“Which one did you jump?” Jerry asked, fighting a grin.
“The bigger one,” Helen answered, a half smile of her own creeping up her face.
Jerry looked at Helen, whistled once, and started the engine. “You’re lucky he didn’t seriously hurt you,” he said, not joking around anymore.
Helen nodded meekly, but she was thinking that Lucas was the lucky one. The strangeness of her own thoughts scared her silent for the rest of the drive home.
Chapter Four
Helen sat in a bathtub of cold water, the lights in the bathroom switched off, and listened to the phone ring over and over. She didn’t know what to say to anyone and every time she thought about attacking Lucas Delos in front of the entire school she groaned out loud in humiliation. She would have to leave the country, or at least Nantucket, because there was no way she could live down the fact that she had tried to strangle the hottest boy on the island.
She groaned again and splashed her face, which was still finding a way to blush even though she was submerged in freezing-cold water. Now that she wasn’t being driven half crazy with rage she could think about Lucas objectively, and she decided that Claire hadn’t been exaggerating when she said he was the best-looking boy she had ever seen. Helen agreed with her. She had been trying to kill him, but she wasn’t blind. Normal boys simply weren’t put together the way he was.
It wasn’t his height or his coloring or his muscles that made him so beautiful, she concluded. It was the way he moved. She had only seen him twice, but she could tell he thought less frequently about his looks than everyone around him did. His eyes, as pretty as they were, looked out, rather than back at himself.
She dunked her head underwater and screamed, just to get it all out without scaring her father. When she came back up she felt a little better, but was still disappointed in herself. One of the terrible side effects of feeling like she somehow already knew Lucas was that she was starting to idealize him, making him more perfect than was humanly possible. Which was uncomfortable because she also still wanted to kill him.
She pulled the rubber plug out with her toes and watched the water creep slowly down the sides of the bathtub until the last of it sucked down the drain. Then she sat naked in the empty tub, staring at her white, wrinkled feet until her butt hurt. Eventually, she knew, she would have to leave the dark bathroom and try to act normal.
She got dressed and went downstairs to check on her dad, finding him just walking through the front door. He had run out to buy ice cream for dinner—and not just any ice cream, but the good stuff from the gelato place that Helen had banned him from when the doctor told him to watch his diet.
“To bring down your core temperature,” he said innocently, shaking the rain out of his hair.
“Is that your story?” she asked him, her hands on her hips.
“Yup. And I’m sticking to it.”
She decided to let it go. There would be plenty of time to worry about his cholesterol in the morning. After so many days with so little food, rich gelato was probably not the best idea, but it did go down easily. They sat on the floor of the living room with their beloved Red Sox on television, passing the pint and spoon back and forth as they cussed out the Yankees. Neither of them answered the phone, which continued ringing periodically, and Jerry didn’t push Helen to explain what had happened. Claire’s mom would never have let her get off this easy. Sometimes there were advantages to being raised by a single dad.
Helen had to change her sheets before she went to bed. The stains from the night before had not disappeared as she had hoped, but tonight she had bigger things to worry about than sleepwalking. For one thing, she could hear someone or something moving around on the widow’s walk. It was different from the sounds she had heard the night before. This time there were actual footsteps directly above her instead of just amorphous whispers coming from all sides. Helen didn’t know what would be worse—going up there and finding a gang of intruding monsters or finding nothing at all. For a moment Helen wondered if she was starting to crack up.