He slinks away, casting a baleful glance at us and at his unfinished rib. When he’s out of earshot, Mary leans in over the table, and we lean in, too. I hear chairs and benches creak around us, and conceive that other tavern-goers are also leaning in to listen, but that could just be my imagination.
“Betty Parris’s going to tell,” Mary whispers.
“Tell?”
“Sure enough, she is. They won’t let her alone. All day and all night, for three days, they’re after her to say who’s bewitching her. They’re going to make her tell. I think we should go over.”
“You think she’ll confess they’re just playing?” I ask, panicked.
If they do, I’ll be catching hellfire and brimstone rained down from my father. And Reverend Parris will beat Betty Parris and Abby raw.
“What else can she say? Unless Abby thinks of something better. Come on. We should go.”
I hunt through the crowded hall to see if I can spot my brother to tell him we’ve gone, but he’s nowhere to be found.
Chapter 16
DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS
TUESDAY, VALENTINE’S DAY, 2012
A week later, and I couldn’t stop looking at my phone.
The library at St. Joan’s was a deep stone cavern, eerily narrow and tall, with walls of books leaning up into the dimness overhead. The only light came from a distant clerestory of leaded Gothic windows tucked under the wooden beams holding up the roof and the green glass lamps dotting the wooden library tables. As a result, people liked to go in there to sleep.
Deena was bent over her physics textbook at the library table across from me, scratching the part in her baby dreads with the end of her pencil. I arranged my books, including my new copy of The Crucible, into a protective wall around my half of the table. Between us, a green-shaded desk lamp buzzed every so often, its brass pull chain hanging exactly where a procrastinating student might most want to play with it, and so I was rolling it between my fingers. The word processing program on my laptop was open to a new document.
The page was blank.
Cursor flashing.
I pulled my phone out again. Nothing. I frowned and stuffed it back in my sweater pocket.
Deena glanced up at me, then looked back down to her physics book as though ready to let it go. She sighed, changed her mind, and kicked me under the table.
“Colleen,” she said. “You’ve got to stop.”
“Not even a text?” I said. I was whining, I knew it, but still.
“Come on.”
“How long does it take to send a text message? Like, two seconds?”
Deena put down her pencil and crossed her arms. “What are you so upset about?”
“Nothing,” I grumbled.
I mean, it wasn’t like Spence was my boyfriend or anything.
Reading my mind, Deena said, “What’d you expect, roses? You’ve only hung out with him, like, once.”
“But we text every day, though.” I heard myself talking and realized who I was sounding like.
Anjali.
Deena saw the thought cross my mind.
“I just channeled Anjali right then.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
“I really wish she’d just write us back and tell us what is going on.”
“I know. I’m worried, too.”
“You haven’t heard from her either, have you?”
“Nothing. No selfies on Instagram, even. I guess maybe you were right.”
We lapsed into silence. I pulled out my phone again. Deena opened her mouth, but I silenced her with raised eyebrows.
Hey
I tapped.
No, not to Spence. Jeez. I wasn’t desperate or anything. It was to Emma. I knew she was bored, and I wasn’t getting anything done anyway.
Hey. How’s school?
I smiled. When Emma wasn’t in school last week, Deena and I had a momentary panic that all of our friends were dying and no one would tell us. But before second period I established that Deena’s theory about nervous parents keeping people out of school for no reason was true, at least as far as the clannish Blackburns were concerned. Emma was on lockdown, getting her homework assignments by e-mail and slowly going crazy. But the good news was, Emma could keep us updated on media reports while we were stuck in class.
Boring. Weird. Nobody’s here. How are u?
“Tell her I say hi,” whispered Deena.
Good. Got into Endicott!!!
I held up my hands in a silent V-for-Victory, and showed my phone to Deena.
“Oh, like anyone’s surprised,” Deena said, grinning.
AWESOME!! D says hi too. Any news?
Deena watched me typing, then sank her head back into her physics book, her pencil making notes in a margin.
WBST says up to 25. True?
I frowned and looked around where we were sitting in the library, as if seeing the lack of people would either confirm or deny what Emma had just said. I whistled between my teeth.
Hard to tell . . . nobody here.
Another text came in while I was typing, so I hit send and then opened it.
The play. Don’t forget.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said out loud.
Deena looked up at me with a quizzical expression.
“Just some jerk,” I whispered.
She rolled her eyes and bent back to her work.
DOING IT NOW SHUT UP.
The phone buzzed again.
Come over after? Mom driving me CRAZY.
Emma.
“You want to hit up Emma’s after school?” I whispered to Deena, who was my ride home.
“Um.” Deena bit her lip and gazed at a point on a distant wall of the library.
I frowned. I’d thought for sure she’d be happy to go see Emma. She’d been out for a week.
“Deena?”
She shifted in her seat. “Well. I mean. I’ve got kind of a lot of stuff to do at home.”
“But I just told her we were coming.”
This statement was not, strictly speaking, true. But I was annoyed. Emma was our friend. And she wasn’t sick, not really. She just had a hypochondriac for a mom. What was Deena’s problem? I considered asking her this while I watched Deena try to come up with a credible excuse.
The phone vibrated again, with the text from UNKNOWN.
“Dammit,” I muttered, scrolling to the new text message.
Don’t forget.
“Hilarious,” I whispered. “Psycho.”
Who are you, anyway? Leave me alone I’m WORKING.
I stuffed the phone deep into the recesses of my shoulder bag, irritated with everyone.
“C’mon, Deena,” I said. “She’s our friend. She’s not sick, not really. You know that. And I need you to drive me.”
Deena scowled.
“Fine,” she said, flipping a page in her physics book with finality.
“I don’t see what the big deal is. We won’t even stay that late.”
“I said it’s fine.” She flipped another page.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I stared at her for a long moment and then, shaking my head, opened the paperback of the play with unnecessary force, cracking the spine flat. I rustled through the pages of one of my history books, ignoring Deena if she happened to notice my deliberate noise, and settled in to read.
An hour passed. Deena knitted her fingers together and stretched, palms out, and I could hear her knuckles pop. The sound caused Jennifer Crawford, who was napping at the far end of the library table, her head on a pile of Faulkner, to twitch in her sleep.
I flipped a page in the play, frowned, and ran my finger down a list of names in the history book at my elbow. Then I flipped the page back.
<
br /> “Huh,” I said. “That’s funny.”
“Hmm?” Deena inquired, resting her chin on the backs of her hands and smiling at me. That’s one of the things I really like about Deena. We can get annoyed at each other, but it will eventually take care of itself, whatever it is, if we just let it lie for a while.
“This girl in the play. Ruth.”
“What play?”
I held The Crucible up so she could read the cover.
Deena made a face. “And you all actually compete to be in that class? I mean, Calc BC, okay, I can see competing to get into that. Because math is real.”
I smiled and said, “This is just extra credit.”
“Oooooh,” Deena said, raising her eyebrows. “Does Fabiana know you’ve got some extra credit?”
“No,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“You’re really gunning for her,” Deena remarked.
“No, I’m not,” I said. But I didn’t know why I said that, because it was totally true. I was gunning for her. Why shouldn’t I?
“What about her?”
“Who? Fabiana?”
“No, the girl in the play. Ruth.”
“Oh!” I flipped back a few pages, and peered at my notes. “That’s just it. She doesn’t exist.”
“What do you mean, she doesn’t exist?”
“Look,” I said, shoving the history book across the library table. Deena leaned closer so she could see, the green library light casting strange shadows in the hollows under her eyes.
“Um,” Deena said. “What am I looking at?”
“Okay, here’s the list of names. Right? They’re the girls who accused women at Salem like three hundred years ago. And now, look.”
I thrust the play across the table. Jennifer Crawford yawned, stretched, and raised her head halfway off her arms, looking at us curiously.
“So?”
“So, these are the characters in the play who are the afflicted girls, and they’re all the same as in the history book. Right? Abigail, Betty, Mary, blah blah blah. But. There’s a Ruth.”
“So he made someone up. Big deal.”
I sat back, ruminating.
“Why would he? Everyone else is a real person. It even says here”—I flipped some pages in a different book, one on literary criticism—“that Arthur Miller did research for the play in the real historical records. Like, real trial transcripts and stuff. There’s a couple of them in the index here. They’re crazy. Like a Law and Order episode.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Jennifer Crawford asked from her book pillow.
“Some play Colleen’s reading,” Deena answered.
“Huh?”
I held the cover up for her to see, too.
“Oh, yeah, I had to read that,” Jennifer Crawford said, propping her chin on her fist.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Deena said, going back to her science book. “He’s a playwright. He can write whatever he wants. It’s all made up anyway.”
I glared at her.
“That for Mr. Mitchell’s class?” Jennifer Crawford asked.
“You mean Ms. Slater’s class?” I said. “Yeah. It’s just a paper.”
“History,” Deena snorted. “Who cares? It already happened. Math gets us into space. And music gets us into bed. History’s, like, already over.”
“But why would he make up only one person out of the whole thing? He could’ve made up everyone. Or no one.”
Jennifer Crawford grinned at me and said, “Maybe he’s hiding something!”
“Oh, yeah. He’s a Freemason,” Deena teased. “It’s all code.”
“Maybe,” I said, sticking the end of my pen in my mouth. I chewed it for a second before realizing that I’d put the business end of the pen in, instead of the cap, which I discovered when a nugget of ink burst under my molar.
“Aw, dammit,” I said.
I stood up, wiping my chin and rushing to find a trash can to spit. Ink and drool leaked over my lower lip, onto the back of my hand.
Jennifer Crawford laughed out loud. “Nice one!” she called.
I made my way to the very nunlike washroom in the library, a plain cell of chipped tiles with two antique sinks and a toilet with one of those high boxes and a pull chain to flush. I peeled my lower lip down and inspected my teeth, which were now purply black and rotten looking, like I was wearing a zombie Halloween costume.
“That is basically the sexiest look I’ve ever come up with,” I muttered, running the water in the sink. “Good thing I did it on Valentine’s Day. I should send Spence a selfie so he can admire my intoxicating charm.”
The door to the washroom opened and Jennifer Crawford came in. She gave me a small smile and offered me a paper towel.
“Thanks,” I said.
She shrugged.
“I think it’s kind of interesting, actually,” Jennifer Crawford said.
“What is?” I dabbed at my lip and teeth, pausing to moisten the paper towel under the sink. Why was she always cool only when no one else was around?
“That he changed only one person’s name. But you’re right, he must have based her on someone and changed the details. Do you know who she’s supposed to be?”
“Not yet,” I said. “There were a lot of afflicted girls, turns out. More than you’d think. I’d never heard of a lot of them. Some of them weren’t even girls. A lot of them were grown women. And there was one man, did you know that? John Indian. That name sounds totally fake.”
“Huh,” Jennifer Crawford said.
“I know. It’s crazy. Now I kind of wish we’d talked about it in class.”
“Me too. Mr. Mitchell would’ve rocked that.”
“Oh, I know.”
I watched her in the mirror over my shoulder. She was inspecting the roots of her pink hair and rummaging in her handbag for a lip gloss. Like we were just friends hanging out gossiping in the bathroom.
“Jennifer,” I said.
“Mmm?”
“Are you worried?”
“Me? What about?”
“What do you think? About getting sick. About . . .”—I paused, gesturing with my hand in a circle of global consequence—“all of it.”
A smile curled up Jennifer Crawford’s cheek.
“Nah,” she said. “Not really. Why, are you?”
I shook the water from my hands and saw that my efforts had largely been in vain and I was going to spend the foreseeable future with blackened teeth.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”
I thought the reporters would all be gone when we were finished with sports, because they usually petered out over the course of the day as other newsworthy things happened in other parts of town. But this time the herd of reporters was just as thick at five as it had been that morning. Deena and I peered at them from a crack in the upper school front door.
“Should we just run for it?” she whispered.
“I guess,” I said.
“Or we could sneak out the door by the gym and go through that lady’s backyard to get to the back fence of the parking lot,” Deena suggested.
“Hmm,” I said.
I didn’t relish a long tromp through someone else’s yard after I’d already spent the afternoon running up and down a hockey field. Plus, the last time we did that, the lady had been home and threatened to call the cops on us. That would really put a damper on the afternoon.
“I say we run for it,” I said.
“Okay.” Deena grinned. “Ready? Set? Go!”
We threw our coats over our heads like we were mob informants running down courthouse steps to a waiting limousine and sprinted together, laughing, to Deena’s car. Cameras clicked in rapid succession and questions were shouted at us, each overlapping the other.
r /> “It’s up to twenty-five now, you girls know that?”
“Aren’t you scared for your safety?”
“D’you think it could be asbestos, or something in the water?”
“Tell us about PANDAS! Are you worried you’ll get it, too? Have you had any strange symptoms you want to tell us about?”
“They’re thinking of closing the school!”
“What’s the administration telling you that it’s not telling us, girls?”
“Talk to us!”
We reached the car, Deena fumbling for her keys to get it unlocked, and then we both dove inside, slamming the doors and muffling the cries of the press into a dull throb.
“At least the days are getting longer, finally,” Deena said as she gunned the engine.
“Yeah,” I said, gasping for breath. I turned to her and grinned. She grinned back.
“To Emma’s?” she said.
“Mush!” I agreed.
We flipped on the radio and pulled away, reporters’ hands trailing off the trunk of her car, like ghosts clutching at the living.
Deena’s car crunched up the driveway to Emma’s house a few minutes later, and the curtain over the picture window into Emma’s living room twitched. Someone had been watching for us to pull up. Or watching for something, at any rate.
“You go get her,” Deena said. “I’ll stay here.”
“Why?” I asked, giving her a look.
Deena shuddered, her hands on the steering wheel.
“Honestly? Emma’s house kind of creeps me out.”
“Creeps you out? What’s to be creeped out about? It’s just a house.”
“I know.” Deena watched the closed living room curtain carefully.
I waited.
“Are you sure?”
“Maybe it’s her mom? I don’t know. I’d just rather wait here.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, climbing out of the car and slamming the door behind me.
A long silence wore by after I rang Emma’s bell. Long enough for me to turn back to Deena, see her shrug in the car, and for me to shrug back. I rocked on my heels, waiting.
Nobody answered.
I was at the point of pressing the bell again when the front door creaked open, and one pale eye surveyed me from the shadows inside the house. It was almost six, and they still hadn’t put any lights on.