Cynthia Hand - Hallowed

No bad-angel vibes, so I look around the parking lot hoping to see Tucker, but he’s not here yet. Nothing left to do but head inside. I straighten the fedora one last time and start for the door.

My senior year awaits.

“Clara!” calls a familiar voice before I even make it three steps. “Wait up.” I turn to see Christian Prescott climbing out of his brand-new pickup truck. This one is black, huge, glinting silver at the wheels, the words MAXIMUM DUTY stamped onto the back.

The old truck, the silver Avalanche that used to be permanently parked on the edges of my visions, burned up in the forest too. That was not a good day to be a truck.

I wait as he jogs over to me. Just looking at him makes me feel weird, nervous, like I’m losing my balance. The last time I saw him was five nights ago when we were standing on my front porch, both of us drenched with rain and smeared with soot, trying to work up the nerve to go inside. We had so much craziness to figure out, but we never ended up doing it, which, I confess, is not Christian’s fault. He did call. A lot, those first couple days. But whenever I saw his name light up on my phone, part of me always froze, the proverbial deer in the headlights, and I wouldn’t pick up. By the time I finally did, we didn’t seem to know what to say to each other. It all boiled down to: “So, you didn’t need me to save you.” “Nope. And you didn’t need me to save you.” And we laughed awkwardly as if this whole purpose thing was some kind of a prank, and then we both fell silent, because really what is there to say? I’m sorry, I blew it, it looks like I messed up your divine purpose? My bad?

“Hi,” he says now, sounding out of breath.

“Hi.”

“Nice hat,” he says, but his eyes go straight to my hair, like every time he sees me with the correct hair color it confirms that I’m the girl from his visions.

“Thanks,” I manage. “I’m going for incognito here.”

He frowns. “Incognito?”

“You know. The hair.”

“Oh.” His hand lifts like he’s going to touch the obnoxious strand of hair that’s already sprung loose from my ponytail, but instead closes into a fist, drops. “Why don’t you just dye it again?”

“I’ve tried.” I take a step back, tuck the runaway strand behind my ear. “The color won’t take anymore. Don’t ask me why.”

“Mysterious,” he says, and the corner of his mouth quirks up into a tiny smile that would have melted my heart to butter last year. He’s hot. He knows he’s hot. I’m taken. He knows I’m taken, and yet here he goes smiling and stuff. This irritates me. I try not to think about the dream I keep having this week, the way that Christian seems to be the only thing in the entire dream that keeps me from completely losing my mind. I try not to think about the words we belong together , those words that used to come to me over and over in my vision.

I don’t want to belong to Christian Prescott.

The smile fades, his eyes going serious again. He looks like he wants to say something.

“So, see you around,” I say, maybe a little too brightly, and start off toward the building.

“Clara—” He trots along after me. “Hey, wait. I was thinking that maybe we could sit together at lunch?”

I stop and stare at him.

“Or not,” he says with that laugh/exhale thing he does. My heart kicks into high gear. I’m not interested in Christian anymore, but my heart doesn’t seem to have gotten that message. Crap.

Crap. Crap.

Some things change. Some things don’t, I guess.

Everybody notices my hair. Of course. I was hoping that they’d notice in a quiet way, a few whispers, some gossip for a couple days, then it’d blow over. But I’m two minutes into first-period French when the teacher makes me take off the hat, and then it’s like a nuclear blast.

“So pretty, so pretty,” Miss Colbert keeps saying, an eyelash away from coming right up and stroking my head. I stick with the story that Mom and I came up with earlier about Mom finding an amazing colorist in California this summer and paying some astronomical fee for her to transform me from orange nightmare to strawberry fabulous. Saying all that in high school — level French while pretending I don’t speak the language perfectly is an especially fun part of the morning. I’m ready to go home before nine a.m. Then I duck into AP Calculus, the bell rings, and it’s like the whole fiasco starts all over again. Your hair, your hair, so pretty. Then again, in third period art class, like they could all start drawing me and my amazing hair.

And fourth period, AP Government, is worse. Christian is there.

“Hi again,” he says as I stand in the doorway gawking at him.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. There are only around six hundred students at Jackson Hole High School, so the odds are in favor of us having a class together. Tucker’s supposed to be in this class too, last time I checked.

Where the— heck is Tucker this morning? Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Wendy either.

“You going to come in?” Christian asks.

I slide into the seat next to him and rummage around in my bag for my notebook and a pen. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, roll my head from one side to the other to try to release some of the tension in my neck.

“Long day already?” he asks.

“You have no idea.”

Right then, Tucker breezes in.

“I’ve been looking for you all day,” I say as he claims the desk on the other side of me.

“Did you just get to school?”

“Yeah. Car trouble,” he says. “We have this old crap car that we use around the ranch, and it wouldn’t start this morning. If you thought my truck was junk, you should see this thing.”

“I never thought Bluebell was junk,” I tell him.

He clears his throat, smiles. “How about that? We’re in a class together, you and I, and I didn’t even have to bribe anybody this year.”

I laugh. “You bribed somebody last year?”

“Not officially,” Tucker admits. “I asked Mrs. Lowell, the lady in the office in charge of scheduling, real nice if she could get me into Brit. History. At the last minute, too, I mean like ten minutes before class started. I’m friends with her daughter, which helped.”

“But why. .?”

He laughs. “You’re cute when you’re slow.”

“Because of me? No way. You hated me. I was that yuppie California chick who insulted your truck.”

He grins. I shake my head in bewilderment.

“You’re crazy, you know that.”

“Aw, and here I thought I was being sweet and romantic and stuff.”

“Right. So, you’re friends with Mrs. Lowell’s daughter? What’s her name?” I ask with mock jealousy.

“Allison. She’s a nice girl. She was one of the girls I took to prom last year.”

“Pretty?”

“Well, she’s got red hair. I kind of have a thing for red hair,” he says. I punch him lightly on the arm. “Hey. I kind of have a thing for tough girls, too.” I laugh again. That’s when I feel the surge of frustration, so strong it wipes the smile right off my face.

Christian.

This kind of thing’s been happening lately. Sometimes, usually when I least expect it, it’s as if I’m allowed access into other people’s heads. Like now, for instance, I can perceive Christian’s presence on the other side of me so keenly that it’s like he’s boring holes into me with his eyes. I don’t get what he’s thinking in words so much as what he feels — he notices how natural it is for me to fall into this easy conversation with Tucker. He wishes that I would joke around with him that way, that we could finally speak to each other, finally connect. He wants to make me laugh like that.