"I don't want you talking to him anymore," Jeff was saying now, and suddenly Linda's own anger rose inside her. Who was JeffLaConner to tell her what she could do and whom she could talk to?

"Let go of me," she demanded. "I'll talk to whoever I want-''

But she couldn't finish her sentence, for Jeff's face had darkened with rage and he was shaking her.

His hands dug deep into her arms now, and she felt flashes of pain shooting down into her hands. Her head was flopping back and forth and her eyes filled with tears.

"Stop it!" she screamed. "You're hurting me! Jeff, stop that right now!"

It was her cry of pain that penetrated Jeff's anger. As suddenly as he had begun shaking her, he stopped and released her. Her face was streaked with tears, he saw, and she was rubbing her left shoulder, her fingers kneading at her own flesh as she tried to massage the pain away. Jeff stared at her mutely for a moment, then abruptly turned, smashed his fist into a tree, and with a cry that was half pain and half frustrated anger, broke into a run and plunged away into the night.

Linda, breathing hard, her heart pounding, watched him go. After a while the pain in her shoulders began to ease, and finally she resumed walking home. What on earth had happened just now? Jeff had never acted like that before-never!

Tonight she'd actually been terrified of him. And she hadn't done anything, not really. But if he was going to act like that…

My God, what if he came back?

She quickened her step, finally breaking into a run. By the time she got home, hurrying to her room without even speaking to her parents, she had made up her mind.

She picked up the telephone and dialed the Tanners' number, only realizing when their phone started to ring that, without even thinking about it, she'd already committed their number to memory.

"Mrs. Tanner?" she asked a moment later. "This is Linda. Can I talk to Mark?"

It was nearly midnight, but Mark still hadn't been able to fall asleep. He'd been in bed for more than an hour already and still couldn't stop trying to figure out what had happened that night. When he'd first heard Linda's voice on the phone, he hadn't thought much about it. But when she'd asked him if he was going to the pep rally tomorrow night, then asked him if he'd go out for a hamburger with her afterward, he'd started to wonder what was going on. He'd accepted the invitation before he'd even thought about it, but as soon as he hung up the phone, the questions had started coming into his mind.

Why had she called him?

She was JeffLaConner's girlfriend, wasn't she?

And her voice had sounded kind of funny, too, as if there were something wrong.

Eventually he concluded that his mother, worried about him after this afternoon, had called Mrs. Harris and asked her to have Linda call him.

But his mother had denied it, and Mark was pretty sure she wouldn't lie to him. She might try to explain why she'd done it, and try to keep him from breaking the date, but she wouldn't lie about it.

Still, it had to be a mercy date. Linda probably just felt sorry for him and had asked Jeff if it would be all right if she invited him along.

That was it! She intended to have him tag along with her and Jeff! He'd look like some kind of an idiot!

He'd almost called her back right then, but as he reached for the phone, he'd changed his mind. Linda wouldn't do a thing like that, would she? He thought about it for a long time and finally decided she wouldn't.

He'd spent some time on his homework, then gone to bed. But he still couldn't figure it out-Linda was a cheerleader, and going out with the star of the football team. And even though she wasn't very tall, she was still an inch taller than he was. So why would she want to go out with him?

Giving up on sleep, he switched the light on, got out of bed, and went to stare at himself in the mirror.

Skinny. Not wiry, like his mother always told him. Just skinny. His chest looked narrow, and his arms were much too thin.

Unbidden, an image of JeffLaConner came into his mind. Was there really a chance he'd ever look like that?

Then he remembered Robb Harris. Three years ago, when theHarrises had lived in San Marcos, Robb had been just as skinny as Mark was now. But Robb had put on weight, and looked great.

Maybe he could do it too, Mark thought as he stared unhappily at his own image.

And it wasn't just Linda, he told himself. It was everything. He knew he'd been thinking about it all afternoon while he andChivas were walking in the hills. He just hadn't admitted he was thinking about it. But there wasn't any point in putting it off any longer.

He was in Silverdale, and he wasn't going anywhere else. And if he was going to live here, he was going to have to fit in with everyone else, even if it meant learning to like sports.

Even if he didn't learn to like sports, he could fake it. He could go to the games and cheer as loudly as anybody else.

And he could start doing exercises. He'd been doing them in gym since seventh grade, and he could do them again.

That was the whole thing, he decided. He didn't like the way he was, so he would change himself.

Lying down on the floor, he braced his feet under the lowest drawer of his desk, then folded his arms behind his head. Taking a deep breath, he began to do sit-ups.

To his own surprise, he managed twenty-five of them before his stomach began hurting so much he couldn't go on. But tomorrow, he told himself as he climbed back into bed, he'd do thirty. And the day after that…

His thoughts were interrupted by a sound that cut sharply through the night, instantly silencing the insects that had been buzzing softly outside.

It was the same piercing, agonizing scream he had heard earlier, when he'd been up in the mountains.

Except that now, in the darkness of the night, the scream sounded different.

It sounded almost human…

Chapter Seven

CharlotteLaConner glanced at the clock that glowed dimly next to the bed. Nearly one-thirty. Beside her, Chuck was snoring softly. How could he sleep, knowing that Jeff had still not come home? Charlotte got up, slipped her arms through the sleeves of a light robe, then went to the window and peered out at the street. The night was quiet. A gentle stillness lay over the valley that seemed totally at odds with the turmoil in her mind.

It had been a bad week for her, and every day things seemed to be getting worse. It had begun on Monday evening, when she'd tried to talk things over rationally with Chuck. He'd listened patiently while she'd told him about seeing Ricardo Ramirez. But when she'd gone on to say that she'd decided Jeff was going to have to quit the football team, his expression froze and a hard look came into his eyes.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," he'd said.

His words had lashed her like a whip, but she'd bitten her lip, then tried to argue with him.

It had done no good. "It was an accident," he'd insisted.

"You don't ask a kid to give up his favorite sport just because of an accident."

As far as Chuck had been concerned, that was the end of it. If he'd even noticed the tension in the house since then, he'd given no sign, acting as if nothing had changed. But Charlotte, unable to get Rick Ramirez out of her mind, had grown quieter through the week, and become acutely aware of changes in Jeff.

If they were really changes.

For by now, she wasn't sure. Perhaps Jeff hadn't really changed at all, and she was simply reading things into his behavior. Still, she believed his personality actually was changing. Jeff's temper-always so even when he'd been younger- appeared to flare up now at the least provocation, and twice this week, when she'd asked him to do something, he had yelled that he already had too much to do, then slammed out the door. On both occasions he'd come back a few minutes later and apologized, and she'd been quick to forgive him. A repeat of the scene on Saturday night was the last thing she needed.