The Battle for Jericho Read online

  When his fingers touched the back of my hand—all wispy and spider-like—it instantly sent a tingle of alarm up my arm into my brain. My body went rigid. I fought the impulse to snatch away, keeping my hand motionless. Thus encouraged, Hutch scooped his fingers under my palm and took my hand.

  We sat that way for maybe ten minutes, watching as one of the hapless Nostromo crewmen got zapped by the face-hugging thingie from the alien egg and turned into a human incubator. Hutch seemed relaxed. I, on the other hand, was all but humming with tension, the way an electrical wire buzzes when charged with energy.

  Hutch scooted closer, lifting our joined hands so he could press his body to mine. He gave me a sidelong glance, to gauge my reaction. I tried to smile. I tried really, really hard to smile, but the words this is so wrong kept flashing in my mind like an emergency beacon. He lowered our hands to his lap, the back of my hand resting against his thigh. His thigh was hard with muscle. My mind yelled at me that touching Hutch’s thigh was as stupid and dangerous as touching fire.

  But as far as my hormones were concerned, it felt very, very good.

  Hutch slowly turned his face up to mine, the way Lissandra does when she wants me to kiss her. I wanted some part of me to flare up in disgust and shout at him to get the hell away from me. I wanted my hands to shove him back. I wanted my body to push itself up and run to the safety of the bathroom, where I would hide until this guy got the message that I didn’t want any part of him and vacated the house. I looked at Hutch, and instead of disgust, I felt this joyous thrill. His eyes were half closed, his face almost glowing with affection. He was so close, so cute, and still so very hurt. There were tremors rippling gently through his whole body, and I realized he was almost as afraid and excited as I was. I had to admire his daring, his willingness to take a big chance by making the first move. If only I could muster some of that grit. Something in me balked, and I held myself back.

  Okay, come on, you can do this, I told that reluctant part of me. Just close your stupid eyes, pretend this is Lissandra, and do it.

  I closed my eyes.

  I leaned closer.

  And I kissed Hutch.

  My mind sort of blanked at first. I think I was trying to block out everything and keep myself removed from what I was doing. But the sensations filtered in anyway.

  His lips felt wonderfully smooth. The soft bristles of his little mustache sticking into my hairless upper lip killed any illusion of femininity. This was definitely a guy I was kissing. I was kissing a guy. I, Jericho Weldon Jiles, was kissing a guy. And I liked it. His mouth was cold from the Pepsi. I tasted the cola there. And I tasted something coppery, which, I realized a moment later, was the flavor of the wound I had punched into his bottom lip. Somehow, that made what we were doing even more intimate. He turned his body and pressed his chest to mine. Slowly, he brought his free hand up and gently caressed the back of my neck. The kiss went on for several long, blissful seconds. And then I felt a familiar tingle begin between my legs.

  I started to get hard.

  That made me jerk my head away as if I’d been stabbed.

  “Jerry?” Hutch looked at me, puzzled and uncertain.

  “Hey, that was… nice.” My hand came up all on its own, but I caught myself before it could scrub my lips. My heart was racing, and not in a good way. “Wow, we really made some progress there, all right. Great job, man. You think that’s enough for today? I do too. Okay, then.” I shot to my feet, rocket-like. “You want some potato chips, man? I want some potato chips. Be right back.”

  I hate to admit it, but I ran from the room.

  FIFTEEN minutes later, Hutch remembered something he had to do at home, and he left. He seemed confused, probably because I had been maniacally rearranging the stuff on the shelves in the kitchen pantry since fleeing my room.

  I was so devastated when he took off I could have cried. Until now, I’d only gotten excited like that for girls. Until now, kissing had gotten me hard only with Lissandra. This wasn’t right. This simply could not be right. Getting an erection from kissing Hutch, one of my best friends, could not possibly be right. I was overcome by an uncontrollable need to purge. I didn’t have a clue as to what had to be eliminated, I just knew I had to rid myself of whatever was wrong.

