The Year of Shadows

by Claire Legrand

  “Oh, yeah? And what do you know about family problems, Mr. Perfect?”

  Henry got this weird look on his face, but he didn’t get a chance to answer. The orchestra started playing Tchaik 4—those big opening notes in the French horns and trumpets that sound like the end of the world. And because I was a conductor’s daughter, my brain recited to itself, automatically: This is the Fate theme.

  Fate: when things happen to you that you can’t control, also known as “destiny.” Fate happens, and you deal with it the best you can.

  The cat hissed at something behind me. The sound of it—and the sudden rush of cold around me—threw chills across my skin.

  Behind me, the heavy metal door that led to the basement started rattling on its hinges, like someone was on the other side, trying to break it down.

  KEPLER NEVER LEAVES the basement unlocked,” Henry whispered.

  Old Kepler was the cleaning guy, and Henry was right—Kepler never left it unlocked. He was obsessed with security. “Don’t want no hooligans down there,” he’d grumble. Like there was something in the basement worth stealing.

  But someone was down there now. Uneven steps stomped up the basement stairs. Dark shapes curled out from behind the door—along the sides, along the bottom. Long, thin, shadowy shapes.

  Like fingers.

  The cat clawed his way out of my arms and bolted away, yowling like crazy.

  The basement door blew open, slamming into the wall. Arctic cold rushed out, nearly blowing us over. Then a second gust of icy air barreled past us from behind, hitting my arm and Henry’s leg. That one did blow us over. My head thudded against the floor, knocking my teeth together. I looked up just in time to see a long, thin black shape seep into the darkness of the basement stairs.

  Hovering there on the threshold, a dark shadow roiled. It wasn’t an ordinary shadow, though. It looked heavy, solid, real. And it was shaped like a human—but a deformed human with a too-long neck and too-long limbs, shifting like a black puddle from one shape to the next.

  “Olivia?” Henry tugged on my sleeve.

  “No sudden movements, Henry,” I said, my eyes fixed on the shadowy figure. More than anything, I wanted to draw it. But I’d have to get out of there alive first, and the feeling seeping off the shadow, like poison, was not good. It was wrong, it was evil. “Just back up, slowly.”

  “No, Olivia, look.”

  I turned around, and I saw the gray man.

  He stood behind us. Drifted behind us. He had legs and feet, but they looked like you could blow them away with a good sneeze. He didn’t have much of a face—a shimmering mass of gray smoke, shifting into shape after shape after shape—a long nose, then a bulbous nose, then no nose at all. His eyes were black, swirling holes the size of saucers. His mouth gaped open wide as a dinner plate, but he had no teeth, just a bottomless pit between his lips.

  I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. It was exactly like what happens in nightmares.

  And it got worse.

  The gray man rushed right at us. He reached us in the blink of an eye, jerking forward like an old movie with bad film.

  Then he was rushing right through us.

  It shouldn’t have been possible, but I felt the gray man oozing through us like a wintry breeze, except this breeze somehow got into my skin, my blood, my bones. I couldn’t breathe.

  I reached for Henry. He was doing the same thing, grabbing at me like he was drowning.

  And the gray man wasn’t alone.

  More gray, smoky shapes rushed to join him. Three more, to be precise. As each one passed through us—like we were nothing, like they were nothing—I struggled not to pass out from the cold that squeezed my insides.

  Together, Henry and I stumbled away, trying to run, before I realized the gray shapes were herding us toward the basement. Toward that shadow thing with its pointy black fingers. The shadow shrank back as we approached it. Then, it shrieked.

  “What is it?” Henry clapped his hands to his ears.

  I couldn’t answer, watching the shadow shrink back down the basement stairs, in full retreat. Its awful screams wedged beneath my fingernails, in my teeth, shaking me to the core.

  The basement door slammed shut.

  Silence, except for the orchestra playing.

  The shadow was gone.

  The four gray figures, suddenly alone, flitted away like scared rabbits—one into the ceiling, two through the wall, and one—the original gray man—sinking through the floor. Right before he disappeared, he winked at me.

