Catherine (13 page)

His face crumpled. For a moment, he looked like he was about to cry. “I thought she’d
come home.” His voice was softer than I’d ever heard it, wondering and sad. “I thought
maybe…”

He didn’t have to say any more. I knew right away who he meant.

“That couldn’t have been my mother,” I told him. “I told you, it was a girl… she was
around my age.”

He didn’t answer, but I could read what he was thinking on his face.

“I don’t believe in ghosts.” Just saying the words freaked me out. “You don’t—do you?”
He didn’t seem like someone who believed in much of anything.

He stood there awhile longer, staring wild-eyed at the window, making no move to shut
it, as though he hoped my mother’s ghost would fly in.

“She’s not dead,” I told him. “I know she isn’t.” I closed the window myself, snapping
the lock shut. “That couldn’t have been her. It was just a dream.”

We stared at each other for a long moment.

“If she comes back, scream your lungs out,” he said. He left, locking the apartment
door behind him.

After that, I tried getting into bed, but my pulse was pounding, and I knew there
was no way I could sleep.
If only I had someone to talk to
, I thought. According to the clock radio, it was 3:12. It was going to be a long
night. When I shut my eyes, I could still
see that frantic face, white as the moon and weirdly familiar, pressing up against
the glass.

Maybe I would never sleep again. Hence’s parting words stuck with me: What if the
girl came back? What if Hence was right and she hadn’t been a figment of my imagination?
What I’d said was true: I didn’t believe in ghosts. Still, the girl’s fingers clawing
at the glass had seemed every bit as real as the hand I now held up to my face.

Finally, I switched on the bedside light. Maybe a book would settle my nerves. I would
find a boring one to help me fall asleep. I assessed the collection, looking among
the ones I hadn’t gotten to yet. On the bottom shelf, near the corner of the room,
I noticed a volume I hadn’t seen before. Twice as thick as any of the others, it bore
an unlikely title:
A Compendium of Anatomy and Physiology
. All of the other books in the room were novels. Why had my mom kept such a thick,
dull-looking textbook? I knelt on the floor for a closer look. It was heavy in my
hands, old-looking and -smelling.

I sat on the edge of the bed, opened the cover, and almost shrieked again. What I
held in my hand was no ordinary book. Someone had hollowed out the pages, making it
into a secret hiding place. Inside was a second, smaller book, its cream cover peppered
with little pink flowers. A journal.

Fingers trembling, I dug it out. I had to work to pry it loose; the journal fit snugly
into its carved-out hole, like she’d measured the size of the space she’d need before
cutting. I opened the cover, and what I found was better than anything I could have
hoped for—page after page of journal entries written in my mother’s loopy, extravagant
handwriting. I riffled through, then pressed the
open book to my chest, hugging it as if it were her. Once I’d blinked back my tears
of happiness, I opened to the first page and saw the date. She would have been seventeen
when she began the journal—the same age I was now.

Book in hand, I slipped under the covers. Reading my mother’s words—hearing her voice—was
exciting but painful. She wrote about school, about her dad and her brother, Quentin,
about her friend Jackie and a trip she’d taken to Greece, but most of all she wrote
about Hence—pages and pages about how intriguing he was and how much she hoped he
liked her back. As I read, I was torn between feelings of love for her (right away,
she seemed like somebody I would
like
) and sadness that I never really got to know her. I even felt jealous of her, growing
up in a nightclub, getting to watch all the shows and hang around with famous and
soon-to-be-famous rockers. Plus, she seemed every bit as smart, focused, and talented
as my dad had always said she was. Mixed in with her journal entries were poems she
had written, and more of her elaborate doodles—faces, birds, a tiara, flowers; all
sorts of ordinary things made beautiful by her pen.

When my eyes got heavy, I closed the pink-and-cream cover and tucked the book within
a book into its place on the shelf, but my mind still buzzed with questions. Had my
mother ever wanted my father anywhere near as much as she wanted Hence? Had her life
with Dad and me been a disappointment? Was that why she ran away? Somewhere in the
journal there must be a clue to where she had gone, and why, and I planned to keep
reading until I found it.

A few days later, to my utter surprise, Hence turned up at Idlewild Prep just as school
was letting out. I was walking out the door with Jackie when I caught sight of him
waiting at the front gate, looking windblown and determined. For a moment I thought
he might offer to carry my books home from school, the way boys did in old movies,
but instead he just stood there, looking first at me, then at Jackie, then at me again,
a question mark in his dark eyes.

“It’s okay,” Jackie said finally. “I need to hurry home, anyway. I promised my mom
I would let her take me shopping this afternoon.” She shot me a funny look and raced
off across the street.

So I stood there, waiting for Hence to explain his presence, and he stared back at
me, not explaining. Meanwhile, I could see Francesca Pasquale and Bonnie Day whispering
to each other about this new piece of hot gossip unfolding in front of their eyes.
Francesca had hated me since fourth grade, when I stopped her from picking on Jackie,
who was the new girl in school, and Bonnie had the biggest mouth in the whole senior
class. I knew they were looking for something about Hence they could turn into a joke
at my expense: his scruffy hair, the holes in his jeans, his army surplus jacket—all
the things that set him apart from the clean-cut jocks they liked so much. But Hence
himself—his deep eyes, his way of standing there not even noticing that everyone around
us was watching—well, there was no put-down they could manage about
him
.

So I stood my ground and let them watch, waiting for Hence to say something, feeling
braver by the second.

“Hi,” he said finally.

“You came to see me?” Of course he did. Why else would he be waiting at the gates
of my school? But I wanted to hear him say it.

