Signs of You (4 page)

“Let's walk,” he says to me. “We've got ten minutes before the bell.”

I can't look at him. I'm worried I'll come unglued again. I can
feel
what he's thinking—
I know you aren't okay, Riley. Start talking.
And I'm just so tired. So damned tired. I can't talk about any of this right now. I just—can't.

Fortunately, the fourth member of our little dysfunctional clan shows up next. Kate's iPod earbuds are jammed in her ears, and her gorgeous black hair is tied up in an unruly knot on her head.

“Who you listening to?” I ask. I eye her iPod, trying to see if it's a new one. Kate was thrown into Back on Track because she responded to the death of her aunt by stealing her mother's credit card. (In addition to failing all her classes, like the rest of us.) She bought everything from new f ive hundred dollar boots to a stupidly expensive purse. And she's still doing it. She “borrows” cash or her mom's card on a semi-regular basis. She claims it's a compulsion, and maybe it is. You have to watch her like a hawk.

“JUDDS,” she says way too loud. “AND DON'T WORRY, THE IPOD IS OLD.”

Jay reaches over and gently takes her headphones out. “You're screaming,” he says. “And listening to country music. Those are two very serious early-morning violations around here.”

“Whatever.” As she tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear, I look for any signs that she's about to lose it, too. We both tried on the cross, and if my hypothesis is right about some weird Catholic curse, then she'd be seeing strange things, too. But she looks totally normal and decidedly un-freaked-out. “My aunt Lilly was originally from Kentucky,” she says as another piece of hair escapes from her disorganized bun. “And she always said that down there the Judds are considered honorary colonels.”

“Honorary colonels, huh?” I ask. Kate nods. I don't know what that's supposed to mean, but I can tell I'm supposed to be impressed—so I am. “Well, I guess I'll have to give the Judds some more thought,” I say.

Kate smiles and heads for her f irst class. Even though I know I'd rather be dragged behind a herd of wild horses than be forced to listen to one note of Kate's music, I don't want to hurt her feelings. I make it my general policy in life not to be an obnoxious ass, and am continually surprised by the number of people who seem not to share this goal.

“If I'm ever captured by terrorists, there could be no greater torture than if they strapped me to a speaker blasting the Judds singing ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water' on a loop. I hope they don't know that,” Noah says.

“Don't be an ass, Noah,” I say. “Let's go in, already.”

He shoots me a quizzical look. “Whoa. What's up with you this morning? You okay?”

Apparently, I can't fool Noah either. He knows me too well. He knows something's off.

“Yeah, I'm good,” I lie.

“No, you're not,” Jay says. He peers at me with his typical sincere concern that makes my insides lurch with a mash-up of feelings.

“I'm
good
,” I say again. “Fine. Just about to fail a history test
and
a physics test today, that's all.”

“No, that's not all. Why'd you drive off like that last night? Are you sure you were just . . . missing your mom?”

“Yes. Yes, I was—I am. Now, take me to physics or lose me forever.”

I bomb both tests.
I still
know exactly zero facts about James K. Polk, which as Jay pointed out last night makes Henry Clay's “Who is Polk?”
campaign slogan especially poignant for me. There was no way I could cram when I got home from the cemetery. I try to focus harder when I get to the physics exam but bomb that in an equally spectacular fashion. I try not to think about my mom or Jay as I read word problems about fulcrums and the surface tension of water rising in a capillary tube. I pray for a C. I try to remember what it was like before Mom died, when I did all my homework and actually studied. But I can't. It's like my ability to care died right alongside her, and I have no idea how to resurrect it. I mean, you can't just order up motivation like it's a Happy Meal or something.

Whatever. I f ill in all the blanks.

As soon as I
get home from school, I crash on my bed and take a nap. I wake to the sound of my dad calling me for dinner. I rub my eyes and realize I feel a little better. A little more stable.
Must have been some sort of freak-out yesterday. Maybe some delayed grief.

I stand and stretch, glancing down at my cell as I pull on my favorite sweats.

Jay has sent me about a million texts.

WHERE R U?

WHERE R U?

WHERE R U?

WHERE R U?

WHERE R U?

WHERE R U?

I start to text him back and ask what's up, but before I can send a message, I hear the doorbell. I run downstairs and open the door.

It's Jay. And he looks like he's dying. His skin is somewhere between peach and lime green. Instinctively, I take his hand and lead him up to my room. My dad lets us hang out in there as long as we keep the door open. He worries that a closed door means we're in a lip-lock, which provides a great example of the lesson that
most
of what we worry about will never happen.

