(Don't You) Forget About Me (10 page)

“Well, Sky, since you've already gotten what you came here for, why don't I drive you home?”

“No thanks,” I say, pushing my door open. “I'd rather walk.”

Elton's hand closes around my wrist, while the other reaches for the bag of pills I left on the floor. “Take the pills, Skylar.”

I stare at the pills, nearly trembling with wanting them wanting them wanting them and—Piper. I use her name like a magic word to break a spell. I can't find her if I'm all fucked up.

Elton gives the bag a little shake, the same way I used to with Chance's treats when I wanted him to beg, sit, heel. “I'd like to see you stay out of trouble,” he says. “Lots of people are wondering why you aren't being sent to the reformatory with the rest of the precautionaries.”

“And what do you say to them?” I ask, remembering Jonathan writing in his letter that Elton used the pills to keep me tame. It's not like I didn't already know that on some level, but to see it laid out so clearly makes me feel like a chump.

“I tell them that I have it all under control,” he answers softly. “Now take a pill like a good girl, and I'll drive you home.”

I squeeze the bag so that pills erupt and then I lean back and hold it over my head, letting them rain down on me. My mouth fills with pills. My teeth clench into a hard smile. Elton's hand squeezes my wrist.

“Skylar,” he warns.

I spit the wad of pills onto his cream-colored leather car seats. They will leave a wet, sloppy purple stain. I know this. I once fell asleep with my cheek on a pile of pills and had a purple mark on my face for a month. One pill remains on my tongue; I stick it out at Elton and then close my mouth and swallow it.

With a smile that doesn't come close to reaching his eyes, Elton releases my wrist. “Have a good day, Sky.”

“You bet I will.” I slam the door behind me and start running with no clear destination in mind, except away.

PARADISE CITY

Eight Years Ago

EVERYONE WENT TO THE FUNERALS RESULTING
from a fourth-year event. It was a way to pay respect and to count your blessings that it wasn't you or yours being put into a pine box.

LuAnn Stimple left twelve victims between the ages of nine and seventeen to be buried. For four days in a row, we went from one funeral service to another, mouthing the same meaningless words, throwing down handfuls of dirt to cover one dead body before moving on to the next.

Daddy loved these funeral-filled weeks. Any large gathering of people put a spring in his step, never mind the reason they'd come together. He'd work the crowds with one arm around Mom's waist and the other free to shake hands, slap backs, and every so often reach over to pat your head or mine while he turned his eyes heavenward and intoned in a solemn voice, “The silver lining here is that we're reminded to cherish our loved ones and hold them closer.”

I hated it, but got through it with you at my side.

Except that week you refused to go.

I thought Daddy would be furious and drag you down to join us, but if he noticed there was one less head to pat, he never said a word about it.

The nine-year-old's funeral was last. There were always more tears at the final funeral, as if people had been saving them and now needed to use them up before it was all over.

I skipped the feast they always had after the final burial. Daddy would be mad, I knew. He always made a big speech, talking obliquely about the sacrifices these brave young people had made for the greater good of Gardnerville. As if their deaths were noble. Or a choice. I didn't know how anyone could listen to it and not hate him, but more than once I'd been told that his words were a great comfort.

I trudged home, my whole body heavy with four days of grief. As I walked, I began to feel angry with you for making me go through this alone. Yes, you had almost been one of LuAnn's victims yourself, but that seemed a better reason than any to attend the funerals of those with less luck. By the time I burst into the house and stampeded up the steps toward your room, I was steaming.

I threw your door open, and froze.

Every square inch of your room was covered in crumpled and torn paper. And you . . . you sat in the middle of the madness, muttering to yourself and stripping pages from a book one sheet at a time, and then tossing them this way and that, adding them to the various piles. You were so absorbed in your task, you didn't hear me come in.

“Piper?” I called softly, my throat already aching with unshed tears.

Startled, you looked up. “Oh good, you're here. Come help me.” You held a book out to me.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
read the gold lettering along the spine. Taking it, I flipped through the book. It looked like you had already stripped half the pages from it.

“Hurry,” you said, flapping a hand at me. “We need to take them apart before we can put them back together.”

