Avalon High (9 page)

“You’re all right, Ellie Harrison,” he said softly, his gaze on mine, his voice unsteady. “And, you know, I think I’d like you even if I wasn’t sure I’d already met you in a past life, and liked you then.”

There’s really no telling what might have happened next. Not that I imagined he might have suddenly wrapped his arms around me and kissed me, the way I’d seen Lance kissing Jennifer in the spare room below us.

But you never know. He might have.

If it hadn’t been for two things….

The first thing that happened was that a cloud went skittering across the moon, blocking out the only light we’d had to see by.

The second was that the door to the widow’s walk suddenly burst open, and then Cavalier came rushing up toward us, closely followed by someone else of the human variety. I wouldn’t have known who it was if it wasn’t for the light from the stairs spilling out behind him from the open doorway.

“There you are,” Marco said, when he saw Will. He could not have missed the way Will jerked his hand from my hair and moved it to pat his panting dog, instead. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I wouldn’t have
found you, if it hadn’t been for that damned dog. Didn’t you hear her barking?”

Will gave Cavalier a final pat, then straightened up. “No,” he said. His voice, which had been unsteady with emotion just seconds before, now sounded totally normal. It was impossible to tell if he, like me, resented his stepbrother’s intrusion. “Why? What’s up?”

“I need to find Jen,” Marco said. “Her car is blocking one of the neighbors’ driveways.”

Will shook his head the way someone who’s just come up from a dive into very deep water does when he breaks the surface. I tried not to think what that meant vis-à-vis…well, me.

“What?” Will blinked a few times. “Jen?”

“Yeah.” Marco looked at me. Not accusingly. Just speculatively, like he was wondering who I was and what I’d done to make his stepbrother act so dopey all of a sudden.

I could have told him in three words. No one and nothing.

Or is that four words?

“I thought Jen’d be with you,” Marco said.
Now
he was starting to sound accusing.

“I haven’t seen Jen since she went to go put lipstick on half an hour ago,” Will said. But not like it bothered him.

“Well, she’s got to move her car,” Marco said. “Mrs. Hewlitt’s blocked in and is threatening to call the cops.”

Will said something under his breath that sounded like a swear word. Then, to me, he said, “Sorry, Elle. I have to go find her.”

“That’s fine,” I said hurriedly, hoping my disappointment over the interruption didn’t show. He’d called me Elle again, after all. “I should go, anyway. Liz and Stacy are probably wondering where I went.”

Will looked for a second like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then he nodded and said, “Oh, right. Well, come on. I’ll walk you out.”

He started for the door to the stairs, Cavalier close at his heels. I followed, with Marco tagging along behind me. As we headed back down to the second floor, Marco asked, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” in a voice I didn’t really like all that much…though I couldn’t say why.

“Oh, sorry,” Will said. “Elaine Harrison, my stepbrother, Marco Campbell. Marco, this is Ellie.”

“Hi,” I said to Marco, over my shoulder, as we entered the hallway.

Marco grinned—one of those grins I’ve sometimes seen described as wolfish in books.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Elaine,” he said. Then, to Will, he said, “I think someone said they saw Jen go through there.” He nodded toward the door behind which I’d found Jennifer and Lance making out.

“Oh, great,” Will said.

And he started to place his hand on the doorknob—

“No, wait!” I cried, before I knew what I was saying.

Will looked at me questioningly. So, for that matter, did the dog. Marco’s look was the only one that wasn’t questioning. His was surprised.

Which was when I knew.

Suddenly I felt like throwing up all over again. Except that I didn’t have time to be sick.

“W-wasn’t that just her?” I stammered.

Will’s hand continued to hover above the doorknob.

“Where?” he asked.

“Wasn’t that her just now, calling you?” Practically falling over my own feet, I hurried to the top of the stairs to the first floor. “He’ll be right there,” I called down. Some people standing at the bottom of the staircase looked up at me like I was insane.

But it didn’t matter, because Will couldn’t see them.

“She’s downstairs,” I heard myself say to Will.

And his hand, to my immense relief, fell away from the doorknob.

“Oh,” he said. “Great. Well. See you around.”

And he started toward the stairs.

That’s when it happened. The thing that afterwards, I was never quite sure how to describe, even to myself.

All I know is, Will started toward the staircase, and I glanced at his stepbrother Marco, to see if he’d follow….

Only to find Marco studying me with an amused expression on his face, as if I were a cat that had suddenly started reading the want ads. Out loud.

