Cloudburst (8 page)

I closed my eyes, but my thoughts wouldn't stop dancing.
Go back to dreaming
about Ryder,
I told myself,
or you'll never get to sleep.
I was able to do just that, and my dreams and sleep became so deep that once again, Mrs. Duval had to waken me.

“I swear,” she said, raising the curtains to let the sunshine slap me in the face. “I'm going to have to come in here at night and turn on your alarm clock myself.”

My eyes were squeezed so tightly shut to avoid the light that I thought the skin would rip on my forehead. I groaned, took a breath, and sat up to face the day. She stood
there looking at me with her hands on her hips again. This time, she really did look upset.

“Once is an accident. Twice is a mistake,” she said. “Especially if it's in a row.”

“I'm sorry. I got too involved in . . .”

“Yes?”

“Homework, and I forgot the clock.”

She tucked the corners of her lips deep into her face and shook her head. Why couldn't I lie as well as Kiera, or was it just that I couldn't lie well to someone like Mrs. Duval?

“Mrs. Caro thinks you should have oatmeal today. She's at the stove,” she added, and started out.

“Is Mrs. March up yet?”

She paused in the doorway. Although she tried to hide it, I saw worry in her face.

“No, and maybe you should not disturb her,” she added, and left.

I rose like Lazarus from the grave, stunned and surprised that I could move, and headed for the shower. Under my breath, I mumbled curses at Kiera for waking me after midnight. That conversation seemed to be more like a dream anyway. Later, at breakfast, even though just the thought of swallowing anything was exhausting, I forced myself to eat most of the oatmeal and the piece of wheat toast with her homemade jam that Mrs. Caro insisted I have. She had my daily vitamins set out as well. I didn't have one foster mother, I thought—I had three now. It was as if all of my bad habits were under surveillance from the moment I awoke to the moment I fell asleep in this house.

By the time I was ready to leave for school, Jordan had still not come down. The only times this happened were when she was sick with a cold or the flu. Generally, though, her health was very good, as was Mr. March's. Mrs. Duval stepped into her shoes and took on the duty of seeing me off, warnings and all.

“You drive carefully,” she said, “and no speeding,” she added, just the way Jordan would.

“Is Mrs. March all right, Mrs. Duval?”

“She'll be just fine,” she said, which was her way of telling me she didn't think so.

Whom had Jordan seen last night? What was troubling her? I wondered as I got into my car. Was it just her husband's intensity about his business now? It was true that there was no blood relationship to tie us together, and my status was still that of a foster child, but time, the hard experiences I had had with Kiera and her friends, the Marches' generosity, all of it, had drawn me closer and closer to the family I had every right to despise. I couldn't help myself. I cared about them all now at least as much as most of the girls at school cared about their families. I tried to put it all aside as I drove.

It was only about a fifteen-minute drive. On rainy days, it might take five or ten minutes more. Nevertheless, I was usually one of the first to pull into the parking lot, even when I rose later than Mrs. Duval and Mrs. Caro would like. They had their act together in such a way that they were able to move me through the morning and out the door at just about the same time.

I was surprised to see Ryder and his sister arrive only
moments after I had. He had looked so unhappy during the time he was here yesterday, and after finishing the day with an argument with his sister in the parking lot, he had seemed to me to be a good candidate for late arrival or perhaps no arrival at all. I had thought there was a real possibility that he had gone home and complained about Pacifica so much that his parents had given in and had let him transfer back to his old school or some other school. Wouldn't the girls be disappointed? Wouldn't I?

It wouldn't be impossible for Ryder to withdraw. Parents of the students at this school struck me as the sort of people who bought their way into happiness, no matter what. If they were annoyed with their cars, no matter how small the annoyance, they traded them in instantly. If they didn't like the decor in their homes, they brought in a decorator and paid top dollar to make changes quickly. If it was too cold for a week, they hopped on a plane and went to Hawaii. Inconveniences were stamped out like roaches. How many times had I heard the girls in my class moan and groan about the electricity being off for a few hours because of a storm or the batteries daring to die in their iPods and cell phones? Tragedy had a new definition here. It was defined by as little as a broken fingernail.

