Season of the Witch (17 page)

I spot Cassandra in the hallway as she trails a group of the grieving out of the science lab. She’s alone, her face unreadable. Clearly, she hasn’t joined the sob fest—but it doesn’t look like she’s judging it either. I can’t believe how calm she is. For a split second, I want to run to her side, say, I can’t deal, tell me what to say, tell me how to look. Then I remember that today of all days, I cannot be linked to Cassandra.

I can’t tell: Are people angry with me all over again because Chloe’s dead? Or was she so crazy these past few weeks, people have a little sympathy for me?

Reality check: probably nobody’s thinking about me today.

When I see Wallace Laird in math, I dare to say, “Kind of a crazy day, huh?”

“Sad day,” he says. Then he looks at me. “Although maybe not for you.”

I shred the corner of a piece of paper on the table. “This doesn’t make me happy, Wallace.”

He nods, but I can tell he doesn’t believe me. Then he says in a broken voice, “She was so
tiny
—” and all of a sudden, I see the truck, powered by all my hate, rushing toward this girl.

Mr. Alistair coughs, his sign that he wants to start class. I raise my hand, ask if I can have a bathroom break.

That afternoon, I see Isabelle coming out of Ms. Petrie’s office. Her dark hair hangs loose over her face, and her long, super-skinny body looks disjointed, as if screws have fallen out at her hips and shoulders. When she says thank you to the counselor, her voice is raw with crying.

I am struck by a memory of me pretending to walk out of Ms. Petrie’s office so that Chloe would think I had reported her. By accident, I catch Isabelle’s eye. For a moment, we just stand there, staring stupidly at each other.

Another memory comes back.

Gee, Isabelle, last time I saw you, you were slamming my head in a toilet. How’s things?

Only Isabelle didn’t do that—I remember now. It was mostly Zeena, gleefully carrying out Chloe’s orders. Isabelle stayed away from that part.

Didn’t do much to stop it, though.

Without her grinning hyena pack, she looks quieter, nerdier. She opens her mouth to say something. But then she stops as Zeena comes to collect her. For a second, Isabelle’s eyes move back and forth between me and Zeena.

Who you gonna choose, honey child? pops into my head.

Zeena grabs Isabelle’s arm, pulls her away.

Finally, the day is over. I decide I will go home, take the hottest bath ever, and find the dumbest thing to watch on TV. I will turn off my phone, close my door to my parents. In my altered state, I have the notion that if I never talk to anyone who knows me again, maybe I can become a totally different person.

A few blocks from school, I see a tall, dark boy standing on the corner ahead of me. He’s wearing a winter coat, and I don’t recognize him right away. Then I do, call out, “Oliver?”

He turns and sees me. For a moment we just stand there. He looks awful, like a ragged ink sketch in his black coat, black hair, and glasses. His skin is pasty, making him appear as if he’s been carved out of old wax. He’s clearly in pain. Things have been so
messed up between him and Chloe and now they’ll never be right. As weak and stupid and hurtful as he’s been, I feel for him.

There has to be a reason the universe put him right in front of me. I must be meant to help him in some way. I open my mouth, ready to say … what, I’m not sure.

But before I can say anything, Oliver shakes his head, starts walking away from me. Desperate, I say, “Oliver …”

“No,” he yells, not even looking at me. “No, I—”

He walks faster, as if I’m going to chase him. At the far corner, he turns, disappears behind a building.

“Okay,” I breathe, trying not to cry. “Okay.”

Then in my head, I hear,
Come be with me. Forget them. You’re beyond them
.

And like Oliver, all I can think is no. I don’t want to be with Cassandra right now. She’s so sure what we did was right, and I’m not. I don’t know if I ever want to be sure.

I turn to go home, but, by following Oliver, I’ve gotten turned around. I’m not sure: Should I go home? I really don’t want to. There’s too much I can’t tell my parents right now.

I can’t go back to school.

Can’t go to the park, it reminds me of Cassandra and our spells.

I can’t go anywhere. I don’t belong anywhere.

