Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  The people in the other yard were whispering frantically. Freddy paused beside the bushes to listen. She couldn’t make out much, though she thought there were two voices. “… being obtuse,” she heard, and then, “… can’t chance it. Even this was a hundred to one against. If we…” The whispers sank into incomprehensibility. Cautiously, Freddy pressed herself against the cedar branches. “… listening! Right now!” hissed one of the whisperers. Freddy jerked back a little. Did the speaker mean her? She—or he—couldn’t have. Freddy had moved silently over the grass; these people couldn’t have known she was here. “Well, we should go over…” said the second whisperer. Something rustled, and there was silence.

  It had all been just strange enough that Freddy went out through the side gate onto Grosvenor Street to take a look. But the street was empty of cars, and the house looked as unlived-in as usual, and when Freddy dodged around the big pine and peered right into the yard, she could see there was nobody there.

  * * *

  By noon, shortly after Freddy discovered that the book her friend Rochelle had recommended to her a few months ago was about tragic nuzzling immortal teenagers and deserved to be shredded, Mel and Roland had gone a bit overboard with the whole RPG thing. Their campaign wasn’t starting until three, but it didn’t seem to matter. Freddy was drearily certain they were going to spend the next three hours talking about nothing else. Then Todd and Marcus would show up, and the game-speak would continue until midnight. Mum and Jordan wouldn’t care. They were out already. Typically, they hadn’t said where they were going, but had just slid out of the house while everybody else was focussed on breakfast. Freddy had the vague sense it had been days since she had seen them properly. She sometimes wondered whether they got around by tunnelling through the walls.

  The problem was that Roland and Mel were having their conversation in the living room, which had been deserted and deathly quiet when Freddy had sat down to read in it ten minutes before. Freddy scowled at her book and tried to ignore the half-spoken, half-signed, entirely earnest discussion about thrice-woven circles and the particular skills of Mel’s cleric character. Mel had the Coleridge book with her and apparently felt it was a good idea to read the entire pleasure-dome poem aloud in dramatic tones, complete with signed translation. The game itself was going to be worse. It would inevitably involve screaming and a fistfight. I wanted to read, thought Freddy. And she had been here first. Deliberately, she brought the book up in front of her face, blocking out the other two and trying to force herself to concentrate on a book that she kind of wanted to throw against the wall or possibly burn.

  “I think you should maybe use monsters that aren’t eldritch tentacled horrors from beyond the depths of space and time,” Mel was explaining. Freddy gritted her teeth and read a description of somebody’s sweater for what felt like the thirty-fifth time. She couldn’t seem to take it in.

  “I like tentacled horrors. I’m comfortable with them,” said Roland.

  Freddy sighed loudly. She knew Mel would notice and Roland wouldn’t. If he had, he would have ignored her. It was their whole relationship: she was helplessly angry with him without knowing exactly why, and he pretended she wasn’t there. Maybe I should just lose it and yell at him for an hour, she thought. She knew she never would. She didn’t confront people. Confronting people was just another way of drawing attention to yourself, which wasn’t the best thing to do when you weren’t even sure you were right about anything. At school, she had turned not confronting people into an art form. It wasn’t always fun to be invisible at school, but it was safer that way.

  She peered over the top of her book at Roland and Mel, happily engaged in a discussion involving the logistics of pleasure-dome ice caves. Neither of them was invisible at school. Both of them had friends. Roland had Todd and Marcus, and Mel had Jonathan and Clara, and sometimes they even all hung out together, and there was always a lot of laughter, plus some squabbling and the occasional full-out screaming match. It was all just … messy. Freddy was glad she wasn’t part of it.

  I have friends, too, she thought. She hadn’t seen Rochelle and Cathy in weeks. She would talk to them tomorrow, anyway, and they would start doing stuff together again, and she could stop feeling as if she was—

  No, thought Freddy, I am not the odd one out. She plunged back into the book, which she was genuinely beginning to despise.

