“Things?”
“Things, Hanna,” said Ms. Harrison gravely. “Hungry things.”
Chapter Six
I had been prepared to write off the incident in geometry as a manic episode. Even though I’d never blanked out and gone on a rampage before, the rest of it—the talking book cover, the voices in the windows—was business as usual. I was always hallucinating. Even taking my pills religiously didn’t prevent occasional … weirdnesses.
Except not all of it had been hallucinatory. Ms. Harrison had acknowledged that something was going on with the windows. Hungry things. she’d said.
But I didn’t have time to ponder cryptic remarks. Half the day was gone and I still hadn’t made any friends. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. I’d never had to make an effort; people had always come to me. Maybe people were shyer in small towns, and I needed to be more aggressive.
I spotted Wyatt immediately through the swarming lunch crowd, his green shirt blazing amid the sea of darkly attired kids even more flagrantly than my purple dress. About a million other kids were squooshed in around him, including Carmin from geometry. I squeezed in as close as I could.
“Yeah, we went into the dark park,” Wyatt was saying as he demolished what looked like Salisbury steak, “but nothing happened. The Mortmaine just needed help digging a tunnel. I’ll probably have to go back before school lets out, though. There’re these creatures living underground, and—”
Wyatt stopped, having noticed that his friends were no longer paying attention to him.
They were staring at me, the intruder.
I smiled at Wyatt. He’d been checking me out in the administration office—he still was—so I figured he could be my ticket in. “Do you mind if I sit here?”
“Sit where?” asked Carmin, who sat across from Wyatt, staring at me over the rims of his blue glasses. “You see any other chairs?”
“I can find one.”
“Don’t bother,” said Wyatt, turning away from me. “There’s no space, unless you aim to sit in my lap.”
Very non-high-minded response. Maybe I was wrong about him. Maybe he only looked high-minded.
I gave Wyatt my sweetest smile. “Thank you.” I sat in his lap.
“You and transies, man,” said Carmin, chuckling. “It never ends.”
“What can I say?” asked Wyatt, a Who, me? expression on his face. “I’m a polite kinda guy.”
“Oh, lovely,” I said. “I adore polite men.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“Polite and funny? Could I be that lucky?”
“I can’t reach my food!”
“I’ll share my fruit salad,” I consoled him, “if you promise not to take big bites.”
He gave me the same look Rosalee had, frowning at me as though I were an alien. A faint scar, almost like a question mark, decorated his chin. All of his face was a question mark. “Who are you?” he asked.
“We sort of met in administration. I’m Hanna Järvinen. And you?” I held out my hand.
He shook it. “Wyatt Ortiga. Pleased to meet you, milady.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” I said. “I’m not half as weird as you lot.”
“Weird?” Wyatt said as everyone at the table chuckled. “Us?”
I nodded. “And geometry was even weirder.”
“What happened?” asked the girl to Carmin’s left. Lecy Gandara. She was in my history class. I remembered her because of the yellow daisies pinned to her blue-black, pigtailed hair.
Carmin popped the top of his soda. “A lure called her.”
“Did she run screaming?” Lecy asked, as though I weren’t sitting right across from her.
“Hell, no,” said Carmin, glaring at me like I was the obnoxious one. “She just sat there taking notes. Cost me ten bucks.”
“What’s a lure?” I asked, picking at the fruit salad balanced precariously on my lap.
“The things in the window,” Carmin said.
“What things?”
“Don’t scare her,” said Lecy. “She’s got the whole rest of the day to get through.”
“You keep your earplugs in at all times,” Wyatt told me, “and geometry will cease to be weird.”
While he gazed longingly at his abandoned Salisbury steak, Wyatt squeezed my hip as though testing me for ripeness. Up close, his eyes, though dark, were as clear and lustrous as window glass. I had the craziest idea that if I looked closely enough, maybe tilted his head toward the light, I’d be able to see into his brain.
“Do I get to squeeze back?” I whispered into his ear, and laughed when he seemed honestly startled to find himself groping me.