  Fifteen minutes after Hutch left, Dad made it home from work. I was in my bathroom, which also doubles as the guest bathroom since it’s the only one on the first floor, which means that I can never let it get too gross because you never know when we might have a guest who’d want to use it. For years after we moved in, the downstairs bedroom had been a guest room for visiting out-of-town relatives, and my room was upstairs, down the hall from my folks’. When I turned fifteen, I craved a bit more privacy and started begging to move downstairs. Mom was reluctant at first. She thought I’d take advantage of the situation to sneak out of the house in the wee hours. Dad convinced her that I would do no such thing, as I surely knew what would happen to me if I did. Of course, he gave me this nuclear-powered look when he said it, which, for a couple of days, killed any desire of mine to leave the house even during the day.

  I heard Dad put his briefcase on the kitchen table. “Jericho?” he called.

  “Back here,” I answered, leaving it to him to figure out where “here” was.

  I heard his approaching footsteps. He arrived in the bathroom door just as I squeezed another shot of liquid antibacterial soap from the dispenser onto my toothbrush.

  Dad gasped. In my entire sixteen years, I don’t think I’d ever heard him gasp like that before.

  In hindsight, I could understand his shock. I was literally foaming at the mouth. Using my toothbrush, I was scrubbing my teeth, gums, tongue, and lips with soap. I’d been at it since Hutch left, and my face still didn’t feel the way I wanted it to.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Dad bellowed. “Have you lost your natural mind?” He snatched the toothbrush from my hand. “Are you trying to poison your fool self?” He shoved my head in the basin and turned the water on full blast. Holding me down with one hand, he began slapping water in my face with the other. “Rinse out your mouth! Rinse out your mouth!”

  After what seemed like a year of waterboarding, he finally let me up. As I gasped, trying to catch my breath, Dad grabbed a towel and began drying my head. He studied my eyes closely as he worked, anxiety shining from his face. “Did you swallow any of that stuff?”

  “Heck no. It tastes awful.”

  “Are you sure? Jericho, that antibacterial soap can be poisonous. Are you sure you didn’t swallow it?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, still clueless as to why he was making such a fuss.

  “Go to the den and wait for me.”

  The back of my shirt was soaked, and water was still dripping down my neck over my torso. I wanted to grab a dry jersey from my closet and change, but I tucked a bath towel around my neck and took myself to the den as ordered. Settling into the recliner, I turned on the television and resumed watching Alien. I could hear Dad’s muffled voice as he spoke on the phone.

  He came into the den a few minutes later. “I called your mom and told her what happened,” he said as he sat down on the sofa. “She said I should keep an eye on you for the next couple of hours. If you start showing any symptoms of poisoning, I’m taking you to the emergency room.”

  “Dad,” I said with studied weariness. “I told you I didn’t swallow anything. I was just trying to… get a bad taste out of my mouth. That’s all. I’m fine.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it. Because your mother says that if you’re fine in a couple of hours, I can kill you.”

  HERE’S the thing. My dad, after finding me washing out my mouth with bug-killing soap, seemed cool. I mean, he made that little joke there, after all. (The remark about killing me was a joke. I think.)

  But I’d been acting pretty damn weird the past few days. Of course, I never considered how my behavior looked from Dad’s perspective. I didn’t realize it at the moment, but
I was freaking the man out in a major way. He knew I was hiding something. And he was determined to find out what that something was.

  So, unbeknownst to me, Dad did something that night he’d never done before.

  He started checking my cell phone to see who my contacts were.

  Chapter 11

  GORDON BROWNING High School maintains three pay phones for the students who are cellular-deprived. (There are actually kids who’ve never had a cell. Unbelievable, huh?) Two of the pay phones are outside the main door of the cafeteria. The third is in the hall outside the principal’s office.

  I desperately needed to talk to Dylan Thursday morning. I had not dared call him from home. Even with my folks upstairs, I wasn’t willing to risk having them overhear. The phones outside the cafeteria are usually tied up at any given moment. Even if the phones aren’t in use, there are so many kids in the vicinity you could hardly expect anything even remotely like privacy. Strangely, there’s never anyone hanging around outside the principal’s office.

