Fog

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Is very graphic.

  Too many cars

  Really jars.

  He had eight verses like this. Christina loved it. She could see the poem illustrated with fat tourist automobiles and bumper-sticker size lettering.

  “Welllll,” said Mrs. Shevvington, adding extra lllll’s. She lifted her eyebrows, sharing a joke with the rest of the class. “You tried, Colin.”

  Christina’s smile of enjoyment faded. Colin’s head sank between his shoulders like a turtle’s. He shuffled to his desk, trying to avoid everybody’s eyes.

  Vicki was next. Vicki’s poem was stupid. It was about the meaning of death as seen in storm clouds. Mrs. Shevvington beamed at Vicki and gave her an A. “Now that,” said Mrs. Shevvington, “is a meaty topic. A topic worthy of a poem.”

  Christina said clearly, “I think a mother’s smile is a topic worthy of a hundred poems.”

  Mrs. Shevvington turned slowly and stared at her. Eyes of mud, skin of jellyfish.

  Christina thought, I am granite. I do not flinch.

  “Notice how the girl who did not do her homework feels free to make comments,” said Mrs. Shevvington.

  Christina’s heart was hot with pleasure. “I did my homework,” she said evenly. “Would you like me to read my poem now?”

  The other children were staring at her, in awe, confusion, or amusement.

  I have become different, thought Christina.

  She had always been different. The one who was painted, the one photographed. But she had not wanted to be different in seventh grade. It was to be the year of being the same! The mainland year, the year of fitting in.

  “Do read your masterpiece for us,” said Mrs. Shevvington in silken tones.

  Christina got up from her desk. Her feet seemed to have gotten heavier; she clumped to the front of the room; when she turned to face the class she saw a haze of unknown mouths and noses, queer staring eyes — strangers, strangers, strangers.

  She swallowed.

  She unfolded her wrinkled poem.

  if I were a sea gull

  I wouldn’t have to stick around.

  if people argued — I would fly off, swerve, wheel, dip, scream.

  a thousand wings of company if I have friends

  two strong wings of my own

  if I don’t.

  Jonah Bergeron clapped.

  Robbie clapped with him.

  The rest waited to see how Mrs. Shevvington reacted. The teacher said nothing about the poem. Instead she walked up to Christina, pushing against her, the cranberry red of her suit shouting as loud as a mouth.

  “Why, Christina, you didn’t do any homework last night. I myself forbade it. You wrote this poem last year, for some island school assignment. You’re handing it in now, pretending you wrote it last night.”

  “I wrote it under the covers,” said Christina, burning. “With my flashlight.”

  Mrs. Shevvington snorted. “I will give you a zero, Christina Romney. Cheating and lying may be acceptable on your island but they will not do here.”

  I could push her down Breakneck Hill, thought Christina, and applaud when she got killed.

  Gretch and Vicki giggled. She knew they were giggling at her. At her poem. At her zero. At her shame.

  After class three things happened.

  Mrs. Shevvington said, “You will give me your flashlight at dinner, Christina.”

  “If you believe I have a flashlight,” said Christina, “you believe I wrote that poem using it last night.”

  Mrs. Shevvington smiled. This time her teeth did not show. It was more a thinning-out of her lips: a challenge. “The flashlight,” she said, “is to be given to me.”

  Why? thought Christina. To cripple me in the dark?

  Who is this woman, that she wants to get me? Who am I to her?

  “Christina?” said a soft voice.

  Christina jumped as if ghost fingers were touching her spine. Then she flushed scarlet. “Hullo, Miss Schuyler,” she mumbled.

  “Are you all right, Christina?” said Miss Schuyler. Her fat braids lay like a thick honey pillow on the back of her neck. How cozy it must be, to live beneath that hair, thought Christina.

  She thought of telling Miss Schuyler about what it was like to live with the Shevvingtons. But she could not do that. Teachers stuck together. Teachers had coffee together and meetings together, and if she told Miss Schuyler, Miss Schuyler would tell Mrs. Shevvington, and somehow Mrs. Shevvington would have more power. “I’m fine, thank you,” said Christina, and she skirted around her math teacher and plowed on down the hall, alone.

