Servants of the Storm (3 page)

Either she’s still alive or I’m so crazy that even antipsychotics can’t touch me.

I won’t quit looking for her until I know the truth.

SCHOOL IS SCHOOL. IT’S A
numb fuzz with or without pills. Moving from one class to another like a robot. Taking notes. Staring at the blackboard. The teachers mostly ignore me, thanks to a few choice panic attacks last year, after Carly died and before the pills kicked in. I remember it—just a little. Mainly me freaking out and people carrying me out of the room. Now the teachers know it’s better to just skip me when polling for answers. My grades went from As and Bs to Fs after the hurricane, but the meds have kept me hovering in the middle Cs. Just good enough to get by.

The fuzz lifts, bit by bit. I start to take an interest in things, look at people again, notice how many kids are missing, compared to before Josephine. At lunch I’m standing in line for pizza, pretty much daydreaming. As Mrs. Lowery puts the plasticky
slice on my tray with a spatula, something catches my eye. She’s been behind the counter of the caf since my freshman year, and most days I don’t even see her. But today something ripples across my field of vision. Something under her apron.

I stop to stare. It’s like she has something wiggly hidden in her bra, and I can’t figure out what it could possibly be. Is she smuggling a kitten? I can’t concentrate enough to make sense of it.

“Is there a problem, Miss Greenwood?” she growls.

“No, ma’am,” I say, looking up. She’s glaring at me, her eyes dark and angry, and I suddenly want nothing more than to be out of the cramped lunch line and away from her. I push my tray along so fast that I forget to get a drink. As I choke down the thick, doughy pizza, I keep thinking about that movie where the aliens explode out of peoples’ chests. By the time the bell rings for my next class, I can’t remember what upset me so much.

In seventh-period English the fog lifts again. We’re talking about
Heart of Darkness
, and I remember watching the movie with my dad a long time ago, some guy’s face in the dark talking about the horror. My desk is suddenly unbearable, cold and constricting. I put on my jacket and rock back and forth, trying to wake up my butt. I don’t notice Baker until he leans over to talk to me. I’d completely forgotten that I sit next to him.

“Yo, Dovey. Can I hitch a ride to rehearsal?”

I blink to focus, and for just a second I see a younger version of Baker instead of a high school junior. This high school boy is no longer the pudgy, pale kid in glasses with a hopeful smile and
striped shirt, forever following Carly and me all over the neighborhood. At first we put up
NO BOYS ALLOWED
signs and refused to answer the door no matter how long he knocked, but then he brought us Fudgsicles, a book of knock, knock jokes, and one of his cat’s kittens, and we were all best friends from then on. So much about him is the same—unruly dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes. But now he’s got contacts, he’s taller, and he has traded his stripes for non-ironic plaid. After Carly’s funeral we stayed unofficial buds, but in a drifting, foggy way. Like two rowboats lost on the same lake, occasionally bumping into each other.

“I have to do something afterward,” I whisper.

“Cool. I’ll come with.”

Mild irritation edges into the numb fuzz, raises my voice.

“That’s not what—”

“Did you want to read, Billie Dove?”

My head jerks up. Mr. Christopher is staring at me with a mixture of annoyance and pity. I guess it’s easier to ignore me when I’m not shouting.

“We’re on page one fifteen,” he says. “If you’re ready to join us.”

I look at my closed book. It’s new, since most of our books were water damaged. I haven’t even cracked the spine. I’ll read it, eventually.

“I’ll do it, Mr. Christopher,” Baker says, and he begins reading loudly and with unnecessary intensity, as if the entire book were written with the caps lock on. He reads like he’s fighting the book and thrashing around in the words. But he’s smirking.

Luckily, the bell rings just then, and his personal assault on Joseph Conrad cuts off midsentence. He follows me to my locker, and it’s like one of those cheesy movie scenes where everyone is moving really fast except for the main characters. Like Baker and I are walking underwater while the other people buzz around us like hummingbirds. There are a few other kids like us, kids who have lost best friends or siblings. We’re the ones who move slowly, heavily. But we try not to look at each other, our eyes sliding away, afraid of small talk that will bring back unwelcome memories. We’re a family of strangers in pain.

