Deep Betrayal Page 0,3

eyes are still burning.” Jules picked up my poetry notebook. The word mutant stood out the most, in all caps, centered on the cover.

“What’s with the self-loathing?”

I ripped the notebook from her hands. “Who says it’s about me? I was actually commenting on you.”

She grabbed it back and thwacked me over the head with it.

“I’m going to give your dad a big hug when I see him. Seriously, the coolest thing any parent ever did, sending you home where you belong. I doubt my parents would have done it.”

Jules’s phone went off and she slid it open. Her thumbs worked furiously over the keypad as she sent back her response, then snapped the phone shut.

“Good news,” she said. “Robby and Zach are going to make it after all.”

Jules’s mother had planned a catered dinner party at their house for our friends. She was loath to celebrate what she called a “milestone event” at the Olive Garden.

“Now, can I help you clean this mess up? My mom’s going to freak when she sees this floor.”

We spent the next hour sweeping my senior year into a trash can and throwing dirty clothes into a hamper. Jules commented on several of my favorite pieces: a navy velvet jacket and a yellow beret. “You’re the only one I know who can pull this stuff off. I’d look like a deranged clown.”

“I was going more for a modern-day Charlotte Brontë.” I hung the jacket in the closet. I hadn’t worn it since coming back to the Twin Cities. I could still smell the lake air in its fibers.

“Who?” Jules asked as she turned on the TV. The 1939 film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles was playing. Jules flopped down on the bed, resting her head in her hands. I wrapped up in an afghan on the floor and tried to focus on the movie. Something about a curse and some girl who got away.

Neither of us was awake for the end of the movie, and I was dreaming again:

I sank through the floor, through the joists, past the tangle of wires to the downstairs, and on past the basement. I dropped like a weighted line below the foundation into a watery underworld. The cold cut my skin and my lungs burned. A mermaid’s arms crushed my chest. Tighter, tighter. I called out, but no one answered. I reached for something that wasn’t there, then the sudden explosion of sound, and the mermaid’s unexpected release, the copper taste of blood in my mouth, red pooling around my face, and the tug of two arms pulling me onto the rocks, a silver ring appearing around a throat … the howling sound of voices calling my name …

I woke up with a shout. “Dad!”

Ugh. Groggy and stiff, I looked around to get my bearings. The movie was over, the lead actor’s voice replaced by a late-night talk-show host’s. I clicked off the TV and stood up. Jules slept peacefully in my bed, her hands curled under her cheek. It wasn’t nice, but I gave her a swift shove, and she rolled off the edge, hitting the floor with a satisfying thud.

“Hey!”

“You fell,” I said, crawling into the warm sheets. “Better go back to your own room. Graduation and all. Get some sleep.”

3

BLUE

“Geez, it’s so blue,” Jules said as we walked into Humphrey Auditorium. She was right. The decorating committee had gone overboard: blue balloons, blue banners, a curtain of blue and white streamers hanging behind the stage. Add in six hundred kids in blue caps and gowns and the effect was a little overwhelming. It was the first time in a long time that I was dressed like everyone else. It made me feel a little off balance.

“I got to get to my seat,” Jules said. “Good luck.”

I nodded, exhaling slowly. “Yeah, you too.”

I found the H row and my metal folding chair with only minutes to spare. Rob Hache slapped my hand as I squeezed by him. Besides Jules, Rob was my oldest friend—ever since we tied for third grade spelling-bee champ. Sometimes he tried to cross the friendship line, but lately we’d reached a truce in that debate.

Up front, the superintendent stood at a shiny blue podium, coughing into his sleeve before making some comments about how we were all heading off into a grand adventure. It wasn’t long before the name butchering began with “Mary Margaret An … An … drze … ze … jewski.”

The superintendent continued to trudge through the alphabet, while