Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (4 page)

As she entered the dorm and climbed the stairs, however, she realized that by sending reassurance texts and pretending everything was fine, she was covering up for Watson and Nikolaos. The smart thing to do, if you were kidnapped or assaulted, was to call the authorities right away, and to tell your friends that something outrageous and unacceptable had just happened to you.

But Watson was right, wasn’t he? She couldn’t explain it the way it really happened. If she did, mental health specialists would converge upon her and examine her brain. If she went down that path, she wouldn’t get to be a normal student, hanging out with other dorm-mates and eating cheap pizza, let alone studying.

Maybe it didn’t happen, she thought, walking down the corridor toward her room, staring at the homemade cloth signs and posters the other girls had already started decorating their doors with. Maybe she’d dreamed it. She curled her fingers around the handkerchief and the violet, feeling their slightly damp, very real textures. Except it did happen, didn’t it?

“There you are,” Melissa greeted. She was sitting at her desk, fingers on computer keyboard.

Sophie had entered the room almost without noticing. She put on a smile. “Hey. Just got your text. I was—yeah, I’m fine.” She sat on her bed and slipped off her sneakers. Dust and dry grass seeds stuck to their laces. Maybe if you looked closely you’d find crazy huge-ass lion hairs, she thought.

“Who was the guy? What happened?” Melissa sounded placid, but vaguely concerned. She pulled the ponytail band from her hair and wove it around her fingers, flexing the elastic as she watched Sophie.

“He was just some guy I was giving directions to.” Sophie turned the violet over in her palm. Violets were never red, to her knowledge, and they didn’t have that whitish cast to their stems. Maybe it wasn’t a violet.

“But I was behind you, near the dorm, and I swear it looked like you both disappeared into thin air when he tackled you.”

Sophie chuckled, and brought up the photo of Nikolaos on her phone, though she didn’t show it to Melissa. “Yeah, he was being an ass. I told him off, and then…walked around to cool down a while.”

“But you
disappeared
.”

“What, like into another dimension?” Sophie tried to put a skeptical spin on it, throwing Melissa a smile.

Melissa was quiet a second. She rotated the elastic band between finger and thumb. “I guess it doesn’t make any sense. Must have been a trick of the light.”

Sophie shrugged, lowering her gaze to her phone again, where she had caught the back of Nikolaos’ head and his striped outfit. She wished she had snapped a shot of Watson. She felt like studying his face would provide some kind of answer or proof, though of course it wouldn’t.

A moment later, Melissa turned back to her computer and resumed typing, evidently shrugging off the strange notion of Sophie’s vanishing act.

Sophie moved to her own desk and switched on her laptop, and sat gazing at the violet while the computer started up. Violets were spring flowers, and this was September. That was another odd point, along with the color. Maybe in a greenhouse someone could grow a red violet, and could do so any time of year. Or in the southern hemisphere—it was spring down there. Watson’s accent did sound sort of Australian. Not that the flower itself mattered much.

Tonight she had expected to be focusing on practical matters: finding food and textbooks, getting to know her roommate and hall neighbors, wandering around campus to locate her classrooms, deciding exactly how much she missed home and her boyfriend and what, if anything, she would do about it.

Instead, one half-hour had thrown her mind into a new orbit.

A spirit world of strange animals. A land of ghosts, where Grandpop now walked. Someone who could switch back and forth between them, and was going to invite her to come visit again soon—or possibly just show up and steal her.

What would she say when he asked?

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
groggy after a night of inadequate sleep, she found her way to the dining hall and ate breakfast with Melissa. The coffee and cereal and banana revived her, though all tasted duller and staler than she would have liked.

With an hour to kill before her freshman orientation meetings started for the day, Sophie got onto her blog.

She found a few comments from her post two days ago, where she’d announced she was off to college and therefore probably couldn’t blog about fruits, vegetables, and nutrition for a few days. The comments wished her good luck and successful studies, but they were all from people she’d never met in real life.

Still, there was one from her favorite and cleverest commenter, Kiwi Ade, who wrote,
Best of luck. Looking forward to hearing about your adventures. Hope only the loveliest things happen to you.

His kindness eased the lump of agitation inside her, and made her smile. His comment, as always, was more mature and considerate than the ones she usually got. (For example, from some girl on this post:
Have fun Sophie, dont let the frat boys mix you a drink, there way strong lol
.)

Though she’d never even seen a picture of him, Kiwi Ade was one of those people she’d met online whose words alone made her think she could probably date him, if they were unattached and living in the same country. At some point he had mentioned being from New Zealand (thus the “Kiwi” part of his nickname, she supposed), and he came across as young, maybe her own age. Most importantly, he had good taste in music and books, not to mention produce, judging from the discussions they’d gotten into on her comment threads.

But the thought of New Zealand instantly sent her mind to Watson, the possibly-Australian, possibly-Kiwi, definitely paranormal young fellow with videos of dead guys on his phone.

Hey, Kiwi Ade
, she considered answering,
do you know anyone in your country or Australia who might be interested in kidnapping me? Someone with supernatural powers, maybe?

Without typing anything, she closed the browser window and set out for her orientation meeting.

Her day didn’t improve much, despite occasional texts from Jacob, Tabitha, and Liam.

In particular, Tabitha’s texts frustrated her, referencing things Sophie couldn’t possibly know about.
Voice practice today. Auditions next week, & competition is f’ing fierce around here.
Tabitha was attending Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, with the aim to become a professional singer. Cornish probably put on dozens of productions a year, and Sophie had no idea which one Tabitha currently had her eye on.

Auditions for what?
Sophie texted back.
Hope you get to relax later.