“What's wrong? You're shaking,” I say as I try to sit him down on my bed.

He won't sit. He just keeps pacing.

“I. I. Oh my god.” He runs to the bathroom and leans over the toilet. I follow him and rub his back. I'm brief ly distracted by the smell of his skin mixed with the scent of man-deodorant. I think they put hormones in that stuff. Good ones. I run my hand over his shoulders. They have muscle def inition but avoid the extremes: They aren't bony but they also don't have that fake, built-in-the-gym look.
Snap out of it
, I tell myself. I glance down at my abdomen, about where I think my ovaries are. I don't know if it's anatomically true or not, but I blame them for what is currently coursing through my veins. I imagine them as egg-shaped cheerleaders, obnoxious and misguided, tossing pom-poms in the air and chanting a cheer about Jay and getting n-a-k-e-d.

“Do you have the f lu?” I ask, trying to focus on anything but the way he smells and the way his warm back feels under my hand.

“No.”

I feel his head; it's ice cold but sweaty.

“Something you ate?”

“No,” he says, moving away from the toilet. We walk back into my room and sit down on my dark green carpet. “Just promise me you won't tell anybody.”

“I promise.”

“I mean, really. You can't tell. Not even Kate.”

“Okay, okay. Just tell me. Go.”

“I think I'm crazy,” he says.

“You're not crazy.”

“Riley, I saw my dad today.”

My heart feels like it freezes, stutters to a stop. He waits for me to respond. I can't.

“I know, I know, but I swear I saw him,” Jay says in the silence. “Sitting on a bench by the river. I was walking the dog after school and went right by him. I tried to shake it off, thinking it couldn't be him. But I couldn't keep going. I had to stop. I stood about twenty feet from him and just—watched. It was my dad, I know it.”

“Did he see you?” I ask, when I'm f inally able to speak.

“Yeah, he saw me and—”

“Recognized you?” I ask.

“Yeah. Instantly. And—”

“And as soon as he recognized you, he was gone?”

Jay stands up and looks at me like I'm possessed. “How did you know that? How did you—”

“Because it happened to me.”
And I think something happened when I was looking at you, too.
But I don't tell him that part, I just tell him about seeing my mom. We talk a mile a minute, over each other mostly, as we compare stories. At f irst, Jay thought he was seeing things. Before he saw his father by the river, he thought he saw a person who was a woman one minute, but when he turned, she was a kid, a little girl. But he shook it off—until he saw his dad.

Jay walks me through the whole encounter. Just like my mom, Jay's father was in the outf it he was buried in. He wore his nice suit and blue tie. His dad was sitting there, half-smiling like he was praying or meditating or something. Jay said he was gazing out at the muddy Cuyahoga River that f lows through Brecksville.

“He was so still and calm,” Jay says. “From his face, you'd think he was staring at the Pacif ic Ocean at sunset or something. Not like my dad at all. To be calm like that. I looked right at him, and as soon as he recognized me, he was gone. And I was looking at someone else. Someone I've never seen before.”

I must look as sick and unsteady as I feel, about to pass out, because Jay puts an arm around my shoulders. Just then, my dad appears in the doorway. He stiffens up when he sees Jay holding me. We pull apart.

“I wanted to tell you that dinner is ready,” Dad says. He looks at the f loor.

“Hello, Mr. Strout,” Jay says, nervously tugging at his shirt. “Good to see you. I was just—”

“We were just talking,” I blurt out. “About some stuff.”

“Good to see you, too, Jay. Feel free to stay and eat.” Dad doesn't look up. Blushing, he turns and heads back downstairs.

“Awesome,” Jay says, exhaling. “We just medaled in synchronized awkwardness.”

“Whatever,” I say. “He always thinks we're—” I stop, too embarrassed to f inish my sentence. The reality of all this hits me hard—
Jay saw his dad; I saw Mom.
I can tell there's a look in my eyes that's never been there before. I can feel it; it's something like—hope.
“Maybe they're out there, Jay.”

“What?”

“Our parents. Maybe we can f ind them—”

“Whoa,” Jay says. “You're crazy pale. Just breathe for a second, okay?”

