The Shadow (3 page)

I selected a red V-neck T-shirt whose neckline flowed so far down my chest that the top of my bra was visible. By the time I realized this, it was too late, as I was already seven minutes into my hideously awkward fifteen-minute drive to high school with my dad.

He was wearing the same pilly green sweater he’d been wearing the day before. His glasses hung over his nose at a tilt, his hair was matted and full of dandruff, and the bags under his eyes were the color of plums. He looked like an incredibly tense zombie, like at any moment he might drive us into a ditch and end it all so he wouldn’t have to be awake any more.

I felt awful for him. His wife was gone, his two children had been kidnapped, and only one had returned.

“What did the police say about Paul?” I asked gently.

“They said they had a few leads. They’re gonna find him,” he whispered, wiping tears from the corners of his tired, sagging eyes.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get him out,” I said, my own chin starting to tremble. I was just as lost as he was, and we couldn’t help one another. “I was so disoriented, and I honestly don’t remember anything. They must have knocked me out.”

Dad put a hand on my shoulder. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about, Brooke. I’m just glad you’re home.”

Dad sighed, without any relief. A feeling of utter emptiness filled the car. Dad’s home, as he knew it, had vanished. And so had mine. We both stared straight ahead, two desperate people, just coasting along.

I remembered Wilhelm’s words: “Brooke has a desperate problem, and you’ve been sent to solve it.”

I perked up a little bit. Maybe if I find Paul, I thought, then I can go home
.
My job was to fix Brooke’s life, and her missing brother and grieving father certainly seemed to be her biggest problems—aside from an inscrutable shower knob. I decided on a mantra to carry me through the day:
Find Paul. Find Paul.

Upper Cordaline High School looked like an English country manor. It consisted of one massive Tudor-style building surrounded by acres and acres of grass so lush and green that it actually shimmered. The school itself was covered in ivy. It looked like the students should have been wearing tweed jackets or wizarding robes instead of what they were actually wearing, which was mostly skinny jeans, graphic tees, and Toms for the girls and cargo shorts, hoodies, and Vans for the boys. Not that I had done any better.

As I moved across the impossibly green lawn it occurred to me that I had no idea what my first class was, or why I was there at seven o’clock in the morning instead of eight, which I remembered, somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness, was the time that school usually started.

When I reached the steps outside the front entrance, I felt like I was being avoided. Every time I tried to make eye contact with someone, they quickly shifted their gaze to either the floor or the sky.

Of course. I’d been kidnapped. The natural reaction was to stare, to see if I’d been scraped and bruised, to see if I hung my shoulders like a victim, to see if I was malnourished or on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I was like an accident on the shoulder of a highway, slowing the foot traffic through the front entrance of the school. I just kept moving, even though I didn’t know where I was supposed to go.

I noticed a general migration to the left, so I followed the herd. They all filed into a large tiered room at the end of the hallway and sat in sections, boys on one side of the room, girls on the other. A man in a red bowtie sat at a grand piano at the front of the room.

Apparently, I was a singer.

I took a seat in the soprano section, because Brooke just seemed like a soprano. The sopranos around me looked confused, like I’d been brainwashed during my time in the van and forgot how high my voice went, which wasn’t so far off.

“Brooke?” came a girl’s timid voice from the back row of the alto section. I spun around and saw two girls with brown hair patting an empty seat. “We saved you your usual seat.”

I laughed nervously and made my way to the back row. All eyes were on me as I shuffled past legs and backpacks and purses and plopped into the empty seat. I could tell they all thought I was crazy.

“Hey,” said the bigger of the brunettes as she nervously put her arm around me and squeezed.

“We love you,” said the smaller one, patting my knee. Neither of them knew what to say beyond that, and neither did I, so the three of us just stared ahead, fidgeting beneath a prickly blanket of unfamiliarity.

It’s a lucky thing that Brooke had placed a laminated version of her class schedule inside one of her binders, otherwise I wouldn’t have known where to go next, which was apparently AP American Literature with Ms. Peterson in room 22A.

I shuffled through the hallway trying to look casual as I searched for classroom 22A.