I open my locker, and it’s plastered with pictures of me and Carly. A photo of us riding bikes, another one we took at a slumber party with Tamika and Nikki, a few with our arms wrapped around Baker’s shoulders, all of us laughing. I unstick an old one and pull it out to look more closely. It’s Carly and me standing together in church dresses with our grandmothers on either side of us. Nana and Gigi look more alike than Carly and me, but you can see the pride in both of their smiles. That was the day Carly won a good citizen award in second grade for saving a cat that had fallen down the storm drain. I helped a little, but it had been her idea to put a branch down there as a ladder, and she had been the one who’d carried the exhausted, dripping cat back to the address on his tag.

The family had offered her a reward, but in typical Carly fashion she’d just put a hand on her hip and told them to spend it on tuna and a trip to the vet, because the poor cat was half chewed-up
and skinnier than he should have been. I catch myself smiling in my locker mirror. God, that girl had a sassy mouth.

I trade my books, load up my backpack, and fight the hall traffic to the student parking lot. I’m lucky to have a car at all, even if it’s my dead grandmother’s 1997 Buick Skylark. One look at the cars around it tells you plainly that we don’t live in those fancy row houses and historic mansions you see in the movies. There’s not a car here fewer than ten years old, and that includes the teachers’. That’s the thing about Savannah. What the tourists see? What they show in the movie theater? None of that is real.

The natives use different roads to avoid tourists in minivans with out-of-town plates. We take a lonely expressway to tired neighborhoods the vacationers will never see. Everything here is broken down a little, languishing in age with less grandeur than the charmingly crooked porches that get photographed on the horse-drawn carriage tours. The city cleaned those areas up fast after Josephine, to get the tourists back. They’re pretty again, and retirees can buy their taffy and take their ghost tours and stand in line for overpriced fried chicken.

What most people know of Savannah is a dream. But this is real life.

I find my car and open the door, pulling up with the little hitch that keeps it from squeaking too badly. I slide in, the seat creaking underneath me on bad springs, and lean over to open the passenger door for Baker.

“You ready for dress rehearsal?” I ask.

“Course I am,” he answers with a lopsided grin. “I’m freaking Caliban. This part was made for me. Are
you
ready?”

“Course I am,” I say. “I’ve barely got any lines.”

There’s an awkward pause. Meds or no meds, the bitterness is sharp in my voice.

He looks out the window, his fingers tapping patterns on the faded dash. I know him well enough to know it’s probably some complex cheat code for Xbox.

“Do you miss being the lead?” he asks.

I start the car with a roar and back out too fast, nearly plowing into some kid I don’t even know. He calls me a bitch and slams his fist down on my trunk. The punch probably hurt him more than it hurt my old Buick. I give him the finger.

I ease into the line and glance at Baker sideways as the car rumbles out of the lot. He just broke our unspoken rule, the one where we never, ever talk about the past. But something has changed for me. Maybe it’s that nagging, desperate hope that Carly’s out there somewhere. Maybe it’s a tiny chemical jolt from my second day off the meds. But I answer his question.

“I miss it,” I admit. “A little.”

And it’s definitely true. This time last year I would have had my pick of the lead roles in
The Tempest
. I probably would have gone for Ariel, or maybe Miranda. I would have done a better job in that white-and-gold toga than Jasmine Pettigo, that’s for sure. Now I’m just another sprite, one of several made-up parts Mrs. Rosewater created by divvying up some of Ariel’s less
important lines. With my emotions blunted and my mind dull, it was the best I could do. I have one scene with Baker, as Caliban, and then the whole play is a bunch of flitting around in a leotard and tutu.

“You would have made a great Miranda,” he says, fingers still tapping as he says exactly what I was thinking. “You think you’ll ever . . . you know, get back into it?”

I snort. He could mean competitive acting. Or he could mean life.

“One day,” I say.

Normally the play is the most important thing I have, but right now all I can think about is getting out of rehearsal and going to Paper Moon to look for Carly. The rest of the drive is silent, but I can tell he wants to say more.

