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  At Devlin's words, the group of guys started laughing, and it was then that I think I started panicking. It just wasn't normal. It was this high-pitched, freaky, other-worldly hysteria. One of the Independence guys turned and punched a guy whose name I didn't know, but by his size, I knew he must be one of the football players. It threw him back like ten feet, and our football players all swarmed the group. I couldn't see which punches were being thrown where, but everyone got involved, which was necessary since these guys were so strong. When I saw Devlin slowly pulling himself off the ground again, I had to fight the urge to run to his side. It felt like hours had passed by, but I knew the fight had only been going on a few minutes when I started to hear sirens getting closer. The second I heard the sirens though, so did the Independence guys, and they tore off as quickly as possible, throwing off several guys who were trying to hold them there.

  Two guys smaller than Devlin came in, guns drawn, and faces completely serious and focused. "Everyone down on the ground, NOW!"

  We all dropped quickly, although some of the guys were moving much more stiffly. I couldn't help but wonder how much damage the Independence guys did to our guys. If this was how they spent their weekends—throwing other football teams around like pillows—I didn't see how we had a shot at beating them in a game of football. It soon became clear though, that even the cops knew something we didn't.

  "Which way did they go?" One cop asked impatiently.

  As several of us pointed from our spots on the ground, the other cop spoke rapidly into his radio. "They're heading northeast through Pinelock, send an ambulance here, we're pursuing."

  The other cop weaved around everyone on the ground, shining his flashlight into our eyes. The girl on the ground next to me was crying in her drunken state about how mad her mother was going to be when she found out that she'd been drinking. A guy not too far from me was asking another classmate if he thought we would be thrown into jail. But before anyone's worry got too out of control, the cops ran away, guns still raised, charging off in the direction the Independence guys went.

  As soon as they left, we all started getting up, which is when it became really obvious that our guys were hurting. Most of those who could leave got out of there before more cops could show up. A bunch of the more sober kids started picking up the remains of the alcohol and hiding it in cabinets in the house. I went to get ice with a couple girls from my English class.

  One of the guys I had seen flying through the air, seemed to be in really bad condition. He was sprawled out on the ground moaning. Another was unconscious, but the ambulance and EMTs showed up unbelievably quickly. Again, there was something odd going on. They didn't ask what happened, they weren't interested in how much alcohol had been consumed, or even if anyone had been doing drugs. Their only questions were about where they had been hit. It was just a little weird.

  Devlin wasn't in as bad a shape as the others were, although he had taken his fair share of blows. I wanted to go to him to help or give some kind of comfort, but there were two blonde-haired popular girls hovering over him. When Sonya grabbed onto my arm and pulled me toward the door, I gave up on Devlin and went with her.

  As I drove everyone home, we talked about it all. Gary and Sonya were inside the house when it all happened, and Jay was nearly passed out in the living room. I seemed to be the only one who saw any of it, so I spent the rest of the night obsessively thinking about the odd bits and pieces. At around 3 a.m. my brain finally shut off, and I fell asleep.

  Injured, Permanently

  The weeks managed to go by pretty quickly. Before I knew it, we were through the first month of school. Jay and I had gone to a few football games, though the Independence games were cancelled since the team was placed on suspension for their behavior at our party. Again, it seemed odd since it was only a small handful of guys that had come to our party, but no one else seemed to think too much of it, so I let it go.

  I was doing really well in all my classes and had managed to make several new friends. The only class I had trouble with was PE. When Sonya warned me about Nicole—the popular girl who thought I was out for her boyfriend—she seriously wasn’t kidding. She seemed to want the sole attention of her boyfriend, which I couldn't blame her for at all, but she seemed to consider every female he laid eyes on to be putting some kind of voodoo spell on him to force him to look their way. Not only that, she also seemed to think every guy on campus should be at her feet drooling. She wasn’t even that pretty with her twiggy little toothpick legs and arms and super-thin, mousy brown, old woman hair. Unfortunately, Nicole was in my PE class. While her locker was on the other side of the room, beyond the teachers’ center island, preventing her from harassing me while changing, it didn’t stop her from being a total witch during class.

