Bones in the Sand, Julie Steimle [best books to read for students .TXT] 📗

contemplating the consistency of the mayonnaise. She shook her head and sat next to him.

"Bones," he muttered. Then he took a bite of his sandwich.

"Found some in your sandwich?" Zormna asked, peeling off the plastic lid to her fruit cup.

Jeff looked over at her and hesitated. The sounds of everyone laughter drowned out each other in conversation that he could tell Zormna felt like putting her hands over her ears. He almost said something, but shrugged it off. He didn't want to get her involved. She had enough worries.

"You're not going to pass out into your lunch, are you?" Mark asked, peering across the table at him.

Jeff sighed and took another bite of his sandwich. This was not the place for that kind of conversation anyway.... The undercover FBI agents around campus were still actively monitoring them. The table could be bugged.

Brian walked through the crowd in the cafeteria aisles and placed a carton of orange juice in front of Jeff. "Drink up. You probably have low blood sugar. Orange juice will help."

Nodding, Jeff took the carton and opened it.

Zormna's jaw dropped, her eyes widening on him as she turned toward him in disbelief. "You were passing out?"

Shaking his head while drinking, Jeff swallowed a gulp of juice.

"Yes," Brian said, gazing irritably at Jeff. "Just after first hour he nearly fainted in the hall. And just a few minutes ago he almost blacked out when he stood up from Civics class."

Pulling back more to examine Jeff's eyes and the quality of color in Jeff's skin - which had always been pale to begin with. It wasn't like Jeff to black out. Despite his vampiric pallor, he was robust and thriving. In fact, she privately believed that he was perfectly built - for a boy his age....

"I wasn't blacking out. I was just dizzy," Jeff protested after another swallow of juice. He tried to brush them off, though his eyes did look unfocused.

Brian glanced at Zormna. She raised her eyebrows.

"Blacking out," Brian said. "I've seen it before. He was staring into space, and then I could see his eyes go out of focus, and he could barely stand."

She nodded.

Turning to Jeff, Zormna put her hand on his shoulder, still peering into his fathomless eyes, and asked, "Are you ok now?"

Heavily sighing, Jeff nodded. "I'm fine. Honest!"

No one at their table looked convinced. Mark and Jonathan were cringing on their side of the table, waiting for Jeff to faint again. They had been discussing calling Alex to come and pick Jeff up from school. Adam was whispering that fainting for no reason at all could be a sign of a brain tumor. Mark peered incredulously at him.

Seeing all this, Jeff rose. "I swear on my mother's...."

But dizziness came over him again - this time darkening his sight so that he really did faint. It felt like he had been swallowed up by the ground itself.

The distant echo of Zormna's voice came as if he heard it across an empty desert. "Oh my! Scrapes! Jafarr!"

He could not hear anything else.

He also could no longer see the cafeteria. Be he could see.

And it wasn't just an image. This time he felt like he was someplace else - transported there. He looked around where he stood, which was open desert. His eyes turned quickly to a row of graves in the earth, bones set in stone like they had been encased there for thousands of years. He tried to look up again and listen to the sounds around him - but it was as if his head could no longer lift and his eyes were fixed onto the ground with weights. He felt like he was being drawn into the hard earth as if he would become one of the skeletons encased in rock. Reaching out for help from anyone, he cried out.

"Zormna!"

Sweat coated on his forehead, his eyes blinking up at fluorescent lights, he gasped for breath. He still couldn't quite hear, though his surrounded him, gathering around him in panic, their mouths forming his name as if they were calling out, though he could not hear them. Zormna knelt the closest, clenching his hand as if she was holding him out from the ground that might swallow him. Her green eyes stared into his in ash-gray fright.

Finally the sound of the room returned to his ears.

 

"Jeff! Jeff!" Mark had leapt over the table, knocking everything off in his rush to get to the other side. Jonathan had scrambled over after him. Brian looked the most worried, checking the back of Jeff's scalp for breaks.

When Jeff had collapsed, Zormna had grabbed Jeff's arm and shoulder mid-fall. But the momentum pulled her to her knees and she hit the floor herself. He had been out of it for three minutes before his eyes had come back into focus.

"Wha...?" Jeff moaned rubbing his head and looking around.

"That's it. We need to take him to the nurse," Brian said, turning to Zormna, Mark and Jonathan.

The others nodded, quickly lifting Jeff off the floor. Jeff couldn't even protest, not sure could have made the walk out of the room himself.

Every head turned as they passed by, rumor spreading through the cafeteria like wildfire. Some said Jeff probably had caught mono. Others claimed to have seen Jeff at a party doing some shady sort of drug in a kitchen. While others made claims that Jeff had been going back to the gang life and would probably be kicked off the wrestling team. However, when those rumors met the ears of those who actually knew Jeff, such as the Henderson twins or their sister Joy, they loudly exclaimed "That's ridiculous! If anything, he was probably practicing his cello really late and he's tired."

"His cello?" other interested parties asked, such as Jessica or Jennifer McLenna, or Kevin Jacobson. "Really?"

But incredulity reigned as others skeptically said the same thing. "His cello? Get real. A guy like that does not play the cello."

The nurse shined the light in Jeff's eyes. "Well, you do still seem unable to focus, but I don't think you need to be sent home."

