“What are you hiding from?” I press, thinking of the shadow in the dreams. “How do I fit into all this?” She only shakes her head and backs away, head bent toward the ground.
In the distance, I hear a stick snap. Yet another unknown presence teases my senses—are there two beings stalking me? This bizarre girl and … someone else? Something else? I whip around quickly, narrowing my eyes to better see into the brush. The girl is right about one thing; it isn’t safe out here. My instincts are singing. “We’ll continue this later,” I tell her, abandoning the clearing. My fingers brush the ribs of a tree trunk as I pass it, and I start to sprint.
Somehow the girl gets ahead of me. “One more thing before you go,” she rasps, her baggy pants billowing in the breeze. With all her shadows and facelessness, she almost looks like a ghost.
I dart around her. “Yes?” The wind rushes past, a roar in my ears.
She deliberately falls behind, but I don’t stop. Her tone is a mixture of determination and worry and real warning as it floats to my ears: “Do not, under any circumstances, go to Sophia Richardson’s birthday party.”
I don’t bother asking any questions.
Fifteen
The blank page stares up at me, mocking, beckoning. I stare back down at it. Thinking. My pencil taps against the kitchen table. Tap. Tap. Tap. A poem about hiding. I’m not a writer—if it weren’t for the dreams, I wouldn’t be a painter, either. Joshua thinks I’m creative; I should’ve corrected him. Maybe then I wouldn’t be distracted by this.
Not only do the words not come, but my mind buzzes with more theories. The woman said it’s almost time. That someone—he—has found me. And I need to remember. What does all this have to do with the car accident? How do the dreams fit in?
“You never work in here.”
I glance up at Mom, who’s standing by the kitchen table and staring at me with an indiscernible expression on her face. She’s tired; her shoulders sag, and there are lines under her eyes. For some reason, as I look at her, all I can think is that I should have tried harder to be the daughter she once tucked into bed every night.
She stops waiting for me to say something. I watch her walk to the sink. It seems there are always dishes to do, no matter how often I try to do them when she’s not around. Once in a while I’ll also do a load of laundry for her, clean out the fridge. If she notices the small gestures, she doesn’t allude to it.
“Sally Morrison called, by the way,” Mom suddenly informs me. “The school counselor? She wanted to know how you’re doing.” As Mom speaks her voice is low, careful. She doesn’t look at me. “When I asked her for a number, she said you would know where to find her.”
I know she’s wondering what I’ve told Sally. But I also know she doesn’t want me to acknowledge what goes on in this house. Sometimes Mom and Charles are alike that way. So all I say is, “Thank you for taking the message.” I tap my pencil some more, my eyes on the white paper spreading miles before me.
“Would you say I hide from you?” I ask abruptly. Mom starts, faces me. Wisps of hair falls into her eyes, and she brushes them away. The house is so silent that I can hear a clock ticking. I mark each second as it passes.
“What do you mean?” Mom finally asks.
“I’m writing a poem about … hiding,” I say, weighing my answer. “As a person. I suppose pretending is the same thing as hiding, isn’t it?”
“You’re asking my opinion?” Disbelief colors her voice. She wipes a plate clean, clearing her throat. She takes her time to answer, mulling over it as I had. Then, “Yes, I guess pretending can be similar to hiding. Hiding doesn’t seem like the right word to use, though. I would say that when someone is pretending to be something, or hiding who they are or what they believe, they’re really more … protecting themselves.” My mother—no, I shouldn’t say that anymore, for really, she won’t ever accept it—sighs. Regret fills the empty space beside her. Regret is a rather plain Emotion and she pays me no mind, intent on her summons. Her eyes are wide and muddy, her hair dull and limp.
“I’d like to think that it’s never too late to change the way things are,” I say casually. Sarah—that’s her name—looks at me again.
“What do you mean?” she repeats.
I give up on the poem, sitting back in my chair. It’s time to go to school soon anyway. “Just that nothing is set in stone.” I bend down to grab my bag. “The past may be the past, but everything else is changeable. You can adjust the path you’re on, right?”