  It seemed like no big deal to begin with. I stuck pretty closely to my new friends Kim and Sarah, which meant that I wasn’t ever alone. But when we started playing baseball, I found myself in trouble. It turns out I have no baseball skills whatsoever. It became a daily chore for someone to try to teach me to hit a ball or throw a ball—I couldn’t do either. Justin worked with me for the first week while trying to teach me to hit a ball. He was a great batter and hit home runs like they were going out of style. But when Devlin stepped forward as my instructor for learning to throw a ball, I could feel my face whiten. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I wasn’t alone in my need to learn how to throw. Crystal couldn't throw either, and unfortunately, neither could Nicole.

  It all started out fine. Nicole was obsessively trying to get Devlin’s attention. While I wasn’t sure that her shorts could get much shorter, and I thought her claim that it was so hot she had to tie her shirt in a knot just beneath her boobs was ridiculous, her flirtation with Devlin didn't really bother me. I did, however, find her to be a total hypocrite.

  She was all pissy with me because her boyfriend supposedly glanced at me every now and again. How was I supposed to stop that? And here she was, not just looking, but touching Devlin every chance she got. That made me more than a little pissy. I hated the whole look-at-me I-want-every-guy-to-want-me type. I’m not a trouble-maker, though. I sat back and chatted with Crystal, trying to tell myself it was my hatred toward Nicole that was making me so angry and not the fact that I was ridiculously jealous over Devlin’s hands on her. I was not jealous! I refused to be. Jay deserved better. He was a nice guy, and I loved him. I refused to have any romantic interest in Devlin Vaughn.

  "Did you hear about that kid down in Independence?" Crystal asked.

  I shook my head vaguely as Nicole pulled her shirt up by the knot in the front—again.

  "Oh, well it's a weird story," she continued. "This kid was on drugs, and he went all crazy—"

  My brain finally snapped out of fuming over Nicole and back into the conversation Crystal was trying to have with me. "No, wait. Yeah, I heard about that. Uh, Raymond something or other, right?"

  She seemed confused. "Raymond? No, this kid's, name is Dave Getzinger, and they think his girlfriend caught it from him. The woman who does my mom's nails has a friend who babysat his girlfriend as a kid and was telling everyone about it."

  Now I was confused. "What do you mean by 'caught it from him?' I thought this was all from some drug?"

  She turned more toward me, practically bubbling with eagerness to relay the information. "Yeah, it started out that way, but now they think it spreads and is like contagious or something. The rumor is that all of Independence could be wiped out with this infection thing, like the bird-flu or something."

  My eyes wandered to Nicole as she rubbed Devlin's upper arm. What on earth was she doing? "That doesn't make much sense." The sarcasm in my voice wasn't been meant for Crystal, making me feel immediately guilty. I forced myself to turn away from Devlin and Nicole.

  She shrugged a little sadly as she picked at something on her shirt. "It's just what I've heard."

  I didn't want her to think I doubted her intelligence over the story she was rep
eating, so I tried to buy into it. "That would be so horrible if it spread to everyone in Independence. Do they have a cure?"

  Her excitement for the topic seemed renewed with my increased interest. "The woman my mom knows, she says that the government has people all over the town trying to figure it all out—like CIA members and stuff. They're talking about the death toll being at like twenty or so."

  The way Nicole draped herself all over Devlin not only made it just impossible to ignore, but it also made me want to throw something at her. I was happy to see that Devlin didn’t seem to be enjoying the attention too much, mimicking the expression I had seen on Jay’s face when he tried to teach Samantha something. But Devlin seemed to be lacking the patience Jay always tried to have. Jay… I tried to keep thinking of Jay and not this absurd jealousy I felt in the pit of my stomach. I had a boyfriend for crying out loud.

  "Piper, you're up!"

