Hunted

around going on where someone makes fun of someone else’s hair, and then someone else tells her to tell her mom to be quiet. No one was talking about boys. At all. No one was complaining about not having their homework done. Actually, no one was saying much of anything. They were just chewing and breathing and smiling. A lot.
    I gave the Twins a WTF look.
    Pod people, Erin mouthed to me while Shaunee nodded her head.
    “Almost as annoying as that asshole Stark,” Erin whispered.
    I tried not to sound massively guilty when I said, “Stark? What about him?”
    “The buttball walked through here while you were still upstairs. All like he owned the place and didn’t care who knew he’d been raping and pillaging some poor helpless pod girl,” Shaunee said, still keeping her voice down.
    “Yeah, you should have seen Becca. She panted after him like a terrier,” Erin said.
    “And what did he do?” I asked, holding my breath.
    “It was pathetic. He barely looked at her,” Shaunee said.
    “Talk about being used and then wadded up and thrown away like a snot rag,” Erin said.
    I was trying to figure out what I could say that would give me more info about what Stark had or hadn’t done without letting the Twins know I cared as much as I was caring, and I thought I should maybe try to say a little something that would kinda somehow stand up for Stark, when Erin’s eyes got all wide and buggy as she stared behind me.
    “Well, speak of the damn devil,” Shaunee said in her best mean-girl voice.
    “Literally,” Erin added.
    “Wrong table,” Shaunee said. “Your minions are all over there and there.” She waved her hand around the room at the other girls who had stopped eating and were staring behind me, too. “Not over here.”
    I swiveled around in my chair to look up at Stark. Our eyes met. I’m sure mine were wide and startled. His were deep and warm, and I could almost hear the question he was asking with them.
    Ignoring everyone else in the room, I said, “Hi, Stark.” I was careful not to make my voice too friendly or icy. I just said hi to him like I would any other kid.
    “You look better than the last time I saw you,” he said.
    I could feel my cheeks getting warm. The last time he’d seen me we’d been in bed together. While I was still staring into his eyes and trying to figure out what the hell I could say to him in front of everyone, Erin spoke up.
    “Big surprise that she looks better than when you were chomping on Becca last night.”
    “Yeah, watching that would be enough to make anyone look a little peaked.”
    Stark broke his gaze from mine. I saw his eyes flash a dangerous scarlet as he rounded on the Twins. “I’m talking to Zoey, not either of you. So butt the fuck out.”
    There was something about his voice that was deeply frightening. He didn’t yell. His expression hardly changed. Instead, he radiated a terrible sense of coiled snake, pissed and deadly and on the brink of striking. I looked more closely at him and saw a ripple in the air around him, like heat waves lifting from a tin roof in summer. I don’t know if the Twins saw it, too, but they definitely sensed something. Both of them paled, but I hardly spared a glance for them. It was Stark I was keyed on because I knew I was glimpsing the monster he’d talked about. Seeing the almost instantaneous change that came over him, I was reminded of Stevie Rae—before she’d found her humanity again.
    Was that why I cared about Stark so much? Because I’d seen Stevie Rae struggle with the same dark impulses and win over them, and I wanted to believe he could win, too?
    Well, dealing with Stevie Rae had taught me one thing for sure, and that was that a fledgling in this position could be a very dangerous creature.
    Keeping my voice completely calm, I said, “What was it you wanted to say to me, Stark?”
    I saw the struggle on his face as the kid I knew fought with the monster who clearly wanted to leap across the table and eat the Twins. Finally he shifted his gaze back to me. His eyes still glowed slightly red when he said, “I didn’t really have anything to say. I just found this. It’s yours, isn’t it?” He lifted his hand and, clenched in it, was my purse.
    I looked from it to him, and then back at the purse again. I remembered what he’d said about being scared of purses like I’m scared of spiders. When I looked into his eyes again, I was smiling.
    “Thanks, it is mine.” I took it from him, and