He takes my hand and leads me to the front porch. We usually don't hug. The closest we get is our usual f ist bump. But Jay steps closer and puts his arms around me. I don't know what to do, so I just go with it. I rest my head on his shoulder and look out at our yard. It's dusk and the lightning bugs take turns lighting up the trees, like long strings of tangled and twinkling Christmas lights. The crickets chirp all around us, like soft sundown alarms that parents all over town have set and hidden, timed to go off all at once and remind us to come home.

“I have something to tell you,” Jay whispers. I pull back a bit and look into his eyes, asking but not sure I want to know what more there could be to this story. “I know it's crazy, but the Saint Ignatius necklace, the cross, I—” he stops.

I f inish his sentence for him. “You wore it?”

“Yeah,” he says. “After you left last night and you asked me about it, it hit me that I'd never even touched it. My dad always threatened to kill us if we did. But I went home and picked it up. Then I put it on. Just for a few seconds.” Jay pauses for a second, disbelief f illing his eyes. “You don't think—”

“Yeah. Because I wore it, too,” I whisper. “One night when you were in your room—”

“I f igured that's why you asked,” he says. I nod. He pulls me close and we're silent for what feels like a few centuries. “It'll be okay,” he f inally says, even though I know he doesn't believe it. “We'll f igure something out.”

I squeeze him tighter and close my eyes, willing him to stay here, to not change, willing this all to go away. He squeezes back and then gently lets me go.

Chapter 4

Me, Three.

I spend my second sleepless night in a row trying to doze off but jumping awake at every noise: a rush of wind, a barking dog, a distant train whistle. I f ight the urge to check under my bed and in my closet for—what exactly I'm not sure—and fail. I shine my iPhone on the contents of my closet, pass it over all the shoes, terrif ied I'll see someone behind the hanging clothes. I get on all fours and lift up the dust ruff le around my bed and scan the dust bunnies to make sure no one is there.

I stare at the ceiling and wait for daylight. When it comes, I f inally doze off. But my eyes pop open at 9
a.m.
, and I drag myself out of bed, thankful that at least it's Saturday, and I don't have to face school. I walk to my chest of drawers to search for a T-shirt, but then I sit back down in the middle of the f loor in my pajamas. I feel like an earthworm f lushed out onto the sidewalk by a heavy rain, stuck to the pavement, drying out by the second.

I stare up at the ceiling again, at my red and white plastic balloon light. It's been there since I was a baby. And by my bed is a puppy lamp. The base is a resin dog looking at me with impossibly large tear-f illed eyes. The lampshade is painted with a pile of puppies all tumbling over each other in a ridiculous romp of joy.

Maybe it's time for this stuff to go.

My mom and I had big plans to redecorate my room. I used to go through magazines and describe the images out loud to her. We'd gotten as far as picking out wallpaper, but then—the accident.

A knock at my door breaks my train of thought.

“Phone's for you,” Dad says as he peeks his head in the door. “It's Kate. Says she tried your cell but you weren't answering.” I can't cope with the thought of talking to Kate and listening about her latest crush, or listening about anything for that matter.

“I put it on silent,” I whisper. “Just tell her I'm sick. Can't talk.”

He tells Kate I'll call later and hangs up.

“You really feel sick?” he asks.

“Sort of.”

He puts his hand on my forehead and a serious look passes across his face as he focuses on reading my temperature. “Nope. Cool as a cuke,” he says way too happily. I don't understand why a cucumber is considered colder than any other vegetable, but I f igure he likes it because it's a food analogy, so I never call him on it.

“Dad, there are all
sorts
of illnesses that don't cause fevers,” I protest as I crawl back into bed.

“Like what?”

“Like . . .” I pause, my mind going blank. I retreat to the safety of food. “I feel like an overcooked hardboiled egg. You know, when the shell cracks a little and the white stuff kind of oozes into the water. And the yolk gets all dry in the center.”

“Oh,” he says, f inally looking concerned. “So your head
and
your stomach?”

I nod like crazy, even though I don't have a clue how he got a headache and a stomachache out of what I just said. “Yeah. Stomach and head. Real bad.”

“Well, I'll start some Jell-O. If you're sure . . .” he pauses searching for words. “That you're just a little sick.”

“I'm f ine,” I say, pulling the blankets over my head.
And by f ine I mean so absolutely far from f ine I couldn't even see f ine if I had a telescope.

“I just think that—” Dad is cut off by the ringing phone. “Oh, dammit. Hello? Yes, here.” Dad pulls the covers down and hands me the phone. “It's Kate again. Says it's urgent.” I roll my eyes and put the phone to my ear.

