Autumn Falls (6 page)

“Oh, be quiet,” Eddy snaps at the heckler. She slides off the piano, then takes my hand and snakes us through the crowd. She only comes up to my chest, but she’s fast; I practically have to run to keep up with her.

She slows down once we’re in the open hall and on our way to her room. She wraps her arm around me and pulls me close, which smushes her head into the side of my boob. It’s a little disconcerting.

“Hi, Mrs. Rubenstein!” Eddy calls to a woman shuffling our way. The two of them hug and chat about their families, Eddy introduces me … then the minute we start walking again Eddy mutters, “The woman’s a pill. Switched bingo cards with me two weeks in a row. And mine was a winner.”

She doesn’t say this softly. I look over my shoulder to apologize, but Mrs. Rubenstein has the same smile on her face as before.

Two conclusions: (1) High school never ends, and (2) It’s more pleasant when you can’t hear the awful things people say.

Maybe I should invest in earplugs.

I’ve pretty much had my fill of Century Acres by the time we get to Eddy’s room and she settles into her favorite chair, but she’s in the middle of another story. “And the nurses,” she says, “the meds they give me? Not what my doctor ordered.” She lowers her voice to a whisper even though there’s no one else in the room and the door’s closed. “They’re running experiments.”

I reach into my bag for my phone, wondering if Eddy will notice if I text Jenna.

“You tried to make him the
boniatillo
,” Eddy says. “He would have loved that.”

I freeze midreach. “What?”

Eddy leans forward in her chair. Her wrinkled brown face is solemn and her eyes are sad.

“Reinaldo. The day he was coming home. It was a good choice. It was always his favorite. Just like you were. Don’t tell your brother I said so, though.”

She winks at me, but I’m having a tough time following. Which is ironic, since this is the first thing she’s said that makes any sense.

“Mom told you about that?”

“Your brother. He showed me a little movie of you. A chef you’re not,
mi corazón
, but by the end it looked
muy delicioso, muy auténtico
.”

“Thanks.”

My voice is barely a whisper. Mom, Erick, and I never talk about that day. Ever.

“You heard my message?” she asks.

I nod. “You have something for me that will change my life?”

“If you let it.”

Eddy pulls something out of her night-table drawer and hands it to me. It’s a paper napkin folded around something rectangular. “Sorry about the wrapping. Reinaldo gave it to me before he left. I didn’t have anything else to put it in.”

Inside the napkin is a brown leather journal. The cover is embossed with a symbol that looks like a triangle with a face in it. I rub my thumb over it. The whole cover feels soft
and weathered, but when I flip it open I see that the crisp, lined pages are blank and clean.

“Dad gave this to you?” I ask.

“To pass on to you.”

I shake my head. “He was on his way home. If he wanted to give it to me, why didn’t he have it with him?”

Eddy shifts back into her chair with a painfully sad sigh. “Your father … knew things.”

“Like what? Are you saying he knew he was going to get into an accident?” Eddy doesn’t answer. “No,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “If he knew, he wouldn’t have gotten into the car. He’d have stayed at the hotel.”

“I don’t know how it worked,
querida
. I don’t know what he could or couldn’t change. I only know what he told me. To give this to you. To let you know it could change your life.”

“It’s a journal,” I say, waving it in the air. “How is that going to change my life?”

She wraps her arms around her bony body. “Do you feel that? They turned down the temperature. They do that here. They never want us to get too comfortable.”

Uh-oh. I’m losing her. “Eddy, what did Dad say? Specifically. How did he say a journal would change my life?”

Eddy suddenly bolts forward and grabs my wrist. “Write in it, Autumn.”

Ow. She’s eighty years old. How can she have a grip of steel? Must be from all that pottery.

“Promise me,” she insists.

“Okay, okay. I’ll write in it.”

“Wonderful,” she says. “Now help me pick out a dress. There’s a Sadie Hawkins dance, and if I don’t ask Juan-Carlos
esta tarde
, Dariana will get to him first.”

“Juan-Carlos … Falciano?” I ask carefully.

“
Sí
. You know him?”

Not really, but I do know he was my grandfather. Daddy started going by “Falls” in college. “Yeah,” I assure her, “he’s a catch. I bet he’ll totally go to the dance with you.”

Eddy beams. I spend the next half hour helping her get dressed and ready for a man who’s been dead forty years; then I say good-bye.

I have some writing to do.

I intend to sit down on a bench outside Century Acres to write in the journal, but something is bothering me, so I don’t do it. I wait until I get on the bus, then text Jenna the whole story.

She’s right. I hate writing, and Dad knew it. It’s a dyslexia thing; words don’t come out the way I want them to. Why would he give me something I’d have to trudge through hell to use?

My phone chirps.

I didn’t check. Why didn’t I check? Of course if he was going to give me something as twisted as a journal, he’d leave a note to tell me why.

I pull out the book and turn each page slowly.

She’s right about Eddy. Of course she is. Eddy was nuts even before she had her stroke. Now she’s over the edge. If what she said was true, that would mean Dad knew he was going to die and couldn’t do anything about it.