“You seem to be finding your way alright,” said a familiar voice.

I whipped my head to the right and saw Will, who was wearing the same crisp white shirt and khakis, but now sported a backpack and a backwards newsboy cap.

“Was that the coolest hat you could find in heaven, or wherever you live?” I sneered.

“I  . . . I was told these were the style,” he bristled.

“Sorry. I’m a little on edge. I’m still a complete stranger to myself. And my clothes don’t fit,” I said, yanking up my shirt. “And I haven’t gathered any information, about anything. I’m a bad detective. Or  . . . Shadow, or Borrowee. Or whatever.”

Will put a hand on my shoulder. “Abby, you were picked for this for a reason.”

“What reason?”

Will’s odd little nostrils flared and his eyes bored into mine. “You have a natural talent for this.”

“I do?”

“Not everyone becomes a Shadow, Abby. Who you are, where you came from, what you’ve done—these things brought you here.”

I blushed a little, but I wasn’t sure why. I shook my head.

“Well, I’d like to give back the position. I don’t want to be a Shadow. I’m too lonely.”

Will pouted his bottom lip. “I’m here…”

“No, it’s not you,” I scowled, “it’s just that everyone is staring at me, waiting for me to have a nervous breakdown, and my best friends don’t know what to say to me, and I have no idea where Paul is! Where is Paul?”

I must have shouted that last sentence, because when I looked up, everyone in the hallway had stopped to look at me. I turned back to Will, who was smirking sheepishly.

“To answer your next question, no, they can’t see me,” he whispered.

For all intents and purposes, I’d been shouting to myself in the middle of a crowded hallway.

A woman with dark red hair and pointed rhinestone glasses emerged from room 22A, put her arm around me, and whisked me down the hallway. “Let’s go talk in my office, Brooke.”

Ms. Peterson’s office was small and cramped and paneled in dark wood. The bookshelves lining the walls were overflowing, not just with heavy, dusty volumes, but with stacks of papers as well. I could barely see her face over the piles and piles of manila folders on her desk. It looked like Ms. Peterson had been neglecting her grading duties for some time.

“I know this must be so hard for you, kid,” she said in a Chicago accent. As her hazel eyes glimmered lovingly from behind those ostentatious rhinestone glasses, I got the sense that Ms. Peterson might be Brooke’s favorite teacher.

I found myself letting out a heavy sigh and resting my head on the front of her desk. “You have no idea,” I said.

She reached over the stacks of manila folders and patted my head. “You know you can always talk to me. Care to tell me what’s going on in that head?”

What’s going on?
I thought. Oh, not much, except I’m not Brooke, I am a person named Abby Grace who may or may not be dead. I am trapped in this foreign body and surrounded by these unknown people and I may be trapped here if I don’t find this stranger’s kidnapped brother, and how I am going to do that is beyond me.

Of course, if I said all that out loud, I would probably get Brooke shipped off to the local psych ward. So I kept it simple. “I’m just so scared,” I said.

Ms. Peterson let out a heavy sigh. “I can’t even imagine. Throwing yourself out the side of a moving van  . . . It’s just so awful.”

I stiffened. The only people who knew I’d thrown myself out of a moving van were Dad, the police, and the people who saw me do it. I closed my eyes and recalled the moment. The smells in the evening air, the glow of street lamps, and the sound of feet against the pavement flooded through my mind. I could see every face of every person on that street. The features and details flicked from one to another; it was as if I were looking at a slideshow of profiles. Ms. Peterson had not been among them.

Her hand on my head suddenly felt icy, so I sat up.

“What’s wrong, Brooke?”

“Oh  . . . ” I trailed off, my eyes wide and my pulse quick. “Nothing.”

Chapter Four

Thursday, 3:22 PM

A
ll I could think about the whole day was Ms. Peterson, with her hair like a burning bush and her gold, wire-rimmed glasses, as she said, ‘Throwing yourself out of the side of a moving van  . . . how awful!’. How did she know I’d thrown myself out the side? Sure, people who get kidnapped usually end up in a van one way or another, but not everyone throws herself out the side. She’d said it with the speed and authority of someone who was there when it happened.

