream columns and Seward Hall with its laughing satyr fountain out front. My sneakers slapped the brick walk as I followed the song, giving into its tug.
The music grew in intensity, mingling with the music that was always in my mind anyway--the psychic fabric that gave me my bearings, that told me where I was in the world. The brick walk ended but I kept running, stumbling on the uneven, overgrown grass. I felt like I was jumping off the edge of the world. The evening autumn sun blazed across the hills, and all I could think was I'm too late.
But there he walked, whoever he was--faraway on the hills, nearly out of my sight. He was little more than a silhouette, a dark figure of uncertain height on an endless hill of dazzling gold. His hands reached out to either side of him, pressing downwards in a gesture that seemed to urge the earth to stay still. Right before he moved too far away for me to discern him from the dark trees far behind him, he stopped.
The music kept on, loud in the way that music in headphones is--sounding like it was made by my brain for my brain alone.
But I knew now, somehow, that it wasn't for me. It was for someone or something else, and I just had the misfortune to hear it as well.
I was devastated.
The figure turned toward me. For a long moment, he stood facing me. I was held, anchored to the ground--not by his music, which still called and pushed against the music already in my head and said grow rise follow--but by his strangeness. By his fingers, spread over the ground, holding something into the earth; by his shoulders, squared in a way that spoke of strength and unknowability; and most of all, by the great, thorny antlers that grew from his head, spanning the sky like branches.
Then he was gone, and I missed his going in the instant that the sun fell off the edge of the hill, abandoning the world to twilight. I was left standing, a little out of breath, feeling my pulse in the scar above my left ear. I stared after when he had been. I couldn't decide if I wished I had never seen the antlered figure, so that I could just go on as before, or if I wished I had gotten here sooner, so I could figure out why I was seeing creatures like him again.
I turned to go back to the school but before I could, I was hit by something solid, right in my gut. It pushed me off balance; I fought to stay upright.
The owner of the body gasped, "Oh my God, I'm sorry!"
The voice stung, familiar. Deirdre. My best friend. Could I still call her that? I gasped, "It's okay. I only need just the one kidney."
Deirdre spun, her face flushed, and her expression changed so quickly I couldn't tell what it had been originally. I couldn't stop staring at her face. I had seen her--gray eyes dominating the slender shape of her pale face--so many times with my eyes shut that it seemed strange to see her with them open.
"James. James! Did you see Them? They had to have come right by you!"
I struggled to pull myself together. "Who's 'Them'?"
She stepped away from me to look over the hill, eyes narrowed, squinting into the oncoming darkness. "The faeries. I don't know--four of them? Five?"
She was seriously freaking me out; she moved so quickly that her choppy dark ponytail swung in small circles. "Okay, look, Dee, stop moving. You're making me seasick. Now what-faeries? Again?"
Deirdre closed her eyes for a minute. When she opened them again, she looked more like herself. Less frantic. "So stupid. I'm just weirded out, I guess. It's like I'm seeing them everywhere."
I didn't know what to say. It kind of hurt just to look at her, in a way I'd forgotten. Sort of like a splinter--not when you first get it under your skin, but the slow ache after it has been taken out.
She shook her head. "Can I be any more stupid? Seriously, it's been forever since I've seen you and I'm already whining in the first five minutes. I should be jumping out of my skin with happiness. I'm--I'm sorry I haven't gotten a chance to see you yet."
For a moment I'd thought that "I'm sorry" would be followed by something else. Something intensely meaningful that would show some recognition that she'd hurt me. When it didn't come, I really wanted to pout and make her feel bad, but I didn't have the balls. Instead, I rescued her, like the gallant, punishment-loving idiot that I am. "Well, the brochure did say that the campus was more than fifteen acres. It could've been years before we ran into each other."
Deirdre bit her lip. "I had no idea how crazy the class schedule would be. But--wow. It's so good to see you."
There was a long, awkward moment where a hug would've usually happened, before last summer. Before Luke, and way before that text message I'd sent--the one neither of us could forget.
"You're very tanned," I said. A lie; Dee didn't tan.
Dee sort of smiled. "And you cut your hair."
I ran a hand over my head, let my fingers worry over the new scar above my ear. "They had to shave it to put the stitches in. I just shaved all of it to match. I wanted to shave my initials in it, but--this will come as a shock to you--I just now realized that my initials spell JAM. It was kind of humiliating."
Dee laughed. I was absurdly pleased that she did. "It sort of suits you," she said, but her eyes were on my hands and the scribbled words that covered both of them up to the wrist.
More ink than skin.
I wanted to ask her how she was, about the faeries, about the text, but I couldn't seem to say anything important. "Better than it would you."
She laughed again. It wasn't a real laugh, but that was okay, because I hadn't really meant it to be funny. I just needed something to say.
"What are you doing here?"
Both Dee and I spun and found ourselves facing one of the teachers: Eve Linnet. Dramatic Lit. She was a small, pale ghost in the dim light. Her face might've been pretty if she hadn't been scowling. "This isn't school grounds."
Something nagged me as wrong, though it took me a second to realize what. She'd come from the hills, not from the school.
Linnet craned her neck as if she'd just noticed Deirdre; Dee's face was red as if we'd been caught doing something. Linnet's voice was sharp. "I don't know what sort of schools you two came from, but we don't allow any of that sort of behavior here."
Before last summer, I would've made some joke about Dee and
I--about how it wasn't like that, how I was her bound love slave since birth, or how nothing had happened because Dee was repulsed by a certain chemical component in my skin. But instead I just said, "It wasn't like that."
I knew it sounded guilty, and she must've thought so too, because she said, "Oh, it wasn't? Then why were you all the way out here?"
I had it. I looked past her, toward the hills, and her eyes darted along my line of vision. "We were waiting for you."
Dee looked at me sharply, but not in the way Linnet did. Linnet looked angry, or afraid. For a long moment she didn't say anything at all, and then, finally, she said, "I don't think any of us should be here right now. Let's go back to the dorms, and I'll just forget this whole thing ever happened. It's a terrible way to begin a school year, anyway. In trouble."
As Linnet turned to lead us back to the school, Dee cast an admiring glance in my direction, and then rolled her eyes toward Linnet, thoughts plain: she's crazy! I shrugged and allowed Dee half a grin. I didn't think there was anything wrong with Linnet's sanity, though. I think that I wasn't the only one who had gone running out to meet that music.
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James
Last nite wz weird. I miss talking like we used 2. Not that u would want 2 hear about this stuff i'm thinking. Like luke. I know what heartache means now. I feel like puking when i think of him.