  Henry and I jumped to our feet and ran, shoving each other to go faster. Soon we were outside, tearing down the wide gray steps that led from the Hall down to Arlington Avenue, and then we were almost getting run over by a cab.

  The wail of its horn brought us to a halt. The wind of its passing tires shot goosebumps up my arms. Suddenly, we stood in sunlight and skyscrapers. The spice of a nearby food cart stung my eyes.

  “Watch it!” the cab driver shouted out his open window.

  Henry put his hands on his knees, catching his breath. “What was that?”

  I smoothed my fingers over my arms. Little red lines marked my skin from where the cat had clawed me. Then I felt something weird, a rough patch of skin. I turned my arm over and saw the black spot.

  Right where the cold thing had slammed into me, knocking me to the ground, a splotchy black mark glittered in the sunlight. It almost looked like a burn, dark as that shadow by the basement.

  “What the . . .” Henry inspected a similar black spot on his right calf. “Olivia, what is this?”

  I probed the burn mark with one finger. It sizzled, colder than ice against my fingertip, the skin rough and scratchy.

  “Olivia?”

  Henry watched me expectantly. A new light shone in his eyes that I didn’t like. I recognized that look. A few brave souls last spring, mostly new kids, had sometimes approached me in the cafeteria with that look in their eyes. They would think, “Could this be a new friend?”

  One look from me was usually enough to dispel them for good.

  Shadows, after all, don’t have friends.

  Especially not friends like Perfect Henry Page.

  I gathered myself and drew down the shades. That’s what I called it when I hardened everything about me from my eyes to the way I was standing, so people would leave me be. It’s like when you draw down the shades of your window to keep out all the sunlight.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said to Henry.

  “Are you kidding me? We just saw—”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t see anything.” Then I walked backstage alone. Henry didn’t follow me. Maybe he was too scared to come back inside.

  But he was right: We had seen something. For the rest of the day, I caught myself drumming my fingers against the burn. It stung when I touched it, but I couldn’t stop messing with it, like when you just have to keep wiggling a loose tooth even though it makes your gums sore.

  Something had left its mark on both me and Henry. And another something had saved us from whatever lay beyond the basement door.

  I didn’t know what this meant, but my sketching hand itched to find out. My head swam with images of shadow fingers and gaping black mouths.

  What had happened? What had we seen?

  One word kept whispering through my head as a possible answer:

  Ghosts.

  I DIDN’T SLEEP much that night. The next morning I’d have to go back to school, and I wasn’t sure which was scarier to think about: school, or the ghosts.

  Every time a sound rustled through the cracked door of my bedroom, or Nonnie shifted in her bed, I sat up, listening hard.

  I kept seeing those shadow fingers curling out from underneath the basement door. The feeling of those gray, foggy shapes rushing through me lingered all through the night. I couldn’t stop shivering. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mom—what she would think, how she’d make me feel better.

 
; I couldn’t stop peeking at the burn on my arm either.

  After a while, I got tired of tossing and turning, so I took a few deep breaths and headed into the kitchen. Underneath the flickering fluorescent light, I examined my burn.

  Yes, there it was, glittering again. It caught the overhead light like I had a million tiny prisms embedded in my skin.

  “Beautiful,” I whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Olivia?”

  I jumped, stubbing my toe on the sink. The Maestro stood just past the light, rubbing his eyes.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “What are you doing up?”

  “Nothing.” I shifted my burned arm behind me. “Getting some water.”

  “Are you—?” He cleared his throat, slicked down his hair. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “My life’s a bad dream.”

  Then I stalked past him back to my room. He didn’t follow me.

  I grabbed my umbrella from under my bed and tucked it into the sheets with me. If ghosts did come after me, it probably wouldn’t do much good. But it made me feel better to have it, to hold it tight and pretend like it made me safer.

  Sometimes you have to lie to yourself like that. Sometimes that’s how you get through things.