Parsifal
, Tabitha answered.
Yep, some gay guys invited me to a Bdwy (CapHl) club tonight. Hope the gay gals are there too!

Was “Parsifal” an opera or a composer?, Sophie wondered, irritated. Tabitha had to realize Sophie didn’t know these things. And it took Sophie a full minute to figure out that “Bdwy (CapHl)” meant “Broadway, Capitol Hill”—Seattle’s gay Mecca. Tabitha was a lesbian, and until now Sophie had been her wing-woman in the limited opportunities they’d had to go out and flirt with people. Now Tab would rely on some group of sophisticated Cornish College people Sophie had never met.

Good luck
, she texted, and put away her phone, lonelier than ever.

It was only a couple of years ago that Sophie had held Tabitha sobbing in her arms, after some girls in their class had lodged snotty, “formal” complaints about having a lesbian share the locker room with them. “It makes us feel weird,” they had said. And though the teachers had concluded there was nothing they could do except keep allowing Tab to use the locker room like all the other girls, and had asked all the young ladies to respect one another’s privacy, the gossip had flashed throughout the town.

Tab had been out to her closest friends and family before, but now she was out to everyone, like it or not. People snickered and stared and sent half-audible whispered comments at Tab’s back. Sophie had wanted to grab a baseball bat and murder the snotty girls and anyone else who made a remark, but all she could do was hold Tab and stand by her, and tell off some of the nastiest commenters. That gave her the reputation of being Tab’s girlfriend, of course, which was so patently ridiculous she didn’t even care—or tried not to. Tabitha’s parents did their best to console their daughter too, but they were in the middle of a divorce, and had no time or energy for dealing with much else. Sophie had kept Tab from collapsing, almost single-handedly.

Now Tabitha didn’t even need her anymore. She was already making new friends and living a glamorous city life.

Meanwhile, Sophie was losing her mind and being introduced to kidnappers, and needed a friend more than ever. But she couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to her, not without sounding crazy.

For the next few days, she stumbled through her new college existence, her mind and heart only half in it. Every time her phone buzzed with a call or text, adrenaline shot through her body. But it was never Watson.

The things he had shown her and told her seemed real. They
felt
real. Her instincts insisted he wasn’t lying. Hiding things, sure, lots of them probably; but not lying.

And he had a dog, a nice dog. He couldn’t be too evil or dangerous if he had such a great dog. She smirked at herself for thinking that, yet on some level it still struck her as a reliable deduction.

She sat with other girls and boys from her dorms and classes, and listened absently as they shared stories of “amazing” things that had happened to them. Sophie could beat all their stories with her single otherworldly encounter, if she wanted. Not that anyone would believe her.

In meetings, professors and campus officials congratulated her on the academic adventure she was about to undertake, and warned her of the physical and financial dangers of campus life. Adventure? Danger? she thought. Compared to the ghost-world and its huge lions, Oregon State University didn’t look so dramatic.

She did believe it was real, she silently admitted to herself on Friday night, twirling the now-dried violet between her fingers. She saw no way it could have been faked. Or perhaps she only
wanted
to believe it?

Half the time she dreaded Watson’s reappearance, fearing he’d leap out and steal her again without warning. The other half of the time, she wanted to see him, to demand explanations, to learn how he did all that. To visit Grandpop in person. If she never saw Watson again, she had to confess, it would be totally frustrating.

On Saturday night, two days before classes would begin, Sophie attended a party for the students of the Nutrition department. In a crowded classroom with food spread on the table, she mingled, holding a fruit-and-vegetable juice smoothie. Within twenty minutes she was utterly tired of telling people her history and plans.

I’m Sophie. I grew up in Carnation, Washington. It’s east of Seattle. My family owns a produce stand and that’s why I chose Nutrition. I want to help people choose foods that are better for them, and grow their own food too. Because they’d all be healthier.

It had seemed so important when she decided upon her major—a mission to improve the health of the general populace; what could be nobler? But tonight her mind obsessed over concerns of a far more fascinating nature, and she spoke to everyone with near-indifference.

She wandered outside with her smoothie, letting the night breeze cool her skin. Sitting alone on the steps of the lecture hall, she checked her phone again for messages. Nothing.

She could go back to the dorm. Another party was getting started there. “Don’t tell, but someone’s bringing beer,” one of the girls in her hall had whispered to her, starry-eyed, as if obtaining beer was the height of lifetime accomplishment. Tabitha and Jacob were each probably doing something similar in their new environments on this Saturday night: drinking booze and chatting with people. Like proper college students.

Sophie had drunk beer a few times, but didn’t love it. She pictured the boys in her dorm, of whom she’d now met a handful. She imagined them tackling her the way Nikolaos had, with more mundane motives. She grimaced.
So
not interested.

The breeze strengthened, growing colder. Sophie sat shivering, her mind traveling to her family and friends.

A week ago, she would have said her two biggest worries in life were relationship issues: hers and Jacob’s, and her mother’s and father’s.

A month ago, she’d seen her mother kissing another man in a car by the Carnation public library. She’d told no one except Tabitha, who urged her to stay out of it. Sophie had obeyed, but the worry of her parents possibly divorcing had been eating holes in her stomach.

And Jacob. Five months ago, just before graduating, they had admitted in a late-night texting session to a mutual crush on one another. He had snuck over to her house and they’d shared their first kiss, on the porch at 12:30 on a spring night, neither of them able to wait until morning. April, May, and June passed in a state of bliss. Then her happiness diminished, chipping away bit by bit as arguments with him cropped up on small but annoying topics. She always attributed the disagreements to the stress of college looming ahead, and made up with him each time.