  “Stop squirming,” said Mel. “If we’re stopping you from enjoying your pink sparkly book, go read it somewhere else.”

  Freddy said, “I was here first.” She cringed at the whine that had crept into her tone.

  “It’s our house, too,” said Roland, “in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  She opened her mouth, then shut it again. The anger surged, choking off her voice. She saw Roland’s mouth quirk in what could easily have been contempt. He thought she was a coward. Maybe he would have liked her more if she had yelled at him. Maybe not. She couldn’t imagine a world in which she and Roland were friends.

  Her right hand hurt. It was in her pocket, and it seemed to be clenched tightly around … that key. She had no idea why. Impatiently, she straightened her fingers. “Whatever you say.”

  “Don’t you go and cry,” said Roland.

  Her hand clenched again. “I don’t cry.”

  Roland laughed derisively. Mel pulled herself to her feet. Outside, there was a crash so violent that even Roland jumped as the impact vibrated through the floor of the living room.

  Freddy said, “What the—?” and ran to the window.

  “No,” said Mel, “not that way. It was on Grosvenor.”

  She took off into the kitchen. Roland and Freddy shared one glance, then followed, out the door and across the yard to the gate in the hedge that led to Grosvenor Street.

  2

  There was only one house on Grosvenor Street, but the park tended to have people in it, especially on weekends and holidays. It didn’t today. Grosvenor was quiet and deserted as Mel led the others out onto it, or as quiet and deserted as it could be after an accident that had left a small moving van wrapped around a tree.

  The van had run headfirst into the pine that separated Freddy’s family’s property from the front yard of the house on Grosvenor Street. The front of the van had folded in on itself like an accordion. There were creaking noises coming from it, and quite a lot of smoke. “Freddy,” said Roland, “Mel should go back in the yard.” For once, Freddy agreed with him. It didn’t seem likely they were going to find anything good in the driver’s compartment. She felt her stomach contract.

  “I’m not a baby,” said Mel, though when Freddy glanced at her, she saw that her sister had gone white.

  Freddy said, “Go—”

  The driver’s side door swung open. All three of them jumped back. “Jesus,” said Roland.

  “No no no,” said a woman from inside the van, “no Jesus here. Where’d that tree come from?”

  “It was standing by the side of the road,” a muffled voice replied, “dumbass.”

  “It was not standing by the side of the road,” said the first person, still unseen amidst the wreckage. The front of the van belched more smoke, and metal scraped against metal. “I was looking specifically. There’s got to be something illegal about trees that appear out of nowhere and jump on top of your van.”

  “Do we hit trees for fun now?” asked the second person, his voice cracking on the fourth word. Freddy recognised that crack. Most of the boys in her class had it, or had had it recently, or would have it soon.

  “I was under the impression it was a driveway,” said the woman.

  “You … are … a … moron,” spat the boy. Freddy edged closer to the van; the others were doing the same. Someone was thrashing around in the middle of the smoke.

  “I certainly seem to be,” said the woman. “Do you have your foot in my face? Why do you?”

  “Because I’m stuck,” said the boy.

  “Uh…” said Roland, but that was all. Freddy glan
ced at him, then at Mel. Why are we behaving like this? No one was leaping forward to try to help the people trapped in the van. No one had called 9-1-1. She thought it was the bizarre contrast between the totalled van and the voices. Neither the woman nor the boy sounded impaired or in shock. They might have been conversing over sandwiches and root beer.

  “I hear spectators,” said the woman. “I wonder what this does.”

  Something went sproing. Mel jumped again as the woman fell out of the van through a cloud of smoke.

  She looked up at them and smiled. “Did one of you put this tree here? I’m thinking of lodging a complaint.”