Surely a family as well known and as successful as Ryder Garfield's was no different. Rather than hear his complaints, his parents could surely just buy him into another school. Yet here he was, and early, too. I sat in my car and watched him in my rearview mirror as he emerged from his. From the way his sister glared at him and hurried off, I knew their argument hadn't ended. Perhaps he had complained about
her to his parents and she had been punished in some way she thought cruel and unusual, such as the confiscation of her MP3 player. He stood there for a moment watching her saunter off.

When I got out of my car, he turned toward me. I wasn't sure what I would do. I was about to raise my hand and say hi, when he lowered his head, turned, and walked slowly toward the school entrance. Whatever friendly overture I had read into his two words to me after English class yesterday had obviously been misunderstood, I thought. He had no interest in being friendly. However, it occurred to me that he might be in my homeroom and perhaps the same morning classes as well. I couldn't wait to see how he would treat me then, if he bothered treating me any way at all.

More often than not, our school lives were like a teenage soap opera. Maybe that was why so many of us were addicted to them. Here, we were on a stage of our own making, and all of us, including me, walked and talked with one eye on our immediate audience but another on everyone around us to see who was looking at us, who was listening to us, who was waiting to see what we were doing.

Me! Me! Me!

I felt like screaming it after Ryder as he approached the door.

Hey, Mr. Big Shot. Look at me!

For a moment, I thought I might have done just that, because he turned at the door and looked back at me. It was just a glance. He wasn't waiting to hold the door or anything, but pathetic me, I was excited by it. I hurried on.
He was in my homeroom, but he was assigned to a seat in the rear. When I walked in, he was taking his seat and didn't care to look at anyone. Before I could say or do anything to get his attention, my girlfriends began arriving right behind me. I did see him glance my way while they talked excitedly about what they had seen or done last night. I thought he smiled, but maybe it was a sneer. With him, it looked as if it would always be difficult to tell the difference.

We did have some morning classes together, but in all of them, we were too far apart to talk, and before lunch, I had instrumental music. As more of my girlfriends found him distant and disinterested, their overall opinions were beginning to cement with the most obvious conclusion taking the headline quickly: “He's very stuck-up. He's in love with himself.”

Those thoughts were logical here. Very few of my friends could envision any boy being so aloof and indifferent to them for any other reason. His parents were really famous, so he didn't want to lower himself enough to have any sort of conversation with anyone here, least of all a relationship.

“He's just out-and-out boring,” Joey Marcus decided. That pleased them even more. Jessica was the last to fall in line, but not before she looked at me to see if I was going to be in agreement. I said nothing, so she chanced it, and then, looking for confirmation, asked me if I agreed. We were all gathered outside the library. Some of us had study hall there. We still had another minute until the bell rang for class.

“It's too easy,” I said.

For a moment, it looked as if they had all been put on pause. They stood there staring at me.

“What's that mean? What's too easy?” Sydney Woods asked first.

“It's too convenient to say he's conceited. You don't have to think about him at all after that.”

“Maybe we don't want to,” Barbara Feld said. They all started to nod.

“I don't believe that. You probably had an orgasm thinking about him last night,” I replied. It was vintage Kiera, for sure. Their mouths fell open. “Better get to class,” I added, and hurried away. Some of them would be late. They were that stunned.

Ryder was only two desks behind me in the next row in social studies class. He was already seated when I entered the room and started for my desk. Just as I passed him, I heard him say, “Queen bee.”

I stopped. “Excuse me?”

“From the way they gather around you, you look like the queen bee.”

“Be careful you don't get stung.”

“Queen bees only use their stingers to dispose of other queens,” he replied. “Each of them should be careful, not me.”

