Through the Break in Her Hair

Chapter 9

Yeah, yeah, yeah. His plan worked, so what?—this is what I tried to tell myself. This is how I tried to knock Van down a tier or two, but it didn't work. He was practically a god to me.

Van had actually given me the ability to talk to Lindsey, minus the gibberish, cold sweats, and bowel seizures. Well, he didn't give it to me, per say. He did the work, I got the credit. Which, hey, if he didn't mind, who was I to stop him?

I was curious when I'd have to "pay up," though. Because, let's be honest, Van was not the kind of guy who worked for free. That would be stupid. With his power, he could have every single dignitary and ruler at his beck and call. All he had to do was drop a few lines of thought, peer into someone else's mind or plans, and WHAM—problem solved, worldwide domination. I should probably keep that thought to myself, Van didn't need to be pulling those kind of strings.

The only downside to our arrangement, at least one of the downsides, was that I could never really be alone with Lindsey. Van was the creepy shadow that lingered behind all of our conversations. I say "all," but in reality we'd only had two or three conversations since the library, if you count a "sexy" tip of the chin. Van's terminology, not mine.

He said that if I squinted my eyes a little and curled up one corner of my mouth, while nodding with my chin only, it would look sexy. It was one tricky little maneuver, and I wasn't quite sold on the promise that it could be sexy. How could Van possibly know anything about being sexy? He was the opposite of sexy, like sexy's younger dopey brother or something.

Anyway, I tipped my chin to Lindsey in the hall once and it made her blush like crazy. She lifted her usual arm-full-of-books up so far that it covered half of her face. After that, all that I could see were the rims of her black glasses. I'm sure she would have hidden those too if she didn't need them for safe passage through the hallway.

Dang! Van was right, I thought, remembering the lusciously pink shade that painted her cheeks.

"Told you," he muttered, not bothering to look up from his lunch tray.

I glared at him momentarily, but let it slide. Maybe he couldn't help but hear everything I was thinking, and reacting was just...automatic? Whatever the reason, I couldn't hold it against him, not forever anyway.

Over the past week, Van and I had fallen into a sort of friendship. We sat together in the trough, on the bus, I even invited him over to my house, but he said he'd rather not. Some bull crap or another about adults not understanding him. I didn't understand him either, or get along with him, but our camaraderie had its benefits.

Lindsey Sumners, ten 'o' clock...

"You don't need to say her last name," I whispered hurriedly. My eyes zipped towards the front of the room where Lindsey was just getting in line for lunch.

"I didn't," Van chuckled. This was his favorite joke.

He argued that not vocalizing was the same as not saying something. Wrong! You could say a million things with just your body language alone, and just because you don't say something out loud, doesn't mean you haven't said it. I must have heard it two hundred times already, and it still wasn't funny. The way I looked at it, whether he said it in my brain or out loud, he still said it. Nothing humorous about that.

I shook my head, brushing him off, and turned back to Lindsey. Why is she so late to lunch and where are all her books? I thought, eying her tray of slop. I don't think I've ever seen her hold anything but a load of textbooks. Which posed another question, where was her back pack?

"Stopped at her locker, forgot her code, and doesn't have one," Van droned. You could tell that he hated relaying useless information like that. He didn't think it held any kind of value, but I did.