Shade

by Jeri Smith-Ready

Zachary checked his watch. “We’re on time,” he whispered. “Where is she?”

  “If by ‘she,’ you mean me”—a head popped up from behind the book fort—“I’m right here.”

  I almost jumped at the sight of the … professor? She looked only a little older than her teenage picture, and if she weren’t slightly shorter than my five-foot-two, I would’ve believed she was a model. Her blond hair fell in waves to her waist. I’d never seen curly hair so long, and I wondered if it was a weave. But it moved like real hair, and she wore hardly any makeup—not that she needed it—so she seemed like a genuinely, obscenely, nature-is-so-unfair-ly gorgeous woman.

  Beside me, Zachary stood with his mouth half-open. “Er … ah … ,” he said, like he was having his tonsils checked.

  I stepped forward. “I’m Aura. We talked on the phone? And this is my new partner, Zachary Moore. Mrs. Richards assigned him to help me.”

  “Lovely.” Like her hair, Dr. Harris’s voice reminded me of liquid gold, warm and soft and heavy. “Call me Eowyn.” She held out her hands, one to each of us. I shook the right one, since it was closer to me.

  Zachary awkwardly shook her left hand with his left. “Eowyn? Like the character from Lord of the Rings?”

  Her head pitched back as she laughed. “My parents were huge Tolkien fans.” She did look kind of like the lady from the movies. “It could’ve been worse,” Eowyn said to me. “If I’d been a boy, they would’ve named me Gandalf.”

  I tried to return her smile, but apparently wasn’t successful.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked me, the corners of her deep blue eyes crinkling with concern.

  I shook my head, then nodded. “Nothing to do with the project.”

  “But you are the project.” Her smile widened. “By that I mean, you and your partner will pour yourselves into the work, and what comes out will reflect your personalities.” She glanced between us, almost slyly. “Which I sense are very similar. Your stars may be closely aligned.”

  Please don’t let her talk about astrology. This whole setup was weird enough without Zachary knowing we were born only a minute apart. And if he knew already, I didn’t want him to know I knew he knew.

  “How do we start, then?” Zachary asked.

  “The way every fortunate endeavor begins.” She unfurled her hand to gesture behind us. “With tea.”

  A small, low table was set up in the corner of her office. Two white mugs sat next to a teapot the blue of a twilit sky.

  “Sit,” she said. “I’ll grab an extra mug from the cabinet here.”

  Zachary and I maneuvered around another stack of books, then stopped next to the two oblong cushions, placed on either side of the table.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’ll take the floor.”

  “No, you won’t.” Eowyn glided over with the third mug. “You two will be putting your heads together a lot this year. It won’t kill you to put your butts together now.”

  If I weren’t so numb, I might’ve laughed, or at least blushed. But I just wanted to start this meeting so I could get some answers, then end it so I could be alone again. Faking okay-ness was exhausting me.

  Zachary and I sat with a few inches between our bodies, on a sagging cushion that wanted to tumble us together. Eowyn lowered herself onto the cushion across from us, using a graceful, no-handed move that screamed of daily yoga practice. She placed the plain white mugs in a row on the table. “Choose one.”

  They all looked the same, but clearly this was some kind of test, judging by the gleam in her eye.

  I chose the one on the left, in front of Zachary, and he chose the one that had been in the middle. For some reason it occurred to me that Logan would’ve reached for the one on the right, because it was the farthest away. I rubbed the achy spot on my chest.

  Eowyn poured the tea, and I noticed she was wearing an obsidian ring in an oval setting. “Now watch.”

  Zachary returned my skeptical glance. Was she going to read our tea leaves? What did this have to do with ancient astronomy?

  Slowly a picture began to appear on the side of each mug, broad red strokes on the white background.

  “These are ogham letters, Irish runes. The designs are activated by the hot liquid,” she said. “Ooh, I got ur, or heather, which signifies healing. Zachary, you have duir, the oak. That usually means strength. And Aura has quert.”

  I picked up my mug and examined the rune. It consisted of a straight vertical line and four short horizontal ones. It sort of looked like a toothbrush. “What’s quert?”

