Under the Light - By Laura Whitcomb Page 0,45

I thought. I’d never had a boyfriend. I stared at him, amazed.

Billy adjusted his sweatshirt jacket on me, zipped me in, flipped the hood over my hair. I thought he was taking more time than he needed to.

“Am I disguised?” I asked. “Do I look like someone else?”

“Not to me,” said Billy.

We waited until the bell rang for the next passing period and then slipped into the foot traffic, making our way back to the lockers. I saw Jill Sugden from church coming our way, so I ducked my head and pulled Billy in the other direction, toward the quad. Then out of the general crowd noise, someone behind us called out.

“Hey, Blake!”

This time it was Billy who changed our direction—he tugged me to the right, onto the path that led to the school office. I didn’t want to be seen by anyone in attendance—they’d know I wasn’t supposed to be at school today—but Billy was right. Whoever called out for him didn’t follow us toward the principal’s office.

We headed for the corner of the building where the bike racks were, but a teacher came out of the attendance office and almost ran into us. Mr. Brown paused to read one of those little phone message notes, and Billy and I stopped just in time. I had taken composition with him freshman year, and he was nice and sometimes funny, but it wasn’t like I knew him very well. It took me a moment to remember that the ghost Helen said he had been her host. To my surprise, I was clutching his arm.

Mr. Brown looked down at me, expecting some student to ask for a makeup quiz or to explain how they’d lost their book report, I suppose. His expression was open and relaxed, but when he saw my face in the shadow of the hood, he froze. He actually dropped his briefcase at his feet and the little note he’d been reading blew out of his fingers.

I was in shock, speechless. I wanted to let go of him, but it was like my hand belonged to somebody else. My shoulder felt heavy and tingling all the way down to my fingertips.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out.

Slowly he reached to put his hand over mine, but I was so embarrassed to be touching him that I tried to pull away. My hand wouldn’t cooperate. In my clumsy struggle to free him I kicked his briefcase and a cardboard box slid out of it. My hand opened suddenly, letting go of him just as a gust of wind swept through the corridor and lifted the lid of the box on the ground and papers started blowing out of it.

We watched the pages blow around like birds. Then I had the irresistible urge to catch them. I ran at the papers, snatching them out of the air as they traveled past the bike racks and toward the parking lot. I reached and grabbed with my right hand and kept the captured ones in my left. I could hear Mr. Brown and Billy helping in the paper chase. Some of the pages were handwritten and some were typed, but as I lifted one from the ground and peeled another from where it stuck to someone’s bicycle, I noticed that they weren’t student homework. The handwriting was all alike and the typed pages had high numbers: 107, 113. It was all one manuscript. His manuscript, maybe. He carried it around hidden in a plain brown box in his briefcase.

I paused and looked at him. With hair ruffled in the wind and a mess of papers under one arm, he jumped up and caught another page in midair—he seemed like a kid, not like a teacher at all. He had a secret, like my photographs.

I dove at another page as it cartwheeled by my feet. I guessed the handwritten ones were especially important because these probably weren’t entered into his computer yet.

Now Mr. Brown was ordering the papers in his hands and Billy was balancing on the bike rack to pull one from a tree branch. We gave our papers to Mr. Brown, who said, “Good work, team.” He turned pages front-wise, right-side up, and flipped through, and as he started to order them by number he stopped and scanned the top one in puzzlement.

“Did we lose some?” I asked him.

“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered.

I felt guilty—I was the one who’d kicked his manuscript box open.

“I actually think this would make a better page one,”