  I closed my eyes for a moment at his deep voice. I could do this. I could be calm and composed. As he tried to teach me the right position for throwing the ball, I began wishing for batting practice with Justin again. Nicole’s snide remarks about my body, my lack of athleticism, how I was too skinny to put any force behind anything, it all made me want to hit her—hard and with a bat. I kept my calm, though. It seemed to piss her off more that I was ignoring everything she said and giving all my attention to Devlin. He seemed to catch on to the idea, winking at me as he began flirting with me just enough for Nicole's intense stares to notice. You could practically see the steam coming out of Nicole’s ears when he wrapped his arms around my waist to put me in the right stance to throw from. I tried to stay distant and remind myself that he was just acting this way to piss off Nicole, but my heart was having a massive fit of excitement.

  When Devlin rubbed his cheek against mine, neither Nicole nor I could take it anymore. She came stomping over to us as I wobbled backward. Devlin reached out to catch me from tripping over myself as Nicole shoved him away from me. My legs got twisted around each other, and I fell backward bending my ankle in a direction no ankle is meant to bend. I screamed in surprise and pain as I landed with a thud on the warm, moist grass.

  "Don’t touch me, Nicole!" Devlin’s anger was surprising.

  If my ankle hadn’t been throbbing wildly, I might have enjoyed the shockingly hostile way he stood up and invaded Nicole’s personal space.

  "If you weren’t a girl…" His irate voice trailed off as he peered over at me cradling my ankle. "Do something useful, and go get Coach Hayman!"

  Crouching down next to me, he carefully untied my shoe, making me wince as he pulled it off. "I’m so sorry, Piper. I should have caught you."

  "How could you with bimbo there shoving you? I can’t believe she did that."

  He slowly peeled off my sock forcing me to put my head back and squeeze my eyes shut in pain. "Sorry, I’m sorry. It’s already swelling. Does it hurt anywhere else?" His hand moved up my ankle to caress my calf, and an entirely different sensation came over me.

  What are they called, those static electricity displays you can play with at interactive science museums? The ones where you place your finger on one point on the glass, and the light shoots from the center directly to your fingertip instead of bouncing haphazardly around the inside of the glass ball—what’s that called? Whatever it is, that is precisely what it felt like when he touched me. Everything sort of slowed down like in a cheesy romance movie or one of those girlie vampire books; only, this was for real. The world seemed to come to a grinding halt so that every atom within my body could pause to take in the fact that his skin had made contact with mine. In that moment, the only thing that kept me from completely losing it in glittery, giddy excitement was the very real lock his eyes had on mine. I was trapped by those brilliant blue volts of energy and nothing short of a metaphorical bucket of ice water could break the spell that our combined energy had created.

  "Vaughn, quit groping the girl, and back away so I can take a look." Did someone order the bucket of ice water for two? Coach Hayman’s rather loud and embarrassing announcement of our less than appropriate position dumped a serious helping of OMG on both of us.

  Devlin dropped his hands immediately, his eyes darting, startled, to Coach Hayman’s as he backed out of the way.

  "I, uh…" He suddenly seemed unsure of himself when he had been so extremely intense not moments before.

  I did my best to watch him out of the corner of my eye while doing my best to look as if I wasn’t watching him. This was a rather tall order with thirty gossip-hungry vultures swarming around, searching for something to feast upon.

  "She fell, Coach. I was just uh, feeling her, uh, I mean, seeing if she—"

  "I was kidding, Vaughn." Coach huffed while roughly taking my ankle in his hands.

  I winced and squealed in pain as he poked and prodded. I wanted to push away his hands partly for fear that he would hurt me more and partly because his touch would dull the impression of Devlin’s not moments before. I wanted to hang on to that crazy, electrically charged sensation as long as I possibly could. It would be hard enough to continue to convince myself that I hadn’t imagined it all without having to push away memories of the coach’s examination.

  "Well, it’s not broken, so let’s try to stand up, shall we?" He stood up and put his hands out to help pull me up. "Okay, put some weight on it slowly."

  I did as instructed, but some serious pain shot up my ankle, and I couldn’t help but cry out.

