Stone Cove Island (16 page)

“Wow,” said Charlie.

“We didn’t even really get to Bess.”

“I wonder who the developer was. Same guy who likes causeways?”

“I wonder. You know what’s weird? She didn’t sound upset,” I said, just realizing it. “That was what I was most afraid of, upsetting her.”

“It happened a long time ago,” said Charlie reasonably.

“Yeah,” I said. “Still.”

“Still,” agreed Charlie. He put his hand over mine. We sat on the old-fashioned chenille bedspread. Its snowy whiteness glowed in the lowering gloom of afternoon. Everything got very quiet. Winter was coming and I could feel that even if they got the ferry running and the houses brightly painted, nothing was going back to normal, ever.

For my Katniss costume, I’d gotten a toy bow-and-arrow set at the Stone Cove Variety Store. They’d reopened by moving all their stock to one side of the large—for the island that is—warehouse space and hanging clear plastic painting tarps from the ceiling to cover the unrepaired soaked drywall and imploded timber on the side the storm had destroyed. Once I’d gotten home, I’d spray-painted the arrows silver and made a quiver out of a roll of brown felt. I wore brown pants tucked into old riding boots (thrift store), a military-looking belt and a navy windbreaker under a longer suede coat (thrift store again). I braided my hair. While I got ready, Mom sat on my bed and watched. She hadn’t read or seen
The Hunger Games
, but I told her the story. And she loved Halloween. She’d made caramel apples to hand out to the kids, as well as the requisite supply of drugstore fun sizes.

“It’s a circle pin with a bird in the center?” she asked. I didn’t have something to use as Katniss’s mockingjay pin. It was the last piece I needed for my costume.

“It can be any bird pin. Gold, if possible.” She thought a minute, her index finger to her lower lip, almost in a “shhh” gesture. For a second, I could see the little girl in her face. Then she smiled, triumphant.

“Aha!” she said, and walked to her bedroom. I followed. She took the wooden jewelry box from her dresser and set it down on the bed between us. She drew out a gold pin, shaped like an eagle. It was a proud, mean bird, clutching something in its talons.

“Would this work?” she asked.

“Totally!” I said, excited. “It’s perfect. Hers is a little more Soviet looking, but that one is great.”

“Well, it’s nationalistic in its own way, I guess.” She pinned it to the collar of my windbreaker. “You won’t lose it, right? You’ll be careful.”

“Of course I’ll be careful.” Did she know about the diary? Or was she just worrying out of habit? “I’ll be really careful.” My eye went to a gold chain, tangled in one of the little partitioned sections of the jewelry box. She seemed to notice it at the same time and picked it up.

“Oh,” she said, slightly breathless. “I haven’t looked at this for a long time. She tried to straighten it. A stiff, scripty
Elizabeth
was looped in gold and held on either side by a thin gold chain.

“After she died, her mother wouldn’t let me keep any of her things. She shut the house up and took the bare minimum with her. I don’t even know what she did with Bess’s things. Anyway, later I found this in my room, under my bed. She’d lost it in the winter sometime. I guess one time when she’d slept over. I was so mad at Karen, but then I
got to keep something after all. Now I understand how scared she was.” She cut herself off abruptly, as though she hadn’t meant to speak these thoughts out loud.

“How scared who was?”

“Karen.”

“She was scared after it happened? Or before?”

Mom hesitated, “I really didn’t know Karen that well. She wouldn’t have confided in someone like me. I was a kid.”

“But Bess was scared too,” I insisted. This was exactly what my dad didn’t want me putting my mother through, I thought guiltily. But it was like a scab I couldn’t stop picking at. She brought that same finger to her lip again, then looked at me hard, her normally cool, sea-glass eyes blazing.

“It’s not something you need to worry about. Eliza, listen to me. I won’t let anything happen to you. Ever.”

I didn’t know what to say. Mom kept staring.

“Was Karen nice?” I asked, just to keep her talking.

“Nice?” she said. “Not really. She was honest though. I respected her at that age, I remember.”

“Did she talk about moving away before the thing with Bess?”

“I don’t know. Bess always said she threatened to, especially when Bess was younger, but we weren’t really close until high school. It wasn’t like you and Meredith. We weren’t really childhood friends. It happened later.”

“Who was your childhood best friend?”

