I sit next to her, cross my arms. “Maybe stupid traditions shouldn’t be carried on.”
Mom tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “If you’re feeling better by then, I hope you’ll go. The booster-club ladies are setting up a booth for me to sell my books.”
I sigh, remembering the boxes from her publisher that I picked up at the post office yesterday. “Okay, but I’d rather work on my darkroom today than go to the canyon.”
Yesterday, I hauled out the junk in the turret that the owners left there. The turret has a bathroom, which is perfect, since I need a sink and water to use for processing. And maybe I’ll feel closer to Henry there, if Mary Jane at the pharmacy knows what she’s talking about. My feelings about our resident ghost are all mixed up. The thought of Henry’s spirit hanging out here scares me a little, but I read another of his poems last night and I don’t care if he was a freak or not; he feels like the one person who understands me.
“Fine,” says Mom, “I’ll help you. What do we need to do?”
“Vacuum and paint the walls,” I tell her. “It’s so windy all the time that dust is all over the place up there. A speck of dirt can ruin the processing.”
“I saw some white paint in the garage. But we don’t have to do it. The handyman is coming back tomorrow to get started. I’ll tell him to add painting the turret to his list.”
“I don’t want to wait. I’d rather do it myself so it’ll be right.”
Mom smiles wryly. “Okay then, Miss Perfectionist. We’ll get to it after breakfast.” She kisses my forehead, then stands and starts toward the door. “I’m glad you’re taking pictures again. You should bring your camera along to the stadium tonight.”
At six o’clock, we drive into town to join the rest of Podunk at the football stadium. As our van moves down the redbrick streets, people on the sidewalks wave. “I don’t get it,” I say from the backseat. “They don’t even know us.”
“It’s called being neighborly,” explains Mom, her voice delighted. Grinning, she honks, then lifts her hand from the steering wheel to wave back at a couple I’m pretty sure she’s never met in her life. Papa Dan sits up front with Mom, waving, too.
“Mom…did you have to honk?” I slouch down in the seat behind my grandfather.
Mom turns a corner onto Sixth Street. “I think that’s your school up ahead.”
Cedar Canyon High is a two-story brown brick building that sits directly across the street from a trim row of old houses with postage-stamp yards and the biggest trees I’ve seen in this town. Wide cement steps on the school building lead up to two marble columns set between three arches. Each arch adorns a massive double door. Only the gargoyles are missing, I think. It’s that sort of place. Ancient and brooding beneath its rusty red-tiled roof. The building isn’t large, but it dominates the neighborhood, silently watching and listening, as it has for maybe a hundred years or more.
Papa mutters beneath his breath, and I say, “That’s it? It looks about the size of two hallways at my old school.”
Slowing the van to a crawl, Mom laughs. “It probably only has two hallways. Eloise told me they graduate around fifty seniors each year.”
“Fifty,” I whisper. “Pathetic. I wonder if Papa Dan went to school here?”
“I’m sure he did,” she says.
So I’ll walk the same halls that my grandfather did at my age, sit in the same classrooms, stare out the same windows. Which is sort of cool but also sort of freaky.
Mom speeds up. We pass the middle school a block down on the opposite side of the street, and directly across from it, the elementary school and the cafeteria that serves all twelve grades. At the end of the street, we circle back behind Cedar Canyon High, where three tennis courts are surrounded by a chain-link fence. Metal bleachers about eight seats tall are on one side of the courts, and the school parking lot is on the other.
The brick street ends, replaced by black pavement. Giant, bright orange paw prints appear on the lane. Sighing, I ask, “What are those?” I brace myself for the answer, since I’m pretty sure it’ll have something to do with some stupid small-town tradition.
“They’re bobcat paws!” Mom exclaims. “The school mascot. They must lead to the stadium. Isn’t that cute?”
I puff out my cheeks and refrain from answering that question as she follows the paws around another turn. A white water tower looms at the end of the road, with Bobcats painted across the top in giant black letters, and beyond it, tall stadium lights appear. We pass the tower and pull into a large parking lot scattered with cars and people.
