Fallen 2. Torment(61)

Shelby and Luce were about to duke it out over a guy.

"Oh." Luce swallowed. "You and Daniel."

"Yeah. We. A long time ago." Shelby wouldn't look at her.

"Okay." Luce focused on breathing. She could handle this. But the whispers

flying around the wall of girls made her skin crawl, and she shuddered.

Shelby scoffed. "I'm sorry the idea disgusts you so much."

"That's not it." But Luce did feel disgusted. Disgusted with herself. "I always ... I

thought I was the only--"

Shelby put her hands on her hips. "You thought every time you disappeared for

seventeen years that Daniel just twiddled his thumbs? Earth to Luce, there is a Before

You for Daniel. Or an In Between, or whatever." She paused to give Luce a sideways

squint. "Are you really that self-involved?"

Luce was speechless.

Shelby grunted and turned to face the rest of the hall. "This estrogen force field

needs to dissipate," she barked, waggling her fingers at them. "Move along. All of you.

Now!"

As the girls scurried off, Luce pressed her head against the cold metal locker. She

wanted to crawl inside it and hide.

Shelby leaned her back against the wall next to Luce's face. "You know," she

said, her voice softening, "Daniel's a crap boyfriend. And a liar. He's lying to you."

Luce straightened up and went at Shelby, feeling her cheeks flush. Luce might be

pissed off at Daniel right now, but nobody talked smack about her boyfriend.

"Whoa." Shelby ducked away. "Calm down, there. Jeez." She slid down the wall

to sit on the floor. "Look, I shouldn't have brought it up. It was one stupid night a long

time ago and the guy was clearly miserable without you. I didn't know you then, so I

thought all the lore about you two was ... supremely boring. Which, if you must know,

explains the huge grudge I've held with your name on it."

She patted the floor next to her, and Luce slid down the wall to sit too. Shelby

gave a tentative smile. "I swear, Luce, I never thought I'd meet you. I definitely never

expected you to be ... cool."

"You think I'm cool?" Luce asked, laughing quietly to herself. "You were right

about me being self-absorbed."

"Ugh, just what I thought. You're one of those impossible-to-stay-mad-at people,

aren't you?" Shelby sighed. "Fine. I'm sorry for going after your boyfriend and, you

know, hating you before I knew you. I won't do it again."

This was weird. The thing that could have driven two friends instantly apart was

actually drawing them closer together. This wasn't Shelby's fault. Any flash of anger

Luce felt about it was something she needed to take up with ... Daniel. One stupid night,

Shelby had said. But what had really happened?

Sunset found Luce walking down the rocky steps to the beach. It was cold

outside, colder still as she got closer to the water. The day's last rays of light danced off

thin sheets of cloud, staining the ocean orange, pink, and pastel blue. The calm sea

stretched out in front of her, looking like a path to Heaven.

Until she got to the wide circle of sand, still blackened from Roland's bonfire,

Luce didn't know what she was doing down there. Then she found herself crawling

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behind the tall lava rock where Daniel had tugged her away. Where the two of them had

danced and then spent the precious few moments they'd had together fighting about

something as stupid as the color of her hair.

Callie had once had a boyfriend at Dover whom she'd broken up with after a fight

over a toaster. One of them had jammed the thing with an oversized New York bagel; the

other one had flipped out. Luce couldn't remember all the details now, but she

remembered thinking, Who breaks up over a kitchen appliance?

But it was never really about the toaster, Callie had told her. The toaster was just a

symptom, something that represented everything else that was wrong between them.

Luce hated that she and Daniel kept getting into fights. The one on the beach,

over her dye job, reminded her of Callie's story. It felt like a preview of some bigger,

uglier argument on the way.

Bracing herself against the wind, Luce realized she'd come down here to try to

trace where they'd gone wrong the other night. She was idiotically looking for signs in

the water, some clue carved into the rough volcanic rock. She was looking everywhere

except inside herself. Because what was inside Luce was just the vast enigma of her past.

Maybe the answers were still somewhere in the Announcers, but for now, they remained

frustratingly out of her grasp.

She didn't want to blame Daniel. She was the one who'd been naive enough to

assume that their relationship had been exclusive across time. But he'd never told her