“Your dad, of course,” she answered, a little too quickly. “We were neighbors. We were in the same playgroup as
babies.” This surprised me. I tried to picture them, toddling around a play kitchen, throwing toy food into the toy sink.

Suddenly a new thought came to me, something I hadn’t realized before, which now struck me like a brick. How had it never occurred to me?
Elizabeth
. We had the same name.
Bess. Eliza, Elizabeth
. All possibility of coincidence seemed to drain away. Was I named after Bess? Was it an accident that I’d been the one to find the letter or was it somehow my fate?

“Mom, we have the same name.” She nodded.

“You should have the necklace,” Mom said, suddenly decisive.

“Mom, no, it’s your one memory of your friend.”

“You should have it,” she insisted. “It’s not doing me any good hidden away in here. Besides, you share her name.” She smiled a weird “go figure,” smile, then threw her arms around me and crushed me to her, breathing ragged breaths I could feel through both coats. I was smothered, face pressed so hard into her shoulder. At the same time, I didn’t want her to let go.

CHARLIE SHOWED UP AROUND
eight, as planned. I hate it in books when writers describe people or things as “impossibly cute” or “impossibly charming,” but both pretty much summed up Charlie Pender that night. I’d dreaded having him pick me up at our house. I’d offered to meet at the dance, but Charlie said no. My dad was out—he’d agreed to be a chaperone; Jimmy was another, so that would make for an interesting night—but my mother was relaxed (for
her)—even friendly. Charlie had brought me a little bag of Scottie dog-shaped licorice candies, a nod to Salty.

After my dad had left for the dance, I’d rechecked the shed for the anchor. When Charlie gave me a questioning look while my mom went to get him a glass of water I knew what he meant and nodded,
Yes, still there
. He drank the water quickly and we left, my mother waving from the porch, looking almost happy.

THE NIGHT WAS COOL
and clear, not yet frigid the way it can get sometimes in the fall. With the island only semi-lit, the stars blazed in the sky, even more than they might on an ordinary night. People had gone out of their way to decorate with pumpkins, witches, scarecrows and ghosts. The houses that were half-destroyed seemed to have made double the effort. Walking down my street, the darkness and quiet unfurling around us like a blanket, I didn’t care if we ever reached the dance. Charlie’s hand was warm in mine, and the air was crisp against my skin and for a moment I felt completely right.

“So, the anchor’s still there,” said Charlie, breaking the silence.

“The anchor’s still there,” I confirmed. Just saying the words made me feel better. As long as the anchor was there, it meant my father wasn’t doing something terrible, whatever that might mean, and that I could still trust him. Or at least, imagine I could.

“You make a good Katniss.”

“I do?”

“Sure. Brave, quick-witted, impulsive, ruthless …”

“Ruthless?” I smacked his arm.

“Okay. You’re right. That’s not fair. Katniss isn’t ruthless, exactly, in the book. And I haven’t seen the movies yet. Let’s just say … mean when she has to be—”

“Charlie, you’re pushing your luck,” I interrupted. I shoved the bad thoughts aside and matched his playful grin.

“Please. Call me Clark.”

I brandished a spray-painted, plastic arrow. “Fine. But don’t forget, I’m armed.”

THE SCHOOL GYMNASIUM WAS
still full of families displaced by the storm, so a local farmer (one of the few left), Randall Moss, had volunteered to host the dance in his big hay barn on Hill Road—the road leading from the school up to the Anchor Club. It would have made more sense for me to pick Charlie up at the inn, as it was much closer to the farm, but Charlie was too chivalrous for that. As it was, we had to pass the inn on our way. Charlie looked up at the grand porch as we walked by. I thought I heard him sigh.

“What?” I asked.

“Just weird to be back. I wasn’t expecting to be here this long. But it sucks you in.”

I nodded. I wished Charlie could love his home as I did, but at the same time, I felt the edges peeling up on the picture I had previously painted of my life here. How much of it was an illusion for my benefit, for the benefit of all the kids and families headed to this dance?

“I’m sure your parents really appreciate having you
here to help. And it’s not for much longer,” I said. What I wanted to say was,
don’t go
, but I couldn’t say that.

