Supervision
Supervision
Alison Stine
Something is wrong with Esmé.
Kicked out of school in New York, her sister sends her to live with their grandmother in the small town she hasn’t visited since she was a child.
But something is wrong with the grandmother Ez hasn’t seen for years; she leaves the house at midnight, carrying a big black bag.
Something is wrong with her grandmother’s house, a decrepit mansion full of stray cats, stairs that lead to nowhere and beds that unmake themselves.
Something is wrong in the town where a child disappears every year, where a whistle sounds at night but no train arrives.
And something is definitely wrong with her cute and friendly neighbour with black curls and ice-blue eyes: he’s dead.
Supervision
ALISON STINE
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Alison Stine 2015
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com;
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015.
Alison Stine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-811359-9
Version: 2015-03-09
For my mom, who taught me how to read—and for Henry, who is a Story
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2ac8b510-b528-5bdf-9f93-ccd34a7beb03)
Title Page (#uef56c926-1d5c-57df-a343-a9e37aead218)
Copyright (#ufc6e8b45-0bf7-5b9f-a758-3db992e1f24f)
Dedication (#ufc76001c-0fce-50ed-a5f2-a5a3a9af6de3)
CHAPTER 1: Acid Loves You (#uabbdf631-4340-53a4-9f22-f87601de720e)
CHAPTER 2: Wellstone (#u5ebce5f5-77b5-5c6a-99d7-5b3ab70dc641)
CHAPTER 3: Six Feet (#u0a85077b-8a46-5210-8ec2-7b5e63bb02f5)
CHAPTER 4: I’m Alive (#ua1b3ac55-7ace-5239-9fe6-359d65e6def1)
CHAPTER 5: Death Beginning (#ud9997823-fdd2-5167-abb3-fa68bc068f17)
CHAPTER 6: Sensitive One (#u78e6237b-7c64-53fa-a393-075d919b6b4d)
CHAPTER 7: Riding Too Long (#ubaf70c2b-0d09-5afe-bf32-b05cee7cc96e)
CHAPTER 8: Wickedness and Snares (#uc421d6a3-bafd-5c00-8d2e-14a758318a7a)
CHAPTER 9: What Do You Want? (#u097cc06b-1fb7-5b4d-935b-1dbfabac9376)
CHAPTER 10: Can You See Me? (#u9ca990e2-64f8-5732-9f98-632cd3f98e75)
CHAPTER 11: Mixed Up (#ud02edfae-27a2-59c4-8f53-3cbf22bda8ff)
CHAPTER 12: Door to Nowhere (#uc764f2b0-4fcf-56a9-bc59-a1319b01b668)
CHAPTER 13: Dance or Die (#u9ee0fc24-9003-5edf-b8c1-4bf304057617)
CHAPTER 14: Mr. Black (#u2dd918ff-6b08-55f4-b708-661730233ed3)
CHAPTER 15: The Lower Vale (#u3a74f07b-5fdf-516c-90e2-3652f8a8afbe)
CHAPTER 16: A Nice Dare (#ubd0ab0b6-585d-5226-b75c-0d16bdc3aa2b)
CHAPTER 17: The Gift at the Table (#u9f1b62f1-87a7-58f8-88b8-bc063e732847)
CHAPTER 18: Red Shoes (#u273333da-ca6e-50ab-b0f4-52c01482b63b)
CHAPTER 19: It’s Easy to Dye (#uf494b84a-5781-5092-b5de-cb66f7e61ab2)
CHAPTER 20: Dearest Annabelle (#u92ea2cf3-d3b8-53f7-8cf9-0d9a5e3a6724)
CHAPTER 21: Great-granddaughter (#uab536b96-5ae4-5076-abf8-d30ce75afd8f)
CHAPTER 22: Free (#u0c194425-971f-5cd4-ac6f-3baae5b54959)
Acknowledgements (#ua6b5ac5b-6dfc-593d-9f25-58b38259fea6)
About the Author (#u88be1f97-e0eb-5b94-95ca-77314cd66774)
About the Publisher (#uee3351bc-f8c5-5897-b432-92a45e6c5f4a)
CHAPTER 1: (#u3e028c1f-f68b-5d7d-9e56-bfeb42ffb2e6)
Acid Loves You (#u3e028c1f-f68b-5d7d-9e56-bfeb42ffb2e6)
Acid walked away the day he told me that he loved me.
He said those three little words, whispered them, and then the teacher slammed her hand on my desk, making me turn around and sit up straight and pretend to pay attention. By the time I glanced back, he had slipped out of the doorway into the hall, skipping class again.
I sat in the back at school. I felt different than everyone else. I wore different clothes. My school didn’t require a uniform, but I kind of wished it did. Acid wore expensive sneakers, but he’d had to scrimp for them, and I often saw him in the same shirt and jeans. Me, I was content to wear a sweatshirt, slipping the hood down over my face as far as I could, until I could hardly see.
The train the afternoon that Acid walked away was late, and when it came it was packed, only one seat in the back of the car I had chosen, near the operator’s booth. It was an hour’s ride home from school, forty-five minutes if I was lucky.
That was another way I was different: I was never lucky.
The subway rumbled and swayed. The car I was in emptied as more and more people got out. Hardly anyone got in as we traveled uptown. We were almost home when the train jerked and halted, and I was pushed into the sleeping man beside me. I moved away quickly, scooting over until my shoulder pressed against the side of the car. The man only snorted and went back to sleep.
The conductor’s voice came over the intercom, scratchy and garbled—but I knew what he was saying; I had heard it before. “This train is being held by supervision. We will be moving shortly.”
We were in between stops, and outside the window, the tunnel looked black. Inside the train, the lights flickered and went out. When they turned back on, there was something on the outside of the window.
Hand. It was a hand.
Someone was riding on the outside of the train.
I stood, my bag sliding off my lap and hitting the floor with a thud. The sleeping man grumbled. The operator came out of his booth and scanned the car.
I met his glance. “There’s someone out there.”
He didn’t look. “Kid, sit down.”
“Look!” I said.
Annoyed, he flicked his eyes in the direction I pointed, barely a glance. But the operator didn’t see. “Sit down,” he said. “We’ll be moving soon.” He opened the door to his little booth, and went back inside, muttering to himself, “Kids!”
I had heard about people riding on the outside of subway cars, trying to be funny, getting themselves killed. But when I turned to look again, to double-check, the hand was gone. I saw only the empty tunnel and the swinging work light. Why was it swinging, as if someone had knocked into it?
With a jerk, the train started moving again.
My stop was the last in Manhattan before the Bronx. My building was the last on the block before the highway, and our apartment was on the top floor, up five flights of stairs. No elevator. “It builds the muscles,” my sister had said when she was a dancer.
But she wasn’t a dancer anymore.
She was waiting for me in the hallway of the apartment when I unlocked the door, which was bad. Really bad. The Firecracker never got home before me, not since she started working her “real job,” as she called it, her “grown-up job” that kept her late, every night, sometimes until nine or ten. I checked my phone. It was six.
“The Head-of-School called,” the Firecracker said. “You’re getting a D in English.”
That hurt, but I tried not to let it. “So?” I said.
“So, they won’t let you out of the ninth grade if you don’t get at least a C.”
I followed her into the kitchen. “What does that mean, they won’t let me out?”
“That means, you’ll lose your scholarship and be kicked out of school. You can’t coast by anymore, Esmé.”
