Things They Would Not Teach Me of in College, Part Two
Title: Things They Would Not Teach Me of in College
Summary: Sam’s senior year: a cute girl in the library, an escape plan in the making, a ghost at the prom. It’s just a perfectly normal high school experience, right?
Pairing: Sam/OFC
Rating: PG-13, to err on the conservative side
Statistics: Two parts. Around 11,700 words total (5,700 this part).
Disclaimer: A world of so not mine.
Thank You: To three incredible betas, mountain_born, varadia, and lazy_neutrino. You ladies rock. Any remaining errors are mine.
Back to Part One
Dad’s out of town the night of the prom, and whether that’s by chance or design, Sam doesn’t know. He learned along time ago, though, not to fret about dentistry when someone gives you a pony.
That leaves only the final obstacle. Namely, getting the car.
The thing is, technically the Impala isn’t even really Dean’s. In theory, the three of them have two cars. But in practice, Dad has the truck, Dean has the Impala, and Sam walks a lot.
Dean eventually agrees to let him use the car, but only after a lot of creative threats about what will happen if Sam chips the paint, or messes up the interior, or returns her with an empty gas tank.
“Dean, I promise, I will not let anything happen to the car,” Sam says, and holds his hands out for the keys.
Dean starts to hand them over, then jerks them back again. “And don’t do anything in the backseat I wouldn’t do.”
“What does that leave, exactly? A full-scale production of a Broadway musical?”
Dean raises an eyebrow and waits.
“I promise,” Sam says again, and Dean finally drops the keys into his brother’s hand.
“Jesus, just ask for my soul next time, why don’t you?” Dean says, running one hand over the Impala’s hood.
“’Cause I can’t drive your soul to the prom,” Sam says. “Thanks. You know I won’t let anything happen to her.”
“You better not.” Dean takes starts back toward the house. Sam has the car door open when Dean calls from the front porch, “And don’t even think about changing the radio station!”
Sam suspects that as impressions go, arriving at your date’s house to meet her parents with “Rock Me Like a Hurricane” blaring is probably not a good idea. He waits until he’s out of earshot, and then turns the radio off. (But he doesn’t change the station.)
Clare lives on the outskirts of town, in a small yellow house with an honest-to-goodness white picket fence. Her father opens the door with apologies that Clare is going to be another few minutes. “There’s been some kind of feminine mystery hair crisis upstairs,” he says, shaking Sam’s hand. Mr. Ellison asks him about school and college and curfews and it’s all so . . . normal.
“You must be Sam,” says the woman coming down the stairs. “Well, don’t you look nice? Clare will be right down.”
“Everything’s squared away, then?” Mr. Ellison asks.
“Oh, yes. A couple of bobby pins, a little hairspray, everything’s fine.” She gives Sam a smile and excuses herself to go find her camera. Five seconds later, she calls, “Honey, where do we keep the film?” and Mr. Ellison excuses himself to go help her look.
“Hey.” Sam looks up to the top of the steps and sees Clare.
She’s wearing pale green, and Sam doesn’t know much about dresses, but it’s not as fussy or as, well, dressy as he was expecting. It suits her, she looks good, but Sam kind of thinks she’s deliberately picked something that won’t look out of place next to his not-a-tuxedo.
And he wants to thank her for that but he has no idea how, so he just says “Hi,” and “You look incredible,” and “Here, this is for you,” and holds out the plastic box with the corsage in it. (One white rose, for her wrist. He asked Vanessa for help and she ordered it for him.)
“You didn’t have to do that,” she says, but she flushes a little, pleased, and Sam decides that maybe Dean knows what he’s talking about as far as chicks and flowers go.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Mrs. Ellison calls, re-emerging with her camera, and ruining what was shaping up to be a really good moment by staging it. (Though given the whole Kodak moment thing, Sam is really glad Vanessa didn’t order one of the ones he’d have to pin on.)
Mrs. Ellison hauls them around the house and the yard to take “just a few pictures,” and Sam would hate to see what “a lot” looked like. Finally, Clare says Mom in a tone of mild and fond exasperation that Sam can’t ever imagine using on his father.
“One more,” Mrs. Ellison says, and takes three.
“Dear,” says Mr. Ellison, “they’re going to miss the dance.” And Mrs. Ellison finally puts the camera down.
Mr. Ellison is holding - Sam has to look twice - a picnic basket. “Thank you, Daddy,” Clare says, taking it from him. Sam’s confusion must show on his face, because Clare explains, “I told you I was going to take care of dinner. I thought, I don’t know, picnic in the gazebo in the park . . . it’s way too hokey, isn’t it?”
“I think it sounds perfect,” Sam says, completely honestly.
He doesn’t even care what’s in the basket.
* * *
They’re a little late (“fashionably late” Clare says) to the actual prom. The basket turns out to contain fried chicken and potato salad and a strawberry pie that Sam thinks Dean would drive two states out of his way for. Sam doesn’t feel any real need to rush through dinner.
He doesn’t see any reason to rush through the part of dessert that isn’t pie, either. He could happily do a thorough study of things like kissing Clare, and the way she shivers and laughs into his neck when he runs his hands over her bare arms and shoulders. He wouldn’t mind knowing exactly how many different ways he can make her say his name, or just figuring out what she’d let him get away with in the backseat of the Impala. And he doesn’t think it would take that much effort to mess up her hair, a few bobby pins and some hairspray not withstanding.
But when she half-sighs and says she guesses they ought to get to the prom already, he doesn’t object, either. There’s always after the prom, too, right?
He doesn’t care for the once over Clare gets from the security guard as they enter the school. He drops his arm protectively across her shoulders and steers her away. Something is wrong with that guy.
Nor does he miss, now that he knows to look for it, the resentment in the look Renee gives Clare as they hand over the cream-colored cardstock bits that let them enter the transformed gym. “I was just about to stop taking tickets,” she tells them. “Glad you could join us.”
“I like your dress,” Clare says in response. Renee looks down at her pink and black dress with a bit of a grimace and barely manages to spit out her thanks. Sam’s not sure why; it seems pretty enough, as dresses go.
The gym is loud and hot and impressively festooned with streamers. The rather incongruous theme chosen by the prom committee (so, Renee), is Dust in the Wind. Renee had given them all some lengthy explanation at lunch one day, about how it would remind them all that their time in high school was fleeting (“Thank God,” Jake put in). And that they needed to remember the transience of life and truly take time to appreciate the moments they could all be together, like the prom.
Jake found it pretentious. Vanessa found it gloomy. Sam just found it stupid, though he was grateful that when Renee discovered classic rock, she didn’t discover Zeppelin, or they’d all be at a Stairway to Heaven prom.
He can also say that of all the times he’s been subjected to the greatest hits of Kansas, he’s never envisioned that particular song (or any of them, really) involving quite so much glitter.
“Awfully sparkly dust,” Clare says, looking around.
“Sam! Clare! There you are,” Vanessa says, arriving with Jake and Peter in tow. “You can settle something for us. Is this Britney or Christina, singing this song?”
