The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer Read online

  Noah grinned. “I neither confirm nor deny your assertion.”

  “You didn’t have to do it, you know.”

  Noah shrugged lazily and stared straight ahead. “I wanted to.”

  “Is it going to screw with your transcripts or anything?”

  “With my perfect GPA? Doubtful.”

  I turned to him slowly, just as we reached the door to my Algebra class. “Perfect?”

  Noah smirked. “And you thought I was just a pretty face.”

  Unbelievable. “I don’t understand. You never take notes. You never have your books with you.”

  Noah shrugged. “I have a good memory,” he said, as Jamie appeared on his way into Algebra. “Hey,” Noah said to him.

  “Hi,” Jamie said, and shot me a look as he slid past us.

  If Noah noticed Jamie’s reaction, he didn’t mention it. “I’ll see you after?” he asked me.

  The thought warmed me up. “Yeah.” I smiled, and walked into class.

  Jamie was already at his desk and I sat next to him, dropping my bag on the floor with a thud.

  “Much has changed since you last I saw,” he said, without looking at me.

  I decided to make him work for it. “I know,” I said with a dramatic, exasperated sigh. “I cannot even tell you how much I am dreading exams.”

  “Not speaking of that, was I.”

  “Why are you Yoda-ing me this morning?”

  “Why are you avoiding the subject du jour?” Jamie asked, filling out squares on his graph paper to form a really weird picture of a fire-breathing dragon with a human arm.

  “I’m not avoiding it, there’s just nothing to say.”

  “Nothing to say. The lonely new girl is suddenly kickin’ it with Croyden’s hottest piece of ass, and there’s a sketchbook of Shawporn depicting this unlikely relationship? ‘Nothing to say,’ my tuchus.” Jamie still refused to make eye contact.

  I leaned in and whispered to Jamie, “There’s no porn sketchbook. ‘Twas a ruse.”

  Jamie finally looked at me and cocked an eyebrow. “It’s all a sham?”

  I sucked in my lips, then bit them, then said, “Not exactly.” I wasn’t sure how to explain what had happened between me and Noah yesterday, and wasn’t even sure I wanted to.

  Jamie turned back to his graph paper. “Well, at some point, you’re gonna have to break this down for me real slow-like.”

  Anna interrupted my train of thought before I could respond to Jamie. “How long do you give it, Aiden?”

  Aiden pretended to study me as he spoke to her. “The end of this week, if she gives it up. Otherwise, she might last a couple more.”

  “Jealous much?” I asked calmly, though inside I was furious.

  “Of what you’re going to go through once Noah’s done with you?” Anna said, her prim little mouth curving into a malicious grin. “Please. But he is an awesome lay,” Anna said to me in a stage whisper. “So enjoy it while you can.”

  Anna sat back down, Mr. Walsh walked in the room, and I seethed quietly in my seat as I pressed my pencil down on my notebook very, very hard. My stomach soured at the thought of Anna acquiring that particular piece of information about Noah. Jamie told me they’d dated. But that didn’t have to mean—

  I did and didn’t want to know.

  When the bell rang, I got up from my seat and another girl in the class, Jessica, elbowed me as she walked by. What was her problem? My arm hurt and I rubbed it before picking up my textbook and notebook from my desk. As I made my way to the door, someone knocked them out of my hands. I whirled around, but no one around me looked particularly guilty.

  “What the hell?” I muttered under my breath as I bent down to pick up my things.

  Jamie crouched with me. “You’re unraveling the very fabric of Croyden society.”

  “What are you talking about?” I shoved my things into my messenger bag with unnecessary force.

  “Noah drove you to school.”

  “So what?”

  “Noah doesn’t drive anyone to school.”

  “So what?” I asked, growing frustrated.

  “He’s acting like your boyfriend. Which makes the girls he treated like condoms a trifle jealous.”

  “Condoms?” I asked, confused.

  “Used once and then discarded.”

  “Gross.”

  “He is.”

  I ignored that, knowing I’d make zero headway on this particular subject. “So what are you saying? I was invisible, but now I’m a target?”

