Paperquake (11 page)

Beth's eyes widened. "But how can that be, Vi?"

Violet hurried to point out the passages in the letter that had come true. The quarrel in the restaurant with her sisters. Getting lost in the crowd.

Beth looked skeptical, then slanted Violet a grin. "If that's true, then some handsome guy like Hal is going to fall in love with you. And won't Jazzy and Rosy freak out?"

"
I'll
freak out if that happens!" Violet looked at her in wonderment. "I've never had a boyfriend." She hadn't thought about what Hal's plan might mean to her. "But it might happen soon—look at this!" She jumped off the bed and dug her history notebook out of her backpack. With eager fingers she extracted the third letter from Hal and handed it to Beth.

"Hal spilled his ink," Beth said. "Hey—it sounds like he planned to take V away somewhere—the very next night, he says. That might mean someone will come for you, too—" Beth broke off. "Wow, Vi—the date on this letter is April 18, 1906. Wasn't that the date of the San Francisco earthquake?" She looked puzzled. "Hey, wait a minute—where did you get this letter, anyway?"

"Well..." Violet hesitated. Then she confessed. "From the Academy of Sciences. You know, the earthquake exhibit with the desk and everything?"

"You
stole
it?"

Violet shook her plastic-wrapped head. "I didn't
exactly
steal it..."

"Yes, you did! That's
exactly
what you did. I can't believe you, Vi. You must be crazy."

"But it was from Hal!" Violet tried to defend herself. "I need to find out about V and what happened to her. Because, well, because maybe it's going to happen to me, too. Don't you see? Hal must be sending me these letters—okay, not really sending them, but putting them in my path. A sort of paper trail!"

"You mean you really think Hal is trying to—like—
warn
you of something?" Beth's eyes were very round. "A warning from the past? That's totally weird. But, hey—I've got a warning from the
present.
What if the police are looking for this letter? Have you thought about that?"

Violet flushed. Of course the museum officials would have discovered the missing letter by now. They would be searching all the visitors before letting anyone out of the museum. The police would have been called. There might even be roadblocks set up all through Golden Gate Park to detain people while detectives searched their cars.

Outside Beth's apartment, a siren whined. Romps scrambled to his feet and barked. Beth grabbed Violet's arm. "Hide!" she whispered. "I'll tell them I'm alone here."

Violet jumped to her feet. The closet? Under the bed? But wouldn't the hair dye drip on Beth's white rug?

The siren vanished into the distance. The girls looked at each other and laughed shakily. "I guess I'd better return the letter," mumbled Violet. "And fast."

"But how?"

Violet sank back onto the bed. Her knees felt like tafiy. Too much was happening all at once. As if diary entries from murderers and letters that foretold the future weren't enough to deal with—now she had to worry about breaking the law as well. What happened to people who stole things from museum exhibits? Would pleading momentary insanity help her case?

 

Would madness provide the excuse I need if ever I am brought to task ?

 

Would she go to jail? Reform school? "Maybe—maybe I can just mail it back to them?"

"Anonymously," stressed Beth. "And maybe you should send the diary page to the police at the same time, so that they can get busy trying to track down the murderer."

"But we don't know who wrote it or who was murdered or anything! And it's so old I don't see how the police could solve the crime anyway, I found these things, and I want to solve the mystery myself. And don't you go telling people about any of this," she added. "Please."

"I won't," Beth promised. "As long as you send the letter back to the museum."

"I will, I will. First thing tomorrow." Violet took a deep breath of relief. She would send it back on the way to school.
But not until I photocopy it,
she decided, looking guiltily over at her friend.

It will be as I promised. I will come for you at midnight.

The words echoed in her head across the decades. Would she still be here tomorrow morning? She glanced down at the letter in her hand. A drop of reddish dye plopped onto the inkblot and she mopped it up hastily with the corner of her towel. "Hasn't it been twenty minutes yet?" she asked in a plaintive voice.

"Close enough," answered Beth with a quick glance at her watch. "Come on."