“It’s Mandy Moore, actually,” Clare says. Sam’s answer would have been hell if I know, if he hadn’t been busy noticing that Vanessa’s pink and black dress looks awfully familiar.
“Isn’t that the same dress-” he starts, and both Jake and Peter cut him off.
“Yes.”
Well, that explains Renee’s reaction. Vanessa looks a hell of a lot better in it then Renee does.
“Vanessa thinks it’s kind of funny,” Peter says. “Renee is . . . remind me why I asked her to the prom, again.”
“Because you’re a gentleman, and you knew she really wanted a date,” Vanessa says.
“Because Teresa shot you down,” Jake says. “Twice.”
“Ah, yes. I knew there was a reason,” Peter says. “Well, the way I see it, I’m-”
“Come on, Jules,” someone hisses, voice carrying all the more because he’s trying to be quiet. Peter stops talking, and they all turn to look. “It’s not like you’re actually going to make a scene at the prom.”
Kevin and his girlfriend, Juliet, are ten feet away, and in the middle of an argument. Kevin looks more cocksure of himself than Sam would have, faced with an overdressed girl who looks quite as pissed as Juliet does.
“Why the hell not?” she demands, and she’s not even trying to keep her voice down. Even the music seems quieter, as conversations stop and people turn to listen.
“You pathetic bastard,” Juliet says.
“Aw, Jules, chill,” Kevin says, putting a hand on her arm.
Juliet shakes his hand off. “‘Chill’? Did you think I was just going to turn another blind eye? This time? You screwed my cousin, you-”
“She’s making it up, Jules. You know I would never-”
“Oh, right,” Juliet says. “Right, she’s making it up. That’s how she knows that your idea of foreplay is get ready, here it comes. But, hey, at least you tell me, because if I didn’t start faking my orgasm right then, I’d never have time to get through it before you were done. Hell, I probably wouldn’t even know that you had started, because it isn’t like you have all that much to work with down there.”
Sam has never in his life heard this many people make this little noise. There’s not a sound in the gym - even the music has stopped. Everyone is watching Juliet and Kevin stare each other down.
And then someone starts laughing. And that’s all it takes. It sets everyone off and someone yells “You go, girl!” The music starts back up, and Sam will never not believe that the DJ didn’t purposely pick “All the Small Things.” Kevin beats the hastiest retreat Sam has ever seen.
Vanessa laughs until she cries, and when she gets enough air to speak again, asks, “Did anyone else find that as deeply satisfying as I did?” No one else says a word, they all just raise their hands.
“Well, if it was small before . . .” Clare says.
“It’ll be in hiding for about six months,” Jake says. “I’d feel sorry for the guy, except that I don’t.”
Vanessa raises a hand to wipe the tears from her eyes, and then says, “Oh, my God, my makeup.”
“You look fine,” Clare says, and Jake leans over to whisper something that makes Vanessa blush scarlet. But Vanessa drags Clare off to help fix damage none of the guys can see, anyway. “It’ll be just a few minutes,” Clare tells Sam. “Get us some punch?”
Sam, waiting in the small crowd at the refreshment table, hears someone say, “I think the jackass had it coming.”
It’s something of a shock to realize that he actually agrees with the security guard for a change.
* * *
The thing about screaming, when it comes from a girls’ bathroom at a senior prom, is that there are pretty good odds it is hair, makeup, or wardrobe related. But it’s Vanessa again, and Sam and Jake are both moving towards the bathroom before anyone else has quite figured out what’s going on.
They hesitate, though, when they reach the door, because, yeah, okay, Vanessa screamed, but it’s still a girls’ bathroom. And then Vanessa comes out, pale and clutching Clare’s arm.
“I’m telling you, Clare, I saw it,” Vanessa says.
“I think you need to sit down,” Clare says, and Jake grabs an empty folding chair from the table Renee is no longer manning.
He helps Vanessa into it, and drops back on his heels to crouch next to her. “You okay?” he asks.
There’s a crowd starting to assemble, Peter and Renee pushing their ways to the front of it.
“What the hell happened?” Renee demands.
“I saw it,” Vanessa repeats.
“Saw what, baby?” Jake asks.
“The ghost, of course,” Vanessa says, and rushes on before anyone can say anything. “It was awful, she looked just like you said she did, Peter. She was all pale and her hair was all feathered and she had this really awful old dress and she was just covered in blood. It was terrifying. I looked in the mirror to, you know, check my eyeliner, and she was right behind me. But then I turned around and she was gone. Just gone.” Vanessa reaches out to grab Clare’s arm. “You saw her, too, right?”
Clare shakes her head. “I’m sorry, but no. I didn’t. Maybe it was just a trick of the light,” she suggests. Vanessa looks at Clare like she’s insane.
“Yeah, and maybe someone here just has an overactive imagination,” Renee says.
“I saw her. I really did.”
“Come on, everyone. Let’s go back to the prom,” Renee says, and starts herding people away from Vanessa and back into the gym.
Sam stops Peter. “Hey, that ghost story. Where’d you hear it?”
“From my older sister, Kelly. When she was home at Christmas.”
“Do you know where she heard it?” Sam asks.
“No idea. What does it matter?”
Sam shakes his head. “Nothing. Right. Just wondered.”
“Look,” Peter says, with a glance over at Vanessa, “she probably really does think she saw it. But, in this case, Renee is right. Vanessa has a pretty active imagination, and she’s kind of a drama queen. What’s the alternative? That there really is a ghost in the girls’ bathroom?”
* * *
It takes Jake and Clare about fifteen minutes, working in tandem, to get Vanessa calmed down. Even then, Vanessa doesn’t want to go back into the prom yet, but Jake says he can take it from here, and Sam and Clare return to the gym.
“Is it cold in here?” Clare asks, sounding slightly puzzled.
It is cold in there, even with all those people crowded into the room. Sam wouldn’t be that surprised to see his breath cloud in front of him. Given the number of girls wearing tuxedo jackets over their dresses, he’s guessing it’s not his imagination.
Sam shrugs out of his blazer and puts it over Clare’s shoulders.
“Thank you,” she says.
“You’re welcome.”
“I guess the A/C is broken,” Clare says. For one brief moment, Sam lets himself believe her. Yes, that’s it, the air conditioning is broken, that’s all it is, because there is no way in hell there is a freakin’ ghost at his freakin’ prom.
And then there’s a flicker of the lights, and some boy band cuts off mid-warble, and Kansas begins explaining that all they are is dust in the wind.
Not. Good.
Renee, hands on her hips, marches across the dance floor to speak with the DJ. Sam moves close enough to hear her (not that it’s all that hard to hear Renee). She’s saying something about not thinking this is funny, and how he has ruined the moment she had planned for that song, and faulty cheap equipment. The DJ apologizes, and the music switches back to bubblegum pop.
For about thirty seconds. And then there’s another flicker, and Kansas starts singing again.
Really. Not. Good.
Renee starts to turn back to the DJ, and is almost crushed when the mirror ball falls from the ceiling.
There’s a collective gasp, and people start moving towards Renee, who is out-screaming that banshee Dad took care of in West Virginia.
Sam looks up at the ceiling. He’s almost certain that she wasn’t anywhere close to being under that thing when it fell.