  "Coach." Devlin sounded angry as he put his arm around my waist, supporting my weight. "It may not be broken, but she’s definitely hurt. Why don’t I take her to the nurse, and let her figure it out?"

  I barely registered Coach’s response. Devlin’s nearness had my head going all kinds of wacky. I felt like one of those planes flying through the Bermuda Triangle, all my instruments were going haywire, dials spinning, flying blind. That’s how I felt—like I was flying blind. When he picked me up into his arms, I swear, I nearly passed out. If it had been a movie, I would totally have passed out. But as this was real life, I had to simply settle for massive heart palpitations.

  When my brain started to function a little again, I wanted to say, I can walk. In fact, I think it would be better if I walked but all I managed was, "Uyaguh…" Thankfully, he didn't take notice of my newly invented word. After about fifteen feet and working to clear my throat and my brain a little more, I tried again "I—I can walk. Really."

  "Want out of my arms so quickly, huh?" His eyes twinkled down at me, and I seriously was not imagining that they lingered for a more than friendly amount of time.

  I started out with a nice strong "no," but unfortunately, control over vowel sounds was clearly an additional side effect of an injured ankle, so all I got out was, "Nuuuh."

  He must have thought me a complete lunatic, but he just gave me this cocky grin. Oh yeah, he knew what he was doing.

  Recovering use of a small portion of my brain, I squeaked, "Maybe I do."

  The tilt of his eyebrow and amusement in his eyes were the only warning he gave me before jostling me in his arms, clearly trying to make me fear that he would drop me. In Jay's arms, I would have freaked out. I might have stumbled in pain to walk on my own or sent him to get me a wheelchair from the nurse, but I certainly wouldn’t have felt comfortable enough to continue being carried in his arms. In that moment, however, there wasn’t a frightened, worried, or concerned bone in my body. Well, at least none related to whether or not Devlin would drop me. Guilt, on the other hand, over what I was trying not to feel for him, and over the comfort I did feel from him ran rampant throughout my entire body. I managed to shut away that guilt-ridden portion of me though, and relax again, almost instantaneously.

  I looked him in the eye. "I trust you."

  His arms tightened around me, and it distinctly felt like he was hugging me. The control dials in my head spun round and round again.

  He tilted his head to the side and asked, "Why do Gary and Sonya
call you Evie?"

  It took me a minute to process the question and another minute to formulate an answer. In the meantime, he was clearly rethinking even having asked it.

  "Sorry." He returned his attention to the cement pathway that wound around another building toward the front office. "Is it personal?"

  "No, no," I managed to spit out. "I—you just surprised me. Nobody really pays attention to that, or wonders about it."

  Excitement bubbled up inside of me. He had been paying attention to what my closest friends called me. Not only had he been paying attention, but he had thought about it enough to ask me to explain. He continued to stare warmly at me, his head tilted, waiting for me to answer his question.

  "When I was just a baby," I began. "My brother was obsessed with this TV show called 'Out of This World.' They would show reruns of it when he got home from school, and he just had to watch every single one. The main character was a half-alien and half-human girl named Evie. It sort of kicked off his whole alien stage. I think she was like his first crush or something. Anyhow, my parents always said I was kind of like his own real-life doll. He'd pose me and talk to me all the time, even when I was just a tiny thing. When he tried to teach me to stop time using my fingers like the character in the show, it just sort of stuck with me. I'd do it all the time. He started calling me 'Evie, the wonder alien' and never stopped."

  "Gary said he'd known you a long time. So you knew him and Sonya when you were a kid?"

  I smiled fondly. "Yeah, Gary, Sonya and I have known each other since birth practically. Our parents were all friends. They've probably heard that story a hundred times. Harm has always called me that, and Harm has always been the coolest big brother, even to them. So it wasn't a surprise that they copied him."

  "Oh." He stared down at me as we rounded a corner, heading beyond the second baseball diamond. It was a hot day outside, the sun warming our faces as we moved through campus. The sounds of laughing and cheering from the game that some students were playing floated on the small breeze that was just barely strong enough to cool us off.