“Well, I want to talk about it.”
“God, you’re a spoiled brat. You always think you should get what you want in life? News flash. Most people don’t.”
Her eyes narrowed. With a huff, she crossed her arms and sat back in the corner.
This time, the silence felt even worse. I lasted all of five minutes till I had to break it. “Look—”
“No, no, it’s fine. Obviously you don’t want to talk about it. Especially with me.”
“You know, you like dishing out the questions about the past, but I don’t see you answering any.”
She scowled and stared out her window, her stubborn silence proof that she understood exactly what I wanted to know.
My fingers drummed on the steering wheel. “Well? How about it, Tarah? Are you ever going to explain why you stopped hanging out with Damon and me? What was the deal? Were we too boring for you all of a sudden? Not cool enough? Did we wear too many colors and not enough leather and spikes and black nail polish for your taste?”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s such crap and you know it.”
“Then why’d you turn your back on us like we were nothing? You never even bothered to try and give us a reason. One day we were all best friends, the next it’s ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hang out with you guys anymore.’” I shot her a quick, furious glance. “We were best friends for years, Tarah. Didn’t we deserve at least an explanation?”
She made a disgusted sound. “Gee, Hayden, I never realized you cared so much. Especially when the very next day you had zero trouble replacing me with Kyle the Vile for your new BFF.”
“I did care. A lot. And Kyle was my dad’s idea, not mine.”
She frowned at me for awhile, blinking fast, thinking so loudly I could almost hear it. One corner of her mouth tightened. “I’m sorry. I really am. I…didn’t handle the whole thing very well.” She shrugged one shoulder. “What can I say? I wasn’t the most mature fifth grader, I guess. I saw you do something you shouldn't have been able to do one day, and me and my big mouth blabbed about it to my dad. He got all excited, started doing research on human evolution developing extraordinary abilities, told my mother where he got the idea from, and she freaked out. She thought I was either lying or confusing fantasy with reality, and that playing all those medieval knights games with you guys was retarding my developing maturity or something. Next thing you know, we're all doing family therapy sessions and I was forbidden from ever hanging out with you guys again."
I glanced sideways at her. "What exactly did you see me doing?"
She shrugged. "Floating in your sleep. You fell asleep in the woods one day while we were waiting for Damon to go and bring back some snacks back to our hiding place. We were doing a dragon recon mission, I think." One corner of her mouth twitched. "She was probably right. It was time for all of us to grow up. I just wish I could have handled it all better."
“And then the next year your family moved closer to the university,” I muttered.
“Right. Dad was teaching, doing lab research, and working on getting yet another Masters degree. Mom figured if we lived closer to the campus and he had a shorter commute, we might get to see him more.”
So that was it, the answer to the big mystery of why I’d lost my best friend. Because Tarah had seen my Clann abilities starting to develop and had talked about it with her dad.
“And then you became friends with the outcasts.”
“Sure, why not? Back then, they were just regular kids like me, and unlike all the other kids in my class, they never teased me about running off into the woods with the Shepherd boys. And becoming friends with a bunch of people got my mom off my back.”
“I guess she never thought you’d end up getting arrested because of them, huh?”
“It’s actually the other way around, Hayden. My friends got arrested because of me. If I'd never seen you levitating, I wouldn't have gotten so obsessed with magic, we never would have ended up having all those weekly meetings in the woods to try and develop our own abilities, and maybe they wouldn’t have learned how to throw fireballs and energy orbs and make it rain on command and stuff. But they did. They discovered their Clann abilities because of me. And even if they hadn’t gotten arrested, they still would be in constant danger because of me. There were so many times that we nearly blew ourselves up while they tried to learn how to control their magic.”
She looked at me then, her eyes big and soft. “That’s why I’m telling you I know how out of control these abilities can get, and how easily accidents can happen with them, and how guilty you can feel afterwards about it. Because I’ve been there. I’ve seen it happen. And if anyone in our group had ever gotten hurt, in the end it would have been my fault. We were being really stupid messing around with stuff we had no understanding of.”
She was tempting me to open up about what happened to Damon and the others. And part of me wanted to give in. I was tired of having secrets between us.
Except every time I looked at her, I remembered the way she’d smiled at me when first waking up at the internment camp. That dazzled look in her eyes, that smile, had made me feel like I was her hero.
It was easy for her to claim to be understanding now while the past was just a bunch of crazy rumors for her. But once I told her everything, how could she not look at me differently? I wouldn’t be Hayden the savior of an entire internment camp to her anymore. I would become Hayden the Screwup.
I knew it was selfish. But for just a few more hours, I wanted her to keep looking at me like I was special for a good reason for a change.
When I didn’t speak, she continued, the corners of her mouth turned down slightly. “Anyways, experimenting with the outcasts in the woods might not have helped me find any special abilities of my own like you guys have, but it did help me in a lot of other ways.”
“Like how?”
“Well, just how many journalists out there can say they helped found a new outcast group and got to be a part of it for years way before the internment camps were ever even created? Or got to help break out an entire prison camp full of Clann people? I've even got video evidence of what we saw in that camp. This is history in the making, Hayden. And we didn't just get front row seats for it. We're actually right up on stage with everybody else."