The Suburban Strange (22 page)

Celia agreed. They walked farther, in love with the night, the moonlight, the silence, and their solidarity. She linked arms with Regine, thinking this was an ideal moment she would remember—maybe one she even would try to re-create—a moment she never wanted to end.

At the end of the boulevard they reached an empty old mansion surrounded by a small park, bordered by a grove of pines. The evergreens blotted out the streetlights and held the moon back. Now and then a car could be heard shushing along the road beyond the trees. Liz opened a thermos and passed around cups of cranberry tea.

“What shall we toast?” Ivo asked. He looked at Celia.

“To the Rosary, who added me to their string, and knew what I needed before I knew it myself,” Celia said.

Regine said, “To the new year, and all it will bring.”

Marco said, “To friendships. Each one is unique, but all of them are the same.”

Brenden said, “To growing up, but always remembering what it feels like to be a child.”

Liz said, “To us, and making the most of every opportunity we have.”

Ivo finished: “To right now. Everything that is ahead of us, everything that is behind us—all we really have is right now.”

They held up their cups and then drank, and Celia thought she tasted the luminous night air that surrounded them with a thin fog. They might have been standing in a watercolor painting. She imagined the way she might draw the scene: the cluster of the six of them, with lanterns held at various heights, and their dark clothes as different depths of shadow and shade. Around them the looming trees, and above them the glowing moon.

“What are you thinking?” Regine asked her.

“About how I got here, and how I never would have guessed I would be here,” Celia said. “I don’t think I could have imagined this, but somehow it’s happened.”

“Sometimes the world stands on its head, just to remind us it can,” Liz said. “And we realize what we thought was right side up could just as easily be upside down.”

“It’s true.” Celia held up her lantern, and the rest of them followed her example, so they could look around their circle at each other, smiling quietly.

15. STRANGE TIMES

O
VERNIGHT BEFORE THE FIRST
day of the second semester, a snow squall blew through the area. But the roads were cleared by morning, so the Rosary’s cars threaded their way to Suburban. As Celia picked her way over the heavily salted patches of ice in the parking lot with her friends, she hoped the second half of the year would bring a fresh start. She didn’t know how that could come true. There was no reason for the curse day accidents, and all the superstitious and cruel things that went along with them, to stop. But she remembered how alive she had felt on First Night, and it made her optimistic.

“The ice is bad enough, but all this salt is like walking on ball bearings,” Marco said, slowing down to cross a treacherous part of the walk. As if on cue, ahead of them a girl threw her arms in the air as first one foot and then the other slipped out from under her. She came down on her back, her head cracking against the icy pavement and snapping sharply up. She lay still for a moment before she struggled to her knees.

The Rosary stopped, but Celia ran forward and took the girl’s arm. “Are you okay?”

“Why didn’t they cancel school?” the girl said. She was crying a little, but mostly she looked dazed. Celia tried to brush snow and salt off the back of the girl’s coat.

“It looked like you hit your head pretty hard,” Celia said. The girl’s pupils were dilated. “I think you might have a concussion.”

“What does that feel like?” the girl said, before turning away and throwing up.

Celia held the girl’s arm and looked around. The Rosary had stayed where they were, and it angered Celia. Meanwhile, a boy in an orange cap and scarf was making his way to her. He reached them as the poor girl straightened up.

“I think she has a concussion,” Celia told Skip.

“Is your birthday tomorrow?” Skip asked the girl, who nodded. He looked at Celia. “Why do you and I seem to be around all the time when these things happen?” Skip asked, taking the girl’s other arm.

I was going to ask you the same thing,
Celia thought.

WITH THAT, THE FRESH START
promised by the holiday break was swept aside. Once again the school was a morass of anxiety, bizarre speculations about virginity, and predatory propositions. But by midday, new information had traveled through the student body: three sophomore girls had celebrated their sixteenth birthdays over the winter break, and while all of them were admittedly virgins, none of them reportedly had suffered anything on their supposed curse day. "Why didn't anyone notice before that the bad things only happen at school?" Liz asked. "Celia, do us all a favor and stay home on the day before your birthday."

