Breathless Read online

  * * *

  Apparently, Joe and Adam were so embarrassed that they’d been bested by one guy half their size that they didn’t tell anyone about the incident. Unsure of why, I didn’t say anything either. Not even to Toby. Especially not to Toby. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t say anything to Toby. It seemed like it wouldn’t be a good idea. He’d probably feel guilty for not being there to protect me. And it was weird that he hadn’t come after me in the first place, wasn’t it?

  It took a week, but the rumors about my gender and deformed genitals eventually died down at school. People were starting to focus on Homecoming, which was only a week away. The dance happened to coincide with Halloween, and the girls that Toby and I ate with were buzzing with theme ideas. They wanted the Homecoming Dance to be a costume ball. It sounded okay, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t know what I was going to dress up as. There was one clear silver lining in the whole set up. If there was a Homecoming Dance on Halloween, my parents couldn’t force me to attend one of their lame parties.

  Actually, I hadn’t heard any talk about a party from my parents. Apparently, a party hadn’t been their big plan for Halloween. Or, if it had, it was no longer on the table.

  The big news at home was that the state was going to let us keep Jason. He was officially registered in their system now, and there was no chance of the arm of the law swooping down and sending him to a shelter or something. I hadn’t really thought that would happen. Jason wouldn’t stay in a shelter. There was no way. He would just run off.

  I still knew next to nothing about Jason. I’d started waking up early on Sundays, trying to catch him alone again. But he was never awake anymore, and there wasn’t anything good on TV on Sunday morning. Sometimes, I formulated theories about Jason. He’d said he was running from a group of people who were like Freemasons with guns. I wondered if they were the Illuminati. The Illuminati was a secret society that controlled everything on earth. They had ties to numerous world governments. They pulled hidden strings.

  But that didn’t make sense. Why would the Illuminati be looking for Jason? I considered the facts. Jason was very, very smart. He was educated. Someone had taken pains to make sure Jason was well read. That sounded like something the Illuminati might do, but again... why Jason? Jason also was skilled in hand-to-hand combat. He had excellent control over his emotions. I’d never seen him angry. None of that fit with the Illuminati.

  Sometimes, I thought Jason was a robot, a secret prototype that the government had created to be a killing machine or something. I speculated that Jason maybe didn’t know he was a robot. That was why he’d been told this story about his mother, who was dead, and all of that. He thought he was human, but actually he was a machine.

  I didn’t think that was really true.

  But it bothered me. Who was this boy who lived in my house? Why couldn’t I crack his secrets? And why didn’t anyone else seem as concerned as I was with figuring out who he was and where he came from?

  Jason had blended into my family. He ate like the rest of the Jones boys. He played video games with them, even participated in their good-natured teasing. He did his chores. He was respectful to my parents. To my knowledge, he hadn’t gone out to any parties or been drinking since the incident at the Nelson farm. But even though he seemed like a regular kid—albeit an obedient, responsible one—there was something about him that just seemed, well, different. He was quiet a lot. He was separate. Even when he was laughing, he didn’t seem... happy. He seemed haunted. I thought that something very bad had happened to Jason at some point in his life. I wanted to know what it was, but at the same time, if it had damaged Jason so deeply, maybe I didn’t.

  Halloween and the dance loomed. Lilith was excited about it, even though she didn’t have a date. “I’ll go solo if no one asks,” she said. “Then I won’t be stuck dancing with the same stupid boy all night.” She wanted to find a costume, and she invited me to go shopping with her.

  Since Bramford was in the middle of nowhere, we had to drive forty-five minutes to Cumberland, Maryland to do any decent shopping. Lilith was excited on the way up, chattering about her various costume options.

  “I’m thinking,” she said, “slutty nurse, or maybe slutty cheerleader, or maybe just slut.”

  I laughed. “Lilith, you know there’s a dress code for this dance.”

  She sighed. “I know. And it drives me nuts. Halloween is the one night of the year where you can get away with wearing next to nothing, and this dance is raining on my parade.”

  I had no idea what I was going to dress up as. I’d tried to get some ideas from Toby. I thought it might be kind of cute if we had matching costumes. But Toby had decided to dress up as Michael Myers, and I was so not dressing up as a helpless victim. So that idea was out.

  “I know exactly what you should dress up as,” said Lilith. “The Virgin Mary.”

