by John Saul
Angel shrugged and passed the stack of quizzes to the boy in front of her, who put his own on the bottom, then handed them to Mrs. Holt. A moment later, as she saw the teacher glance at her test, then look up at her, Angel wished she hadn’t taken the quiz after all.
Or at least hadn’t turned it in.
But now it was too late.
“It seems Angel has set the standard for the rest of you,” Mrs. Holt said, holding her single sheet up for the rest of the class to see. “This is what a math quiz should look like. Every equation solved, and every step shown.” She smiled at Angel, and Angel slunk lower in her chair. “Thank you, Angel. Well done.”
All around her Angel could feel the envy the class had felt for her a few minutes ago hardening into resentment, and she knew she’d made a mistake.
Why did she have to write down the answers? Why couldn’t she have just solved the problems in her head, then taken a book out of her bag and spent the last ten minutes reading? But now it was too late, and everyone was staring at her, and—
The clock ticked one more time, and then the clanging of the last bell erupted through the school. As the rest of the class began picking up their backpacks and heading toward the door, Angel stayed where she was, deliberately slowing the process of putting her books in her pack so that by the time she left the room the rest of the class would be gone. But even hanging back didn’t keep her from hearing what the rest of the kids were saying.
“Of course she’s a suck-up—her name’s Angel, isn’t it?”
“Who cares if she’s smart—just look at her! Yuck!”
Her face burning and her eyes stinging, Angel sat at her desk waiting for the room to empty. After two minutes that seemed to take forever, the door swung closed for the last time and silence fell over the room. At last Angel stood up from her desk, picked up her backpack, and started toward the door. She was just starting to push it open when Mrs. Holt spoke to her.
“Angel? Is something wrong?”
She froze, her hand still on the doorknob. How could Mrs. Holt not know what was wrong? Couldn’t she see what had happened? Hadn’t she heard what everyone was saying? But it wasn’t her fault, Angel told herself. It was my fault. Mrs. Holt had said she didn’t have to take the quiz, but she did it anyway. Shaking her head but saying nothing, Angel fled from the classroom.
The corridor was even worse. All around her, kids were laughing and talking; lockers were slamming. Angel worked her way through the throng toward the foot of the stairs that would take her to her own locker on the second floor. Keeping her head down, she did her best to look at no one and be deaf to anything the other kids might be saying about her. By the time she reached the head of the stairs, the corridor was almost empty. Hurrying to her locker, Angel began working the combination, but the metal door didn’t open until the third try. She was reaching for the jacket she’d hung on the locker’s single hook when she felt someone behind her.
Felt eyes looking at her.
Go away, she thought. Just leave me alone.
Then she heard a voice.
A soft voice that sounded just as apprehensive as Angel felt.
“I thought—well, if you want to, maybe we could go get a Coke or something.” Turning away from her locker, Angel saw Seth Baker standing a few feet away, his backpack slung over one shoulder. Angel felt a lump forming in her throat as he gazed at her, and then her eyes began to sting once more as the tears she’d been struggling to control threatened to overwhelm her. The silence lengthened, then Seth started to turn away. Angel reached out toward him, trying to force something—anything—from her constricted throat, when he spoke again. “Come on—let’s just get out of here, okay? Then you can tell me what happened.”
Still without having spoken a word, Angel followed him down the stairs and out of the building.
Houdini was sitting on the sidewalk across the street, exactly where she’d left him this morning, and Angel wondered if the cat could possibly have been sitting there all day. As she and Seth crossed the street, the cat stood up, stretched, and gazed suspiciously at Seth. His tail twitched slightly, but when Angel introduced them, Seth squatted down and looked the cat squarely in the eye.
“Very nice to meet you,” he said, extending his hand, as if Angel had introduced him to another human being.
Houdini’s tail stopped twitching and he licked Seth’s hand, and when Seth and Angel started down the street toward the center of the village, he followed, walking between them.
“You really want to go in there?” Angel asked ten minutes later as she and Seth stood in front of the Roundtree drugstore, which still had the kind of old-fashioned soda fountain that had disappeared from most drugstores nearly fifty years earlier. All the booths were occupied, as were all but two of the stools. And every face was familiar, though Angel could put names to only two or three of them. As she and Seth gazed through the window, she saw her cousin Zack look up, glance toward then, then lean across the table to whisper something to Heather Dunne. Though they could hear nothing through the thick plate-glass, both Angel and Seth could see Heather—and everyone else—first laughing at whatever Zack Fletcher had said, then turning to look at the two of them.
“You want to go to my house?” Angel asked, and saw Seth hesitate. But then he nodded.
“Sure.”
Turning away from the drugstore, they continued along the sidewalk toward the corner, where they would turn right to follow Black Creek Road out of town. “I guess it was stupid to think anything would be any different here,” Angel said. As they’d walked from the school to the drugstore, she’d told Seth what had happened at the end of the last period.
“How come teachers do things like that?” Seth asked. “Seems like she didn’t have to tell the whole class what you did.”