  Jamie tilted his head and laughed. “Oh, you were never invisible.”

  Noah was waiting for me when we made it out of the classroom. Jamie wordlessly stepped around us and headed to his next class. Noah didn’t even notice.

  The rain slanted in under the arch-covered path, but he walked on the outside anyway, not caring that he was getting wet. As soon as we were out of earshot, I couldn’t hold in the question that had been nauseating me since Algebra. I looked up at him.

  “So, you dated Anna last year, right?”

  Noah’s formerly content expression morphed into disgust. “I wouldn’t exactly use the word ‘dated.’ “

  So Jamie was right. “Gross,” I muttered.

  “It wasn’t that awful,” he said.

  I wanted to bang my head against the brick arch. “I don’t want to hear that, Noah.”

  “Well, what do you want to hear?”

  “That she has scales underneath her uniform.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  My heart leapt, but I tried to appear only mildly curious. “Really?”

  “Really,” Noah said, his tone amused.

  “So, uh, what happened?” I asked so very casually.

  Noah shrugged one shoulder. “She just sort of attached herself to me last year, and I suffered it until her general hideousness of character and my inability to translate her moron language got to be too much.”

  It was still too early to celebrate. “She said you were an awesome lay,” I said, feigning interest in the gush of water that spilled out from the gutter by the lockers. My face would betray me if he saw it.

  “Well, that’s true,” Noah said.

  Lovely.

  “But she wouldn’t know from personal experience.” Just then, Noah tilted my chin so that I faced him. “Why, Mara Dyer.”

  I bit my lip and looked down. “What?”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said incredulously.

  “What?!”

  “You’re jealous.” I heard the smile in his voice.

  “No,” I lied.

  “You are. I’d reassure you that there’s nothing to worry about, but I think I kind of like this.”

  “I’m not jealous,” I insisted, my face burning under the touch of Noah’s fingers. I backed up against my locker.

  Noah raised an eyebrow. “Then why do you care?”

  “I don’t. She’s just so—so malodorous,” I said, still looking at the ground. I finally screwed up the courage to look up at him. He wasn’t smiling. “Why would you let her say she slept with you?”

  “Because I never kiss and tell,” he said, ducking slightly to meet my eyes.

  I turned away from him and opened the locker door. “Then anyone can say they’ve been doing anything with you,” I said, into the dark space.

  “Does that hurt your feelings?” He spoke in a low voice from behind my shoulders.

  “I don’t have feelings,” I said, my face buried in my locker.

  Noah’s hand appeared on the locker next to me and I felt him lean toward my back. The air was thick with our electricity.

  “Kiss me,” he said simply.

  “What?” I turned around and found myself just inches from him. My blood glowed under my skin.

  “You heard me,” Noah said.

  I felt the stares of other students. In my peripheral vision, I saw them huddled under the covered path, waiting for the rain to let up. They gawked at Noah’s long figure leaning ov
er mine, his hand pressed on the steel by my ear. He didn’t inch closer; he was asking, waiting for me to make the next move. But as my face burned with the feeling of his eyes and their eyes on me, the other students began to disappear one by one. And I don’t mean they walked away. They disappeared.

  “I’m not into kissing,” I blurted, my eyes darting back to Noah’s.

  Noah’s mouth tilted into the smallest of smiles. “Oh?”

  I swallowed thickly, and nodded. “It’s stupid,” I said, checking for the once-assembled crowd. Nope. Gone. “Someone poking their tongue in someone else’s mouth is stupid. And gross.” Way to employ my AP English vocabulary. Mara doth protest too much.

  Noah’s eyes crinkled at the corners, but he wasn’t laughing at me. He ran his free hand through his hair, twisting it as he went, but a few thick strands fell back over his forehead anyway. He didn’t move. He was so close. I breathed him in, rain and salt and smoke.

  “Have you kissed many boys before?” he asked quietly.

  His question brought my mind back into focus. I raised an eyebrow. “Boys? That’s an assumption.”

