The Yearbook (8 page)

And then what will Yiayia do? She’ll have nothing to talk about.

Which is just fine.

“D
AVID!”

I was fading into consciousness. My eyelids fluttered.

“David! Are you all right?”

It took a few seconds for Ariana’s face to come into focus. She was leaning over me, still in a down coat. Her face was streaked with tears. Behind her the bookcase was ajar, and I could see into the scenery shop.

“Yeah,” I groaned. “I — I just tripped, I guess. How did you find me?”

“Mr. Sarro told me you were in the office, but it was empty when we checked. Then he said he heard voices in the auditorium. I saw the gate open and the light on in the scenery shop, so — ”

“Why did you come? I thought you went home.”

“I was going to, but — but — ”

Ariana’s face crumpled. Tears began streaming down her cheeks.

I sat up and let her bury her head in my shoulders. “What? What happened?”

Her answer was a fit of moaning, keening cries. She couldn’t speak. I gently helped her up, trying to keep weight off my bum ankle. As she sat on a sofa in the scenery shop, I swung the bookcase inward.

I took one last look into the basement cavern and saw the graffiti on the walls. I remembered reading some of it, but that was all. The rest was a blank.

But I did recall turning the lights on. And now they were off.

The bookcase slid into place, and I sank into the sofa. “Ariana,” I asked, putting my arm around her, “did you shut the li — ”

She clutched me so hard, it took away my breath. “Oh, David, it was horrible! Now I know how you felt. I — I — I don’t know what — I — should we call the police? I want to move — I don’t want to live here anymore — ”

“You kids all right down there?” Mr. Sarro’s voice boomed from above. “I mean, I don’t want to interrupt, but I can’t let you stay down there unsupervised, you know. Not that I don’t trust you, but my job — ”

I looked at Ariana. She wiped her eyes and nodded.

“No sweat, Mr. Sarro!” I said. “We’re coming right up!”

I helped Ariana to her feet. As she climbed the spiral stairs, I pulled the light switch, then followed her up.

We went to the yearbook office, where I grabbed my coat. When we were finally outside, Ariana hugged me with both arms and began crying again.

Whoa.

If I could bottle how that felt, I’d keep it with me and take a sip every day for the rest of my life.

Had she found out about Smut and Monique? Was that what this was about? “What’s wrong, Ariana?” I asked.

She swallowed hard. “Come with me.”

As we walked arm in arm toward her house, my ankle began feeling stronger. Ariana was trembling, and I held her tightly.

We turned onto Cass. At the intersection with Eliot Place, we saw the construction site that Chief Pudgy had almost run into. Ariana stopped. Her face was practically white.

“L-l-look in there,” she said. “I can’t.”

I left her on the corner and walked closer. Wooden sawhorses surrounded a gaping, rectangular hole in the road. Inside the hole was a corroded metal pipe that looked as if the Pilgrims had put it in themselves. The center had rotted away, and debris had collected inside it — newspapers, bottles, wrappers, a shoe.…

My eyes widened. I went to the edge and looked over.

The shoe had a foot in it, And it was attached to a leg.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“What do we do?” Ariana asked.

“Is it real?”

“I don’t know!”

As if in answer, the foot twitched.

Then, slowly, it slid into the pipe.

W
E STOPPED RUNNING AFTER
three blocks. Clutching hands; we sat on a park bench along the Ramble.

For a long time we couldn’t talk. Ariana rocked slowly back and forth, her eyes focused blankly on the sidewalk.

My head throbbed. The chalky smell was in my nostrils again. I sat forward, massaging my temples and breathing deeply.

Ariana finally turned to me, her eyes bloodshot and her teeth chattering. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t … know.” Each word was like a fist to the head. I gasped.

“David, are you okay?”

I nodded, then whispered, “I’ll deal with it.”

Ariana moved aside. “Lie down.”

I did as she said. She looked down at me, her eyes now full of concern. “I’m sorry,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve been so upset, I didn’t even ask you about your accident.”

“What accident?”

“Oh, my lord, amnesia.” She began speaking slowly, as if to an infant. “I found you in the basement of Wetherby High School. Do you know where that is?”