I sank down to the floor, papers crinkling beneath me. “Piper, are you okay?”

I wanted you to laugh and say it was all a joke.

You didn't. Instead you snatched
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
back from me. “These are my books, my stories. I can change them if I want to.”

“Okay,” I answered, gently taking the book back. I opened it and tore a page out. “I'll help.”

We ripped the pages, not just from
Alice
, but also
Peter Pan
and the entire Chronicles of Narnia. As we began to put the books back together, heavily edited and with entirely new endings, the pattern became clear. Characters in these books made the same terrible mistake that Dorothy did in
The Wizard of Oz
. They left a magical and sometimes dangerous place for the relative safety and comfort of home.

You called the characters idiots and cowards. You pounded the book covers and said these books equated ordinary with good and extraordinary with evil.

I nodded and agreed, but all the time I couldn't help finding the new stories unsatisfactory in a slightly different way. In our Gardnerville story, we were born into the magical and dangerous place, and that left us with a new problem and no easy solution that I could see.

Maybe it was all those funerals, but our predicament seemed much worse than anything that Alice faced. How could we ever have a happy ending, Piper, when the mysterious and deadly land is where we've grown up, and there is never any hope of finding a safe place to call home?

SEVEN

THE WORLD COMES INTO FOCUS, THEN GOES OUT
again. Blurry. Sharp. Blurry. Sharp.

The first time I took one of those purple pills, I tried to stand up and walk. It didn't go well. I had fallen flat on my face and lay on the floor, straining my eyes, fighting to bring the world back into focus. Until I realized my vision wasn't the only part of me impaired. Every bit of me was blocked up. All five senses and my sixth sense too. Without them, it was quiet, wonderfully so. There were no secrets to be guarded against. Everything was easier.

But that was a long time ago. It's not easier now. The sharp moments are cutting into me, reminding me. Piper is gone. Or maybe she isn't. Maybe I gave her up for lost, when all this while she's been waiting for me to break her out. From the fog a memory swings toward me like a lighthouse lamp, blinding me with its sudden glare. With painfully intense clarity, I can see Piper. Her hands grip my shoulders and her nose is less than an inch away from my own. She is telling me something I must do. Something I must do after. But after what? The light begins to dim, and before it blinks out, I recall my response. “Impossible.” That's what I told her. I attempt to remember something more, but the darkness is worse than ever, and when I try to penetrate it I am rewarded with a terrible pressure pushing against my temples.

Too late, I stick my finger down my throat. I gasp and gag, but nothing comes up. The pill is long dissolved. I could have done that before. I had enough time before the pill worked its ugly magic. Hell, I could've hidden it in my cheek and spit it out when Elton drove away. But I didn't want to. That's the truth. I am a coward. That's even more true. Always looking for the easy way out. Always have been. It was never a problem when I could hide in Piper's shadow, when she made the decisions and I marched behind her.

Now I stare up at the sky. Except there is no sky, only a sagging ceiling with a dark-brown water stain. I wriggle my fingers and touch dirt. In fact, I can now feel dirt covering me, crumbling around my shoulders and sprinkled over my bare legs. It seems that while I was out of it, someone tried to bury me alive.

Everything blurs again, but this time it's because of the tears in my eyes. I try to wipe them away, but my arms are still limp and useless.

The tears stream. The dirt itches. The dark-brown water stain begins to take the shape of a monster with fangs. Having no other choice, I wait. Time passes. My mind churns. It is impossible to avoid the memory of Foote asking whether I am suicidal. I told myself that it was just an accident. A mistake. A one-time thing that would never happen again. Now, though, it's as difficult to shrug off the question as it is the dirt making my skin itch.

At last, motor function returns. My legs flex and, pushing against the floor, I inch myself into a seated position. The room wobbles and wavers, then finally comes into focus. I recognize it immediately as the headquarters for the Gardnerville Historical Society, aka one of GG's spare bedrooms. I'm sitting on the wood floor in a pile of dirt. Across the room, with her back to me, GG is seated at her ancient wooden desk, which is so warped that none of the drawers fully close anymore. I watch as she bends over some piece of paper with a magnifying glass.

“What the fuck?” I say. Or not. My tongue gets twisted. All that comes out is, “Wah?”

