Eyes of the Wolf

25
My alarm went off. My alarm needed to die.

My phone went off. Screw the phone.

I winced at my mental word choice and curled into a ball under my thin sheets.

Last night seemed so fresh. Niko and I. We’d…

Come very close to doing something I knew I’d regret. I didn’t know if he’d regret it—I didn’t know much about him.

And I’d almost had sex with him anyway. Oh God, was I a slut?

My thoughts went on hiatus when I realized the cacophony in my bedroom had abated slightly, and it took a moment for it to register that my phone had stopped ringing. It took another to realize that my alarm had not. I remedied that, and it was quiet. Eerily quiet.

I went back into my ball.

One of my birds gave a tweet as it woke up.

It was silent.

My dad turned his water on on the other side of the world. Turned it off.

Silence.

I didn’t want to think.

I dozed.

My phone rang, piercing like a demented whistle and prodding my ears with sound that threatened to pin me to my pillow through my brain. I cringed away from it, but I couldn’t escape it. But I didn’t want to talk.

The phone stopped.

:o3

Somewhere, far away, my front door opened.

I groaned and rolled over, my pillow over my head. I felt suffocated and claustrophobic, but it was better than being around all the sound. Voices still permeated my aural shield, but there was nothing more that I could do to prevent it. A metronome clicked close by.

“Maya!” one of the voices suddenly barked. My door had opened, I guess, since the voice lacked that distant, echoing quality. “Maya…”

A hand, thin but strong, grasped my shoulder and shook me. I stiffened, then peered over my pillow, my glare of reproach dimmed somewhat by my incapability to open my left eye yet. Somebody with cerulean hair was staring down at me, her arms crossing as I watched.

“What are you doing, Maya?” Chris asked. Her voice wasn’t as hard and cold as I expected it would be—it was soft, concerned. “I called you, and you didn’t answer, and your dad says that you haven’t been out of bed all morning.”

“What’re you doing here, Chris?” I said, my voice sounding like another groan.

“I’m here because—”

“Weren’t you on the bus?”

“I drove Brad’s car,” she snapped. I rubbed at my still-shut eye, irritated with how dry it felt, like keeping it closed was the only way to keep it even remotely hydrated. BS, I told it. “What are you doing here, huh? You’re laying here like a big lump. I’ve never seen you like this before—why are you like this? I tell you what, this whole slow waking up thing is getting—has gotten ridiculous. Come on, get up. Maya, get up, and don’t look at me like that.”

Did she mean that baleful look I must be giving her? She deserved it. All I could tell was that I could see her now, looking much less angry than normal with a cool blue veil over her head rather than the usual crimson hood of fury and fire. Still feeling that getting up was not worth it, I fell back to a position in which I did not have to hold my head up by my neck muscles, and didn’t say a word. Facing the world would take more energy than I had.

“Maya…” The bed creaked as she sat on it, making it slope downward and making me uncomfortable again. “Why are you acting like this? Are you mad at me?” Her voice held hurt now.

Don’t do this, Chris. Be the ice queen again.

“Did I say something?” I couldn’t bear it anymore. I shook my head. “What’s wrong then?” Should’ve expected that one.

She fidgeted, and said softly, “I dyed my hair last night. You like the color? I liked it when I saw it at the shop, so I got it and thought I’d surprise you. I don’t even look like a goth elf, huh?” Her voice stopped, waiting for a response. “I was gonna give blood today too. The college down the street has all the donor buses out, so I’m finally old enough to give blood without having a permission form. I was hoping you’d come with me, since I’m not terribly fond of blood and I have no idea what it’s like in there.”

I looked up at her. I knew Chris hated blood—her mastery of understatement went unchallenged by far in this situation. That scene in the Disney Beauty and the Beast gave her chills sometimes.

“Why the hell are you doing it then?” I mumbled to her.

“Because it’s a good thing to do,” she answered. Now that I looked at her though, she seemed paler than usual. That was saying something. She glanced at me and gave a half shrug with a matching, yet shaky, smile. “And hey, maybe it’ll be good for me.”

