The Reaping of Norah Bentley (3 page)

“That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Small world,” he said with a shrug.

“I guess.” I wanted to—felt like I should have been—a little more apprehensive about the whole thing, but then he smiled again. And he still had that easy, comfortable air about him, like there was no place else he’d rather be than underneath my questioning gaze. Like he’d never done anything wrong, anything he needed to hide from me.

“You never answered my first question,” I said. “Who
are
you, aside from Harold’s nephew, I mean?”

“You can call me Eli.”

“I
can
call you Eli? What does that mean?” What was it, some kind of alias? Why would he need an alias?

“It means my real name is Elijah,” he said. “But if you call me that, I’m probably not going to answer you.”

He seemed to find my scrutiny amusing, so I took the liberty to keep asking questions.

“And what are you doing here, exactly? Do you often hang out in graveyards?”

“I could ask you the same question, couldn’t I?”

“Me?” I stammered, annoyed to have the question thrown back at me. “I followed the dog in.”

“And I saw you.” He hesitated. “I did follow you in here. I admit that.”

A slight chill slid down my spine. “So you
are
stalking me.”

He frowned a little. “I don’t think that constitutes stalking.”

“A girl can never be too sure.”

“Well,” he said, his face quickly brightening again. “If I
am
stalking you, then I’m doing a pretty poor job of it—seeing as how I don’t even know your name.”

He looked at me expectantly, sunlight dancing in his eyes, and I promptly directed my attention to a nearby headstone instead. Madison Coates. Born: 1857. Died: 1921. Apparently, she was a beloved mother and wife. Most of the other nearby headstones were so weathered down you couldn’t read them—not that I didn’t try. I could feel the nervous blush burning in my cheeks. This was all getting a little too strange, a little too real, and he was standing a little too close all of a sudden.

But for some reason, after a minute of silence my mouth opened on its own, and then someone else who sounded just like me was introducing herself to this complete stranger.

“It’s Norah. Norah Bentley.”

The red in my cheeks burned even hotter. What was I thinking? Norah Bentley does not introduce herself to people. Especially not to strange people in graveyards who might possibly be murderous stalkers. Even if they did have ridiculously disarming smiles.

He took a step closer, and I automatically took a step backwards.

“It’s nice to finally meet you,” he said. His voice was like a tendril of fine silk that curled its way around me, leaving me too focused on the softness at first to realize how tightly it constricted. But soon I was having a hard time breathing, and the tips of my fingers started to go numb—the all too familiar signs of a panic attack looming just in the distance.

“I should get going,” I said. Might’ve stuttered it. I was no longer in control of my own body; my mind had forced me elsewhere, into some other reality where I couldn’t hear his words and where mine were only a faint echo against the walls of my mind.

Breathe
, I commanded myself.
Breathe.

Suddenly I felt like I was back on that beach, watching the scene unfold from above again—until Eli’s touch wrenched me back into reality. His hand was freezing. I stared down at his fingers, curled loosely over my right arm just above the elbow.

Breathe.

“Are you okay?” He still sounded like he was in a tunnel.

“I really need to go now.”

I jerked my arm out of his grasp and took several more steps backward. Then I did what any sensible person would have done in that situation. I turned and walked as fast as I could in the opposite direction.

“Do you remember the boy I told you about?”

That single sentence took almost a half hour to get out, an entire lunch period’s worth of debating with myself, my thoughts tumbling and crashing into each other like students who rounded corners without paying attention to where they were going.

Rachel, my best friend since forever, picked at her fries for a moment, then lifted one in between two perfectly manicured fingers. She popped it into her mouth and chewed it completely, swallowed, then reached for her water and took a long sip of it before finally answering.

“What boy?”

“From that day. The one who saved me.”

Rachel frowned and reached for her purse. “I was afraid that’s who you meant.”

“Afraid?”

“We’ve talked about this. And you know what Miss Brandes said…” Rachel cleared her throat before continuing, in a perfect recreation of Brandes’ snippy know-it-all tone: “When traumatic things happen to us, sometimes we willingly disassociate. Hallucinations, the fixation of dreams, and so on, aren’t uncommon when the mind is under severe—”

“I know. I know what she said. And I’m not saying it isn’t true. But what if this particular part of that day, what I remember about the boy I mean, what if I’m not making it up? What if he’s real?”

Rachel’s face started to redden. “What if he is?” She was rummaging through her purse, not looking at me as she spoke. “He supposedly ‘saved’ you, but then he just left you lying there, half-dead, and went on his way, right? He sounds like a jerk. He better be glad he’s not real, because if he was I’d track him down and kick his ass.”

I took a sip of my coke, set it delicately back down, and cleared my throat.

“I saw him again.” Might as well be blunt, I figured. Not usually my style, but it was the only way I was going to get her attention.

She gave me a sharp look, then went back to pretending to search for something in her purse.

“I saw him,” I pressed. “I talked to him.”

She finally consented and stopped messing with the purse, but she still refused to look at me.

“Where?” she asked impatiently. “Like in another dream, or—?”

“In the cemetery.” Our eyes finally met. We were both frowning. “It was like I was in a dream,” I admitted.

“What the hell where you doing in the cemetery?”

“…It’s kind of a long story.”

“Weird.” She pulled out her chap stick and swiped it across her lips. “Well are you sure you weren’t hallucinating?”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’re thinking it.”

“…Am not.”