  Noah laughed, the sound low and husky. “Girls, then?”

  “No.”

  “Not many girls? Or not many boys?”

  “Neither,” I said. Let him make of that what he would.

  “How many?”

  “Why—”

  “I am taking away that word. You are no longer allowed to use it. How many?”

  My cheeks flushed, but my voice was steady as I answered. “One.”

  At this, Noah leaned in impossibly closer, the slender muscles in his forearm flexing as he bent his elbow to bring himself nearer to me, almost touching. I was heady with the proximity of him and grew legitimately concerned that my heart might explode. Maybe Noah wasn’t asking. Maybe I didn’t mind. I closed my eyes and felt Noah’s five o’ clock graze my jaw, and the faintest whisper of his lips at my ear.

  “He was doing it wrong.”

  35

  nOAH’S LIPS PRESSED LIGHTLY ON THE SKIN of my cheek and lingered there. I was on fire. By the time I opened my eyes and my breathing returned to normal, Noah wasn’t in front of me. He hung casually from the archway in the locker nook, waiting for me to get my things for Art.

  The bell rang.

  I still stood there. I still felt the imprint of his lips on my cheek. I still stared like an idiot. Noah’s smile spread into a smirk.

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and mustered up what dignity I had left before walking right past him, careful to avoid the rain slanting under the arches. I was glad Art was next. I needed to decompress, to watch my stress level as Dr. Maillard had said. And Noah was impossible to ignore. When we stood in front of my classroom, I told him I’d meet him later.

  Noah’s forehead creased as other students walked past us. “But I have a study period.”

  “So, go study.”

  “But I want to watch you draw.”

  I answered him by closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead. He was impossible.

  “You don’t want me there?” he asked. I opened my eyes. Noah looked crestfallen and adorable.

  “You’re distracting,” I said truthfully.

  “I won’t be. I promise,” Noah said. “I’ll get some crayons and draw quietly. Alone. In a corner.”

  I couldn’t help my smile and Noah saw his opening; he brushed right past me into the classroom. I calmly walked to a table at the far end of the room. Noah’s eyes followed me as I sat at a stool and withdrew my graphite and charcoal.

  I ignored him and went to my happy place. I opened my sketchbook, quickly flipping past the pages filled with Noah, as the substitute cleared her throat before speaking.

  “Hi, guys! I’m Ms. Adams. Mrs. Gallo had a family emergency so I’m going to be your sub for the day.” With her short bangs and glasses, she looked twelve years old. And sounded it.

  When Ms. Adams took attendance and called out the name of an absent classmate, Noah’s hand shot up. I watched him cautiously. After she finished roll call, Noah stood, completely unself-conscious as heads followed his progress to the front of the room.

  “Um—” Ms. Adams checked her clipboard. “Ibrahim Hassin?”

  Noah nodded. I died.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Noah wore a bemused expression. “Didn’t Mrs. Gallo tell you?” he asked her. “We’re supposed to start working on live models today.”

  No, I was being tortured.

  “Oh, umm. I didn’t—”

  “It’s true,” a girl in a cheerleading uniform piped up. Brittany, I think. “N—Ibrahim’s supposed to go first. Mrs. Gallo said.” A chorus of nodding and murmuring supported Brittany’s assertion.

  Ms. Adams looked baffled and a bit helpless. “Uh, okay, I guess. Do you guys know what to do?”

  Noah flashed her a brilliant smile as he dragged a stool to the center of the room. “Definitely,” he said. He sat down, and I looked at my blank page, feeling the pressure of his eyes on me the entire time.

  “Um, wait—” the sub said, a note of desperation in her voice.

  My eyes flitted up to the front of the classroom. Noah was in the process of unbuttoning his shirt. Sweet Jesus.

  “I’m really not comfortable with—”

  He pulled his tie loose. My female classmates tittered.

  “Ohmigod!”

  “Holy hell.”

  “Hot. So hot.”

  He lifted the hem of his T-shirt up. Good-bye, dignity. If Noah heard the girls, he made no indication. He caught my stare and shot me a sly smile.

