Prom Nights from Hell(42)

 

«She's the driver?» the woman said. «Looks like one of those girls from Hawaiian Airlines you used to date, but younger. And cuter. You know how your judgment gets around cute young girls. You're sure I don't need to be concerned?»

 

Miranda heard him laugh, the genuine amusement in his voice as he said, «Her? Baby, she's just a high school student who has a crush on me. Trust me, you've got nothing to worry about.»

 

And thought: Trap. Door. Now. Please.

 

Sometimes having superhearing supersucked.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

 

Miranda loved the Santa Barbara airport, the way it looked more like an Acapulco Joe's Cantina than an official building with its adobe-style walls, cool terra-cotta floor, loopy blue and gold tile, and bougainvillaea careening down the walls. It was small, so planes just parked where they landed and had staircases wheeled out to them, with only a chain-link fence separating people waiting for someone from the people coming off the plane.

 

Pulling the welcome sign out of the Town Car, she checked the name on it-CUMEAN-and held it up in the direction of the disembarking passengers. As she waited, she listened to a woman in the gold Lexus SUV four cars behind her talking on her phone, saying, «If she gets off the plane, I'll know. He'd better have his checkbook ready,» then tilted her head to focus on the low srloop srloop srloop sound of a snail slithering across the still-warm pavement toward a bunch of ivy.

 

She still remembered the exact moment she realized that not everyone heard the things she heard, that she wasn't normal. She'd already spent the first half of her seventh-grade year at Saint Bartolomeo School-the part after the screening of the Your Body Is Changing: Womanhood video-puzzled by all the changes they didn't list, like uncontrolled bursts of speed and randomly crushing objects you were just trying to pick up and hitting your head on the ceiling of the gym when you were doing jumping jacks and suddenly being able to see dust particles on people's clothes. But since Sister Anna answered all her questions with «Stop joking, child,» Miranda thought they must just be so obvious the movie didn't need to mention them. It was only when she'd tried to earn Johnnie Voight's undying affection by warning him not to cheat off of Cynthia Riley again because, based on the sound of her pencil five seats away, she always got the wrong answers, that Miranda learned just how «differently abled» she was. Instead of falling on his knees and declaring that she was his goddess in a training bra and plaid skirt, Johnnie had called her a freak, then a nosy bitch, and tried to beat her up.

 

That was how she'd first learned how dangerous powers were, the way they could make you an outcast.

 

And also that she was stronger than boys her age, and that they didn't think that was cool or even good. And neither did school administrators.

 

Since then she'd become expert at acting normal, being careful. Had mastered her powers. Or she'd thought she had, until seven months earlier when-

 

Miranda pushed the memory aside and turned her attention back to the people at the airport. To her job. She watched a little girl with blond ringlets sitting on her dad's shoulders standing next to the path and waving as a woman walked from the plane toward them, now shouting, «Mommy, Mommy, I missed you!»

 

She watched the happy family hug and felt like someone had socked her in the stomach. One of the advantages of going to boarding school, Miranda thought, was that you didn't get invited over to people's houses, never had to see them acting like normal families, having breakfast together. For some reason, whenever she imagined truly happy families, they were always eating breakfast.

 

Plus people who had normal families didn't go to Chatsworth Academy, «The Premier Boarding Experience in Southern California.» Or, as Miranda liked to think of it, Child Warehouse, the place where parents (or in her case, guardians) stored their children until they needed them for something.

 

With the possible exception of her roommate, Kenzi.

 

She and Kenzi Chin had lived together for four years, since their freshman year, longer than Miranda had lived with almost anyone. Kenzi came from a perfect-eat-breakfast-together family, had perfect skin, perfect grades, perfect everything, and Miranda would have been forced to hate her if Kenzi wasn't also so completely loyal and kind. And a tinsy bit insane.

 

Like earlier that afternoon when Miranda walked into their room and found her standing on her head, wearing only underpants, with her entire body slathered in drying mint-colored mud.

 

«I am so going to be in therapy for the rest of my life to get this image out of my mind,» Miranda told her.