Sarah doesn’t answer now, but I see that her brow is furrowed and Regret is gone. I walk to the door, smile back at her once. Caught off guard, Sarah smiles back. It’s tiny, and it’s hesitant, but it’s a smile.
“I’m going to Sophia Richardson’s birthday party.”
Joshua jumps a little at the sound of my voice. He glances at me as he slams his locker shut. His eyes behind that red hair are wary. “Assuming,” he begins tiredly, “that you also got an invitation to that horrible event—no offense, but I doubt it—why would you want to go? I sure as hell don’t plan to.”
I shrug, hold my books to my chest. “There’s … something there I want to see.” The girl—that Emotion, Element, whatever she is—either wants to stop an event from happening at that party or wants to stop me from discovering something. And if it’s so important that she would advise me against going, then it’s definitely something worth seeing.
Joshua eyes me skeptically. “What on earth would you possibly want to see at Sophia Richardson’s birthday party? The Dorseth brothers getting so drunk they can’t even walk? Sophia bullying her friends or forcing me to dance? Spin the bottle, truth-or-dare? What could you find interesting there?”
Nothing I say will be a good enough reason for him, so I just shrug again. “I thought you might want to come with me.”
He starts walking to class. I don’t have this one with him, and mine’s in the opposite direction, but I catch up anyway. He doesn’t speak for a moment, and somehow I know he’s thinking about the last time we were together, in the library. The way I ran away, how limp my fingers were when entwined with his.
“Tell me something,” Joshua says. He flips that hair out of the way for the millionth time and I resist a peculiar urge to tell him to cut it. “Why do you want me to come?”
If I answer right away, he’ll know I’m lying. If I don’t answer, he’ll walk away and never look back, no matter how much he likes me. I’ve pushed Fear away, Maggie is dying, and my brother is a coward, so technically, Joshua is the only person in the world who gives a damn about my fate. I think about it for a moment, and then realize I don’t want to think about it. This in itself is strange, unsettling, dangerous.
“If you don’t want to come, I understand,” I manage to say. My nothingness is weakening, because even though it tries to dig a deeper hole inside of me, I feel just the tiniest bit of … vulnerability. Completely unaware of anything else, I stop in the middle of the hallway, grasping at the scrap of Emotion. There is no other feeling except for this, and the taste of it is so unfamiliar. My knowledge and experience have not prepared me for it. More than ever before I realize that I do not understand humanity nearly as well as I’d once thought. My breathing quickens, and even though the floodgate is barely open, a painful fist of Emotion buries itself in my stomach.
Grief.
Why?
“Elizabeth? Are you all right?” A hand cups my elbow. Joshua looks down at me with concerned eyes.
“Elizabeth?” Sally Morrison stands in the doorway of the office, gazing at me worriedly, her forehead all scrunched and wrinkled.
Please come back, please …
You killed me.
Then, inexplicably, I envision that shadow standing over the girl and the dead body of the boy. The red eyes, the fog of beetles. Coming after me. Now the breath hitches in my throat.
“Your terror tastes just as I imagined, Elizabeth,” Fear whispers into my ear. The sweet scent of strawberries waf
ts past my senses. He’s pressed to my back, and for the first time his touch affects me! My heart hammers, and past the dread I’m seized by a fierce desire to turn, press my palm to his chest, and experience his lips against mine again—
And just like that, a brick slams into place and the wall is whole again. The power is stronger than ever. The fragile memory of feeling is gone. Black ink drips through my soul, the nothingness darting every which way to swallow me whole. Fear sighs with both satisfaction and disappointment, stepping back to observe. “It must be the boy,” he mutters to himself.
I pull away from Joshua, regarding him thoroughly. Was he really the one to bring on the tide of Emotions? No—the strange girl said it was almost time. So this connection with Joshua Hayes is no longer logical. He takes up time and effort, and the very idea of him enrages Fear. Not to mention Tim. Courage may have believed I would need this boy, but unlike the hooded girl, Courage is not particularly powerful. It’s unbeneficial for me to listen to him.