“Hey.” All I hear is crying. “Kate?” I sit up.

“You've got to come over here,” Kate chokes out between little sobs. “I'm freaking out.”

No, no, no
.

I stare at my Dad. He stares at me. The phone feels cold against my ear. “Kate,” I manage. My tone is much calmer than I would have expected. “Who'd you see?”

The crying immediately stops.

“How did you know?” she asks.

“Just tell me who you saw.”

“Aunt Lilly.”

We all know Aunt Lilly. She's the reason Kate ended up in our group. She's been dead for almost two years.

I tell Kate I'll
be there in f ive minutes. My father's eyebrows arch in that I-thought-you-said-you-were-sick kind of way.

“It's urgent,” I say to Dad as I text Jay and Noah. I tell them to meet me at Kate's house ASAP. “Girl stuff. Let me go? Please?”

Dad shakes his head, clearly debating with himself whether or not to push me on this, to f ind out what's really wrong. But
girl stuff
almost always succeeds in scaring him off. “Fine,” he agrees after a minute. “But be back for dinner. I'm doing a fantastic pot roast. With garlic mashed potatoes.”

“Okay,” I say as I rif le through my drawers, looking for a clean T-shirt. “It's a deal.”

Dad sighs and hesitates, but then goes downstairs while I shower and change. I put on the shirt and jean shorts, run a brush through my wet hair, and head down to the kitchen. I take a few deep breaths on the stairwell to hide the panic that's building in my veins so Dad doesn't get upset. But one line keeps running through my head over and over:
It's happening to all three of us.

“Oh, I forgot to mention the parsnips,” Dad says as I enter the kitchen. “Really great rosemary roasted parsnips.”

“Parsnips?” I manage a smile and kiss him on the cheek. “Wouldn't miss those for the
world
.”

I head out the backdoor and cross the yard, proud that I kept it together in front of Dad. I put a foot on the stone wall at the edge of our property, grab onto the branch of a dogwood tree and pull myself over. The wall is covered with ivy, and I have to make sure my sandals don't slip on a waxy green leaf; I've had countless skinned knees jumping over this wall on my way to Kate's.

The reasons I've jumped the wall on my way to her house have varied since we've been friends. Sometimes it's major, like when she found out that her dad had a not-so-secret girlfriend. Other times, it's more minor, like when she thinks her mom has imposed an unfair punishment over whatever her latest credit card debacle is. Or like when I feel the need to have a meltdown over the fact that Jay is a moron who will apparently never get that I'm in love with him. We cope by eating huge bags of Cheetos. Or lying on the grass in her backyard, staring up at the stars. We talk about how life really makes no sense if you think about it. How some people die early. How some people don't.

And then there was the gum episode. I totally lost it on Mother's Day sophomore year. Kate told me to come over to her house after school, and when I got there, she'd bought crazy amounts of gum. All sorts. Orange dreamsicle gum. Key lime pie gum. Gum in cubes. Sticks. Balls. Pink. Blue. Even purple. She had sugar-free and the kind that's so sweet the sugar crystals make your tongue raw. We sat together on the f loor of her bedroom surrounded by mounds of it. And I felt so weird because I just couldn't cry, so she cried for me—and we chewed and chewed and chewed. And I told her the thing that scared me the most was that it still hurt so bad sometimes I couldn't talk about it. I couldn't f ind words.

“When the gum wrappers reach knee height,” she said, in her I'm-totally-serious tone, “then we might f ind words. We might begin to process. But not now. Not before the gum.”

And she was right. Words did come to me after we made it through the pile, and I was able to tell her:
Thanks for being awesome.

This is the thing between us: we stick together no matter what. No matter how much she gets on my nerves or I get on hers. And I know she's freaking about seeing Aunt Lilly. But at least I know exactly how she's feeling. I go as fast as I can toward her house, f ighting to keep my balance while I walk along the retaining wall that goes across our neighbor's backyard. Still I break into a run when I see the giant willow tree in Kate's backyard. It's like an enormous green shroud, the greatest tree to sit under, the f irst place Kate retreats to when her parents are mad or when she's depressed. Just as I expected, she's sitting on the ground, leaning against the thick trunk.

Even in the soft sunlight f iltering through the leaves, she looks pale and sickly. I sit beside her. Her usually shiny black hair looks dull and limp. We just look at each other for a moment, as if we're both watching, studying each other's faces, looking for some irregularity, something out of place that would signal we're both in a dream. I reach into my pocket.

