“Thank you.” Celia never had felt so comfortable with someone new so quickly before.
“So, Ivo and Liz always talk about your beauty and how well you draw, but they never tell us more banal things. How do you like Suburban?”
“It’s good, so far,” Celia said. “I didn’t really enjoy my first year at the other school. I think Suburban would have been more like that if I hadn’t met them.”
“They should have invited you over sooner, but I’m glad you’re here now.”
“Your house is beautiful,” Celia told him.
“Thank you! Actually, tell me this.” Mr. Fourad glanced at the door and then looked curiously at her. “Will you tell me about Diaboliques? My children have forbidden me to go, but it sounds absolutely brilliant.”
“It is!” Celia laughed. “It’s like a jewel box with all kinds of secret compartments. You go through all these rooms, and each one is more interesting than the last, until you get to the room where we spend most of our time, and it’s amazing. The clothes, the music, everything.”
“I wish I could go.” Mr. Fourad smiled. “I guess those days are over for me.”
“That’s a shame. It shouldn’t be like that.”
“Maybe not, or maybe so. I’m not sure I would go back to high school again just to have the chance to go to Diaboliques.” He chuckled. “Some things you have to do at the right time in your life, and I’m just glad all of you are doing it. I have my own memories to cherish.” Then Mrs. Fourad was calling him from the other room, and he took his leave.
Celia wandered into the study, where she had seen the old books, but this time her attention was caught by a piece of calligraphy framed on the wall. She read the angular script whose letters intertwined:
Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might
appear to others that what you were or might have been was
not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to
them to be otherwise. —Lewis Carroll
Celia felt someone beside her and turned to find Liz. “What does it mean?” Celia asked her.
“Be what you would seem to be,” Liz told her. “Be yourself.” She looked tenderly at Celia for a moment, and then the two of them turned back to reread the quote, standing quietly together. Celia thought if she had an older sister, she’d want her to be Liz.
They gravitated back to the family room again to exchange gifts. Ivo asked Celia to help him retrieve his presents, so she followed him up to his room and had a moment to be awestruck by the black walls, the bare surfaces, the framed photograph of a man leaping from the top of a brick wall, hurtling toward the street below as if it were a void. But the moment he was sure they were alone, Ivo turned to her with a purpose.
“I haven’t forgotten, you know,” he said.
“Forgotten what?”
“About that poem in your sketchbook.”
“Oh, really? I thought—” Celia broke off, unsure what she thought.
“I know something is happening. And you know about it. And I wasn’t supposed to find out. And I think you tried to make me forget about it somehow. But I remember.”
“What do you remember?” Celia asked.
“I remember the poem has something to do with the curse. I think you’re trying to stop it? You did something to me, because every time I try to remember, it’s all a fog.” He was concentrating, as though he were trying to work out an equation in his head. “You don’t want me to know. And I guess there’s not much I can do about it. Just tell me: are you in trouble? I mean, are you in danger?”
“No, Ivo, I’m not. I promise you, I’m not. I thought I told you. It was just a scary poem my friend Mariette wrote around Halloween. It’s not real. It’s just a scary poem.”
“Who’s Mariette?”
“Mariette? My chemistry lab partner?” Celia saw the blank look on Ivo’s face again. “You don’t remember meeting her?”
“No, when did we meet?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If you say so.” They looked at each other for a long moment. He gave her the same expression she must have given Mariette for weeks before she found out the truth. It was a look that said, I can’t put my finger on it, but something is going on here.
“A scary poem?” Ivo said finally.
“It’s just a scary poem,” Celia said. “Let’s go back to the party.” She picked up two of Ivo’s gifts, and he picked up the other three.
The Rosary sat down in the family room with mugs of cranberry tea.
Celia reached for her stack of gifts. “I’ll go first, since I’m the newest.” She passed them around and waited as they were opened carefully.
“I feel like I’m looking at a photograph,” Brenden said, marveling at his portrait. “A really good photograph.” They passed the portraits around.
“They’re not just our likenesses—you captured our personalities,” Liz said. “You are really talented.”
“Well, you were all great subjects, even if you didn’t realize it at the time,” Celia said, thrilled.
“Were you looking at us when you drew us?” Marco asked.
“No. But I made quite a few sketches of each of you before I was ready to do these.”
“You must be as bored in art class as Marco is in home ec.” Liz smiled.
“We get to do what we love. It’s not that bad.” Celia smiled at Marco, who winked at her.
“The senior class is raising money for a mosaic to go in the new computer wing they’re going to build this summer. We should have you design it,” Liz said.
“That’s a great idea,” Brenden said.
“I’ve never done mosaic work,” Celia said.
“You wouldn’t have to install it. We just have to give a sketch to the mosaic woman.”
“I’d love to help with that. Just let me know what you have in mind.”
Marco had made each of them black beaded bracelets that resembled short rosaries, with a simple square cross on a short beaded strand. “I know we haven’t been wearing rosaries much, but I thought maybe it was because they were a little too long.” Immediately the bracelets went on everyone’s wrists. Regine had created collage books for all of them, and again, they were passed around for everyone to see. No one was surprised that Brenden had made everyone a compilation CD. “It was so hard keeping these tracks from you.” He laughed. “There is some great stuff on there.”