“Here we are,” Mom declares, throwing the van into Park. When I climb out, the scent of freshly cut grass surrounds me along with echoing drumbeats and the blare of a marching band tune. After unloading Mom’s books from the back of the van, we start off toward the football field, following the trail of orange paw prints across the parking lot. I have my camera slung over my shoulder by the strap and it bangs against my side as we walk, comforting me in some weird way as we merge with the flow of bodies headed for the stadium entrance. People call “Hello” to us and “How are you?” Mom makes idle chitchat, but I only murmur “Hi,” and walk a little faster.
The football field opens up in front of us, a long stretch of green divided into grids by straight white lines. A curving red track with seven lanes surrounds the field, and it’s cluttered with makeshift booths—card tables filled with crafts, baked goods, glasses of lemonade, and other items for sale. At least fifty band members, dressed in their regular clothes, stand in rows, center field, warming up.
“The woman I spoke with on the phone said to look for her on the track directly beneath the press box,” Mom calls back to me. She leads Papa Dan in that direction, and I follow behind, watching the opposite sideline, where six female cheerleaders in short orange skirts practice backflips and cartwheels. Alison’s bouncing blond ponytail is hard to miss. I keep my gaze on her, wondering what it would’ve been like to grow up in a town like this. Do the kids here know there’s more to life than football? I seriously doubt it.
The band breaks into a familiar fight song, and like programmed robots, the cheerleaders’ pom-poms snap into position as they begin a dance routine. “Go, Cats! Fight, Cats! Win, Cats!” they yell, pumping their pom-poms into the air. Alison bumps her hip against the girl on her left, and I realize it’s Shanna beside her. No surprise. Fans whistle and clap, chanting along with the cheerleaders. The school mascot wears a cat suit, complete with a tail and claws. He runs up and down the sidelines, then pulls off the bobcat head to yell at someone in the bleachers. Rooster Boy. I groan out loud.
People of all ages laugh and talk on the bleachers, wander around the sidelines, and visit with one another at the booths. All so at ease, so familiar with one another. My stomach wobbles. How will I ever feel like I belong in this little town where everyone else seems to have known one another all of their lives? In the cities I’ve lived in before, the schools were full of unknowns—outcasts, or other transplants like me, just passing through.
“Millicent!” a shrill voice calls, and I turn to see a tall, skinny woman in jeans, a Bobcat T-shirt, and tennis shoes waving frantically at us from beside a card table. The table is decorated with black crepe paper that flutters in the breeze. “Millicent Moon!”
“Della?” Mom calls back.
She nods. “Della Shroeder. We spoke on the phone?”
“Oh, look what you’ve done!” Mom exclaims, guiding Papa Dan toward the grinning woman. I follow, mortified by what I see. A little boy and girl dressed in torn black clothing stand next to Della Shroeder. Their eyes are smudged black with makeup, and red lipstick is smeared on their faces to simulate blood. Mom sets her box on the table and says, “Well, hello, little zombies!” Della and Mom shake hands. “You’ve gone to so much trouble,” my mother says. “This is so creative. I love it!”
“No trouble at all,” says Della. Indicating the zombies, she says, “These are my twins, Lacy and Luke.”
Mom introduces Papa Dan and me, then settles my grandfather in one of two folding chairs on the opposite side of the card table. I open a box and begin setting books next to a bouquet of black and gray carnations as fast as I can, ready to go off on my own before anyone my age wanders by and sees the whole lame setup. After we finish arranging the display, I stack the empty boxes under the table, then catch Mom’s eye from where she stands talking to a group of ladies. I lift my camera, and she nods.
In the past few months, I’ve noticed that Papa Dan seems uncomfortable around large groups of people. But his foot taps to the band music now, and he appears content sitting with Mom and watching the activity on the field, so I climb the bleachers toward the press box. I pass Mr. Quattlebaum sitting with three other elderly men, eating orange sugar cookies and drinking lemonade from clear plastic cups. He tips his stained John Deere hat when I pass by, says, “Howdy-doody, young lady.” I say hi back and smile, and the other old men grin at me and call out greetings. One of them says my great-grandmother Piper used to babysit him, and he remembered “looking up” to Papa Dan, who was a teenager.