Celia was happy to agree, but Mariette was unconvinced when they discussed it later that afternoon. “This is what I know,” she told Celia. “You remember, the admonition says the Unkind has until the lunar eclipse to kill a girl and collect her dying breath, and the next lunar eclipse isn’t until the beginning of June. So whoever it is definitely is going to want to succeed before then. So far the girls have been coming to school, but if they start staying away, the Unkind might start going to them and hurting them elsewhere. And that makes it a lot harder for me to protect them, if I’m actually protecting them at all.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“And I still have no idea who the Unkind is. How old is Ivo?”

“Seventeen, I think? His birthday is in the summer. He must be seventeen. You still think the seventeen warning in your admonition is about the Unkind person?”

Mariette nodded. “I know Ivo’s your friend, but I can’t help wondering about him. I’m sure it’s nothing. He would have figured out what I was doing to his memory if he were Unkind.”

“Well, you didn’t get all of his memory,” Celia said. “He forgot you completely, but he still remembers the admonition, so now he just suspects me.”

“Oh really?” Mariette was distressed. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“Was what you did to him an experiment, or did you know what you were doing?”

“Kind of. I was pretty sure . . .” Mariette was quiet for a moment. “What could he do, though? You took the admonition out of your sketchbook. It’s just his word against yours.”

“Yes,” Celia sighed. “He just looks at me strangely.”

TOMASI DIDN'T SHOW UP AT
Diaboliques on the first Fridayin January, and considering the way their date had ended, Celia wasn't really surprised. She never had mentioned her lovely, terrible reunion with him to the others. Her life had divided into separate compartments: she had the Rosary, and Mariette, and her fleeting experiences with Tomasi, and more and more they were becoming mutually exclusive. If anything, the close call with Ivo made it clear they had to remain that way. She never had been in such a situation before. She'd never known any secrets to keep. At Diaboliques that Friday she still looked across the room a few times, trying to will Tomasi into attendance, but for the first time it seemed really futile.

She waited for a song she knew everyone in the Rosary loved. Soon enough, Patrick played “Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven,” and while Celia wanted to dance, instead she told Regine she was going to the bathroom. Regine nodded, hurrying onto the dance floor with the others.

Celia went down to the mezzanine as quickly as she could and stared around in the darkness until she found the red-haired fortuneteller, who looked up at Celia as though she was expected. Celia sat down, but before she could say anything, the woman brought her lips to Celia’s ear.

“I will tell you something I rarely tell anyone, but I think you will come to understand it. One of the biggest responsibilities of having secret knowledge about other people is being able to judge when it is right to tell them and when it is better to keep it from them. Maybe they aren’t ready to hear it. Maybe they need to find out on their own. Maybe they would misuse the information. Maybe what you know is only part of the story, and it will only confuse them. There are so many possibilities.

“I know you have questions. I know you are prepared to beg me to answer them. But I don’t think it’s right. Not now.”

Celia asked anyway. “Is Tomasi okay?”

The woman looked at her, and Celia couldn’t tell if she was irritated or sympathetic. “He is as okay as someone in his position can be. For every time you think of him, he has thought of you twice.”

Celia began to ask another question, but the woman gave a barely perceptible shake of her head, and Celia relented.

ON A BLEAK WEDNESDAY CELIA
sat at lunch with Regine and Brenden, but all of them were lost in their own thoughts. January seemed to be creeping by, and the cold weather made the spring semester feel like it would last forever. It was a good thing the Rosary had enjoyed First Night together, because now everyone seemed to be preoccupied—with college, with passing Chem II, with the anticipation of a long-distance relationship. Celia couldn't pretend she wasn't preoccupied, too. Even though she didn't expect to see Tomasi at Diaboliques, she was not about to let go of her longing for him. She had had her first kiss, and it had been fantastic, at least until his father had interrupted them. That had changed everything. Now Tomasi was no longer the mysterious guy she might get to know someday. He was
the one
. Celia could not allow him to slip away now as easily as she had that fall. It made her crazy every time she thought about it, which was hourly.

