Flock (5 page)

When the final bell rang, I headed to my locker with a sense of relief and excitement. The end of day signaled not only the weekend but just a few hours remaining until my date with Jack. So maybe I should have cut Penny a little slack on the whole moon-eyed thing. As I was spinning to the last number of the combination, none other than Penny appeared at my side.

“Are you coming to the game?” she asked.

Jack and I had talked about it. It was a home game, and our football team was supposed to be decent again this year, even after losing Jack, the star quarterback. I had argued in favor of a real date night: a movie and a bite to eat. Jack, on the other hand, didn’t want me to miss out on my senior year.

“Maybe. We haven’t really decided.”

“You have to come,” Penny said. “It’ll be weird enough without Tina. I can’t lose you, too. Who would I sit with?”

Though I had only known Tina for one short year, whereas she and Penny had been hanging out since their monkey-bar days, I missed her, too. She was a freshman at Iowa State — a Cyclone (which, as far as mascots went, was nothing short of twisted).

“There’s always Jinky,” I said, joking.

“Actually . . .” Penny scrunched her mouth to the side. “Jinky will be there. I told her I’d show her around the field and explain the game a little bit, so she can get some photos for the paper.”

“Dinner and a movie is sounding better and better,” I said, leaning down to get the jacket that had fallen to the floor of my locker.

“Please,” Penny pleaded.

“Please what?” I heard a male voice ask. A slightly accented male voice.

“Please come to the football game,” Penny said, her voice going all singsongy.

“I’d love to,” Marik said.

Standing and folding the jacket over my arm, I shut my locker with an echoing bang. The “please” had been for my benefit, I wanted to clarify. I didn’t. I held my tongue. One look at Penny’s cherubic expression, and I decided to play along.

“Great,” Penny said. “Jinky’s coming, too. And you and Jack, right, Kat?”

“The boyfriend?” Marik asked. “Good. A chance to meet him.”

And while we’re on the subject of twisted ideas . . .
I thought.

A few hours later, when Jack picked me up, I was sporting a palette of gold and green, our school colors.

“I thought you’d said no to the game,” he said.

“I had a change of heart. Do you mind?”

“A minor change to the evening’s itinerary I couldn’t care less about. But a change of heart . . .” He raised one eyebrow and tilted his head forward. “Not my favorite expression.”

I shoulder-bumped him. “You know what I mean.”

“I just wish I hadn’t dressed up.”

I had to cough back a laugh. What he considered dressed up was Levi’s and a dark gray polo shirt. Casual was something in the T-shirt family, genus NFL, species Vikings.

“Good thing you did. As a returning alum, you have an image to keep up,” I said, climbing into the passenger seat of his old beater of a truck.

“This ride will do the trick.” He smiled and turned the key in the ignition. The engine gunned to life with all the subtlety of a garbage disposal.

I had decided not to prepare Jack for meeting Jinky and Marik. The goal was to give them — Marik in particular — as little buildup as possible. More and more, I was realizing how crucial it was that Jack did not sniff out a secret between me and Marik. Any hint of trouble, and a caped Jack would fly in. The guy could throw storms, after all. Who could blame him for a teensy hero complex?

As we approached the entrance gate, I saw Penny off to the side with a camera-slung Jinky and a tall, bouncing blur of green and yellow.

“Look. There’s Penny,” I said, my voice a study in practiced nonchalance.

“Who’s she with?” Jack asked, his registering hesitation. And it wasn’t Jinky giving him pause. Her black leather jacket and ripped jeans were tasteful compared to the cartoonish being that bopped up and down beside her.

“Didn’t I mention she invited Jinky and her cousin, mostly because Jinky’s taking pictures for the paper?”

“No,” Jack said, taking my hand. “You didn’t mention it.”

As we approached, Marik waved and leaped like some kind of dancing bear. “Over here, Katla.” For all his silly antics, he was still roguishly handsome.

Jack squeezed my hand tighter.

“Hey, guys,” I said, still moderating my voice. “Go Falcons,” I added by way of acknowledging Marik’s over-the-top school spirit. “Jack, meet Jinky and Marik, exchange students from Iceland.”