“I’m not coasting,” I said.
But I knew I was.
It was like I was tired all the time. It was like I was angry and upset—but if I talked to someone about it, if I stayed after school to meet a teacher or go to tutoring, I would have to think about it. I would have to bring it up. And I didn’t want to bring it up. I wanted it not to be happening at all.
Miss Wrong.
I did well in school when I was a kid, well enough that they made me take tests, and the tests got me into a new school, a private school. Acid and I were scholarship kids, brought in by the tests. In middle school, I had raised my hand and answered questions, and I had usually got them right. But in high school, this year, something had changed in me. I got the questions wrong sometimes, often enough that I got a new nickname.
The teachers at my new school all called us by our last names, like we were in the military or gym class. So Wong became Wrong for my classmates. Miss Wrong. It wasn’t a stretch. It wasn’t very creative.
But I still stopped raising my hand.
The Firecracker was banging pots in the kitchen. “They’ve given you multiple chances at that school,” she said.
I dropped my bag on the floor. “No, they haven’t.”
“Those were their words. Not mine. Your scholarship is a big deal, and if you don’t deserve it, if you don’t work for it, they’re going to find someone who does.”
“So?” I said. I slumped against the doorframe. My sister was kneeling, her head and shoulders in a cabinet. “Are you actually going to try and cook something?” I asked.
“I’m home early,” she said. “I thought I might as well.”
Her frame was twisted to reach into the back of the cabinet, her arm extended, almost artfully. I thought of her dancing—and then I thought of how I was never going to see that again.
She backed out of the cabinet, holding a frying pan at a distance, as if it were something distasteful. “I can’t afford that school. If you lose that scholarship, you’re out.”
I shrugged. “Public school.”
“No. You don’t understand. If you lose your scholarship, you’re out of here. You’re out of New York. I’m sending you away.”
Acid never answered his phone. When it got too late to call, I fell asleep.
I had nightmares since my parents died. Not nightmares: dreams. I dreamed about a dark space. At the end of the space was a light, a bright white light growing brighter and bigger and whiter—and in the light, my mother danced.
I knew it was my mother, not my sister, although I had never actually seen my mother perform on stage. But the face on the dancer in my dreams matched the face I saw in pictures—like the Firecracker’s only thinner, a slimmer face than mine, with the high cheekbones I would never have, and the wrinkles on the forehead I didn’t have yet. It was the smile most of all that made me certain it was my mother. In photographs, she always smiled when she performed, and I knew—I remembered from seeing her on stage—my sister never did.
My sister grimaced. She grunted and frowned and stomped across the stage, a ball of energy, a lightning bolt. She danced like she was always angry. She tore through toe shoes. Her tutus ripped. Her feet bled. “The Firecracker,” The Times called her, and the name stuck. They also wrote that she was a tribute to her mother.
My sister quit dancing, right after that.
I didn’t really remember my mother, and I remembered my father only as a voice, a deep belly laugh. They died when I was a kid, in a car crash.
But I never dreamed about that.
In English, I tried to text, and the teacher saw. “Miss Wong,” she said. “Your phone, please.”
I slid out of my seat and dragged myself to the front. No one laughed until the third row, when a girl coughed and said it: “Miss Wrong.” Then everyone laughed, an explosion that radiated through the room. The teacher glared at the class, but didn’t say anything. I was getting a D, why would she?
After school, I had to double back to the classroom to pick up my phone, and I barely made the train. It was less crowded than yesterday, but slow, and the car I had picked had bad air-conditioning, the windows steaming over in the afternoon heat. Someone had cracked one open, a slit through which I could see the black tunnel. When we stopped at 168
Street, I could see something on one of the tunnel walls: graffiti. A tag. A name in bright green. I read it.
Acid.
There was more. There was a whole, terrible sentence.
Acid Loves You.
It wasn’t my stop, but I pushed out of the car just as the doors were starting to close. My bag got stuck, and I yanked it free, nearly falling onto the platform. People were staring, but I didn’t care.
The train began to pull away and I looked around. Everyone who had gotten off went up the stairs to street level. With a shudder, the train left too. And I could see it now, the stupid graffiti, see it clearly: Acid Loves You. It was painted in bright green, the color of acid, almost florescent in the dark tunnel.
The subway platform where people waited was tiled in white, but in the tunnel through which the trains traveled, the walls were black. It was here that the message had been painted. Someone had climbed down from the platform, and into the tunnel to do it.
The platform ended at the mouth of the tunnel, at a sign that read CAUTION: DO NOT ENTER. But a little walkway continued into the tunnel beyond the sign, an access path for subway workers. I looked down this little walkway, peering into darkness. The only light came from the work bulbs strung across the ceiling every few feet, and the signal light: a kind of traffic light for trains.
The signal light was red, which meant no train was coming.
I glanced behind me. There were only a few people waiting for the downtown train. No one was looking. I stepped over the sign, crept onto the walkway—and went into the tunnel.
I wanted to see the graffiti up close. It had to be from my friend, it had to be. How many people in our neighborhood were called Acid? I balanced on the narrow walkway. There was a railing, but it was low and spindly. It wouldn’t hold me if I fell.
I just wouldn’t fall, I told myself.
The graffiti was only a few feet inside the tunnel, painted on the wall a little above my head. Whoever had written it hadn’t been much taller than me—and they were sloppy; a line of green paint trailed down the tunnel. I followed the paint splatter, crouching until I was kneeling, until the paint disappeared into the wall.
Into the wall?
I spread my palms, scanning the wall. It felt smooth. Then I felt a rough line. I worked my fingers into the crack and pulled until a door popped open. It was a small space, a crawl space, little more than a hole, and inside was darkness—and green polka dots.
Inside the door in the wall, green paint spotted the floor, so bright it glowed. I didn’t think; I crawled. I pushed in, my knees dragging on cement, trying to examine the paint.
With a groan, the door to the crawl space swung shut behind me. My chest swelled and I couldn’t breathe. I shot forward, knocking my forehead into a wall. Pain. Then everything was blackness.
When I woke, it took a moment for me to remember where I was. Panic returned. I was cold and stuck in the subway tunnel, in some sort of recess. I couldn’t turn around so I pushed back as hard as I could, shoving my backpack against the door. It swung open and I fell out onto the tunnel walkway.
A light was moving in the tunnel, jostling up and down. I stood. I wanted to run, but I was afraid I would fall. I saw a man beneath the moving light. The light was attached to him, a big headlamp, and he was running, coming right at me. I would have been scared, except he looked funny with the oversized headlamp, like a kid playing dress up. He wore a pair of overalls, and they were filthy, as was his shirt. Even his face was smeared with dirt.
“Child,” he said. He waved his arms. “Child, get out of here. A train is coming.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “The light is red.”
“The light?” he said, confused.
“The signal light.” I pointed behind me, then turned back to the man to show him, but he was gone. The tunnel was empty. And I felt something behind me. Arms wrapped around my waist and lifted, grabbing me, yanking me out of the tunnel.
It was another man, another subway worker who had grabbed me. He wore a bright orange and yellow safety vest, goggles, no headlamp—and there was a policewoman with him. The radio on the cop’s shoulder squawked.
“We got her,” the officer said into the radio.
Out on the platform, a crowd had gathered.
The subway worker was sweating. He set me down on the platform, and wiped his forehead with his hand. “Girl,” he said. “You are in so much trouble.”
And I was.