  She was perhaps thirty-five and would have looked as boring as any other grown-up if she hadn’t been wearing a trench coat and a fedora. Freddy and Roland both turned towards Mel. Mel had discovered the mystery genre at the age of nine. She’d handed various books on to Freddy, who had been able to get only about a quarter of the way through The Big Sleep before giving up, but Freddy had also been forced by Mel to watch plenty of films about private eyes in the big city, and she could see that this woman would have seemed perfectly at home toting a gun in a shadowy alley at midnight.

  “Excuse me. Hello. Trapped in smoking wreckage,” said the boy. “If the van explodes, I shall be displeased.”

  “Don’t mind Josiah.” The woman bounced to her feet. She didn’t seem injured at all. “He got up on the wrong side of the bed some time ago, and he hasn’t been back to sleep since.”

  More scraping noises happened, and the boy followed the woman much less gracefully. “Ow,” said Mel, watching him tumble into a puddle. Oil, maybe from the van, had got into it, turning it rainbow coloured. Freddy twitched. She wanted to run forward and help these people, but … she didn’t.

  The boy rolled over and sat up, dripping. Roland and Mel both squeaked. There was a gash on his forehead, and blood had streamed down his face, making him look as if he were peering out at them through a mottled red-and-brown mask. “It’s nothing. It’s only a flesh wound. Et cetera. Don’t faint. Cuerva Lachance, you’re just going to leave me sitting here, aren’t you?”

  “Probably,” said the woman. “Have you taken a look at these ones, Josie, dear?”

  The boy’s bloody forehead knotted. “Don’t call me Josie. What am I supposed to be looking at?”

  Freddy, Mel, and Roland stood all in a row, watching as the boy—Josie, or Josiah, or whatever it was—leaned against the side of the stricken van and pulled himself to his feet. Waving the smoke away from his face, he squinted out through it at them. It was hard not to stare. The woman was ordinary looking, despite her clothes, but there was something … not right about the boy. From what Freddy could see through the smoke and the bloody mask, he was average in size for his age, which seemed to be about the same as her age. His hair was black and straight, though tousled by the accident, and his skin was much darker than the woman’s. He should have been practically indistinguishable from any other fourteen-year-old boy. But there was something different. It was making her eyes water. She had no idea what it was.

  And then the boy was staring at them.

  “Not again,” he said. “Where is he, then?”

  Freddy thought maybe he was looking at her in particular. “Uh…?”

  “Him. Where is he? You have to know,” said Josiah impatiently.

  Freddy glanced at Mel, who shrugged.

  Slowly, Josiah’s face changed. It was hard to say for sure with the blood in the way, but Freddy thought what she was seeing may have been a look of dawning horror.

  “No,” he said.

  “I think so,” the woman replied, gazing vaguely off into the park. “Look … trees.”

  “But it’s not—I don’t—we shouldn’t—Cuerva Lachance! No. We’re not here for this. I refuse to be here for this! You,” he said, pointing dramatically towards them with a hand shaking so violently that Freddy wasn’t sure whether his finger was aimed at one of them in particular or all three of them in general, “go away. You appall me. I refuse to acknowledge your existence. You’re not here.”

  The woman beamed at them all from under her improbable hat. “Would you help us unload? There may be pie in the van. It’s possible it’s been squashed by the couch, but you never know. Helping us unload will be fun, and there’s a squirrel in the tree. I never expected that. I’m Cuerva Lachance.”

  Freddy looked at Roland and Mel for help, but she could already see they were going to be useless. Roland’s mouth was hanging open. Mel, usually not shy at all, was sidling behind Roland. Freddy’s eyes moved from her stepbrother and sister to the boy Josiah, who was muttering to himself and working his hands into and out of fist shapes, and then to the woman in the trench coat and fedora. Nothing added up at all. “Are you…” said Freddy, and stopped. She moistened her lips with her tongue and tried again. “Are you going to live here?”

  “Of course,” said Cuerva Lachance brightly. “We had to live somewhere, and it seemed convenient. It’s pure bad luck there’s a tree instead of a driveway. I take it you live next door? I like meeting neighbours. Josiah, did you know you were bleeding? I can’t think why you’re doing that. Let’s go find that pie.”

