Awaken Read online

  A girl with blond glittery hair turned back to look at me. I met her eyes and offered her a grin but she turned away without saying anything. A boy sat in the other back corner of the room, distracted by something he was watching on his flipscreen. I glanced at him, but he appeared set on ignoring me, so I assumed he wasn’t Justin. The tutor, who looked young, was fussing with the Electric-Board power cords at the front of the room.

  Three girls walked in the door and I observed them with fascination. They dropped their flipscreen bags on the front table and said hi to the tutor. He glanced up and asked them how their papers were coming along. Apparently they had done this before. I twisted a strand of hair around my finger anxiously as I noted how much more time these girls put into their appearance than I did. They wore dark makeup, their heavy eye shadow and black eyeliner visible from where I was sitting. They each had glitter highlights, the latest hairstyle trend that all the celebrities were sporting. My mom thought it looked trashy, so I wasn’t allowed to get them, but I thought it looked stupid anyway. Why would I want my head to look like a sparkling disco ball? One of the girls had silver hair with gold glitter highlights. Her head was impossible to ignore—it lit up the room like a comet. I also noticed their bright, colorful scarves that matched their coats, their leather wrist warmers, and their shiny flipscreen covers. I looked down at my outfit. I wore my usual jeans and a boring, long-sleeved brown shirt. I didn’t mean to look so drab; I just wasn’t used to making a public appearance. I did manage to brush my blond straight hair so it fell long and in one even length past my shoulders, almost to my elbows. I looked invisible next to these girls but I’ve learned there’s safety in blending in.

  The tutor, who introduced himself as Mike Fisher, announced we’d be starting in a few minutes. I took out my flipscreen and opened it with a sigh. Where was Justin? This was his idea, and now he doesn’t show? I frowned and watched the three girls in front of me giggle over something on their phone screens. One of them glanced over her shoulder and caught my eye. She looked me up and down and smirked at my style, or lack thereof. I rolled my eyes and when I heard footsteps, I glanced up. A boy walked in the door—well, hardly a boy since he looked more like a college student. The three girls’ heads also shot up, I noticed, and their chatter abruptly stopped.

  His tall, athletic frame nearly filled up the doorway. He walked in the room with a spring in his step, as if his body contained an overabundance of energy.

  “Justin,” the tallest, prettiest one said. I felt my stomach kick at the sound of his name and instinctively set my hands on top of it, wondering what just happened.

  “You can sit with us,” she said, and motioned to an empty chair next to her. I watched their interaction and was impressed she could be so outspoken. Looking at him only made me want to hide underneath the table. I was expecting he’d be some cyber nerd with challenged writing skills. Not a female lust magnet.

  “I’m meeting somebody, but thanks,” Justin said. Her face fell for a moment but when he smiled at her, his dimples set deep in his face, she beamed back.

  My stomach did another flip and I winced at the sensation. It felt like Justin’s presence stole the oxygen in the room. I tend to shrink when people look at me, as if my shoulders are sensitive to stares, but he was oblivious to the attention he was generating. He had on a dark baseball cap, pulled low over his forehead, but I could see tufts of dark brown hair spilling out around the edges. He wore faded jeans and a dark gray T-shirt. It made me feel a little better. Those girls might look like peacocks next to me, but from his apparel he didn’t seem to care about fashion either.

  He looked around the room and his gaze quickly passed over me. I wasn’t surprised. In my brown shirt I looked camouflaged with the other chairs. I watched him and observed his expression change. He slowly looked at each face sitting there as if he thought he was in the wrong room. He waved at the other girl sitting by herself and addressed the guy in the back of the room opposite me as Matt. Then he looked at me, this time full in the face. I felt myself blush, but his look wasn’t flirtatious. It was unbelieving, as if I shouldn’t be sitting there. I bit my bottom lip and my eyes fell down to my flipscreen.

  I kept my eyes on my screen until I heard the chair move next to me and was aware of him sliding into the seat. When I looked over at him, I was met with dark brown eyes that stared straight into mine.

  “Hi,” I mumbled. It was the standard social greeting so why was he looking at me like I was nuts?

  “Alex?” he asked me with disbelief.

  “It’s Madeline, actually. Alex is just one of my profile names.”

  He leaned back against the chair and studied me. My eyes flickered to the three girls in the front of the room, blatantly staring at us with their mouths open.

  “Madeline,” he said finally. I felt my stomach contract again and tried to ignore it. He took his baseball cap off and ran his fingers through a heap of brown messy hair.

  “Sorry I’m late. Traffic.”

  All I could do was stare at him. I felt my face heat up, infuriated he could see it. Meeting people in person makes you vulnerable, which my dad always preaches is a weakness.

  “How did you know it was me?” I asked. His eyes took a turn around the room.

  “I’ve seen them all before,” he said. “The real world’s getting pretty small. I think we’re an endangered species.” He looked back at me and there was a small grin on his lips, which forced me to stare at them too long.

  I jumped when Mike interrupted us to scan our fingerprints. I brushed mine against the small, portable screen he carried, about the size of a cell phone. Justin quickly scanned his finger and turned his attention back to me.

