“Helen?” Ariadne said.
Helen looked up and saw everyone staring at her. “Yes?” she said, bewildered and a bit startled.
“You didn’t hear a word any of us just said, did you?” Cassandra asked.
“Sorry,” Helen replied defensively. When did Cassandra get here? she wondered.
“Did you dream last night?” Cassandra asked, like she was repeating herself. Helen shook her head. Cassandra sat back in her chair and folded her arms, her naturally bright red lips pursed in worried thought.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Claire said to Helen, looking both concerned and guilty.
“I don’t know,” Helen mumbled. “I haven’t dreamed in so long I guess I forgot to mention it.”
“Well, Orion didn’t,” Cassandra said in her eerily calm way. Then her face changed dramatically and she leaned toward Helen, looking exactly like a normal girl for a second. “Is Orion always so . . .” She broke off, unable to frame her question properly.
“Funny? Pig-headed? Huge?” Helen fired off in rapid succession, trying to answer Cassandra’s question with whatever Orion-ish word popped into her cluttered head.
“Is he really big?” Ariadne asked curiously. “Like the original Orion?”
“He’s enormous,” Helen answered quickly, trying not to blush. A few more descriptive words bubbled up inside of her head as she thought about Orion, but she kept those to herself. “Help me out here, Cass. Is he always so what?”
“Unpredictable,” Cassandra finally decided.
“Yeah. That’s actually a great word to describe him. Wait, how can you know that?”
“I didn’t see him coming,” she said, more to herself than anyone else.
“What are you talking about? Did he text you or something?” Helen asked, growing more and more confused. “I never gave him your number.”
“Lucas did.” Cassandra acted like everyone knew this.
“What?”
“Orion texted my brother first thing this morning.”
“How did Orion get . . .” Helen stumbled horribly, and stopped breathing. She couldn’t say both Orion’s and Lucas’s names in the same sentence for the life of her.
The bell rang, and everyone else gathered their things while Helen stared off into space, unable to get past the thought of Lucas. Helen knew she was so sleep deprived that she had become cerebrally impaired, but even so, she knew that it was Lucas’s name and not Orion’s that had dealt the knockout punch to her nervous system.
“Why didn’t you say something, Len?” Claire asked in a hurt voice. She automatically grabbed Helen’s dangling arm and dragged her along to her next class when Helen didn’t respond to the bell.
“Say what?” Helen mumbled, still in a daze.
“This morning! You didn’t say one thing about how you’re, you know . . . you let me go on and on about Jason, like it was nothing.”
“Gig, don’t,” Helen said gently. “I’d so much rather hear about how happy you are than talk about how messed up I am. Really. It helps me to hear that good things are still happening in the world, especially when they’re happening to you. I want you to be insultingly happy for the rest of your life, no matter what happens to me. You know that, right?”
“God, you’re really dying, aren’t you?” Claire gasped quietly. “Jason said so, but I didn’t believe him.”
“I’m not dead yet,” Helen said through a weak laugh as she backed into the room. “Get to class, Gig. I’m sure I’ll survive social studies, at least.”
Claire waved sadly at her and then trotted down the hall while Helen went in and sat at her usual seat. She watched in shock as Zach came and sat next to her. He tried to say something but she cut him off.
“I can’t believe you actually have the nerve,” Helen said. She got up and took her stuff, but Zach grabbed her arm as she walked past.
“Please, Helen, you’re in danger. Tomorrow . . .” he said in an urgent whisper.
“Don’t touch me,” Helen hissed, pulling her wrist out of his grip.