Glass Houses

“But you’re not kicking anybody,” she said quickly. “Right?”

“Nobody who doesn’t deserve it,” he said. “What else do I need to fit in?”

“Backpack.” She found her spare—she’d brought two—and tossed it to him. He stuck in some paperbacks, a PSP, and his iPod and headphones, then raided the cabinets for Twinkies and bottled water. “We’re not exactly going to the wilderness, Shane. You don’t have to take everything. There are vending machines.”

“Yeah? I didn’t see any lunch in that schedule. You’ll thank me later.”

In fact, she did feel better with Shane loping along beside her; he was watching the shadows, the dark alleys, the empty buildings. Watching everything. Even though he’d packed the iPod, he wasn’t listening to it. She missed hers, all of a sudden, and wondered if Monica had it.

They made it to campus without incident, and they were halfway across it, heading for her first class, when Claire suddenly thought of something and came to a full stop. Shane kept going for a couple of paces, then looked back.

“Monica,” she said. “Monica’s going to be hanging around. She usually is. She’ll see you.”

“I know.” Shane hitched his backpack to a more comfortable spot. “Let’s go.”

“But—Monica!”

He just looked at her, and started walking. She stayed where she was. “Hey! You’re supposed to be with me, not leaving me!”

“Monica’s my business,” he said. “Drop it.” He waited for her, and she reluctantly caught up. “She doesn’t mess with us, I won’t mess with her. How’s that?”

Wishful thinking, to Claire’s mind. If Monica really had gotten it in for Shane, even a year or two ago, and gone far enough to kill his sister, she couldn’t imagine any situation where Shane just walked away. Shane wasn’t a walking-away kind of guy.

The square concrete courtyard between the Architecture Building and the Math Sciences Building was packed with students crossing between classes. Now that Claire knew what to look for, she couldn’t help but notice how many of them had bracelets—leather, metal, even braided cloth—with symbols on them.

And how many students didn’t.

The ones who wore the symbols were the shiny, confident ones. Sorority girls. Frat guys. Athletes. Popular kids. The loners, the sideliners, the dull and average and strange…they were the ones who weren’t Protected.

They were the cattle.

Shane was sca

Almost there…

She was actually on the steps leading up to the Math Building when she heard Shane stop behind her. He was staring off into the Quad, and as Claire turned, she saw Monica, surrounded by a clique of admirers, staring right back at him. The two of them might as well have been alone. It was the kind of look that people in love exchanged, or people who were about to kill each other.

“Son of a bitch,” Shane breathed. He sounded shaken.

“Come on,” Claire said, and grabbed his elbow. She was afraid he wouldn’t let her pull him on, but he did, as if his mind was somewhere else. When he finally glanced at her, his eyes were dark and hard.

“Not here,” she said. “She won’t come in.”

“Why not?”

“It would embarrass her.”

He nodded slowly, as if that made sense to him, and followed her to class.

Claire had a hard time keeping her mind on the droning lecture, which was familiar anyway, and she’d read far ahead of where the professor was teaching…but mostly, she kept thinking about Shane, sitting motionless next to her, hands on the desk, staring blankly into space. He wasn’t even listening to his iPod. She could sense the tenseness in his body, like he was just waiting for the chance to hit something.

I knew this was a bad idea.

It was an hour-and-a-half lecture with a fifteen-minute break in the middle; when Shane got up and walked out, she hastily followed him. He went up to the glass doors and looked out over the Quad.

“She’s gone,” he said, without looking at Claire. “Quit worrying about me. I’m okay.”

“She—Eve said she burned your house.” No reply. “And—your sister—?”

“I couldn’t get her out,” Shane said. “She was twelve, and I couldn’t get her out of the house. That was my job. Watch out for her.”

He still didn’t look at her. She couldn’t think of anything to say. After a while, he walked away, into the boys’ bathroom; she dashed into the girls’, waiting impatiently for the line to clear, and came back out to find him nowhere in sight.

Oh, crap.

But when she went back to the lecture hall he was sitting right where he’d been, this time with his iPod earbuds in place.

She didn’t say anything. Neither did he.

It was the longest lecture, and the least enjoyable, that Claire could remember.

Physics was in the same building; if Monica was waiting out in the wilting sun on the Quad, she’d be getting a really good tan. Shane sat like a statue, if a statue wore headphones and radiated angry coiled tension that made hair stand up on a person’s arms. She felt like she was sitting next to an unexploded bomb, and given all of the physics she’d had, she understood exactly what that meant. Talk about potential energy….

Physics crawled slowly by. Shane broke out water and Twinkies, and shared. Chemistry was in the next building, but Claire made sure that they went out the side entrance, not through the Quad. No sign of Monica. She suffered through another hour and a half of chemistry and tension. Shane gradually unwound to the point that her nerves didn’t jangle like sleigh bells every time he moved, and ended up playing on his PSP through most of the class. Killing zombies, she hoped. That seemed to put him in a good mood.

In fact, he was positively cheerful during chem lab, interested in the experiment and asking so many questions that the teaching assistant, who’d never had to come to Claire’s table before, wandered over and stared at Shane as if trying to figure out what he was doing there.

“Hey, man,” Shane said, and stuck out his hand. “Shane Collins. I’m—what’s the word I’m looking for? Auditing. Auditing the class. With my friend here. Claire.”

“Oh,” said the TA, whose name Claire had never learned. “Right. Okay, then. Just—follow along.”

Shane gave him a thumbs-up and a goofy grin. “Hey,” he said in an undertone, leaning close to Claire. “Any of this stuff blow up?”

“What? Um…yeah, if you do it wrong, I guess.”

“I’m thinking about practical applications. Bombs. Things like that.”

“Shane!” He really was distracting. And he smelled good. Guy good, which was different from girl good—darker, spicier, a smell that made her go all fluttery inside. Oh, come on, it’s Shane! she told herself. That didn’t help, especially when he shot her that crooked smile and a look that probably would kill most girls at ten feet. He’s a slacker. And he’s—not that smart. Maybe he was, though. Just in different places than she was. It was a new idea to her, but she kind of liked it.

She slapped his hand when he reached for the reagents, and concentrated on the details of the experiment.

She was concentrating so hard, in fact, and Shane had gotten so engrossed in watching what she was doing, that neither of them heard footsteps behind them. The first Claire knew about it was a searing, burning sensation down the right side of her back. She dropped the beaker she was holding and screamed—couldn’t help it, because God, that hurt—and Shane whirled around and grabbed somebody by the collar who was backing away.