CHAPTER 2: (#u3e028c1f-f68b-5d7d-9e56-bfeb42ffb2e6)
Wellstone (#u3e028c1f-f68b-5d7d-9e56-bfeb42ffb2e6)
My sister dragged the old suitcases out of the closet, and swung them onto my bed. She clicked them open, one after the other.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Packing,” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m packing for you.”
“Where am I going?”
She looked at me. “You know.”
The nightmares that night were different. No dancing. No mom. No tunnel even, despite the fact that I had just been pulled from one, despite the fact that the police had taken me to a corner of the station, and asked me: What was I doing? How could I have been so dumb? Didn’t I know I could have been killed? Didn’t I know people died that way? Just a few months ago, in this very tunnel.
I knew, I knew, I told them. I said I was sorry.
The first few times I told the story, I told about the man with the headlamp and the dirty clothes. But no one knew who the man was. So I stopped telling that part. When my sister showed up, the police let me go. No fine. This time. And no court appearance because the Firecracker was taking me out of state.
She promised.
The nightmares that night felt real. I dreamed I was in my bed in my room in the apartment—but something was wrong with my hand. It hurt. It tingled, the blood pricking my palm as if my hand had fallen asleep.
But then in the dream, when I turned over to look at it on the sheet, my hand wasn’t there. It just wasn’t there. My hand was gone. It hurt, but it was a phantom pain. In my dream, my body was missing.
I woke up with aches, my limbs stiff from sleeping wrong—and I woke up late. The Firecracker threw my suitcases down the stairs. I pulled on an oversized sweatshirt and jeans without looking in the mirror, half-asleep.
It was May, still cold in the morning. We didn’t talk in the cab. We didn’t hug at the station. I kept my hands stuffed in my pockets and my hood pulled down.
But then the Firecracker said, “It will be better this time.”
I sniffed. “What do you mean?”
“Grandma. She’ll be good for you. It’ll be good for you to be in the country right now, away from …” she gestured around at the station: the early morning commuters rushing by, the platform littered with trash, the garbage cans covered with graffiti like scabs. “All this.”
“I thought you loved all this.”
“Sometimes I do,” my sister said. “But it’s time for you to go.”
And then she gripped my shoulders and pulled me toward her in a hug. She smelled of fancy perfume and leather and the smell that never quite went away from her; it seemed attached to her hair, the smell of rosin for the toe shoes, though it had been ages since she had worn them.
“I’ll visit you soon,” the Firecracker said. I was about to say something in response, but then she pulled out of the hug and squeezed my shoulder. “Esmé, eat something. You feel like you’re wasting away to nothing.”
Once on the train, I closed my eyes and didn’t look back.
My sister had bought me a ticket on the Keystone to Pennsylvania—a daylong trip from Penn Station. I slept mostly. We passed into New Jersey, following the water, steely and gray. I didn’t talk to anyone, or move when the conductor came through, calling for lunch reservations. I wasn’t hungry. When the train stopped after Elizabethtown, at the most desolate, busted place I could imagine, I stood. This was the stop. I knew it. After all, I had been here before.
When our parents died, the Firecracker was fifteen—my age now—too young to take care of me herself. I tried to imagine my sister like me, in school, wearing toe shoes around her neck, her long hair in a ponytail. I couldn’t picture it, not really. I was five then, and we moved in with our grandmother, our mother’s mother, for three years until my sister was legal, could drop out of school and get a job, get a place for us back in the city where we belonged, she said.
I knew the blandness, the brokenness of this place, I had been here and escaped from it once already. Wellstone.
The conductor called the name of the town, but I was the only one who got out. The train huffed away, and I was left. Outside on the platform, under an overhang, I sat on a bench to wait.
Wellstone was a punishment, like my grandmother was a punishment. My sister had used both of them as idle threats for years. If I didn’t do better in school, if I didn’t come home on time, if I didn’t stop talking back, she would send me here, to Wellstone, where there were no malls or coffee shops or stores that stayed open past five o’clock or kids my own age or anything to do.
There were also rumors about this town, stories which I could still remember bits of: something about a man in the woods; bones in the weeds; places where kids were afraid to play. This was not a good place, I knew that much.
My grandmother didn’t have internet. She didn’t have a computer. She didn’t have cable. She lived in an old, rambling mansion that was falling down. It wasn’t safe, I remembered. Once, my foot had fallen through a stair. Rain had fallen through the ceiling. The Firecracker had cried a lot.
But in New York, after they had pulled me from the tunnel, my sister had made plans, secretly and instantly. There were three weeks left of school, and she had arranged for me to be transferred. The school in Wellstone had emailed a schedule. They were expecting me.
Grandma was the only family we had left, the last resort for me.
I didn’t even know if I would know her face. She was quiet and terrifying, I remembered that much. She kept cats with no tails who roamed freely in and out of the house. There was a barn I wasn’t allowed to go into. There was a big black bag she carried that I wasn’t allowed to touch.
My grandmother had worked the night shift, as a nurse or something. She had cooked strange things, nearly inedible things, bubbling stews and simmering broths, which she left hissing on the stove all day. The house smelled of herbs and dried flowers and dust and spice and boiling chickens. She kept the bones. The cats played with them.
On the train platform, I shivered. I checked for reception on my phone. I waited. And I waited. I had started to fall asleep when I heard a car. I sat up and reached for my suitcases.
My grandmother came around the corner of the station. I hadn’t seen her for seven years. She was smaller than I remembered, and she wore glasses, the kind with a beaded chain. She walked heavily and slowly, as though it hurt her. She stepped up to the platform and looked across.
I didn’t run to her. I didn’t shout. I wasn’t going to hug her. I decided to stay very still. I decided to look like it didn’t matter; I didn’t care.
She turned, and without a word to me, began to walk back to her car.
“Grandma?” I said, but my voice felt thick. I wasn’t sure she had heard me. By the time I had gathered up my bags, the car was starting. “Grandma, no!” I left the suitcases and ran into the parking lot.
Her car, a station wagon, was just disappearing up the road.
I dialed my phone. “Grandma left me,” I said when my sister picked up.
“Why are you calling me at work?”
“She left me.”
“Where?” my sister said.
“At the train station.”
“Well, was your train late?”
“No.”
“I’m sure it’s a mistake,” the Firecracker said. “A misunderstanding.”
I remembered her raging about our grandmother, about her strangeness, her habits. Eccentric was the word the Firecracker used, which, as a child, I had thought was electric; I kept waiting for our grandmother to light up like a Christmas tree.
“You know where she lives,” my sister said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, you have the address. And you remember the house.”
“Yes,” I said.
I couldn’t forget the house.
I hung up the phone, hoisted my suitcases, and started up the hill to the road. Soon a truck passed me, a group of bare-chested boys hanging out in the bed. Wellstone boys. I thought about hitchhiking, though the Firecracker would kill me if she found out, but the truck didn’t slow.
I began to remember the way. Past the gas station and fairgrounds. There was the hill. There was the road, the driveway cracked and steep. I tightened my grip on the suitcases and started up. The driveway veered, and there was the house: glowering from on top of the hill. The house was three stories, mostly brick, and over a hundred years old. It had belonged to someone important. It had been passed down. It had a name—but I couldn’t remember what it was.
