Page 62 of Friend
Crap!
“Bianca?” My voice sounded strangled and strange. “What are you—”
“Do you want some punch?” She straightened, cup in hand, and turned back to me smiling.
I blinked, startled, as I glanced between her and the shikigami. He was looking at her like she was crazy.
I was positive she’d seen it—and he knew it too.
“Sure…” I said instead, because what else was I supposed to do? She had been taking her medicine, and she seemed fine.
She could have also been looking at the giant poster of Agatha.
“How about—” I started, but my question was cut off whenThrillerbegan to blare over the loudspeakers. That, in itself, wasn’t offensive.
But the sudden gathering and howling of our wolf classmates was.
Bianca stiffened, her attention wandering to the dance floor, and the part of me that I’d been ignoring—the one that told me that coming here was a very bad idea—grew stronger.
We had rules about this!
I set one of the plates on the table, making sure to keep the one more fully filled with pastries, cheese, and cookies, and grabbed her hand. She jumped and looked at me instead.
“Let’s go sit by the lake,” I told her. There was a small enclosure there, on a hill that the ecology class used for research. It was perfect—we’d be close enough to hear the music, and still be ‘here’, but would be away from anything that might trigger her.
And it helped that no one else was allowed out there either.
“It’s closed,” Bianca pointed out. “It even said on the flier.”
It was, mostly because no one thought it was a good idea to allow teenagers to have free rein in the middle of the night. They didn’t want to be responsible for teen pregnancies.
“It’ll be fine,” I told her, pulling her with me. We didn’t need to worry about that.
“But…” she almost whispered as she spotted a trio of teachers by the door. “The gate is probably locked.”
It was—and not only by a gate—but even more importantly...
...How could it be that her moral compass about breaking rules only applied in certain situations? She was so frustrating.
Sometimes it was impossible to follow her thought process.
“That’s good then,” I told her. She’d already established this. “Since I’m supposed to know how to break into things.”
That was why she’d sent me to do the dirty work with Cory.
Bianca had the grace to turn red, but no longer resisted as we left the building. As soon as we were out of sight from the teachers and our classmates, sans anyone just arriving or lingering in the entryway, she stopped hesitating entirely.
It was easy to break into a fenced garden when you had a key, and Bianca, busy staring at the moon, hadn’t even noticed. Nor had she even flinched as we passed through the barriers set up by my father to keep wayward students away.
He’d never think to protect this area against me.
I set my jacket on the grass—for Bianca to sit on—and I dropped crossed-legged on the ground beside her. We could still see the bright lights streaming from the gymnasium windows through the gap in the weeping willow branches.
“Was it worth coming, do you think?” It’d been hard to be in there for longer than ten minutes—then with the shikigami, and wolves…
I was afraid I’d ruined it for her. I could have planned something else. I hadn’t even thought to check these details out ahead of time.
The question was for both her sake and mine. At first, I thought it would be useless—stupid. That this was a waste of time for everyone involved.
