Why do I have to prove myself to you constantly? Frankly, out of fear of displeasing you, I have to guard and evaluate every word I say before I say it. This is too hard; it’s too much work. It’s what I have to do with most of the adults in my life. When I’m involved with someone romantically, out to have a good time, I don’t need to bring all the baggage I have with my parents, my teachers, and some burdensome friends. I want to be carefree. You’re too intense.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re the one talking me into auditioning, and then you aren’t in the play? I don’t know. I would feel bad about it.”
He nodded. “Okay. Let’s wait to see what happens. That way, we don’t make promises we can’t keep.”
“Well, I can tell you both now,” Ivy said. “If I got the part of Renfield and neither of you got a part, I would still do it.”
Dillon seemed to check my expression first, and then we both laughed. I didn’t think I would laugh at all today. It amazed me how a good laugh could push back on the dark feelings inside you. Until now, I was like a zombie in my classes. I wondered if news about Ryder had reached someone in school who had then passed it along so that it had arrived in every one of my classes before I had. Good news traveled by boat; bad news was always on a jet.
Turning on your cell phone after lunch hour was prohibited. If you were caught, you could lose your phone and even be suspended for a day. Texting was practically a federal offense, especially during any class. The safest thing to do was go to the general office during a study hall and ask permission to call home.
“What’s wrong?” my mother asked instead of saying hello. She had read my cell number on the phone screen.
“Nothing’s wrong. I wanted to know if it would be all right if I went to Ivy’s house after school to practice for the play audition tomorrow. Dillon Evans has a copy of the script.”
“Oh. Yes. That would be a good idea, the play.”
“I have to win the part, Mummy. Just because I want to do it now doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means a lot, Fern. If you really want to do it, you’ll be motivated to really try. Dinner will be at six as usual.”
“Will my . . . will Dr. Davenport be there?” I was having much more trouble calling him my father now.
“As far as I know right now, yes,” she said. “I’ve heard nothing,” she added before I could ask.
“Okay, Mummy. ’Bye,” I said. My voice sounded far off, even to me. It was as if I was drifting away from myself. I wondered if that would be so bad.
I caught sight of Dillon between sixth and seventh periods. He was lumbering along, standing a little taller, I thought. He spotted me and paused.
“We’re on,” I said.
He nodded and moved on quickly, as if he didn’t want anyone to know. He certainly didn’t show any excitement or happiness about it.
“You’re a queer duck, Dillon Evans,” I whispered to myself.
Ivy and I didn’t share the last period. Our schedules varied from each other’s in the afternoon because she had moved so successfully through Introduction to French that she was in the advanced class with juniors and seniors. I was taking Spanish and doing well but not so exceptionally.
When the end-of-the-day bell rang, I left slowly. Jennifer Sanders and Denise Potter caught up with me. Jennifer actually seized my arm to stop me.
“We just heard about your brother,” Jennifer said. “Raegan Kelly’s brother Ian told us your sister told her. Sounds very bad.”
“How bad is it?” Denise asked. “On a scale of one to ten,” she added.
“No one’s weighed it yet,” I said, “but thanks for your concern and sympathy. I’m so lucky to have friends like you hovering about, waiting for an opportunity to pounce on bad news.” I flashed a smile and left them dumbstruck.
Ivy was already at Dillon’s car, waiting.
“You know,” she said, “he’s never offered to take me home after school. Even when I hinted about it.” She stepped closer. “Actually, my mother forbade me from going to school with him or coming home with him.”
“Why?”
“My mother thinks he’s too weird. But don’t worry about it. She’s not home today. She went to New York with some friends to see a show.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have volunteered your house, though.”
“I said don’t worry about it,” she quickly added. Dillon was heading toward us.
“I gave Mr. Feldman my poem to read earlier today,” he said as he approached. He looked energized. “He asked me to stop by to talk about it.”
“Did he like it?”
“He told me it was good enough to submit to some magazines and suggested a few.”
“Oh, wow. Will you let me read it now?” Ivy asked.
“Fern?”
“It’s your poem, Dillon.”
“I gave it to you,” he said.
“Okay, Ivy. Read it on our way to your house,” I said, and gave the envelope to her. You’d think I’d given her an envelope full of diamonds.
Maybe I had.
“Did you get the idea for this poem before you met Fern or afterward?” she asked after we had started away. She was in the rear.
“Why?” he asked quickly.
“Just wondered. It’s very good.”
“Why?” he asked, and winked at me.
“You captured a universal feeling, need,” Ivy said. She was a top student. She was up to his challenge. I smiled to myself.
“And what is that, pray tell?” Dillon asked.
“The need to trust someone and the joy we feel when we find that someone,” she said, and handed the poem back to me.
Dillon was silent. I looked back at Ivy. She was smiling impishly.
Dillon turned to me. “We’re surrounded by all sorts of vampires,” he said. He was smiling differently, smiling with relief. For a moment or two, at least, he was happy to be vulnerable. And Ivy was right . . . that took trust.
