Complete Nothing Page 9

“Hey. That’s actually pretty cool,” Hephaestus said.

  Wallace blushed pleasantly. “Thanks.”

  “Does it have any practical use?” I asked.

  “True,” Hephaestus said, somehow scolding me with one syllable.

  “I’m just saying, what would you do with this knowledge?” I was genuinely curious as I leaned over his shoulder and bit into a carrot stick. “Why do you want to know everyone’s height, weight, and whatever else you said there?”

  “Well, aren’t you glad to know you’re the second-tallest girl in your class?” he asked plainly.

  I lifted a shoulder. “I suppose.”

  “Here. Give me your phone.” He held out his hand, which bore one thick purple band on its ring finger. “I’ll download the app for you.”

  “I don’t have a cell phone,” I told him.

  His whole face went slack. “You don’t have a cell phone?”

  “Nope.”

  His hand hit the table with a crack, and I winced. That had to hurt. But he didn’t flinch. “How do you text?”

  “I don’t.”

  “How do you tweet? Update Facebook? Instagram? Play games? Listen to music?”

  I sat up straight at this. “Wait. You can use them to listen to music?”

  Wallace looked at Hephaestus as if I’d just dropped in through the ceiling from some far-flung galaxy.

  “I know, dude,” Hephaestus said, biting into an apple. “She’s weird.”

  Wallace put his pad thingie away and took out his phone, which looked just like the pad thingie, only smaller. He placed his phone on the table and opened up a screen that had songs and bands listed with prices next to each one.

  “You can buy any music you want,” he said slowly, as if he was attempting to communicate with a dolphin. “You just need to open an account with a credit card number and you’re in.”

  “Any music I want?” This was interesting. I scooted my chair closer to Wallace’s and tentatively touched the screen. I had missed music since I had been on Earth. The stereo system at Goddess Cupcakes played a steady stream of current pop hits, but I was more of a classical connoisseur, and I’d heard nothing of it since my arrival here over two weeks ago. Perhaps these soul-sucking devices I’d so vilified had a positive purpose.

  “Here.” Wallace pulled out a pair of earphones and stuck one side in my ear, the other in his. “What do you like? Hip-hop? Hard rock? Country?”

  “Mozart,” I told him.

  He glanced at me, obviously surprised and maybe impressed. “Mozart it is.”

  After hitting a few buttons on his phone, Mozart’s Requiem flowed through the earpiece. I leaned back next to him and sighed, the music instantly working its calming effect on my frayed nerves. “Thank you.”

  He grinned. “You’re welcome.”

  “Aw,” Hephaestus said. “True’s made a new friend!”

  I picked up a carrot stick and chucked it at him. It bounced off Hephaestus’s forehead and landed on Orion’s foot as he was walking by. He froze. I froze. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed him coming our way. For the past three days I’d had a sort of instinctive radar alerting me every time he was within a twenty-foot radius. Orion looked from me to Wallace and got this odd expression on his face—one I couldn’t define. My heart pounded at his nearness.

  “Your projectile?” he said finally, stooping to pick up the carrot.

  I shoved myself up from the table, the earpiece ripping from my ear. “Hi,” I said. “I actually need to talk to you.”

  “You do?” he said.

  “You do?” Hephaestus echoed.

  “Uh . . . yeah! About your spirit basket!” I improvised.

  “Oh. Well, I was just going up to get something to drink.” Orion smiled, and it nearly melted me. “Wanna come with?”

  It was a simple invitation, but it made my heart dance. “Sure.” I glanced at Wallace, who was wrapping up his headphones. “I’ll be right back.”

  I wanted him to teach me more about the music purchasing system. If it was as easy as he made it seem, I might have to cave and finally get one of those cell phones for myself.

  “So what’s up?” Orion asked, rubbing his hands together as we walked. His strong, gentle, masculine hands.

  I drank him in, even as I realized he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking ahead, probably more interested in deciding what to drink than in me. My spirits began to sink.