“Will,” he said, not taking his eyes—as dark as his stepbrother’s were light—from me. “Why don’t you invite Elaine to come sailing with us tomorrow?”

“Oh, hey,” Will said, pausing at the top of the stairs, and looking back at me, “that’s a great idea. Do you like sailing, Elle?”

Elle. I couldn’t help swallowing.

“Uh,” I said. What was going on here? I wondered. Thrilled as I was to be included in any plan of Will’s, I couldn’t help wondering why Marco wanted me to come along. He didn’t even
know
me.

And from the way he was looking at me, I wasn’t all that sure he even
liked
me. Especially after what we both—Marco and I—knew I’d just done.

“I don’t know,” I said uncertainly. “I’ve never been. We don’t sail much, back in Minnesota.”

“Oh, you’ll love it,” Marco said. “Won’t she, Will?”

“Yeah, you will,” Will said enthusiastically. “Meet us by the Alex Haley statue at the city dock tomorrow at noon. You know where that is?” When I nodded, he said, “Great. See you then.”

And then he hurried down the stairs to look for Jennifer. Leaving me alone with Marco…

…with whom I wasn’t about to stick around and make small talk.

“Well, see you tomorrow,” I said, and started toward the stairs myself.
Get out
, my heart seemed to be saying with every beat.

But I didn’t move quickly enough, since Marco’s voice
snaked out across the landing like an arm, almost physically drawing me back toward him when he asked, in an insinuating tone, “You didn’t
really
hear Jen just then, did you, Elaine of Minnesota?”

I froze, one foot on the stairs, and one still on the second floor. For some reason, my blood had run…well, cold.

“Sorry,” I said. “I…I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, I think you do,” Marco said, with a wink. Then, as I stood there watching him, he went up to the door Will had come so close to opening, and thumped on it, once, with the side of his fist.

“Jen,” he shouted through it. “You in there?”

There was a pause. Then a thin voice called through the door, “Um, yeah, just a sec! I’ll be right out.”

Marco looked back at me and shook his head.

“Nice try,” he said. “But he’s gonna find out about them sometime.”

So I’d been right. He’d known. He’d known all along. He’d wanted Will to open that door and find the two of them in there.

What kind of sick person
does
something like that?

Will’s stepbrother, evidently.

“Um,” I said, trying to play dumb.
He’d known
. But that wasn’t the weirdest part. I’d
known
he’d known. “I have to go—”

Marco wasn’t falling for it, though. Not only did he keep talking, but he crossed the space between us in two long strides and snatched up my arm in fingers that
were so cold, they burned. He held me in a grip of iron, so that I couldn’t even dart down the stairs the way I’d planned.

“What were you trying to do, anyway?” Marco asked, with a sneer. “Protect him?”

“Let go of my arm,” I said in a voice that shook a little. Something about his touch was really creeping me out.

I wasn’t the only one it bothered, either. Hearing a low sound coming from somewhere near my feet, I looked down and saw Will’s dog, Cavalier—who hadn’t, as I’d thought, followed her master downstairs—crouching on the white carpet, growling softly up at Marco.

Really. Growling. At Marco.

He noticed, too, and said, in tones of disgust, “Leave me alone, you stupid mutt,” to the dog.

Then Marco thrust me away from him, hard enough to cause me to stumble to my knees and have to grab hold of the banister to keep from falling.

But Cavalier stopped growling. She hurried over to me and licked my arm where he’d touched it.

“Oh, please,” Marco said very sarcastically, when he observed this. Then, staring at me—my rapid breathing, my white-knuckled grip on the banister—he shook his head once more and said, “You aren’t even supposed to be on his side. You’re supposed to like the other one. What kind of lily maid are you, anyway?”

I just blinked at him. Lily maid? Oh, right. The Lily Maid of Astolat, which was another name for the Lady of
Shalott—the one I was named after. Funny.

Not.

And sort of random, for a guy with a tattoo.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, in a shaky voice. I felt a little bit braver with Cavalier beside me. “B-but I think you should leave Will alone.”

Marco seemed to find this hilarious.

“You think I should leave
Will
alone?” he asked, in a voice dripping with derisive laughter. “Is
that
how it is, then? Christ, did Morton ever have it all wrong.”

Morton?
Mr
. Morton? What was he talking about?

“You think what Will’s going through
now
is bad?” Marco shook his head, the wolfish grin back, wider than ever. “Are you in for a surprise.”

