Читать книгу Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful - - Страница 16

Gabriel told Matthew Nowiki that I had been so desperate to prove I was still normal, I’d begged him to have sex with me. Actually begged. Like a prostitute offering her “wares” to a policeman to avoid arrest. Gabriel had been very clear with Matthew that my parts “didn’t feel right”—the implication being that something down there had been irregular, that Gabriel and his manhood had had a lucky escape.

According to Matthew (as relayed to me by Lilly), Gabriel had wanted to take me home early in the evening, but I hadn’t let him because I’d wanted to lose my “human virginity.” As if I’d been having sex with aliens and werewolves and centipedes for years and was trying to prove that I was still a real girl. “My human virginity.” This phrase captivated everyone. In an objective corner of my mind, it even captivated me, and I recognized how well it summed up my differences, my desperation, and how I’d abused Gabriel. That the latter two were entirely fabricated didn’t matter. And I was weird. Let’s face it. Everyone sensed that something had been off since I’d returned to school.

I didn’t go outside for lunch that week, but when I peeked through a second-floor window at the courtyard below, I could see and hear Lilly and my other friends gossiping with everyone else over the details and whether I was still, technically, a normal human. Maybe I would have done exactly the same thing if it had been someone else they were talking about. Even nice people didn’t want to commit themselves until a general consensus could be reached: Was I a perversion of nature to be shunned, or was I in the category of the meek and thus worthy of protection and sympathy? What if I was both?

So I was standing right behind Gabriel on the street corner outside Go Get ’Em Tiger. There was a tingle all up and down the meshline from the coffee, but this sensation was at war with the hot jitters rushing through me. Gabriel was slurping his coffee, and when he turned his head slightly, I saw his square jaw, his dark eyes beneath his blond hair. So handsome, but painful to look at now. Can’t he feel me standing here boring holes into his back with my eyes?

Four lanes of traffic came at us. In the closest lane was the huge City of LA driverless bus, so wide it almost didn’t fit in one lane.

I was overcome with thirst, which wasn’t real thirst but a side effect of internal imbalance. She wanted it so bad, and I gave it to her so hard, but it was weird down there …

I was so close to Gabriel that none of the other pedestrians could see my hands. They were crowded around, but all looking at the crosswalk light, or at the traffic.

How much of you is real?

I flexed my fingers. There was an irresistible gravity between my palms and his body.

It’s not really like virginity exactly.

So help me God, Jesus, and all the saints, I pushed him. The bus was bearing down on us, the last vehicle through the light, and I shoved him, both hands at his hips, every bit of strength I could muster in the move.

Gabriel had been taking a drink of coffee, off balance on one foot. He flew off the curb. I reached after him, as though trying to grab him back, as though I’d seen him tripping before he even realized it himself and was attempting to save him. Was I really trying to save him? I don’t know. What I do know is that Gabriel flailed wildly, the coffee going everywhere, and I accidentally grabbed one of his arms.

That kept him from dying, because I yanked him back toward me on reflex. The top half of Gabriel’s body was tugged to safety. The bottom half … well, the bus hit him full on. I mean, the bus was programmed to protect human life, including pedestrians, but what the hell was it supposed to do? If it came to an immediate stop, it would endanger everyone inside. So the bus passengers got a moderate jolt, and Gabriel got … all the rest. It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen, if you don’t count those few moments I was still conscious, when I saw the windshield break in front of me and the dashboard dislodge and go through my rib cage, taking out the vital organs in its path. I only saw that for a moment or two; I saw the whole Gabriel incident in full consciousness, from beginning to end.

The bus struck him and the sound was of something both firm and wet colliding with something very hard. Maybe like what you’d hear if you stomped on stalks of celery with heavy boots, or if you dropped a half-melted bag of ice from a second-story window onto concrete. He was shattered from the ribsdown. His hand, grasped tenuously in my own, was pulled free, and he was thrown a dozen feet as the bus screeched to an immediate halt.

“Oh my God!” I yelled.

Everyone was yelling some version of that. We rushed in a mass to his limp form lying half in the traffic lane, half on the sidewalk. His eyes were open, and as we all crowded around him, they fluttered closed. Not before he’d seen me, though. There was a moment: his eyes, my eyes, recognition.

More people were looking at me as someone called 911. A siren was already audible only blocks away.

“What happened?” one woman asked me. “You tried to pull him back, I saw you.”

“Did he fall, or did he jump?” someone else demanded urgently.

“I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “I just reached out …”

“You saved him.”

And just like that, I was not the villain of this moment but the hero.