The Athena Effect by Derrolyn Anderson

  ~

  She sat up the next morning with a groan, rubbing her sore cheek gingerly. Her mother used to say that no good deed goes unpunished, and Cal finally understood what she meant by it. She missed her parents ferociously, suffering a stab of deep blue pain so powerful she had to lie back down to catch her breath.

  After she finished crying, she got up to go to school.

  Idiot motorcycle boy didn’t show up for the next few days, and she wasn’t surprised. As sore as she was, she figured he must really be hurting. By the end of the week he was back, and a crowd of girls clustered all around sympathetically, exclaiming loudly over his bruised face and fawning all over him. Cal did her best to avoid them and, thankfully, he didn’t seem to recognize her when she passed him in the halls.

  He must have gotten what little sense he possessed knocked clean out of him, she thought.

  She kept up her nightly walks, avoiding the cemetery for a few days. Tired at school and uncomfortable at home, Cal wandered around in a daze of grief and confusion. She made herself as small and unobtrusive as she could, trying to attract as little attention as possible. She trusted no one, and fully expected something bad to appear around every corner.

  Still, some girls took note of her. The kind of girls that amused each other at the expense of those they believed would not fight back. Cal endured taunts about her clothes and the fact that she had no friends.

  Her isolated upbringing left her ill-equipped to deal with being teased, and the cruelty they showed her only served to reinforce her unfavorable view of the city. She wished she was back in the forest with only animals for company.

  The school library was her savior, and she found herself reading more and more, using books to escape her everyday life. In order to steer clear of Phil, she started to eat only at school, taking her lunch to hide away in a back alley between some storage sheds. She would sit and read, sharing what she had with a pair of mangy stray cats.

  Now she also had to dodge the idiot boy and his parade of girls, because they were always looking for secluded spots on campus to grope each other in. She saw him with a different one every time, and the girls he discarded sometimes came looking for him, radiating an ugly jealous green or a pitiful depressed blue.

  One day a red-haired girl passed right by her hiding place, looking around anxiously before storming off in greenish brown frustration. A few minutes later the boy swaggered up, glancing down the alley and spotting Cal where she sat reading. She looked down at her book, willing him to leave.

  “Hey,” he called out, scaring the cats away.

  Please don’t talk to me, please just keep walking, she thought. He was clearly trouble, and she really didn’t want anything more to do with him.

  “Hey, I know you …” he said, coming closer.

  She cringed, closing her book and packing her things up. “I don’t think so,” she said quietly.

  “You’re the girl that was petting my dog.”

  “Um … yeah,” she said, relieved. She got up to go, hoisting her heavy book bag over her shoulder with a grimace.

  “How did you do it?” he asked.

  “Do what?” She avoided looking up at him, arranging things in her overloaded bag.

  “Get near him. He doesn’t like strangers. Most people are scared of him.”

  She was suddenly angry, thinking about the poor whimpering dog. She snapped, “He gets scared too, you know. You shouldn’t leave him tied out there all night!” She stormed past him out of the alley, colliding with the girl that had come back looking for him.

  “Hey! Watch where you’re going, you stupid hick!”

  Cal’s binder toppled out of her bag and exploded on the ground, sending loose papers blowing in the breeze. She crouched down to gather her things, her eyes burning with frustration. She could hear the girl laughing at her as she scrambled to stack up the loose pages, lunging for the ones that blew out of her reach. Motorcycle boy was decent enough to chase down the other papers, retrieving them and coming back to hand them to her.

  She was mortified, and when she reached up to take them her loose sleeve slid down her increasingly thin arm. His eyes flew open wide when he saw the twin scars on her forearm. She snatched the papers from him, stuffing them into her bag and pulling her sleeve back down hastily.

  “It’s you … It was you.” he blurted out in disbelief.

  He could scarcely fathom that this was the fierce girl who had helped him out. He’d been able to think of nothing else for days, questioning if she was real, wondering how he could track her down. And now here she was–the weird new girl at school who dressed like a hobo and walked around with her head down, like she was afraid of her own shadow.

  She reluctantly looked up at him, fighting back the tears that only made her eyes look even bigger than they already were. He stood there staring at them, struck dumb. One of her eyes was blue as the clearest sky, and the other one was the bright green of a new spring leaf. The colors were surprising, but there was something else. Instead of the fear he expected to see, there was sorrow.

  She had the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.

  Before he could say anything, the girl with the two different colored eyes sprang up gracefully as a doe and bounded away.

  The redhead came up and took him by the arm. “Come on Cal. Let’s go.”