Gravestone (5 page)

8. Empty Canvas

There is a gift in my locker.

No note this time. Not like the others I received, warning me, teasing me, messing with my mind.

No gun either. That nice little gift got me kicked out before the principal and the rest of the school realized that someone planted it.

I still don’t know who did that. But that’s only number 72 on the list of questions needing answers.

Today the gift is a picture.

I take it out and glance over my shoulder to see if anyone is watching me. Not that I can see.

It’s a creased page from a magazine. A photograph of an ordinary road going into the woods. It looks like a colorful fall day. Could have been taken somewhere around here.

At the bottom of the page is something written in black ink. In Jocelyn’s handwriting.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I’m pretty sure that’s a famous poem, but I don’t know who wrote it.

This was in Jocelyn’s locker.

So why is it suddenly in mine?

As I close my door, I wonder what happened to the rest of her stuff.

More than ever before, except maybe on that first day of stepping into a semester already halfway through, I feel eyes on me. Watching and waiting. Wondering when I’m finally going to give up.

I think back to Jared’s parting words when he dropped me off.

I’ll be in contact with you. That’s the way it has to be.

I wonder when I’ll see him next.

All I know is that I’m supposed to say and do nothing. Just go with the flow. And that’s what I’m doing.

It takes half the day before I find Newt. At lunch I finally sit across from him and give him a look that I hope conveys what I’m thinking.

A look that says
If you don’t give me answers I’ll do exactly what Gus Staunch did to you that first day I saw you being smeared across the school hallway
.

“Lunch might be the worst place ever to talk about stuff,” he whispers as he smells his white-bread sandwich.

“Do you know?”

He looks one way, then the other. “I know enough.”

I shake my head and motion my hands in a
So what now?
gesture. He takes a bite of the sandwich and then makes a face.

“Well?” I ask.

“Lunch is a time to eat.”

“So when do I get the decoder that shows me how to look at the map to our secret meeting?”

“Don’t get annoyed.”

I laugh in disbelief. “This isn’t ‘annoyed.’”

“I didn’t do anything.” He’s still talking in something barely above a mumble.

“I’m way past being annoyed.”

As Newt’s head moves up to face mine, I see his scar under the hard lighting of the cafeteria.

“I hope that doesn’t mean you’re going to be stupid,” he says.

“Newt, man …”

“After school, okay?”

“After school what?”

“After school.”

“I can’t just swing by your house, remember? I don’t have a ride.”

“You won’t need a ride. Just—just meet me at the lockers and we’ll go from there.”

“Go where?”

He shakes his head and keeps eating.

I look around the room that’s full of conversation and laughter, and I see Poe sitting at a different table than usual. Sitting by herself.

I sit in the art room and wonder how in the world I’m going to learn anything about art in this little town and this dead-end school. This is a new elective I’m taking. Maybe I should have taken computers or shop class. The art teacher, Mr. Chestle, sure looks artsy as he goes on about something or other.

I glance around the room to see if there’s anybody I know. I recognize some faces from other classes, but nobody I know by more than a first name. There are more girls in the class than guys. A few look like freshmen, or more like sixth graders who decided to visit the high school for the day. There’s that loudmouthed redheaded girl I generally try to avoid because she talks all the time. The hot dark-haired girl with her friends on either side. I need to avoid any and all hot dark-haired chicks from here on out until the end of my life. Which may be sooner than I think. There’s a blond girl with glasses who easily could be a librarian. Or a witch. A librarian witch.

The blond is staring at me. She gives me a closed smile. As if she knows something.

I don’t smile back. I think I probably look confused, irritated, maybe even a bit offended.

She glances away, and I continue checking out the class.

I look at the empty canvases all around the room just waiting to be filled.

I totally know I’m one of them.

It’s going to be a long semester.

9. A Way of Making Things Happen

I need to look on the bright side. It’s the end of the day, and I haven’t been bullied by Gus. I haven’t been suspended. Poe hasn’t yelled at me anymore (though we haven’t spoken either). The only notable thing is the absence of the other member of the threesome that came up to me on the first day of school last October: Rachel. I figure she’s just taking an extra day or so coming back from vacationing in Colorado.

I’m waiting by my locker, a little nervous that Newt forgot what he said at lunch, when I see him coming down the hallway.

“Ready?” he asks as he doesn’t slow down.

I follow him outside, where it’s now brutally cold. The snow hasn’t gone anywhere. It seems to have settled in, determined and suffocating.

“Where’re we going?” I ask.

“Come on,” he says.

I know that, like me, he doesn’t have a license. Only one of us is sixteen, however.