  “Quert is apple.” Her eyes softened. “For love.”

  I froze. My hands tightened on the mug, though I wanted to hurl it against the wall and watch it shatter into a thousand pieces of deceitful white ceramic.

  Zachary held up a finger. “Could I trouble you for some sugar?”

  “Of course.” Eowyn sprang to her feet. “Be right back.” She slipped out of the office.

  “Give me that,” Zachary said in a low voice. He gently pried my fingers off the Love mug and took it from me. He replaced it with his Strength. “Just breathe.”

  I tried, but my lungs kept wanting to hitch into a sob. Desperate, I took a sip of the hot tea. It was bitter and sort of smoky. My next breath was almost normal.

  “Here you go!” Eowyn swept back into the room, her blue gypsy skirt brushing her ankles. She tossed some sugar packets and a pair of plastic stirrers onto the shiny wooden table.

  I unzipped my book bag. “I’ve made a lot of notes since the last time we e-mailed. I want to focus on—”

  “Let’s begin at the beginning.” Eowyn sat down. “Crazy concept, huh? Tell me, have you always lived in the city?”

  I nodded. “Why?”

  “What about you?” she asked Zachary.

  “I’ve lived all over.” Covering the Love symbol on his mug, he stirred his tea, though he hadn’t touched the sugar packets.

  “So you’re intimately acquainted with the night sky, and you can teach Aura. Not too much, though—she needs to learn on her own.”

  “Learn what?” I asked her.

  Eowyn reached behind her and brought forward a large black vinyl portfolio, held shut with a red velvet tie. She undid the tie and unfolded the portfolio twice to make a three-by-three-foot square. Several gray sheets of paper were clipped to the inside.

  “For your star maps.” Her voice came from behind the portfolio. “Nine sheets. One per month between now and June. Ideally I’d like to see a full year, but this’ll do.”

  I pointed to the ceiling, though Eowyn couldn’t see me. “I already know the constellations.”

  “From real life or from books?”

  I thought of my mother’s photos. “What does this have to do with megaliths?”

  “You need to understand.” She folded the portfolio, then gave it to Zachary. “Think. How does a society organize itself, make decisions, have progress? By people getting together. How do they know when to get together? They use clocks and calendars. But what if there were no clocks and calendars? You’d have chaos.”

  She took a long sip of tea, holding the mug in both hands like a little kid. “The stars and moon and planets give us order. Except for comets and supernovae, we can count on the sky to look exactly the way we predict. Isn’t that comforting?”

  “Uh-huh.” I didn’t dare disagree with her sharp gaze. Surely this was leading somewhere.

  She pointed to the Stonehenge poster tacked to her bookshelf. “The people who built the things you want to study? They were trying to make sense out of life and death.”

  I stared into my tea. Yeah, good luck with that.

  Eowyn spoke softly. “I think that’s what we’re all looking for, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, but kept my head down, letting my hair droop forward in a veil.

  “So.” The professor’s voice brightened. “To understand the ancient astronomers, you need to be in their place, at least one night a month.”

  “Where?
” Zachary asked. “We can’t see many stars from our neighborhood.”

  “Don’t worry, I have a connection.” She rose again and went to her desk. I pulled my sleeve down over my knuckles so I could wipe my eyes.

  Eowyn continued. “A friend of mine has a farm up near the state line, where the sky is much darker.” She brought me a white linen business card, which was one of hers but had another name and number scrawled on the back.

  I pocketed the card. “Do you know if there are a lot of ghosts there?”

  “Hmm.” Eowyn fidgeted with her obsidian ring. “You can ask Frank when you call. It’s always been farmland, so probably not.”

  “I’ll deal.” I tried not to sound bitter. “I see them every night. Besides, who ever heard of an astronomer afraid of the dark?”

  Eowyn raised her hand. “Me, for starters.” She gave a nervous laugh. “So bring your first star chart when we meet again next month. It doesn’t have to be perfect—in fact, if it’s perfect, I’ll know you copied it from a book. Just do your best.”

