Fallen (18 page)

She laughed. “Versus what? All those times I let you win?”

Daniel started to nod, then stopped himself abruptly. “No. Since you lost at the pool the other day.”

For a second, Luce had the urge to tell him
why
she’d lost. Maybe they could laugh about the whole Gabbe-being-his-girlfriend misunderstanding. But by then, Daniel’s arms were over his head and he was in the air, arcing and then falling, diving into the lake with a perfect little splash.

It was one of the most beautiful things Luce had ever seen. He had a grace like none she’d ever witnessed before. Even the splash he’d made left a lovely ring in her ears.

She wanted to be down there with him.

She tugged off her shoes and left them under the magnolia tree next to Daniel’s, then stood at the edge of the rock. The drop was about twenty feet, the kind of high dive that had always made Luce’s heart skip a beat. In a good way.

A second later, his head popped up above the surface. He was grinning, treading water. “Don’t make me change my mind about letting you win,” he called.

Taking a deep breath, she aimed her fingers over
Daniel’s head and pushed off and up into a high swan dive. The fall lasted only a split second, but it was the most delicious feeling, sailing through the sunny air, down, down, down.

Splash
. The water was shockingly cold at first, then ideal a second later. Luce surfaced to catch her breath, took one look at Daniel, and started in on her butterfly stroke.

She pushed herself so hard that she lost track of him. She knew she was showing off and hoped he was watching. She drew closer and closer until she slammed her hand down on the rock—an instant before Daniel.

Both of them were panting as they hauled themselves up on the flat, sun-warmed surface. Its edges were slippery because of the moss, and Luce had a hard time finding her grip. Daniel had no problem scaling the rock, though. He reached back and gave her a hand, then pulled her up to where she could kick a leg over the side.

By the time she’d hoisted herself fully out of the water, he was lying on his back, almost dry. Only his shorts gave away any hint that he’d just been in the lake. On the other hand, Luce’s wet clothes clung to her body, and her hair was dripping everywhere. Most guys would have seized the opportunity to ogle a dripping-wet girl, but Daniel lay back on the rock and closed his eyes, like he was giving her a moment to wring herself out—either out of kindness or a lack of interest.

Kindness
, she decided, knowing she was being hopelessly romantic. But Daniel seemed so perceptive, he must have felt at least a little bit of what Luce felt. Not just the attraction, the need to be near him when everyone around her was telling her to stay away, but that very real sense that they knew—really knew—each other from somewhere.

Daniel snapped open his eyes and smiled—the same smile as in the picture in his file. A rush of déjà vu engulfed her so completely that Luce had to lie down herself.

“What?” he asked, sounding nervous.

“Nothing.”

“Luce.”

“I can’t get it out of my head,” she said, rolling over on her side to face him. She didn’t feel steady enough to sit up yet. “This feeling that I know you. That I’ve known you for a while.”

The water lapped against the rock, splashing on Luce’s toes where they dangled over the edge. It was cold and spread goose bumps up her calves. Finally, Daniel spoke.

“Haven’t we been through this already?” His tone had changed, like he was trying to laugh her off. He sounded like a Dover guy: self-satisfied, eternally bored, smug. “I’m flattered you feel like we have this connection, really. But you don’t have to invent some forgotten history to get a guy to pay attention to you.”

No. He thought she was lying about this weird feeling she couldn’t shake as a way of coming on to him? She gritted her teeth, mortified.

“Why would I make this up?” she asked, squinting in the sunlight.

“You tell me,” Daniel said. “No, actually, don’t. It won’t do any good.” He sighed. “Look, I should have said this earlier when I started to see the signs.”

Luce sat up. Her heart was racing. Daniel saw the signs, too.

“I know I brushed you off in the gym before,” he said slowly, causing Luce to lean forward, as if she could draw out the words more quickly. “I should have just told you the truth.”

Luce waited.

“I got burned by a girl.” He swung a hand into the water, plucked out a lily pad, and crumbled it in his hands. “Someone I really loved, not too long ago. It’s nothing personal, and I don’t want to ignore you.” He looked up at her and the sun filtered through a drop of water in his hair, making it gleam. “But I also don’t want you to get your hopes up. I’m just not looking to get involved with anyone, not anytime soon.”

Oh.

She looked away, out at the still, midnight-blue water where only minutes ago they’d been laughing and splashing around. The lake showed no signs of that fun anymore. Neither did Daniel’s face.

Well, Luce had been burned, too. Maybe if she told him about Trevor and how horrible everything had been, Daniel would open up about his past. But then again, she already knew she couldn’t stand hearing about his past with someone else. The thought of him with another girl—she pictured Gabbe, Molly, a montage of smiling faces, big eyes, long hair—was enough to make her feel nauseated.

His bad-breakup story should have justified everything. But it didn’t. Daniel had been so strange to her from the start. Flipping her off one day, before they’d even been introduced, then protecting her from the statue in the cemetery the next. Now he’d brought her out here to the lake—alone. He was all over the place.

Daniel’s head was lowered but his eyes were staring up at her. “Not a good enough answer?” he asked, almost like he knew what she was thinking.

“I still feel like there’s something you’re not telling me,” she said.

All of this couldn’t be explained away by one bad heartbreak, Luce knew. She had experience in that department.

His back was to her and he was looking toward the path they’d taken to the lake. After a while, he laughed bitterly. “Of course there are things I’m not telling you. I barely know you. I’m not sure why you think I owe you anything.” He got to his feet.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to get back,” he said.

“Don’t go,” she whispered, but he didn’t seem to hear.