We roll into downtown, and I’m struck, as ever, at the change that has taken place. For a city that survived the Civil War, Savannah got a raw deal with Josephine. It’s like the winds came with chisels and the water brought a jackhammer to the streets. Bits of buildings are broken off, and half of the beautiful green oaks are gone, leaving holes in the canopy, where sun shines through cruelly, when it does shine. Thick swaths of Spanish moss drape from the swaybacked branches of the trees that survived, framing each street with lank, gray rags. Except for the tourist areas, everything is spooky, malevolent, just a little too dark, as if one more raindrop could shatter it all.

Parking is always sketchy, but I manage to squeeze into a space in a back alley. My school puts on two plays a year, and
since we don’t have a stage, we take over the old Liberty Theater downtown for a week of dress rehearsals and a weekend of shows. It’s pretty broken down, which is why they let a bunch of high school kids invade it with paint and makeup and glue guns. And the owner is this seriously grouchy old guy named Murph who is always yelling at us in the girls’ dressing room, trying to catch a peek during costume changes.

Baker trips on a chunk of concrete as we pass the creepy antiques shop next door to the Liberty, and the old lady inside frowns at us from the window, where she’s dusting a hideous painting of a monkey in a hat. This is my third year doing plays here, and I’ve never seen a single person in the shop besides her. It doesn’t even have a name, and the junk in the dull windows never seems to change. Sometimes I wonder if maybe the doors are locked from the inside, if she’s just trying to keep all of her oddities and antiquities to herself. We hurry past and cross in front of Savannah’s oldest theater.

The Liberty looks dilapidated and sad, even though Josephine left it miraculously undamaged. The front windows are all pasted over with moldering posters from past plays, some so ancient that they’re still in black and white. The whitewash over the bricks has seen better days, and the awning hangs in flaps like it was raked by giant claws. Most of the lightbulbs around the marquee are broken. Still, it’s better than performing Shakespeare in our school’s cafeteria, which smells like burned beef sticks and swamp farts. The four front doors to the Liberty are always chained, except on
opening night. As we pass, I reach out to touch the rusted links held together with a shiny new lock. Someone has jammed gum into the keyhole.

“People are monsters,” Baker says with mock sadness and a hand over his heart.

The street is almost empty. The tourist crowds will pick up closer to Christmas, but for now, in that dead space between Halloween and Thanksgiving, Savannah looks her age, possibly older. Faded flags and swags of moss flap in the breeze, and I hug myself and wish I’d brought a heavier coat. Hard to believe we were having a freak heat wave before Josephine, and almost exactly one year later it smells like snow that will never fall.

I open the theater’s side door, and Baker follows me into the darkened hallway. I stop, caught in a wave of memories. The first time Carly and I burst through that door, we were giggling, freaking out over our first speaking parts in our freshman show. Joining drama club had been her idea, but it became my passion. We were here after school, painting sets on the weekend, running lines back and forth with our backs against the bricks. We hugged our parents in this hallway, our makeup and glitter rubbing off on their Sunday suits, bouquets from the Piggly Wiggly in each hand. A senior once gave Carly a carnation after a show, right here where I’m standing, and she blushed so brightly that I could see the pink, even through her blue-black skin. They went on one date, and when he tried to feel her up, she kneed him in the nuts, and he was out of school for a week.

This is the first time I’ve been here since the flood, smelling the wet-rot of the water overlaying the centuries of cigarette smoke and wood.

“You okay?” Baker asks.

I reach for the wall, one hand to my head. It’s starting to ache, and I hear a weird hum right on the edge of my consciousness.

“I’m fine,” I say, focusing on the peeling green paint under my hand. “Just a headache.”

Honestly, I didn’t think I would feel any effects this quickly from dropping the meds. The pills arrive in an unmarked bottle of old-fashioned glass, and the white tablets aren’t stamped. I couldn’t pinpoint the formulation online, so I don’t know exactly what I’m up against, withdrawal-wise. Still, it seems like it should take more than a day and a half for me to be feeling things again, remembering things. If I had given it more thought, and maybe if I hadn’t been so desperate to find Carly, I wouldn’t have quit my mystery meds cold turkey right now. The first stage rehearsal at the Liberty is the wrong time to go crazy. I need this play, need this normalcy.

I fight my way past the memories and walk down the musty hallway with its off-kilter wood floors and buzzing lights. People laugh and talk beyond two open doors, and Baker salutes me before he disappears into the boys’ dressing room. I take a deep breath, put on a smile, and push into the girls’ room.