eventual moving on. Everyone seemed to be having a great time.
Everyone but Kyle.
Making their way out of the spotlight, Isabel and her brother accepted the adulation and pats on the back from their audience. Liz stepped up to hug Max, giving him the kind of warm kiss that Isabel had not seen them share in quite some time. For the briefest moment, she was jealous of the fact that she couldn't be so public with the guy she was seeing. But, the trade-off for her clandestine relationship with Jesse was well worth the few pangs of regret.
Setting her sites on Kyle, Isabel continued through the crowd as the band took the stage for another short set. Kyle was looking down at his glass of soda, transfixed by it. Beside the glass, his fingers drummed a repetitive beat.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap.
Isabel remembered when Liz explained that the tapping fingers were some kind of side effect experienced by people that Tess had mindwarped. It had happened to Maria's mom after Tess had forced her to forget a particularly confusing evening at the UFO Center. When Ms. DeLuca had started to remember things, her fingers would drum on the counter. It had also happened when Kyle remembered the horrible things that Tess had made him forget. But Maria had been keeping tabs on her mom, and reported that Ms. DeLuca had stopped tapping her fingers weeks ago. Why hasn't Kyle?
«So what, your soda's more interesting than our skit?» Isabel asked, smiling.
Apparently unaware of the fact that she was speaking to him, Kyle took a moment before he looked up at her. «Oh, no… no. I was just… thinking.» «Is something wrong?» she asked, about to take a seat. «Yes,' he replied, standing. «Can we go somewhere and talk?»
Without waiting for an answer, Kyle started heading for the back of the cafe as the band struck up yet another cheerful tune. They had exhausted their entire repertoire of original songs in the first set and had moved on to top-forty hits. Oddly, however, Maria had not joined them again.
Dutifully, Isabel followed Kyle, concerned for her friend. Unfortunately, when the pair walked into the back room of the Crashdown, they came right in on the middle of another one of Michael and Maria's love spats, which explained the singer's momentary absence from the stage.
«And look at your jeans!» Maria said in a tone of voice that was just short of yelling, not wanting to disturb the party in the other room.
«Oh, now you're going to insult my clothing?» Michael shot back in his usual sarcastic, defeatist tone.
«Black!» she slammed her locker door for effect. «It was the one color Liz specifically asked us not to wear. And look at you. Black jeans. Was it that difficult of a rule to understand? Should I have brought a color wheel by to explain what would have been an appropriate hue?»
«Sorry I don't own an extensive wardrobe,' he said by way of an explanation. «I wore what was clean. Besides, I think you're wearing enough colors in that outfit for the both of us.»
«I'm sorry,' Kyle mumbled as he started to back out the door.
Isabel, however, was having none of that tonight. «Can't you two just put your petty little arguments on hold for one evening? It's really gotten way past the point of cute lovers' quarrels. Maria, why don't you go out there and sing some more with the band. Michael, you go watch her.»
Without another word, Michael and Maria left the room in a huff. As soon as they were out the door, Isabel laughed to herself. «Some people express their love for each other in the strangest ways.»
«Yeah,' was the only response Kyle could muster.
«Okay, Kyle, spill it.»
He took a deep breath, as if stalling for time to either convince himself to speak or to brace himself for Isabel's reaction for what he was about to say. «You remember the
time you took me on a dreamwalk into the mind of the Playboy Playmate of the Year?» Kyle asked.
Isabel was afraid to think about where this one was going. «Yes. Afterward, I couldn't bathe long enough to make me feel clean after I realized the things you had in mind.»
«I've been thinking a lot about that lately,' he said, with no trace of lecherous teenage humor in his voice. His fingers were tapping against Liz's metal locker.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap.
«I'm sure you have,' Isabel said, taking his hand so that the metal-amplified drumming would stop. «But we won't be doing that again. I don't usually bring guests with me when I dreamwalk.»
«That's not what I want.»
«Then what, Kyle?» Isabel checked through the door's window to make sure none of the «out of the loop» guests was going to stumble across their conversation. It was more out of habit than concern. «What's with the mood you're in? I mean, obviously we're all upset, but you seem to be really agitated at the moment. I didn't think you and Alex were all that close.»
«Right now, I feel closer to him than I think anyone else could,' Kyle replied in a monotone. «I did kill him, after all.»
A flood of denials came rushing to Isabel's mind. It was just a matter of which one would come out of her mouth first. «That's ridiculous. Tess killed him. You had nothing to do with it.»
«But if I hadn't come into the room,' he explained, «if I hadn't opened the door when I did, maybe Tess wouldn't have been pushing so hard on Alex's mind. She was trying
to get him to shut up in front of me. She killed him because of me.»
Isabel took a moment to gather her thoughts. She wasn't prepared to handle such a conversation, but knew that what she was about to say would carry a lot of weight with him. «And if 1 hadn't introduced Alex to Tess, it wouldn't have happened. And if Liz hadn't told him our secret, it wouldn't have happened. And if our spaceship had crashed in Tupelo, Mississippi, it wouldn't have happened. Kyle, there are millions of things that could have been done to avoid it, but none of us has the power to see the future. We can't stop things before they happen.»
«But you can change things after the fact,' Kyle replied. «You can make people change.»
Isabel knew what he was talking about. «Kyle, Tess mindwarped you into helping her set up Alex's death. You didn't know what you were doing.»
«I loaded him into the car like he was a duffel bag,' Kyle reminded her.
«Because you thought he was,' she shot back. «You had no control over your actions. She was using you.»
«That's not much consolation,' he replied. «Buddha says, 'Kill not, but have regard for life.''
Isabel didn't have a good response to that one, so she went with the obvious. «I really don't care what Buddha says. I truly doubt that Buddha ever considered alien mind tricks when coming up with life philosophies.»
She managed to elicit a slight smile from Kyle on that one. But it was quickly wiped away. In the momentary pause that followed, they both listened to the music coming from the restaurant. Apparently, Maria had taken Isabel's
suggestion and once again had joined in with the band. She was wrapping up a tune by the group Save Ferris. It was a band Isabel knew Alex had loved.
«Kyle, why are you telling all this to me?» Isabel asked.
«I've been having trouble sleeping,' he said. «I keep replaying the memory of Alex's death. Every time I close my eyes, I see myself walking in on them. Sometimes, I see myself in Alex's place. Other times, I see things that have nothing to do with it. Strange things that I don't understand.»
«What kinds of things?»
«Everything,' he replied. «And nothing, too. I can't explain it.»
«So that's why you look so tired.»
«It's not just when I'm sleeping,' he continued. «This afternoon, I was working on a car when I got flashes of Alex's car hitting the truck. Isabel, I wasn't even there when the collision happened.»
But Isabel knew what he was talking about, because she had seen it too. She thought it had been normal for the imagination to make them see these things. «I think that's just our minds trying to explain things. Since we weren't witnesses, our minds are making up the scenario so we can find some kind of closure.»
«It's not closure,' he said, sure of himself. «It's getting worse. Much worse.»
«How?»
