Spend it with you. Lie on my bed with you and memorize your smell and the sound of your voice so no one could ever take it away from me.
"Dee." He ran a hand down my arm, twining his fingers 194
in mine. "You've got to go on as normal. If you don't--They'll come in to finish my job for me."
So we packed my harp in the car and went on our way to the Warshaws. As Luke had promised earlier, the sky was clear and fresh, the only signs of the storm already disappearing behind the trees. While Luke drove, lost in his thoughts, I slouched in the passenger seat and typed an epic text message to James--confessing all, like we always used to do. For as long as we'd been friends, we'd relied on the written (well, typed) word to convey thoughts that seemed too embarrassing or serious to talk about in person. I remembered getting a long text from James about guardian angels and whether or not everyone had one, and another one about whether I thought being an introvert was a mental illness, and I remembered sending a long one about how I thought I'd never fit in and another about music as a possible time-traveling device-- so long that it took an hour to punch in all the letters on the cumbersome keypad. This one was a bit shorter than that.
james, i should've been honest with u from the start, but i was afraid of hurting ur feelings or ruining our friendship, i've been spending a lot of time w luke & i think i'm falling in love w him.
i know it's crazy and too soon but i can't help it. somehow he's in this faerie thing, but i don't know how yet. i read his mind that's one of the new freaky things i can do i guess & i found out he'd killed a lot of people, i know this will sound messed up but i think he was forced to do it. he's supposed to kill me too but he won't & now i'm afraid whoever's behind it is going 195
to do something awful to him. i don't know what to do. maybe i'm supposed to save him. plz dont be angry w me i need ur help.
I sighed and deleted the message without sending it. Closing the phone, I turned toward Luke.
"What are you thinking about?"
"Whether they'll write my life story as a tragedy or an epic fantasy." He had pulled himself out of his thoughts with effort, and it seemed he'd lightened them a lot for my benefit.
I laughed. "And whether or not they'll get a cute guy to play your part?"
"No, I was wondering if it was going to be a kiss at the end, or sad music and a sweeping camera shot over the fields I once roamed freely." He glanced over and brushed the top of my hand with his fingers before looking back to the road. "I'm hoping for the kiss, but expecting the sweeping camera shot."
I frowned. "Can you tell me who did that to you, back in the kitchen?"
Luke paused, as if trying out the idea. "Someone... who started out like you."
"Oh, that's specific."
"I can't be specific."
I squinted in the dying evening light and tried to think of what I was like. "Shy? Ruled by an iron-fisted mother? Musical?"
Luke groaned at all of my choices. "Think basic." "Female? Human?"
196
"Ding! Give the girl a prize!" Squinting in the evening light, he put on a pair of sunglasses; they made him look almost unbearably cool. It really wasn't fair that he had so many Deirdre-felling weapons in his arsenal. "So theoretically, if she's like you, I can talk about you and you'll learn about her and I won't get in trouble."
"That makes my head hurt, but I think I'm with you."
Luke warmed to the idea. "Okay. Let's talk about your gift. It can't change who you are. It's like--" he struggled for the words. "It's like being drunk. Getting sloshed doesn't change who you are--it just takes away all your inhibitions. It makes you more you. So if you've got a nasty streak, you're a mean drunk. If you're a nice person, you're one of those amiable drunks. You're a crazy talented girl with an amazing force of will, and this gift just takes that and explodes it."
"You've already won me. You don't have to compliment me."
Luke made a vague motion. "It just comes naturally to me. I can't seem to stop. You have an amazingly cute pony-tail; it makes me want to touch it. See, that one just slipped out.
"If you make me blush, I am going to hit you." I was thrown off-balance by his sudden lightness of mood--this was the Luke who had flirted with me at the competition, not the Luke shedding tears of blood in a tomb or the Luke lost in memories in the kitchen. I'd missed him.
He glanced over at me and rewarded me with a brief, shining smile.
I bit my lip and blushed anyway. "So, go on with the gift 197
bit. I assume that this someone else who might be a lot like me, but isn't, wasn't a nice person who became an über-nice person after they found out about their gift." My emphasis on the word
"gift" was decidedly sarcastic; the jury was still out on whether or not I agreed with Luke's terminology.
"No. Someone who might be like you and might have something to do with my condition was a nasty, paranoid-schizo girl who loved telling people what to do. And when she grew into her gift, she was a nasty, paranoid-schizo girl who told people what to do and hurt them if they didn't do it. A lot of people."
I contemplated this. "And where do you come into it?"
"I think that might