  I wasn’t going to get what I wanted out of this. I wanted him to take me in his arms and kiss me like he had that day in the woods back in Maine when I’d saved him from that huge bloodlusting bear. Or the time we’d gone skinny-dipping in the stream just outside our house. The day he’d caught me singing to the birds in the trees while I searched for kindling. Or any of the hundreds of small, seemingly insignificant kisses—the wake-up kiss, the good-night kiss, the see-you-when-I-get-back-from-hunting kiss.

  Any of these would have been fine. But none of them were going to happen.

  I reached up to touch his arrow pendant, which was tucked under the collar of my T-shirt.

  “Well, first . . . I wanted to apologize for the other day,” I said, feeling as though my pulse was pounding in my skull.

  He looked me up and down but kept walking. “Apologize for what?”

  “For . . . you know . . . kissing you? I thought you were someone else.”

  You. With your memories. That’s who I thought you were.

  He glanced back over his shoulder at my table. “Oh, that.”

  He laughed and mercifully stopped walking. I wasn’t sure I would be able to keep up with him with the room spinning and my brain weighing nothing and my heart slamming around inside my chest. I didn’t understand how humans managed to make it through an average day, what with the way my body always seemed to be at odds with my intentions. I so badly wanted to play it cool, but just being this close to Orion was putting me in need of an oxygen tank.

  “You don’t have to apologize for that,” he said. “There are worse things than getting randomly kissed by a hot girl.”

  I blinked, my face flushing with pleasure. “You think I’m hot?”

  He grinned that grin that had stolen my heart. “Isn’t that an accepted fact?”

  That was the Orion I knew and loved. Confident and complimentary. Honest and playful. I wanted to kiss him so badly my lips hurt.

  “So, you wanted to ask me about the spirit basket?” he said.

  “Right. I want to make sure I fill it with things you like.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about it. I like everything.”

  “But everyone has favorites.” I took a breath and held it, anticipating his reaction to what I was about to say. “Let me guess, you seem like a peanut butter cup kind of guy.”

  Orion’s jaw dropped slightly. “How did you know?”

  Because I brought them to you to celebrate your one-month anniversary back on Earth and your eyes rolled back in your head when you tasted them?

  “Lucky guess,” I replied with a smile. “I was also thinking raspberry cheesecake bars, pretzels, and maybe something with coconut?”

  Orion actually took a step back and nearly leveled a pair of small girls walking by with vanilla cones from the frozen yogurt machine.

  “That’s crazy. What are you, a mind reader or something?” he asked.

  “Nah. I just think it was meant to be, us being matched up.”

  He looked me over with a sort of pleased awe. “Yeah. Maybe it was.”

  My fingers twitched to take his hand. To press it against my chest so he could feel my heart beat. To do anything and everything to make him remember. But I could do nothing other than stare into his eyes, his incredible blue eyes.

  This was so wrong. We were soul mates. We were each other’s one and only. I knew him like the back of my hand. Shouldn’t he have known me no matter what? Shouldn’t our eternal connection be more powerful than any spell a god could cast on him?

  I felt m
y blood begin to boil, even as I knew I was asking the impossible. Zeus was more powerful than any being in the universe. He could do anything, even erase true love, obliterate memories, alter souls. But still, I burned with anger.

  Orion should have been able to overcome it. Our love should have been more powerful still.

  “There’s something about you,” I said carefully, trying to tamp down my roiling emotions. “I feel as if we’ve met somewhere before.”

  He tilted his head and in a breath, something stirred inside his eyes. Some spark of recognition. My heart leaped, and I did reach for his hand.

  “Hey, Orion!”

  We both flinched. Darla Shayne stood behind me with Veronica Vine at her side, each wearing the same low-cut T-shirt in different colors. Darla’s diamond D pendant hung right at the top of her serious cleavage, and I saw Orion’s eyes dart there.

  “Hey, D,” he said, stepping toward her. “I didn’t think it was possible for someone to look that gorgeous after staying up all night.”

  “I have my ways,” Darla said flirtatiously.

  “You were up all night?” I asked. “How would you know that?”

  “They were texting,” Veronica said with a sneer. “Not that it’s any of your business, freak.”

