Believing (16 page)

Her footsteps echoing down the corridor, Calla turns the corner and stops short just outside the auditorium, startled by the sudden, jaunty sound of a piano playing inside.

Someone is singing. A girl’s melodious soprano.

She recognizes the song after a moment: “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” Olivia Newton-John sang it in the movie
Grease
with John Travolta. Calla watched it with her mother whenever they caught it on television. Mom said it was one of her favorite movies when she was a kid.

Unable to resist a peek, she slips into the back of the auditorium to see who’s singing.

To her shock, the cavernous space is dark. Deserted. Silent.

The piano bench is empty, lid closed.

And the music stopped as suddenly as if someone had turned off a radio. Maybe that’s all it was. Only . . .

There’s no radio that she can see, and it really sounded as if someone were rehearsing live music in here.

Spooked, Calla backs out of the auditorium and hurries toward the media center, wondering if the school might be as haunted as Lily Dale itself.

————

It’s been another long day, and Calla is relieved when the last bell rings as Mr. Bombeck is in the midst of working a difficult problem on the board. She has no clue what he’s doing. Her thoughts keep drifting to what happened earlier, in the auditorium.

It’s probably no big deal—just a random haunting—but for some reason, that ghostly music left her with a lingering feeling of, well, doom. As if that makes any sense at all. “Hopelessly Devoted to You” might be a melancholy song, but it’s not a funeral march.

“All right. We’ll save this equation for tomorrow,” Mr. Bombeck announces above the immediately chattering voices and scraping chairs. “Calla? Can you please stay for a minute and see me?”

She sighs inwardly and approaches Mr. Bombeck’s desk as the room clears out and the hall beyond fills with voices and lockers slamming.

“Have a seat.” Mr. Bombeck closes the door and gestures at the chair beside his desk.

She sits. So does he.

He looks intently at her, steepling his fingers beneath his chin as if he’s about to pray. “Were you able to follow today’s lesson, Calla?”

“Pretty much,” she responds, trying to put her other concerns out of her head.

“You seemed a little lost.”

Oh, yeah, that’s just because every time I turn around, I’m seeing and hearing ghosts,
she wants to say.
Other than that, no problem.

“How about if we take a few minutes to go over what we did today?” he asks, reaching for the chalk. “And I’ll give you some worksheets. You can meet with Willow again tonight or tomorrow, and hopefully, you’ll be getting up to speed by the end of the week.”

She nods, deciding not to mention that Willow has a homecoming committee meeting tonight. She has a feeling Mr. Bombeck won’t consider that a good reason not to meet with her study partner and do homework.

Twenty minutes later, Mr. Bombeck lets her go at last. She hurries through the almost-empty corridors to her locker.

“There you are!” Evangeline calls as Calla walks toward her. “I was just about to leave, but I didn’t want to walk home without you.”

“Sorry . . . I had to stay after for math.”

“I know. I saw Jacy and I know he’s in your last period so I asked him where you were. Any excuse to talk to him, right?” she adds with a wry smile.

Calla smiles back, hoping it doesn’t look too forced. She gathers her things from her locker as her friend changes the subject to homecoming.

“I heard Russell Lancione is going to ask me to go with him,” Evangeline says. “I don’t know if I want him to. I mean, it would be nice to go to the dance, but . . . maybe not with Russell.”

“Why not?” Calla asks, even though she knows the answer will probably have something to do with Jacy.

Evangeline shrugs. “He’s nice and everything, but . . . you know . . . he’s . . .”

Not Jacy,
Calla thinks, seeing her friend’s wistful expression.
Yeah, I totally hear you.

But Evangeline says only, “He’s just kind of blah.”

Calla grins. “I guess blah isn’t your type, huh?”

“I guess not. What about you?”

“Blah’s not my type, either.”

Evangeline laughs. “No, I mean, what about you and the homecoming dance?”

For a split second, Calla wonders if Evangeline possibly read her mind and knows that she, too, is longing for Jacy to ask her.

“Nobody’s asked you yet, right?”

Oh. Phew.

“No . . . why?” Calla slams her locker door closed and pulls on her jacket.

“I probably shouldn’t say anything, but . . .”

“But what?” Calla prods, as they head toward the exit.