The upper third of the stands is empty. I make it to the press box and sit on the low cement wall alongside it, above the top bleacher bench. I can see everything—the band on the field, the cheerleaders and Rooster Boy on the opposite sideline, the townspeople milling about. When I look straight down and use my zoom, I see Mom and Papa Dan from behind. The gaudy black booth has attracted a small crowd. I recognize some of the group—stone-faced Mrs. Quattlebaum, Reagan from the grocery store, Della Shroeder and her zombie twins, J. B. the pharmacist and Mary Jane—who didn’t even contact me today about my pictures. I felt funny calling her on a Sunday, so I didn’t. The truth is, I was a little afraid of seeing the photos, anyway, so I put it off. I’m still afraid. Or more like freaked out, I guess. I’ll go by City Drug after school tomorrow, first thing, and pick them up. Might as well find out the truth about what I saw—or didn’t see—in that mulberry tree, one way or the other.
Aiming the camera randomly from the field to the sidelines to the bleachers across the way, I shoot pictures quickly—band members marching, Rooster Boy strutting, cheerleaders bumping and grinding. A father chasing a toddler away from the field; families cheering in the stands. I shift again to Mom’s booth. Sheriff Ray Don Dilworth is there now, too.
It’s only then that I tune in to an argument going on a few feet behind me, on the other side of the press box. Two male voices—one older, the other young. “We’ve already talked this to death,” the older man says. “Get your butt over to that grocery store and join your team. You’re suited up and ready to go. Now get out of here.”
“Dad, I—”
“Don’t argue with me, Tate. I thought we decided—”
“You decided. I just gave in, like always. I’m not you. I don’t want to play football this year. I want to—”
“Waste your time on a bunch of nonsense? Give up the sure bet of a football scholarship for the slim chance you might win a stupid contest?”
“It’s not a contest, Dad, it’s—”
“Do you want to go to college or don’t you?”
“If I win, it’ll help pay tuition.”
“If you win,” the father says with a dismissive huff.
“If Mom were here—”
“Well, she isn’t. I am. As long as you’re living under my roof, you listen to me.”
“Forget it,” the guy says in a clipped, defeated voice. After a long pause, he says, “It’s too late for me to catch the team, anyway. Here they come.”
A roaring cheer rises up from below me, and I glance down to see football players in uniform rushing onto the field, each one carrying a watermelon. “Ohmygosh,” I murmur. Some of the players haul the melon cupped in one arm as they run; others cradle it with both arms. A few show-offs shoulder the fruit, holding it in place with one hand.
The man behind the press box yells something at his son, but I can’t make out the words over the voice on the loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentleman…,” it booms, “the Cedar Canyon High School fighting Bobcats have arrived!” The band begins a rousing chorus of the school song. People in the stands and on the sidelines lift their hands above their heads along with the cheerleaders, moving their arms left to right with the music and singing. The players deposit their watermelons into a pile on the grass at the edge of the field.
I take shot after shot, moving quickly, but my mind is on the quarrel I overheard between the guy named Tate and his selfish father. Good for you, Tate, I think. Good for you for not giving in this time. For standing up for yourself.
The band plays a second song as the football players form a single line. The crowd claps to the beat of the music. The cheerleaders prance. Rooster Boy in his cat uniform pulls a small, round melon from the pile, then tries to drop-kick it toward the goal. The melon makes a short, sharp arc into the air before falling a few feet away from him and splattering onto the field, shooting red mush everywhere. Laughter erupts as he falls to the ground, grabbing his toe, and I catch myself laughing, too.
Seconds later, the band stops playing and moves to the end of the field. In the press box, the announcer begins introducing the varsity team members, and one by one they leave their line and run to the center of the stadium. “Number seventy-three, Blaine Carter, offensive guard. Number twenty-one, Dustin Blades, fullback. Number thirteen, Cody Riddlesborough, wide receiver. Number ten, Tate Hudson, quarterback.”