  I sat for a moment before realizing we’d been dismissed. “That’s it? What about my research—I mean, our research?”

  “We have all year for that.” Eowyn squatted beside me like I was a kindergartner. “Here’s something to remember. When you look at very faint stars, you’ll notice that they often appear brighter from the corner of your eye. Averted vision, we call it.”

  “Okay,” I said, for lack of a better response.

  “Same with the answers you seek,” she said. “You won’t find them by staring until your eyes fall out. They’ll come when you’re looking at something else.” She laid a soft hand upon my shoulder. “But they will come.”

  On the way home, Zachary and I didn’t speak much. He used an app on his phone to check the weather forecast for the week, and we decided to head up to Farmer Frank’s field on Thursday night, since it was predicted to be a clear night with a new moon.

  I wasn’t even sure I would survive that long. There was Logan’s viewing tomorrow night, then the funeral two days later—not to mention school and the scrutiny that would come with it.

  Instead of double-parking in front of his apartment building, I pulled into a metered spot on the street. A fat white Chihuahua in a jack-o’-lantern sweater barked at my car, prompting the owner to pick it up and tuck it under her arm.

  “Thanks for the ride.” Zachary wrapped the strap of his book bag around his hand but made no move to get out. “Are you all right?” He shook his head and looked away. “Stupid question.”

  I watched the woman set down the wiggly dog about twenty feet away. It trotted along the sidewalk, pulling on its leash, then stopped abruptly to sniff a parking meter.

  “At school tomorrow,” I said, “you’re going to hear a lot of stuff about me. Most of it’s bullshit.”

  “I won’t believe a word. In fact, I’ll just give them blank looks and say—” He uttered a series of guttural Gaelic syllables. All I could make out was something that sounded like byorla.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t speak bloody English.”

  I almost laughed, but it came out as a cough. Then I looked down at the gearshift in park, and realized I didn’t want to go home and face Gina’s pity.

  “Do you want to know what really happened?” My voice squeaked at the end of the sentence. “It’s kind of a long story.”

  Zachary reached over and turned off the ignition. “I’ve got time.”

  Chapter Seven

  Monday morning I walked into a roomful of eyes.

  Or at least it felt that way as I placed my late slip on the corner of Mrs. Wheeler’s desk with a shaky hand. My peripheral vision was a big blur, but it looked like a wall of beetles, sitting in pairs.

  “Thank you, Aura,” my homeroom teacher said, whispering so as not to interrupt the sacred morning announcements on the PA. Maybe her eyes were kind, but I didn’t look at her.

  I’d worn my hair down, of course, the better to hide. Unfortunately, it also hid the end of Mrs. Wheeler’s cane poking out from under her desk.

  In my hurry to take a seat, I tripped over the cane and pitched forward. The floor rushed up, and only my flailing hands broke my fall. “Oufgh!”

  Dead silence. I wished everyone would laugh, point, call me names. Anything but sit and stare, like I was the one who belonged in a graveyard.

  “Aura, are you okay?” Mrs. Wheeler’s panicky voice made it sound like I’d had a stroke, not a moment of klutziness.

  “Fine.” I adjusted my glasses, hoping they didn’t look as crooked as they felt. “Can I have a bathroom pass?”

  Before she could respond, the bell clanged, signaling the end of homeroom.

  I was first to the door, smacking my book bag into the wall and knocking down a DMP recruitment poster taped there. Last week I would’ve been applauded for my accidental vandalism. Today there was silence.

  Megan was at my locker, leaning against it with forced casualness. We’d both begged to stay home from school, but her parents and Aunt Gina had decreed that going would help us cope.

  “Hey,” Megan said as I approached, her eyes slightly dazed. “How’s it going?” One side of her hair was yanked loose from her ponytail.

  A fresh scratch marred her cheek. I reached up to touch it. “How’d you get that?”

  “Huh?” She passed a hand over her face, then blanched at the thin streak of blood on her finger. “Oh! Um, my cat. Corrie’s having a bitch-kitty day.”

  “And she messed up your hair?”