  Power, thought Christina dimly. What is power?

  She thought of power plants, and electricity. She thought of nations and wars. Mrs. Shevvington has more power than I do, thought Christina. But what is the power for? Where are we going with it?

  Robbie caught up to her, drawing her out of the hall traffic. “Christina? Is that your name?”

  She was uncertain of them all now. “Uh-huh,” she said cautiously.

  How thin Robbie was. How powerless. “I don’t want you to get in trouble with Mrs. Shevvington,” said Robbie quickly, looking around to be sure nobody heard. “You’re new here, Christina. You don’t know. Don’t speak up again like that.”

  “But you’re new, too,” protested Christina. “We’re all new. We just started junior high. How can you know Mrs. Shevvington any better than I do?”

  Robbie’s eyes were old and dark. He said, “I have an older sister.” He said no more, giving the sister no name, no description; as if his older sister truly were nothing more than that — not a person, not a soul — just a thing. Christina shivered. Robbie swallowed. Whispering, he added, “She — she had Mrs. Shevvington last year for senior English.”

  “And?” said Christina.

  Robbie shrugged. He walked away. “Just don’t talk back,” he said over his shoulder.

  His sister, then — had she talked back?

  But what had happened to his sister? Why did Christina feel that she had just received a gift from Robbie, a present he had been afraid to give her — news about the sister who had no name?

  Next it was Blake who stopped Christina in the halls. Blake looked so handsome! Christina wondered if the painters and photographers who came to Burning Fog would want Blake to pose. He did not have an island look, though; she had never seen anybody so thoroughly mainland. “Christina, what happened to Anya?” said Blake. He ran his hands through his thick dark hair and it flopped across his part.

  The fingers of the sea, thought Christina. They followed Anya all the way into the school. “I don’t know, Blake. What’s the matter?”

  “She’s being weird. She looks funny.”

  “She’s worried about going out with you, and both of you getting into trouble.”

  “Yeah, I’m worried about that, too. But she was saying — ” Blake broke off, embarrassed, because several lowly seventh-graders were listening. “She was saying the sea was gone,” he said in a low voice. “She made it sound like the Atlantic Ocean had moved away.”

  The poster had changed. Could the ocean itself change? If the ocean could change, anything could; none of the laws of earth and life would be safe. If the world were about to collapse, Christina wanted to be on the island with her family, where she knew the rocks and the roses. “I’d better go see,” she said. She pushed through the seventh-graders, running out of the building, down the wide steps, between the brick gates, heading for the Singing Bridge.

  But it was not Blake running along with her — it was Jonah. Where had he come from? “Christina, you’re crazy,” he shouted, matching her steps perfectly, so their ankles locked like kids in a three-legged race. “Course the ocean’s still there,” he said. “If it had disappeared it would have been on the evening news.”

  “I can’t rest easy till I taste it,” she shouted to Jonah. “Run faster. We have to get back to class on time.”

  “Taste?” said Jonah.

&nbs
p; “When you take a deep breath of low tide air,” said Christina, “you taste it, too.”

  They reached the Singing Bridge. Cars hummed over it. The tide was high but the Cove was relatively quiet. Waves slapped in a friendly fashion against docked boats.

  They stopped, panting.

  Jonah said, “Um, Christina?”

  The waves flecked a faint mist onto her face. “It’s still here,” said Christina. She sucked in lungs full of air, salting her mouth and throat.

  “There’s this dance,” said Jonah.

  Christina focused on him. She was granite and would not give in to yarns and fancies. A dance. “Oh, we’re awful for dances on the island,” she said.

  Jonah looked relieved. “You’re a terrible dancer, you mean? Good, because I’ve never danced at all. I’ve hardly even seen dancing except on videos, but I feel as if I should know how. And this — ”

  “No, no,” said Christina irritably. She grabbed his arm, turning him around, and they began jogging back to school. “Awful for dances means we love dances. We have lots of them on the island.”