  Before the homeroom bell, I skipped going to my locker, thereby missing my morning treat from Lissandra. Given where I’d put my lips last evening, I couldn’t bring myself to kiss her just yet. That didn’t mean, however, that I was finally getting with the gay program and avoiding her. I wanted to be with her more than ever. I wanted to make sure my hormones were still in good working order when it came to her. But that would have to wait.

  Mac didn’t put in an appearance at the cafeteria for lunch, and although Hutch waited at our usual table for me to join him, I flew past with my tray as if I didn’t see him and settled at a corner table with a couple of the guys from my American history class. Despite my already nervous stomach, I went through my pizza and Jell-O pudding cup pretty fast. Although I knew I was inviting indigestion, I wanted to have enough time before lunch period ended to make a phone call. Once I finished eating, I told my dining companions I had to run and did just that. I went to the phone outside the principal’s office and dialed up Dylan.

  The call was answered after only two rings. “Law offices of Stabler and Benson,” went the clipped female voice. I pictured a young pretty thing, narrow-waisted with a bulging bust and round hips and gorgeous eyes you could go deep-sea diving in. Bad Jericho, bad Jericho! “How may I direct your call?”

  I glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot. “Uh. Can I speak to Dylan Cussler?”

  “Mr. Cussler is not available at the moment. May I take a message?”

  “Uh. No. There’s no message. I’ll call him back. Later. Thanks.”

  I hung up the receiver. I tried the cell phone number from his business card. After several rings, I got his voice mail. I hung up without leaving a message. Damn it. If ever I needed my gay mentor, it was now. I had managed to avoid Hutch so far, but I knew I would eventually have to talk to him at some point before school was out. Or worse, he’d want to walk home with me. Facing him today was going to be hell. I was still creeped out from our kiss and the way I reacted below the belt, which was bad enough. What really bothered me was the look on Hutch’s face when he left my house yesterday. The line he gave me about having to take out the garbage was just an excuse to exit. I could see how humiliated he was as he walked out. This thing between us was hard for him to embrace too. I had only made things worse by giving the impression that I was offended by him.

  On top of that, Mac had not wanted to walk to school with me this morning. When I stopped by his house, he wouldn’t even open the door for me. He just yelled for me to go on without him. At school, every time I tried to start up a conversation with him, he cut me off, said he had to be somewhere, and walked away. I really needed a friend. No, I was not going to cry on Mac’s shoulder about the nightmare logistics of a dude trying to get busy with one of his best buds, but it would have been nice to have him notice that I was bugged about something, swat me in the back of my head, and tell me that everything was going to be all right.

  I looked at my watch. There were only two minutes left before the end of my lunch period. As she usually did, Lissandra would have stopped by my locker for a quick, midday hello. By now, however, she would have given up waiting at my locker and gone to the lab for biology. She has this fanatical thing about not being late for class. The clock was ticking down for me, as well. I figured I had just enough time to grab a couple of books from my locker.

  Exiting the stairwell, I ran down the hall, which was almost deserted. That was a good sign that the seconds were counting down to the official start of the next period. As I rounded the corner, I almost collided with Mac. He was leaning back against one of the lockers, his eyes closed, his backpack dangling by a strap from his left hand, the expression on his face one part goofy and one part bliss. The crazy look on his face undoubtedly had something to do with the fact that Gina Marie Silva was standing next to him, her lips at his right ear, whispering something to him through a smile that would have turned ice to water in two seconds flat. Everything about her was scorching: the mass of curly black hair flowing down her back, the sultry tan face, the dark, flashing eyes, the bodacious boobs that hovered only a half inch away from Mac’s arm, the black skirt that looked as if it had been painted onto the fantastic curves of her hips. Hell, if I stared at her for half a second, my face would be every bit as goofy as Mac’s was. With their fine physiques, Mac and Gina Marie seemed to enhance each other’s attractiveness. Standing there, they looked as if they were posing for a yearbook shot: Mr. and Miss Teen Perfect Body.

  Mac sort of jumped when I rounded the corner and stopped a few feet from them. “Hey, Jer,” he said. He looked at me, and his face flashed suddenly with guilt. He turned away from me uneasily, gesturing at the incredible being next to him. “You know Gina Marie?”