She watched, chest heaving, as Daniel dove into the water.

He came up far away and began swimming toward shore. He glanced back at her once, about midway, and gave her a definitive wave goodbye.

Then her heart swelled as he circled his arms over his head in a perfect butterfly stroke. As empty as she felt inside, she couldn’t help admiring it. So clean, so effortless, it hardly looked like swimming at all.

In no time he had reached the shore, making the distance between them seem much shorter than it looked to Luce. He’d appeared so leisurely as he swam, but there was no way he could have reached the other side that quickly unless he’d really been tearing though the water.

How urgent was it for him to get away from her?

She watched—feeling a confusing mix of deep embarrassment and even deeper temptation—as Daniel hoisted himself back up onto the shore. A shaft of sunlight bit through the trees and framed his silhouette with a glowing radiance, and Luce had to squint at the sight before her eyes.

She wondered whether the soccer ball to her head had shaken up her vision. Or whether what she thought she
was seeing was a mirage. A trick of the late-afternoon sunlight.

She stood up on the rock to get a better look.

All he was doing was shaking the water from his wet head, but a glaze of droplets seemed to hover over him, outside him, defying gravity in a wide span across his arms.

The way the water shimmered in the sunlight, it almost looked like he had wings.

O
n Monday evening, Miss Sophia stood behind a podium at the head of the largest classroom in Augustine, attempting to make shadow puppets with her hands. She’d called a last-minute study session for the students in her religion class before the next day’s midterm, and since Luce had already missed a full month of the class, she figured she had a lot to catch up on.

Which explained why she was the only one even pretending to take notes. None of the other students even
noticed that the evening sun trickling in through the narrow western windows was undermining Miss Sophia’s handcrafted light-box stage. And Luce didn’t want to call attention to the fact that she was paying attention by standing up to draw the dusty blinds.

When the sun brushed the back of Luce’s neck, it struck her just how long she’d been sitting in this room. She’d watched the eastern sun glow like a mane around Mr. Cole’s thinning hair that morning during world history. She’d suffered the sweltering midafternoon heat during biology with the Albatross. It was nearly evening now. The sun had looped the entire campus, and Luce had barely left this desk. Her body felt as stiff as the metal chair she was sitting in, her mind as dull as the pencil she’d given up using to take notes.

What was up with these shadow puppets? Were she and the other students, like, five years old?

But then she felt guilty. Of all the faculty here, Miss Sophia was by far the nicest, even gently pulling Luce aside the other day to discuss how far behind Luce was in the writing of her family tree paper. Luce had to feign astonished gratitude when Miss Sophia walked her through an hour’s worth of database instructions yet again. She felt a little ashamed, but playing dumb was far superior to admitting she’d been too busy obsessing over a certain male classmate to devote any time to her research.

Now Miss Sophia stood in her long black crepe dress, elegantly interlocking her thumbs and raising her hands
in the air, preparing for her next pose. Outside the window, a cloud crossed over the sun. Luce zoned back in on the lecture when she noticed there was suddenly an actual shadow visible on the wall behind Miss Sophia.

“As you all remember from your reading of
Paradise Lost
last year, when God gave his angels their own will,” Miss Sophia said, breathing into the microphone clipped to her ivory lapel and flapping her thin fingers like a perfect angel’s wings, “there was
one
who crossed the line.” Miss Sophia’s voice dropped dramatically, and Luce watched as she twisted up her index fingers so the angel’s wings transformed into devil’s horns.

Behind Luce, someone muttered, “Big deal, that’s the oldest trick in the book.”

From the moment Miss Sophia had kicked off her lecture, it seemed like at least one person in the room took issue with every word that came out of her mouth. Maybe it was because Luce hadn’t had a religious upbringing like the rest of them, or maybe it was because she felt sorry for Miss Sophia, but she felt a growing urge to turn around and shush the hecklers.

She was cranky. Tired. Hungry. Instead of filing down to dinner with the rest of the school, the twenty students enrolled in Miss Sophia’s religion class had been informed that if they were attending the “optional”—a sad misnomer, Penn informed her—study session, their meal would be served in the classroom where the session was being held, to save time.

The meal—not dinner, not even lunch, just a generic late-afternoon fill-up—had been a strange experience for Luce, who had a hard enough time finding anything she could eat in the meat-centric cafeteria. Randy had just wheeled in a cart of depressing sandwiches and some pitchers of lukewarm water.

The sandwiches had all been mystery cold cuts, mayo, and cheese, and Luce had watched enviously as Penn chomped through one after another, leaving tooth-marked rings of crust as she ate. Luce had been on the verge of de-bologna-ing a sandwich when Cam shouldered up next to her. He’d opened his fist to expose a small cluster of fresh figs. Their deep purple skins looked like jewels in his hand.

“What’s this?” she’d asked, sucking in a smile.

“Can’t live on bread alone, can you?” he’d said.

“Don’t eat those.” Gabbe had swooped in, lifting the figs out of Luce’s fingers and tossing them in the trash. She’d interrupted yet another private conversation and replaced the empty space in Luce’s palm with a handful of peanut M&M’s from a vending machine sack. Gabbe wore a rainbow-colored headband. Luce imagined yanking the thing from her head and pitching it in the trash.

“She’s right, Luce.” Arriane had appeared, glowering at Cam. “Who knows what he drugged these with?”

Luce had laughed, because of course Arriane was joking, but when no one else smiled, she shut up and slipped
the M&M’s into her pocket just as Miss Sophia called for them all to take their seats.