“Sam?” Clare asks, and he pulls his attention away from the ceiling.
“Would you excuse me?” he says.
“Where are you going?”
“I just need to get something from my car. I’ll be right back.”
* * *
Okay, so the smart thing to do would be to call Dean, explain everything, and get advice.
The problem with that plan is that Dean would probably insist on showing up to help - or just to take care of it himself - and that leads to awkward and uncomfortable and potentially bad. If it leads to really bad, it also leads to leaving town in a hurry, and there goes graduation and his diploma and Stanford and his whole future.
And then there’s the fact that Dean would be so disappointed that Sam hadn’t looked into the ghost story when he first heard it. Not angry, not the recriminations and accusations that Sam would get from Dad. Just quiet, unspoken disappointment.
Yelling he could have handled, but that he’d rather avoid.
So, smart or not, what Sam does is get rock salt and lock picks from the trunk of the Impala and then let himself into the school library.
It’s kind of a pity he can’t tell Dean about this. His brother would probably get a good laugh out of the fact that Sam snuck away from the prom to do research.
Then again, maybe it’s just as well.
The thing is, even as he’s pulling old yearbooks off the shelves and waiting for the computer to boot up, he still can’t shake the feeling that this is just wrong. If anything like that had actually happened, everyone would know. There’d be a memorial in the school lobby or something. It wouldn’t have been news to everyone when Peter told the story.
Hell, Dad would have known about it before he decided to move them here. Dad wouldn’t have decided to move them here. There are enough un-haunted high schools in the country, and Dad is big on not hunting where you have to live.
There’s nothing in the yearbooks from the late 1970’s, but that’s not conclusive. Especially when the student was a soon-to-be-graduating senior, it’s not uncommon for yearbooks not to have memorials. And sometimes the family doesn’t want one. He does learn that the Class of 1978 also had Dust in the Wind as a prom theme, but there’s no mention of anyone taking that to the extreme of actually returning to dust.
The archives section of the local paper’s website offers a cheery but useless, “Page under construction! Check back soon!” He searches the ‘net, but nothing turns up on Bicentennial High School and prom and suicide.
Sam checks his watch. If he doesn’t get back soon, Clare is probably going to think that she’s been ditched.
And if there is a ghost at the prom, well, that’s where he needs to be, too.
* * *
“Sam! There you are,” Clare says, putting a hand on his arm like she’s afraid he’s going to wander away again. And then she says, “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Sam asks.
“Whatever you went to your car for,” Clare says.
“Oh, um,” Sam says, and gets saved when there’s another lurch from the sound system, and “Dust in the Wind” starts playing again.
“That’s, like, the sixth time that’s happened,” Clare says.
“Hey, is Renee okay?” Sam asks.
“You mean with the mirror ball and all? Yeah, she’s fine. Not hurt, anyway. But getting seriously pissed about the fact that prom isn’t perfect.”
“Interesting priorities.” Sam turns and watches as a streamer detaches itself from the ceiling and drifts down to land on Renee, interrupting what looks like a lecture she’s giving the security guard on the number of cookies he’s eaten.
Sam turns back to Clare, who has pulled a compact out of her purse and is checking her lipstick. He stops, suddenly, when he catches sight of the reflection in Clare’s tiny mirror, of a blood-soaked 1970’s prom-goer.
He turns to look behind them, though he’s not surprised when he doesn’t see the ghost. The reflection is gone, too, when he looks back at the mirror.
“This makes no sense,” Sam says out loud.
Clare snaps the mirror closed and looks at him. “What? Being that upset about the repeat playing of some gloomy seventies song?”
“No,” Sam says. “Yes. Well . . .”
“Sam?”
It just doesn’t add up. It’s as simple as that. This whole thing is the hunting equivalent of 2 + 2 = Thursday. A story that sensational would get widely told. There would be records. He’d know her name by now.
And if her goal is to punish people who are having a good time at the prom, there’s no reason for her to be doing anything to Renee. Even Sam can tell Renee is miserable and has been since long before she showed up in the same dress as her better-looking friend. Vanessa would be the logical target, but there she is, wrapped around her boyfriend and laughing, completely ignored while Renee is struck with another falling streamer.
So for all the cold air and crashed mirror balls, the only logical conclusion is that this is not a haunting.
“Sam? Are you okay?” Clare asks.
If it’s not a ghost, it has to be something else. Or someone else. Someone who’s, what, trying to teach a Renee a lesson? Or just out to enjoy her being miserable at the prom? That makes some sense, and everything bad tonight has happened to or around her.
No, wait. Not everything. Someone else has had a fairly miserable prom night. A bully who got publicly and humiliatingly dumped by his pushover girlfriend.
And there’s one person Sam can think of who has been present for all of it, everything that Kevin and Renee have done, and everything that’s been done to them. Just the one.
“Earth to Sam,” Clare says.
Sam looks down at his prom date, with her remarkable gold-brown eyes and slightly concerned smile. “Hey, you okay?” she asks.
“What the hell are you?”
* * *
It’s one of those moments when time seems to stop, and Sam doesn’t realize immediately that time has done just that. Everyone and everything in the gym has frozen except him and Clare, still and silent.
“You’re good,” she says, cheerfully, and she sounds different. Older, maybe. “I haven’t been made in over a century.”
Sam gestures to their classmates. He’s in way over his head here, and he knows it. So it’s time to figure out what Dean would do. “Let them go. Now.”
“Relax, Sam. They’ll be fine. I just wanted to talk to you alone for a minute. Well, not exactly a minute, what with time stopped and all, but you get the idea.”
Sam wishes he had any idea what he was dealing with, and some kind of weapon beyond a pocket full of rock salt. “What the hell are you?” he asks again.
“Your kind tends to call us tricksters,” Clare says. “I find that term maybe a little judgmental, but we can go with it.”
Sam wracks his brain for information on tricksters, and comes up a couple of half-remembered stories, and the fact that Dad has never faced one. Great.
“My kind?” Sam asks, mostly stalling for more time to think.
“You know, hunters.”
“I’m not a hunter,” Sam says.
“Aren’t you, though?”
“No. I’m a person whose father makes him hunt. But that doesn’t make me a hunter.”
“Sam, what do you think the point of all this was?”
“You wanted to play a trick on Renee,” Sam says. “And Kevin.”
“No, I wanted them to learn lessons. I have . . . colleagues who like the bigger, bolder, and, frankly, deadlier kind of lesson, but I prefer to find people a little younger, and actually give them a chance to use what they’ve learned, in the real world. It’s like being a teacher. Only without the parent conferences and having to grade papers.”
Sam snorts.
“You’re not convinced. Look, Kevin just needed to be knocked down a peg or two, and Renee will be happier when she learns that she doesn’t control the world around her. Or even need to. But they, Sam, were side projects. Mostly, this lesson was for you.”
“Yeah? And what lesson was that? Check and make sure the girl who’s flirting with me isn’t some kind of monster before I go out with her?”
“Not a bad thing to learn, though I do protest the use of the word monster. But, no.”
“Then what?” Sam asks, and it’s annoyingly hard to keep from sounding hurt. Damn it all, but he really liked her.