I passed my grandmother’s station wagon parked in front of the collapsing barn. When the driveway ended, I dragged my suitcases through the grass, tearing through the weeds to get around the house. The grass hadn’t been mowed in a long time, and there were tree limbs down all over the yard. Wide steps led to a front porch and double doors, thrown wide open to the afternoon. When I walked up the steps, four blurs shot out of the doors and down, yowling.
Cats. My grandmother fed a whole herd of them, all tailless. Manx, I remembered they were called.
“Scat!” I told them. I dropped my suitcases on the porch and knocked at the open door. “Grandma?” I called.
No one answered.
I went inside.
I hadn’t remembered how high the ceilings of the house were, how the wooden floors echoed. I peeked in the doorway of the first room to my left: empty, except for bookshelves and a piano. The room on the right, the dining room, had a heavy oak table in the center, drapes drawn shut over the windows, and a fireplace, the marble mantle cluttered with candles. There were candles on the floor in the hallway too, all dusty and blackened, burned down to nubs.
A ballroom stood on the third floor, I remembered now—I had roller skated there. A big staircase led up to it, but I kept walking down the hall. I came to a smaller set of stairs, the servant steps. To my right was the kitchen. To my left was the sitting room where my grandmother waited for me, watching television with the sound off.
“Grandma?” I whispered.
Blue light flickered over her face. It was her. She was the same, only shrunken, only not speaking to me for some reason.
“I’m here,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“Esmé? Jennifer’s daughter?”
It hurt to say my mother’s name. Not hurt exactly. It felt forbidden, like a spell. It felt like I shouldn’t speak her name aloud. I wished I hadn’t. I felt dizzy, like I might be sick.
Her face unfroze at the sound of my and my mother’s names. She looked around, concentrating, as if she was listening hard. I thought she was going to speak. But she only reached over to the end table, picked a phone, saw that nobody had called or was calling, and turned the phone facedown again. She never met my eyes.
I turned away. “I’ll just go get my bags,” I said.
I lugged them up the main stairs because I didn’t want to have to face her again. Was she mad at me already? What had my sister said to her about me?
On the second floor, there were four closed doors, and two open ones. The front room held a white canopied bed. There were magazines and old, moldy books on the night table, and house slippers underneath it—my grandmother’s room.
That left the smaller room for me. I was relieved to see the bed had sheets on it, a pink quilt folded at the foot, towels draped over a chair. I opened the two doors in the room to find a closet, and a bathroom with a tub ringed in rust.
Had this been my room? I set my suitcases down, opened the drapes at the window, and looked out. The room faced the backyard. Beyond the old barn, there was a pond, round and still. I hadn’t remembered that, either.
Exhausted, too worn out to be hungry, I climbed into bed and pulled the quilt around me. I didn’t bother getting undressed, or calling the Firecracker to tell her I was here. Not home. I was not home. I would never say that word again.
I was too nervous to sleep beyond the first beam of sun breaking through the drapes. Despite weak water pressure, the shower worked. I combed out my long hair, pulled on a new shirt and jeans. The door to my grandmother’s bedroom was closed, and downstairs, there was no sign of her. I remembered her working nights, remembered the Firecracker making dinner, and grumbling about it. I found a bowl and cereal in the cabinet, milk in the fridge. I ate standing up over the sink, then washed and dried my dishes, putting them away where I had found them.
I wouldn’t bother my grandmother. I wouldn’t be a burden; she wouldn’t notice me at all.
The school bus stop was at the bottom of the driveway, my sister had told me, and a handful of kids already stood out there by the road. One of the boys looked up as I approached. One of the girls was studying a book, and another boy tried to knock it out of her hands.
She snatched it away. “I’ve got a test.”
“New girl today,” the boy said.
I adjusted my bag. I just wanted to get this over with. “I’m Esmé,” I said.
“Weird name,” he said.
“Weird family,” a second girl said.
“Do you think she’s a witch like her grandma?” the boy asked.
I held my bag tighter. “My grandma’s not a witch,” I said.
“All I know is,” the girl with the book said, “this girl got kicked out of her old school. She’s like, a juvenile delinquent or something. A total freak.”
“I am not,” I said.
But the boy just lunged for the girl’s book again. They wrestled, the girl smacking the boy on the shoulder, the other girl ignoring them, examining the split ends of her hair. I stood at the back of the bus line, hating this place, and hating my grandmother and my sister for bringing me here.
When the bus came, I sat in the first empty seat, and no one sat with me or talked to me. When we stopped and the bus emptied, I had to fight to get out into the aisle; kids kept pushing past me, and the driver almost closed the door.
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to check in, but I waited around the office for what seemed like forever, until after the first warning bell had sounded and the office cleared. Then I followed the late kids out into the hall. No one asked if they could help me or what I was doing. I didn’t bother finding my locker. I pulled the print-out of my schedule from my pocket, and was searching for room numbers when the tardy bell rang.
Someone sprinted around a corner and plowed into me.
I was knocked to my knees. My bag shot off my back and onto the floor, the zipper splitting open. The boy who had knocked me down pushed himself up with a squeal of his sneakers and took off. “Hey,” I said. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
He dashed around the next corner and was gone.
“Jerk,” I said.
In the empty hallway, I stood and gathered my stuff. I collected the loose papers that had fallen from the folder that was supposed to travel with me to the office: my permanent record from New York. Words leapt out at me from the file: distracted … disrespectful … loner … antisocial … underachiever … daydreamer … lives in a fantasy world …
The words began to blur. No, I would not cry. Not on the first day of school. I shoved the pages back into the folder. Somehow, I found my classroom. A science lab. Students perched at tables, looking bored. There was one empty stool so I took it.
“All right,” the teacher said. She looked up. She was going to make some sort of announcement, introduce me, something embarrassing.
I tensed, waiting for it.
The door shot open and a boy came in, looking flustered. He headed straight for me.
He ran up to me. Then he sat on me—or tried to, sat right on my stool, on my lap. I pushed him as hard as I could, and he tumbled off the stool onto the ground. He looked up, his face blanching.
The class laughed, everyone at once. The teacher rolled her eyes and told them to be nice, told the boy to be more careful. He stood and reached for my stool again, and I backed up, scooting the stool with me.
“Sit in the back, Ron,” the teacher said. “I don’t think that chair likes you.”
“The chair?” I said. “Hello? I have a name.”
But Ron moved away, and no one asked me what my name was. The teacher didn’t do an announcement, or give me a book. She didn’t even take roll. She started the class like nothing was different. “So,” she said. “Today we’re going to talk about something that actually matters to us, matters to our history here in Wellstone.”
“History matters?” some boy said.
“The locomotive,” the teacher said. “You might be surprised to learn the steam locomotive has something in common with an aircraft carrier. Anyone know what?”
I looked around. No one knew my name here yet. No one knew my nickname—Miss Wrong—or had given it to me, thinking they were being smart, thinking they were being new. Slowly I raised my hand.
“The steam locomotive and an aircraft carrier. What do they have in common?”
I pumped my hand. I waved it.
“Anyone?” the teacher said.
“Excuse me?” I said. “They both convert heat into motion.”
The teacher sighed. “They both convert heat into motion.”
I lowered my hand.
“Take out your books,” the teacher said. “I know we’ve all got senioritis here, but there are three weeks left of school and we’re going to make them count. Read chapter twelve to yourselves, please, then we’ll do the questions together.”
Everyone fumbled with their books. Everyone but me.
I waited for the teacher to notice. I waited for her to give me a book, to ask my name, to see me. But she never did.
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Alison Stine
Something is wrong with Esmé.
