(Don't You) Forget About Me (19 page)

THIRTEEN

I CAN'T SLEEP WITH THAT GAGGLE OF IMPOSTORS
down the hall. I told Mom we should throw them out, but she convinced me to wait until morning.

“They all look so frail, like something's been whittling away at them. I think they've all come from the reformatory,” she said.

If they've come from the reformatory, then I feel certain Piper must have sent them. But why send them with her name? Why not come herself? These are questions I have no answer for.

As soon as darkness begins to soften from black to blue with the promise of the sun's rising, I climb out of bed and throw some clothes on. In bare feet, I slip down the hall. I don't make it very far. A huddled figure leans against Piper's closed door. At first I think it is one of the girls pretending to be her, but when a floorboard creaks beneath my feet, the person who looks up at me is my own mother.

She puts a finger to her lips, indicating I should stay quiet, and then climbs to her feet and leads me downstairs and into the kitchen. Sitting at the table, I watch as she puts the kettle on and her hands tremble from the weight. Sun begins to peek through the window, lighting her up, and with it, I see her in a way I haven't in a long time. She looks tired and too thin. The dark hair that usually curls around her shoulders has threads of silver streaking through it. I remember then that even though Dad was a cheating bastard, she was devastated when he died. She cried for weeks. Maybe months. I stayed away. Let the promise of soon-to-be baby Wills comfort her.

Time does not easily age people in this town, but grief does. I know this, but I hadn't realized how deeply it had left its mark on my mom.

Mom steps out of the telling ray of sunlight and sits in the chair opposite mine. “So not one of them is Piper?” She sounds disappointed. But she looks at me, in this reproachful way, as if disappointed that I won't accept those girls as Piper replacements.

Last night I'd wanted to scream at her for letting me hope—for even a few short minutes—that Piper had returned. Now, though, I kind of get it. She wanted it to be Piper as much as I did. She wanted it so badly she was willing to believe a lie.

“You know they're not,” I say.

“I suppose I did,” Mom answers. “But I thought maybe she'd changed or somehow transformed to survive.”

I'd had a similar thought at first, but I don't tell Mom this. Instead, I repeat, “They're not Piper.”

Mom sighs one of her legendary sighs at the same time the kettle begins to howl. She gets up and pours water into two cups. “Cocoa or tea?”

“Cocoa,” I answer.

“Good choice.” Mom pulls two cocoa packets from the cupboard and empties them into the mugs. Sticking a spoon into each, she sets one in front of me. “Make sure to stir it up real good.”

Our spoons clink as we chase little clumps of cocoa round our mugs. “Piper and I did this once,” Mom says. “You were sick. Do you remember when almost the whole school came down with that strange stomach bug? There was total panic. All these children who had never before had so much as the sniffles were suddenly so sick they couldn't get out of bed. They all—you included—thought they were dying. But for the parents, much to our own shame, we weren't just worried about our sick children. We were worried about ourselves. So many of us had come here to avoid sickness, we knew what it truly was to be at death's door and we didn't want to be there again. We worried that whatever it was that kept us healthy wasn't working anymore. Between taking care of you and becoming a hypochondriac, I couldn't sleep. I came down here to put the kettle on, and Piper joined me. She said she couldn't sleep either.

“Then she sat there, exactly where you're sitting right now, and gave me one of those quintessentially Piper-type looks—like she could see straight through me. And she said, ‘Don't worry. Everyone will be fine soon, and everything will go back to normal.' She sounded so certain. I believed her. I guess if I was a better mother, I would've asked how she knew. I didn't, though, because I had long ago given you two to each other, and you girls had in turn both come to see me as the nice lady you waved to on your way out the door.”

I stand and push my untouched cup of cocoa across the table. “Give this to Wills. I've gotta go.”

“He probably won't be up for a while. He's a bit under the weather, I'm afraid.”

“What?” I stop in my tracks. I'd be less shocked to hear that Wills had flown out of his bedroom window. “What do you mean ‘under the weather'?”