“You’ve got this notion, and it’s actually quite charming and quaint, that there’s a ‘normal’ life out there somewhere. I mean, look at our date. The house with the white picket fence, my charmingly involved and enthusiastic constructs of parents, a picnic in a gazebo in a park. The whole thing was something straight out of a ‘50s sitcom, with maybe a bit more making out. Even Donna Reed didn’t live The Donna Reed Show, Sam.”
She pauses and waits for him to say something, and maybe the fact that she wants him to comment is what keeps him from doing so. Maybe it’s just that he has no idea what to say.
Clare goes on. “But here you have this date, that’s perfect and normal and perfectly normal, or at least what you think of as normal, and where are you? Everyone else in this room thinks it’s a short in the DJ’s equipment and a problem with the A/C. And you’re off sneaking into the library to look up ghosts.”
She leans closer and drops her voice to an intimate whisper, “And is that a pocket full of rock salt, or are you just happy to see me? Rock salt won’t work on me, for the record.”
Sam steps back, fists clenched at his sides. He suspects punching her won’t work, either, but he might try anyway. “So what? You’re just . . . toying with me? This whole time?”
“I’m trying to do you a favor. I like you, Sam. But you need to understand something. You know about the supernatural, and the supernatural knows about you. That never changes. The genie doesn’t go back in the bottle, the toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube. You’re lying to yourself if you think you can ever get completely away from it.”
“Watch me. I am done with this life in a couple of months. I’m getting out.”
“What you’re doing, Sam, is running. And running does nothing except take you from being the hunter to being the hunted. You can run as far and as fast as that big brain and those long legs will carry you, and it will never be far or fast enough. You might manage to hide from it for a while. But it will catch up to you. It will hunt you down. And when it does, it’s going to hurt like hell.”
Clare looks down at his still clenched fists. “Go ahead and punch me if you want, Sam, though I do have to say you never struck me as the kind of guy who hit girls.”
“You’re not exactly a girl.”
“Close enough. Which you should know; you’ve had your hands all over me tonight.”
Sam doesn’t especially want to be reminded of that. “Well, I’m not interested in you or your lesson. Thanks, anyway.”
“That’s the ironic part. And it might even be actually ironic, not black-fly-in-your-chardonnay ironic.”
“What is?”
“You learned it a little too well. You saw past the ghostly puppet to the trickster pulling the strings. I was sloppy there, and I guess I learned a lesson about underestimating hunters. And I like you, I do, but not enough to run the risk of getting staked by your dad or Dean. So I’m afraid you are going to have to learn this lesson on your own, because you’re not going to remember any of this.”
She wraps her hands around his neck, so fast it he doesn’t have time to react, pulls his head down, and kisses him.
* * *
Sam looks down at his prom date, with her remarkable gold-brown eyes and slightly concerned smile. “Hey, you okay?” she asks.
He blinks, momentarily a little lost. Slowly, the noise resolves itself into music and voices, and the motion around them becomes distinct individuals and couples dancing.
“What just happened?” he asks.
“I kissed you,” Clare says. “And I thought it was a good kiss, if I do say so myself, but I didn’t realize it was that good a kiss.”
“Guess I’m still getting used to kissing you,” he says.
“Maybe you need more instruction in the art of kissing me,” she says.
That sounds promising. “Do you give lessons?”
“Oh, sometimes,” she says, breezily.
Sam leans down to kiss her again. “I’m a very good student,” he says, close to her ear.
“I’m sure,” she says, and he puts his hands at her waist to pull her even closer.
“You there, boy, what do you think you’re doing with her?” someone demands, and Sam has taken a step away from Clare and shoved his hands into his empty pockets before he realizes it was Jake.
“You’re a jerk,” Sam tells him.
“You should have seen your face,” Jake says, laughing.
“I’m sure it was hilarious,” Sam says. “Did you want something?”
“Just saying hello. Getting some punch for Vanessa.”
“Hi. And don’t let us keep you from that,” Sam says.
“Right. Catch you guys later,” Jake says.
Sam turns his attention back to Clare. “So,” she says, “are we going to dance, or what?”
Privately, Sam thinks or what sounds like it has some intriguing possibilities. But for the moment, he wraps his arms around her waist again. “Sure. Let’s dance.”
* * *
Sam gets up early on Sunday morning, hours, he suspects, before the most devout of his church-going classmates, a hell of a lot earlier than Dean, and washes the Impala. It’s not dirty; it’s never allowed to sit in the driveway dirty. But Sam wants to do something to say thanks for letting him use the car, and for talking Dad around, and everything. Dean will never let him do something for Dean, but he can wash and wax and detail the car. And they’ll both know why he did it, even though all Dean will say is that Sam never does the wax right.
When he’s done, Sam goes back into the house and brews coffee that’s strong enough to peel not only the wax but the lacquer off the car. He drinks two cups, has breakfast, and changes into running clothes.
Since Dean looks like he’s going to sleep until noon or Armageddon, Sam goes back to the kitchen to turn off the coffee pot and leave a note explaining his absence.
His father is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, and it’s one of the things Sam has never been able to figure out, how Dad moves that quietly.
Hell, how he drives that quietly.
“Sammy,” he says.
“Dad.”
There’s a moment. This is a situation Sam knows he’s been working to avoid, and that he suspects Dad has been working to avoid, too. The two of them, alone, with no buffer of Dean.
“How’d it go?” Sam asks.
“It’s dead.” Another moment, too long, and then Dad asks, “How was your dance?”
“It was nice,” Sam says, an answer that’s as inadequate as his father’s was. He rushes on, trying to find something more to say. “I had a good time. It was lots of glittery decorations and punch and stuff. There was a weird thing where the DJ’s equipment kind of glitched and it kept playing Kansas over and over, but, you know, it was . . . nice.”
He’s not sure what he wanted. It’s not like he expected Dad to care about the details, or ask about Clare, or comment on anything, really. He doesn’t even really want to tell Dad any of that stuff, to have it dissected and critiqued.
But he also wants Dad to have more to say than, “Good. You going running?”
Sam bites back all the retorts that crowd into his head because it should be perfectly obvious that he’s going running. “Yes.”
“How far do you think you’ll go?” Dad asks.
On an ordinary Sunday, he’d go five miles. But he’d also have run five the night before. And he hates - hates - that he can’t tell if Dad’s question is meant to be a challenge or just an inquiry about when to expect him back. He hates that he has to wonder.
“Eight miles, maybe,” Sam says, and he hates that he just added three miles to his planned run because he was afraid to say five.
Dad nods. “Better get on that, then. I’ve got stuff to go over with you and Dean later.”
“Yes, sir.”
Usually, Sam settles quickly into a rhythm, hits his stride and just runs. But it is as bad this morning as it was a few years ago, before he stopped growing quite so quickly. He’s unfocused and awkward, knees and ankles at odds with each other.
And stuck with a thought he can’t place, and can’t shake, that’s chasing itself around his head.
You can run as far and as fast as that big brain and those long legs will carry you, and it will never be far or fast enough.