This year in Western Lit, we started reading the Bible. In the beginning, all these people get exiled—like Adam and Eve getting thrown out of Eden, Cain getting banished after he murders Abel. I remember thinking, Is that it? Why doesn’t God smite them down or whatever? How bad could banishment be? So you can’t ever go back to where you were—big deal.

Now I know better.

The next day, I tell my mom I’m sick and I can’t go to school. She thinks I’m not telling the truth about the first part but suspects I am about the second. In fact, both parts are true. I end up sleeping through most of the morning, a half sleep where memories of Oliver in the diner, Chloe’s face as she circled me in the hallway, nasty laughter in the cafeteria, are swallowed up in the choking smoke from Cassandra’s incense.

Then, around one o’clock, I open my eyes. I can’t lie still another second. I have to get up, have to get out.

I take a shower. Get dressed. Drink three cups of coffee and eat two bowls of cereal.

For no good reason, I look at the clock. Chloe’s funeral is at four o’clock.

It’s three-fifteen now.

I had absolutely no intention of going to Chloe’s funeral. I told Ella I wasn’t going. I’m certainly not dressed for a funeral. And yet here I am on a bus headed to the east side.

This is wrong on just about every level, I tell myself. Someone’s bound to get all righteous and slap me in the face for stealing Oliver. And I’m so brilliant, I’ll probably retaliate by shouting, “Yeah, and I cut myself and burned things! That’s why she ended up under that truck, ha, ha!”

They say you go to funerals to pay your respects. I have no respect for Chloe.

So why am I going?

The memorial service is at St. Sebastian’s Church at Fifty-Third and Lexington. I know this neighborhood pretty well. It’s a mix of old and new, with the sleek, silver Citicorp building soaring over stodgy old hotels and churches. Ella’s parents and mine realized at about the same time that neither of their daughters was going to ace the SATs without major help. So last spring, they insisted we do test prep. At which point, Ella and I decided test prep would be utter and complete torture without a bud, so we insisted they send us to the same class. I don’t remember a lot about the classes; mostly I remember laughing with Ella over Pinkberry afterward, about how low we were going to score and how we’d probably end up behind the Pinkberry counter serving snotty kids like us our whole lives. I remember Ella saying, “Well,
you
won’t. But I will.”

“You will not,” I said.

“No,” she said sadly. “This morning, I was trying to tell my dad about Gordon Ramsay’s new show and he was like, I don’t know this person and I don’t care. And I don’t know why you do. I was like, Oh, uh. Whatever the brilliance gene in my family is, it skipped me totally.”

“Well, so did the tight-ass judgmental gene,” I said. But I could tell it didn’t cheer her up.

By the time I arrive, the service has already started and the heavy wood doors are closed. There’s a little entry hall between the inner and outer doors. The walls and ceiling are cool gray stone, and the space feels slightly like a crypt. I pace, trying to figure out whether to go in. There are stacks of church bulletins in a wire rack. A little stone fountain is set into the wall. I look closer, see there’s water in it, but no spout. Not a fountain. Holy water.
You sprinkle it on yourself and it protects you from evil spirits. Or it burns you if you are an evil spirit.

I have a terrible need to touch it. But stupidly, I’m scared.

A burst of organ music rattles the door. I crack it open slightly and peek in. The place is packed. Sobs ripple through the air. My stomach lurches. Chloe had a lot of friends.

I let the door close, wander back and forth across the stone floor of the lobby. I can hear the organ playing, slow and sad. I guess everyone’s supposed to be thinking about Chloe now. I look up at the ceiling, wonder if she’s floating up in the heavens. I imagine her kicking insufficiently fluffy clouds aside, going, “You want me to sit on that? No way!”

Maybe she’s in hell. This is, after all, the girl who said, “First the bag, now the bitch.” There was a hard-core meanness to Chloe. She could be cruel, got off on it, in fact. And it wasn’t like she had any excuse. As far as I know, her life was pretty okay.

Except of course for the fact that it’s over.