  * * *

  Somehow, Freddy, Mel, and Roland found themselves hauling boxes and furniture from the van to the house on Grosvenor Street. It made no sense. They should have been phoning 9-1-1 and calling for the nice men in white coats to come deal with Cuerva Lachance; they should certainly have been staying out of the house. “I think we’re all enchanted,” Mel told Freddy at one point. It was sometimes a little too easy to forget that Mel was only twelve. She could go on about string theory for twenty minutes before turning the entire conversation on its head by mentioning unicorns. Freddy didn’t think they were enchanted. She thought they were in shock. It just seemed easier to turn their brains off and do what Cuerva Lachance told them.

  It was impossible to think of her as anything but “Cuerva Lachance,” which was what Josiah called her, always in tones of contempt or exasperation. The part of Freddy that wasn’t striving to catch up observed that all of them tried to change this. When Cuerva Lachance wrenched open the back doors of the van (and dodged the six boxes and the bookcase that tried to fall on top of her), Mel, still standing behind Roland, said in a subdued voice, “Ms.… Lachance…?”

  “Cuerva,” said Cuerva Lachance.

  “Cuerva,” said Mel. There was a pause. Freddy watched her sister struggle, then give in and add, “Lachance. Shouldn’t someone move the van away from the tree?”

  “It’s a good theory,” said Cuerva Lachance, “but I don’t know where we’re going to find anyone like that. Here, little fat one. Take this box. Don’t drop it; we wouldn’t want to break anything.”

  Mel gingerly took the box, which had been flattened and mangled by the accident and the tumble from the van. “Uh—”

  “Big awkward one,” said Cuerva Lachance to Roland, who didn’t notice because he was watching Josiah walk around in circles, tugging at his own hair. Freddy nudged Roland. Her resentment of him had, for the moment, been swallowed up in bewilderment.

  Roland looked at the woman. “Yes? Cuerva … Lachance?” His struggle was shorter than Mel’s, but Freddy still heard the pause.

  “Chairs,” said Cuerva Lachance. “You look about the right size for those. Curly-haired one, you help the fat one with the boxes. I see another squirrel.”

  “Uh,” said Freddy, “Cuerva…”

  She was determined not to say the surname. There was no reason she should. All her classmates’ parents went by their first names except Paul Jacobs’s, who insisted on children calling them “sir” and “ma’am.” Paul was constantly being embarrassed about his parents.

  It was no good. The “Cuerva” seemed incomplete by itself. When she said it alone, she found herself stuck with a space of silence that could be filled by only one word.

  “… Lachance,” continued Freddy, defeated. “We can’t get into the house.
”

  “Josiah has the key,” said Cuerva Lachance. “He never misplaces keys. It must be boring to be that responsible. Josiah, let the nice people inside.”

  Keys and trees, whispered something inside Freddy’s brain. For a sliver of time, she almost knew why. Then the conversation continued, and the thought flitted away.

  “They’re not here,” said Josiah. His voice started high on the first word and dived into the subbasement on the last.

  “They still need you to open the door for them,” said Cuerva Lachance. “What’s your name, little fat one?”

  “Mel,” said Mel. To Freddy’s surprise, she added, “Melanie Duchamp.” She even pronounced it the French way, as Dad always had. Freddy was pretty sure her sister hadn’t said her full name to anyone since Dad had left.

  “Curly-haired one?” said Cuerva Lachance, industriously picking up boxes.

  “Freddy. Frédérique. Duchamp.” It was, again, as if the pauses could only be filled in by certain words. She felt, and she couldn’t have said why, that she had to give Cuerva Lachance her full name.

  Cuerva Lachance had simply to glance in Roland’s direction for him to say in resigned tones, “Roland Michael Isamu Fukiyama.”

  “My sympathies,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Let’s go throw everything in a great big pile in the living room.”