There is now a sequel, or a semi-sequel, to this story, Cabinet of Curiosities.
Summary: Sam’s senior year: a cute girl in the library, an escape plan in the making, a ghost at the prom. It’s just a perfectly normal high school experience, right?
Pairing: Sam/OFC
Rating: PG-13, to err on the conservative side
Statistics: Two parts. Around 11,700 words total (5,700 this part).
Disclaimer: A world of so not mine.
Thank You: To three incredible betas, mountain_born, varadia, and lazy_neutrino. You ladies rock. Any remaining errors are mine.
Back to Part One
Dad’s out of town the night of the prom, and whether that’s by chance or design, Sam doesn’t know. He learned along time ago, though, not to fret about dentistry when someone gives you a pony.
That leaves only the final obstacle. Namely, getting the car.
The thing is, technically the Impala isn’t even really Dean’s. In theory, the three of them have two cars. But in practice, Dad has the truck, Dean has the Impala, and Sam walks a lot.
Dean eventually agrees to let him use the car, but only after a lot of creative threats about what will happen if Sam chips the paint, or messes up the interior, or returns her with an empty gas tank.
“Dean, I promise, I will not let anything happen to the car,” Sam says, and holds his hands out for the keys.
Dean starts to hand them over, then jerks them back again. “And don’t do anything in the backseat I wouldn’t do.”
“What does that leave, exactly? A full-scale production of a Broadway musical?”
Dean raises an eyebrow and waits.
“I promise,” Sam says again, and Dean finally drops the keys into his brother’s hand.
“Jesus, just ask for my soul next time, why don’t you?” Dean says, running one hand over the Impala’s hood.
“’Cause I can’t drive your soul to the prom,” Sam says. “Thanks. You know I won’t let anything happen to her.”
“You better not.” Dean takes starts back toward the house. Sam has the car door open when Dean calls from the front porch, “And don’t even think about changing the radio station!”
Sam suspects that as impressions go, arriving at your date’s house to meet her parents with “Rock Me Like a Hurricane” blaring is probably not a good idea. He waits until he’s out of earshot, and then turns the radio off. (But he doesn’t change the station.)
Clare lives on the outskirts of town, in a small yellow house with an honest-to-goodness white picket fence. Her father opens the door with apologies that Clare is going to be another few minutes. “There’s been some kind of feminine mystery hair crisis upstairs,” he says, shaking Sam’s hand. Mr. Ellison asks him about school and college and curfews and it’s all so . . . normal.
“You must be Sam,” says the woman coming down the stairs. “Well, don’t you look nice? Clare will be right down.”
“Everything’s squared away, then?” Mr. Ellison asks.
“Oh, yes. A couple of bobby pins, a little hairspray, everything’s fine.” She gives Sam a smile and excuses herself to go find her camera. Five seconds later, she calls, “Honey, where do we keep the film?” and Mr. Ellison excuses himself to go help her look.
“Hey.” Sam looks up to the top of the steps and sees Clare.
She’s wearing pale green, and Sam doesn’t know much about dresses, but it’s not as fussy or as, well, dressy as he was expecting. It suits her, she looks good, but Sam kind of thinks she’s deliberately picked something that won’t look out of place next to his not-a-tuxedo.
And he wants to thank her for that but he has no idea how, so he just says “Hi,” and “You look incredible,” and “Here, this is for you,” and holds out the plastic box with the corsage in it. (One white rose, for her wrist. He asked Vanessa for help and she ordered it for him.)
“You didn’t have to do that,” she says, but she flushes a little, pleased, and Sam decides that maybe Dean knows what he’s talking about as far as chicks and flowers go.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Mrs. Ellison calls, re-emerging with her camera, and ruining what was shaping up to be a really good moment by staging it. (Though given the whole Kodak moment thing, Sam is really glad Vanessa didn’t order one of the ones he’d have to pin on.)
Mrs. Ellison hauls them around the house and the yard to take “just a few pictures,” and Sam would hate to see what “a lot” looked like. Finally, Clare says Mom in a tone of mild and fond exasperation that Sam can’t ever imagine using on his father.
“One more,” Mrs. Ellison says, and takes three.
“Dear,” says Mr. Ellison, “they’re going to miss the dance.” And Mrs. Ellison finally puts the camera down.
Mr. Ellison is holding - Sam has to look twice - a picnic basket. “Thank you, Daddy,” Clare says, taking it from him. Sam’s confusion must show on his face, because Clare explains, “I told you I was going to take care of dinner. I thought, I don’t know, picnic in the gazebo in the park . . . it’s way too hokey, isn’t it?”
“I think it sounds perfect,” Sam says, completely honestly.
He doesn’t even care what’s in the basket.
* * *
They’re a little late (“fashionably late” Clare says) to the actual prom. The basket turns out to contain fried chicken and potato salad and a strawberry pie that Sam thinks Dean would drive two states out of his way for. Sam doesn’t feel any real need to rush through dinner.
He doesn’t see any reason to rush through the part of dessert that isn’t pie, either. He could happily do a thorough study of things like kissing Clare, and the way she shivers and laughs into his neck when he runs his hands over her bare arms and shoulders. He wouldn’t mind knowing exactly how many different ways he can make her say his name, or just figuring out what she’d let him get away with in the backseat of the Impala. And he doesn’t think it would take that much effort to mess up her hair, a few bobby pins and some hairspray not withstanding.
But when she half-sighs and says she guesses they ought to get to the prom already, he doesn’t object, either. There’s always after the prom, too, right?
He doesn’t care for the once over Clare gets from the security guard as they enter the school. He drops his arm protectively across her shoulders and steers her away. Something is wrong with that guy.
Nor does he miss, now that he knows to look for it, the resentment in the look Renee gives Clare as they hand over the cream-colored cardstock bits that let them enter the transformed gym. “I was just about to stop taking tickets,” she tells them. “Glad you could join us.”
“I like your dress,” Clare says in response. Renee looks down at her pink and black dress with a bit of a grimace and barely manages to spit out her thanks. Sam’s not sure why; it seems pretty enough, as dresses go.
The gym is loud and hot and impressively festooned with streamers. The rather incongruous theme chosen by the prom committee (so, Renee), is Dust in the Wind. Renee had given them all some lengthy explanation at lunch one day, about how it would remind them all that their time in high school was fleeting (“Thank God,” Jake put in). And that they needed to remember the transience of life and truly take time to appreciate the moments they could all be together, like the prom.
Jake found it pretentious. Vanessa found it gloomy. Sam just found it stupid, though he was grateful that when Renee discovered classic rock, she didn’t discover Zeppelin, or they’d all be at a Stairway to Heaven prom.
He can also say that of all the times he’s been subjected to the greatest hits of Kansas, he’s never envisioned that particular song (or any of them, really) involving quite so much glitter.
“Awfully sparkly dust,” Clare says, looking around.
“Sam! Clare! There you are,” Vanessa says, arriving with Jake and Peter in tow. “You can settle something for us. Is this Britney or Christina, singing this song?”
“It’s Mandy Moore, actually,” Clare says. Sam’s answer would have been hell if I know, if he hadn’t been busy noticing that Vanessa’s pink and black dress looks awfully familiar.