Then his lap began to vibrate, startling me.
“Sorry.” Wyatt shifted me a bit to retrieve his cell phone from his pocket, his ears red. He looked at the number and groaned.
“Who is it?” asked Carmin.
“Guess.”
Everyone at the table laughed.
“Pet, you got the flu,” Wyatt screamed into his phone. “Just lay there and get better, and for Christ’s sake, stop calling me!”
“Don’t worry,” Lecy told me. “Pet’s his ex-girlfriend.”
I can’t imagine what she saw in my face that made her think she needed to reassure me. What did I care if Wyatt had a girlfriend, ex or otherwise? He was into me, not the other way around.
“Good thing he’s not going with Pet anymore.” Carmin raised his voice. “Be pretty damn awkward explaining why Wyatt’s got a hot-ass girl in his lap!”
“What girl?” The ex-girlfriend’s voice was teeny and panicked.
“Nothing,” Wyatt said. “I-gotta-go-hope-you-feel-better-bye.” He shoved his phone into his pocket, grabbed the empty milk carton off my tray, and bounced it off Carmin’s forehead. “Asshole.”
“Just trying to pave the way for the new transy in your life,” Carmin said, pretending to be hurt.
“I already went through that shit with Pet. I’m not gone be stupid twice in a row.” Wyatt bucked me off his lap. “No more transies! Ever!”
I stood there gripping my tray. Stunned. The journey from being felt up to brushed off had been a dizzying one. Dizzying and irritating.
I dumped my bowl of fruit salad into Wyatt’s lap.
“I wish I’d bought something hot.” My voice was shaking—I was shaking. “Like chili. Something that would have burned.”
Wyatt, on the other hand, was as steady as a panther moving in on a kill. “They only serve chili on Fridays,” he told me, as though imparting great wisdom. “Do yourself a favor, transy, and disappear.” He scooped a handful of the fruit salad pooled in his lap and flung it at me.
Everyone else at the table copied him—flinging mashed potatoes, forkfuls of Salisbury steak, handfuls of potato chips, and screaming “Transy!” at me like a curse.
I fled the cafeteria and rushed into the first girls’ restroom I came to. At the sink I surveyed the damage, the unfamiliar sting of male rejection creeping over me. Everyone had rejected me, but only because Wyatt had first.
Wyatt.
I cleaned the food off my dress as well as I could, pondering how cocky Wyatt would be if, instead of chili, I dumped battery acid in his lap. Where could I get battery acid, anyway? Wal-Mart?
The ever-reddening light in the silent restroom interrupted my scheming. The change of light wasn’t coming from the fluorescents overhead, but from the window at the far end of the restroom.
Where another glass statue stood.
The girl’s hands were flat against the frosted window. A thick red soup swirled within the glass, reminding me of what I’d seen in the administration office.
Usually my hallucinations made sense: a whispering voice in my ear, a room full of birds only I could see. Nothing like this bloody randomness.
I crept past the statue and reached up to touch the window. The cool red glass sucked ghoulishly at my finger. I wrenched free, finger throbbing as though it had received the mother of all hicke
ys. But instead of a purple bruise, my right finger, down to the second knuckle, had turned to glass.
I looked from my finger to the statue beside me. Her crystalline strands of bobbed hair. Her translucent dimpled toes peeking from glass sandals.
I wasn’t going to become a statue. So what if the other kids didn’t like me and had thrown food at me; that didn’t make me inhuman. I was here. I was real. I could prove it.
I rummaged through my purse for my nail clippers and used the hook on the end of the metal file attachment to cut into my finger. At first the sharp file glanced harmlessly off the glass. I shook my hand vigorously, watched the blood rush down. I cut again, and the glass unfroze into flesh.
“Ha!” I screamed as blood dripped into the sink. I was no statue. They wouldn’t lick me that easily.
“Oh my God!”
I whirled and saw a bevy of horrified girls crowding the doorway of the restroom.
“It’s not that bad,” I assured them, running water over my finger, over the growing puddle of blood in the sink. “Just a scratch—”
They pushed past me and circled the statue, crying as the office staff had done.