  Just then a group of seniors passed by in a triangle spearheaded by the volleyball captain, Michele Lundquist, and her boyfriend, Steve Rayburn. The guys started meowing at Megan.

  As they walked away, cackling and hissing, Megan’s fair skin turned almost as red as her hair.

  Then she looked past me and shook her head quickly.

  I turned and saw Zachary halt a few feet away. “Oh. Hi.” He scratched the left side of his face, where he had the beginnings of a bruise.

  “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked.

  “Aura!”

  Amy Koeller pushed past a group of cheerleaders, her long blond hair tangling with her backpack strap.

  “I’m so sorry about Logan. That royally sucks.” She hugged me, for the first time ever. “And, oh my God, if I knew those people online were going to be so mean, I never would’ve mentioned it. I am so incredibly sorry.”

  I gaped up at her. “How did you know I knew?”

  She straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin, like she was on the witness stand. “Your friends had a little incident.”

  “Ha!” Megan exploded. “Nate and Lauren were talking shit about you, Aura, in the courtyard before school.” She pointed behind her. “Then their douche bag friends joined in, so I told them to go screw themselves—”

  “And then Lauren hit Megan.” Amy’s eyes got big. “I bet it was her class ring that made that cut.”

  “That’s when he showed up.” Megan raised her fist to Zachary. “Saved me from a serious ass-kicking.”

  He returned the brotherly gesture. “Actually, I think it was them I saved from you.”

  “Are you hurt?” I asked him.

  “Had a lot worse rows in my life. At least none of the teachers saw.”

  “I gotta run to English.” Amy squeezed my wrist. “Sorry again.”

  My battered friends flanked me as I opened my locker, snagging the sleeve of my ragged black hoodie on the latch.

  “You guys didn’t have to do that for me.” I tugged out my American lit book. “If you’d gotten caught, you could’ve been suspended.”

  “But we didn’t get caught,” said Megan. “Hey, you know who was too chickenshit to stand up for you? Brian Knox. He was supposed to be Logan’s friend, but he just stood there.”

  My memory flashed back to that odd almost-fight between Brian and Logan the night of the party.

  Zachary che
cked his watch as the hallway started to empty, and I recalled his remark about hating being late. “Which one was Brian?” he asked Megan.

  “About your height, sandy hair, always wears that stupid backward white baseball cap. Sorta beefy, like a wrestler, but that’s mostly his beer gut.” Megan lowered her voice. “He has a major problem. They all partied, but sometimes Brian would get wasted before a gig. Mickey and Logan were about to kick him out of the band.”

  “I didn’t know that.” I struggled to cram the book into my bag. “When did that happen?”

  “Last week. But then those label guys called, and it was too late to get a new drummer.”

  “Logan didn’t tell me.” I guess we’d been too busy fighting about our own issues at the time. Regret stabbed at the tender place where my last ribs met, and it was all I could do to stand up straight.

  “Hmm.” Megan pinched her bottom lip as she thought. “I wonder if Brian was the one who started those rumors. None of the people talking online were actually at the party.”

  “I’ll find out,” Zachary said matter-of-factly, like it was already done.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry.” His gaze flitted over the students as they hurried into the classrooms before the bell rang. “I have ways.”

  My aunt put her hand on mine as we pulled into a parking space at the McConnell Funeral Home Monday evening. “Ready?”

  A blur of violet ghosts shifted and pulsed in front of the wide white building on North Avenue. At least it was totally BlackBoxed so these spirits couldn’t follow us inside. They must have all mourned someone here while they were alive. As long as none of them were too “shady,” I’d make it to the door without falling over or throwing up.

  “Let’s hurry,” I said.

  I kept my head down as we waded through the sea of ghosts. My path contorted to avoid each one, even though I couldn’t physically bump into them. Aunt Gina didn’t comment. She was used to it.

  “Why won’t they let me in?” an old man asked, keeping pace with my long strides. “They have my wife.”

  “They have my wife,” shouted a young guy in a soldier’s uniform. “I’ve waited for her all these years. Why hasn’t she joined me?”