“Isn’t that the same dress-” he starts, and both Jake and Peter cut him off.
“Yes.”
Well, that explains Renee’s reaction. Vanessa looks a hell of a lot better in it then Renee does.
“Vanessa thinks it’s kind of funny,” Peter says. “Renee is . . . remind me why I asked her to the prom, again.”
“Because you’re a gentleman, and you knew she really wanted a date,” Vanessa says.
“Because Teresa shot you down,” Jake says. “Twice.”
“Ah, yes. I knew there was a reason,” Peter says. “Well, the way I see it, I’m-”
“Come on, Jules,” someone hisses, voice carrying all the more because he’s trying to be quiet. Peter stops talking, and they all turn to look. “It’s not like you’re actually going to make a scene at the prom.”
Kevin and his girlfriend, Juliet, are ten feet away, and in the middle of an argument. Kevin looks more cocksure of himself than Sam would have, faced with an overdressed girl who looks quite as pissed as Juliet does.
“Why the hell not?” she demands, and she’s not even trying to keep her voice down. Even the music seems quieter, as conversations stop and people turn to listen.
“You pathetic bastard,” Juliet says.
“Aw, Jules, chill,” Kevin says, putting a hand on her arm.
Juliet shakes his hand off. “‘Chill’? Did you think I was just going to turn another blind eye? This time? You screwed my cousin, you-”
“She’s making it up, Jules. You know I would never-”
“Oh, right,” Juliet says. “Right, she’s making it up. That’s how she knows that your idea of foreplay is get ready, here it comes. But, hey, at least you tell me, because if I didn’t start faking my orgasm right then, I’d never have time to get through it before you were done. Hell, I probably wouldn’t even know that you had started, because it isn’t like you have all that much to work with down there.”
Sam has never in his life heard this many people make this little noise. There’s not a sound in the gym - even the music has stopped. Everyone is watching Juliet and Kevin stare each other down.
And then someone starts laughing. And that’s all it takes. It sets everyone off and someone yells “You go, girl!” The music starts back up, and Sam will never not believe that the DJ didn’t purposely pick “All the Small Things.” Kevin beats the hastiest retreat Sam has ever seen.
Vanessa laughs until she cries, and when she gets enough air to speak again, asks, “Did anyone else find that as deeply satisfying as I did?” No one else says a word, they all just raise their hands.
“Well, if it was small before . . .” Clare says.
“It’ll be in hiding for about six months,” Jake says. “I’d feel sorry for the guy, except that I don’t.”
Vanessa raises a hand to wipe the tears from her eyes, and then says, “Oh, my God, my makeup.”
“You look fine,” Clare says, and Jake leans over to whisper something that makes Vanessa blush scarlet. But Vanessa drags Clare off to help fix damage none of the guys can see, anyway. “It’ll be just a few minutes,” Clare tells Sam. “Get us some punch?”
Sam, waiting in the small crowd at the refreshment table, hears someone say, “I think the jackass had it coming.”
It’s something of a shock to realize that he actually agrees with the security guard for a change.
* * *
The thing about screaming, when it comes from a girls’ bathroom at a senior prom, is that there are pretty good odds it is hair, makeup, or wardrobe related. But it’s Vanessa again, and Sam and Jake are both moving towards the bathroom before anyone else has quite figured out what’s going on.
They hesitate, though, when they reach the door, because, yeah, okay, Vanessa screamed, but it’s still a girls’ bathroom. And then Vanessa comes out, pale and clutching Clare’s arm.
“I’m telling you, Clare, I saw it,” Vanessa says.
“I think you need to sit down,” Clare says, and Jake grabs an empty folding chair from the table Renee is no longer manning.
He helps Vanessa into it, and drops back on his heels to crouch next to her. “You okay?” he asks.
There’s a crowd starting to assemble, Peter and Renee pushing their ways to the front of it.
“What the hell happened?” Renee demands.
“I saw it,” Vanessa repeats.
“Saw what, baby?” Jake asks.
“The ghost, of course,” Vanessa says, and rushes on before anyone can say anything. “It was awful, she looked just like you said she did, Peter. She was all pale and her hair was all feathered and she had this really awful old dress and she was just covered in blood. It was terrifying. I looked in the mirror to, you know, check my eyeliner, and she was right behind me. But then I turned around and she was gone. Just gone.” Vanessa reaches out to grab Clare’s arm. “You saw her, too, right?”
Clare shakes her head. “I’m sorry, but no. I didn’t. Maybe it was just a trick of the light,” she suggests. Vanessa looks at Clare like she’s insane.
“Yeah, and maybe someone here just has an overactive imagination,” Renee says.
“I saw her. I really did.”
“Come on, everyone. Let’s go back to the prom,” Renee says, and starts herding people away from Vanessa and back into the gym.
Sam stops Peter. “Hey, that ghost story. Where’d you hear it?”
“From my older sister, Kelly. When she was home at Christmas.”
“Do you know where she heard it?” Sam asks.
“No idea. What does it matter?”
Sam shakes his head. “Nothing. Right. Just wondered.”
“Look,” Peter says, with a glance over at Vanessa, “she probably really does think she saw it. But, in this case, Renee is right. Vanessa has a pretty active imagination, and she’s kind of a drama queen. What’s the alternative? That there really is a ghost in the girls’ bathroom?”
* * *
It takes Jake and Clare about fifteen minutes, working in tandem, to get Vanessa calmed down. Even then, Vanessa doesn’t want to go back into the prom yet, but Jake says he can take it from here, and Sam and Clare return to the gym.
“Is it cold in here?” Clare asks, sounding slightly puzzled.
It is cold in there, even with all those people crowded into the room. Sam wouldn’t be that surprised to see his breath cloud in front of him. Given the number of girls wearing tuxedo jackets over their dresses, he’s guessing it’s not his imagination.
Sam shrugs out of his blazer and puts it over Clare’s shoulders.
“Thank you,” she says.
“You’re welcome.”
“I guess the A/C is broken,” Clare says. For one brief moment, Sam lets himself believe her. Yes, that’s it, the air conditioning is broken, that’s all it is, because there is no way in hell there is a freakin’ ghost at his freakin’ prom.
And then there’s a flicker of the lights, and some boy band cuts off mid-warble, and Kansas begins explaining that all they are is dust in the wind.
Not. Good.
Renee, hands on her hips, marches across the dance floor to speak with the DJ. Sam moves close enough to hear her (not that it’s all that hard to hear Renee). She’s saying something about not thinking this is funny, and how he has ruined the moment she had planned for that song, and faulty cheap equipment. The DJ apologizes, and the music switches back to bubblegum pop.
For about thirty seconds. And then there’s another flicker, and Kansas starts singing again.
Really. Not. Good.
Renee starts to turn back to the DJ, and is almost crushed when the mirror ball falls from the ceiling.
There’s a collective gasp, and people start moving towards Renee, who is out-screaming that banshee Dad took care of in West Virginia.
Sam looks up at the ceiling. He’s almost certain that she wasn’t anywhere close to being under that thing when it fell.