Kicked out of school in New York, her sister sends her to live with their grandmother in the small town she hasn’t visited since she was a child.
But something is wrong with the grandmother Ez hasn’t seen for years; she leaves the house at midnight, carrying a big black bag.
Something is wrong with her grandmother’s house, a decrepit mansion full of stray cats, stairs that lead to nowhere and beds that unmake themselves.
Something is wrong in the town where a child disappears every year, where a whistle sounds at night but no train arrives.
And something is definitely wrong with her cute and friendly neighbour with black curls and ice-blue eyes: he’s dead.
Supervision
ALISON STINE
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Alison Stine 2015
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com;
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015.
Alison Stine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-811359-9
Version: 2015-03-09
For my mom, who taught me how to read—and for Henry, who is a Story
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2ac8b510-b528-5bdf-9f93-ccd34a7beb03)
Title Page (#uef56c926-1d5c-57df-a343-a9e37aead218)
Copyright (#ufc6e8b45-0bf7-5b9f-a758-3db992e1f24f)
Dedication (#ufc76001c-0fce-50ed-a5f2-a5a3a9af6de3)
CHAPTER 1: Acid Loves You (#uabbdf631-4340-53a4-9f22-f87601de720e)
CHAPTER 2: Wellstone (#u5ebce5f5-77b5-5c6a-99d7-5b3ab70dc641)
CHAPTER 3: Six Feet (#u0a85077b-8a46-5210-8ec2-7b5e63bb02f5)
CHAPTER 4: I’m Alive (#ua1b3ac55-7ace-5239-9fe6-359d65e6def1)
CHAPTER 5: Death Beginning (#ud9997823-fdd2-5167-abb3-fa68bc068f17)
CHAPTER 6: Sensitive One (#u78e6237b-7c64-53fa-a393-075d919b6b4d)
CHAPTER 7: Riding Too Long (#ubaf70c2b-0d09-5afe-bf32-b05cee7cc96e)
CHAPTER 8: Wickedness and Snares (#uc421d6a3-bafd-5c00-8d2e-14a758318a7a)
CHAPTER 9: What Do You Want? (#u097cc06b-1fb7-5b4d-935b-1dbfabac9376)
CHAPTER 10: Can You See Me? (#u9ca990e2-64f8-5732-9f98-632cd3f98e75)
CHAPTER 11: Mixed Up (#ud02edfae-27a2-59c4-8f53-3cbf22bda8ff)
CHAPTER 12: Door to Nowhere (#uc764f2b0-4fcf-56a9-bc59-a1319b01b668)
CHAPTER 13: Dance or Die (#u9ee0fc24-9003-5edf-b8c1-4bf304057617)
CHAPTER 14: Mr. Black (#u2dd918ff-6b08-55f4-b708-661730233ed3)
CHAPTER 15: The Lower Vale (#u3a74f07b-5fdf-516c-90e2-3652f8a8afbe)
CHAPTER 16: A Nice Dare (#ubd0ab0b6-585d-5226-b75c-0d16bdc3aa2b)
CHAPTER 17: The Gift at the Table (#u9f1b62f1-87a7-58f8-88b8-bc063e732847)
CHAPTER 18: Red Shoes (#u273333da-ca6e-50ab-b0f4-52c01482b63b)
CHAPTER 19: It’s Easy to Dye (#uf494b84a-5781-5092-b5de-cb66f7e61ab2)
CHAPTER 20: Dearest Annabelle (#u92ea2cf3-d3b8-53f7-8cf9-0d9a5e3a6724)
CHAPTER 21: Great-granddaughter (#uab536b96-5ae4-5076-abf8-d30ce75afd8f)
CHAPTER 22: Free (#u0c194425-971f-5cd4-ac6f-3baae5b54959)
Acknowledgements (#ua6b5ac5b-6dfc-593d-9f25-58b38259fea6)
About the Author (#u88be1f97-e0eb-5b94-95ca-77314cd66774)
About the Publisher (#uee3351bc-f8c5-5897-b432-92a45e6c5f4a)
CHAPTER 1: (#u3e028c1f-f68b-5d7d-9e56-bfeb42ffb2e6)
Acid Loves You (#u3e028c1f-f68b-5d7d-9e56-bfeb42ffb2e6)
Acid walked away the day he told me that he loved me.
He said those three little words, whispered them, and then the teacher slammed her hand on my desk, making me turn around and sit up straight and pretend to pay attention. By the time I glanced back, he had slipped out of the doorway into the hall, skipping class again.
I sat in the back at school. I felt different than everyone else. I wore different clothes. My school didn’t require a uniform, but I kind of wished it did. Acid wore expensive sneakers, but he’d had to scrimp for them, and I often saw him in the same shirt and jeans. Me, I was content to wear a sweatshirt, slipping the hood down over my face as far as I could, until I could hardly see.
The train the afternoon that Acid walked away was late, and when it came it was packed, only one seat in the back of the car I had chosen, near the operator’s booth. It was an hour’s ride home from school, forty-five minutes if I was lucky.
That was another way I was different: I was never lucky.
The subway rumbled and swayed. The car I was in emptied as more and more people got out. Hardly anyone got in as we traveled uptown. We were almost home when the train jerked and halted, and I was pushed into the sleeping man beside me. I moved away quickly, scooting over until my shoulder pressed against the side of the car. The man only snorted and went back to sleep.
The conductor’s voice came over the intercom, scratchy and garbled—but I knew what he was saying; I had heard it before. “This train is being held by supervision. We will be moving shortly.”
We were in between stops, and outside the window, the tunnel looked black. Inside the train, the lights flickered and went out. When they turned back on, there was something on the outside of the window.
Hand. It was a hand.
Someone was riding on the outside of the train.
I stood, my bag sliding off my lap and hitting the floor with a thud. The sleeping man grumbled. The operator came out of his booth and scanned the car.
I met his glance. “There’s someone out there.”
He didn’t look. “Kid, sit down.”
“Look!” I said.
Annoyed, he flicked his eyes in the direction I pointed, barely a glance. But the operator didn’t see. “Sit down,” he said. “We’ll be moving soon.” He opened the door to his little booth, and went back inside, muttering to himself, “Kids!”
I had heard about people riding on the outside of subway cars, trying to be funny, getting themselves killed. But when I turned to look again, to double-check, the hand was gone. I saw only the empty tunnel and the swinging work light. Why was it swinging, as if someone had knocked into it?
With a jerk, the train started moving again.
My stop was the last in Manhattan before the Bronx. My building was the last on the block before the highway, and our apartment was on the top floor, up five flights of stairs. No elevator. “It builds the muscles,” my sister had said when she was a dancer.
But she wasn’t a dancer anymore.
She was waiting for me in the hallway of the apartment when I unlocked the door, which was bad. Really bad. The Firecracker never got home before me, not since she started working her “real job,” as she called it, her “grown-up job” that kept her late, every night, sometimes until nine or ten. I checked my phone. It was six.
“The Head-of-School called,” the Firecracker said. “You’re getting a D in English.”
That hurt, but I tried not to let it. “So?” I said.
“So, they won’t let you out of the ninth grade if you don’t get at least a C.”
I followed her into the kitchen. “What does that mean, they won’t let me out?”
“That means, you’ll lose your scholarship and be kicked out of school. You can’t coast by anymore, Esmé.”
“I’m not coasting,” I said.
But I knew I was.