I knew she understood the look I gave her at that. Her grin became more embarrassed, but she didn’t condemn her views. I sighed and sat up, slowly, opening my eye reluctantly and blinking it several times. As I glanced to my clock, Chris said simply, “Yes, we are late to school. Do you want to go?”

Our gazes locked. “Not particularly,” I told her slowly. This surprised me. It apparently surprised her, too, because she was silent for longer than I would expect before saying simply, “Alrighty then. Is your dad gonna get mad?”

I considered. “Maybe.”

“Do you have any tests today?”

“No.”

“I’ll talk to your dad.”

:o3

Driving down the road proved calming, somehow. Watching trees pass by like spectators at a racing event, in which oneself is a competitor. Almost a paradox, really, since if one is really competing in such a race, they probably aren’t looking at the audience. Then trees became buildings, pedestrians and their yappy dogs, bikes, and strollers. It was watching them that made me feel like the spectator, suddenly. An odd feeling.

“Did something happen last night?” my companion asked gently, after sipping her water bottle at a red light. I turned to her, mentally double taking at the hair color that was the color children used when filling in oceans, not fire trucks. It seemed to blend somehow with the green of her eyes, even though in all the lime and emerald there wasn’t a pinprick of blue.

Jeez, I was spacey. Did something happen last night?

Yes.

Did I want to talk about it?

No.

“Maya?”

“No.” Swearing inwardly, I staunched the flow of words with, “Yes. Sorry, yes. I meant yes.” Crud, why did I just say that?

“What happened?” I didn’t immediately answer. “Was it Niko?”

For the first time in my life, I hesitated and said to her, “I don’t wanna talk about it.” I mean, sure, we had come across subjects we didn’t want to breach, and they had just died. I had never actually instigated the demise so…abruptly.

She sat in her seat and pulled into the parking lot of the college. Her eyebrows were drawn together in thought. As I got out of the car, her voice followed me and made me stop.

“Did he hurt you, Maya?” I turned back. She sat with her left wrist on the steering wheel, and the other on her seat belt. Worrying my lip in my teeth, I shook my head.

“Is he why you’re acting like this?” I paused, and took too long. “What did he do?”

I shook my head at her, trying to dismiss it. My door shut as hers came open like a jack-in-the-box, with her as the oddly-colored thing inside. She clicked her way over to me on blue-ink heels and glared down at me. I tried walking by her, but she grasped my shoulder and held me still.

“Tell me please,” she pleaded, her voice much gentler than her grip.

I glanced to my shoes, which looked extra grubby compared to her pristine stilettos.

“Later, okay?” She searched my face, as if she could spy a lie in some facial feature, but then seemed to take me for my word. With a firm nod, she turned and grabbed her purse—black leather—from her car and strode up to the bus. Letters adorned it like gaudy jewelry, and “We’re your type!” was promised in businesslike lettering beneath them.

I stood by as a clean-shaven, spiky haired guy watched her write out her information as a long-haired guy with a budding mustache in the chair next to her was having his finger wiped with a wet piece of cotton. Chris handed the spiky hair guy her driver’s license and lowered her pen to sign, so I looked instead to the other would-be donor. The lady, a young lady of about thirty, held a plastic box to his finger and it clicked. I saw blue hair rustle just as a crimson bead appeared at the guy’s fingertip.

“Oh my god,” Chris sputtered, her pen giving the end to the last name “Carle” a particularly long-tailed “e”. Her neighbor gave her a dirty look as the woman squeezed at the finger, then wiped the blood away, and then squeezed it again. The process was repeated four times before she actually brought another piece of plastic to his finger. I squeezed my friend’s shoulder.

With much cringing, she underwent the same process after the hairy guy left. I held her other hand as this went on, sending apologetic looks to the lady manning the needles whenever I made eye contact.

The guy sighed with relief when she finished with that, then handed her a sheet of paper to read and another to fill out. She took the paper and took a seat at another table. I sat on a bench and watched the proceedings dispassionately. A well-fed crow landed on one of the metal bars on the bus and looked skeptically at me.

“Excuse me?” came Chris’s voice. The information guy raised his head. “On this, ‘have you ever had contact with somebody else’s blood?’”

“What about it, ma’am?”

“Does squashing a fat mosquito count?”

Oh boy.