  “I was just going to get a soda,” Orion said to Darla, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Want anything?”

  “I’ll come with you,” she said.

  “We’re good, right, True?” he asked me.

  “Sure,” I replied quietly. “Yeah. We’re good.”

  He lifted his hand in a wave, and the two of them walked off together to join the dwindling line near the soda machine.

  “So many hot new guys and you seem to be going after every one of them,” Veronica said, tilting her head. “First Charlie, then Heath, now Orion. Too bad not one of them looks like he’s interested in you.”

  My jaw dropped open to reply, but I had no response, and Veronica slowly sauntered off. She was right. Not one of them was interested in me. Charlie had Katrina, Hephaestus had my sister and previously my mother (gag), and now, it seemed, Orion was moving on to Darla. As Orion ordered his soda, Darla placed her hand delicately on his arm, and I suddenly saw myself with my bow and arrow, drawing, aiming, piercing her through the heart.

  I felt the cool, smooth shaft of a wooden arrow in my fist and looked down. I was holding an actual arrow. A straight, perfectly calibrated arrow with genuine feather fletching and a silver tip. My heart vaulted into my throat. Not again. Had anyone seen that simply appear in my palm? I glanced around, but no one seemed to be watching me. Then I spotted Claudia approaching, her eyes trained down on her phone. It gave me enough time to drop the arrow on the floor and kick it under the nearest table.

  “True! Hey,” Claudia said.

  I glanced down at the arrow. The fletching was bright red and not entirely tucked away.

  “Um, hi. How’s everything?” I asked.

  “Everything sucks,” she replied plainly. “I think we need to step up our plan. Just gossiping about me and some fictional guy isn’t going to do it. You said you found someone?”

  Keegan Traylor’s flirtatious smile flashed through my mind. “I did.”

  “Good. I want to meet him.”

  She turned to look back at the senior section. At Peter’s table, specifically. The buxom girl from the pep rally rehearsal was kicked back in the chair next to his, her legs propped up on his lap while she did some kind of ritual with his hand. Massaging his palm? Cracking his knuckles? Counting his digits? It was impossible to tell, but whatever it was, it was clear by the hungry look on his face that it was totally turning him on.

  “Jealousy is definitely a powerful thing,” Claudia said, looking green.

  I kicked the arrow that my own jealousy had conjured farther under the table and clenched my teeth at the sound of Darla’s flirtatious laugh. “You have no idea.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Claudia

  “This is crazy,” I said to True, resting my “injured” leg atop the coffee table in front of us. It was covered with magazines for every audience, from Vanity Fair to Highlights to Men’s Fitness. “I can’t fake an injury.”

  “Why not? People do it every day,” True replied. “Now pucker.”

  She’d already teased and fluffed my hair, applied more mascara to my lashes than I normally wore for a recital, and dotted my cheeks with berry-shaded blush. Now she was coming at me, wielding a pink lip-gloss wand like a sword.

  “Yes, but what am I going to say?” I asked when she was done touching up my lips. I used my phone to take a picture of myself. I looked like a baby-faced prostitute. I hoped this Keegan person hadn’t told True that this was the look he was into. I wasn’t sure I could replicate it on my own, let alone get up the guts to leave the house like this. Or make it past my mother without getting grounded.

  Keegan Traylor. His name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why. True had told me the basics—that he was hot and he went to St. Joe’s, but I didn’t know anyone at St. Joe’s. It was a boys’ school, and as far as I knew, no one from there had ever joined my dance studio, so why would I?

  “You’re a dancer, right?” she said, capping the lip gloss and tossing it into my leather bag. “Tell him you felt something pop in your ankle at your last rehearsal. He’ll check you out and tell you you’re fine and then we’re out of here.”

  “And how am I going to get alone time with his son?” I asked, glancing nervously at the woman behind the glass doors. She had teeny bifocals and a pig nose and kept looking over at us like she suspected something. Maybe because I was the only minor in the waiting room without an adult. Or because True was performing a rom-com-worthy makeover in her waiting room.