Liz gave them each tiny shadow boxes. “What’s inside?” Marco asked.
“Well, look and see, but you have to keep it a secret. Everyone’s is different.”
Celia looked through the hole in her shadow box and found a short poem, lit from behind:
One night I shall be awakened
by the horn from the driver
and know before my eyes are fully opened
that the signal is for me.
Then I shall descend those stairs,
going out onto the avenue
to ride away in the passenger’s seat
without so much as a glance at the driver.
Celia caught her breath and looked around the room. Everyone had a similar expression. “I can’t wait to read your first book,” Brenden said to Liz.
“Neither can I!” Liz said, smiling. “If I want to be a novelist I’m going to have to start writing longer things than poems and short stories.”
“Well, mine aren’t as personal as the rest of yours, but hopefully they symbolize something,” Ivo said, handing them identical boxes. They each unwrapped a black metal lantern with a single candle inside. “Let’s go for a walk.”
They collected their coats and carefully lit the candles, and then they stepped out into the night. The street was quiet, and a brilliant, nearly full moon easily outshone the corner streetlamps. “It really does give a luster of midday to objects below,” Brenden murmured.
Lanterns in hand, they walked down to the boulevard and then followed it as it curved through the ne
ighborhood. The lawns rose sharply, lifting the houses above the sidewalks. During the spring and summer a row of trees shaded the sidewalks and street on either side. Now they were lonely coatracks, broken umbrellas spread against the sky. The air was still and warm enough that Celia didn’t shiver in her coat, and she was enraptured by the poetry of the surroundings and the procession.
“Is it all right if there’s no music? We always have music,” Marco said.
“Every once in a while the best soundtrack is silence,” Brenden replied, taking Marco’s free hand in his.
Celia agreed. They walked farther, in love with the night, the moonlight, the silence, and their solidarity. She linked arms with Regine, thinking this was an ideal moment she would remember—maybe one she even would try to re-create—a moment she never wanted to end.
At the end of the boulevard they reached an empty old mansion surrounded by a small park, bordered by a grove of pines. The evergreens blotted out the streetlights and held the moon back. Now and then a car could be heard shushing along the road beyond the trees. Liz opened a thermos and passed around cups of cranberry tea.
“What shall we toast?” Ivo asked. He looked at Celia.
“To the Rosary, who added me to their string, and knew what I needed before I knew it myself,” Celia said.
Regine said, “To the new year, and all it will bring.”
Marco said, “To friendships. Each one is unique, but all of them are the same.”
Brenden said, “To growing up, but always remembering what it feels like to be a child.”
Liz said, “To us, and making the most of every opportunity we have.”
Ivo finished: “To right now. Everything that is ahead of us, everything that is behind us—all we really have is right now.”
They held up their cups and then drank, and Celia thought she tasted the luminous night air that surrounded them with a thin fog. They might have been standing in a watercolor painting. She imagined the way she might draw the scene: the cluster of the six of them, with lanterns held at various heights, and their dark clothes as different depths of shadow and shade. Around them the looming trees, and above them the glowing moon.
“What are you thinking?” Regine asked her.
“About how I got here, and how I never would have guessed I would be here,” Celia said. “I don’t think I could have imagined this, but somehow it’s happened.”
“Sometimes the world stands on its head, just to remind us it can,” Liz said. “And we realize what we thought was right side up could just as easily be upside down.”
“It’s true.” Celia held up her lantern, and the rest of them followed her example, so they could look around their circle at each other, smiling quietly.
15. STRANGE TIMES
OVERNIGHT BEFORE THE FIRST day of the second semester, a snow squall blew through the area. But the roads were cleared by morning, so the Rosary’s cars threaded their way to Suburban. As Celia picked her way over the heavily salted patches of ice in the parking lot with her friends, she hoped the second half of the year would bring a fresh start. She didn’t know how that could come true. There was no reason for the curse day accidents, and all the superstitious and cruel things that went along with them, to stop. But she remembered how alive she had felt on First Night, and it made her optimistic.
“The ice is bad enough, but all this salt is like walking on ball bearings,” Marco said, slowing down to cross a treacherous part of the walk. As if on cue, ahead of them a girl threw her arms in the air as first one foot and then the other slipped out from under her. She came down on her back, her head cracking against the icy pavement and snapping sharply up. She lay still for a moment before she struggled to her knees.
The Rosary stopped, but Celia ran forward and took the girl’s arm. “Are you okay?”
“Why didn’t they cancel school?” the girl said. She was crying a little, but mostly she looked dazed. Celia tried to brush snow and salt off the back of the girl’s coat.
“It looked like you hit your head pretty hard,” Celia said. The girl’s pupils were dilated. “I think you might have a concussion.”
“What does that feel like?” the girl said, before turning away and throwing up.