“It’s not like she was trying to be mean or anything. And it was my fault. If I’d—”
“It wasn’t your fault!” Seth broke in, the words bursting from his lips with enough force that Angel jumped almost as if something had struck her. Seth barely seemed to notice. “So you could do the stuff in your head—how does that make you wrong? And how could Mrs. Holt not know what was going to happen when she started telling everyone what you did? Come on, Angel—it wasn’t your fault at all.”
“Then how come it felt like it was my fault?” Angel asked.
Seth shrugged. “How come it always feels like it’s my fault when my dad—”
Abruptly, he fell silent, and Angel stopped and looked at him. “When your dad does what?”
A shadow seemed to pass over Seth’s face. “Nothing,” he said. “Sometimes he just gets mad at me, that’s all.”
That’s not all, Angel thought. But there was something in Seth’s expression that told her not to push, so she didn’t press him, and for the rest of the walk out to the Crossing, neither of them said another word. But when they finally came around the last bend and stood across the road from Angel’s house, Seth paused, cocking his head as he gazed at the structure on the other side of the road.
“Seth? What is it?” Angel asked. “Do you see something?”
Seth hesitated, remembering the strange image he’d seen on his computer—an image he’d been unable to duplicate, even though he’d come back out here half a dozen times since, taking pictures of the house in all kinds of light. But none of the pictures had shown the strange flames bursting from the second story window or the faint shadow, as if someone—or something—might have been inside the house.
Now it looked perfectly normal.
Perfectly normal, and perfectly ordinary.
Seth finally shook his head in answer to Angel’s question. “I was just wondering,” he said. “I mean—is it weird living in there, knowing what happened?”
Angel wondered if she should tell Seth what had happened on her very first night in the house. Yeah, right. And have him think I’m crazy. “It’s just a house,” she said, not quite answering his question. “Come on.”
As they went inside, the cat that had followed them all the way from town darted off into the woods.
They were in Angel’s room, their backpacks on the floor, the two of them sitting side by side on the bed, leaning against the wall. Seth glanced uneasily around the room. “This was the girl’s room.”
Angel shrugged. “I guess.”
“I don’t need to guess—this was the room they found her in. Doesn’t it bother you, sleeping in here?”
“Why should it?” Angel countered, a little too quickly, her voice sharper than she’d meant it to be. “I mean, it’s not like there’s—” She hesitated, then went on. “—not like there’s a ghost or something.”
Seth cocked his head as he gazed at her, just like he had when he’d been looking at the house earlier, and Angel felt herself reddening. “What?” he asked. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Angel said, again too quickly.
“I don’t believe you.” For an instant he thought Angel was going to say something, but then he could see her changing her mind. “Come on,” he pressed. “Tell me. Did something happen?” Now he could see by the look in her eyes that he was right—there was something she didn’t want to tell him. “What is it? You might as well tell me, ’cause I’m going to keep bugging you till you do.”
“It wasn’t anything,” Angel protested. “It was only a dream!”
“So if it was only a dream, what’s the big deal?”
“It isn’t a big deal,” Angel countered. “It was just a nightmare, that’s all. Can’t we just talk about something else?” But when she saw that Seth wasn’t going to talk about anything else, she finally told him about the strange dream in which she’d seen a girl burning in the closet, and what had happened when she finally woke up, when she was certain she could still smell smoke in the closet, even though the fire had only been a dream.
Seth listened in silence until she finished. “See?” she said. “I told you it was just a dream, didn’t I?”
Instead of replying to her question, Seth opened his backpack and pulled out a notebook. From the pocket in the back cover he took an envelope, which he wordlessly handed to Angel.
“What is it?” she asked, holding the envelope gingerly, as if it were hot.
“A photograph,” Seth said, his voice sounding oddly hollow. “I took it a while ago, the day you and your folks came to look at this place. There’s something in the window—something like . . .”
He spread his hands helplessly. “I don’t know—it doesn’t show up real well. Even when I blew it up, I couldn’t really see anything.”
Angel pulled the photo out of the envelope. “How did you know we were looking at the house?” she asked as she studied it. The photo showed the house exactly as it had been the day she and her parents first came to see it. But one window on the second floor—her window—looked strange. Fuzzy, and slightly out of focus. But there seemed to be something behind the glass, something she couldn’t quite make out.
“I saw you. I was across the street when you left.”
And then Angel remembered. It had been just as they were driving away from the house. She’d looked back at the house and seen something—something that looked like the face of a girl looking out the window of her room. Was it possible that Seth had actually taken a picture of it? “Are there any more?” she asked.
Seth nodded, and handed her another envelope. Her pulse suddenly quickening and her fingers trembling, Angel opened the envelope and pulled out another photograph, also of the house, but in this one flames were pouring out the second story window.
Her window.
She stared at it silently for almost a full minute, then tore her eyes away to gaze at Seth. “I don’t understand. If the house was on fire—”
“It wasn’t,” Seth broke in. “It was sunset, and the sun was sort of reflecting in the window, but when I looked at the picture on my computer . . .” His voice died away and he shook his head. “It’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, doesn’t it look exactly like flames?”