“I heard Blue’s going to ask you to homecoming.”

Calla’s jaw drops. “Who said that?”

“Linda Samuels, this girl who goes out with Ryan Kruger, told me. She said Blue’s thinking about it.”

“Really?”
Then why is he sending e-mails to Willow York about the homecoming dance? Is he planning to ask her first, and I’m just the backup in case she says no?

“Don’t tell him I said that, though,” Evangeline says.

“Oh, please. As if.” Calla laughs and shakes her head.

No way is she going to get her hopes up that Blue will ask her.

Still, as she and Evangeline head toward home, despite everything she’s been through, Calla finds her heart a little lighter for the first time all day. Thinking about a school dance—even if part of it is worrying about who may or may not ask her—feels welcome and normal compared to dwelling on ghosts and death, as she has been.

THIRTEEN

Tuesday, September 11
7:39 a.m.

The next morning, Calla steps out onto the porch with her backpack to find Lily Dale draped in heavy gray fog. The air feels like a warm, wet blanket and a dank smell is coming from the lakefront. Oh, ick. What a change from yesterday’s crisp, sunny weather. All that’s missing is the gloomy sound of a foghorn and a clanking bell.

“Gross out, isn’t it?” Evangeline calls as she heads down the steps next door with her own backpack. They’ve already got their morning timing perfectly in sync.

“I never know what to expect around here,” Calla says as they fall into step together, heading toward the gate though they can’t see more than a few feet in front of them. “I thought it was supposed to be nice out today.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“The weatherman on the news last night.”

“Oh, please.” Evangeline dismisses that with a wave of her hand. “Around here, it’s impossible to predict. Did you ever hear what Mark Twain said about the weather in western New York? He used to live around here, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know. What did he say?”

“If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”

Calla smiles. “Yeah, no kid—” She breaks off abruptly, startled to glimpse a familiar figure just ahead in the mist.

Kaitlyn.

“What’s wrong?” Evangeline asks.

Kaitlyn is shaking her head ominously, just as before.

“Stop him!”

Her words shriek through Calla’s brain and then she disappears, enveloped in fog.

“It was Kaitlyn,” she tells Evangeline shakily. “She wants me to stop him.”

“Still?” Evangeline grabs her hand and squeezes it. “Breathe. You look like you’re going to faint.”

“How am I supposed to stop him if I don’t know who or where he is?”

“I think it’s time,” Evangeline says slowly, “that you sat in on one of my beginning mediumship classes. You need to learn how to develop your abilities. I know you’re going to say you can’t, and come up with a million excuses, but—”

“Okay.”

There’s a pause. “Okay?” Evangeline looks confused. “Okay, what?”

“Okay. I’ll come to one of your classes. This is crazy. If I’m going to do this sort of thing—and it really seems like I don’t have a choice—then I’m going to do it right.”

“Hey . . . what are you doing all by your lonesome?”

Munching on an apple, Calla looks up from her book to see Blue standing over her. “Oh, hi. I’m trying to read Shakespeare.
Hamlet.
”

“For pleasure?”

“Are you kidding? For English.” And she’s read the same page at least three times just now, preoccupied with her decision to accompany Evangeline to a class. Evangeline thinks her Saturday-morning instructor will let Calla sit in.

“We’re reading
King Lear
in my section,” Blue comments. “I’d rather do
Hamlet
. We did it in my old school, so at least I know it.”

His old school, Calla knows, is a fancy boarding school he attended until he got kicked out. He didn’t tell her why, and she hasn’t felt comfortable asking, but she’s definitely curious.

Grabbing a chair from the next table and straddling it backward, he asks, “So, where are your friends today?”

“Oh, you mean Willow and Sarita?”

He nods.

“They had to go to the computer lab to work on a flyer for the homecoming dance.”

“Oh. That. Is that the only thing they ever think about?” he asks with a good-natured roll of his blue eyes.

She’s spared having to answer, because a wadded up ball of paper sails through the air and hits Blue on the head.

“Hey!” He looks around to see his friend Ryan, the obvious culprit, beckoning him from two tables away.

“Looks like you’re being summoned,” Calla observes.

“Yeah. I’ll let you get back to your Shakespeare. See you later.”