Then the door to the spare room opened, and Jennifer came out, tucking some of her hair back into the clip it had slipped out of.

“Hi, guys,” Jennifer said breezily—too breezily. “Sorry, I was just on the phone with my mom. Somebody was looking for me?”

I just stared at her. I couldn’t believe anyone could look so great, and be so…

Well, cold.

Then, when Marco didn’t say anything, and Jennifer looked from him to me questioningly, I stammered, “Y-you need to move your car.” I was still feeling sick to my stomach, but I tried not to let it show. “It’s blocking their neighbor’s driveway.”

Jennifer looked blank. “But I parked in the Wagners’
driveway,” she said.

I glanced at Marco. He winked.

“Sailing tomorrow’s going to be fun,” he said. “Don’t you think, Elaine?”

Stacy and Liz weren’t exactly thrilled about how long it took me to join them at the car.

“God, what’d you do?” Stacy said, when I finally staggered down the hill toward them. “Take the long way?”

“Sorry,” I said to them. I really meant it, too. I
was
sorry.

Just not for the reason they thought.

I was quiet on the ride home. Maybe too quiet, since Liz asked, “Are you okay, Ellie?”

I said I was. Except I knew it was a lie. How could I be okay after what had happened?

Which was part of the problem. What exactly
had
happened? I didn’t even know, really.

So I had found out Jennifer was cheating on Will. With his best friend. So what? It didn’t have anything to do with me.

And so what if I’d met Will’s stepbrother and had had a fairly strange conversation with him? Big deal. Guys are weird in general. And guys whose fathers were killed by their mothers’ new husbands are probably weirder than anybody. I mean, what did I expect?

But the thing with Marco just seemed—I don’t know,
weirder
than anything that had ever happened to me. The way the dog had growled when he’d touched my arm. And the way he’d been talking to me as if we were continuing a conversation we’d had in the past—except that we had only just met! And what had that thing he’d said about the Lady of Shalott been all about? And his reference to Mr. Morton. What did Mr. Morton have to do with anything?

Unless…

“Hey,” I said, leaning forward in the backseat of Stacy’s car. “Who was the teacher Marco Campbell was supposed to have attacked?”

Liz was fiddling with Stacy’s CD player, trying to find a track she liked. “I heard it was Mr. Morton.”

“God, Liz!” Stacy burst out laughing. “Gossip much?”

“Well,” Liz said defensively, “my mom heard it from Chloe Hartwell’s mom who heard it from her cousin who’s a dispatcher on the Annapolis police force.”

“Oh,” Stacy said, still laughing. “Then it must be true.”

“Why did he do it?” I asked. “Try to kill Mr. Morton, I mean?”

Liz shrugged. “Who knows. Marco’s not exactly all there, you know what I mean?”

Did I ever.

Stacy pulled up in front of my house and said, “Don’t forget, you still have to let us know when you want to be initiated.”

“I will,” I said. “And thanks, you guys. For coming with me tonight.”

“My first party with the In Crowd,” Liz said with a sigh.

“And my last,” Stacy said dryly. Then she waved, and they drove away.

When I got inside, my mom and dad were still up, watching the news.

“Hi, honey,” my mom said. “How did it go? Did you have a nice time?”

“Great,” I said. “I had fun. Avalon won. Tomorrow I’m going sailing with Will.”

“That sounds nice,” my mom said. “Is Will an experienced sailor?”

“Sure,” I said, though technically I had no idea whether or not this was true—just that he and Lance had sailed up the coast over the summer.

“You’re not going to wear that skirt on the boat, are you?” my dad called to me, as I ran up the stairs to my room.

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” I called back. “’Night!”

Because after everything that had happened, the last
thing I wanted to do was sit around and chat with Mom and Dad. I needed…I needed…

I didn’t know what I needed.

I showered, changed into my pajamas, and climbed into bed. Then I stared at the rose Will had given me. It was in full bloom now, its petals lustrous in the glow from my bedside lamp.

I was sleepy, and yet I knew if I turned out the light, I wouldn’t doze off. I was too wired. All I could think about was Marco. How had he known I’d been named after Elaine, the Lily Maid? This is not a literary character with whom guys his age tended to be familiar.

And was that crack about my liking the wrong guy supposed to mean that it was Lance I should be in love with, not Will? Because Elaine had liked Lancelot?