“And now—” The priest’s voice jerks me back to the service. I crack the door again and see two women—no, a woman and a girl—making their way to the podium. They’re both in black, and the woman has her arms tight around the girl. The woman is severe-looking, her dark hair pulled back like Chloe’s. Chloe’s mom—or maybe an aunt, because this woman has it too together to have just lost her daughter. The girl is maybe ten. She’s sobbing into a handkerchief.

As she steps up to the lectern, you can hear her sniffling and choking. Finally, she manages, “Hi, I’m Chloe’s sister, Amelie.” Her miserable little-girl voice goes right through my gut like iron. I had
no idea Chloe had a sister. And all of a sudden, it doesn’t matter if Chloe was nice, not nice, what she did to me. This child is brokenhearted that her big sister is dead.

I turn, push the doors open, and go outside. Here it’s bright, sunny. Chilly. The honking of cars, the rumbling of garbage trucks. People walking their dogs, sipping coffee as they go.

This is life, real life. No magic here. I lean against the cold handrail on the steps, take comfort from the cold, hard metal. I’ll wait for Ella. Maybe we can go to Pinkberry after.

“Hey.”

I turn, see Isabelle. Her brown hair is pinned back with a barrette. She’s wearing all black. The way she’s standing, moving her foot along the step, looking at me, not looking at me—I get the sense she knew I was out here. That she came to see me. She looks so uncomfortable, I know I have the power.

She points to the steps. “Mind if I sit down?”

I wave at the other end of the step. “Go ahead.”

Isabelle sits, rearranging her skirt under her. “God, it’s cold.”

“That’s what happens in October.”

“I just couldn’t be in there anymore.” Then, keeping her eyes focused ahead, she says “For the record?”

“Yeah?”

“What we did to you was shitty.” She says it all in a rush, like she has to get it out before I stop her.

She looks at me when she’s done.

I say, “Sorry—did you want me to argue with you?”

“Guess not.”

That’s all I’m going to give her right now. And yet she stays.

“Just being in there”—Isabelle nods to the church—“you kind of start thinking about … soul stuff. Right and wrong.”

“I know what you mean,” I say, thinking of my terror at the holy water. If it feels good, I am a good person. If it stings, evil. If only it were that easy.

Then Isabelle says, “I started adding up all the things I felt guilty about.” She laughs unhappily. “The list got too long, so I stopped.”

Curious, I ask, “What else was on the list?”

“Well, you were at the top,” she says. “But right after that”—this she has to say to the steps—“was letting Chloe walk home alone that night.”

So—I am not the only one who feels guilty over Chloe’s death.

“Come on, you couldn’t know what was going to happen.” I wonder who I’m absolving here—Isabelle or myself.

Isabelle shakes her head. “I should have known. She was a total wreck—ever since school started. And it wasn’t getting better with time. You probably heard about the cafeteria thing.”

I nod.

Isabelle continues. “Her parents put her on chill pills after that. But they obviously didn’t work. Or maybe they made her more crazy, who knows. Plus, I’m sure you know …”

I’m not sure what she means, so I shake my head.

“Oliver breaking up with her? Because he supposedly wanted to get back together with you?”

“That’s Zeena’s story, not mine.”

“Yeah, Zeen didn’t do Chloe any favors spreading that around,” says Isabelle bitterly.

“So she was freaking out.”

“It was more than that. She wasn’t thinking right.” Isabelle blinks; tears run down her face. “She wasn’t the Chloe I knew. Like she was hallucinating or something.”

Or bewitched.

“What happened that night?” I ask.

Isabelle gives a big, shuddering sigh. “She was in a severely bad head space. Like, meds and vodka, probably not a great combo, right? Thank God Zeena wasn’t there. She would’ve just made it worse. As it was, Chloe and I spent the whole night in a corner obsessing about—”

“Let me guess.”

“She was convinced—don’t take this the wrong way.”

“I won’t.”

“She was convinced you were out to get her. She said you were stalking her at school. Even when you weren’t around, she could supposedly feel you thinking about her. That night, she said she could practically hear you.”