Saint of Sinners by Devin Harnois Read Free Book Online Page A

like the kid so much, I might’ve punched him. The week after, on Wednesday, I finally gathered the courage. Just after the last bell, I met her at her locker. “Hey, you have a minute?”
    She gave me a curious look. “Sure.”
    I led her to a relatively quiet spot between banks of lockers. She looked almost as nervous as I felt. You stood up to Fenrir. You cut off the devil’s arm and sent him running, I told myself. “So I was wondering… if you, maybe… um…” I took a deep breath. “You wanna go out sometime?”
    She’d already had a bit of a blush. Now it got deeper. “Go out? You mean…”
    “Like a date. Yeah.” Fuck, what if this was all in my head? What if Casey was wrong? Or worse, just teasing me?
    Her eyes lit up and a big smile spread across her face. “Yeah. I’d love to.”
    I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “Awesome. I was afraid you’d say no.”
    “I was afraid you wouldn’t ask.”
    I laughed. “Is it always this awkward?”
    She tilted her head. “What?”
    “Asking people out.”
    “You mean you haven’t?”
    Oh, shit. I shouldn’t have said that. Unless I wanted to lie, now I had to admit I’d never had a girlfriend before. I shook my head. “This is the first time I asked anyone out.”
    She blushed again and smiled again, clearly pleased. So maybe it wasn’t a bad thing. “Why didn’t you do it before? I mean, you’re really cute and you have that whole mysterious thing going on.”
    “My life is really complicated.” I wanted to steer the conversation away from my past. “So, what should we do? We already went to the movies with everyone. Dinner might be nice to have, but I want to do more than that.” I tried to think of romantic movies. Where did they go on first dates?
    “I don’t know. We could just go for a walk in the park. Or we could go bowling or something.”
    Bowling sounded boring . I didn’t want my first date to be boring. “Is there anything different you want to do? Something unusual, not like skydiving or anything. Just something…” I shrugged. “Memorable.”
    “I don’t know. We could decide later, I guess.”
    I didn’t want to leave things like that. “Is there anything you haven’t done for a while you really like? Or a place you love that you haven’t been to for a while?”
    She looked down, thinking. After a moment she looked up, uncertain. “Honestly… the zoo.” She scrunched her face a little, like she was expecting me laugh and say no.
    I’d been to a zoo once. I had mixed feelings about it, with all those animals in cages, especially since I could talk to some of them. But it had been enjoyable, too, seeing the animals close up, talking to them when no one else was in earshot. Few of them were truly unhappy, mostly just bored and restless. “The zoo,” I repeated. “I could go for that.”
    “Really? You don’t think it’s a little kid thing to do?”
    “Do animals stop being interesting when you hit puberty?” I joked. “I love animals.”
    “Me, too.”
    I noticed the stream of kids thinning. “Shit, we better go before we miss the bus.” So we said good-bye and ran to catch our respective buses. I kept smiling to myself all the way home. I was going to have my first date. Operation Normal Life was going well.
    ***
    We worked out the details the next day at lunch. We’d go Saturday and she’d take her parents’ car. I tried not to be embarrassed about Hayley driving me to our first date. This wasn’t the fucking nineteen fifties after all, and I didn’t have a car. Having someone drive both of us would be worse. She’d just gotten her license that summer, so she was nervous about driving that far, but she promised she was a careful driver. I wasn’t worried about that. If I had to, I could use my powers to prevent an accident, or at least keep it from being anything serious.
    The zoo was on the edge of a neighboring town, about an hour away. I hoped being alone with her