“Sam?” Clare asks, and he pulls his attention away from the ceiling.
“Would you excuse me?” he says.
“Where are you going?”
“I just need to get something from my car. I’ll be right back.”
* * *
Okay, so the smart thing to do would be to call Dean, explain everything, and get advice.
The problem with that plan is that Dean would probably insist on showing up to help - or just to take care of it himself - and that leads to awkward and uncomfortable and potentially bad. If it leads to really bad, it also leads to leaving town in a hurry, and there goes graduation and his diploma and Stanford and his whole future.
And then there’s the fact that Dean would be so disappointed that Sam hadn’t looked into the ghost story when he first heard it. Not angry, not the recriminations and accusations that Sam would get from Dad. Just quiet, unspoken disappointment.
Yelling he could have handled, but that he’d rather avoid.
So, smart or not, what Sam does is get rock salt and lock picks from the trunk of the Impala and then let himself into the school library.
It’s kind of a pity he can’t tell Dean about this. His brother would probably get a good laugh out of the fact that Sam snuck away from the prom to do research.
Then again, maybe it’s just as well.
The thing is, even as he’s pulling old yearbooks off the shelves and waiting for the computer to boot up, he still can’t shake the feeling that this is just wrong. If anything like that had actually happened, everyone would know. There’d be a memorial in the school lobby or something. It wouldn’t have been news to everyone when Peter told the story.
Hell, Dad would have known about it before he decided to move them here. Dad wouldn’t have decided to move them here. There are enough un-haunted high schools in the country, and Dad is big on not hunting where you have to live.
There’s nothing in the yearbooks from the late 1970’s, but that’s not conclusive. Especially when the student was a soon-to-be-graduating senior, it’s not uncommon for yearbooks not to have memorials. And sometimes the family doesn’t want one. He does learn that the Class of 1978 also had Dust in the Wind as a prom theme, but there’s no mention of anyone taking that to the extreme of actually returning to dust.
The archives section of the local paper’s website offers a cheery but useless, “Page under construction! Check back soon!” He searches the ‘net, but nothing turns up on Bicentennial High School and prom and suicide.
Sam checks his watch. If he doesn’t get back soon, Clare is probably going to think that she’s been ditched.
And if there is a ghost at the prom, well, that’s where he needs to be, too.
* * *
“Sam! There you are,” Clare says, putting a hand on his arm like she’s afraid he’s going to wander away again. And then she says, “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Sam asks.
“Whatever you went to your car for,” Clare says.
“Oh, um,” Sam says, and gets saved when there’s another lurch from the sound system, and “Dust in the Wind” starts playing again.
“That’s, like, the sixth time that’s happened,” Clare says.
“Hey, is Renee okay?” Sam asks.
“You mean with the mirror ball and all? Yeah, she’s fine. Not hurt, anyway. But getting seriously pissed about the fact that prom isn’t perfect.”
“Interesting priorities.” Sam turns and watches as a streamer detaches itself from the ceiling and drifts down to land on Renee, interrupting what looks like a lecture she’s giving the security guard on the number of cookies he’s eaten.
Sam turns back to Clare, who has pulled a compact out of her purse and is checking her lipstick. He stops, suddenly, when he catches sight of the reflection in Clare’s tiny mirror, of a blood-soaked 1970’s prom-goer.
He turns to look behind them, though he’s not surprised when he doesn’t see the ghost. The reflection is gone, too, when he looks back at the mirror.
“This makes no sense,” Sam says out loud.
Clare snaps the mirror closed and looks at him. “What? Being that upset about the repeat playing of some gloomy seventies song?”
“No,” Sam says. “Yes. Well . . .”
“Sam?”
It just doesn’t add up. It’s as simple as that. This whole thing is the hunting equivalent of 2 + 2 = Thursday. A story that sensational would get widely told. There would be records. He’d know her name by now.
And if her goal is to punish people who are having a good time at the prom, there’s no reason for her to be doing anything to Renee. Even Sam can tell Renee is miserable and has been since long before she showed up in the same dress as her better-looking friend. Vanessa would be the logical target, but there she is, wrapped around her boyfriend and laughing, completely ignored while Renee is struck with another falling streamer.
So for all the cold air and crashed mirror balls, the only logical conclusion is that this is not a haunting.
“Sam? Are you okay?” Clare asks.
If it’s not a ghost, it has to be something else. Or someone else. Someone who’s, what, trying to teach a Renee a lesson? Or just out to enjoy her being miserable at the prom? That makes some sense, and everything bad tonight has happened to or around her.
No, wait. Not everything. Someone else has had a fairly miserable prom night. A bully who got publicly and humiliatingly dumped by his pushover girlfriend.
And there’s one person Sam can think of who has been present for all of it, everything that Kevin and Renee have done, and everything that’s been done to them. Just the one.
“Earth to Sam,” Clare says.
Sam looks down at his prom date, with her remarkable gold-brown eyes and slightly concerned smile. “Hey, you okay?” she asks.
“What the hell are you?”
* * *
It’s one of those moments when time seems to stop, and Sam doesn’t realize immediately that time has done just that. Everyone and everything in the gym has frozen except him and Clare, still and silent.
“You’re good,” she says, cheerfully, and she sounds different. Older, maybe. “I haven’t been made in over a century.”
Sam gestures to their classmates. He’s in way over his head here, and he knows it. So it’s time to figure out what Dean would do. “Let them go. Now.”
“Relax, Sam. They’ll be fine. I just wanted to talk to you alone for a minute. Well, not exactly a minute, what with time stopped and all, but you get the idea.”
Sam wishes he had any idea what he was dealing with, and some kind of weapon beyond a pocket full of rock salt. “What the hell are you?” he asks again.
“Your kind tends to call us tricksters,” Clare says. “I find that term maybe a little judgmental, but we can go with it.”
Sam wracks his brain for information on tricksters, and comes up a couple of half-remembered stories, and the fact that Dad has never faced one. Great.
“My kind?” Sam asks, mostly stalling for more time to think.
“You know, hunters.”
“I’m not a hunter,” Sam says.
“Aren’t you, though?”
“No. I’m a person whose father makes him hunt. But that doesn’t make me a hunter.”
“Sam, what do you think the point of all this was?”
“You wanted to play a trick on Renee,” Sam says. “And Kevin.”
“No, I wanted them to learn lessons. I have . . . colleagues who like the bigger, bolder, and, frankly, deadlier kind of lesson, but I prefer to find people a little younger, and actually give them a chance to use what they’ve learned, in the real world. It’s like being a teacher. Only without the parent conferences and having to grade papers.”
Sam snorts.
“You’re not convinced. Look, Kevin just needed to be knocked down a peg or two, and Renee will be happier when she learns that she doesn’t control the world around her. Or even need to. But they, Sam, were side projects. Mostly, this lesson was for you.”
“Yeah? And what lesson was that? Check and make sure the girl who’s flirting with me isn’t some kind of monster before I go out with her?”
“Not a bad thing to learn, though I do protest the use of the word monster. But, no.”
“Then what?” Sam asks, and it’s annoyingly hard to keep from sounding hurt. Damn it all, but he really liked her.
