The Secret Hour

6

12:01 P.M.

JONATHAN

Jessica headed to lunch, a fist of nerves clenched in her stomach.

Dess had given her the creeps again, just like that first day in trig. Jessica could see why Dess didn't have many friends. Every time Jess felt like they were starting to connect, the girl would make some weird, knowing observation, as if she wanted to convince Jessica that she had psychic powers. All Jessica had wanted was some help with trigonometry, not a course in the arcane ways of Bixby, Oklahoma.

Jessica sighed as she made her way toward the cafeteria. Now that she thought about it, Dess wasn't really all that mysterious. Just sad. She was pushing Jessica away on purpose. The befuddling twists and turns of her conversations were probably meant to shut people out. Messing with people's heads was easier than getting to know and trust them. Maybe she was afraid.

But Dess never seemed afraid, only calm and confident. However off the wall her lines were, she always delivered them in such a knowing way. Dess talked as if she lived in an alien world with completely different rules, all of which made perfect sense to her.

Which was another way of saying she was crazy.

On the other hand, something inside Jess felt as if Dess was actually trying to communicate with her. Was trying to help her understand her new town or maybe even warn her about something. Dess had been totally right about the weird dream. Of course, that didn't necessarily make Dess a mind reader and didn't mean the Bixby water supply had caused it. A lot of people had funny dreams when they went new places. Dess probably realized that Jessica was freaked out about moving and had decided it would be fun to freak her out a little bit more.

It had worked.

As Jess reached the lunchroom, the slightly rancid smell of frying swept out of the open double doors, along with the roar of hundreds of voices. Jessica's step slowed as she crossed the threshold. As the new girl, she still experienced a few seconds of minor panic while figuring out where to sit, not wanting to offend new friends or get stuck with people she wasn't sure about.

For a moment Jessica almost wished that Dad hadn't decided to start packing lunches for her. Waiting in line for official Bixby High School slop would have given her more time to scope out where to sit. Maybe that was why high school lunches had been invented. It certainly hadn't been for their nutritional value. Or their flavor.

As her eyes scanned the room, the butterflies in Jessica's stomach started fluttering again. There was Dess, looking straight at her. The girl must have used some quicker route to the lunchroom through the Bixby High maze. She sat at a table in a distant corner with two friends. Like her, they wore all black. Jess recognized the boy from the first day of school. She remembered that moment of anxiety entering Bixby High for the first time, terrified that she was late. The memory was strangely clear; the image of his glasses getting knocked off was cemented in her mind. Jessica wondered why she hadn't seen him around since then. With his long black coat the guy should have stood out at Bixby. There'd been a lot of kids like him and Dess back in PS 141, but there were only three or four here. It was too warm and sunny in Oklahoma to do the whole vampire thing.

Unless, of course, you were "photophobic," if Dess had even been telling the truth about that.

Now the boy was looking at Jessica too, as if he and Dess were both expecting her to join them. The other girl at the table was staring off into space, headphones over her ears.

Jessica looked around for somewhere else to sit. She wasn't up for any more head games today. She looked for Constanza or Liz, but she couldn't see them or any of the other girls from the library table. Her eyes searched for a familiar face, but Jess recognized no one. The horde of faces blurred together into a bewildering mass. The cafeteria slipped out of focus, the dizzying roar of voices assaulting her from all sides. Her moment of hesitation stretched out, suddenly transformed into total confusion.

But somehow her feet kept walking, bringing her closer to Dess's table. The girl and her friends were the only stable part of the room. Instinct carried Jessica toward them.

"Jessica?"

She turned, recognized a face out of the blur. A very attractive face.

"I'm Jonathan, from physics class. Remember?"

His smile cut through the fog enveloping her. His dark brown eyes were very much in focus.

"Sure. Jonathan. Physics." She had noticed him in class. Anyone would have.

Jessica stood there, unable to say anything more. But at least she had managed to stop walking toward Dess's table.

A look of concern crossed his face. "Want to sit down?"

"Yeah. That would be great."

He led Jessica to an empty table, in the corner opposite Dess's. Her dizziness began to subside. She gratefully dumped her book bag and lunch sack onto the table as she sat down.

"You okay?" Jonathan asked.

Jessica blinked. The cafeteria was back to its normal self: loud, chaotic, and a bit smelly, but no longer a roller coaster. Her disorientation had vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. "Much better."

"You looked like you were going to take a spill."

"No, I... Yeah, maybe. Tough week." Jessica wanted to add that she didn't usually act like a zombie in front of cute guys but somehow couldn't find the right words. "I think I just need to eat."

"Me too."

Jonathan overturned his lunch bag, spilling its contents onto the table. An apple rolled perilously close to the edge of the table, but he ignored it. It stopped just before falling to the floor. Jessica raised an eyebrow as she looked at his pile of food. It included three sandwiches, a bag of chips, a banana, and a carton of yogurt in addition to the wayward apple.

Jonathan was thin as a rail. A hungry rail. He grabbed a sandwich from the pile, pulled off its plastic wrap, and tore into it.

Jessica looked at her own lunch. As always, Dad had gotten bored last night and created something complicated. Grated cheese, ground meat, chopped lettuce, and tomato all occupied their own corners of a multisection container. A couple of hard taco shells were visible through the plastic of another. The tacos were already broken. Jess sighed and popped open the containers, dumping all the ingredients together and starting to mix them up.

"Mmm, taco salad," Jonathan said. "Smells good."