Charlie didn’t say anything. We walked in silence until we hit the crest of the hill, the land now rolling down toward the harbor. From the road, we could see the barn, giant doors flung open, inside glowing orange like a welcoming fire. In the night it looked like a giant jack-o’-lantern.

“Wow,” I said. “Beautiful.”

Charlie squeezed my hand in agreement. “Ready to leave District Twelve?” he asked. We turned down the rutted driveway.

Inside, Macklemore blared from speakers that had been stacked unprofessionally among hay bales. Everyone was there, even the kids I’d never seen at a dance before. It seemed important that night for us all to be together. Parents stood in corners in pairs or alone, looking either bored or dubious. Too many chaperones, in my opinion, for less than a hundred kids.

“I bet now you really feel like you never left,” I told Charlie.

“Yeah. That’s for sure. Do you want some bad punch?” he asked. “Or do you want to dance?”

“Dance,” I said quickly.

I looked up at the huge orange Chinese lanterns swaying from the rafters. An old Smashing Pumpkins song from the nineties had started, and couples around us were moving onto the dance floor, or really just the middle of the floor. It was an undanceable: a half dreamy but not slow song, and kids were standing, swaying to it, unsure what to do. The dance committee had done a good job
with the decorations, going for abstract, filmy fabrics and sparkly spiders, lighting everything in an orange glow rather than featuring skeletons and zombies. There had been a lot of debate about whether it was appropriate to have blood, gore and death at the dance after so much real destruction had visited the island.

Some kids had gone for a hurricane theme, covering themselves with fake plastic fish and other debris like they were flotsam washed up on the beach, or opting for the understated, high-concept costume: cutoff pants (“floods”). But most came as characters from horror movies,
Carrie, The Shining
and
The Blair Witch Project
—Aiden Walters had turned himself into a bundle of sticks. His date, Alison Jaffe, carried a flashlight under her chin all night—and the usual assortment of classics: popular girls as sexy kitty cats, jock-y guys dressed as girls, geeks decked out in Star Wars or costumes recognizable only to serious Comic Con insiders.

“Dance it is,” said Charlie, once we’d taken in our surroundings.

“Thanks for coming back to high school.”

“I would never go back for anyone but you.” We waited until the next song started, an upbeat, overplayed, disco-inspired track. As we danced, I watched the parents watching us. Colleen’s mom was laughing, talking to the woman who sold ferry tickets. She was dressed as some kind of old-fashioned English barmaid or maybe Swiss Miss. I wasn’t sure which. Nancy and Greg Jurovic, in matching red sweaters, were toasting everyone who walked by, Nancy’s a no-sleeve and Greg’s a cardigan.

“Twin set!” Nancy called out in response to each confused look she received.

In one corner, at a table, sat Meredith and Tim, heads close, talking intently. Meredith looked beautiful: Snow White with very white, powdered skin and lips that were—you’re expecting “impossibly” here, right?—red. Tim was dressed like an explorer or someone on safari. Indiana Jones, maybe?

I smiled. I didn’t know where Pete Brewer was, and I didn’t really care. He was probably out behind the barn playing some drinking game with his baseball team buddies, each of them stretching out their girlfriends’ borrowed sweaters and skirts beyond repair.

I winked at Meredith when we got close enough and she smiled a shy smile and tossed her hair back, happy and embarrassed. Officer Bailey—Lynn, as I saw her now, a teenager in pimples and mom jeans—was watching me. She was not in costume other than her own off-duty version, black jeans with quilted vest. The whole time we moved around the floor, I felt her eyes on me. When I looked back at her, she looked away. I wondered if this scenario felt familiar from her own high school days: on the sidelines, watching her classmates have fun, wishing she could be one of them. She was making me uncomfortable. Charlie sensed my distraction.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“It’s LB. She’s watching us. It’s … I don’t know. Creepy.”

“So let’s go outside. It’s nicer out there anyway.”

He was right. Even with the barn doors wide open, the air inside felt humid and overheated. We headed toward
the back door that opened out onto the cow and hay fields, but when we reached the door, I saw that Officer Bailey had cut across and beaten us there. She reached one hand toward my wrist, tapping me lightly with two fingers.

“Uh, Eliza?” I expected her to say students weren’t allowed out behind the barn, but she didn’t. “I keep meaning to get this back to you. You left it in the diner?”

To my amazement, she held out my mother’s diary.