What was it with these people and statues?
After a trip to the unsympathetic school nurse, who bandaged my finger, I spent the rest of the day being thoroughly and utterly ignored. Maybe Rosalee was right. Maybe in this weird-ass school, I was nothing.
Chapter Seven
After school, as I pedaled home, I could feel myself coming undone. My hair, reddish in the sunlight, unraveled from its bun and corkscrewed across my overwarm face, fitfully blocking traffic from sight. My dress straps kept slipping down my shoulders. Even my brain was unspooling: random, unrelated thoughts tangled within my skull, independent of my will.
My control had scattered.
I tried to look on the sunny side, but reality darkened my vision. I had to admit to Rosalee that I’d failed to fit in, just as she’d predicted, and I was damned if I could find the sunny side to that.
I should have been up to my neck in sunshine. Portero was a small town, for God’s sake. I should have been beating away nosy neighbors carrying casseroles in Tupperware and eaten up with curiosity about me.
They were all around as I rode, the sidewalks wide and bustling with women in black sundresses and men in black hats gabbing with black-aproned shop owners.
But what destroyed the sepia-toned quaintness was the multitude of missing-person flyers.
The flyers were everywhere, of people of all ages and sizes and varieties, plastered on windshields, tacked into the trunks of the ornamental trees along the medians. The entire exterior wall of an art store was papered top to bottom with the flyers, like a morbid mural.
I wasn’t surprised so many people had run away from Portero. Or possibly—considering the way I’d been treated at school—been run off.
I stopped my bike at a red light next to a dark peach juice stand.
Dark peach juice?
A little girl with braided hair flitted up to the drivers of the cars behind me, quick as a hummingbird, exchanging clear plastic cups of what looked like liquid sunlight for cash.
Dark peach juice?
An even littler girl at the stand called out to me, “Dark peach juice. Two dollars a cup.”
The oldest girl, who was close to my age, also stood at the juice stand, handling the line of people on foot that had formed down the sidewalk. The oldest girl took time from pouring juice for her customers to box the littlest girl’s ear. “Don’t offer to transies, nitwit. Might as well pour the juice in the gutter.”
“How do you know I’m a transy?” I asked the oldest girl, who didn’t know me from Eve.
She took me in at a glance and went back to pouring cups of juice. “Bright, stupid clothes. No visible scars. But especially your eyes. You can always tell by the eyes. Yours ain’t never seen anything real.”
A horn honked behind me and made me jump. The light was now green. I pedaled on.
Such an unfriendly town. Unfriendly and strange.
I had put the bike away and was closing the carriage doors of the garage when a lemon Jaguar pulled into the driveway, a slick-haired man in a shiny gray suit behind the wheel. As soon as the car rolled to a stop, Rosalee burst out of the passenger-side door wearing stilettos and a tarty black dress.
“Call me tomorrow!” the man yelled at her, and then displayed his tongue the way a snake would, as if to taste the air Rosalee had just vacated.
After the snake man drove away, I went into the kitchen to find Rosalee finishing off a glass of wine. Sparkly red clips held her thick, curling hair away from her face, and she had removed the stilettos. The barrettes and bare feet made her look young, a little girl who’d long since outgrown her clothes.
“It’s a bit early for a date, isn’t it?” I asked, because we couldn’t both be girls—someone had to be the adult.
“I don’t date.” Rosalee corked the wine and placed it in a rack beneath the counter. “Not that it’s any of your business.” Her eyes narrowed. “What happened to your finger?”
The school nurse hadn’t quite come out and called me a baby, but she had made a point of wrapping a Teletubbies Band-Aid around my “boo-boo” when a plain one would have worked just as well. “It’s just a scratch,” I told her, in no mood to be sidetracked. “If that guy wasn’t a date, what was he?”
Rosalee removed the barrettes and let her hair hide her face. She rubbed the nearly Day-Glo hickey decorating the side of her neck. “Work.”
