Starcrossed

talk shows where everyone screamed at each other, and here she was for the second time in half an hour looking to mix it up with someone much bigger and stronger than she was. Thankfully, she wasn’t as desperate to kill Castor the way she had been with his son. No one had ever enraged Helen the way that Lucas had, but she still wanted to put a few dents in Castor’s fender. That urge confused her deeply.
    “I’m glad you’re all right,” Castor said with a smile, diffusing the situation. He turned to the principal and made it clear that he and his family did not want Helen punished. As far as he was concerned Helen had been ill, and the whole incident should be forgotten. He left as abruptly as he had entered.
    As soon as Castor’s footsteps faded away, the sobbing sister vanished and the whispering stopped. Helen no longer felt angry. She slumped down onto the cot like a balloon with a fast leak.
    “You’d best take her home now, Jerry,” Mrs. Crane said with a no-nonsense voice and a comforting smile. “Lots of fluids, no direct light, and get her to take a cool bath to bring her core temperature down. All right?”
    “Sure, Mrs. Crane. Thanks a lot,” Jerry replied, reverting back to the teenaged boy he had been the last time he was in Mrs. Crane’s office.
    Helen kept her head down on their way out to the parking lot, but she could feel the other students staring at her as she passed. As she jumped up into the passenger seat of the Pig she saw the door by the principal’s office open and the two Delos boys leaving with Castor. Lucas’s eyes went straight to hers and held them. Castor pulled up and put his hand on the back of his son’s neck, talking to him. Finally, Lucas broke his stare contest with Helen and looked at his father briefly before nodding and looking at the ground.
    It started to rain. One, then two, then three big, fat drops of summer rain splashed down, and suddenly the air was full of water. Helen slammed her door shut and glanced over at her father, who was also looking back at the Delos family.
    “Which one did you jump?” Jerry asked, fighting a grin.
    “The bigger one,” Helen answered, a half smile of her own creeping up her face.
    Jerry looked at Helen, whistled once, and started the engine. “You’re lucky he didn’t seriously hurt you,” he said, not joking around anymore.
    Helen nodded meekly, but she was thinking that Lucas was the lucky one. The strangeness of her own thoughts scared her silent for the rest of the drive home.

Chapter Four
    H elen sat in a bathtub of cold water, the lights in the bathroom switched off, and listened to the phone ring over and over. She didn’t know what to say to anyone and every time she thought about attacking Lucas Delos in front of the entire school she groaned out loud in humiliation. She would have to leave the country, or at least Nantucket, because there was no way she could live down the fact that she had tried to strangle the hottest boy on the island.
    She groaned again and splashed her face, which was still finding a way to blush even though she was submerged in freezing-cold water. Now that she wasn’t being driven half crazy with rage she could think about Lucas objectively, and she decided that Claire hadn’t been exaggerating when she said he was the best-looking boy she had ever seen. Helen agreed with her. She had been trying to kill him, but she wasn’t blind. Normal boys simply weren’t put together the way he was.
    It wasn’t his height or his coloring or his muscles that made him so beautiful, she concluded. It was the way he moved. She had only seen him twice, but she could tell he thought less frequently about his looks than everyone around him did. His eyes, as pretty as they were, looked out , rather than back at himself.
    She dunked her head underwater and screamed, just to get it all out without scaring her father. When she came back up she felt a little better, but was still disappointed in herself. One of the terrible side effects of feeling like she somehow already knew Lucas was that she was starting to idealize him, making him more perfect than was humanly possible. Which was uncomfortable because she also still wanted to kill him.
    She pulled the rubber plug out with her toes and watched the water creep slowly down the sides of the bathtub until the last of it sucked down the drain. Then she sat naked in the empty tub, staring at her white, wrinkled feet until her butt hurt. Eventually,