Jinky gave Jack a beady-eyed once-over. If I had to guess, I’d say he passed initial inspection. She didn’t sneer, anyway, and shook the hand he offered. Marik pumped Jack’s hand vigorously and even dropped an arm over his shoulder like some kind of costumed bighead making his theme-park rounds. Marik was several inches taller than Jack, who was no runt at six-two, which made the impression all the more comical.

“It’s very nice to finally meet Katla’s boyfriend,” Marik said.

I watched for a beat or two, wondering if Jack would have some kind of spooked reaction to the merman or shaman in front of him. He didn’t. Instead he gave me a quick pump of his brows. So far, Marik was more theater than threat.

Right on cue, Marik pointed to his chest and said, “Look, Katla, we match.” Indeed, we wore the same Falcons T-shirt, on sale every Friday at the school’s spirit shop, technically a folding table from which the marching band sold school-logo apparel. My T-shirt was under a denim jacket and had a fluffy gold-and-green scarf cowling its neckline. His was over a white thermal undershirt and tucked into a pair of what could only be described as plaid golf pants — knickers, more specifically — circa turn of the century: 1900, not 2000. They were in the right color family, anyway.

Marik noticed me scrutinizing his outfit. “Penny said to wear as much green and yellow as I could find.”

How he had found some of the more unusual articles, the coordinating argyle socks, for instance, I hardly knew, but figured I had no room to judge, especially as I was currently wearing striped tights, green high-top Converse sneakers, and yellow pom-poms at the ends of my two braids.

“Should we get seats?” I said. “It looks like the stands are filling up.”

“Save us two,” Penny said. “I’m going to walk around with Jinky and help her get some shots of the crowd.”

Jack, Marik, and I climbed up the steep steps of the home-side bleachers. Once again, I noticed the overall lightness of Marik’s bearing, despite his size. His crazy getup didn’t help. He was like a big stuffed animal. I was sure, regardless of the inroads he’d made with the school’s
it
crowd, that his outfit would invite teasing, if not outright mockery. Just my luck to be his seatmate. About halfway up the climb, someone called out, “Hey, Marik.”

He stopped, lifting his head in the direction of the voice. Meanwhile, Jack had found us an open row of seats with enough room for five.

A whistle again drew our attention to the upper ranks of the crowd. “Marik,” a male voice bellowed, “we’ve got a seat for you up here.” Gazing up, I noticed Abby, Shauna, and John in the group.

“Thanks, but I’m with Katla tonight,” Marik said full throttle, turning more than a few heads in our direction.

“Nice outfit,” a girl’s voice, closer than the other, called out.

Marik performed a small jig in the aisle, which earned him a round of applause and more whistles, all good-natured and well-meaning, as far as I could tell. As Marik took a seat next to me on the bench, Jack dropped his arm over my shoulder, and I felt his own shake. Turning, I realized it was laughter rocking him. Go figure.

Penny and Jinky didn’t join us until well into the first quarter, and they were both up and gone again from halftime until the start of the fourth quarter. Jinky, I noticed, was dangerously close to smiling when they got back; Penny, it seemed, could coax a curl out of the most stubborn of cowlicks.

Our team won by a field goal. It took Marik a while to sort out the rules and the concept of partisanship but ended up as one of the Falcons’ biggest fans. Even I had to tee-hee at his enthusiasm. It looked like Penny had competition for Most Spirited.

We were standing just outside the exit to the stadium, sorting out rides to the Kountry Kettle, when Jack’s phone rang. He stepped away to take the call and returned with an odd expression on his face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’ve gotta go. Something’s up at the farm,” he said, pulling me out of hearing range of the others. “Can you get a ride home with Penny?”

I didn’t like the sound of “Something’s up,” mostly because I’d had more than my share of
up
since moving to Norse Falls.

“Up how?” And where the heck was gravity when you needed it, anyway?

“Midas is acting strange. He’s howling and pacing and clawing at the door to get out. My dad’s never seen him like this. And since he’s my dog, my dad wants me to come and settle him.”