  “Oh.” Jonah considered this phrase. “Well, will you come with me?”

  “Come with you where?”

  “The dance.”

  “What dance?”

  “Christina!” he yelled. “The seventh-grade dance! The Getting To Know You Dance! In two weeks.”

  There had been that form entitled Getting to Know You. There had been that order from Mr. Shevvington that Jonah was to be her friend. She said, “It’s bad enough I have to get soup and sandwiches on a blue ticket, Jonah Bergeron. I’m not going to a dance on a blue ticket. Get lost.”

  Christina walked home with Anya and Blake.

  The Jaye boys were not with them. Michael had started soccer practice, and Benj was looking for a job; he said life was too boring with nothing to do but school. He was hoping for a gas station. He liked engines.

  Blake said, “Anya, please tell me what’s wrong.”

  She still had her bruised look. Even though Blake clung to her hand, Anya seemed to be alone, lost inside her own body.

  Blake pleaded with Anya. He said he loved her. He said he wasn’t going to obey his parents; what did they know anyway? He said okay, if Anya wouldn’t ride in his car, then he wouldn’t either. He would abandon it in the parking lot and walk every step she walked. He just wanted to be with her. Something was wrong, please let him help.

  Blake said, “Anya, tell me how you got that big bruise on your leg. And the cuts on your knee.” Anya said nothing. Blake lifted the hem of Anya’s skirt to show Christina the bruise.

  Christina sucked in her breath. “Anya is sleepwalking,” she said dubiously, although she did not want anybody to know. It sounded crazy; she was afraid a catalog Maine person like Blake would abandon Anya if she sounded insane. Blake would stick by Anya because he was in the mood to oppose his mother and father; but he wouldn’t if everybody else said she was a nut case. Christina stared at the bruise. She could not remember either of them falling, and there had been no crashes among the huffing sounds.

  “Listen,” whispered Anya. “The sea. It sounds as if it’s in chains.”

  “It’s just the tide,” said Blake. “It always sounds like that.”

  “Can’t you hear?” Anya cried. “Chains scraping. Ankles caught. Children choking.”

  “It’s the sand,” protested Blake. “When the waves go back out, sand is dropped along the way.”

  Anya shuddered. “It sounds like dead armies marching.”

  Blake looked at her in despair.

  “I will never sleep again,” she told him. “You didn’t hear the sea last night. All the dead beneath the waves began breathing again.”

  Ffffffffff, Christina remembered.

  “It must have been the wind in the shutters,” Blake said.

  That night they did their homework at the kitchen table. Anya was writing an essay. “Write about young love,” said Christina. “Write about Blake’s car.”

  But Anya was writing about the tide in Candle Cove.

  Every twelve hours (plus twenty minutes) the tide licks the barnacles, inching toward the village. Then a queer sickening whisper begins. Fffffff — puffing out a candle. And the entire ocean, laughing because it caught you by surprise, hurls itself into the Cove. You cannot get away. It has you. If you are in Candle Cove, wading, rowing a dinghy, digging for clams, you will die. Candle Cove is the Atlantic Ocean’s toy. Like a birthday present, it opens itself every day, hoping, hoping, hoping, to catch you by surprise. And drown you.…

  Mrs. Shevvington, like the English teacher she was, said, “Anya, two errors here. First, you refer to the sea as if it is a person. As if it thinks and plans. This is called personification. Attributing humanity to things or animals.”

  “I never said the sea had humanity,” said Anya. “The sea is psychotic. The sea is a mass murderer.”

  “Your second error is pronouns,” said Mrs. Shevvington. She was smiling. As if Anya had finally gotten the lesson right. “The reader cannot tell who the victim is.”

  “Me,” said Anya. “The sea wants me.”

  Chapter 9

  “MOTHER?” CHRISTINA SAID, CLINGING to the telephone. “Oh, Mother, I’m so glad to hear your voice.”