GG swivels to face me. “Oh good, you've returned from your little trip to nowheresville. How was the weather there? Do anything interesting?”

I glare. Well, I stare and try not to drool on myself.

GG shakes her head at me sadly. “You're making me feel very old, Skylar. I watch you and see the choices you're making, and then I come here and look at all these stories I've written out by hand over the years. My handwriting was always so neat. So small. I can't read a damn word of it now. Not that it matters. It's the same damn story every damn time. The Gardners who reap what they sow. So this afternoon when I found you collapsed on my doorstep, I thought I would try something different. I said to myself, ‘Let's plant this Gardner and see what grows.' And that's exactly what I did.”

This is the part where I would be saying something sarcastic and then walking away, but with both my legs and tongue out of commission, I am actually listening instead of thinking about my escape route. That's why I notice that something is wrong with GG. She seems different. She seems . . . old.

The change is so dramatic; I can't believe I didn't notice it earlier. Her famous snowy white hair that she wears long and flowing over her shoulders is striped through with wiry gray. The barely noticeable laugh lines around her eyes have spread like ever-widening chasms. Most troubling, though, is the unmistakable curve to her usually ramrod-straight back.

“Whatever you're thinking—stop it,” GG says.

I scrub a hand across my face and then—with effort—push an answer through my stiff lips. “Not . . . think . . . any . . . thing.”

“Can't argue with that,” GG answers as she stands up in her usual brisk way. For a minute I think that I imagined it all, but then she wobbles, wavers, and slowly sinks back into her chair.

“Shi-it,” I stutter, struggling to get up from my place on the floor and having no more success than GG.

GG waves a hand at me. “Settle down, Skylar. I'm honored that you took a moment to think of someone else's troubles for a change, but you needn't bother. I've been feeling it more and more these last four years, what with that newcomer's tampering. Although who knows, perhaps in the end it will all be for the best.”

“Best?” I ask.

GG ignores me. “And I am especially feeling my age at this moment, after dragging all that dirt in here.” With a jerk of her chin, she indicates the soil covering me. I'd actually forgotten about it, once I realized I wasn't buried in it.

Since she obviously doesn't want to discuss the aging thing, I focus on the dirt instead. I let a handful of it run through my fingers. “Practical joke?” I am relieved when the two words come out of my mouth fairly smoothly.

This earns me one of GG's imperious sniffs. “Hardly. I was simply returning something that I believe belonged to you.”

“Whaddaya mean?” I ask at the same time GG says, “Do you know what I'm looking at here?”

My hand clenches around a handful of dirt. Anger trips up my still-recovering tongue and I blurt out, “Bullshit.”

“Good guess, but no,” GG answers. “These are papers that might do you some good, Skylar. I know you think the way forward is to forget the past, but I guarantee that will only cause more trouble in the end.”

“Seriously?” I roll my eyes, but honestly I'm scared. GG's right, I am comfortable with forgetting. “Two lectures a day is a bit much even for you.”

In response, GG clears her throat. “In 1856 Lachman Gardner discovered this valley. It was love at first sight.”

“Lachman?” I can't help but feel relieved that we're discussing my great-great-grandfather. I can deal with history when it's of the ancient variety.

“Yes, Lachman,” GG snaps back at me.

I hold my hands out in a “hey, chill out” gesture, but the effect is ruined by their trembling and I quickly drop them back into my lap. “I know 'bout him.”

And I did. Not just because we had studied him in school. Although we had. We also celebrated Lachman Gardner month every March. I seem to recall a statue of Lachman once standing at the center of town, posed with one clay fist clenched over his heart, but maybe I'm remembering that wrong, because all that's in that spot now are some words etched into cement.

“You know, but you don't really know anything,” GG says in response to my protest. “Now listen. Lachman loved this valley and he ruined it too.”

“Ha,” I say, forcing myself to my feet. The room swims. I stumble forward like a newborn calf and have to clutch GG's desk to keep from falling. GG smirks at me while I catch my breath. The old lady gets under my skin. She always has. Just once I'd like to win an argument with her, and maybe this is my chance. “Lachman ruined it? How about—he built it.”