Tate Hudson. I pause, zoom in closer on the quarterback. The man I heard arguing behind the press box called his son “Tate.” The quarterback’s helmet is off, and I recognize the golden hair, the sharp-angled face—though the last time I saw him, he didn’t look so unhappy. Tate is the guy I met at the Longhorn Café our first night here. The one who was so nice to me at the salad bar. I snap his photograph, feeling bad for him and disappointed that he didn’t stand his ground, after all. But I understand. Lately, I feel powerless over what happens in my own life, too.
We’re pulling out of the stadium parking lot when Mom says, “Look in my purse, Tansy. The lady who works at the pharmacy gave me your pictures.”
“Mary Jane?” I take her purse when she hands it back between the seats.
“She apologized for not calling you earlier so that you could get them. Apparently she got in late yesterday, and she’s been busy today. It slipped her mind.”
I turn on the overhead light, find the photo envelope, and shuffle through pictures of our house, the land around it, Papa Dan at the windmill, until I find the one I want. The photo is in full color as it should be, since my camera was loaded with color film. Papa Dan peers up into the mulberry tree—not some boy dressed like he’s out of the past. And no phantom sits on the tree bough, either.
Switching off the light, I sit back in my seat. The fact that everything about the picture appears normal makes me queasy instead of relieved; weak in the knees, scattered, and unsteady. I tuck the photos into the envelope, confused and unsure what to think.
When we get home, I go straight to my room. Tossing the envelope onto my bed, I head for my closet, slide hangers across the metal bar, trying to push thoughts of the photograph out of my mind so I can decide what to wear to school in the morning. I don’t want to call too much attention to myself, though I’m pretty sure there’s no escaping it, no matter what I choose. I decide on my newest pair of jeans, a dark purple T-shirt, and my plaid Converse sneakers with the yellow laces. From an overhead shelf, I grab one of Papa Dan’s berets. Probably a big mistake, I know, but I can’t help myself. I didn’t wear a hat tonight, and I felt a little lost without it. I have to be me, and wearing my grandfather’s hat will be the next best thing to having him with me.
Satisfied, I hang the clothes on my closet door and put the beret on the dresser, wondering if Tate will like it as much as he did the fedora. Asking myself why I even care, I gather Henry’s treasures and the envelope of photographs and take t
hem up to the turret. Flipping on the overhead light, I stand in the middle of the room. The scent of fresh paint hangs heavy in the air. Mom and I made good progress up here today.
The turret has three windows: One overlooks the front yard; a second one, the back of the house, the storm cellar, and the field beyond; the third overlooks the mulberry tree and the Quattlebaum farm. I wonder if the old couple sees the glow from the window up here, if they’re freaked out over at their farmhouse, thinking Henry’s ghost is in the turret playing his violin.
I walk to the second window, sit on the sill, and place Henry’s treasures and the photo envelope beside me. Lifting the crystal, I turn it left then right, hoping the cut glass might catch the overhead light and scatter colored dots across the walls like it did in the cellar. When it doesn’t, I set it down and open the pocket watch. The hands are stopped at 12:22, the same time they showed when I first found the watch. Strange. I remember setting the timepiece to the correct time and winding it. I lay the watch on the sill alongside the crystal and the photographs.
My thoughts drift to school, to the Watermelon Run, to Tate and his father. I feel tugged one way and then another. I hate being alone, but why try to make friends when I’ll be leaving soon? Besides, the idea of trying to fit in with the kids here makes me sick to my stomach. They all seem so tightly bound to one another, I doubt there’d be room for me, even if I wanted into their space. And, thanks to Hailey and Colin, I don’t trust friendships anymore. How can I be sure who’s real and who isn’t?
I touch Henry’s watch and wonder about Cedar Canyon High. What’s it like beneath that red tile roof? Behind those old brick walls with their curlicue trim? Beyond the arched marble columns and the heavy double doors? I guess it doesn’t matter. I’ve had a lot of experience being the new girl at school. I know the routine. Pretend not to care what they think. Smile, but only if someone smiles at you first. Blend in the best you can. I hope Tate is in some of my classes. At least he’ll be a friendly face. A sexy one, too.
Through Her Eyes Page 7