The bell rang, so I slipped into my seat. I wanted to look back at him, but I didn't do it once during the whole class period. When the bell rang to end it, he was up but talking with Gary Stevens, who I thought was one of the nicer boys in our class. He was slim, with curly red hair and
freckles that looked like drops of pure honey on his cheeks. His father was an accountant whose clients included many of the parents in Pacifica, but Gary seemed the most unassuming of the boys in our class. He had a great sense of humor, was bright and maybe a little immature, but I did find him the easiest to talk with, maybe because he was so meek at times. The girls couldn't understand why I bothered.

“His idea of a good time is playing with his Wii,” Mona Kirland said.

“Not his wee-wee?” Lily Albert added, and everyone around us laughed. Everyone, that is, but me.

“Sometimes,” I told them, “it's nice to talk to someone who's not trying to upstage you all the time. You don't have to guard every word you say or worry he'll go making up stories about you afterward. Try it. You might like it.”

Some of them actually did, and I laughed to myself, thinking how the other boys were wondering why Gary was suddenly so popular.

I think Ryder felt comfortable with him as well, and when I went to lunch after instrumental class, I saw them sitting together at a table outside the cafeteria. I sat with my girlfriends and watched him out of the corner of my eye. Our lunch conversation had returned to more ordinary subjects such as soap opera stories, clothes, and makeup. Halfway through lunch, Jessica came out of the building. I had been wondering where she was. I could see the excitement in her face. She obviously had something to tell me.

I deliberately stayed back when the warning bell sounded and everyone started back into the building.

“Where were you?” I asked her.

“Claire found out about Summer,” she said, sotto voce.

“You heard about this just now?”

“I called her. She told me to try reaching her about now.”

“You're not supposed to have your cell phone on in school. You could have been suspended.”

“I went into the bathroom. No one heard me.”

“Why risk it?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Yes, I guess so. There should be a motto over the front entrance,” I said. “ ‘Gossip, the lifeblood of Pacifica.' Let's go in.”

“Don't you want to know what she found out?”

I watched Ryder walk into the building with Gary and then looked at her. “Well, obviously if I don't let you tell me, I'll be responsible for the first human being to really burst from scandalous information. Go on.”

“Summer was caught in the athletic storage room making love to her boyfriend, who happened to be a junior. She was to be quietly expelled, but the Garfields were given the option of just having her and Ryder transferred.”

“Why him, too?”

“Isn't it obvious? I figure he's supposed to be keeping an eye on her. That explains the outburst in the parking lot yesterday about her going braless. Well?” she asked, as if she had climbed Mount Everest or something.

I gave her my best stern glare. “If you spread this stuff around, you'll make it really hard for both of them here,” I said. “And if one other person tells me this stuff, I'll know you did.”

“What are you so upset about? I thought you wanted to know.”

“Never mind. You just remember what I said,” I warned, and started in ahead of her.

When I was at my hall locker, I saw Ryder talking to his sister. She stood with her arms embracing her books and listened. Then, without speaking, she turned and walked away from him. He watched her a moment and headed in my direction. I deliberately walked a little slower, but he didn't stop to walk with me. He passed me, but I heard him mumble, “Shouldn't you be in your hive?”

“Very funny!” I shouted after him.

I glared at him across the aisle when I took my seat.

“Why are you so nasty?” I asked before Mr. Malamud began the class.

“Just comes to me naturally, I guess,” he said.

“Maybe we all need to be inoculated before we catch it,” I said.

He looked at me wryly and then gave me a much warmer smile.

I held my breath, expecting some sort of sarcastic comment to follow, but it didn't come. He actually looked friendly for a few moments in English class. Throughout the day, I had noticed that aside from Gary, he rarely spoke to anyone. It wasn't that the other boys had a lack of interest in him. I did see attempts being made to strike up conversations in the hallways and at lunch, but he either shrugged, shook his head, simply nodded, or replied in some monosyllabic way. His responses were quickly turning them all off.