Break Away (Away, Book 1) (3 page)

“Was.”

“Is…was…whatever. Nobody changes just like
that.” And especially guys like Ian who thought the entire female
population was at their feet. Linda hadn’t been able to witness all
the lovely “encounters” out in the parking lot with him plastered
on several girls’ faces, or even right here in the hallway. Since
she’d barely checked into school this year—her parents had
transferred from the University of Iowa to the creative writing
department at Berryford’s preppy university—she’d only seen Ian’s
best behavior now that he was with my sister and out of high
school.

Yes, he’d changed a lot from the time he’d
started hunting Buffy—which must’ve been his fastest hunt ever.
She’d fallen prey to his charms faster than a pissed off monkey
running to reach his stolen banana. But
I
didn’t believe in
this sudden change. I hadn’t forgotten all those hot and heavy
scenes with him practically eating those girls’ faces last year. He
was a player to the core. He never took seriously any girl. And,
no, he hadn’t been exactly popular. He was just one of those guys
who kept to themselves, hanging in one corner with a few friends,
looking all mysterious and pensive, as if he would just pull out
his guitar and start playing some tunes. That brooding, artsy vibe,
I think, was what made him so irresistible to girls—besides his
chiseled good looks, of course. He had the looks of James Dean and
the spirit of Van Gogh—a dreamy combination of which he took full
advantage.

“Wow, I love Buffy’s blazer,” Linda suddenly
said. “Where did she get it?”

I turned around and chased her line of
stare. “At Ralph Lauren, I think. What a preppy thing to buy.” I
snorted, looking at Buffy crossing the bottom of the hallway with
the double J’s. Their true names were Jessica and Jennifer, but
since they sounded too run of the mill, I’d decided to give them a
worthy moniker—one for the price of two. A great deal, really.

As if sensing my thoughts, Jennifer glanced
at me, and when she realized who I was, the casual look in her eyes
filled with fierce disapproval. Her eyes narrowed and she turned
around, tagging along with Buffy and Jessica, her rounded chin
pointing forward.

Had I said how much the double J’s disliked
me? And how much I disliked them? It was a world of pure love down
here.

“Ouch,” a guy said with a hiss when he
passed by me, waving his hand in the air as if he’d been burned.
“Keep down the coldness, babe.” His other friends smirked and
smacked hands with him in manly approval.

See? Pure love.

“Baboons,” Linda muttered, glaring at
them.

I glanced at her with a frown. “Baboons? Is
that an insult?”

“Baboons are vile.”

I rolled my eyes. So much for having a
saint-cursing friend. “Don’t waste your anger on them—which is
obviously limited. Keep it for Brad instead.”

“How can you put up with this?” she asked.
“You’re not an ice queen, Dafne. Maybe you can be a little
cold-blooded sometimes, but you’re not heartless like everybody
thinks. I know you and…”

“Linda,” I stopped her, holding up my hand.
“I don’t care about what they think of me. They can call me
whatever they want. And I don’t mind being an ice queen. It’s way
better than being a tramp or a dumb cheerleader with two pompoms as
a brain.”

“Thanks a lot.”

What? I hadn’t mentioned her name, and then,
“no,” I shook my head, realizing the major slip up I’d done. “I
didn’t mean you, Linda. You ended with that cheering business a
long time ago—thank God.” I added with a sigh, and then came back
to my original train of thought. “Anyway, you’re not that type of
girl. You’re light years away from
dumbland
.”

Still, she didn’t seem convinced.

“Come on, Linda. You know I wasn’t talking
about you.”

“Well…there’s only one way to know.”

“Tell me, then.” I said, hooking my right
thumb on the belt loop of my low jeans.

She crossed her arms over her chest and
said, “If you tell me which mascara you normally use, I’ll believe
you.”

“Not again,” I said annoyed, snagging my
shoulders in a gesture of absolute weariness. “I already told you I
don’t use any of that stuff. And what does it have to do with any
of this?”

“Nothing, I'm just using this weak moment of
yours to convince you to share with your best friend your beauty
secrets—because I don’t believe you. You can’t have those big,
feathery eyelashes just like that. It’s not normal.”