“I’m fine, thank you,” I say to Joshua, and Fear makes another satisfied sound in his throat. “If I don’t leave now, I’ll be late for class.” I look at Sally. “I’m fine,” I repeat, smiling for good measure.
“What about the project? The poem? Did you finish?” Joshua calls after me. “They’re due tomorrow, you know!”
Fear walks beside me. I ignore Joshua and pick up my pace to make it to Chemistry class. Fear is quiet; unusual for him. At the doorway, I pause. No one else is around, save for a tall boy hurrying to his own class farther down the hall.
“You won’t ever taste me again,” I tell Fear in my flat way. “I hope you savored it.” Mildly, I wonder why there had been that sudden impulse to kiss him.
Surprisingly, given his nature, he is not smug or quick to react. He touches my cheek, leans in, and inhales me. “I should be glad you’ve decided to break all ties with the boy,” he murmurs. He runs his hand down my arm. “But in a way, he was good for you. I think, little by little, he was breaking through.”
“No one can break through,” I lie. Yet again I think, the girl did say it was only a matter of time …
Fear picks up on the false note in the words, and it isn’t until he raises his pale brows at me that I comprehend I’ve said that last part out loud. “You’ve discovered something,” he states with interest. “And you’re not going to tell me.” It wouldn’t be sensible to have Fear hunting the girl down; she won’t tell him anything. I open my mouth to give him more excuses, but the Chemistry teacher notices me standing outside the door and glares.
The bell is going to ring any second. Turning aside so my teacher won’t see me talking to myself, I say out of the corner of my mouth, “I’ll tell you what I know if you do something for me.”
Fear is intrigued. He tilts his head in question.
I wave at the teacher in reassurance, then face Fear again. “I want you to come with me to a birthday party Saturday night. I don’t know what I’ll find there, and I might need protection.”
The lovely Emotion smirks. “What can be so dangerous about a human’s birthday party?”
I open the classroom door, thinking, We’ll see, won’t we?
When I get home, Mom is locked in the upstairs bathroom again. Standing in the hall, I can hear her quiet, dry sobs. But I don’t try to comfort her; it didn’t go over so well last time. Instead, I shut myself in my room and work a little more on the mural covering the walls. I study the V formation once again, the two figures on the ground that represent everything and nothing to me.
And just like that, I’m sucked into another memory that’s sprouted from a corner of my mind I thought was empty.
“I’m bored. Let’s gather the others and dance again.”
The girl waits for her companion to respond, standing eagerly in her dirty clothes and tangled hair. He glances up at her from where he’s sitting with a book, his back against a tree. His dark hair curls over his neck. “You promised Mom we wouldn’t,” is all the boy will say. He turns a page, tracing the words with the tip of his finger.
The girl pouts. She stoops. There’s a wilting flower at her bare feet, turning brown. She touches it, and suddenly the flower straightens on a stem that’s newly green and strong. The petals streak with fresh shades of pink. “It’s been so long,” she wheedles. “Please? Just one last time?”
Wavering, the boy looks at her with uncertainty in his eyes. There’s another dead flower by his leg, and as she waits for an answer he touches it. Just like with the girl’s touch, the flower grows at the contact, stretched full of life. Green and pink, no more brown. The boy frowns in contemplation. He wants to please her. He wants to dance again, too. He opens his mouth to answer, maybe give in, but before he can utter a word there’s a crackle nearby. The pair jump and whirl.
“Who’s there?” the boy calls out, failing to sound brave. The book falls to the ground, unheeded. The girl frowns and tugs at her brother’s arm.
“Landon, it’s nothing. You know we don’t have anything to be scared of out here … ” As she speaks, though, a figure emerges from the green shadows. The boy shifts so he’s in front of the girl, and he glares at the man.
“You don’t belong here,” he snaps. There’s recognition in his eyes.