“You’ve got this notion, and it’s actually quite charming and quaint, that there’s a ‘normal’ life out there somewhere. I mean, look at our date. The house with the white picket fence, my charmingly involved and enthusiastic constructs of parents, a picnic in a gazebo in a park. The whole thing was something straight out of a ‘50s sitcom, with maybe a bit more making out. Even Donna Reed didn’t live The Donna Reed Show, Sam.”
She pauses and waits for him to say something, and maybe the fact that she wants him to comment is what keeps him from doing so. Maybe it’s just that he has no idea what to say.
Clare goes on. “But here you have this date, that’s perfect and normal and perfectly normal, or at least what you think of as normal, and where are you? Everyone else in this room thinks it’s a short in the DJ’s equipment and a problem with the A/C. And you’re off sneaking into the library to look up ghosts.”
She leans closer and drops her voice to an intimate whisper, “And is that a pocket full of rock salt, or are you just happy to see me? Rock salt won’t work on me, for the record.”
Sam steps back, fists clenched at his sides. He suspects punching her won’t work, either, but he might try anyway. “So what? You’re just . . . toying with me? This whole time?”
“I’m trying to do you a favor. I like you, Sam. But you need to understand something. You know about the supernatural, and the supernatural knows about you. That never changes. The genie doesn’t go back in the bottle, the toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube. You’re lying to yourself if you think you can ever get completely away from it.”
“Watch me. I am done with this life in a couple of months. I’m getting out.”
“What you’re doing, Sam, is running. And running does nothing except take you from being the hunter to being the hunted. You can run as far and as fast as that big brain and those long legs will carry you, and it will never be far or fast enough. You might manage to hide from it for a while. But it will catch up to you. It will hunt you down. And when it does, it’s going to hurt like hell.”
Clare looks down at his still clenched fists. “Go ahead and punch me if you want, Sam, though I do have to say you never struck me as the kind of guy who hit girls.”
“You’re not exactly a girl.”
“Close enough. Which you should know; you’ve had your hands all over me tonight.”
Sam doesn’t especially want to be reminded of that. “Well, I’m not interested in you or your lesson. Thanks, anyway.”
“That’s the ironic part. And it might even be actually ironic, not black-fly-in-your-chardonnay ironic.”
“What is?”
“You learned it a little too well. You saw past the ghostly puppet to the trickster pulling the strings. I was sloppy there, and I guess I learned a lesson about underestimating hunters. And I like you, I do, but not enough to run the risk of getting staked by your dad or Dean. So I’m afraid you are going to have to learn this lesson on your own, because you’re not going to remember any of this.”
She wraps her hands around his neck, so fast it he doesn’t have time to react, pulls his head down, and kisses him.
* * *
Sam looks down at his prom date, with her remarkable gold-brown eyes and slightly concerned smile. “Hey, you okay?” she asks.
He blinks, momentarily a little lost. Slowly, the noise resolves itself into music and voices, and the motion around them becomes distinct individuals and couples dancing.
“What just happened?” he asks.
“I kissed you,” Clare says. “And I thought it was a good kiss, if I do say so myself, but I didn’t realize it was that good a kiss.”
“Guess I’m still getting used to kissing you,” he says.
“Maybe you need more instruction in the art of kissing me,” she says.
That sounds promising. “Do you give lessons?”
“Oh, sometimes,” she says, breezily.
Sam leans down to kiss her again. “I’m a very good student,” he says, close to her ear.
“I’m sure,” she says, and he puts his hands at her waist to pull her even closer.
“You there, boy, what do you think you’re doing with her?” someone demands, and Sam has taken a step away from Clare and shoved his hands into his empty pockets before he realizes it was Jake.
“You’re a jerk,” Sam tells him.
“You should have seen your face,” Jake says, laughing.
“I’m sure it was hilarious,” Sam says. “Did you want something?”
“Just saying hello. Getting some punch for Vanessa.”
“Hi. And don’t let us keep you from that,” Sam says.
“Right. Catch you guys later,” Jake says.
Sam turns his attention back to Clare. “So,” she says, “are we going to dance, or what?”
Privately, Sam thinks or what sounds like it has some intriguing possibilities. But for the moment, he wraps his arms around her waist again. “Sure. Let’s dance.”
* * *
Sam gets up early on Sunday morning, hours, he suspects, before the most devout of his church-going classmates, a hell of a lot earlier than Dean, and washes the Impala. It’s not dirty; it’s never allowed to sit in the driveway dirty. But Sam wants to do something to say thanks for letting him use the car, and for talking Dad around, and everything. Dean will never let him do something for Dean, but he can wash and wax and detail the car. And they’ll both know why he did it, even though all Dean will say is that Sam never does the wax right.
When he’s done, Sam goes back into the house and brews coffee that’s strong enough to peel not only the wax but the lacquer off the car. He drinks two cups, has breakfast, and changes into running clothes.
Since Dean looks like he’s going to sleep until noon or Armageddon, Sam goes back to the kitchen to turn off the coffee pot and leave a note explaining his absence.
His father is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, and it’s one of the things Sam has never been able to figure out, how Dad moves that quietly.
Hell, how he drives that quietly.
“Sammy,” he says.
“Dad.”
There’s a moment. This is a situation Sam knows he’s been working to avoid, and that he suspects Dad has been working to avoid, too. The two of them, alone, with no buffer of Dean.
“How’d it go?” Sam asks.
“It’s dead.” Another moment, too long, and then Dad asks, “How was your dance?”
“It was nice,” Sam says, an answer that’s as inadequate as his father’s was. He rushes on, trying to find something more to say. “I had a good time. It was lots of glittery decorations and punch and stuff. There was a weird thing where the DJ’s equipment kind of glitched and it kept playing Kansas over and over, but, you know, it was . . . nice.”
He’s not sure what he wanted. It’s not like he expected Dad to care about the details, or ask about Clare, or comment on anything, really. He doesn’t even really want to tell Dad any of that stuff, to have it dissected and critiqued.
But he also wants Dad to have more to say than, “Good. You going running?”
Sam bites back all the retorts that crowd into his head because it should be perfectly obvious that he’s going running. “Yes.”
“How far do you think you’ll go?” Dad asks.
On an ordinary Sunday, he’d go five miles. But he’d also have run five the night before. And he hates - hates - that he can’t tell if Dad’s question is meant to be a challenge or just an inquiry about when to expect him back. He hates that he has to wonder.
“Eight miles, maybe,” Sam says, and he hates that he just added three miles to his planned run because he was afraid to say five.
Dad nods. “Better get on that, then. I’ve got stuff to go over with you and Dean later.”
“Yes, sir.”
Usually, Sam settles quickly into a rhythm, hits his stride and just runs. But it is as bad this morning as it was a few years ago, before he stopped growing quite so quickly. He’s unfocused and awkward, knees and ankles at odds with each other.
And stuck with a thought he can’t place, and can’t shake, that’s chasing itself around his head.
You can run as far and as fast as that big brain and those long legs will carry you, and it will never be far or fast enough.
There is now a sequel, or a semi-sequel, to this story, Cabinet of Curiosities.