Rachel was getting to her feet, and I did the same in automatic response. All around us people were shuffling, antsy with anticipation of the one ‘o’ clock bell that would usher us to fourth period. I was distracted for a second by a football player at the table to our right—I think his name was Trevor, or Travis, or something like that— who thought he was being really cool by dumping the rest of his chocolate milk into his plate and making a soupy mess of everything left on it, then daring his equally cool buddy to take a bite of it.

I rolled my eyes at the two of them before turning back to Rachel. She was walking away from me, carrying her tray toward the trashcans. She lingered there just long enough for me to catch up, and when I did, she didn’t say anything. She just turned and headed through the double-doors out of the cafeteria and towards Mrs. Schulz’s English class.

“Did you read?” she asked as we rounded the corner into the Art and Literature wing of Sutton High.

I tried to ignore the stab of annoyance I felt at her blatant change of subject, and shrugged.

“Some of it,” I said. “Sparknoted the rest of it.”

Rachel nodded and let out a dramatic fake sigh. “Story of our lives,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She gave me a sheepish smile, which I took to mean she was bowing out of the conversation I’d attempted to start at lunch. I wasn’t surprised. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to dwell on what had happened to me that day, and I guess I couldn’t really blame them. If I could have, I would have forgotten about it myself.

The running joke amongst the class was that Mrs. Schulz had been teaching A.P. English at Sutton High for about two hundred years now. It was a mean thing to say—but really, there was no denying how ancient this woman looked. Her hair was dove white, with patches of it missing here and there. Her skin, dotted with liver spots, hung over her like it was secondhand, taken from somebody twice her size. She must have been a tall, proud looking woman at some point, though; because even now that old age had hunched her over, she was still taller than most of the students in her class.

Her bright blue eyes still shone as bright as ever, too—as bright as they did in her wedding picture she kept on the desk. They reminded me of another pair of bright blue eyes. And those eyes were just as real as hers. They weren’t part of some hallucination.

I glanced sideways towards Rachel’s desk. She was busily flipping through her book, I guess trying to fill whatever void Sparknotes had left. I watched her silently for a minute, before deciding I should probably be doing the same thing. So, for what seemed like the millionth day in a row, I pulled out my own battered copy of Goethe’s
Faust.
I laid it next to my notebook, opened it to some random pages, took some post-it notes out of my bag and started sticking them on the pages in an attempt to make myself appear more prepared for class than I actually was.

Mrs. Schulz was whipping a piece of chalk across the blackboard, indifferent to the screeching making the rest of the class cringe. When she’d finished writing several phrases and words I probably should have known but most of which I didn’t, she turned to face us with a smile. She swished her hands together, sending a cloud of chalk dust into the air.

“Let’s review Friday’s discussion, yes?”

The class replied with one or two unenthusiastic groans and at least one sarcastic “yes, please!” Undeterred by the lackluster response, Mrs. Schulz tapped the end of her piece of chalk underneath one of the terms she’d listed on the board.

“Tragic hero,” she read. “Anyone care to define the term for me?”

I actually did have a pretty good guess for that one, but I wasn’t in the mood to lead a discussion. Besides, plenty of other hands were already in the air. But, of course Mrs. Schulz walked back to my row anyway, her gaze fixed on me. It was like she had a radar that honed in on students who didn’t want to talk. I dropped my gaze and focused on the mole just below her left eye, hoping that if our eyes didn’t meet she’d just leave me alone.

“Miss Bentley? Care to give it a shot?”

Well damn.

My mind clouded over the second I became the center of attention, and any guess I had at the answer was lost in the fog. I wriggled in my seat and started to flip through my notebook for the definition I knew I hadn’t written down, kept turning the dog-eared pages, trying to fill the uncomfortable silence and ignore the twenty sets of eyes focused on me.

Breathe.

Mrs. Schulz hooked a claw-like finger onto the corner of my desk, and I gave up and pushed the notebook aside. The class started to whisper, to leaf impatiently through their own notebooks.

“…What was the term again?” I asked.

“Tragic hero.”

“Right. Tragic hero.” I tapped the chewed-up eraser of my pencil against the desk and took a deep breath. “Don’t remember that one,” I said quietly. “Sorry.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her creepy plastic smile twitch a little. Without another word, she spun around and swooped down over Rachel’s desk, moving faster than her two-hundred-something-year-old self should have been able to.

“Maybe you can help your friend out, Rachel?” she said.

Rachel’s chime-like voice persuaded most of the class to stop fidgeting and turn their attention back to our row. I managed to breathe again, and opened my notebook to a blank page myself, with the intention of writing down every word Rachel was saying. It was pointless, though. I couldn’t focus on class right now. I’d just have to copy her notes later.

I’d been like this all weekend. Like I’d been stumbling through that thick fog; it slipped in through my ears and clouded my mind to the point that I was doing good just to get a simple, coherent sentence out.

Helen, with all the tact she normally possessed, had announced at Sunday dinner that I was acting like I was high. That even got Dad to raise his eyebrows, to decide his daughter was more interesting than his macaroni salad for at least a full minute. He lost that interest, though, when I shoved my plate away, went to my room and locked the door behind me. Helen followed me, but my Ipod was loud enough to drown out the sound of her fist banging against the door. I closed my eyes and waited for her to go away, waited for my thoughts to take me someplace else. And they’d gone straight to the same place they were at now.

Eli.

If I was any sort of artist, I could have painted his face clearly from memory, even though I’d spent most of our brief second meeting staring at the ground. I could still see his tall figure, backlit by the rays of the early morning sun. I could still see his eyes, the look of confusion and something like desperation on his face as he watched me back away from him.