Creature by John Saul Page B

alone.
    Jeff fell in beside her and slipped his arm around her shoulders. It wasn’t the first time he’d put his arm around her as they’d walked, but tonight, for some reason, it made her feel uncomfortable. Almost instantly she realized why.
    Mark Tanner.
    Linda had been dating Jeff LaConner since last spring. But even during the summer, when they’d spent time together almost every day, she hadn’t been certain how she felt. Of course, at the beginning she’d been thrilled that Jeff was interested in her at all, since she was only a freshman and he was a junior. And a football star, at that. And she’d loved the envious looks Tiffany Welch and the other girls had given her when Jeff came over to sit with her at lunchtime. But as the summer wore on and Jeff began spending more and moretime practicing football, she’d had misgivings. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him—she did. It was just that he didn’t seem to be interested in anything but football, and half the time, when he’d come over to see her, he and Robb ended up out in the backyard, passing a ball back and forth while she sat on the porch wondering why he’d come at all.
    And then last weekend Mark had come to town, and on Saturday, before Robb had arrived and Mark had gotten so quiet, she’d enjoyed talking to him. Not that they’d really talked about much. But it had been easy for her to talk to Mark, because unlike her brother, or Jeff most of the time, he really listened when she talked to him. It had been the same every morning this week, when they’d walked to school together. Even at lunch hour, though most of the time she was with Jeff, she’d found herself looking around for Mark.
    “We still on for the pep rally tomorrow night?” she heard Jeff asking now. As he spoke, she felt his hand tighten on her shoulder, and there was a roughness in his voice she couldn’t remember having heard before.
    “T-Tomorrow night?” she asked, stammering slightly. “But you didn’t ask me, did you?”
    Jeff stopped walking and turned to face her. They were a few yards away from a streetlight, and though Jeff’s face was partly in shadow, his expression appeared angry. “I didn’t think I had to,” he said. “You’re going to be there, and I’m going to be there, and we always go out afterward, don’t we?”
    “Do we?” Linda asked, then felt stupid at the sound of her own question. Of course they did—everyone knew they did. Why had she said something so dumb?
    Mark Tanner: that was why.
    “What do you mean, do we?” Jeff asked. There was a definite tinge of anger when he said, “You’re my girlfriend, aren’t you?”
    Linda swallowed. “I—I don’t know,” she replied. All of a sudden it seemed as if her mind had gone off on its own and she no longer had any control over her own thoughts. “Ithink—well, maybe we’ve been spending too much time together.…” Now, why had she said that? Sure, she’d been thinking about Jeff, wondering how she really felt about him, but she hadn’t really been thinking about breaking up with him, had she?
    Maybe she had.
    Jeff’s eyes were glittering angrily now, and he reached out, putting his hands on her shoulders. “It’s that Tanner creep, isn’t it?” he demanded. “If that little shit’s been trying to hit on you—”
    “Stop it!” Linda hissed, glancing around, hoping no one was watching. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Mark.”
    But it did, and Jeff seemed to know it. His hands tightened on her shoulders, and she felt a stab of pain where his fingers dug into her flesh. The streetlight was full on his face now, and suddenly he looked different to her. His anger had done something to his features, and his face—the face that she had always before considered so handsome—seemed coarse.
    “I don’t want you talking to him anymore,” Jeff was saying now, and suddenly Linda’s own anger rose inside her. Who was Jeff LaConner to tell her what she could do