Jessica nodded. The spicy aroma coming from the meat had taken the edge off the fried smell of high school cafeteria. "My dad's getting into southwestern cuisine in a big way."

"Beats sandwiches."

"That one looks good."

"They're peanut butter on banana bread."

"Peanut butter on banana bread? All three? That's a... time-saver, I guess."

"Saves slicing bananas. I can't ever wake up early enough to make anything fancy."

"But three of them?" she asked.

He shrugged. "That's nothing. Some birds eat their own body weight every hour."

"Sorry, I missed the feathers on you."

Jonathan grinned. He looked sleepy. His eyes never quite opened all the way, but they twinkled when he smiled. "Hey, if I don't get enough calories, I'm the one who's fainting." He opened the second sandwich and took a huge bite, as if talking this much had put him behind schedule.

"That reminds me," Jessica said, "thanks for saving me. That would have been a smooth move, falling on my face in front of the whole school my first week here."

"You could always blame the Bixby water."

Jessica's fork halted a few inches from her mouth. "You don't like it either?"

"I moved here more than two years ago, and I still can't drink it." Jonathan shuddered.

Jessica felt the fist of nerves in her stomach unclench a bit. She had started to think that everyone else in town had been born and bred here and that she was the first outsider they'd ever seen. But Jonathan was another stranger to this strange place.

"Where'd you move here from?" she asked.

"Philadelphia. Well, just outside, anyway."

"I'm from Chicago."

"So I heard."

"Oh, right. Everyone knows everything about the new girl."

He smiled, shrugged. "Not everything."

Jessica smiled back at Jonathan. They ate quietly for a while, ignoring the roar of the cafeteria around them. Her taco salad really was good, now that she paid attention to it. Maybe having a house dad wasn't so bad. And Jonathan's quiet feasting on his sandwiches was somehow reassuring. Jessica felt comfortable in a way she hadn't since coming to Bixby. She felt... normal.

"So, Jonathan," she said after a few minutes. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"When you first got here, did you think Bixby was kind of weird?"

Jonathan chewed thoughtfully.

"I still think Bixby's weird," he said. "And not kind of - very. It's not just the water. Or the snake pit or all the other funny rumors. It's..."

"What?"

"It's just that Bixby is really... psychosomatic."

"It's what?" she asked. "Doesn't that mean 'all in your head' or something?"

"Yeah. Like when you feel sick, but your body's really okay. Your mind has the power to make you sick. That's Bixby all over: psychosomatic. The kind of place that gives you strange dreams."

Jessica almost choked on a forkful of taco salad.

"Did I say something?" Jonathan asked.

"Mm-mm," she managed, clearing her throat. "People keep saying stuff that makes no..." Jess paused. "That makes too much sense."

Jonathan looked at her carefully, his brown eyes narrowing even further.

"Okay, I guess this might sound a little nuts," Jessica admitted. "But it sometimes seems like people here in Bixby know what's going on inside my head. Or I guess one person does, anyway. There's this girl - half the time she talks crazy, but the other half it's like she's reading my mind."

Jessica realized that Jonathan had stopped eating. He was looking at her intently.

"Do I sound insane?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I had this friend back in Philadelphia, Julio, who would go and see this psychic every time he had five bucks to blow. She was an old woman who lived in a storefront downtown, complete with a purple neon hand in the window."

Jessica laughed. "We had palm readers like that in Chicago."

"But she didn't read palms or look in a crystal ball," Jonathan said. "She just talked."

"Was she really psychic?"

Jonathan shook his head. "I doubt it."

"You don't believe in that stuff?"

"Well, not as far as she goes." Jonathan took a bite but kept talking. "I went with Julio once to watch, and I think I figured out how it worked. The woman would say weird, random things, one after another, until something rang a bell with Julio and his eyes would light up. She'd keep pushing in that direction, and he'd start talking and telling her everything. His dreams, what he was worried about, whatever. He thought that she was reading his mind, but she was only getting him to tell her what was going on inside his head."

"Sounds like a good trick."

"I'm not sure it was just a trick," Jonathan said. "I mean, she really seemed to help Julio. When he was about to do something stupid, he wouldn't listen to anyone else, but she could always talk sense into him. Like when he'd decided to run away from home one time, she was the one who talked him out of it."

Jessica put down her fork. "So she wasn't just ripping him off."

"Well, the funny thing is, I'm not sure that she knew what she was doing. Maybe it was all instinct and she really thought she was psychic, you know? But she wasn't really psychic, just psychosomatic."

Jessica smiled, taking a thoughtful bite of her salad. The woman Jonathan had described sounded a lot like Dess. Her weird, probing questions and random statements, all delivered with total authority, had almost started Jessica believing that Dess had some kind of special power. Or at least they had fooled her enough to creep her out. Maybe it was all in her head. If Jessica believed that Dess had some special power, then in a way she did.

In any case, Dess certainly put the psycho back in psychosomatic.

"So it's possible," Jonathan continued, "that this girl you know isn't completely nuts. She might have a different way of communicating, but maybe she does have something important to say."

"Yeah, maybe," Jessica said. "But whatever it is, I kind of wish she'd just come out and say it."

"Maybe you're not ready to hear it."

Jessica looked at Jonathan with surprise. He blinked his sleepy brown eyes at her innocently.

"Well, maybe you're right," she said, shrugging. "But until then, I'm not going to worry about it."

"That makes sense."

Jessica smiled at those three words as Jonathan attacked his final sandwich. It was about time something made sense.