Cold Kiss

I roll my eyes. “Not you.”
    Gabriel pulls out the chair across from mine and sits down, but before I can say anything else, he holds a hand up. “Look, I get it. I shouldn’t have … I didn’t mean to make this weird. But I wanted to say sorry. Okay? It’s no big deal. I mean, it is, but … I’m not going to say anything.”
    My heart is pounding again, and I’m so tired of it. It’s exhausting, all that adrenaline and whatever it is that makes me the way I am, tingling in my veins like some biological red alert.
    I stare at Gabriel for a second, and his cool gray eyes are serious. I know he’s not teasing me, even though that would probably be easier to deal with. I flick my gaze to the two girls at the other end of the table. They’ve stopped eating, mom-made sandwiches still clutched in their hands, and I glare. They grab their paper bags and half-eaten carrot sticks and take off.
    “That wasn’t nice,” Gabriel says, but he’s grinning. Slouched across from me in faded navy cords and a plain gray pullover, he actually looks a little too comfortable.
    “Freshman girls are the only people I can actually push around, so I have to take advantage sometimes.” I fold my arms across my chest and sit back. “What exactly is no big deal? You know, that you’re so generously not going to tell everyone.”
    It’s a dangerous move—I don’t actually want him to spell it out, especially not here in the cafeteria, but I have to know what he knows.
    It’s like the first rule of Fight Club. Whatever it is that the women in my family can do, you don’t talk about it. Not even with each other, if my mom’s anyone to go by.
    I know we’re not the only people with something to hide. Everyone keeps secrets—I’m not stupid. No one is, not really. I mean, it only took two weeks in seventh grade for everyone to figure out that when Kayla Schmidt said she was having dinner with her dad once a week, she was really going to a shrink, because she weighed about eighty pounds and sat through every lunch period nibbling a single stalk of celery.
    And most everyone knows that Janine French has only slept with three guys, but it’s easier to pretend she regularly beds down with the whole football team because that way she’s the one being called a slut. Same way it’s easier to pretend that no one knows Peter Brannigan’s dad hits his mom, because that way there are no awkward conversations, and no reason to feel like you’re supposed to be doing something to help.
    So yeah, everyone has something to hide, and sometimes it’s Very Special Episode stuff and sometimes it’s just stupid, like acne all over your back. But as far as I can tell, none of it is going to get you hunted down and burned at the stake.
    Okay, that’s a little extreme, I know, but I did bring my dead boyfriend back to life. Of a kind, anyway. That’s not exactly pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
    Gabriel’s watching me, and he puts his apple core down on the table before he speaks. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he says, so low I have to lean forward a little bit. “I can’t hear your thoughts, not word for word, not unless I really try, and even then it’s not really accurate. You were trying to tell me something before, right? I don’t know what it was, but I could feel you sort of … poking at me.”
    Oh . That’s … unexpected.
    I must make a face, because he shrugs. “It’s more that sensations sort of come at me? Sometimes images. Like, say someone’s across from me on the bus, thinking really hard about her sister. I might get the feeling of worn cotton, or certain colors, or a scent first, and then maybe a memory of them hiding together under the covers, looking at a book, or fighting over the last pancake or whatever, so I know it’s her sister and not her mother she’s thinking of. See?”
    “Sort of.” It’s like a window, I guess, maybe a distorted one, but still a view right into someone’s head. Into someone’s heart.
    I wonder if he’s seen me and Danny, curled up together on my bed before he died, if he can smell Danny’s soap, the one he used to use, the way his hands feel on me now, cold and firm.
    “It’s mostly just plain old clairvoyance,” he says, like clairvoyance is just an everyday thing, and I roll my eyes. “I can’t see the future, not usually anyway, but I can sometimes see the past. And with most people, what I get, unless I tune it out, is a sort of low-level hum, like