  “Just out of curiosity, why do you go by Alex in your profile?”

  I lifted my shoulders and kept my eyes on my flipscreen. “I hardly ever use my real name. I like to keep my identity private.”

  “Why?” he asked me. It was a simple question, but it felt like an attack.

  “Does it really matter?” I asked and my voice came out flat. Out of the hundreds of thousands of people I’d met online, I could count on one hand how many I’d met in person. I could make friends around the world without stepping out my front door. But people stretched themselves so thin, they started to lose shape. On-line we were all equal. Social status wasn’t important. Money and looks and jobs and clothes almost become obsolete. So who cares what my real name is? It’s just a label, like a particular brand of person. Who cares who sits behind it when we only meet in waves of space?

  Justin pursed his lips together as he thought about my question.

  “I was expecting a guy, that’s all,” he said finally.

  I noticed his empty hands. “Where’s your flipscreen?”

  He tapped his index finger against his temple. “It’s all in here.”

  “How are you supposed to do your homework?” I asked with a frown.

  He pointed at my computer. “Call me crazy, but I find those things more distracting than helpful. Don’t get me wrong, they have their benefits, but if you turned it off once in a while your heart wouldn’t stop beating. The world wouldn’t cease to exist.”

  “But you would cease to exist,” I pointed out, and he answered me with a look that was so intense it made my heart skip.

  “Is that really what you think?” he asked.

  “I’m not saying I agree with it,” I said. “It’s just how life is.”

  He pulled a small notebook and pen out from his back pocket. He uncapped the pen with his teeth and jotted something down on the thin, plastic-based paper. I stared at his hand with fascination. I thought only my ancient-minded mother attempted longhand.

  He glanced back at me. “I know. I get a lot of crap, okay?”

  “I just didn’t think anyone wrote longhand anymore,” I said. “Except for my mom, who I swear time-travels back to 2010 every other day to pick up lifestyle habits to live by.”

  He creased his eyebrows a
nd stared back at me for what I felt like was too long. “This is going to be fun” is all he said.

  I frowned at his comment, but before I could ask what he meant, Mike began the study session. Justin distracted every brain cell I had, but I was determined not to let him see that. I raised my hand to ask one of the questions I had highlighted from the assignment.

  Before Mike called on me, he smiled and asked me what my name was. I lowered my hand slowly and looked around the classroom, taken aback by this. A stranger had never come right out and asked me my name before. It was invading. He didn’t need to know my name. This was just a tutor session. I chewed on my fingernail as I contemplated how to respond. I felt eyes turn to look at me, one set of eyes in particular.

  “Why do you want to know my name?” I asked, defensively. Mike smiled, which irritated me even more. Was he enjoying making a spectacle out of me?

  “It helps if I can say your name when I call on you, that’s all,” he pointed out. “It’s more personal than saying ‘Hey you.’”

  “Oh,” I said, as I made sense of this obvious logic. It was personal, which I wasn’t used to.

  “Sorry,” I said. “My name’s Madeline.” It felt strange to hear my name out loud. My voice echoed off the walls as if I were speaking into a microphone. I waited for him to glare at me but he just nodded with encouragement.

  “Okay, Madeline,” he said, and used the ElectricBoard to answer my question for the class. As he spoke, humiliation flooded through my chest for being so rude. I’m used to the luxury of feeling embarrassed in the privacy of my own home. I wanted to explain myself, to remind everybody this was my first public study group, that I wasn’t used to being around people. I turned my head to see Justin watching me.

  “What?”

  “Is this really the first study group you’ve ever been to?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

  “I’ve been to a lot of study groups,” I said.

  “Okay, the first real one? Nondigital?”

  I nodded and his eyes fell into an unbelieving stare, like I was lying. As if he already knew me that well.

  “My parents limit where I can go online,” I said quickly. “A lot of sites are blocked from my computer so I had no way to find these groups.”

  “That’s right,” he said with a nod. “You’re grounded.”

  “That’s right,” I added, and gritted my teeth. “Now that we’ve announced I’m a juvenile delinquent to the entire room, can we please change the subject?”

  I turned away but I could still feel his eyes on me as if they weighed down the air between us.

  “We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

  I shot him a confused stare. What does he mean, we? The tutor started lecturing again, before I could ask him.

  Through the rest of the study group I observed Justin out of the corner of my eye. I noticed a few odd things about him. First, he couldn’t sit still. He was either tapping his foot, or drumming his fingertips on the table, or chewing on his pen or his nails. If he wasn’t fidgeting, he was doodling in his notebook, as if the information being discussed was below him. He raised his hand once to help explain a question even the tutor was having problems articulating. If he was so smart, what was he doing here?

  “You’re using the semicolon wrong,” he said once, and I shrunk away from him. First, he leaned in way too close to tell me that and I could feel his breath stir my hair. Second, why was he looking over my shoulder? Who was the tutor here?

  “I see you bite your nails too,” he said another time, and I sat on my hands and tightened my lips.