We drove on in silence. That wasn’t good for me. I couldn’t help envisioning Ryder lost and alone in the clinic. Was he medicated into a stupor? Was he gazing out a window and desperately trying to remember his own name? Was he thinking at all of me?
“Hey,” Dillon suddenly said. I thought he had been looking at me on and off and realized I was lost in thought. I turned to him. “It’s going to be all right, Fern. He’ll come back.”
I nodded, smiling.
But will I? I wondered.
10
I HAD BEEN to Ivy’s house a half dozen times over the past few years. We had often studied for tests together. Parker or Mr. Stark would drive me there and pick me up when it was time to go home. Only once did Ivy’s mother drive me home and only because she had a business meeting close to Wyndemere. There were moments when I feared that she didn’t want Ivy and me to be friends. It might hurt her business if her daughter associated too closely with the daughter of a “fallen woman.” And yet she was also political enough to realize like most people that it didn’t pay to alienate one of the most prestigious families in the area, the Davenports. Now that I was “out of the closet” as a Davenport, I was tolerated more, but in subtle ways I was reminded that it was toleration. Of course, that was soaked in hypocrisy, especially for someone like Mrs. Mason.
Since Ivy’s mother’s divorce, she had become a busier real estate agent, working for one of the bigger companies. From what I understood, Ivy’s father wasn’t living up to his financial obligations. He had gone off to California with the young woman he had committed adultery with. Ivy had very little contact with him and rarely mentioned him. There were no pictures of her father anywhere in the house, even in her room. She said if she put one out, it would upset her mother.
“Orphans are luckier that way. They aren’t forced to choose between their mother and father,” she told me. She laughed afterward. That was Ivy’s way after she had said something penetratingly painful. She would laugh rather than cry, but I couldn’t laugh. I
felt her disappointment. The most difficult thing involved with having friends was sharing in their pain and trouble.
I looked forward to knowing Dillon more, but what I already knew about him suggested this was the reason he wasn’t looking for best buddies the way most of the boys in school always were. He didn’t want to hear about anyone else’s troubles. If I asked him why, I was sure he would tell me he had enough of his own. I certainly did as well, but I couldn’t ignore Ivy. She was too sweet, too reluctant to trade nasties with the girls who bullied her, which made her too vulnerable. Half the time when we were with other girls in school, I felt like her bodyguard.
She and her mother lived in a three-bedroom, two-story Wedgwood-blue house with a front porch, family room, and formal dining room built on what I heard some people call a “postage-stamp lot.” The small den had been turned into her mother’s home office. Sizewise, the whole house would probably fit in Wyndemere’s living room, but I thought it was cozy and warm. Ivy’s bedroom was not much bigger than the bedroom I had when my mother and I lived in the help’s quarters, but it was beautifully decorated, with light pink curtains, fuchsia wallpaper, a four-poster bed with a swirling mauve headboard and matching dresser and armoire, an ivory-white shag rug, and a small light oak desk for her computer.
Her mother didn’t want her to “clog” the walls with posters and pictures like other girls our age did in their rooms. There was no en suite bathroom. Only her mother’s bedroom had that. Two bedrooms shared the bathroom in the hall, but since, according to Ivy, they rarely had guests, the bathroom was basically hers.
In my mind, when I thought about Ivy’s house, I thought of a dollhouse, not because I was arrogant about living in a mansion but because everything in her house was so neatly organized and coordinated. As a real estate agent, her mother believed it was important for her own home to be a showcase. She had even taken courses in interior design and decoration so that if she showed a property, she could give the prospective buyers some ideas for redecorating to their taste.
It hadn’t occurred to me until we arrived, but Ivy’s explaining why her mother wouldn’t normally permit her to ride with Dillon suggested that he had never been in her house. I had no doubt she wasn’t happy about them being friends. I didn’t come right out and ask him or her, but from the way he looked at everything and because she had to ask him to take off his shoes, I gathered he hadn’t ever been invited. We had already taken off ours. Her mother had made that point when I first visited. She wasn’t afraid of the germs, she said. She believed floors and carpets would last longer and continue looking new longer if people walked barefoot or in slippers. I asked Ivy if her mother made customers who came to her home office do that, too.
“She takes off her shoes, and some do and some don’t, but she’ll never criticize a customer,” she told me.
“Does anyone really live here, or is this a model home for sale?” Dillon asked Ivy as he took off his shoes.
She laughed, of course. “My mother’s a bit of a kook when it comes to keeping everything orderly and in its proper place. She’s terrified some visitor will question her ability to choose the perfect home for her customers. She thinks we’re on a stage all the time. I told her we should have a curtain right here in the entryway that would open like the curtain in a theater when she brought someone into the house and maybe with some background music. Anyone want a soda or something?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Where could we practice?” Dillon asked. “That rug in the living room looks like no one’s ever walked on it. I don’t want my fingerprints on anything. It looks like a bunch of sailors polished the furniture like they would their ship.”
“Let’s go up to my room,” Ivy said, laughing.
We went up the short carpeted stairway with its glistening mahogany banister and turned right to the first door.
“I guess girls are a lot neater than boys,” Dillon said as soon as we had entered.