The three of them hadn’t spoken for ten minutes when there was an eruption of shouting on the other side of the cafeteria. For a moment Celia couldn’t tell what was happening, but soon she made out, “She’s choking!” amidst the cries. Brenden and Regine looked in the same direction, their expressions unchanged.

“Why don’t you ever try to help?” Celia asked them, exasperated. They stared at her in surprise. Before they could respond, a boy in an orange sweater ran across the cafeteria toward the choking girl. Within a minute Skip had performed the Heimlich maneuver, causing the girl to cough up her food. Then there was more shouting, and Celia gathered that the girl’s friends were remonstrating with her for having come to school on the day before her birthday.

“I had an exam!” the girl screamed angrily to the room, storming away from the table, looking humiliated and drained. “I couldn’t stay home!”

The noise had drawn teachers out of the lounge in the hall just outside the cafeteria. They lingered, unsure whether they needed to respond.

CELIA STRUGGLED TO STAY AWAY
from the Tudor house with wooden shingles, which she now knew was Tomasi's. Each time she went to the bookstore she stopped on Tomasi's corner and looked down the street at the house, knowing it was inevitable—at some point she would walk down there, defy his father's warning, and knock on his door. Something didn't make sense to her. She could understand Tomasi's parents wanting him to be careful as he healed, but his father hadn't shown much in the way of concern. And his wrath had been directed as much at Celia as at Tomasi.

Toward the end of January, having spent three Fridays at Diaboliques aching for him, she surrendered the battle and left her house early for work. She studied Tomasi’s house as she approached it for any clue that might help her guess the mystery it contained. But the pair of chimneys, the furry moss on the roof, the flagstones, offered nothing to her. She rang the bell and waited nervously on the front step. A woman in an apron opened the door. “Hello?”

“Hi. My name is Celia. I’m a friend of Tomasi’s. Is he home?”

“No, he isn’t.” The woman pushed the door slightly closed so her body filled the opening. “Who are you?” She looked Celia over, and for the first time in months Celia was self-conscious for dressing entirely in black.

“I—I met him at a club he used to go to on Fridays,” Celia stammered. “He recommended some books for me to read.”

“What kind of books?”

“Um,
The Awakening,
by Kate Chopin?”

“He recommended that to you?” The woman looked confused for a moment; then her expression hardened again. “Look, I think it’s better for you to forget about him. He’s not going to that club anymore, and he’s not associating with those people anymore. Please leave him alone.” The woman’s last sentence was more an entreaty than a warning. Her eyes were tired.

“I don’t understand,” Celia said. “Wasn’t he feeling better?”

“Better?”

“From when he had pneumonia?”

“Pneumonia? He didn’t have pneumonia.” The woman was surprised by the suggestion. “He ran away. So you don’t know him very well at all, do you?”

“He ran away?” Now it was Celia’s turn to be surprised. She didn’t bother to try to hide it.

“Yes.” Tomasi’s mother paused. “If you really didn’t know, maybe I’m taking this out on you when you don’t deserve it. Listen, Tomasi’s had a really hard time, and we’re trying to help him. We’re concerned he may have been hanging around with people who were a bad influence on him.” The woman’s eyes flitted over Celia’s outfit again.

“I’m sorry, I had no idea. I had just met him, and then he disappeared, and then I saw him again last week, and then his dad showed up and made him go home.”

“That was you.” The woman hardened a little again.

“I didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be out. We just had cider.”

“He wasn’t supposed to be. See, our problem is he’s sneaked out before and met people we don’t know, and we had to stop it. So when he sneaks out and meets you, we’re suspicious. We’re suspicious of you.”

“I’m sorry,” Celia said. “I don’t know anything about that.” She thought for a moment. “I have to go to work. Can I leave you my number? If you decide it’s okay for him to call me, I’d really like to talk to him.” Celia pulled her sketchbook out of her bag and flipped to an empty page. She scribbled her name and number on the top corner, then tore it off to hand to the woman, who took it.