“Well, yeah …”

“Good. Now, I think you may have a concussion, David. Do you have blurred vision?” She held up three fingers, like a Boy Scout salute. “How many fingers?”

I returned the salute. “On my honor, I will do my duty to God and country, and obey the Scout code …”

Ariana’s face went blank. Then she scowled at me. “Very funny. You know, we have a serious situation here.”

I was already feeling better, until I started to laugh, which was like inviting Arnold Schwarzenegger to sit on my head. “I don’t have amnesia,” I said, speaking slowly, “at least not completely. I went to the basement to look for The Delphic Club meeting place.”

“You
what
?”

I told her everything I’d learned about Reggie Borden and the strange 1950 deaths. I described the rumors about the underground groups, and I told her my suspicions about The Delphic Club meeting in the basement.

Ariana listened closely, softly stroking my hair and nodding. “That feels so good,” I said. “You have soft hands.”

She laughed. “Soft hands? Stephen says my hands are like a truck driver’s.”

“He’s lying. You could be a masseuse — or a painter or a pianist.”

“
Please.
I’m much too practical. You need to be a dreamer for those things.”

“You’re not?”

“Uh-uh. Just the opposite. I discovered there was no Santa at the age of three, by stringing gum across the chimney. When the gum wasn’t broken the next morning, I had my proof.”

I sat up. “You
didn’t
!”

Ariana nodded. “When I lost my first tooth I didn’t put it under my pillow for the Tooth Fairy. I put it in a glass of Pepsi to see if it would decay.”

“And … ?”

“It did. To a little pebble.”

My pain was melting away — and so was the wall that had always been between Ariana and me. We were talking a lot, probably to avoid thinking about the Sewer Thing. But we were
one
now, united with a knowledge that no one else shared. And no matter what the outcome, we would carry this with us for the rest of our lives.

I smiled at her. Her eyes became moist. “Oh, David,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

I didn’t know whether she meant
do
about us or
do
about the foot in the sewer pipe.

But it didn’t matter. I drew her close to me, and she didn’t resist. I closed my eyes and gently opened my mouth.

The warmth of her kiss bathed me. The events of the past few days flew away, and I knew in my bones that Ariana and I belonged together.

When our lips parted, she rested her head on my chest. I felt so lucky. I wanted this to last.

But I started thinking about Smut.

“Uh, Ariana,” I said, screwing up my courage. “When I was looking for the meeting place, I saw Stephen and Monique. You were right about them, you know. They were … well, kind of hanging all over each other.”

Ariana stiffened. She let go of my hand and sank back into the bench.
“What?”

“You know, arm in arm.…”

Ariana looked disgusted. “Is that what this was all about, David? You were just spying on Stephen? Trying to get me to like you?”

I tried putting my arm around her. “No! That’s not it at all. I … I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She edged away. “I’m not upset,” she said with a strange calmness. “Why should I be upset? I mean, classmates are dying, corpses are swimming in our water system, there’s a hole under the school, our yearbook was sabotaged, you’re busy checking out forty-year-old Communist conspiracies, and my boyfriend is seeing someone behind my back. What’s the big deal?”

“Ariana— ”

With a choked sob, she got up from the bench and ran toward her house. “Leave me alone.”

I followed at a sprint. “I know how you must feel, but — ”

She spun around. Her eyes were murderous. They froze me in my tracks. “You don’t have a clue how I feel, David. But I see through you. And I think what you’re trying to do is sick.”

“I don’t understand — ”

“I’m sorry I ever asked you to be on the staff. You’ve spent two months staring at me, but I never thought you’d stoop to this. You leave my private life to
me
!”

“But —but — ”

I sputtered as she disappeared around the corner. Her footsteps echoed hollowly in the bleak evening.

David Kallas, Master of Tact.

I stood there until my ears became numb with the wind. Then, slowly, I headed home.

My body tensed as I approached the construction site. Smoke was billowing from it now, and I craned my neck to see inside.

The smoke was seeping out of the pipe, escaping upward through the junk in the rotted-open part.

The shoe was gone, of course. But where?