It was like I was tired all the time. It was like I was angry and upset—but if I talked to someone about it, if I stayed after school to meet a teacher or go to tutoring, I would have to think about it. I would have to bring it up. And I didn’t want to bring it up. I wanted it not to be happening at all.
Miss Wrong.
I did well in school when I was a kid, well enough that they made me take tests, and the tests got me into a new school, a private school. Acid and I were scholarship kids, brought in by the tests. In middle school, I had raised my hand and answered questions, and I had usually got them right. But in high school, this year, something had changed in me. I got the questions wrong sometimes, often enough that I got a new nickname.
The teachers at my new school all called us by our last names, like we were in the military or gym class. So Wong became Wrong for my classmates. Miss Wrong. It wasn’t a stretch. It wasn’t very creative.
But I still stopped raising my hand.
The Firecracker was banging pots in the kitchen. “They’ve given you multiple chances at that school,” she said.
I dropped my bag on the floor. “No, they haven’t.”
“Those were their words. Not mine. Your scholarship is a big deal, and if you don’t deserve it, if you don’t work for it, they’re going to find someone who does.”
“So?” I said. I slumped against the doorframe. My sister was kneeling, her head and shoulders in a cabinet. “Are you actually going to try and cook something?” I asked.
“I’m home early,” she said. “I thought I might as well.”
Her frame was twisted to reach into the back of the cabinet, her arm extended, almost artfully. I thought of her dancing—and then I thought of how I was never going to see that again.
She backed out of the cabinet, holding a frying pan at a distance, as if it were something distasteful. “I can’t afford that school. If you lose that scholarship, you’re out.”
I shrugged. “Public school.”
“No. You don’t understand. If you lose your scholarship, you’re out of here. You’re out of New York. I’m sending you away.”
Acid never answered his phone. When it got too late to call, I fell asleep.
I had nightmares since my parents died. Not nightmares: dreams. I dreamed about a dark space. At the end of the space was a light, a bright white light growing brighter and bigger and whiter—and in the light, my mother danced.
I knew it was my mother, not my sister, although I had never actually seen my mother perform on stage. But the face on the dancer in my dreams matched the face I saw in pictures—like the Firecracker’s only thinner, a slimmer face than mine, with the high cheekbones I would never have, and the wrinkles on the forehead I didn’t have yet. It was the smile most of all that made me certain it was my mother. In photographs, she always smiled when she performed, and I knew—I remembered from seeing her on stage—my sister never did.
My sister grimaced. She grunted and frowned and stomped across the stage, a ball of energy, a lightning bolt. She danced like she was always angry. She tore through toe shoes. Her tutus ripped. Her feet bled. “The Firecracker,” The Times called her, and the name stuck. They also wrote that she was a tribute to her mother.
My sister quit dancing, right after that.
I didn’t really remember my mother, and I remembered my father only as a voice, a deep belly laugh. They died when I was a kid, in a car crash.
But I never dreamed about that.
In English, I tried to text, and the teacher saw. “Miss Wong,” she said. “Your phone, please.”
I slid out of my seat and dragged myself to the front. No one laughed until the third row, when a girl coughed and said it: “Miss Wrong.” Then everyone laughed, an explosion that radiated through the room. The teacher glared at the class, but didn’t say anything. I was getting a D, why would she?
After school, I had to double back to the classroom to pick up my phone, and I barely made the train. It was less crowded than yesterday, but slow, and the car I had picked had bad air-conditioning, the windows steaming over in the afternoon heat. Someone had cracked one open, a slit through which I could see the black tunnel. When we stopped at 168
Street, I could see something on one of the tunnel walls: graffiti. A tag. A name in bright green. I read it.
Acid.
There was more. There was a whole, terrible sentence.
Acid Loves You.
It wasn’t my stop, but I pushed out of the car just as the doors were starting to close. My bag got stuck, and I yanked it free, nearly falling onto the platform. People were staring, but I didn’t care.
The train began to pull away and I looked around. Everyone who had gotten off went up the stairs to street level. With a shudder, the train left too. And I could see it now, the stupid graffiti, see it clearly: Acid Loves You. It was painted in bright green, the color of acid, almost florescent in the dark tunnel.
The subway platform where people waited was tiled in white, but in the tunnel through which the trains traveled, the walls were black. It was here that the message had been painted. Someone had climbed down from the platform, and into the tunnel to do it.
The platform ended at the mouth of the tunnel, at a sign that read CAUTION: DO NOT ENTER. But a little walkway continued into the tunnel beyond the sign, an access path for subway workers. I looked down this little walkway, peering into darkness. The only light came from the work bulbs strung across the ceiling every few feet, and the signal light: a kind of traffic light for trains.
The signal light was red, which meant no train was coming.
I glanced behind me. There were only a few people waiting for the downtown train. No one was looking. I stepped over the sign, crept onto the walkway—and went into the tunnel.
I wanted to see the graffiti up close. It had to be from my friend, it had to be. How many people in our neighborhood were called Acid? I balanced on the narrow walkway. There was a railing, but it was low and spindly. It wouldn’t hold me if I fell.
I just wouldn’t fall, I told myself.
The graffiti was only a few feet inside the tunnel, painted on the wall a little above my head. Whoever had written it hadn’t been much taller than me—and they were sloppy; a line of green paint trailed down the tunnel. I followed the paint splatter, crouching until I was kneeling, until the paint disappeared into the wall.
Into the wall?
I spread my palms, scanning the wall. It felt smooth. Then I felt a rough line. I worked my fingers into the crack and pulled until a door popped open. It was a small space, a crawl space, little more than a hole, and inside was darkness—and green polka dots.
Inside the door in the wall, green paint spotted the floor, so bright it glowed. I didn’t think; I crawled. I pushed in, my knees dragging on cement, trying to examine the paint.
With a groan, the door to the crawl space swung shut behind me. My chest swelled and I couldn’t breathe. I shot forward, knocking my forehead into a wall. Pain. Then everything was blackness.
When I woke, it took a moment for me to remember where I was. Panic returned. I was cold and stuck in the subway tunnel, in some sort of recess. I couldn’t turn around so I pushed back as hard as I could, shoving my backpack against the door. It swung open and I fell out onto the tunnel walkway.
A light was moving in the tunnel, jostling up and down. I stood. I wanted to run, but I was afraid I would fall. I saw a man beneath the moving light. The light was attached to him, a big headlamp, and he was running, coming right at me. I would have been scared, except he looked funny with the oversized headlamp, like a kid playing dress up. He wore a pair of overalls, and they were filthy, as was his shirt. Even his face was smeared with dirt.
“Child,” he said. He waved his arms. “Child, get out of here. A train is coming.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “The light is red.”
“The light?” he said, confused.
“The signal light.” I pointed behind me, then turned back to the man to show him, but he was gone. The tunnel was empty. And I felt something behind me. Arms wrapped around my waist and lifted, grabbing me, yanking me out of the tunnel.
It was another man, another subway worker who had grabbed me. He wore a bright orange and yellow safety vest, goggles, no headlamp—and there was a policewoman with him. The radio on the cop’s shoulder squawked.
“We got her,” the officer said into the radio.
Out on the platform, a crowd had gathered.
The subway worker was sweating. He set me down on the platform, and wiped his forehead with his hand. “Girl,” he said. “You are in so much trouble.”
And I was.