“You wouldn’t say that if you saw my sister’s room at Wyndemere.”
“She’s right. I’ve seen it,” Ivy said. “Sit anywhere, even on the bed,” she suggested. “I’ll get us some lemonade just in case we need it after we start.”
She left. Dillon looked at me, shrugged, and sat on the bed. He took out the pages of the play.
“Take these,” he said, handing them to me. “Dracula isn’t in these scenes with Lucy. You’ll do those first.”
I took the pages, sat beside him on the bed, and started to read them.
“This is the first girl’s bedroom I’ve been in, not counting my mother’s,” he said, gazing around. “It smells nice, and I like the way she’s neatly placed all her stuffed toys and dolls on those shelves.”
“I have some, too, but maybe not displayed as nicely,” I said. For a long moment, we simply stared at each other. I spoke first, because he was looking at me so intently. “What?”
“I was remembering the first time I saw you in the school hallway. You resembled a doll in that green dress with a bow tied in the front. Your hair was pinned up so neatly, and you looked like you had just vaguely brushed on lipstick. The thing I remember clearly is your eyes, the way the violet was captured in the light streaming through the hall window. They were two small streaks of lavender. I thought to myself, this girl has no idea how beautiful she is going to be, not yet, anyway.”
He stopped. The silence was so deep between us that you could dip a spoon in it. Actually, I was speechless. What he had said was so surprisingly sincere. There was no irony, no sarcasm. I was waiting for some punch line.
“I’m sorry,” he said, now uncomfortable with my silence. “I’m talking too much and embarrassing you.” He smiled. “Actually, you look a little stunned.”
The truth was I couldn’t swallow. I was holding my breath, but my heart had begun to race. It was as if he had been trapping his thoughts for so long that they had to explode. The idea that someone had observed me so closely and admired me so deeply for all this time without my ever knowing made me feel . . . naked.
“I am stunned. Why didn’t you ever say hello or something?” I asked in nothing more than a loud whisper.
“You looked occupied,” he said. “Anyway, sorry I broke your concentration. If you look at those pages, you have Lucy’s first entrance on the stage. My guess is Mr. Madeo will use these monologues of hers, because she’s already suffering without knowing she has been Dracula’s victim. He’s been feeding on her, weakening her at night after she falls asleep, to turn her into one of his own. Madeo would want to see what each candidate will do to show it.”
I smiled.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“C’mon.”
“Well, I was just thinking that maybe that was what you were trying to do just now.”
He shook his head, confused.
“Weakening me with your pretty words.”
He looked like he was insulted, angry, and then he laughed. “Now you’re into it,” he said.
“What’s so funny?” Ivy asked, entering with a tray on which there was a pitcher of lemonade and three glasses.
“Fern just realized I really am a vampire,” Dillon said. “But I’ll make an exception right now and drink some of your lemonade instead of your blood.”
He plucked a glass off the tray. She set it on the night table beside her bed, and he poured a glass, which he offered to me first.
I took it. My throat had tightened with excitement and felt dry. After a sip, I put it down and looked at the pages.
“Lucy’s frail from the loss of blood,” Dillon said. “So try to sound a little faint, but don’t speak too softly or too low. You have to realize you’re going to be on a stage.”
That was exactly how I was feeling at the moment. I read the lines as if every word was exhausting.
“Good,” he said. “Get to the part where she is describing her bad dream.” He leaned over my shoulder to point it out. Just a ha
lf inch closer, and we’d be cheek to cheek. “Read it slowly, as if you’re remembering the experience with some difficulty. It has to be mysterious, frightening, but you can’t forget it even though you want to. Try it,” he said. “Wait, imagine an organ playing under your lines. It sets a tone.”
I looked at Ivy. She had an expression of amazement on her face.
“How does he know all this? Maybe he really is a vampire,” she said.
“Don’t make me laugh. It will put me out of character.”
I sucked in my breath, closed my eyes, opened them, read the lines to myself, and then closed my eyes again for a moment. When I opened them, Dillon and Ivy were both looking at me with such expectation I was afraid to recite the lines. But I did.
When I was finished, neither Dillon nor Ivy said anything.
“I think I’m going to have a nightmare tonight,” Ivy finally said. “Maybe we should have used another room in the house.”
Dillon laughed and drank some lemonade. “Let’s keep going,” he said. “We’ll do a scene between Dracula and Lucy. Madeo likes to put two possible choices against each other as soon as possible to see how they do, how they fit.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“It’s how he ran the audition for Our Town,” he said.
We went on. He handed me different pages. First I read them, and then we did them. It felt like we had been doing them for hours. I was happy for the rest when Ivy did lines as Renfield. Dillon suggested she speak with a nasal tone, just to sound weird.
“You have one of those eyeliner pencils?” he asked her.
She didn’t, but she got one from her mother’s room, and he drew a mustache on her. We laughed at how nutty she looked. Dillon pointed out that Renfield should look and sound nutty, and she read the lines again.
“You might have a good shot at this part,” Dillon told her. “The cast list is too heavily male. If you pull it off, he’ll really consider you.”
Echoes in the Walls Page 16