I dropped into the red chair, trying to block the flood of embarrassing images that wanted to fill my brain.
My own mother. A call girl.
Had Poppa known? Had he been a client? No wonder Rosalee had never cared about him, about me.
“You want coffee?”
“Ah … yes.” I had no trouble looking her in the face anymore. She was still beautiful, but the burning, rapturous aura surrounding her had dimmed. “I mean no,” I amended. “I can’t drink coffee anymore. It interferes with my meds.”
Rosalee went to the fridge. “Then I’ll get you some milk. Finns love milk. At least that’s what Joosef always said. Here.” She tossed me a box of Famous Amos cookies.
I gaped at the box in wonder. “Milk and cookies, Mom? Really?”
She set the milk before me. “Eat ’em and shut up.”
“But it’s just like TV!”
“How? It’s fake and unhealthy?”
Let her be sarcastic. I was over the moon. The horrible day I’d had was almost worth it, as I sat with my mythical milk and cookies and felt at ease with Rosalee for the first time.
“What’s a transy?” I asked.
“A transient.” She grabbed an apple for herself and leaned against the picture window, since she couldn’t sit with me at the table. “Anything transient. Like a mayfly.”
I knew about mayflies, had seen them in action during the slow summers at our lake house in Finland. Huge swarms of them rising like dark mist from the lakes, mating in the air in winged orgiastic abandon, only to flutter back down into the water, drained. Dead. An entire lifetime played out in the space of a few hours.
But what the hell was mayflylike about me?
Rosalee polished the apple on the scant bit of fabric covering her chest. “How well did you fit in today?”
“Not too well, actually.”
“I knew you wouldn’t.” She took a triumphant bite of her apple. “That’s why I sent you to school. I figured it’d be better if you tried and failed on your own. Better if you could see for yourself.”
“See what?”
“That you don’t belong here.”
“Yet. I have a few prospects.” Just one, and a lousy one at that, but she didn’t need to know everything. “I hung out with this popular boy and his friends at lunch. I could tell he was really into me.” And he was. Too bad he was rude and not at all a nice person, despite what he’d looked like.
; After a lengthy silence, Rosalee took another bite of her apple, chewed carefully. Swallowed. “Just so you know, sleeping around doesn’t count as fitting in.”
If anyone else had said such a thing to me, I would have slapped her, but this wasn’t just anyone.
The milk and cookies lost their sweetness. “Sex isn’t the only thing I have to offer,” I said, the words so low I could barely hear them.
“But it’s the only thing they want.” Rosalee frowned out the window at all the sex-hungry men in the world. “Besides, what else is there to offer?”
“Trust. Affection. Respect.” I shoved her tainted after-school snack across the table. “It must be hard to think of qualities you don’t possess.”
Rosalee’s hand tightened on her apple—for a second I thought she was going to hurl it at me. “Go take your pills,” she said, her voice as empty as her expression.
I took my pills all right, but not the ones she wanted me to take. I went upstairs and downed four sleeping pills before crashing on my pallet. I watched the light grow dim as the sun traveled low in the sky, but mostly I watched the box of sleeping pills I’d replaced on the shelf. Right above my head. So easy to reach up. Never mind how heavy my arm, how tired my heart, how bleary the box. So easy to swallow the remaining four. Or more. If I could just reach—
A sharp pain stabbed my hand as Swan landed between me and the box, wings outstretched, feathers bristling. She eyed me balefully, a spot of blood on the end of her hard yellow beak, the same blood that now dotted the back of my sore hand. She whooped angrily.
“Not the boss of me,” I muttered, barely able to get the words out as the pills I’d already taken worked their magic.
Swan scooped the box of pills into her beak and swallowed it whole, as though it were a particularly good piece of fish, the last thing I saw before sleep took me. I was glad to be taken.
Outsmarted by a bird.
How humiliating.
Chapter Eight
“Hanna!”
I awoke with a start, Rosalee shaking my foot like a castanet. I jerked free and kicked at her, but she had excellent reflexes and easily dodged me.