“Steady?” Nick asks.
“As a rock.” She smiles and presses a button. The incline of the treadmill lowers. She adjusts her uniform shirt, tucking the white ends more neatly into the awful blue polyester-blend pants she has to wear. “Cutting school?”
I try to smile but I can’t quite make it work.
Nick stands next to me. His arm wraps around my waist. “Zara is feeling a little blue.”
He puts some extra stress on the words “feeling” and “blue.”
Betty takes a swig from her water bottle. She squints at us.
“Really blue,” Issie emphasizes before looking over at Mike, slightly panicked.
Betty hops off the treadmill. She puts her big hands on my shoulders and leans down a little to stare into my eyes. “Blue, huh? Depressed?”
I sniff. Her deodorant is working overtime. It is nice and everything, but a little too baby fresh for me.
“Mike,” she says in a louder voice.
“Yeah.” He turns his head to sort of half look at us. He gives a wave.
Dev and Is wave back.
“You okay with keeping Josie company for a minute while I talk to my granddaughter here?” Betty asks. But when Betty asks things like this, it’s more of a telling. Believe me, I know. She’s uses the same tone about bringing my laundry downstairs. There’s no choice when she talks like this. It’s a command.
“Absolutely. I need more coffee anyway.” Mike stands up and stretches. He is pretty tall like Nick, only super skinny, all scarecrow limbs. Mike points a finger at me in a pretend gun sort of shape and leaves. The door swings behind him.
The moment he is gone, Betty leaps into action.
“Devyn, get me the equipment by the coats,” she orders.
Dev grabs the alarm red box that looks like something you lug fishing lures in, only it has medical symbols on it. It’s kind of cool how he can do this with his braces.
“Take your coat off, Zara.” Betty unlocks the kit and slams it open.
Nick helps me shrug off my coat.
“Roll up your sleeves,” Betty insists.
I pull them up.
“You’re blue,” she says. She stops for a second. Her eyes meet my eyes.
“I know.”
“It was worse before,” Nick says.
Betty pulls out a needle and a vial that you store blood in. Her voice is stunned. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Issie grabs my hand. “Do you want to squeeze?”
“Sure,” I say, grabbing her tiny hand back. “Why are you taking my blood?”
Betty plunges the needle into the underside of my elbow. “To see if you’ve turned.”
I shudder.
“Stay still,” she says as the vial fills up.
“You can tell by my blood?” I ask, watching. “Wouldn’t I feel different? Evil or something?”
“Tell me when it’s over,” Issie says. She’s the one changing colors now. She’s all pale and looking like she’s going to faint. “I can’t stand it. I hate blood and needles. Even the word ‘need-le.’ Urck.”
I let go of her hand. “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt. Much.”
“You’re always trying to be so brave, Zara. You don’t have to be.” Betty eases out the needle. “Nick, put some gauze on that. Light pressure.”
She caps the vial and turns back to us. “I’m going to send this out for some tests.”
“Send it where?” I ask.
“My parents,” Dev answers. “They’re kind of experts.”
I don’t get it. “I thought your parents were psychiatrists.”
“They are. But, um, they have some side fields that they work on.”
“Like what?”
“Cryptozoology. Medical research on blood differences in weres, pixies, others.”
I swallow. “Others?”
He nods. “Since I was attacked, my parents have become a little . . . um . . . zealous.”
“They’re brilliant people,” Issie interrupts.
“Yeah, but they’ve gone a little crazy about this. They’ve converted the entire basement into a lab. They’re online 24-7 researching and they didn’t even know pixies existed until this fall.”
I pull my sleeves down. “And why has nobody told me this before?”
Everyone looks at Devyn, who is sitting in a metal folding chair with this amazingly introspective look on his face. “Because they’re protecting me.”
I resist the urge to ask why and wait for him to tell me instead. He sits up taller and says, “My parents aren’t exactly the most normal people and my home is a sty.”
“Beyond a sty, really,” Issie says. “You know the opposite of anal retentive? That’s them. No offense, Dev.”
He slowly stretches his legs out in front of them. “I don’t bring anyone back to the house except Is and Nick. I never have.”
“And it took him years to let me come over,” Nick says.
“He beat me up first.” Devyn smiles. “It was seventh grade. We’d been friends since kindergarten.”
I swallow hard. I understand but I still feel left out of the loop. It makes me feel all new kid and not trusted, like I’m not one of the pack. Part of me wants to pout about it but I buck up and say, “How’s my skin, Gram?”
She leans over and peers into my eyes. Her strong hands rest on my shoulders. “Nobody is going to panic about this. You will get some good cover-up. You said it’s already fading?”
“It’s faded a lot,” Nick answers.
“When did it start?” she asks, letting go of my shoulders.
I settle back against Nick’s chest. It is solid good.
“Can you tell her?” I ask.
He wraps an arm around me and tells her about the weird feeling I had. He tells her how Issie and I broke my dad out of the house (and put him back) and what he said about the other pixie.
She listens to it all before she says anything and when she does, she shakes her head.
“This is bad.” She whirls on me and Issie. “I can’t believe you two did that. You cannot trust pixies.”
“So you can’t trust me?” I ask.
“You’re not a pixie. You’re human.” She snaps her medical kit shut.