God, how lame. It wasn’t even funny. I love my parents and all, but why did they have to name me after someone so pathetic? The only thing my namesake and I had remotely in common was a mutual love of floating…although I preferred to do mine on a raft in a pool, whereas Elaine of Astolat favored floating to her death in a boat….

I suppose, by Marco’s reasoning, if I were Elaine, and Lance was Lancelot, that meant Jennifer was Guinevere. Which was kind of funny, actually, since the name Jennifer comes from the name Guinevere…just a little something you can’t help knowing if you’re the daughter of two medieval scholars.

And if you wanted to think along those lines—you
know, Lance being Lancelot, me being Elaine, and Jennifer being Guinevere—then Will could only be King Arthur. Which meant Marco had to be Mordred, the guy who ultimately kills Arthur and brings down Camelot, after the whole Guinevere thing.

Except from everything I’d read, Mordred was Arthur’s half brother, not his stepbrother.

Still, all that, coupled with the fact that the school we all go to is Avalon High, home of the Excaliburs?

Freaky.

Maybe Marco hadn’t meant it to be funny. Maybe he’d meant it
literally
.

Yeah. And maybe tomorrow, my dad would let me borrow the car and drive it by myself, without a licensed driver in the passenger seat.

Well, what did I care, anyway, if Will’s stepbrother wanted to compare me to some chick who’d killed herself over a mythical knight from Camelot? As insults went, it wasn’t even that cutting. He couldn’t have known, of course, about my great antipathy toward all things medieval.

Which just made the whole thing even lamer.

Except…

Except that none of this explained the coldness of his fingers. Or the way Cavalier had reacted when Marco had touched me. Or what he’d meant about Mr. Morton. Or why Marco had wanted Will to find out about Lance and Jennifer in that horrible way….

Still feeling a little sick, I rolled over and turned off
my bedside lamp. As I lay there in the semidarkness, I heard a thump. A second later, Tig joined me for her nightly snuggle.

Only tonight, for some reason, she couldn’t seem to settle down. She kept sniffing where Cavalier had licked me—and Marco had touched me—even though I’d washed all those parts when I showered. When I peered at Tig in the moonlight that spilled in from behind my blinds, I could see she was wearing an expression Geoff called Cat Face—her mouth partly open, like she’d smelled something bad.

Then, giving my arm a last and final sniff, she threw me a look that clearly indicated I’d betrayed her somehow, then stalked off the bed and left to sleep elsewhere.

Which meant she was
really
peeved.

I lay there thinking to myself that things were really going great if my own cat didn’t like me anymore. What had
happened
at that party, anyway? And what was I going to do about it?

What
could
I do, anyway? I mean, I supposed I could talk to Lance—I was going to have to talk to him, anyway, about the whole World Lit thing. Maybe while I was doing that, I could convince Lance to come clean with his friend. It had to be better for Will to find out that way than the way Marco had planned on having him find out….

I wished I hadn’t agreed to go sailing with Will and the rest of them the next day. I had no desire whatsoever to watch Will and Jennifer holding hands, however sweetly
they did it, knowing that the whole thing—well, as far as Jennifer was concerned, anyway—was just a scam.

And I was fairly certain Marco was going to do something to upset everyone—or Will, at least—because he hadn’t managed to do so successfully tonight.

But…but part of me wanted to go sailing with Will. The part of me that wanted to do anything with Will, just to be around him. The part of me that was in love with him, despite his having a girlfriend already. The part of me that, every time I saw a rose now, started thinking about Will….

God, I had it bad.

Sadly, that part of me seemed to be stronger than the rest of me, since, when I woke up the next day, I knew without a doubt that I was going sailing with A. William Wagner and Company.

And not just so I could hang around with Will, either. I woke up feeling like it was my duty to go. Because—or so I told myself—that way I could keep an eye on Marco myself. He was definitely out to stir up trouble for his stepbrother.

Only…why? Why would he want to hurt Will in that way? I couldn’t imagine that Will had done anything that hurtful to him. Was it just because of what had happened between their fathers? Was Marco really that resentful of Will’s dad marrying his mom? I could sort of see why he would be, if the part about Admiral Wagner assigning Marco’s dad to a post where he was sure to be
killed or whatever was true. But why take it out on Will? It was Admiral Wagner he should be worried about punishing, if you ask me.