"But he nearly fainted three times today," Brian protested, almost pounding the table Jeff was sitting on in exasperation.

They had tested Jeff's reflexes, listened to his breathing, taken his temperature and even looked into his ears. But because of district policy, the nurse couldn't give him any medication or let him go home unless he vomited or had head lice.

"All this boy needs is some orange juice and a good night's sleep," the nurse replied in a dry-and-tired monotone, filling out the form and ticking off to herself.

"He could have mono," Mark exclaimed.

Jonathan smirked, peeking at Zormna. He lifted his eyebrows flirtatiously at her, but she just looked confused.

The nurse shook her head at him. "What he has is fatigue. The boy has been having too many late nights, and it had gotten to him. That's all."

Zormna glanced over at Jeff who was patiently staring at the ceiling while waiting for permission to leave. Late nights, she could believe. Jeff never did tell her everything he was up to - only that he was keeping his promise to protect her from all threats to her life. She said, "But shouldn't he at least rest here before he faints again?"

"Thank you, Nurse Zormna," Jeff muttered, rising quickly and hopping off the table. "I'm fine. Just like the nurse said. I've been practicing my lute way too late at night. That's all."

Zormna opened her mouth to protest the validity of that statement, as she knew his bedroom was not soundproofed, and she doubted the communications room in the house was completely sound proof either. He'd wake the entire house.

"Lute?" Mark's expression screwed up in disbelief. Most people pictured Jeff playing the electric guitar.

"It is quieter than the banjo," Jeff said, averting his gaze from Zormna.

Jonathan smothered a snicker. Adam just stared.

"I would have said cello," Brian interjected, not convinced Jeff was ok. 

"Yes," said the nurse, to Zormna and Jeff. "I think he should rest a little here before going to his next class."

Jeff immediately scowled at Zormna. Zormna grinned back at him, justified.

The nurse then made him sit down on the school cot and turned the lights off so that he could close his eyes.

"Now, you boys and young lady can go to let him rest," the nurse said, shoving them out the door.

"Can Zormna stay for a second?" Jeff asked, lifting his head off the pillow.

"Ooooo!" Jonathan, Mark, and Adam chorused in their laughter. Brian set a hand to his forehead.

"Now, really, young man. I think this young lady is distraction from - " the nurse started to say.

But Jeff put his hand gently on her arm. "Just a minute? I just need to talk to her for a second - a nanosecond, please."

The nurse looked disapprovingly at the both of them, as she like so many people, though Jeff and Zormna were 'romantically' involved.

"Please?" He tried to look innocent and cute, but with the scars on his face it was a bit hard to pull off. He always seemed more roguish.

"Oh, fine.... But only a minute." The nurse left Zormna alone with Jeff while she shoved the boys out of the room. Mark and Jonathan were making kissing noises, but they quit once the woman had closed the door.

Sitting down in the folding chair next to the cot, Zormna looked at Jeff. She whispered. "What is it?"

Jeff sat up, his voice even quieter. "Check for bugs."

She shook her head. "I already did when they brought you in. It's clear. Trust me. I go over this office regularly during my 'sessions' with the school nurse. Now, what's going on?"

"I've been having visions," he said.

"What?" Zormna leaned back.

"Shhh! You don't want the nurse to come in early." He then sighed, thinking. "Every time I have been blacking out I have been seeing things. Pictures. Visions."

Zormna swallowed. There was always something so mysterious, almost mystical about Jeff. She had suspected he was psychic, but he never claimed to be. "How?"

Jeff shrugged. "It's a seer trait. It's never happened to me before though, except...." He shook his head. "Well, you know the dreams I've had when I was younger - our shared dreams - but that was when I was sleeping."

She nodded. They had shared a number of dreams in the past, which she had always attributed to his mysterious seer connection. She took this seriously. "What did you see?"

Trying to picture it, he said, "I see bones."

"Bones?" Zormna echoed.

He nodded. "Yeah, only embedded in rock in a desert."

Zormna swallowed again. "These aren't our - "

Jeff quickly shook his head. "No. No, I don't think so. I think these bones are - I don't know how but - they're calling to me."

"Calling to you?" Zormna blinked, taking it in. "Why?"

He shrugged. "I dunno. All I know is that I have been having this horrible feeling this last month. And it has hit me real bad lately, now that I have started getting these glimpses of these bones in a desert."

"Scrapes, Jafarr. What desert? Where? Whose bones? What do those bones want from you?" Zormna tried not to get irritable, but it tended to come out when she couldn't understand something. And seer related things were the hardest things for her to understand.

Jeff flopped back on the bed. "I don't know. That's the problem."

Zormna held back, waiting.

"I think if I don't figure out whose bones those are, soon I'm going to continue to pass out from visions of them until they kill me," he said.

She huffed. "Don't be so melodramatic, Jafarr. Whosever bones those are, they're dead. Gone. Buried. Why is it important for those bones to get a hold of you? What can you do? Why does it matter?"

"You're making my head ache, Zormna." Jeff moaned and rolled over away from her. "I don't know all those answers. All I know is that those bones aren't leaving me alone, and it feels urgent."

Zormna leaned towards him. "Hey, Jafarr, I'm sorry.