I sat at the edge of the hole. I had seen a foot disappear into a pipe. I had to make sense of it somehow.

I asked myself a basic question: What does a pipe do?

Carry fluids.

How do the fluids move?

From a higher to lower position … from higher to lower pressure.

So, an object
in
the pipe — say, a body — would move for the same reasons a liquid would.

Okay, so maybe we had not seen the Foot of the Living Dead. Maybe it had been your garden variety corpse moving to the laws of physics.

Gee, what a relief.

I climbed down into the hole. Using my hands, I cleared out the junk I could see, taking care not to reach into the pipe. Then I lowered my head to look inside.

A billow of smoke rushed around my head, and I came face-to-face with a pair of small eyes.

“Agggh!” I bolted upright.

Footsteps skittered down the pipe, toward the Ramble.

A rat. No big deal. It must have felt worse than I did.

I let my heartbeat settle, then asked myself another small question:

What happens to the contents of a pipe?

They are carried to a dumping place, which in Wetherby is usually the Wampanoag River.

I ran into the Ramble before I had the opportunity to think about what I was doing. Rain had started, and my feet slipped off slick, wet branches.

I found my way to the boulder near the drainpipe. This time, no fuzzy head poked its way out of the water. I leaned out over the river and saw nothing but the gaping black circle of the pipe and some refuse underneath.

As I stood up, the rays of the setting sun caught a shiny object in the muck near the pipe. I walked over, reached in, and pulled out a gold high school ring.

The name
RACHEL GREEN
was carved on the inside.

“S
O HOW EXACTLY WOULD
you date a prehistoric mummy?” asked Mr. O’Toole in first-period physics the next morning. “Mark?”

Rosie looked up from his doodling. “Um … ask very nicely?”

The class burst into laughter.

Me? I was barely paying attention. It had been a horrible night. I’d managed to track down Chief Hayes, who had been eating dinner at Arby’s with his family. (They were the only customers. The rest of Wetherby had been in hiding every night since Rick had been found.) While they stared at me, chewing away, I had showed him Rachel’s ring and explained what had happened.

He had told me not to call the Greens or John Christopher until he’d had a chance to investigate. So I had gone home and faced a ballistic assault from Mom, who was sure I’d been killed. After that I’d called Ariana, who hung up on me. Then I’d had insomnia.

By Friday physics, I was a train wreck. The shock of Rick’s death was still in the air, and now Rachel was gone. And John was in my next class, English.

I dreaded going. How could I not tell him? It would be impossible.

I was seriously thinking of giving myself a bloody nose so I could end up in the nurse’s office.

Come to think of it, slitting my throat might have been a better idea.

“… concept of radioactive half-life,” Mr. O’Toole droned on. “Who can explain it? David?”

“What?” I muttered.

“Tell me about half-life.”

Rachel Green,
I wanted to say. That was a half-life. Less. She was only seventeen.

“Okay, I guess Mr. Kallas needs a little jump-start this morning,” Mr. O’Toole continued. “David, say I have a radioactive substance that weighs eight ounces. Its half-life is twenty minutes. How heavy will it be in one hour?”

What language was this?

As I sat there, mute and fishlike, Jason Herman was having a cow behind me. “Ooh oohoohooh …”

“Jason,” Mr. O’Toole said.

“Well, it decays by half each time period. Sixty minutes is three periods, so eight becomes four, then two, then one. The answer is one ounce!”

Mr. O’Toole’s face brightened. “Thank you, Jason. Had you answered a few more like that earlier in the semester, you may have pulled ahead of the rest of your classmates.”

“Which isn’t saying much,” said Ed Lyman from the back of the class.

“Hark! He speaks!” Mr. O’Toole said. “The rumors of brain death are not true!”

Somehow I made it to the end of class without further verbal abuse. But as I was walking out, Mr. O’Toole stopped me. “David, I want you to know I will flunk a senior as quickly as a junior. I once hoped you would be my best student. Right now I’ll settle for a basic understanding of principles. Got the message?”

“Yes,” I said.

This was the latest version of The Speech. The “I Read About Your IQ Score and You’re Not Living Up to Your Potential” speech I’d heard many times, in different forms, all four years at school.