Midas was a huge yellow lab, an old one, so mellow he’d earned the nickname Old Meller. If he was spooked, it had to be something. My heart was already racing so fast it was halfway to the parking lot. I remembered my premonition from earlier that day.

“I’m coming with you,” I said.

Jack exhaled one short puff through his nostrils. I loved it when he went primal on me.

“Why?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m not thinking anything yet, but I want to come along,” I said, already stepping toward Penny and formulating an excuse for her.

Jogging through the parking lot, Jack tugged at my arm with urgency. I could do without a lot of the baggage that came with our abilities, but having Jack pull at me insistently . . . Yep, that part of it made me all kinds of mad-happy.

At Jack’s, his dad, Lars, met us at the back door, where he stood holding an exuberant Midas by the collar. Seeing Jack, the hulk of a dog barked and jumped, pushing off Jack’s chest with his front paws. It was an act of affection, but one that would have knocked a smaller person — me, for instance — back a week.

“Down, boy,” Jack said.

Midas returned to all fours, spun three times, and then leaped at Jack again, this time stretching his front legs onto Jack’s shoulders and baying at something outside.

“See what I mean?” Lars said. “But he’s obviously relieved to see you.”

Jack rubbed the dog’s shaggy head and ordered him down. Even I could see that Midas in a clearly agitated state was a danger to no one, but it didn’t tamp down the something’s-wrong sensation in my gut.

“We’ll walk him,” Jack said. “It’s probably a skunk or an opossum. You know how he hates trespassers.”

A few minutes later, Jack and I set out carrying a couple of Maglites with beams that could guide tanks. Though mine was a foot long, heavier than my own arm, and clublike, and though we were accompanied by a very large, overly protective dog, I still had the feeling that we were under-provisioned.

As we trekked along a hard-packed dirt path, Midas pulled at Jack impatiently. At first, Jack’s spirits matched the dog’s; both were giddy and pumped with adrenaline. Soon, though, Midas’s feverish behavior grated on Jack, and he stopped, more than once, to scold and heel the unruly animal.

The path led us deep into their back property. Much of the Snjossons’ land was planted in orderly orchard plots according to species. Sweeping my light left and right, I knew we were still skirting these tidy sections. We fell into a comfortable pattern, and even Midas seemed to relax with the even pace of our march and the harmony of nature’s nighttime music. I was particularly heartened by the chorus of birds overhead, and their songs were in perfect accord with the whoosh of wind as it ruffled leaves and branches. It seemed to me a symbol of the way Jack and I complemented each other.

We came to the old stone bridge that crossed a brook. Behind it was a wooded area, too cragged and hilly to farm. Though I knew it was the shortcut to the back plots, something about the woods — the wildness in the diversity of size and type of trees, the density of their shoulder-to-shoulder stance, and the darkness they harbored — reawakened my misgivings.

“Maybe we should take the road,” I suggested. The property was crisscrossed with a system of interior roads over which trucks were able to pass. It would be a longer route but more civilized, in my opinion.

Jack stopped at a fork in the path. “Midas is pulling this way.” He pointed toward the woods. “As odd as that is.”

“Odd how?” I asked.

“He doesn’t usually go this far. Getting old, for starters,” Jack said, reining Midas in with a gentle tug of the leash. “He normally tires out about halfway through the first plantings. But even when he was a pup, there was something about the back plots he never liked.”

“What do you mean?”

“For whatever reason, the area always spooked him.”

I swept my flashlight back and forth as if scouting for Midas’s bogies.

Again, the dog strained to keep going.

“Calm down, boy,” Jack said. “We’ll get there.”

We started up again, heading for the woods. Taking deep breaths, I told myself that it was the back orchard, not the woods, that rattled the dog. It wasn’t much reassurance, but it kept me from visualizing the trees’ branches as snatching fingers and hearing threats issue down from their heights. As to Midas’s nervousness, I reminded myself that dogs were worriers by nature, operating on some kind of perennial Code Red, where everyone from the UPS guy to the cookie-peddling Girl Scout was up to no good.