“Gum?” I say, holding out the pack. Since the gum episode, I never go to her house without it; it's our medicine. She nods, and we both take a piece. We unwrap them in silence and start our ritualistic chewing.

“How'd you know?” she asks between loud chomps. Tears f ill her eyes.

“I saw Mom. In the grocery store. And Jay saw his dad.”

The chewing stops.

“Don't panic. You'll swallow the gum.” I decide against telling her what happened with Jay the other night as well. “Just breathe. And keep chewing.”

Reluctantly, she blows a bubble. “How are you even calm right now? How are you so good at this?”

“Good at what?”

“Being all leader-ish. And chill.”

“I didn't know I was,” I say. And I don't. All I know is that when someone I care about is panicking, I get calm and start saying things I don't believe like
it'll be okay,
and
everything's f ine.
Plus for the past two years, it's like I can't
really
panic or really
feel
much of anything. When a real feeling starts, it gets cut off at the pass with a wave of numbness.

“Well,” Kate says. “I guess this takes the struggling montage to a whole new level.”

That's what we always say when nothing's going right. We tell ourselves that our lives are movies, and in movies there's always a huge part of the story where the heroes struggle like hell to make it to the happy ending. Bad guys have to be fought off, girlfriends have to be wooed back, records have to be set straight—and then there's one big hellish montage before it all works out, right before the credits. It's where we are right now, but I can't even smile at the joke. I've never been less sure of a happy ending.

“I hate this movie,” Kate says after a moment. “I mean, I expected scenes like getting dumped or having horrible parents. But I didn't expect a
seeing-dead-people
scene.”

“Well, I have a theory,” I venture. “But I'm guessing it will freak you out even more.”

“Um, I really think we've reached freak-maximum here. I don't think there's anything you could say that would—”

“You know the million-year-old silver cross necklace at Jay's house?” I ask before she can f inish. “The famous one that belonged to Saint Ignatius?”

She stops chewing. “The thing in the case? By the sofa?”

“Yes. That. The one we wore Wednesday night?”

“No way,” she says slowly, shaking her head. “You think?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Jay put it on for the f irst time, too. Then he saw his dad the next day. When did you see Lilly?”

“OMG, I thought I saw her Thursday.” She starts chomping again, animated. “Like, I caught a glimpse of her in the Target parking lot, but when I looked closer it wasn't her. I shook it off and just thought it was someone who looked like her, you know? But then this morning, running errands for my mom downtown. I saw her. I
know
it.”

We hear the gravel crunching beneath Jay and Noah's feet as they come up the driveway.

“Holy Catholic crap,” Kate says, her eyes wide. “Should we like, call the Pope or something?”

“Yeah, you have his cell number?” I mutter.

Finally, I am able to get Kate to smile.

The four of us
head to Kate's basement, our usual spot the rare times we hang out at her house. It has baby blue shag carpet and fake wood paneling along the walls. There's a green/orange carpet stain right at the base of the stairs that belongs to Jay. During a particularly egregious game of Truth or Dare, we dared him to drink a mixture of raw eggs and Mountain Dew. Juvenile, I know. He kept it down for about thirty seconds.

Kate f lops down on the mustard-yellow corduroy couch. I sit next to her and the guys sprawl out on the f loor in front of us.

“So what the hell is going on?” Noah says running a hand through his blond hair. “I am not cool enough to have more than three friends. And all three of you look like you're losing your minds. This leaves me alone in the world. Unacceptable.”

As usual, he's trying to keep it light, but it's obvious that he's really worried. I can tell by the way he's looking at me. Noah has mastered the tell-me-everything look; it's impossible to keep anything from him. Not that the four of us keep any secrets from each other, anyway. But still, that look is like his superpower.

“Seriously,” he says, “this better be a real emergency because my new coronagraph just got here. And I was just about to try it out when Jay called me and told me to get over here.”

“Oh no,” Kate says. “Please don't explain what a choreograph—”

“It's a
corona
graph, and it's
amazing
,” Noah says, lighting up. “It f its over the telescope and blocks out direct light from the sun when you're looking straight at it. So you can see really cool stuff in the sun's atmosphere that you wouldn't be able to see without one—”

“Wake me when he's f inished,” Kate interrupts dully.

“Oh, come on,” I say. “Let's not be all anti-knowledge like a bunch of popular douche bags.” But really I'm just trying to postpone the inevitable, because it means I'll have to relive the moment when I saw my mother.