“You're wrong, Skylar.” GG stands as well. “He only built it after he broke it. And this is exactly what I am talking about. You don't know why you do anything, because you don't know what has already been done. I am trying to make you understand.”

“By covering me with dirt?” Releasing the desk, I take a lurching step back to where I'd been lying on the floor. “Enough.” Leaning down, I scoop a handful of dirt from the floor. “Explain this.”

GG stumbles away, but there is nowhere to go. Her chair hits the back of her legs and she sinks into it, looking . . . defeated.

It's what I wanted. Or what I thought I wanted. It's not the first time that the two haven't matched up the way they should.

I look down at the soil in the palm of my hand. Beating GG with a handful of dirt shouldn't be possible, which means that this isn't just any old dirt.

A memory rises, of Piper handing me a plastic shovel and telling me to dig. She points to the ground on the other side of the fence that surrounds the reformatory. “You can feel it, can't you?” she asks. “The reformatory poisons everything it touches, even the very ground it sits upon.”

“It's from the reformatory, isn't it?” I ask now.

After a long moment GG nods. “Couldn't you feel it? Even with gloves on, I was sick from touching it. The reformatory has that effect on most of us. Except lately some people are immune—including you.”

GG's right—I should have felt it. I did a little bit. That itching along my skin. Wool sweaters give me the same scratchy feeling. But it should've been much worse. This is what powers the reformatory, something in the dirt. The very land it is built upon makes people sick. We've all seen it. The fourth-year villains go into the reformatory able to bring down buildings with a snap of their fingers, but with every step taken during four years or more of lockup, a little bit of that power seeps away, until by the time they're let out, they can't even snap their fingers. This is how the reformatory works, how it has always worked. No one is immune.

Except, I apparently am. The dirt has no effect on me. This information doesn't feel surprising or new. I knew it but momentarily forgot. The surprise is that someone else found out. “How did you know?”

“I didn't know. A long time ago, I guessed, but it wasn't until recently that it seemed important enough to know for sure.” GG lifts a shaky hand to smooth back a bit of hair. “So, you see, you're not the only person in this family who sometimes prefers to hide from the truth.”

“Yeah? And do you feel better now that you know?”

“No.” GG laughs in this hollow sort of way. “I don't feel better. But I do feel more prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” My voice is too loud, because I am annoyed with myself for asking another question, and even more annoyed with GG for not spitting it out already.

“‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,'” GG answers. “That's a poem. Maybe you've heard it before?”

Opening my hand, I let the dirt trickle from my fingertips. It takes everything inside me not to fling it in GG's face. Quoting poetry at me. Maybe I'd heard it before. Yeah, I'd heard it all right and I knew who GG heard it from too. “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats was one of Piper's favorites. She made me memorize it along with her. I thought I'd forgotten it along with everything else, but with that one line it all comes back.

Here's another thing I remember: I don't need to be here anymore now that my legs are working again.

“Skylar, someone needs to be the one,” GG calls after me, as I walk out the door.

The one to what? I would ask if I wanted an answer. I don't, so I give her both middle fingers in response instead.

“‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.'” GG's voice follows me down the hall spewing another line from that damn poem.

Who the hell knows what she means by it all. It's vague. Like everything else GG is tiptoeing around. Making words but not saying anything at all. Some people would find it tantalizing. Some people would still be standing there like idiots, asking questions, trying to get a straight answer. Not me. GG can go digging through the dirt and history too. She's certain to find some skeletons. If she keeps digging long enough, eventually one of the skeletons will probably be mine.

Me, though, I'm more interested in searching out the living. Piper is up there at the reformatory, waiting for me. I'm beginning to feel more certain of that. Ozzy found a way into the locked room and he must've seen Piper in there. I don't know what he said to her, or what he did. Something terrible, I'd guess. She'd have to be furious to make him jump like he did. And she's somehow gotten to LuAnn too. The other day when she jumped onto Elton's car, I felt like she was trying to communicate something to me. Maybe Piper sent her to me with a message.

Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly.

I want certainties, not endless indefinites.

It'll be okay, though. Once I figure out how to get to Piper, I won't have to worry about what questions to ask. She'll have them all and the answers too.

At least I hope so.