Celia held the girl’s arm and looked around. The Rosary had stayed where they were, and it angered Celia. Meanwhile, a boy in an orange cap and scarf was making his way to her. He reached them as the poor girl straightened up.
“I think she has a concussion,” Celia told Skip.
“Is your birthday tomorrow?” Skip asked the girl, who nodded. He looked at Celia. “Why do you and I seem to be around all the time when these things happen?” Skip asked, taking the girl’s other arm.
I was going to ask you the same thing, Celia thought.
WITH THAT, THE FRESH START promised by the holiday break was swept aside. Once again the school was a morass of anxiety, bizarre speculations about virginity, and predatory propositions. But by midday, new information had traveled through the student body: three sophomore girls had celebrated their sixteenth birthdays over the winter break, and while all of them were admittedly virgins, none of them reportedly had suffered anything on their supposed curse day. "Why didn't anyone notice before that the bad things only happen at school?" Liz asked. "Celia, do us all a favor and stay home on the day before your birthday."
Celia was happy to agree, but Mariette was unconvinced when they discussed it later that afternoon. “This is what I know,” she told Celia. “You remember, the admonition says the Unkind has until the lunar eclipse to kill a girl and collect her dying breath, and the next lunar eclipse isn’t until the beginning of June. So whoever it is definitely is going to want to succeed before then. So far the girls have been coming to school, but if they start staying away, the Unkind might start going to them and hurting them elsewhere. And that makes it a lot harder for me to protect them, if I’m actually protecting them at all.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“And I still have no idea who the Unkind is. How old is Ivo?”
“Seventeen, I think? His birthday is in the summer. He must be seventeen. You still think the seventeen warning in your admonition is about the Unkind person?”
Mariette nodded. “I know Ivo’s your friend, but I can’t help wondering about him. I’m sure it’s nothing. He would have figured out what I was doing to his memory if he were Unkind.”
“Well, you didn’t get all of his memory,” Celia said. “He forgot you completely, but he still remembers the admonition, so now he just suspects me.”
“Oh really?” Mariette was distressed. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Was what you did to him an experiment, or did you know what you were doing?”
“Kind of. I was pretty sure . . .” Mariette was quiet for a moment. “What could he do, though? You took the admonition out of your sketchbook. It’s just his word against yours.”
“Yes,” Celia sighed. “He just looks at me strangely.”
TOMASI DIDN'T SHOW UP AT Diaboliques on the first Fridayin January, and considering the way their date had ended, Celia wasn't really surprised. She never had mentioned her lovely, terrible reunion with him to the others. Her life had divided into separate compartments: she had the Rosary, and Mariette, and her fleeting experiences with Tomasi, and more and more they were becoming mutually exclusive. If anything, the close call with Ivo made it clear they had to remain that way. She never had been in such a situation before. She'd never known any secrets to keep. At Diaboliques that Friday she still looked across the room a few times, trying to will Tomasi into attendance, but for the first time it seemed really futile.
She waited for a song she knew everyone in the Rosary loved. Soon enough, Patrick played “Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven,” and while Celia wanted to dance, instead she told Regine she was going to the bathroom. Regine nodded, hurrying onto the dance floor with the others.
Celia went down to the mezzanine as quickly as she
could and stared around in the darkness until she found the red-haired fortuneteller, who looked up at Celia as though she was expected. Celia sat down, but before she could say anything, the woman brought her lips to Celia’s ear.
“I will tell you something I rarely tell anyone, but I think you will come to understand it. One of the biggest responsibilities of having secret knowledge about other people is being able to judge when it is right to tell them and when it is better to keep it from them. Maybe they aren’t ready to hear it. Maybe they need to find out on their own. Maybe they would misuse the information. Maybe what you know is only part of the story, and it will only confuse them. There are so many possibilities.
“I know you have questions. I know you are prepared to beg me to answer them. But I don’t think it’s right. Not now.”
Celia asked anyway. “Is Tomasi okay?”
The woman looked at her, and Celia couldn’t tell if she was irritated or sympathetic. “He is as okay as someone in his position can be. For every time you think of him, he has thought of you twice.”
Celia began to ask another question, but the woman gave a barely perceptible shake of her head, and Celia relented.
ON A BLEAK WEDNESDAY CELIA sat at lunch with Regine and Brenden, but all of them were lost in their own thoughts. January seemed to be creeping by, and the cold weather made the spring semester feel like it would last forever. It was a good thing the Rosary had enjoyed First Night together, because now everyone seemed to be preoccupied—with college, with passing Chem II, with the anticipation of a long-distance relationship. Celia couldn't pretend she wasn't preoccupied, too. Even though she didn't expect to see Tomasi at Diaboliques, she was not about to let go of her longing for him. She had had her first kiss, and it had been fantastic, at least until his father had interrupted them. That had changed everything. Now Tomasi was no longer the mysterious guy she might get to know someday. He was the one. Celia could not allow him to slip away now as easily as she had that fall. It made her crazy every time she thought about it, which was hourly.
The Suburban Strange Page 17