  “I’ve seen her around.” I waved at her. “Hey.”

  Gina Marie leaned away from Mac and looked at me in moves that were as silky as syrup pouring from a bottle. Everything about her screamed sexy. “Hi there, Jeremy,” she replied with a smile.

  “Uh. Hi.” I kind of noticed that my name didn’t sound quite right when she said it, but I was so mesmerized by the perfect way her lips moved that I didn’t care. It was amazing to me now that I never really paid much attention to her last year. Jeez, what a difference bountiful curves make.

  “His name’s Jericho,” Mac corrected her.

  Gina Marie made a little laugh that should have been graced with embarrassment but wasn’t. It was still a sweet sound to me. “Oh. Sorry, Jericho.”

  “That’s okay. No problem.” She could call me JJ if she wanted.

  “Well, I hate to meet and run, but the bell’s gonna ring any second.” Gina Marie flicked another smile at me and turned to Mac. “I have to get to my chorus class. We’re doing songs today from Disney’s version of Beauty and the Beast. It’s sort of an audition. That’s gonna be the show we put on this year. I’m hoping to get the part of Belle. Wish me luck.” She kind of dashed her face toward Mac’s in a move that could have ended in a kiss but didn’t, and she flitted around the corner like a butterfly.

  “Good luck,” I muttered to the delicate, perfumed breeze she left in her wake.

  Mac pulled away from the locker as I turned back to him. “Gotta run,” he said quickly. “See ya later, Jerry.” He took off down the hall, walking fast.

  I saw again the nervous guilt in Mac’s eyes just before he made his hasty retreat. As I hurried to my locker, I wondered what was going on with him. He had ditched me before at various times during our friendship, for various reasons, and he had done it without even a bit of regret, so I knew he wasn’t feeling bad for avoiding me today. The self-reproach he was showing was the kind you would get from a guy who had been caught doing the snuggly cuddly with another dude’s girl. But Gina Marie was sure as hell not my girlfriend, nor was she anyone else’s as far as I knew.

  So why was Mac feeling so guilty?

  AFTER the final bell, I went downstairs in a rush and headed toward the gymnas
ium to find Lissandra. Her last class of the day was PE. I was hoping to catch her before she went to my locker in search of me.

  She was almost too fast for me. When I bolted through the double doors of the east entrance, she was there with her backpack on her shoulder, just about to reach for the handle.

  Lissandra stepped back with a startled “Oh!” Seeing it was me who had come charging through, she broke into a quirky grin. “Well. Look at Mr. Eager. I hope you’re breaking down doors to get to me.”

  “You know it,” I said, grinning back at her. I planted a quick kiss on her lips. “Let’s go to McDonald’s and get that sundae.” I hoped she was still treating. After buying a bag of pretzels out of the snack machine this afternoon, I was down to two bucks.

  “Oh, Jerry.” Her face showed regret. She was wearing her favorite jacket, a fluffy, cottony white thing that I was reluctant to touch because I was afraid I’d leave smudges on it. “Today, I can’t. Once my dad picks me up, we’re going home to get Mom and then we’re all going to the airport.”

  “You’re leaving town?”

  “Yes. The fall regional tournament is tomorrow night in Atlanta. Chester Bailey picked up a stomach virus yesterday and won’t be able to make it.” Her face got a look of delight. She reached out and grabbed me by the shoulders, squeezing them excitedly. “I’m sorry Chester got sick, but Mr. Stein asked me to take his spot. Me! Can you believe it? He asked me to go in Chester’s place.”

  I couldn’t help but to grin. I was happy for her. This was Lissandra’s second year as a member of the school’s Debate Society. She went all last year hoping to make it to one of the tournaments but was never chosen. Now, finally, she was going. She wanted to make her career in broadcast journalism. She wanted to be one of those reporters who shouted challenging questions at politicians on camera as they raced for their cars or planes trying to escape. She wanted to get in their faces until they answered her. She wanted to moderate presidential debates like her idol, Gwen Ifill, and force the candidates to the mat with logic and fact. “Hey, Lissa, that’s great. I’m so glad you made it.”