The drivers in the front were wearing ski masks. I’d assumed they were male, but perhaps one of them had actually been Ms. Peterson. I swirled images of the van around in my brain, over and over, trying to remember if I’d caught a glimpse of burning red hair or rhinestone glasses, but nothing materialized.

The rest of the day ground along like a runaway train trying to come to a halt and burning up on the tracks. There was gym class, where I couldn’t remember my locker combination and had to play volleyball in my flowing red shirt. There was a pop quiz in AP art history, which Brooke would later find (if I ever managed to fix her life and return her body) that she’d failed. There was a physics teacher with a lisp so severe that little bullets of spittle exploded from her mouth and landed on my cheek and forehead. There was a French class so loud and so rude that the teacher spent much of it crying in the corner. And finally, at the end of a calculus class that might as well have been taught in Korean, the clock struck three, and I threw my binders in my backpack and headed toward Ms. Peterson’s office.

I tiptoed past the office window and saw Ms. Peterson at her desk, sitting behind all those stacks of papers. She had her feet up on the desk and she was talking on the phone, one of those old-fashioned black phones with a rotary dial. Ms. Peterson looked like she should be operating a switchboard in 1961 instead of teaching English in 2011.

I hurried past the window and waited by the lockers halfway down the hall for her to vacate her office.

I tried to look like I was doing something important, so I fiddled with the lock on the mauve metal locker I happened to be standing in front of, until a puny ninth grader with glasses thicker than a piece of toast scooted over and swatted my hand away. “Excuse me, Ma’am,” he scowled. “I think you have the wrong locker.”

Ma’am?

I scowled right back and moved away, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Ms. Peterson bustle out of her office and down the hallway in the opposite direction, so I moved in for the kill.

I knew that sneaking into the office of a member of the faculty was the sort of thing that would probably get me—Brooke—suspended, if I were caught, but the way Ms. Peterson had spoken to me about the van had made my gut twist in that special way that your gut twists if you think you hear someone breaking into your house. So I opened her door and swiftly shut it behind me.

The lights were off. The blinds were drawn. The only light inside the office was the fluorescent light of the hallway, filtering in through the tiny window in the door. All of Ms. Peterson’s manila folders lurked in the dense shadows, hiding their secrets. The room smelled like an old closet. I saw now that the bookshelves on either side were lined not only with books and folders, but with bizarre trinkets that looked outright spooky in the dark: an ivory elephant, a brass scale, a plastic security camera that didn’t seem to be attached to anything, a bottle of hairspray and six cat figurines.

It occurred to me that I didn’t know what to look for in that shadowy landfill of an office. Why would she possibly kidnap me, or for that matter, my younger brother Paul? Was she really a doctor who did evil medical experiments on teenagers in her basement? Should I be looking for a box with a scalpel and a skull saw? All I saw were knickknacks and folders.

I pulled open the long, thin drawer underneath her desk and found a knotted mess of paper clips, tacks, used erasers, and rubber bands so old that they’d lost all their elasticity and had begun to melt into one rubber glob.

There was another stack of drawers on the right side of the desk. The bottom was a file cabinet crammed with more untamed manila folders bursting with papers—did she save
every
assignment that
every
one of her students had
ever
done?—and the top drawer was  . . .

Locked.

I yanked desperately at the metal handle, but the drawer wouldn’t budge. It made sense that a teacher might lock a drawer in her desk, in case a student ever broke into her office to snoop around, but what could be important enough to hide? She left her students’ papers floating freely around the room, so she wasn’t too worried about their privacy. She was clearly more concerned with her own.

I dug through the drawer of loose office supplies and found a paper clip. I pulled one end of the taut metal loose and jiggled it in the little silver lock beneath the handle of the drawer, feeling very much like a spy. I thought maybe I should invest in a black unitard, or a trench coat and hat, to go with my new line of work. Maybe Shadowing wasn’t such a terrible job.

I jiggled the lock until little beads of sweat appeared on my forehead, but the drawer wouldn’t budge.