  “So what?” I asked.

  “Don’t get so defensive. It’s not a crime.”

  “According to my mom it is,” I said. I pulled my hands out and frowned at my ragged nail beds. “She tries to force-feed me gum when I do it, but I can’t chew gum.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s weird. I swallow it right away. This one day, I swallowed four pieces of gum in a single afternoon. I thought I was going to be the first person to die from gum buildup clogging my stomach cavity.” I shut my mouth before another word could escape. Why couldn’t I be online right now? Definitely would have deleted that one.

  Justin stared at me and raised a single eyebrow. I felt my face blush and looked down at my flipscreen to avoid his eyes.

  “I think that’s the most random thing I’ve ever heard,” he finally said, and his lips turned up at the corners. As if his grin was contagious, I smiled back at him, a genuine smile that I don’t think I’ve worn in months. In that instant I felt something inside of me shift, as though a hollow shell in my chest had cracked open and something warm flooded in. I glanced over at the three girls sitting in front of us. Maybe random is more alluring than glitter this season.

  While Mike made his way around the room to answer individual questions, I called Justin out on his own quirky behavior, as he had yet to do a second of work. I leaned toward him, a wave of confidence coming over me.

  “So, why are you really here?” I whispered. “You’re not paying any attention to this.”

  He hesitated for a moment and then leaned toward me and fixed his eyes on mine. I could smell the cotton of his T-shirt, or maybe it was his skin, but it was sweet and strong and I inhaled a deep breath. I forgot people carry a scent, an energy that a computer can’t transmit.

  “I finished this assignment already,” he said. “I don’t come here for help. I could lead this if I wanted.”

  “Then why do you come here?” I whispered back.

  Justin looked at me as if the answer was obvious. “To be around people. It’s one of the only ways I can.”

  I creased my eyebrows at him and had to make an effort to whisper. “What? Are you nuts?”

  He leaned closer. “I think people are nuts to shut themselves inside all day long. We’re cutting ourselves off from each other and it’s only going to get worse.”

  I felt goose bumps rise up on my arms. I grinned at him.

  “And you think going to study groups and doodling in your notebook is going to change things?”

  Justin smiled back, a plotting smile that held uncountable meanings.

  “I have a plan,” he said.

  Chapter Three

  As Mike wrapped up the study session, I turned off my flipscreen and packed it in my bag. Justin slid his notebook back in his pocket and waited for the other students to clear out. The three girls in the front row walked to the door and the tall, confident one looked back at Justin and waved while her friends glared at me, stupefied.

  I wouldn’t be invited to join Team Sparkle anytime soon. Bummer.

  Justin nodded back at the girls, still making no effort to leave. The last two students filed out and I finally stood up and pulled my bag strap over my shoulder.

  “It’s been interesting,” I said. Justin stood up and pushed his chair back. He towered over me and I felt stunted by his height.

  “Not a total loss?” he asked me.

  I fidgeted with my bag strap. “I did finish the assignment,” I offered, as I tried to downplay the ridiculous crush that was forming and how clearly it must be written on my face.

  We walked outside in silence and the brisk night air was a relief compared to the stagnant, sterile air in the office building. I wasn’t sure how to do the whole “Nice to meet you, keep in touch” kind of thing. Do we shake hands? Bump fists? Do one of those awkward side hugs? Instead of waiting to make a fool out of myself, I took a step toward the train stop but I felt a tug on my sleeve.

  “I can give you a ride home,” he said.

  Justin pointed over his shoulder at a dark sports car and I blinked hard as if I was seeing things.

  I stared up at the night sky. “Could this day be any more bizarre?” I asked.

  “You’ve never been in a car?”

  “You’re looking at me like I’m strange. They’re practically outlawed.”

  There’s no need for cars these days with a
ll the Amtraks, ZipShuttles, light rails, and subways available. They’re permitted on some of the existing freeways and residential streets, but I can go days without seeing one. Even my dad thinks owning a car is out of the question; besides, anything that evokes a sense of freedom is banned from our property. Cars should only be used for emergency or law enforcement.

  Justin pulled his baseball cap low over his head and studied me, his eyes shaded under the rim. “I guess this is a lot of new experiences in one day. I don’t want to overwhelm you,” he said, but there was an edge in his voice, like he was daring me.

  I walked around the car, parked like an obedient animal waiting to be unleashed, and studied the side body, the tires with their silver sparkling chrome, the sleek glass windows. It was tempting. I ran my hand along the smooth surface of the roof.

  “Why do you have a car?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s a long story.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “I have time.”

  He gave me a long stare and I returned it. He opened up the passenger door.

  “Your parents are probably expecting you home,” he stated. Before I could argue, Mike called out to us. He waved from the bottom of the steps and jogged across the street.

  “You own a Mustang?” he asked when he met us. He rubbed his hand along the sleek rooftop with fascination, just as I had done. He and Justin started talking makes and models and years and they lost me at “eight-cylinder engine.” After a thorough discussion of turbochargers, Mike turned and handed me a business card.