Horrific.

But if he
did
know he was going to die … and if he
couldn’t
do anything about it … it would be pretty cool to have one last gift from him. Even a random gift he’d never expect me to use.

“Hey, Mom,” I ask during dinner, “did Dad ever … sense things?”

“Oh God,” she groans. “What did Eddy tell you?”

“Sense things?” Erick asks. “Like ESP?”

“She didn’t tell me anything,” I say, taking a sip of milk. “She just … you know … hinted.”

Erick puts his hands to his temples. “I sense that Schmidt is going to beg for meat loaf.” Sure enough, Schmidt starts to whine. “It’s inherited. I’m a genius.”

“You’re a loser,” I say. “He’s been doing that since we sat down.”

“Your grandmother always had some wild ideas, even before the stroke,” Mom says. “You can’t believe them. Your father was gifted in a million ways, but not the way Eddy likes to think.”

I let it go. But when I go up to my room, I take out the journal and flop down with it on my bed. I stare at the triangle face on the front. It’s such a strange image. It looks like a child could have scrawled it, but it’s intricate too. Like hieroglyphics.

I pull open the cover. Nothing special inside at all. If I searched hard enough I probably could find this exact same journal at the mall. Most likely that’s where Eddy found it, on a Century Acres bus trip.

Still …

I grab a pen.

I don’t want to keep a diary. I’m not the diary type.
Jenna’s wish-list idea doesn’t seem right either. There’s only one reason I’m even interested in this journal, so there’s really only one thing it feels right to do.

I always write slowly, so it takes forever, and I can pretty much guarantee that ninety percent of the words are spelled wrong, but I tell him everything. I write more than I’ve ever written in my life.

It feels good.

It shouldn’t. It’s a journal, not my dad, and part of me feels like a sap for getting so into it … but screw it, I like writing to him. When I feel like I’ve said everything I want to say, I think again about Jenna’s wish list idea. This time it makes me smile and I add one last sentence.

I close the book and feel absolutely fantastic for exactly one minute … until I look at the clock.

It’s midnight and I haven’t even started my homework.

I am an idiot.

I might be a prophetic idiot, though, because over the next two weeks,
exactly
one thing is easy. I have a pop quiz
in French that I hard-core ace because it’s all oral conversations in front of the class. No writing at all.

The rest of my life? A giant ball of stress.

Classes at Aventura are a million times harder than the ones at Stillwater, and there’s so much reading that I’m up late into the night, every night. Amalita and J.J. have been great. One or both of them usually hangs out with me after school, and we all work together either at the outdoor courtyard at the mall or at one of our houses. Jack sometimes hangs too, but he’s distracting because he’s apparently some kind of supergenius. He finishes everything while he’s still in class, so while we’re all trying to work, he’s quoting his favorite panels from whatever comic he’s reading.

As for the journal, I don’t have time to write anything as long as my first entry. I carry it with me, though, just in case I have a second to jot something down. I’m fully aware that carrying a journal is a prime setup for disaster, but I can’t help it. It makes me feel good to keep it close.

There’s one other thing that has me stressed out, and I finally bring it up one day at lunch.

“Check it out,” I say. “She’s staring at me.”

“She who?” J.J. asks.

“She
Reenzie
.”

They all follow my gaze across the field and look right at her.

“Stop it!” I hiss.

“Yeah,” Jack says. “You don’t want to look her in the eye or you’ll turn to stone.”

“A Medusa reference,” J.J. says. “Impressive. You read that in a Greek mythology comic book?”

“Bite me,” Jack says as he checks out a pretty girl with blond pigtails walking by us.

“Dios mío,”
Amalita mutters. “What’s the problem, Autumn? She’s giving you the
mal de ojo
? Let me talk to her.” She gets to her feet and shouts “Hey!” before I yank her back down.

“Stop! You’ll make it worse. It’s not a huge deal,” I say. “It’s just that she’s
always
doing that, looking at me like she wants to kill me. Ever since that day in the mall.”

“When she realized her man wants you,” Amalita says.

“But Sean’s not her man,” I say. “You told me he’s not into her.”

“And we have no way of knowing he wants Autumn,” J.J. points out. “He didn’t ask you out or anything, did he?”

Jack snorts.

“No,” I say. “He’s nice to me. He talks to me when I see him in homeroom. We’ll walk together a little on our way to our next class sometimes. That’s it.”

“Which is nothing,” J.J. says.

“Unless he talks about you in front of Reenzie,” Amalita says.

“Whatever,” J.J. says. “I think you should let it go. She wants to glare, let her glare. You’re stressed-out enough with work and life and stuff that actually matters. Don’t let Reenzie Tresca add to it. She’s not worth it.”

“You’re right,” I say. “Except … I feel like she’s plotting something.”

And then lunch ends and I think about it in chemistry class and I’m freaked out all over again. I excuse myself to the bathroom and bring my bag, then duck into an empty science lab. I yank out the journal and scribble as quickly as I can: