It’s too unfair for words.
And now Dare’s new despondent attitude?
It’s too much.
“Get up,” I announce, walking toward him and grabbing his hand. I yank him until he has to get up, and then I pull him toward the door.
“Let’s ride into town.”
That’s against all the rules and we both know it. If we got caught, we’d be in serious trouble, both of us. Dare’s not supposed to leave the house, but I’m not supposed to leave the grounds. It’s forbidden.
Dare starts to shake his head automatically, but I hold up my hand.
“Are you scared of them?”
He pauses and I’m delighted to see an old familiar gleam in his eyes.
There it is.
The Dare Me stare.
My heart flutters because the real Dare is back, even if only for a minute. He’s not afraid of anything. He can’t be.
“Okay,” he agrees. “Scooters though, not bicycles. I don’t want you to wear yourself out.”
It’s annoying because everyone is always saying things like that…. like I’m an invalid instead of crazy. But when Dare says it, I don’t argue.
“Fine,” is all I say.
We sneak out the back doors and down to the garages, where we grab the motorized scooters.
As we ride into town with the wind in our faces, I turn to Dare.
“Why don’t you talk like the rest of them? Only every once in a while do you say things in the English way. It’s weird.”
Dare stares at me drolly. “My father was French. I refuse to speak like Richard.”
“But you’re English now,” I point out. “And sometimes, you do sound like it.”
“That’s the meanest thing you’ve said to me all day.”
I haven’t said much to him today yet, but I don’t point that out. Instead, I pay attention to the road so that I don’t hit a pot-hole and bend a wheel like last time. We have to be like Ninjas, in and out of the village without our family knowing.
Or there will be hell to pay, especially for Dare.
“Why is my uncle Richard so mean to you?” I ask him as we stow our scooters on the village sidewalk. He shrugs.
“Lots of reasons, I guess,” he answers, pointing at the ice cream parlor. “Want some?”
Always. He knows that.
He buys me a dish of chocolate and he gets vanilla, and we sit in the shadows of the alleyway, nursing our ice cream. I watch mine begin to melt, as condensation forms on the cup in my hand.
“Your uncle doesn’t like me because I make him think of things he doesn’t want to,” Dare finally says.
“What things?”
Dare shakes his head. “Grown-up things, Calla. Nothing you need to worry about.”
But I do. I worry about it. I can’t stop worrying about it, about him. I’m so tired of things being kept from me, tired of being treated like a little girl.
“Who screams at night?” I ask tentatively, and Dare turns his head and I know that he knows. But he shakes his head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s ok,” I whisper, because I know he’s lying. “You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”
For a second, for one second, I think he’s going to. He looks at me like he’s speculating, like he’s pondering and I think he’s going to confide in me, but then…he doesn’t. He just takes a bite of ice cream and moves further away from me, edging down the pavement.
“There’s nothing to tell,” he says blankly, and I know the matter is closed. He doesn’t trust me. Not yet.
“Fine.”
I eat my ice cream until it’s gone and when it is, I turn to him.
“I don’t want to go back,” I say.
“We have to,” he replies, taking my cup and throwing them both in the trash.
“Because we’re both prisoners?” I ask, remembering his words from long ago.
He stares at me for a long time, his dark eyes hardening, hiding his pain.
“Yes.”
“You could leave, you know,” I suggest hesitantly. “You could run away. If you hate it so much here, I mean.”
Dare stares into the distance, his eyes so very dark. “And where would I go? There’s nowhere I could go that the Savages wouldn’t find me.”
He’s so bleak as he climbs to his feet and reaches down to help me up. Our ride back to Whitley is silent.
When we roll back through the gates, Richard is waiting.
His car is parked halfway down the driveway, and he’s leaning against it, waiting for us like a tall, coiled snake….a snake poised to strike. My heart pounds and leaps into my throat and I’m frozen.
“Go to the house, Calla,” my uncle tells me, his eyes hard and focused on Dare, and they contain a strange gleam, something that turns my stomach to ice.
“But…it was my idea!” I tell him quickly. “Dare didn’t want me to go alone.”
Richard turns to me, his face oh-so-cold, and Dare nudges me.
“Just go, Calla,” he says quietly.
Richard is satisfied by that, because Dare is being submissive and my uncle shoves him into the car. “You know you’re not to leave the house, boy,” he snaps, a vein pulsing beside his eye. He slams the car door far harder than necessary.
I watch them drive up the driveway, I watch Richard yanking Dare into the house, and I can’t stand to follow them and hear what I know I’ll hear. I dash into the back doors, into the kitchen, and I throw myself in Sabine’s arms.
She listens to me cry and when I’m done, she calmly looks at me.
“We’d better go get those scooters, child.”
She walks up the drive with me, and we push them back, and I ask her a million questions.
“Why does Richard hate Dare? Why is he so mean? Why isn’t Dare supposed to leave Whitley?”
Sabine listens but she doesn’t answer until long after we’ve put the scooters away and returned to the kitchen.
“Things aren’t what they seem, little Calla Lily,” she tells me. “It’s time that you wrap your young mind around that.”
No amount of prodding will get her to say more, and when I go to bed that night, all I can think about is Dare and his dark eyes staring at me as that car disappeared down the driveway.
When the screaming starts, I close my eyes against it, trying to tune it out, because when I hear it, all I can do is imagine those beautiful dark eyes filled with pain. It crushes me, and I sleep to escape it.
Chapter Eight
Price Funeral Home and Crematorium
The Oregon sky hangs misty and cloudy and dark. I watch the lightning stretch from one end of the horizon to the other, illuminating the darkness, exposing the night. It casts a purple light upon everything, and the world seems mystic.
I hold Dare’s letter in my lap because it’s precious. He seldom writes to me and when he does, I save them.
Dear Calla,
This one says.
How are the dead people? Whitley is the same. I’m practically living with dead people too, you know. Eleanor is close to 200, or at least she looks like it. And Sabine, God. Who knows how old she is?
I’m sending a picture of Castor and Pollux. They were swimming in the ocean and Pollux caught a fish. Someone on the beach thought he was a bear and started screaming. It was the funniest thing ever. Castor hunts for you when you’re gone, and he sleeps next to your bedroom door, until I make him come with me.
See you this summer,
Dare
His words are etched on the paper, scrawled with a nonchalance that is typical of Dare. Somehow, he makes me miss Whitley, even though the estate is huge and scary and everything there feels wrong. But Dare is there, and my dogs are there. I miss Dare during the winters, although I’d never have the guts to tell him.
I pin the picture of the dogs on my bulletin board, and do my math homework, and then when I go to sleep, I dream about Dare.
I dream a
nd dream and dream. My dream turns my stomach to warm sunlight, and a weird sensation travels through my thighs and belly, a hot feeling like fire.
I dream that sunlight filters in through the Carriage House windows, and that I’m seated on the couch, lounging on my side. I’m completely naked but for high heels and my cheeks are flushed, and I’m older. Maybe seventeen? My hair is long and red and curls around my shoulders, flowing down my back .
Dare sits in front of me and he’s got a pencil in his mouth, chewing on it as he studies me, then he draws on the paper. He’s drawing me, and he’s beautiful and he’s beautiful and he’s beautiful.
“You’re so beautiful, Calla-Lily,” he murmurs. “You’re so much better than I deserve.”
The light shines into his eyes and they seem like gold instead of black, and his teeth are ever white. A silver ring gleams on his finger and it spins in my mind,
Spinning
Spinning,
And I startle awake,
And when I gather myself,
I realize my cheeks are flushed, just like in my dream.
It’s hours before I finally go back to sleep, and even the next day in school, I find myself thinking about that dream. It’s a situation that I would be unlikely to be in… exposed like that in the sunlight. It’s so out of my character.
I manage to focus my attention for long enough to take my math test, and then Finn and I are out for the day, and on our way home in the brisk cold Oregon air.
As we hike up the road lugging our heavy backpacks, our Chucks squeak on the rocky road, the light sheen of rain making it slippery. I curl my hands inside my mittens while I inhale deeply. Breathing in the salty smells of the ocean, I absently stare over the side of the cliffs toward the beach below.
Something bright blue catches my eye in the rocks below. The blue is out of place against the drab winter background of the beach. I pause, interested, dropping my backpack as I inch closer to the edge to get a better look.
Someone stares back at me, and the eyes aren’t friendly.
They’re dead.
I gasp, loud and long and Finn’s hands yank me away from the edge.
“What’s wrong with you, Calla?” he demands in agitation. “You could’ve fallen over the side. You know not to mess around with these cliffs.”
I can’t answer. I’m so completely shocked and appalled as I point with a shaky mitten-clad finger.
That couldn’t be what I thought it was. Who I thought it was.
But it is. I lean forward and look again and I see that I wasn’t wrong.
I also see that no matter how much death a person is exposed to, nothing prepares you for the dead and unexpected face of someone you know.
Finn peers around my shoulder, and I feel him startle as he recognizes the body on the rocks below.
“Is that Mr. Elliott?” he asks in shock. I nod dumbly, unable to make my lips move.
Mr. Elliott is one of the few teachers who has ever been nice to me, although he never really liked Finn. Apparently, skinny underdeveloped boys don’t impress him much, and so he never stepped in when the football guys stuffed Finn into trashcans in the locker room.
I hated that. But I can’t deny that I still liked him…for how he treated me.
Specifically, he never made me participate in dodge ball.
He knew I’d be pummeled into a bloody pulp, so he always let me sit it out. And he never acknowledged that he knew why. He never said the humiliating words, I know everyone hates you so I won’t make you a target. I always appreciated that.
But now, he’s dressed in jogging clothes and lying in a broken heap at the bottom of the cliffs. One of his knees is bent, and his foot is cocked at an unnatural angle, pointed up at the sky.
As Finn pulls out his phone and calls the police, all I can focus on are Mr. Elliot’s socks. They’re the old-school kind, the gym socks that you pull up to the knee…the ones with the stripes. His stripes are bright blue.
A man is dead, and all I can think about are his socks.
Maybe everyone is right and there really is something wrong with me.