Angel’s eyes narrowed, and she was suddenly certain she knew what had happened. “You used one of those programs like PhotoShop, didn’t you?” But as soon as she uttered the words, she could see by the expression in his eyes that she was wrong. “But if you didn’t do it . . .” Now it was her voice that died away, and when she spoke again, her voice held the same hollow note she’d heard in Seth’s a few minutes ago. “So how come you’re taking so many pictures of my house?” she asked, looking once more at the strange image of flames seeming to billow from her window.
Seth shrugged. “I like it. I mean, it’s not like it’s huge or anything, but it’s really old, and—” His eyes shifted away from her. “Maybe part of it is that nobody else usually comes out here.”
“Why not?”
“All the stories,” Seth replied. He glanced around the room, which appeared utterly ordinary with the afternoon sunlight pouring in.
“You mean about the murders?”
Seth nodded. “But there’s other stuff too.” He fell silent again, but looked at her. “You know how kids tell stories about haunted houses?” Angel nodded. “Well, around here, this is the haunted house. I mean, even before that guy killed his family, everyone talked about it.”
“About what?” Angel pressed. When Seth still hesitated, she reminded him that she’d told him about her dream.
“There’s stories about all kinds of stuff,” he finally said. “You know—ghosts and witches.”
“I don’t believe in that kind of stuff,” Angel replied, but even as she said it, her gaze drifted to the photo that still lay on her lap. Was it possible that whatever was behind the window was the strange apparition she’d seen that day they’d come to see the house? She decided then that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Getting up, she went to the dresser, turning her back on Seth. But she could still see him reflected in the mirror, staring at her.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Don’t stare at me—I hate it when people stare at me.”
“I wasn’t staring at you,” Seth protested as he put the pictures in his backpack. “But even if I was looking at you, so what?”
Now it was the memory of the kids in Mrs. Holt’s class that rose in her mind: Who cares if she’s smart—just look at her! Yuck! The stinging words made her eyes well with tears again. “Because I’m not pretty,” she blurted, wheeling around to face Seth. “I mean, just look at me!” When Seth said nothing, Angel said, “See? Everyone’s right! I’m just yuck!”
Now Seth was truly staring at her. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
Finally giving in to the tears she’d been struggling against all day, she said, “What does it matter if I’m smart? All anyone cares about is how I look! And I look awful!”
“You don’t look awful,” Seth protested. “You look—” He stopped, seeing in her eyes that if he said she was pretty, she wouldn’t believe him. “You look interesting,” he said. “So your face isn’t like Heather Dunne’s. Who cares?”
“I care,” Angel wailed. “I don’t want to be ‘interesting.’ I want to be pretty.” She turned around again and was staring at herself in the mirror when Seth appeared next to her. For a long minute the two of them stared at her reflection in the mirror, and then Seth cocked his head slightly and a little smile played around his lips.
“What?” Angel asked, still truculent. “Are you going to try to convince me I am pretty? Because if you are, don’t bother—my eyes are too big, and my lips are too big, and my eyebrows—”
“Will you be quiet for a minute?” Seth broke in. “I was just thinking—have you got any makeup?”
“You mean like lipstick and eyeliner and that kind of stuff?” When Seth nodded, Angel shook her head. “My mom won’t let me wear any, except on Halloween. Last year I was going to be a vampire, but—”
“But what?” Seth pressed. Angel said nothing, but Seth tho
ught he knew the answer to his question. “Nobody invited you to a party, did they?” The tightening of Angel’s expression told him he was right. “Nobody invited me to any parties either,” he went on. “So, you still got the vampire stuff?”
“It’s just junk!” Angel protested. “It’s not makeup.”
“Sure it is,” Seth told her. “I bet it’s the same stuff they sell in the cosmetics section of the drugstore in a different package. Get it out.” Angel didn’t move. “Oh, come on—it can’t hurt just to try something, can it?”
Still not sure what Seth was up to, Angel rummaged around in the bottom drawer of her dresser until she found the unopened package that contained not only the makeup kit for the vampire, but the teeth and a black cape as well. “This is stupid—” she began, but Seth had already taken the package out of her hand and began ripping it open.
“Cool!” he said, shaking out the cape and throwing it around his shoulders, then gazing at himself in the mirror over Angel’s dresser. Then he opened the box that contained the makeup. “ ‘Dead white,’ ” he read off one of the labels. “And they have ‘bloodred,’ ‘bruise purple,’ and a bunch of other stuff. Put it on,” he told her.
Angel reddened. “I—I don’t know how,” she finally admitted. “I’ve never put on makeup before.”
Seth rolled his eyes. “Then I’ll do it,” he said. “Come here.” He pulled her over so she was standing in front of him. “This is going to be fun,” he said. “Like painting a picture on your face.”
Angel glanced sourly at her reflection in the mirror. “You can’t fix my face with makeup,” she told him.
“Bet I can,” Seth retorted. “Besides, I don’t want to fix anything—I’m going to make everything bigger.”
Angel’s eyes widened. “Are you crazy?”
“Be quiet,” Seth told her. “I’m just going to try it, okay? I mean, what can it hurt? No one’s here but me, and if it doesn’t work, we can just take it off.” He held up a small jar of cold cream. “See? They even put it in the kit, in case the sight of blood makes you sick.”