Just as he said he’d be, Will was waiting for me by the statue of Alex Haley that sits at the end of what the locals call Ego Alley, the city dock at the end of Main Street in downtown Annapolis. I could see as my parents and I pulled up why they call it Ego Alley…there are all these yachts there. And to get them out to sea, you have to sail them past all these outdoor cafés and bars where people sit along the water all day, watching the boats. It’s like a fashion show at the mall or something, only with boats.

Alex Haley, who wrote the book
Roots
, must have lived in Annapolis, because the whole dock was devoted to him. There was a big statue of him, with these smaller statues of kids lying around on the ground beneath him, like he was reading them a story. Will was leaning against one of these kid statues, waiting for me.

The minute I saw him, my heart did that somersaulting thing inside my chest. That’s because, for a second, I thought he was there alone…that, by some miracle, it would be just the two of us out on his boat. But then I saw Jennifer’s golden head bob up. She and Lance and Marco were waiting in a rubber dinghy in the water just below the dock, the dinghy that would take us out to Will’s boat, anchored a short distance offshore. My heart, instead of doing more gymnastics, fell.

It fell more when my parents decided to actually get
out of the car and go over and chat with Will, whom I guess they considered their big friend now, since they’d let Will chow down on all of our pad thai and wear my brother’s bathing suit, and all.

“Hey,” my dad said, leaning an elbow on Alex Haley’s shoulder. “Nice day for a sail.”

“Yes, sir,” Will said, straightening up and smiling at us. He had on a pair of Ray-Bans to keep out the glare of the sun. The warm breeze tugged at his dark, curly hair and the open collar of his blue shirt. To me, he said, “Glad you could make it.”

But before I had a chance to reply, my mom started asking Will all these worried questions, like how long he’d been sailing, and whether or not he had enough life preservers…that kind of thing. You know, the kinds of things you always wished your mom would ask the guy you have a major crush on when he’s invited you to go sailing with him.

Not.

Will’s answers must have satisfied my mom, since she finally grinned at me and said, “Well, have a nice time, Ellie.” And my dad went, “See you later, kiddo.” Then the two of them climbed back into the car and went to have brunch at Chick & Ruth’s Delly.

I looked at Will and said, “Sorry.”

“No problem,” Will said, with a grin. “They care about you, is all. It’s cute.”

“Please just shoot me now,” I begged him, and he laughed.

“Can we go?” Jennifer called from the dinghy. “We’re losing prime tanning time.”

“And God forbid the homecoming queen should be pasty,” Marco said, causing Jennifer to take a playful whack at him. Lance, holding the rudder, just sat there grinning at the two of them, looking godlike in a throwback that showed off his grapefruit-sized biceps.

“I’m with Jen,” he said—an unfortunate choice of words to those of us in the know. “I’m sick of these tourists staring at us.”

It was true that some people wearing T-shirts that screamed
DON
’
T HASSLE ME
,
I
’
M LOCAL
had come up and were asking Will and me if we knew where the line to the
Woodwind
, the tour boat that went around the bay, was. Will showed them where they needed to go, then handed something to me that he took from the floor of the dinghy. It was a life preserver—not, thankfully, one of those big orange puffy ones that make the people who wear them look like the Pillsbury Doughboy, but a slim and stylish navy blue one.

I was busy fastening it when a group of kids about our own age showed up by the Haley statue and started piling into a small motorboat a few slips down from ours. They had one of those big inner tubes with them, and as they swung it into the boat, it bumped into the boat beside it—a much fancier one than ours, with an older man and woman in it, just getting ready to set out toward their yacht.

“Sorry,” I heard one of the kids say, and he pulled the
inner tube back into his own boat.

“You’re sorry?” The older man looked disgusted. And angry. “I’m sorry. Sorry they ever started letting people like you have the run of the place.”

I stopped fastening my life preserver and just stood there, totally shocked. Nobody ever says things like that back in Minnesota.

“Hey, man,” one of the other kids in the motorboat said. “He didn’t mean anything—”

“Why don’t you people go back where you came from?” the older man wanted to know, while his wife looked on, tight-lipped, her knees pressed firmly together.

“Why don’t
you
go back where you came from?”

But this didn’t come from any of the boys in the motorboat. It came, I was startled to realize, from Will.

The old man looked just as startled as I was. He flung Will a surprised look from beneath his little captain’s hat, then said, in a disapproving voice, “I beg your pardon, young man, but I was born in this country—and so were my parents.”

“Yeah, but were
their
parents?” Will asked him. “Because unless you’re Native American, I don’t think you can go around telling other people to go back to their country.”