“Looks that way.” And he allowed himself that cautious smile that always made me think
somebody used to slap the grin right off his face. Every time I saw that smile, I
wanted to throw my whole self between Hence and the memories of whatever made him
afraid to cut loose and be truly happy.

But that day, Francesca, Bonnie, and everyone else who watched us with calculating
eyes were the ones I wanted to protect Hence from. Before I could think too hard about
what I was doing, I stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips—hard at first, defiantly.
Once he got over his surprise and started to respond, our kiss softened into something
gentle and lingering. I heard gasps and giggles at first, but after a moment or two,
I heard nothing but the blood rushing in my ears.

When I pulled back, finally, all I saw were Hence’s startled eyes and his parted lips.
The school and everyone in front of it had vanished from my mind. “Let’s go home,”
I said, taking his hand. But we didn’t make it home—at least not at first. We stopped
to kiss in front of Gristedes, and again by China Yearnings. By the time we started
walking for real, the sky had turned a deep twilight blue and a cold wind had whipped
up. My lips were chapped, and I had a crick in my neck from tilting my face up to
his, but I was happier than I could ever remember being. We held hands almost all
the way to The Underground, but half a block away we let go because it still felt
too soon to let Dad know about any of this.

When we got to the door, Q was there waiting for us, and from the look in his eyes,
I knew Bad Quentin had come out to play.

“Go around the back,” he snarled at Hence. “You were supposed to be on the clock over
an hour ago.”

Without a glance at me, Hence did as he’d been ordered, while I stood there fuming.
Q wasn’t Hence’s boss. He didn’t even officially work at The Underground, except when
Dad was short of help, and then he would stomp around looking all put out, as though
it were beneath him to change lightbulbs or stock napkin holders.

For a moment I thought Dad had run out somewhere and left Quentin in charge. I thought
Hence’s lateness for work was the whole problem. I tried to slip past Q and through
the front door.

“Not so fast,” he said, his voice ominously still, and right away I knew what was
wrong: One of those bitchy girls from school had
told him about Hence showing up there, and about how we had kissed in front of everyone—a
serious kiss, and not a mere peck on the lips. A lot of the girls at school had their
eyes on Q, and would welcome a chance to score points with him.

But even if we’d been told on, it still didn’t strike me as such a big deal. So Hence
was my boyfriend. Why should Q care? I waited there, hands on my hips, for whatever
he would say next.

He sputtered for a moment, as if he didn’t know how to begin. “Not in front of the
whole world,” he said finally. “Get inside.”

“I
was
going inside. Until you stopped me.”

The moment we were through the door, he laid into me. His first question was shocking
enough: What kind of slut was I, making out in public, in front of the whole school?
But what came after was even worse: Was I sleeping with Hence? Or planning to? (I
didn’t answer either question; my love life was none of Q’s business.) And things
went downhill from there. How could I stoop so low as to involve myself with “some
bottom-dweller busboy who had come out of nowhere to work for minimum wage and sleep
in our basement”? Those were his exact words, and they shocked me. I’d had no idea
until that very moment how much of a snob my brother was.

As much as that last question stunned me, it was nothing compared to what came out
of Q’s mouth next: “He’s not even white.”

My jaw dropped. “What does that mean, Quentin?”

“Look at him. No way he’s white. He’s part black or Indian or Mexican or something.”

I’d never given a second’s thought to Hence’s race. “So what?”
I said. “Jackie’s been my friend forever, and she’s black. You never cared about that.
What does it matter?”

But Q didn’t respond, probably because he knew there could be no good answer. “He
doesn’t even have a last name. You’re the daughter of Jim Eversole, owner of one of
the biggest nightclubs in Manhattan. You’ve got this bright future ahead of you. You
still want to go to Harvard, right?”

I didn’t answer.

“So why would you get involved with some nobody who’s only going to drag you down?
A
musician
.” The expression on Q’s face could only be described as a sneer.

“Who
are
you? Seriously, Q, how long have you been such a racist snob?”

He ignored my questions. “What do you think Dad will say when he finds out you’ve
been sneaking around with Hence?”

My laughter came out as a snort. “This is our dad you’re talking about? The guy who
lets me go clubbing?”

Quentin’s frown deepened. “Dad’s only a pushover because he thinks he can trust you.
You think he’ll keep Hence on here if he knows you two are up to whatever it is you’re
up to?”

“You’re going to tell on me?” This was yet another shock. Hadn’t Q and I always been
on the same side? “Hence and I are
not
sneaking around. If we’d been sneaky, you wouldn’t know about any of this.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me? Because Dad will definitely want to know
if you’ve been screwing the help.”

I froze. Dad wasn’t a bigot; I couldn’t imagine he would care about Hence’s race,
or what kind of family he came from. But the
ugly way Q made his last point gave me pause. The more I thought about it, the more
I knew Quentin was right about one thing: Dad might care whether or not I had sex.
Not that he’d ever told me I shouldn’t, not in so many words. But he still thought
of me as his little Cupcake. He’d always trusted me, and I’d never given him any reason
not to. And if Dad thought there was a chance Hence and I were heading in that direction,
he might fire Hence and kick him out of the building. I couldn’t let that happen.

“I’m not sleeping with Hence,” I told Q. “I’m not sleeping with anyone.” I adjusted
my tone, trying for something more conciliatory. “Please don’t say anything. Please,
Q? We’ve always looked out for each other.”

“I’m looking out for you now,” he said.

“What if I promise to stay out of trouble? Not to…” I couldn’t even bring myself to
say it. “You know.”

Q looked at me closely, his eyes that steely shade they took on whenever his mood
turned sour. “That’s not good enough,” he said. “It’s him I don’t trust, not you.”