I sighed. “Okay, you found me. I'm an alien
from the fourth district of Venus.”

“Stop it.” She tilted her head, looking at
me with exasperation. “You’re so selfish.”

I didn’t understand why it was so hard to
believe I didn’t use makeup to come to school. My eyelashes were
big enough and curled already. The only thing I allowed myself to
pick up in the morning was a dusting of pink blush to spread across
my high cheekbones and chin—my skin was almost two shades below
ghostly white, and the long dark hair on top didn’t help. The
contrast only deepened the pallor, thus a little help was always
welcome. But beyond that, everything on me was honest-to-God
natural-born. All made in Mom’s belly.

My throat clogged. It was the second time in
the day I’d thought about my parents. Normally, the piercing
memories were only acknowledged at night, when I was on my own and
not in the public eye. Thinking about them during the day put me in
a black hole, blocking my way to a free and easy road. And let’s
just say that the road during the day was a
lot
longer than
during the night, so doing this for a second time today meant
sinking myself deeper into that shady hole while I still had a big
piece of road ahead. I was breaking the rules.
My
rules to
survive the day.

“It’s not selfishness,” I said, trying to
ignore the thorn in the back of my throat while putting up a poised
stance. “It’s being beautiful as hell.”

“Arrogant much?”

“Hey, I'm just telling the truth. Is being
straightforward a crime?”

“Not for an alien from the fourth district
of Venus, I guess.”

We laughed and moved on to our next
class.

The school here wasn’t that different from
the one I used to attend back in Chicago. There were the same rows
of blue lockers bracing the hallways, the polished floor scratched
by students’ frantic soles, the classroom doors with lab-like
windows, the long lights trailing after one another on the
ceiling—maybe there was a slight difference on the size—okay, maybe
it wasn’t slight. The one in Chicago was at least two times bigger.
But this was a very small city after all.

Actually, I could hardly call it a “city,”
but together with West Berryford, on the other side of the Wabash
River (where Ian’s preppy university was), this town-like place
spurted to life, giving it a somewhat city vibe. A lame one, at
that.

The atmosphere in this school, though, felt
entirely different. And it wasn’t because I’d changed from the time
I used to wander hallways with more than one friend at my side,
cheery and careless, with no care in the world but parties and
hookups. It was because almost half of the people here could only
think about reading or writing, which was kind of odd. There were
always those who favored the library or some small spot under a
tree shadow outside, but the cafeteria? The bathrooms? The
hallways? The stairs? They were everywhere with a book sprawled
open in their hands, or with an open notebook lying in their laps
as if somehow they couldn’t unlock their eyes from the pages.

It hadn’t been always like this, of course.
But I couldn’t tell when it’d begin. It was, in fact, a wonder I’d
noticed any of this. Usually, I was in my own world, surfing in the
waves of my thoughts. Every now and then I stepped out onto the
shore of reality to make small talk with Linda, but a few seconds
later my mind was back on the surfboard, far away from those who
surrounded me.

This time, it was just too bizarre not to
notice. Something was…off.

“Bio was a pain today. We had to cut
some…”

“Why is everyone like this?” I interupted
Linda as we passed by a girl leaning against the wall with her eyes
glued on a purple book.

“Like what?” she asked puzzled.

“Like if there’s some life-shaking exam
going on that I don’t know about.”

“Uh, you lost me.”

I stopped before pulling open the exit door
and turned to look at her. “Didn’t you see all the people reading
and writing on the way?” I waved my eyes to the hallway behind
us.

She spun and looked with a frown. “Oh.”

“
Yeah
, don’t you think it’s weird?” I
pushed open the door and stepped outside. There was still a cold
breeze brushing the air, like sprayed fresh mint over tap water.
The tooth-edged leaves of small oak trees seemed to shiver, and the
purple-pink flowers of redbuds deepened in color under the bright
sun, as if the gold in the light fed the cashmere petals.

But that wasn’t what I noticed first.
Another guy was reading on the steps down to the parking lot,
oblivious of the people walking down next to him. “Another one,
huh?” Linda said when she spotted the lanky guy with a black hoodie
seated on the edge of the staircase. “This is definitely weird.”
She shook her head softly as we moved down the stairs.

