The longer Isobel stared at the figure standing in the open doorway, though, the more distant Coach’s voice began to grow. The walls of the gymnasium, the squad, and the floor, too—they all blurred out of her vision until there was only him.
Isobel walked toward the figure and reached for the glasses, the urge to strip them from his face and look into his eyes nothing short of a compulsion.
He stopped her hand with his. The contact made her pause, and the nameless dread inside her melted away as his fingers intertwined with hers.
His hand felt so warm.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
His voice rippled through her, low, soft, and a little husky—like the hushed crackling of an old-fashioned record player just before the music starts. Quieting the tangled mesh of her thoughts, it numbed her like a drug.
Her eyes flicked down from his glasses to the slight smile that tugged at one corner of his mouth. A glint of light caught on his lip ring, causing the silver to flash.
Suddenly it was too hard to breathe. She wanted to feel that tiny slip of metal against her own lips, to kiss him. As if that would somehow help her catch her breath.
But she couldn’t escape the feeling that there was something about the moment, something about his very presence that she wasn’t grasping. It was as if her mind had misplaced some vital bit of information. Or lost it entirely.
“What—what are you doing here?” she asked him, because it was the one question that kept pushing all the others out of the way.
One of his eyebrows drifted above the top edge of his sunglasses. His half smile remained in place. “I came to pick you up,” he said. “You’re my girlfriend. I do that now, remember?”
Girlfriend.
The word felt like a switchblade to her heart. The pain it evoked was more tender than sharp, though, the kind that comes along with saying good-bye to a friend you know you’ll never see again.
“C’mon,” he said before she could ask any more questions. He began to turn away and she felt his hand tighten around hers, squeezing, tugging her after him. “We should go.”
Isobel found herself following him, her steps falling in stride with his.
She wanted to look back, to see who’d been watching and who had noticed. Certainly Coach had seen her go. Isobel couldn’t understand why Coach wasn’t yelling at her right that very second, shouting for her to come back and that practice wasn’t over until after cooldown. But she didn’t have time to turn around. She and Varen had already reached the double doors that led out into the school’s rear parking lot.
They pushed through, greeted by a cascade of snow that poured from above, the gray-purple clouds all but blotting out the sky, leaving no room for the cold winter sun.
Varen’s black 1967 Cougar sat alone in the empty parking lot, a dark inkblot surrounded by a sea of vacant whiteness.
Isobel frowned. Where were all the other cars? Where was the line of minivans and SUVs waiting to pick up the rest of the squad? Where was Coach’s hulking, rust-red Suburban?
“I need to show you something,” she heard Varen say, though he didn’t turn around.
Isobel’s focus narrowed in on the nape of his neck, the place where his hair, black and silken, jagged as crows’ feathers, brushed the collar of his T-shirt.
Had she only just noticed how long it had grown?
A breeze whipped past them, and his bare arms made her wonder why he hadn’t worn his jacket.
“Varen, where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” was his only response as he hurried her through the parking lot. Beneath their feet, the snow, still fresh and powdery, made no sound.
Reaching the Cougar, he opened and held the passenger-side door for her, the cab light illuminating the familiar burgundy interior.
She hesitated and glanced back to Varen. Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he gestured to the upholstery. “Yeah,” he said, “sorry about that. Still waiting on those mink seat covers.”
Isobel shot him a wry smile. Before she could return his trademark sarcasm with her own dry quip, though, something about his appearance made her pause.
There was something missing. Something off . . .
She realized that even though she was looking straight at him, she could not see herself in the mirrored lenses of his glasses, only the reflection of blackened trees standing in rows behind her, their thin prison-bar trunks still visible through the thickening screen of falling snow.
In the reflection, a large ebony bird lifted off from one of the twisted branches, and the sound of its beating wings caused her to flinch and whirl. But when she looked, there were no trees. No bird. Only the rigid outline of Trenton High’s neo-Gothic facade.