“It's just a cold, Sky. Nothing to worry about.” Mom sounds calm, but I can hear the worry underneath it.

“People don't get colds here.”

Mom shrugs. “That's what I'm trying to tell you. Things are changing. Wills isn't the first person to get a cold. From what I hear, it's been going around the last two weeks or so. I also heard that one of the old-timers is fighting a pretty nasty cough. They're afraid it might turn into pneumonia.”

I want to deny it again. I want to tell her that things don't change here. But, of course, they do. They already have. People are getting sick. The Salt Spring is shrinking. The reformatory is crumbling. The inmates are fighting back. I have that same shaky feeling I had at the reformatory yesterday with Foote. It suddenly seems possible that things have already gone too far, that there will be no going back. Perhaps Gardnerville could have withstood Piper's and my tampering with the dirt, or Elton's pills helping everyone suppress their worst impulses. But the two of them together seem almost certainly catastrophic.

Maybe Piper has already figured out a way to deal with that. Maybe that's why LuAnn talked about an uprising instead of destroying the reformatory. Maybe Piper's plan has evolved.

“Really, Sky, don't look so worried. Wills is going to be fine.”

“Yeah.” I nod, feeling guilty that the worried expression Mom saw was for Piper instead of Wills.

“If anything, you should worry about me, having to take care of such a terrible patient.”

As she smiles at me, I realize again how tired Mom looks. And scared. She came here because she was sick and dying. Gardnerville saved her. But what if Gardnerville can't save people anymore? Would Mom get sick again and even possibly . . . die?

I shake the thought away. I can only handle so many problems right now, and the one I've chosen to focus on is Piper. After I get her home, she can help me figure everything else out.

Still, instead of leaving the house with only my usual wave in Mom's general direction, I go to where she is still sitting at the kitchen table and give her a quick peck on the cheek before darting toward the door.

“Sky,” Mom calls, with a hitch in her voice that breaks that short bit of my name into two. I turn back and see her hand held against her cheek as if I'd slapped her. It occurs to me then that I can't remember the last time I kissed her. I feel guilty about that for a minute, until I remind myself of all the times I walked into a room and she didn't see me because she only had eyes for Dad or Wills. Maybe she's thinking the same thing, because instead of saying her usual “See you later” or “Be safe,” she simply whispers, “I'm sorry.”

The automatic response of “It's okay” is on my tongue, but it doesn't get any further than that before I swallow it down. Because it's not okay.

I take off without a plan of what to do or where to go. I just know that I need to do something. Now. Or yesterday would be even better, because it suddenly feels like time is running out. I console myself with the fact that I can still clearly recall yesterday. It's an incredibly small victory, but I'll take it.

Eventually, I slow down and collect myself. A part of me wishes I could rewind and go to three days ago when there was nothing in my head except getting a fresh batch of forget-me-nots from Jonathan. It's not a particularly helpful desire right now, but it does give me a direction. I decide to head toward school. Maybe someone there will know something about the girls upstairs calling themselves Piper. I'm pretty sure I won't learn anything, but it is better than my other option, which is to try the reformatory again.

As I walk past the press box, it's impossible not to look up and wonder who is working it today and if there are any forget-me-nots still for sale. Probably not. And even if there were, I don't want them. Correction. I can't want them.

But I do.

Somehow I keep putting one foot in front of the other until the press box and pills are behind me, and the temptation to head up there has passed. Pivoting sharply, I head into the school.

I stand in the middle of the empty hallway for a few moments, lost and uncertain, knowing I'm just wasting time. The real answers are behind a locked door at the top of the hill; it's not like I can just go into the library and find a book with the names of those girls pretending to be Piper.

Oh.

As I take off down the hall toward the library, I wonder if I've always been this dumb, or if I can blame it on the forget-me-nots. Either way, the answer is depressing.

The library is empty. Not exactly a surprise in the middle of August.

