Animal Nature

Chapter 6

By Thursday the news had completely forgotten about one missing boy and a dead middle-aged woman.

Shy managed to go to her locker and get to homeroom without bumping into Ron Black, whose locker was beside hers. But just before she entered the classroom, she thought she glimpsed a familiar face, and her heart skipped a beat.

David?

It couldn't be. Shy drifted to her desk. Even if he were found last night, he wouldn't be in school today. No, it was her mind playing tricks on her. She wanted to see him so badly she had.

On the way to her history class, however, she saw him again, disappearing into a classroom. Students pushed her to the side of the hallway when she stopped dead. It was David, not some other kid who had brown hair and a muscular build. He walked like David, too.

Shy forced her feet to move. David was supposed to be in her history class. Yesterday, instead of listening to her ancient teacher's lecture, she'd stared at the empty desk beside hers. Mr. Kilpatrick hadn't received the memo yet about David's disappearance, as he continued to call David's name out when he read the attendance list. "David Lupien?" he said every day, squinting around. "Absent again? Tsk, tsk." Shy had never known anyone who actually said, "Tsk, tsk." But Mr. Kilpatrick was so old he'd probably invented it.

Shy hesitated at the doorway. She'd seen him enter. Yet she feared her imagination was at work. She steeled herself for the inevitability that David would not be sitting there at his desk when she walked in.

She passed through the doorway.

David sat at his desk, busily writing in his notebook.

Shy stopped again, and again students behind her pushed her aside. She took their cue and haltingly moved to her desk and sat down.

"Hi, David," she said.

For a long moment he didn't answer, and her mind raced to conclusions. Maybe I'm totally crazy and David's not there, and I'm talking to an empty desk. Shy glanced around. No one seemed to be looking at her like she was crazy.

Finally David looked up quickly. "Hey," he said, then returned to his writing. Shy tried to read what he was so furiously writing, but his writing cramped up from so far away.

"Uh... so... um, what happened?" she asked.

David shrugged, and the bell rang, then Mr. Kilpatrick shuffled to his desk and cleared his phlegmy throat to get everyone's attention. David was still writing.

Shy pulled out her textbook and binder, every so often looking over at the boy who had been her best friend in even her earliest memories. He felt unfamiliar, somehow, his face blank. So many questions crowded in her head. The news hadn't mentioned David being found – that would have been big news, wouldn't it? Never mind that, David would have called to tell her he was back. To be in school today, he must have come back sometime yesterday, but Shy hadn't heard anything from him.

Normally Shy would have had a hard time staring at someone's face, examining it. Even with David, Shy had trouble making eye contact. But with David pointedly avoiding her gaze, Shy could look all she wanted.

Had David always had a unibrow? Shy didn't think so. The hairs that connected his eyebrows were sparse, though, so maybe Shy had just never noticed. It seemed to her that David's shoulders were a bit wider than they were before, but David was always doing something active, so maybe the muscles were simply more built up than the last time she'd noticed his muscles. Only she thought someone lost in the woods for several days would have been thinner. Instead, David looked bigger than he used to. More muscular.

She blushed a little, but didn't stop looking.

The camping trip in July, the camping trip before David's trip to Maine, that was when Shy had realized for the first time that she was attracted to her best friend. He'd been chopping wood for the campfire, and had taken off his shirt. Shy had paused in preparing their dinner to stare. Never before had she noticed how chiseled his muscles were, and how smooth and tan his skin. And when he stopped chopping wood and turned and looked at her, she thought he'd notice her the same way. After all, she was wearing a bikini top and cut off shorts because they'd been lying out by the lake all afternoon.

Yet his eyes had moved right over her. "Where did Jeff go? He was supposed to be helping me with this." Then he had thrown together a fire in minutes without a lighter or a match.

Now Shy pulled her eyes away and focused on her history book. Whatever had happened out there in the woods, David was even less interested in her. She hoped, at least, that he still wanted to be her friend.