Helen sat in a bathtub of cold water, the lights in the
bathroom switched off, and listened to the phone ring
over and over. She didn?t know what to say to anyone
and every time she thought about attacking Lucas
Delos in front of the entire school she groaned out loud
in humiliation. She would have to leave the country, or at least
Nantucket, because there was no way she could live down the fact
that she had tried to strangle the hottest boy on the island.
She groaned again and splashed her face, which was still finding
a way to blush even though she was submerged in freezing-cold
water. Now that she wasn?t being driven half crazy with rage she
could think about Lucas objectively, and she decided that Claire
hadn?t been exaggerating when she said he was the best-looking
boy she had ever seen. Helen agreed with her. She had been trying
to kill him, but she wasn?t blind. Normal boys simply weren?t put
together the way he was.
It wasn?t his height or his coloring or his muscles that made him
so beautiful, she concluded. It was the way he moved. She had only
seen him twice, but she could tell he thought less frequently about
his looks than everyone around him did. His eyes, as pretty as they
were, looked out, rather than back at himself.
She dunked her head underwater and screamed, just to get it all
out without scaring her father. When she came back up sh
e felt a
little better, but was still disappointed in herself. One of the
terrible side effects of feeling like she somehow already knew Lucas
was that she was starting to idealize him, making him more perfect
than was humanly possible. Which was uncomfortable because she
also still wanted to kill him.
She pulled the rubber plug out with her toes and watched the water