They left the letters on Beth's bed and returned to the bathroom. Violet knelt over the bathtub again while Beth rinsed her hair. Rivers of muddy dye streamed from Violet's head and swirled down the drain. Beth shoved Violet's head directly beneath the tap for a final rinse. When the pounding water finally ran clear, she wrapped "Violet's head in a clean towel.

Violet hurried to the mirror, trying to push all thoughts of letters and crime from her soon-to-be-revealed golden head. Both girls leaned toward the mirror above the sink. "
Tadah!
" Beth cried, and the towel fell away

Violet started into the mirror. A bubble of disappointment rose into her throat. As far as she could tell, her hair looked the same as always. Wet, but the same dark brown, nearly black frizz. "Nothing happened, Beth!"

"Wait," said Beth, and reached under the sink for her mother's hair dryer. "Let's see what happens when we dry it."

Violet stood still, trying not to cry, while Beth blew hot air on her hair.

"I think there are highlights," Beth said encouragingly. "Golden highlights, coming through. Hang on. They're just like Jazzy's and Rosy's."

Violet tilted her head. Golden? In the fluorescent bathroom light her hair now seemed to have an odd-colored cast, like the skin of an overripe plum. "They look like
purple
highlights to me, Beth." And now tears coursed down her cheeks. "Now I don't look like Jazzy and Rosy, and I don't even look like
me
anymore."

Beth consulted the package insert. "It wears off in four to six weeks, anyway. That won't be so bad."

But Violet could only stare in the mirror, shaking her head.

Your raven hair!

Oh, Hal,
Violet thought sadly.
Ton would have liked me better just the way I was.

When she returned home from Beth's, Violet went straight to her little alcove bedroom and tied a red bandanna over her hair. She went down for dinner, relieved to find that her sisters had been invited to eat pizza with Casey and Brett at Brett's house and wouldn't be home until bedtime. Although she was eager to tell them about the letters' ability to foretell her future, she did not want to hear comments about her purple hair. And she did not want them to know about the stolen letter but couldn't quite trust herself not to tell.

Over dinner Lily and Greg asked whether she was coming down with something—her face looked a little flushed. And why was she wearing that scarf on her head? Violet pushed back her chair and said she thought she'd do her homework and go to bed early.

She lay across her bed, poring over the letters from the past, looking for more clues to her own life. There were connections she hadn't caught at first that leaped out at her now.

I look at the flowers in the garden...

Flowers. And Violet had imagined flowers in the back concrete yard so clearly she could almost
see
them. Not to mention the fact that her parents were florists. And the very garden bench and birdbath she'd envisioned turned up in the cellar.

Is your heart still aching? I ache myself when I think of the pain you have been in....

This was clearly a reference to her open-heart surgery.

No one ... keep us apart.... help you ... the window...

She glanced at her bedroom window. It gave her delicious shivers down her back to think that Hal—no, how could it be Hal?—that
someone
might come for her. She'd never thought to try it, but a person probably could climb up the front porch pillars, right up onto the porch roof and over to her window.

And what about the earthquake? Hal had been writing the letter to V when he was interrupted. Violet shivered and slipped under her quilt. Could all the quakes they'd been having recently somehow be tied to the letters? She quickly pushed that thought away.

Your raven hair! aglow with lights—

Aglow now with highlights. Purple highlights.

Violet pulled another pillow under her head and lay back, thinking. Could it really be just as Mr. Koch kept saying in class? That nothing is coincidence, that there is a reason for everything that happens. That history and science are connected. That the past leaves clues for the present, and the role of scientists is to decipher those messages to better understand how the world works.

She tossed and turned until she heard her sisters come up to bed, and then her parents. Still sleep wouldn't come. The glow of the street lamps outside shone through her windows like a beacon from the past on which, she imagined dreamily, someone might fly in to take her away with him....

When the wind rattled the panes of her window, she sat bolt upright in bed. Was Hal here for her now? At last she slept, dreaming first of the face in the needlepoint portrait and then, as the mournful
whoooo
of the wind insinuated itself into her dreams, of howling shadow children. She slept fitfully, jerking awake whenever the clock chimed on the mantel downstairs.