CHAPTER 2: (#u3e028c1f-f68b-5d7d-9e56-bfeb42ffb2e6)
Wellstone (#u3e028c1f-f68b-5d7d-9e56-bfeb42ffb2e6)
My sister dragged the old suitcases out of the closet, and swung them onto my bed. She clicked them open, one after the other.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Packing,” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m packing for you.”
“Where am I going?”
She looked at me. “You know.”
The nightmares that night were different. No dancing. No mom. No tunnel even, despite the fact that I had just been pulled from one, despite the fact that the police had taken me to a corner of the station, and asked me: What was I doing? How could I have been so dumb? Didn’t I know I could have been killed? Didn’t I know people died that way? Just a few months ago, in this very tunnel.
I knew, I knew, I told them. I said I was sorry.
The first few times I told the story, I told about the man with the headlamp and the dirty clothes. But no one knew who the man was. So I stopped telling that part. When my sister showed up, the police let me go. No fine. This time. And no court appearance because the Firecracker was taking me out of state.
She promised.
The nightmares that night felt real. I dreamed I was in my bed in my room in the apartment—but something was wrong with my hand. It hurt. It tingled, the blood pricking my palm as if my hand had fallen asleep.
But then in the dream, when I turned over to look at it on the sheet, my hand wasn’t there. It just wasn’t there. My hand was gone. It hurt, but it was a phantom pain. In my dream, my body was missing.
I woke up with aches, my limbs stiff from sleeping wrong—and I woke up late. The Firecracker threw my suitcases down the stairs. I pulled on an oversized sweatshirt and jeans without looking in the mirror, half-asleep.
It was May, still cold in the morning. We didn’t talk in the cab. We didn’t hug at the station. I kept my hands stuffed in my pockets and my hood pulled down.
But then the Firecracker said, “It will be better this time.”
I sniffed. “What do you mean?”
“Grandma. She’ll be good for you. It’ll be good for you to be in the country right now, away from …” she gestured around at the station: the early morning commuters rushing by, the platform littered with trash, the garbage cans covered with graffiti like scabs. “All this.”
“I thought you loved all this.”
“Sometimes I do,” my sister said. “But it’s time for you to go.”
And then she gripped my shoulders and pulled me toward her in a hug. She smelled of fancy perfume and leather and the smell that never quite went away from her; it seemed attached to her hair, the smell of rosin for the toe shoes, though it had been ages since she had worn them.
“I’ll visit you soon,” the Firecracker said. I was about to say something in response, but then she pulled out of the hug and squeezed my shoulder. “Esmé, eat something. You feel like you’re wasting away to nothing.”
Once on the train, I closed my eyes and didn’t look back.
My sister had bought me a ticket on the Keystone to Pennsylvania—a daylong trip from Penn Station. I slept mostly. We passed into New Jersey, following the water, steely and gray. I didn’t talk to anyone, or move when the conductor came through, calling for lunch reservations. I wasn’t hungry. When the train stopped after Elizabethtown, at the most desolate, busted place I could imagine, I stood. This was the stop. I knew it. After all, I had been here before.
When our parents died, the Firecracker was fifteen—my age now—too young to take care of me herself. I tried to imagine my sister like me, in school, wearing toe shoes around her neck, her long hair in a ponytail. I couldn’t picture it, not really. I was five then, and we moved in with our grandmother, our mother’s mother, for three years until my sister was legal, could drop out of school and get a job, get a place for us back in the city where we belonged, she said.
I knew the blandness, the brokenness of this place, I had been here and escaped from it once already. Wellstone.
The conductor called the name of the town, but I was the only one who got out. The train huffed away, and I was left. Outside on the platform, under an overhang, I sat on a bench to wait.
Wellstone was a punishment, like my grandmother was a punishment. My sister had used both of them as idle threats for years. If I didn’t do better in school, if I didn’t come home on time, if I didn’t stop talking back, she would send me here, to Wellstone, where there were no malls or coffee shops or stores that stayed open past five o’clock or kids my own age or anything to do.
There were also rumors about this town, stories which I could still remember bits of: something about a man in the woods; bones in the weeds; places where kids were afraid to play. This was not a good place, I knew that much.
My grandmother didn’t have internet. She didn’t have a computer. She didn’t have cable. She lived in an old, rambling mansion that was falling down. It wasn’t safe, I remembered. Once, my foot had fallen through a stair. Rain had fallen through the ceiling. The Firecracker had cried a lot.
But in New York, after they had pulled me from the tunnel, my sister had made plans, secretly and instantly. There were three weeks left of school, and she had arranged for me to be transferred. The school in Wellstone had emailed a schedule. They were expecting me.
Grandma was the only family we had left, the last resort for me.
I didn’t even know if I would know her face. She was quiet and terrifying, I remembered that much. She kept cats with no tails who roamed freely in and out of the house. There was a barn I wasn’t allowed to go into. There was a big black bag she carried that I wasn’t allowed to touch.
My grandmother had worked the night shift, as a nurse or something. She had cooked strange things, nearly inedible things, bubbling stews and simmering broths, which she left hissing on the stove all day. The house smelled of herbs and dried flowers and dust and spice and boiling chickens. She kept the bones. The cats played with them.
On the train platform, I shivered. I checked for reception on my phone. I waited. And I waited. I had started to fall asleep when I heard a car. I sat up and reached for my suitcases.
My grandmother came around the corner of the station. I hadn’t seen her for seven years. She was smaller than I remembered, and she wore glasses, the kind with a beaded chain. She walked heavily and slowly, as though it hurt her. She stepped up to the platform and looked across.
I didn’t run to her. I didn’t shout. I wasn’t going to hug her. I decided to stay very still. I decided to look like it didn’t matter; I didn’t care.
She turned, and without a word to me, began to walk back to her car.
“Grandma?” I said, but my voice felt thick. I wasn’t sure she had heard me. By the time I had gathered up my bags, the car was starting. “Grandma, no!” I left the suitcases and ran into the parking lot.
Her car, a station wagon, was just disappearing up the road.
I dialed my phone. “Grandma left me,” I said when my sister picked up.
“Why are you calling me at work?”
“She left me.”
“Where?” my sister said.
“At the train station.”
“Well, was your train late?”
“No.”
“I’m sure it’s a mistake,” the Firecracker said. “A misunderstanding.”
I remembered her raging about our grandmother, about her strangeness, her habits. Eccentric was the word the Firecracker used, which, as a child, I had thought was electric; I kept waiting for our grandmother to light up like a Christmas tree.
“You know where she lives,” my sister said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, you have the address. And you remember the house.”
“Yes,” I said.
I couldn’t forget the house.
I hung up the phone, hoisted my suitcases, and started up the hill to the road. Soon a truck passed me, a group of bare-chested boys hanging out in the bed. Wellstone boys. I thought about hitchhiking, though the Firecracker would kill me if she found out, but the truck didn’t slow.
I began to remember the way. Past the gas station and fairgrounds. There was the hill. There was the road, the driveway cracked and steep. I tightened my grip on the suitcases and started up. The driveway veered, and there was the house: glowering from on top of the hill. The house was three stories, mostly brick, and over a hundred years old. It had belonged to someone important. It had been passed down. It had a name—but I couldn’t remember what it was.
I passed my grandmother’s station wagon parked in front of the collapsing barn. When the driveway ended, I dragged my suitcases through the grass, tearing through the weeds to get around the house. The grass hadn’t been mowed in a long time, and there were tree limbs down all over the yard. Wide steps led to a front porch and double doors, thrown wide open to the afternoon. When I walked up the steps, four blurs shot out of the doors and down, yowling.