Loser.

Maybe there’s a car waiting for us. Maybe it’s Jared. This will be our first meeting of the secret underground something-or-other. We’ll meet at Jared’s cabin and come up with crazy theories and eat lots of really bad food and maybe play some video games.

Instead, we walk up to a station wagon waiting for us. Or, as it turns out, waiting for Newt. The man behind the wheel looks way too old to be Newt’s father.

“Come on, get in,” Newt says.

When I’m in the backseat, he introduces me to the driver. “Grandpa, this is one of my buddies. Sam.”

For a second, I wonder if his grandfather is called Sam. But then the driver calls out my name, or what he thinks is my name, with a cordial Southern accent.

“Where are you from, Sam?”

Newt glances back at me just to give me some bit of a heads-up.

“Oh, I’m, uh, from up north. But now I live just outside of town.”

“That right? Whereabouts up north?”

“New York,” I say. It’s just the first thing out of my mouth. I know I don’t sound like I’m from New York. I’m trying to think of more of the story when Newt’s grandfather starts talking to him about his day.

“Sometimes Grandpa picks me up when my parents can’t,” Newt tells me.

The more I listen to his grandfather, the more he sounds like any ordinary old guy. Slower and more reflective, without much of a care in the world.

Soon I find myself in Newt’s basement, just like the other time I went over to his house to try and learn a few things. His grandfather is somewhere upstairs, babysitting or maybe just sticking around to see what he can find in the pantry.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

Newt shakes his head. The door to the basement is closed, and he must know that nobody is around. He’s finally not telling me to hush.

“I know what happened,” I say.

I’m like a convict who wants to confess to the judge and jury and get the crime off his chest.

“Chris.”

“What?”

“Just—just listen. The less you tell me, the less I know.”

I don’t quite get that logic. “What’s that mean?”

“You need to tell people who can do something about it.”

“But—why’d you bring me here?”

“I know that Jocelyn is gone. That she moved.”

“Newt, she died!”

He doesn’t give me a white-faced, shocked glance. He knows.

This whole freaking town knows.

“She died. I saw her die. She died right in front of me. You don’t get it. You don’t understand.”

I take a deep breath and wait.

“The official word is that Jocelyn and her aunt moved.”

“She didn’t move,” I say.

“I’m just telling you this so you know.”

I guess if you’ve been living in the insanity that is Solitary for so long, you’d be able to appear as nonchalant as Newt.

“The stuff that happened with Wade—people believe that her aunt had enough and disappeared.”

“People really believe that?”

“Not everybody knows the truth, Chris. Not everybody around here is—”

“Crazy?” I say, then add a few more colorful descriptions.

“Not everybody knows. Not everybody is a part of them.”

“We have to do something.”

“I’m doing all I can,” Newt says. “And this is it.”

I look around at the basement.

So you told me Jocelyn’s officially missing. Great. Fabulous. Thanks. A lot.

“Rachel is gone too.”

For a second I think he means she’s gone, like Jocelyn is gone. That someone killed Rachel.

“She moved with her family.”

“What?”

Newt nods. “They have a way of making things like this happen.”

“Things like what?”

“People disappearing. People moving. People moving on.”

I think of what Jared said about Uncle Robert and his mother. One disappeared and one “moved on.”

“Jocelyn didn’t
move.
Do you get it?”

“Don’t get angry at me. I hear you. But Rachel
did
move.”

“Why?”

“Because she knows too much and cares too much.”

“She’s not the only one who cares.”

“Caring is a dangerous thing around here,” he says.

“That why you’re talking like a robot?”

The guy with the messy hair and the face of a ten-year-old shoots me a glance that I actually admire. It’s a look that’s the equivalent of a curse word.

“There are reasons why I remain quiet.”

I think of the scars he has on the outside. I wonder if he carries just as many on the inside.

“So, what? Just like that? Rachel is gone?”

“Just like that. It’s that easy.”

“She didn’t say good-bye.”

“She couldn’t.”

Now I know why Poe was so angry.

But I had nothing to do with this. It wasn’t my fault.

“Do you know where she is?”

“No.”

“But why then—I was there—I saw it happen. I was there, Newt. I saw them. I saw what they did. Yet they let me go.”

“I know.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Why make Rachel and her family move? What about me? What about my mother?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

I think of telling him about Jared. But Jared told me not to tell another person.

Don’t trust anybody, Chris.

There’s no need to tell Newt about Jared.

“What are we supposed to do?” I ask him.

“There’s no ‘we,’” he says. “I’m not in this equation.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“If I were you, I’d get as far away from this place as I could.”