  “Lilith!” I exclaimed. “That’s so mean. Why would you say that?”

  “Oh, it’s a joke! It’ll show all those bitches at school that you don’t care what they say about you. It would be hilarious.”

  “No way,” I said. “But maybe a Vestal virgin.”

  Lilith laughed. “Really?”

  I thought about it. “Vestal virgins are way sexier than the Virgin Mary,” I said.

  Lilith allowed me that.

  Our first stop was the Goodwill store, in order to find cheap pieces that would make up the bulk of our costumes. We’d spend more money on accessories. All of this was Lilith’s scheming. I didn’t think about things like this. I hit the racks, looking for something that looked kind of like a toga. I didn’t even know what Vestal virgins looked like. I figured it didn’t matter. No one else would know what they looked like either. After all, they hadn’t been around for over a thousand years.

  Lilith combed the store on her own. We met up twenty minutes later at the dressing rooms with our arms full of clothes. I had about four different options. Lilith maybe had ten. I finished before she did. I’d found a dress that I thought would work pretty well. It was white and gathered at an empire waist. It draped in several different layers. It didn’t look exactly like a toga, but it was close enough. While I was evaluating each new dress that Lilith tried on, I talked to Lilith. And before I knew it, the whole story about Jason beating up Adam and Joe came pouring out.

  I hadn’t meant to tell Lilith about it. Not because I usually kept things from her. It was only that the story was embarrassing. I didn’t like to think about the things that Adam and Joe had said. I didn’t like to think about the look in Adam’s eyes when he was close to me or his hands on my waist. Or about what might have happened if Jason wasn’t there. But it felt weird keeping something like that from my best friend. I told Lilith everything.

  When I got to the part about Jason punching Adam, Lilith threw open the door to the dressing room, half-dressed. “You are fucking kidding me!”

  Everyone in the entire Goodwill seemed to hear her. They looked up from the children’s clothing section. From the furniture section. From the cashier’s desk.

  “Sorry,” said Lilith. She smiled in embarrassment. To me, quieter, she said, “So, how come nobody heard about this?”

  “Well, I guess no one said anything.”

  Lilith ducked back in the dressing room. When she emerged, she was back in her own clothes. “I’m gonna go with the first thing I tried on.”

  Hmm. It wasn’t like Lilith to decide so quickly. She hung up the other clothes she didn’t want on the rack to be restocked. Then she took my hands. “Look, Zaza. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to spend too much time with Jason.”

  She seemed so serious. When was Lilith ever this serious? I took my hands out of hers. “I don’t spend much time with him,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “But, you know, maybe you shouldn’t get too attached.”

  “Attached?” Lilith was acting weirder and weirder. I felt like I hardly knew my best friend. “What do y
ou mean?”

  “It just seems like you like him a lot, that’s all,” she said, surveying the dress she was about to purchase. It seemed like she was purposefully not looking at me.

  “He’s interesting,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “Well, he might not be around forever, you know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She dropped the dress to her side, heaving a huge sigh. “Oh, God, Zaza, I can’t really talk about it, but you just have to trust me.”

  “Why can’t you talk about it?”

  “I’m not allowed,” she said.

  That was it! Lilith had said that before. She’d said she wasn’t allowed to get it on with Jason. And then Toby had said he wasn’t allowed to have sex with me. And now Lilith wasn’t allowed to talk about something? What was going on here? “Who says you’re not allowed?”

  “God, I need to shut up,” Lilith muttered.

  “No, you need to explain yourself,” I said. “You really, really do.”

  Lilith held up her dress again. She held it up against herself and looked in the mirror. “Trust me, okay? I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I was getting frustrated. Were both Lilith and Toby being told what to do by the same authority? What was it? Or was I grasping at straws? Trying to put something together when there was nothing there at all?

  Lilith looked at me. “Everything’s gonna be better after Halloween, okay? This thing with Toby, everybody making fun of you, all of it. After Halloween, you’ll see. None of it will matter.”

  “Why? What’s going to happen at Halloween?”

  “I can’t,” said Lilith. “I told you too much already. Just believe me.” She looked around the store. “And don’t tell anybody I said this to you.”

  And that was all. And try as I might, I couldn’t force Lilith to even acknowledge she’d said what she’d said, let alone elaborate on it.