Cats. My grandmother fed a whole herd of them, all tailless. Manx, I remembered they were called.
“Scat!” I told them. I dropped my suitcases on the porch and knocked at the open door. “Grandma?” I called.
No one answered.
I went inside.
I hadn’t remembered how high the ceilings of the house were, how the wooden floors echoed. I peeked in the doorway of the first room to my left: empty, except for bookshelves and a piano. The room on the right, the dining room, had a heavy oak table in the center, drapes drawn shut over the windows, and a fireplace, the marble mantle cluttered with candles. There were candles on the floor in the hallway too, all dusty and blackened, burned down to nubs.
A ballroom stood on the third floor, I remembered now—I had roller skated there. A big staircase led up to it, but I kept walking down the hall. I came to a smaller set of stairs, the servant steps. To my right was the kitchen. To my left was the sitting room where my grandmother waited for me, watching television with the sound off.
“Grandma?” I whispered.
Blue light flickered over her face. It was her. She was the same, only shrunken, only not speaking to me for some reason.
“I’m here,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“Esmé? Jennifer’s daughter?”
It hurt to say my mother’s name. Not hurt exactly. It felt forbidden, like a spell. It felt like I shouldn’t speak her name aloud. I wished I hadn’t. I felt dizzy, like I might be sick.
Her face unfroze at the sound of my and my mother’s names. She looked around, concentrating, as if she was listening hard. I thought she was going to speak. But she only reached over to the end table, picked a phone, saw that nobody had called or was calling, and turned the phone facedown again. She never met my eyes.
I turned away. “I’ll just go get my bags,” I said.
I lugged them up the main stairs because I didn’t want to have to face her again. Was she mad at me already? What had my sister said to her about me?
On the second floor, there were four closed doors, and two open ones. The front room held a white canopied bed. There were magazines and old, moldy books on the night table, and house slippers underneath it—my grandmother’s room.
That left the smaller room for me. I was relieved to see the bed had sheets on it, a pink quilt folded at the foot, towels draped over a chair. I opened the two doors in the room to find a closet, and a bathroom with a tub ringed in rust.
Had this been my room? I set my suitcases down, opened the drapes at the window, and looked out. The room faced the backyard. Beyond the old barn, there was a pond, round and still. I hadn’t remembered that, either.
Exhausted, too worn out to be hungry, I climbed into bed and pulled the quilt around me. I didn’t bother getting undressed, or calling the Firecracker to tell her I was here. Not home. I was not home. I would never say that word again.
I was too nervous to sleep beyond the first beam of sun breaking through the drapes. Despite weak water pressure, the shower worked. I combed out my long hair, pulled on a new shirt and jeans. The door to my grandmother’s bedroom was closed, and downstairs, there was no sign of her. I remembered her working nights, remembered the Firecracker making dinner, and grumbling about it. I found a bowl and cereal in the cabinet, milk in the fridge. I ate standing up over the sink, then washed and dried my dishes, putting them away where I had found them.
I wouldn’t bother my grandmother. I wouldn’t be a burden; she wouldn’t notice me at all.
The school bus stop was at the bottom of the driveway, my sister had told me, and a handful of kids already stood out there by the road. One of the boys looked up as I approached. One of the girls was studying a book, and another boy tried to knock it out of her hands.
She snatched it away. “I’ve got a test.”
“New girl today,” the boy said.
I adjusted my bag. I just wanted to get this over with. “I’m Esmé,” I said.
“Weird name,” he said.
“Weird family,” a second girl said.
“Do you think she’s a witch like her grandma?” the boy asked.
I held my bag tighter. “My grandma’s not a witch,” I said.
“All I know is,” the girl with the book said, “this girl got kicked out of her old school. She’s like, a juvenile delinquent or something. A total freak.”
“I am not,” I said.
But the boy just lunged for the girl’s book again. They wrestled, the girl smacking the boy on the shoulder, the other girl ignoring them, examining the split ends of her hair. I stood at the back of the bus line, hating this place, and hating my grandmother and my sister for bringing me here.
When the bus came, I sat in the first empty seat, and no one sat with me or talked to me. When we stopped and the bus emptied, I had to fight to get out into the aisle; kids kept pushing past me, and the driver almost closed the door.
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to check in, but I waited around the office for what seemed like forever, until after the first warning bell had sounded and the office cleared. Then I followed the late kids out into the hall. No one asked if they could help me or what I was doing. I didn’t bother finding my locker. I pulled the print-out of my schedule from my pocket, and was searching for room numbers when the tardy bell rang.
Someone sprinted around a corner and plowed into me.
I was knocked to my knees. My bag shot off my back and onto the floor, the zipper splitting open. The boy who had knocked me down pushed himself up with a squeal of his sneakers and took off. “Hey,” I said. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
He dashed around the next corner and was gone.
“Jerk,” I said.
In the empty hallway, I stood and gathered my stuff. I collected the loose papers that had fallen from the folder that was supposed to travel with me to the office: my permanent record from New York. Words leapt out at me from the file: distracted … disrespectful … loner … antisocial … underachiever … daydreamer … lives in a fantasy world …
The words began to blur. No, I would not cry. Not on the first day of school. I shoved the pages back into the folder. Somehow, I found my classroom. A science lab. Students perched at tables, looking bored. There was one empty stool so I took it.
“All right,” the teacher said. She looked up. She was going to make some sort of announcement, introduce me, something embarrassing.
I tensed, waiting for it.
The door shot open and a boy came in, looking flustered. He headed straight for me.
He ran up to me. Then he sat on me—or tried to, sat right on my stool, on my lap. I pushed him as hard as I could, and he tumbled off the stool onto the ground. He looked up, his face blanching.
The class laughed, everyone at once. The teacher rolled her eyes and told them to be nice, told the boy to be more careful. He stood and reached for my stool again, and I backed up, scooting the stool with me.
“Sit in the back, Ron,” the teacher said. “I don’t think that chair likes you.”
“The chair?” I said. “Hello? I have a name.”
But Ron moved away, and no one asked me what my name was. The teacher didn’t do an announcement, or give me a book. She didn’t even take roll. She started the class like nothing was different. “So,” she said. “Today we’re going to talk about something that actually matters to us, matters to our history here in Wellstone.”
“History matters?” some boy said.
“The locomotive,” the teacher said. “You might be surprised to learn the steam locomotive has something in common with an aircraft carrier. Anyone know what?”
I looked around. No one knew my name here yet. No one knew my nickname—Miss Wrong—or had given it to me, thinking they were being smart, thinking they were being new. Slowly I raised my hand.
“The steam locomotive and an aircraft carrier. What do they have in common?”
I pumped my hand. I waved it.
“Anyone?” the teacher said.
“Excuse me?” I said. “They both convert heat into motion.”
The teacher sighed. “They both convert heat into motion.”
I lowered my hand.
“Take out your books,” the teacher said. “I know we’ve all got senioritis here, but there are three weeks left of school and we’re going to make them count. Read chapter twelve to yourselves, please, then we’ll do the questions together.”
Everyone fumbled with their books. Everyone but me.
I waited for the teacher to notice. I waited for her to give me a book, to ask my name, to see me. But she never did.
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Alison Stine
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фэнтези про драконов
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 28.04.2024
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О книге: Something is wrong with Esmé.