Ari and Zac

Chapter 8: I Can't Feel My Face

Chapter 8: I Can't Feel My Face

Zac swung the door open and his mouth went slack at the sight of the girls standing on the other side. He recognized them both, but he'd never expected in a million years for the two of them to show up at the party together. On the right stood the girl from the ice cream shop, wearing a hot pink strapless dress (did she think it was prom?) and way too much eye makeup.

But Zac wasn't really looking at the girl on the right.

His heart dropped into his stomach as he met eyes with the other one. He hadn't expected to see her tonight. Hell, a part of him had feared that he'd never see her again at all, after the accident he witnessed this afternoon. But it was definitely the same girl who stood before him now, even if her outfit was a far cry from the mermaid costume she wore earlier. She'd dressed for the party in dark jeans and a slinky black t-shirt, with her blood red hair tumbling round her shoulders.

"Holy shit," he said, cursing himself for the way his voice rose. "It's you!"

The girl stared back at him, but she didn't say a word. It was the other one—fake-eyelash-girl—who broke the silence first.

"Um, hi. So you guys know each other?"

Zac couldn't quite focus on the meaning of the words. His whole face had gone strangely numb—like the way it felt after a trip to the dentist, before the novocaine wore off.

"Huh?" he managed to reply. He tore his eyes away from the mermaid goth girl and back to the bubblegum princess. He supposed he could see why this one had her share of admirers. Underneath all the eyeliner and mascara, she had that classic all-American beachgirl look, with freckles splayed across the bridge of her nose, and a faint glow to her cheeks that might have been the remnants of a sunburn. She wasn't bad to look at. Not at all. She only paled in comparison to the girl who stood beside her.

Zac couldn't resist another glance. She had her eyes averted as she looked down at her phone. The glow from her screen cast her face in a wash of white light that only accentuated the creamy smoothness of her skin, with dark eyes that stood out like two blots of ink on a sheet of parchment paper.

There was something different about those eyes, something almost...other-worldly. Inky dark, nearly black at first glimpse, but when the light of her smartphone screen hit them, her eyes flashed with blue-green fire. They called to mind the ocean, at night during a storm: black water illuminated by a sudden bolt of lightning. Zac could swear he'd seen eyes like that before somewhere. For the life of him he couldn't remember where.

She was tapping out a text message. Zac waited for her to finish and look back at him again. He forced his mind to focus. Get a grip, he scolded himself. He was not here to ogle the local talent—at least, not in the visual sense of the word. Tonight's party had one goal, and one goal only.

To find a voice.

He'd spent the better part of the evening plying girls with drink and shepherding them over to the pink plastic karaoke machine in the far corner of the room. Most of them found the idea completely bizarre. Singing? Into a microphone? Half of them looked at him like he was insane for suggesting such a thing, and the other half squealed with delight.

"Oh my God! I used to have one of these when I was little!"

So far, they all sucked. He'd heard dying goats with better singing voices. It didn't help that no one remembered any of the words. Cyrus had loaded up the playlist with all the biggest smash hits from 2015 and 2016: the last two years of pop music before SirenSong swept onto the scene. But that was already a few years ago. Ancient history, as far as most teenagers were concerned.