  “Don’t worry,” True replied with a wave of her hand. “It’s taken care of.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Claudia Catalfo?”

  We both looked up.

  “That’s him,” True whispered, turning away from me to hide behind her hair.

  “No. Way,” I said.

  “Yes way,” she replied.

  The single most gorgeous guy I’d ever seen stood at the corner separating the waiting room from the exam rooms. He was tall and broad-shouldered with perfect posture and was wearing a light-blue polo shirt with a white doctor’s jacket over it, which brought out the incredible cocoa-and-milk color of his skin. He looked like he’d just stepped off the set of some hot new medical drama. Emphasis on the “hot.” If Peter ever saw me with this guy, he’d eat his heart out.

  “Nice work,” I said under my breath, feeling disloyal for my thoughts.

  “I know,” she sang.

  But then, it wasn’t disloyal. Peter and I were no longer together. At least, not for the moment. And he had a sophomore giving him lap dances in the middle of pep rally practice, not to mention what had gone on in the cafeteria. Every time I thought about the way that girl had just draped herself across him this afternoon, I wanted to kick something.

  “Claudia Catalfo?” he said again.

  “Go!” True whispered.

  I got up, and she kicked my foot. Right. I was supposed to be in pain here. I limped toward Keegan Traylor, and he smiled at me. I swear my knees almost buckled. No one should be allowed to be that good-looking in real life. It simply wasn’t fair to the rest of us normal humans.

  “Claudia?” he said.

  “Yes?” I breathed.

  “I’m Keegan,” he said. “Right this way.”

  He led me down a carpeted hallway and into exam room two. A man who had to be his father was sitting on a rolling stool near the counter, clicking through pages on a laptop. He looked up, smiling, when we entered. Yep. Same perfect teeth. Same friendly brown eyes.

  “Hi, Claudia. I’m Dr. Traylor,” he said, taking his glasses off and tucking them into the breast pocket on his jacket. “This is my son, Keegan.”

  “Nice to meet you both.”

&nbs
p; “Keegan is a senior in high school and plans on doing premed next year at Princeton.”

  “Princeton? Wow.” Hot and smart? Even more unfair. “That’s impressive. I’m applying there too.”

  “Oh yeah?” Keegan said.

  “Yeah. I’m top of my class at Lake Carmody,” I told him.

  “He’s second in his class at St. Joe’s,” Dr. Traylor said with a smile. “You two should talk.”

  “Maybe we should,” Keegan said, and held my gaze for a long (possibly admiring?) moment. “Luckily, the number one guy wants to go to Yale for hockey, so . . . Anyway, Princeton’s not a done deal,” he said modestly, then loud-whispered, “My dad just thinks it is.”

  “I keep telling him I don’t know why he thinks my pride in his success is an embarrassment,” Dr. Traylor said, snapping on a pair of surgical gloves. “But on to the business at hand. Keegan’s been shadowing me for a few weeks, and we’d like him to sit in on your evaluation. Is that okay with you?”

  “Oh. Sure,” I said. “No problem. It’s not even that bad of an injury,” I added, trying to preemptively cover. “But I have a big audition next week, so I just want to make sure it’s okay.”

  At least that part wasn’t a lie. And my stomach flip-flopped just thinking about it. The Lafayette School of Dance. Giddy shivers. But right now, I had other things to focus on.

  “Well, let’s take a look.” He rolled his stool closer to me. “Why don’t you have a seat on the table and tell us . . . how did you injure the area?”

  I pushed myself up on the crinkly paper, feeling prickly and hot. I hated lying, especially when I knew for certain I’d get caught. The second this guy touched my ankle he was going to know I was faking it. He was an expert on the human body and could probably tell in an instant whether muscles or tendons or bones were intact. I glanced over at Keegan, who was watching me intently. He was sooooo beautiful. True was a genius.

  “Well, I’m a dancer,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? What kind?” Keegan asked.

  “Ballet is my focus,” I said. “But I take jazz and modern, too.”

  “Cool,” Keegan said.

  “It is, indeed, cool,” his father put in. “So what happened, exactly?”