  There had been a phone line out to Burning Fog Isle all of Christina’s life, but not during her parents’ childhoods. They had had to use ship to shore radio. Christina blessed the telephone. She just hoped Mrs. Shevvington wouldn’t come home and catch her in the forbidden living room before she had a chance to explain everything. “Mother, it’s so awful here. I need you,” cried Christina. “Please come.”

  There was a curious pause. It was not like her mother. For a moment Christina thought the connection had been broken, and she imagined the fingers of the sea, taking the underwater cable, tearing it asunder, laughing beneath the waves.

  “Christina,” said her mother in a queer voice, “the Shevvingtons have talked to us. They were on the telephone with us late last night. Honey, how could you behave like this? How could you forget your upbringing? Rude in school, lying about your homework, frightening Anya, refusing to eat the meals Mrs. Shevvington labors over? Christina, your father and I hardly know what to think.”

  The black-and-gold peacocks mocked Christina. “Mother, that’s not what it’s like.” The telephone shook in her hand.

  Her father got on the extension. She could see them, her mother in the kitchen, fragrant from baking; her father in the bedroom, sweaty from playing tennis. “Christina, when you left the island we were so proud of you, and now look. Cheating and yarning and refusing to obey authority! We don’t know what’s the matter with you, but luckily you’re with people who are used to dealing with difficult adolescents. The Shevvingtons are going to handle it.”

  “It!” cried Christina. “You mean me? It isn’t like that. The Shevvingtons are cruel people. I think they hate girls. I think they choose a new one each year, and this year it’s Anya. The Shevvingtons made us fill out forms about what we’re afraid of — acid, or rats! You have to — ”

  “You’re making that up, Christina,” her father said. “Christina, honey, no teacher, no principal, would ever hand a form like that to a child.”

  “No, no. It’s true. And this house — I’m sure that the sea captain’s bride — or maybe it’s the poster, the poster of the sea — ”

  “Stop it!” shouted her father. “Christina, I won’t have this! Mrs. Shevvington told us that you and Anya have some sort of sick game about that poster on your wall. Now you listen to me. When I was a kid, I had a hard time finding my place at the mainland school, too, and so did your mother, and so did everybody else, but we didn’t resort to making up ridiculous stories and placing blame on other people, and pretending that the finest, most caring principal the school has ever had is cruel! We just worked harder, Christina. We obeyed the rules! And that’s what we expect from you, too.”

  The phone crac
kled.

  It’s the sea listening in, thought Christina. The sea knows what’s going on. The sea started it.

  Mrs. Shevvington came into the room. She did not look powerful enough to control Christina’s parents across the water. But she was. She took the phone, smiling her corncob smile. She told Christina’s parents that visits would not be a good idea and phone calls would be worse. There should be no communication between Christina and her parents until Christina had learned to behave.

  Christina willed her parents to refuse. Believe in me! she thought.

  “Fine,” said Mrs. Shevvington. “Arnold and I will keep in touch. The important thing is not to worry.” Her smile stretched long and thin and yellow. “We are in complete control of Christina.”

  Dolly’s first tape arrived.

  Dolly was bored; it was no fun being the oldest in school; she had to help with the little kids, and this year the kids were really little: five-, six-, and seven-year-olds. Dolly missed Christina. Dolly was sure Christina was having a perfect year. Because that was the only reason Dolly could think of that Christina wasn’t sending tapes — she was too busy and too happy.

  Christina had a blank tape. Benj had bought it for her. But what could she say to Dolly?

  Dear Dolly, Remember my school daydream? Best friends, laughter, shared snacks, phone calls, compliments, a boyfriend?

  I sit alone at lunch. Mrs. Shevvington punishes me for everything. Mr. Shevvington smiles and says I need mental counseling. As for your brothers, Benj won’t listen to me; Michael never comes near me; word got around school that I’m weird, and he’s afraid it’s catching.

  I sleep alone in a dark green room that talks to me at night. Mrs. Shevvington took my flashlight, and the light switch for the bedroom is on the far side of the room from my bed, and the light switch for the hall is all the way around the other side of the balcony. I just get under the covers in the dark and hope Anya doesn’t jump out her window.