The intruder stares at them with an odd little smile curving his lips. He’s older, though there’s no way to guess his age. He’s out of place in the woods; his clothing is impeccable, pressed and dark. He wears slacks and a white dress shirt. “I’m sorry if I scared you,” he says, folding his hands behind his back. “I was answering a summons, just north of here.” His tone is friendly. “I heard you and thought I would drop by to say hello. What are you two doing all the way out here? It’s not safe.” His smile is too bright. The girl glares at him. When neither of them answers the man takes a step closer, tilting his head. “Where are your parents?” he asks. “Your mom … and your dad?”
Landon opens his mouth to speak again, but the girl beats him to it. “Leave,” she snarls, and in her agitation, the leaves in the tree actually tremble. “You have no summons here, and you’re not welcome.”
“Rebecca,” her brother hisses. “Stop it!”
Their visitor, surprisingly enough, is already backing away. He’s still smiling. “Better get home,” he advises as he reaches the tree line. “Don’t want to be out here after dark. You never know what could be roaming these parts.”
And then he’s gone.
I slowly withdraw my hand away from the dead boy in the mural, my lips pursed in contemplation. The man … How do I know him? He looked familiar, somehow. I struggle, searching all my memories for a placement. But there’s nothing. No, not nothing. Whatever else I don’t know, I now know this.
The siblings in my dreams were something more than human.
And their names were Rebecca and Landon.
The phone rings through the empty house. It’s the only sound besides the clock in the hall. My eyelids slide open, listening to the harmony. Ring. Tick. Ring. Tick. Tim snores on, oblivious. Since Mom and Charles don’t creak out into the hall, they must not hear it, either.
No one ever calls this late.
The phone stops ringing for less than a minute before beginning again. It’s almost like an abrasive slap in the sacred silence of the night. I set my covers aside and get out of bed, padding downstairs on silent feet. I pick the phone up on its third ring.
“Hello?”
“Elizabeth? Is that you?” a tearful voice asks.
Still affected by remaining dregs of sleep, I don’t identify it right away. The person on the line asks if I’m there, and it slowly clicks. Maggie’s mom. I lick my dry lips, unable to make my voice properly concerned as I ask, “Yes, what is it? Is Maggie all right?”
My friend’s mother sobs once, tries to smother it. “I’m sorry to call so late,” she chokes. “But Maggie’s been asking for you. I thought you might want to see her one last time … the doctor says she won’t be with us much l
onger. Until tomorrow night, at the latest.”
I don’t respond for a moment, and just listen to her cry. It’s a wet, desolate series of noises. Whimper, snort, hiccup, exhale. “Elizabeth? Are you still there?” she asks when I’ve been quiet for too long.
“Yes. Let me think.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeats. “It’s just … Maggie is barely holding on as it is. You’re so important to her, and I just thought … ”
It wouldn’t be prudent for me to see Maggie, even now. Tim would find out if I skipped school, and the portfolio for Mrs. Farmer’s class is due. I still haven’t written a poem or a peer review. I shouldn’t encourage these connections—not until I know the truth about myself and the influence over me has been broken.
“Elizabeth?” My name has never sounded so bleak on another person’s lips. I clutch the phone tight, holding it away from my ear slightly as if it could sting me. Maggie’s mother sniffles one last time, and I decide to pretend again despite the consequences. After all, Maggie will be dead in a matter of hours, and no one would understand if I were to go on like nothing is wrong.
“I’ll see you soon.”
Maggie’s mom sounds so relieved and grateful as she says goodbye. After I’ve hung up, I stand in the kitchen for a couple minutes, thinking, remembering. An idea forms in my mind. A few more minutes pass, and then I quietly exit the house. I go into the barn, up into the loft, and don’t leave until morning.
The air in the hospital is brittle this time, grim, as if everyone knows about the girl on the ninth floor. The nurse at the front desk doesn’t smile at me, and after I’ve stepped off the elevator, the anguish hits me like a wave. Walking up to her room, I see Maggie’s dad, John, sitting in a chair in the hallway, bent over his knees, eyes in the heels of his hands. Sorrow is beside him, his white palm resting on John’s bowed head. As usual, the Emotion doesn’t speak when he sees me.
Some Quiet Place Page 12