  “M-Mr. Hassin, please put your clothes back on,” Ms. Adams stammered.

  Noah paused, letting everyone enjoy the view a moment longer, then shrugged back into his T-shirt, then his dress shirt, redoing all of the buttons incorrectly and leaving the cuffs undone.

  Ms. Adams exhaled audibly. “Okay, guys, get to work.”

  Noah’s eyes held my face. I swallowed hard. The juxtaposition of him sitting in a room full of people while staring at no one but me was overwhelming. Something shifted inside of me at the intimacy of us, eyes locked amid the scraping of twenty graphite pencils on paper.

  I shaded his face out of nothingness. I smudged the slope of his neck and darkened his delinquent mouth, while the lights accented the right angle of his jaw against the cloudy sky outside. I did not hear the bell. I did not hear the other students rise and leave the room. I did not even notice that Noah no longer sat at the stool.

  I felt fingers whisper on my back. “Hey,” Noah said. His voice was very soft.

  “Hey,” I answered. I remained hunched protectively over the page but half-turned to meet his stare.

  “May I?”

  I couldn’t deny him and I didn’t reply. I shifted out of the way so he could see.

  I heard his intake of breath. Neither of us spoke for a long time. Then, “Is that what I look like?” Noah’s expression was unreadable.

  “It is to me.”

  Noah didn’t speak.

  “It’s just how I saw you in that moment,” I said.

  Noah was still silent. I shifted uncomfortably. “If you looked at everyone else’s drawings, they’d be completely different,” I added.

  Noah still stared.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said, as I moved to close the sketchbook.

  Noah stopped me. “No,” he said in a low voice, barely perceptible.

  “No?”

  “It’s perfect.”

  He was still staring at it, but he looked—distant. I closed the book and slipped it in my bag. When we left the classroom, his hand braceleted my wrist.

  “May I have it?” he asked.

  I arched an eyebrow.

  “The picture?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Thank you,” he said, a smile flirting with his mouth. “Would it be greedy to ask for one of you?”

  “A self-portrait?” I asked
. Noah smiled an answer. “I haven’t done one in forever,” I said.

  “So it’s about time, then.”

  I contemplated the idea. I’d have to draw myself without a mirror, now that I saw dead people in them these days. I shrugged noncommittally in Noah’s general direction and focused on the drips of rain that fell from the thatched roof of the tiki hut above us.

  I heard a low buzzing from Noah’s pocket. He withdrew his phone and arched his eyebrow at it.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Mmm,” he murmured, still staring at the phone. “It’s your brother.”

  “Daniel? What does he want?”

  “Joseph, actually,” Noah said, texting something back. “And to offer a stock tip.”

  I have the strangest family.

  Noah shoved his phone back in his pocket. “Let’s eat in the dining hall,” he said out of nowhere.

  “Okay.”

  “I haven’t exactly been—wait, what?” He looked bemused.

  “If you want to go, we can go.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That was easier than I expected. My body must have addled your good sense.”

  I sighed. “Why do you insist on making me hate you?”

  “I’m not making you hate me. I’m making you love me.”

  Damn him for being right.

  “So you’re giving in?” he asked. “Just like that?”

  I started walking. “How much worse could it be after everything else today?”

  Noah stopped. “Worse?”

  “Having everyone stare and wonder what sort of hijinks your vagina’s been up to isn’t as thrilling as one might imagine.”

  “I knew it,” Noah said simply. He still had my hand. It felt tiny and warm in his. “I knew this would happen,” he said again.

  I pushed my hair back from my forehead. “I can take it.”

  “But you shouldn’t have to,” Noah said, his nostrils flaring. “I wanted to show them you were different. That’s why—Christ,” Noah said under his breath. “That’s why everything. Because you are different,” he said to himself. A shadow darkened his face and he was silent as he stared at me. Studied me. I was lost, but didn’t have time to ask what he was talking about before his expression changed. He withdrew his hand from mine. “If you’re getting hell for this—”