I wanted to talk to Monique first, since she seemed friendliest, and my lonely childhood of mystery novels told me she'd know the most about where to start my investigating.
Best laid plans of mice and men and all that.
I wound up talking to Dylan first, for the simple reason that Max didn't show up to school that day. She wasn't in English lurking at my elbow, and I didn't see her walking with Jim from the science classrooms.
When she didn't show for lunch I was hardly surprised.
I'm not the dastardly planning type - I liked seeing her, even though I still hadn't said a damn thing to her. She never said anything to me, but I guess I enjoyed just having her around.
That's probably really creepy.
Dylan was alone at the table they usually occupied, book open on the table in front of him and a tray of "food" at his hand.
I approached.
"Dylan. Hi."
He looked up from his textbook. "Nick."
"Can I sit here?"
He shrugged and forked a bite of fried mystery meat into his mouth, light flashing off the thin metal band he wore on his ring finger.
I should explain something else here: no one I knew was exactly an open book. I knew very little about almost everyone I knew. I just didn't happen to have a crush on most of them.
Take Dylan, for example. He was fairly handsome, I could see that, but I didn't give a flying fuck about his deep secrets, or why he wore a ring. (Current scuttlebutt, however, was that he was secretly carrying a torch for some unknown person and that they had given him the ring. Or maybe that he was just weird. No one could ever quite agree.)
I set my tray down on the table across from him. I'd also picked up the mystery meat, but I didn't really intend to eat it.
"You know Max, right?"
I've never been known for subtlety.
He gave me a curious look. "Yeah. Why?"
I leaned forward. "Tell me about her."
"She says she's in your English class," he said curtly. "Talk to her. Not me."
He got up and left.
I thought, then, that maybe he was just a dick. But I also had a little feeling that this had just taken a left turn into the land of the needlessly complex and horrifyingly revealing.
Now, at that time I hadn't read H. P. Lovecraft, which Jim was to introduce me to not too long from then. Thus, I couldn't make the ironic and almost truthful comparison of me to the poor bastard who always takes a wrong turn somewhere and ends up surrounded by eldritch horrors.
I'm not saying that anyone was part fish in that town, or that the cats possessed some kind of weird hivemind intelligence. But strange things were going on under the surface, that was for sure.
I wanted to know what kind of things.
And therein lay my eventual doom.
Note: Here we meet one of my favorite MR characters: monsieur Dylan.
Place the Lovecraft references, receive my happiness.
My thanks to everyone who's reviewed so far: mickeymac, JealousMindsThinkAlike, FlockLuver2314, Serenity Jones, MaximumRideFanAddict, and fanglover101, you flatter me.