Two hours later, my mother rushes to assure me that there isn’t.
“It was shock, honey,” she tells me, stroking my hair slowly away from my face. “Most people don’t get upset right away. It’s a delayed reaction.”
She wipes my face with a cloth, and makes chocolate chip cookies, and everything is fine until two days later, when it’s my turn to help my father.
I stare at my father’s perfectly manicured hands, the fingernails that are cut into perfect squares, as he pulls the crisp sheet back up over Mr. Elliott’s body.
“I wonder if he had a heart attack and fell from the cliffs?” My dad muses calmly. “Or if he slipped? Poor guy.”
My dad is unflappable, his voice matter-of-fact and speculative.
He doesn’t ask me if I’m okay, because it doesn’t occur to him that I might not be. Death is his business and he deals with it on a daily basis. Nothing bothers him anymore, and he forgets that it might be unnerving for someone else.
I swallow.
“Is the M.E. coming?” I ask, and my voice sounds tremulous in this large sterile room. It’s cold in here because it has to be, and I rub the goose-bumps off my arms. My dad glances at me as he wheels the metal gurney into a cooler.
“Of course,” he nods. “The medical examiner always has to come and sign the death certificate. You know that.”
I do. But somehow, staring at the familiar and dead face of my gym teacher causes the things I know to fly right out of my head.
I nod back.
“Are you hungry?” I ask him, wanting an excuse to leave this room. “I can make you a sandwich.”
My dad glances up at me again, and smiles. “I could eat,” he answers. “I’ll come down to the kitchen in a minute.”
I slip from the prep room and close the door behind me in relief, leaning against it for a second with my eyes closed as I try to un-see Mr. Elliott’s blank face. The last time I’d seen it, it’d been red and taut as he yelled at us during gym. Seeing it so empty and devoid of life is just flat-out jarring.
“You okay?”
My mother is concerned about me still. Always. I nod, because I don’t want to worry her. She’s always worried about me, it seems.
“Yeah. It’s just…he was nice to me.”
That night, after dinner, I have ear-buds in while I do Chemistry homework, but I still hear my parents bickering in the next room.
“I don’t like it,” my mother says. “We’re surrounded by too much death here. It’s not good for her.”
“She needs to prepare for it,” my father says, and his words make me pause, my fingers icy as they hold my pencil.
“Perhaps,” my mother answers, and she sounds so sad. “But not yet. She doesn’t need to face it yet.”
There is silence and I wonder if my father is comforting her, as I so often see him doing. He holds her close and murmurs into her red hair, and his voice is low. It always works.
In a minute, though, they continue.
“As much as I hate it, I think we should spend more time at Whitley. The atmosphere is quiet there. It’s good for Calla’s mind.” My mom is quiet, her voice thin.
My father doesn’t like the idea, I can tell. “And you’ll have to spend more time with Richard? Laura, please. The reason we came here was to get away. We have to participate, but we don’t have to be with them every day of our lives.”
Participate in what? I don’t even realize I’d whispered out loud, until I receive an answer.
“I know,” a voice says, and my head snaps up.
In the corner of my room, a boy stands, his hood pulled up and shadows covering his face. He’s tall, he’s slender, he’s familiar.
I don’t feel afraid, although I probably should.
“Who are you?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Does it matter?”
“Yes,” I answer firmly, a
nd I think he smiles. I can barely make out the curve of a lip.
“It doesn’t matter because I know what they’re talking about, and you don’t.”
“I’ve seen you before,” I say slowly. “But where?”
He doesn’t answer and instead shakes his head.
“Your teacher,” he says, and his words are soft and enunciated. “You can change it.”
“Change what?”
“It,” the boy says impatiently. “You can change it. If you try.”
“I’m crazy, aren’t I?” I whisper, and I’m surprised when he shakes he hooded head.
“No, they just want you to think so.”
This perplexes me, and I want to ask more, but I blink and he’s gone and of course I’m crazy.
I fall asleep thinking about the boy and his dark shadowy face and Mr. Elliott.
I dream about Mr. Elliott, and how he was simply dead and it was so startling.
The surprise of it was the worst part, the shock when I saw him broken on the rocks. But even more surprising is how in my dream, he drags himself off of the rocks, and his legs is crumpled, but he still pulls himself on his elbows, and then he blows his whistle and shouts for everyone to line up on the basketball court.
I’m frozen, because he was dead and then he wasn’t.
I’m unsettled enough to not go back to sleep for the rest of the night.
I’m still unsettled by it when I get ready for school in the morning, and I’m expecting the school to still be somber, to be in mourning, but they’re not.
That annoys me. It’s like the world should acknowledge that someone important died, but it doesn’t. It just keeps chugging on like normal.
I dread going to gym class because…just because. It will be weird, it will be creepy, it will unsettle me.
But I never guess how much.
Because when I dress out and line up on the base-line with everyone else, Mr. Elliott limps from his office on crutches to stand in front of us, his whistle around his neck and his blue-striped socks pulled to his knees.
Then behind him, the hooded boy is in the corner, and he whispers, and I hear his whisper as clearly as if he’s right in my ear, even though he’s across the room.
“I told you.”