When we closed the distance with him, she
tilted her head to the side, trying to catch what the source of
bewitchment was. “
Star Wars
,” she mouthed to me, half
rolling her eyes. “I guess that’s not part of some English exam,”
she whispered into my ear, as if avoiding to be overheard by the
sci-fi bookworm. But it was completely unnecessary. An asteroid of
the size of Brazil could’ve been falling and burning the air with a
huge tail of fire and acrid smoke, and he wouldn’t have even
blinked.

Or who knows? Maybe he would’ve taken out
his hidden light saber and saved the day.

“I'm telling you…there must be something
going on,” I said, bringing to my mind all the puzzling images of
people I’d noticed over the last two weeks. And the number seemed
to increase while the days unrolled one after another. “Could there
be a bug in the air that makes you, I don’t know, read
compulsively?” It sounded stupid, but it was the only thing I
had.

“Well, that’s original.”

“Oh, enlighten me, please. I don’t hear you
giving any ideas.”

“Maybe there are reading
seasons
over
here,” she guessed when we reached the foot of the long staircase.
“Every place has its own weird thing, right?”

“Reading seasons?”

“Like sharp cravings or something.”

I turned to look at her with skeptical eyes.
“Cravings to stick your nose in a book? What do you think they
are…teens with pregnancy syndrome?” I stopped before my Mini
Cooper, polished and smooth as the black keys of a Steinway grand
piano. “My theory was a
lot
better, not credible, but
better.”

“It could be, you know.” She shrugged.

“Have you forgotten that I’ve lived here for
almost two years now? Don’t you think I would’ve noticed if there
was weird reading seasons around here? If I’m telling you this it’s
because all of that.” I waved my hand to the sci-fi bookworm still
diving into the pages “It’s completely and entirely not
normal.”

“I so agree with you,” a girl’s voice said
next to me. “There’s definitely something not normal about
you.”

Even though I wanted to refuse to look at
Jessica, even if my guts twisted at the high-pitched, corrosive
sound of her voice, I turned and faced her sneering visage. “Yikes!
This must be my super duper lucky day.” I raised my shoulders in
mock surprise. “The double J’s talking to me! To what do I owe this
honor?”

Jennifer stuck out his bottom lip and
snorted. “Didn’t you say she was in a less…
bitchy
mood
today?”

“Jessica started it this time,” Buffy told
her with an accusing look. “And she is in a good mood today. Right,
Dafne?” She looked at me with her pink glossy lips pressed
together, as if making sure the truce between us was still
valid.

“Well, now that your Lucy Liu wannabe here
tainted my ears with her lovely words,” I said, locking my eyes on
Jessica’s, “I might be back on a full-gear subzero mode—a gift only
for her.” I wrinkled my nose.

Her narrowed dark eyes tightened even more.
“I'm
not
a wannabe,” she said slowly, menacingly.

I whistled. “Man, I can barely see your eyes
now. Glowers don’t look good on you, Jess.”

“What, are you a racist now?” Jennifer
snapped in Jessica’s defense.

“Oh, no, I love Japanese people. They
invented sushi after all,” I told her with a serious look, and
suddenly craved a lip-smacking California roll. “But you have to
accept that her eyes do look like two black slits.”

Though Jessica was cute-looking—straight
dark hair, heart-shaped face, small flat nose, plump lips—when the
anger inside of her boiled, she looked like a wild karate chopper
about to kick the crap out of people.

“What do you think you are? You might be an
eighties bad joke for all I know.” She pointed her slit-eyes to my
clothes.

“Should I be flattered by the compliment you
can’t seem to do openly?” I gave her a knowing smile.

Linda snapped her hand to her mouth to hide
a chuckle, and Jennifer snorted once more, twisting a strand of
ginger hair around her finger.

“You know that she pulls off really well the
whole retro urban chic style,” Buffy moved her eyes to me. And my
breath stopped, because I couldn’t remember the last time she’d
spoken nicely of me in front of her friends.

Jessica answered with silence and pushed
away her glare from me. I swallowed back a laugh. “Just so you
know,” she said a few moments later, as if wanting to counterweight
her muted approval, “Lucy Liu is Chinese descendant,
not
Japanese.”