Watching him walk away, Calla can feel the curious attention from a group of girls sitting at the end of her table.

Sure enough, moments after she goes back to her reading— or pretends to—one of them comes walking over. She’s a petite blond, just short of pretty thanks to close-set eyes and a narrow, pointy nose.

“Hi,” she says. “You’re the new girl, right? From Florida?”

“Right. Calla.”

“I’m Pam.”

“Nice to meet you,” she says politely.

“Are you seeing him?”

“Who?” Calla asks, knowing darn well who.

“Blue Slayton.”

“We’ve gone out,” Calla admits.

“Really? Are you guys going to homecoming together?”

“I don’t know . . . I mean, no. Not that I know of.” Officially feeling like a tongue-tied idiot, she shrugs and wishes Pam would go away.

“Want to come over and sit with us?”

Normally, Calla would welcome the invitation, but she really isn’t in the mood to field curious questions about Blue and homecoming.

Still, maybe it’s better than sitting here alone with
Hamlet.

“Sure,” she tells Pam. “Let me just get my stuff together and I’ll come right down. Thanks.”

It can’t hurt to make some new cafeteria friends, she decides as she sticks a straw wrapper into her Shakespeare text as a bookmark. After all, who knows if Willow will want to sit with her after this?

Why wouldn’t she? Because you were talking to Blue? Isn’t that a little extreme?

She wonders if Blue would even have come over if Calla had been sitting with Willow as usual. Probably not, if he’s sending Willow e-mails about homecoming.

It’s being held in October, kicked off with a pep rally after school, then the big varsity football game against the school’s archrivals, the Brocton Bulldogs. Afterward is the formal dance in the gym, with a live band this year instead of the usual DJ.

Calla keeps telling herself it’s no big deal if she doesn’t get to go. After all, she’s new here and it’s not like it’s a prom.

Prom. Hah.

Last spring, Kevin dumped her right before her junior prom. She wound up going—just as friends—with Paul Horton, who’s an inch shorter than her on a regular day. He was a good three inches shorter on prom night because of the heels she’d picked out when she thought she was going with Kevin. She stubbornly decided to keep the shoes since they went perfectly with the dress, and suffer through looking down at the top of her date’s head all night. Maybe deep down, she was thinking that at the last minute, Paul would uninvite her . . . and Kevin would simultaneously reappear in her life.

So much for that.

As for Lily Dale’s homecoming dance, she can’t help dwelling on that e-mail she saw and wondering if Willow is going with Blue despite being broken up and despite Evangeline hearing he’s going to ask Calla.

She wonders, too—even though it’s ridiculous—whether there’s the slightest chance Jacy might ask her to go with him.

If he does
—
not that he will
—
what would you do about Evangeline?

It doesn’t matter,
she tells herself as she walks over to join Pam and her friends.
Because Jacy won’t ask you. Period.

When Calla walks into the house after babysitting at Paula’s, she moodily lets the door slam shut after her.

“Calla? Is that you?”

“Yeah.”

She spent the rest of her lunch period wishing she had stuck to Shakespeare. Pam and her friends were gossipy, and Calla was turned off by mean-spirited comments a few of them made about poor Donald Reamer.

Later, she failed a quiz in Bombeck’s class, and Paula’s kids insisted on playing Candyland for two hours straight. Moving around and around the tedious game board was about as much fun as taking the pop quiz in math. Dylan insisted on an extra game piece for Kelly—who, Calla is starting to believe, might be nothing more than an imaginary friend after all. It’s not as if she herself has sensed a presence lingering around Dylan, or as if Kelly’s game piece moved itself around the board, which might have been a heck of a lot faster. Instead, Dylan did it, taking an extra and painstaking turn each round, so that the game lasted far longer than it should have.

Home at last, Calla heads right for the stairs. She’d love to flop onto her bed and read or listen to music. That’s not going to happen, though. She has a pile of homework to do.

“Come in here,” Odelia calls from the back of the house. “I have something to show you.”

“What is it?” Calla drapes her backpack and jacket over the newel post and heads to the kitchen.

The room is empty . . . or so she thinks.

Then she hears Odelia’s voice again, coming from under the kitchen table.