All the yearbooks, going back fifty years at least, are lined up on a shelf near the librarian's desk, and I pull out the ones from the last four years and drop them on the closest table. I start looking for the girl sleeping in Piper's bed first. It isn't until I open the last yearbook—the one from four years ago—that I find her. She is on the first page. The first several pages are reserved for those who don't make it to graduation. Technically it's called the remembrance page, but everyone refers to it as the graveyard.

Her name is Lindsay Grove. She was fifteen years old and had just gotten her braces off. According to the yearbook, she perished on Piper's May Day. Someone has used a silver gel pen to scribble,
I love you, Lindsay. I always will
.

Turning the pages, I scan the rest of the pictures in the graveyard, looking for the other girls in Piper's room. Each person gets their own page. All of them have messages scribbled on them. Some just say,
Miss You
; others offer specific memories of the person—things that would have been written in that person's yearbook if they were still alive. None of the other girls are in the graveyard, and it's a weird relief to know there is only one supposedly dead girl pretending to be my sister.

Giving up on finding the other girls, whose faces I can only half remember at this point anyway, I flip to the student portraits that are taken at the beginning of the year, searching for Piper. She's not there. I turn the pages more frantically, not caring if they get torn. Finally I find the class picture they take in the gym with everyone stacked together on the risers. There are only around seventy kids, but I have to search for a moment, running my finger across the smiling faces until it lands on Piper. She is in the last row, arms crossed against her chest. There is something about the way she stands among her classmates, with them yet isolated. She is the only person who isn't looking at either the camera or a friend; instead her gaze is fixed somewhere to her left, far beyond what the camera captures.

I grab more yearbooks, going further back, trying to find more pictures of Piper. Now I remember how many times over the years she just happened to miss school on picture day. Looking at the yearbooks, it's almost like Piper never even existed. They didn't even include her name with a box that said “not pictured” like they did for the other kids who must have also missed picture day. It was like they were already punishing her for something she hadn't done yet.

I tear the page with Piper's class picture from the book and with a swipe of my arm send the yearbooks flying to the floor. It doesn't help. Clenching the stiff paper so tight that its edges bite into my skin, I flee the library.

Unmoored, I drift down empty hallways until I find myself standing in front of what was once Piper's locker. The middle school had an earlier dismissal, and this is the spot where I used to wait for her. Toward the end, when she was so wrapped up in Elton, I would stand here for hours after the high school had emptied out, waiting and waiting, but Piper would never come. I'd stomp home and glare in her direction, waiting for a guilty apology that hadn't even occurred to her. She'd forgotten me so completely that I could feel myself begin to disappear—as if I didn't exist without her.

“Well.” A crisp voice interrupts my reverie. “Fancy meeting you here.”

GG stands in the middle of the hallway, looking ready for battle.

I throw my hands up in mock surrender. “You found me.”

“Unintentionally, I assure you. Quite frankly, it was my hope to avoid you for at least the next week, or however long it took me to overcome the urge to slap your face.”

“Well, don't let me keep you.” Turning on my heel, I march in the opposite direction.

Of course, GG follows me. “As it happens, your mother called me this morning. She was all in a tizzy, saying she was afraid you were going to do something stupid. I agreed there was a good possibility of that, but wondered what exactly made this different from any other day.”

“Low blow.”

“Oh, darling, if only that was the worst thing I could say about you. Your mother has enough to worry about without wondering if you're going to crave destruction on a grand scale the same way Piper did four years ago.”

I stop and spin again to face her. “What is your problem? Do you think I need a fucking lecture right now?”

“No, I don't. But I've been storing this up for four years, waiting for a good time, and now that you have finally left your purple haze behind, I am seizing the moment.” GG takes a deep breath and then abruptly switches topics. “We Gardners are a peculiar lot. My own mother used to say we were all cursed. I called her a superstitious old lady and told her our differences meant we were favored, not damned. I was so young then—don't look at me like it's so difficult to imagine, Skylar. I was indeed young once and I was much better at it than you. You know nothing and want to know even less. I, on the other hand, was full of conviction and contempt for everyone who wasn't me.” GG stops mid-harangue, an odd smile on her face. “Funny, I'd forgotten that.”