  The next day, when I woke up, the cat had returned.

  He was cleaning himself, perched on the metal foot-rail of my cot much more gracefully than such a large cat should have been able to perch. I stared at him, too afraid to move because then he might disappear again. My heart still pounded from the night of strange dreams I’d had—dreams of gray shapes and black shadows and terrible shrieks.

  Dreams of ghosts.

  Don’t think this means anything, said the cat’s bored expression. I’m keeping you around as a curiosity, pet. This isn’t romantic.

  “Don’t go.” I stretched my hand out one slow inch at a time. “Don’t go, you weird cat. Please?”

  The cat’s whiskers twitched. Of course I’m not going anywhere. If I were going anywhere, why would I have come here in the first place? He sat down after circling once to inspect the area, then blinked at me. Idiot.

  I smiled.

  “Is a strange name, ‘Weird Cat’,” said Nonnie, from across the room. She sat up in bed, swaying, like someone was playing a waltz only for her. “Is that his name? Gatto, gatto.”

  “Put your scarf on, Nonnie.” I didn’t like seeing Nonnie like that, without some kind of scarf on her naked head.

  “Which scarf?”

  “The yellow one with the blue polka dots.”

  “Oh, I like that one, Olivia!”

  “I know.”

  “So, is that his name, ombralina? Weird Cat?”

  I pulled on my boots to go use the bathroom. I had these scuffed black army boots I wore everywhere, and we couldn’t trust the plumbing in this place. “I don’t think so. That’s kind of quirky, but it’s not him.”

  “Igor.”

  “What?”

  Nonnie smiled at me. Her eyes nearly disappeared in wrinkles. “His name. Igor.”

  “Igor?”

  “Like Stravinsky!”

  I made a face. “I am not naming him after a composer, Nonnie.”

  Nonnie clasped her hands under her chin. “I love Stravinsky! Molte bene!” Then she started to hum the trumpet solo from Petrushka.

  I scowled. It was difficult to argue with Nonnie when she looked so happy. Plus, Stravinsky wasn’t the absolute worst or anything. His music was odd and sometimes disturbing. I wondered if he had been a “little shadow” when he was a kid too.

  “Fine.” I sighed. “If you really think so.”

  The cat jumped down next to me, butting his head against my boot. Well? Are we going to brave the plumbing together or aren’t we?

  “Igor, Igor!” Nonnie cried, throwing up her hands.

  And so, his name was Igor.

  I walked to school alone, getting more nauseated with every step.

  School wasn’t always so bad. It used to just be school, with homework and people messing around in the halls and passing notes in class. I always decorated my notes with elaborate drawings and folded them into origami shapes, like Mom had taught me. Once, when Mr. Fitch had caught me passing a note, he’d taken it up and asked to see me after class.

  “If I catch you doing this again, Olivia, I’ll have to give you detention,” he had said. “You need to pay attention. You need to take notes. Sixth grade is a big year, an important year. Do you understand?”

  Every year was an important year, according to every teacher I’d ever had. It got exhausting after a while. “Yeah. I get it. I’m sorry.”

  Then he had sighed and turned the origami swan over and over in his hands. It had swirls and stars and forests all over it, like a quilt of sketches. “But this is quite beautiful, Olivia.” He had handed the swan to me and smiled. “You should do something with that. You really should.”

  But now? Since Mom left? I think I became a shadow at school more than anywhere else.

  People just didn’t get me anymore. That’s how I wanted it to be. I’d made it happen, in fact. It was embarrassing to be the girl whose Mom left her without even a good-bye. So I’d done my best to turn invisible. Like a sketch of me with my mouth sewn shut and my face scribbled over. That’s what I had created. No hot, bubbly feelings spilling out. No humiliating family secrets blurted out by mistake. No random screaming fits. I felt like doing that a lot—just throwing my head up to the sky and letting a scream rip out.

  But people generally don’t approve of random screaming fits, even when they might be perfectly justified.