 

At breakfast the next morning, Violet glanced across the table at Jasmine and Rose and her tired muscles relaxed with a small glow of satisfaction.
Too bad we don't wear school uniforms,
she thought. That would make looking alike much easier. But at least today her sisters had put on the clothes she'd selected and laid out on their beds. They were all three of them wearing jeans, blue sweatshirts, and white running shoes. They were all wearing their hair in ponytails tied back with blue elastic scrunchies. She was the only one, however, who wore the blue hood of the sweatshirt pulled up over her head and tied tightly under her chin.

"I knew it was true about our poor sweet Baby," Jasmine said to Rose as she poured herself a glass of orange juice from the carton, "but I didn't think it would manifest itself until she was older."

"All the signs have been there a long time." Rose shook her head sadly and reached for the carton. "Poor attention span, poor ambulatory skills—" She poured herself a glass of juice, too.

"What's
that
mean?" interrupted Jasmine.

"You know—moving around. Walking. She always crashes into things or trips over her own feet—and her feet aren't even as big as ours. It's poor ambulatory skills. It's because her gravitational force is different from ours."

"She's trying to adapt," said Jasmine solemnly. "But it's an uphill battle. Her true origins keep betraying her no matter how she tries to fit in."

"What are you talking about?" asked Violet in irritation. This was twinspeak in full force.

Rose sipped her orange juice. "The hood. It's because your antennae have started to sprout, right?"

"Now girls," protested Lily, coming in from the kitchen with a platter of scrambled eggs.

"It's because she's an alien," Jasmine said kindly. "She can't help it."

Violet bit back a snide retort and adjusted the hood of her sweatshirt. All desire to tell them of her amazing discovery about the letters disappeared. They didn't deserve to know anything. Just let them find her gone—rescued from this family by a handsome boyfriend.

Jasmine winked at her. "It's elementary, my dear Baby. On your planet, girls' antennas—or do I mean
antennae!—
usually don't sprout until they're about eighteen. You're pretty young to have this happen to you. It's perfectly understandable that you'd want to hide them."

The teakettle whistied in the kitchen, and Violet waited until Lily left the room. Then Violet leaned across the table and hissed at her sisters, "I had something totally important I wanted to tell you. It's to do with the letters from Hal. But forget it."

Jasmine and Rose exchanged one of their maddening twin looks. Then Jasmine said, "Pretty please with sugar on it?" And Rose said, "If you don't tell us, I'll tell Mom you ran off at the street fair!"

Violet drained her juice and set the purple plastic cup down with a bang. "No way. You don't deserve to know. I'm leaving early—I have an important science project to work on." She pushed back her chair. Really she was leaving early to have time to photocopy the stolen letter before she mailed it back.

She'd been hiding it under her sweatshirt all the time she ate breakfast. It crackled against her chest. As she stood up, the manila envelope with the letter inside slid to the floor. She knelt to retrieve it, but Rose was faster.

"What are you sending to the Academy of Sciences?" Rose asked, looking at the address. "Are you offering them your alien body for display?"

"Give it back!" Violet grabbed for the letter, but Rose smiled in a supercilious way and held it above her head.

"Don't give it back until she tells us," directed Jasmine.

Violet prayed that Rose would not open the envelope. She hadn't sealed it yet, merely tucked in the flap. She grabbed again for the letter and knocked a fork off the table. It clattered on the wooden floor. When she bent to pick it up, she had to restrain herself from reaching under the table with it to stab Rose in the leg. Their mother returned with her cup of tea.

"Mom! Tell Rosy to give me back my letter!"

"Rose, dear," chided Lily, sitting down in her chair.

"It's to the Academy of Sciences," Rose reported.

"It's for my science project!" Violet snapped.

"You've written to the museum for information?" exclaimed Lily. "Baby, I'm proud of you. Your schoolwork will be hugely improved if you apply yourself this way from now on. What's your topic?"