DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

“Okay. I understand.” Dion finished his hamburger, rolled up the foil wrapper, and tossed it at the nearest trash can. It missed by several feet, and he stood up, picked it off the ground, and dropped it in. He turned around. Through the thin material of Penelope’s blouse he could see the outline of her bra. He sat down next to her. “So what are we?” he asked. He tried to make the question sound casual. “Are we friends or are we… more than friends?”

She licked her lips, said nothing.

His heart was beating rapidly in his chest, and he suddenly wished he hadn’t said anything. “What are we?” he asked again.

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either.” His voice sounded too high.

They were both silent for a moment.

“I want to be more than friends,” Penelope said softly.

Neither of them said anything. The surrounding lunch noises faded from background sound into something else, something less. They looked into each other’s eyes, neither knowing what to say but neither turning away.

The silence was awkward, but it was a pleasant awkwardness, the welcome discomfort of initial intimacy. Dion smiled, embarrassed. “Does this mean that we’re, uh, like boyfriend and girlfriend?”

She nodded but looked down at the ground. “If you want to be.”

“I want to be,” he said.

There was a second’s hesitation, an instant of uncertainty, then he took her hand in his. His palms were sweaty. He was embarrassed by their sweatiness, but not embarrassed enough to move them away. He squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back.

He let out the breath he’d been holding. “Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“It wasn’t?” She laughed.

He laughed.

And then they were laughing together.

Dion met with Mr. Holbrook after school.

He hadn’t discussed the independent study idea with Holbrook since the teacher had originally brought it up, had, in fact, nearly forgotten about it, but he’d received a pink summons notice during his last period, requesting that he meet the mythology instructor after class, and after dumping his books in his locker, he made his way through the rapidly emptying hall to Holbrook’s room.

The classroom was empty when he arrived. He waited five minutes, but the teacher still hadn’t shown. He would have left then and there, but a message on the blackboard read:

Dion. Please wait. I will be back shortly.

There were other words on the blackboard as well, most of them half-erased. Many appeared to be foreign, the characters part of a non-English alphabet, and while Dion didn’t know how he knew, he realized that they were entirely unrelated to classwork or school.

That frightened him for some reason.

The door of the room opened, and Holbrook walked in. He was carrying what looked like a folded sheet atop an armload of supplies, and he placed them all on top of his desk. “So, Dion,” he said. “How’re things going?”

“Well, there haven’t been any big changes in my life during my afternoon classes.”

Holbrook chuckled, but there was no humor in the sound. “That’s true. We just saw each other this morning, didn’t we? In class.”

Dion had been leaning against the back counter, and he straightened up.

There was something about the teacher’s tone of voice that seemed odd, off, unusual.

Threatening.

That was it exactly.

He stared at the instructor, his stomach knotting up. The hostility had been vague, veiled, but it had been there, in the voice, and it was there now in the look the teacher was giving him from across the room.

What did Holbrook have against him?

He suddenly realized that the classroom door was closed.

“I… got your summons.” He held up the pink notice, aware that his voice was quavering, wishing he could stop it.

“Yes,” Holbrook said.

“Is this about the independent study thing? I already told you I don’t want to do it.”

“Why?” the teacher asked. “Afraid of being alone with me?” He grinned.

This was getting too damn weird. Dion started toward the door. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Afraid I’ll attack you?”

Dion stopped, turned toward the teacher. The supplies on the desk, he saw now, were rolled-up scrolls of parchment. “Is there a reason you called me here?” he said coldly. He met the teacher’s eyes.

Holbrook looked away, moving back a step. “Why do you think I asked you here?”

He wished Kevin was with him. If he’d had his friend’s moral support, he would have replied, “Because you’re a pervert, that’s why.” But Kevin wasn’t here, and he wasn’t brave enough to talk back to the teacher.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The teacher had pulled open the top drawer of his desk. Dion craned his neck, trying to see what Holbrook’s hands were fiddling with, caught sight of what looked like a long, shiny knife amidst the pencils and paper clips.

The door to the room opened, and Dion jumped, startled.

“Wait a minute!” Holbrook said.

Dion was not sure if the teacher was talking to him or to the group of men walking into the room, but he quickly pushed his way past the men, through the doorway, into the hall. He was sweating, his heart pounding, and the first thing he noticed was that the school seemed to be empty.

There were no faculty or students in sight.

He turned, caught the last of the men looking at him, and quickly sprinted down the hallway toward the exit. There’d been five men altogether, and each of them had been carrying scrolls and white cloth—just like Holbrook. Dion didn’t know if he’d been invited to a Klan meeting or what, but there was something about the situation that didn’t sit right with him, and he did not stop running until he was outside the building and on the sidewalk headed toward home.

22

Pastor Robens looked out over the half-empty church. He tried to smile, though smiling was the last thing he felt like doing at the moment. Three weeks ago, when church attendance had started to drop, he’d attributed it to a flu bug that was going around. Two weeks ago, he’d blamed the playoffs. But last week, as