  I even looked like a shadow. Short, skinny half-Italian girl with long black hair. Wearing my favorite striped socks (which I wore with everything) and my boots (ditto), whatever faded clothes I had left (I’d thrown out all the bright colors, keeping only the darks and the blacks), or whatever I found at the charity store. Shabby old jacket. Hair covering my eyes. Head buried in a sketchpad.

  And now one of Nonnie’s scarves tied around my arm to hide my burn.

  I used to have friends. Not real friends, I guess, but the kind you sit with at lunch and sometimes have sleepovers with, the kind you pass notes to in class.

  But friends don’t stick around if you don’t talk to them. Not even halfway friends do that. Some of them tried for a while: “Hi, Olivia. How’d you do on the test?” “Olivia! Can you do one of those pen tattoos on my arm?” “Olivia? Are you okay? I heard about your mom.”

  At first, I gave them one- or two-word answers. Then I stopped giving them any answers at all.

  Before long, I sat by myself at lunch. I sat by myself in class, even though I was surrounded by twenty other kids. I was by myself everywhere. It was easier that way.

  My sketchpad was a better friend than anyone else could be, anyway. As I turned off Gable Street and passed through the concrete courtyard of James S. Killough Intermediate School, I held my sketchpad tightly to my chest.

  Like a shield.

  For a few days, everything went just like it was supposed to. I went to school. Class. Lunch. I watched for Henry and went the other way whenever I saw that bright red hair. I kept my head down and scribbled notes as much as I needed to so my teachers wouldn’t get suspicious. I went to The Happy Place after school and wiped tables and washed dishes. And the rest of the time, I drew.

  Mostly, I drew ghosts.

  I looked everywhere for them, every night—in the restrooms, in the rooms backstage, underneath every row of seats.

  Nothing. Not one shadow finger, not one gray foot.

  The picture I had of them in my head was pretty fuzzy, so I kept drawing them over and over, trying to capture the memory of them on the page. It wasn’t working very well; it’s harder than you might think to draw just the right amount of transparency, of driftiness. And those black eyes of theirs—I couldn’t quite get them black enough.

  But, ghosts or no, my burn stayed the same, dark a
nd glittering.

  Henry didn’t talk to me for a whole week, although I always felt him watching me with this thoughtful look on his face, like I was his homework and he had to figure me out. The Maestro and the office staff, they all let him hang out at the Hall even when he wasn’t working. He’d camp out in the middle of the floor seats and do his algebra problems like it was his living room couch or something.

  The dork.

  Then, the Thursday of the second week of school, Mark Everett decided I’d had enough time to myself, I guess, and started hollering at me across the cafeteria. Mark Everett was one of those boys who probably picked at scabs till they got infected. He just couldn’t leave people alone.

  “Hey, what’s the deal, Olivia?” He was sitting a few tables away from me. Henry’s table. “Why so gloooomy, Olivia? Why so sad?”

  The boys at the table laughed, except for Henry. He just kept chewing his sandwich. Heads all across the cafeteria turned to see what was happening.

  “You going to a funeral or something, Olivia? Why you gotta wear so much black, Emoooolivia? Get it?”

  Mark was truly cracking himself up over there. I sat at my table, alone, and started drawing. I wasn’t so hungry anymore.

  A noise across from me made me look up. It was Joan Dawson. We’d gone to school together since kindergarten, but we’d never really talked or anything. All I knew was that Joan’s family was rich, and that she liked to make signs and hold one-woman protests in the courtyard outside. You know, antiwar stuff and antifascism stuff, things like that. The teachers called her precocious. And sometimes, when they thought no one was listening, obnoxious.

  Joan was usually by herself too. But she didn’t seem to care. I tried not to care, but every now and then I could feel it creeping up on me, sending this awful, sinking, lonely feeling into the pit of my stomach.

  “You shouldn’t listen to them, you know,” Joan said. She tossed her shiny brown hair like the way people do in magazines. Joan would have probably been popular, if she’d cared about things like that. “They’re plebeian.”