Descending Star

PRECIPICE

Jacob had abandoned First Beach an hour ago and retreated to his house and bedroom, to suffer alone, and cram, for his two exams tomorrow. Emily had been useless as a tutor, more a distraction than a help. With that woman in a room, a guy couldn't concentrate on anything. No wonder Sam Uley had regressed to the maturity of a thirteen year old boy in the past six months. No wonder his mind had turned to mush. Jacob honestly didn't envy the guy, even though his college-dropout-girlfriend had the body of an idealized pin-up girl. He'd been out on that beach gawping at flash cards for nearly an hour, and he couldn't remember a single one.

He had barricaded every crack of his bedroom door with damp towels. It did nothing to filter out the revelry going on outside. These walls had the porosity of a cheese grater. Some Council meeting. Who were they kidding? What a shallow pretext for this community-wide effort to haze him into flunking out of sophomore year and being forced to repeat it. He could hear, through the door, a horseshoe championship, a ghost pepper eating contest, and robust debate over how to dress and spit a boar.

Everyone seemed to be out there. Not only Pop's Council of Elders, and not only Sam Uley's cult, but also Leah's crew as well. And to top it off, it sounded to him as though she had conscripted his own former best friends, Embry and Quil, as wingmen. Those three were louder than all the rest. What did they have to cheer about? Nothing. They were raising the roof just to haze him, nothing more.

But the thing that finally set him off was the rock band, warming up in the side yard. Four middle school aged kids who couldn't even tune their guitars, with a pimple-faced greasy fourteen year old frontman who thought he was the hottest thing since Pearl Jam. It wasn't even the noise that set Jacob off. He managed to keep his cool, with his nose firmly jammed in his Natural World textbook, until the idiots crossed some wires, shorted the circuit breakers, and knocked out every light in the house.

Twenty pairs of boots stomped into the house, in search of the electrical panel.

Jacob boomed, "It's in the hall closet! Damn it! I have finals tomorrow!"

They wanted him to fail. It was a plot, a vast conspiracy, and the whole damned Reservation was in on it.

He heard a timid, mousey knock on his door, and he couldn't help but think that maybe Ben and Zoey had finally given up on their futile quest to find the vale and high falls, on the foothills of Skyline Ridge. He'd told them they'd never find it in less than two days, but had they listened? No.

But yeah, maybe they'd finally given up. Maybe that was Zoey at the door, coming to tell him that he'd been right all along.

The knock repeated.

"Come on in." He yelled the words, no doubt too loudly, but he couldn't hear himself think.

The door shimmied back and forth against thirty pounds of wet towels.

"Give it a shove," he called out.

It had to be Zoey. Strong for her size, he'd grant her that much, but objectively a lightweight. He'd let her struggle for a few seconds. Then he'd go to the rescue, and things would be cool with them, again.

Then again, Ben Swan might also be with her, he realized. That would suck. Those two were like peas in a pod, or peas and carrots, or maybe peashooters and air darts. Whatever they were, he didn't like it. Ben was supposed to have a girl of his own. They'd had a deal, and Ben Swan had reneged. He was so done with that kid, and he didn't care how close Billy was to the filthy traitor's old man.

"I should take the Chevy back," he said to himself.

The door absorbed a hard shove and burst inward. A chestnut maned bombshell in a flesh colored bikini and sarong nearly sprawled on the floor, and then recovered.