The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove (26 page)

sounded like several voices speaking together, and the sound faded beneath the

rush of wind and rustle of branches. Through the trees ahead, I thought I saw a

flash of a light, but it was gone in an instant.

Then something moved. Two deer stepped from behind the trees to the

edge of light from the porch. They stared at me with liquid black eyes, and their

ears twitched forward. This was the first time I had seen real deer and their

beauty filled me with wonder.

Then they turned and slowly walked away. I went back inside and watched

television until I fell asleep on the sofa.

The next day, I tried to be patient, but I couldn’t wait to see Lucky again, so

I went early for my tutoring session.

Mrs. Monroe met me at the door and said, “Lucky’s not back from the

movies yet. He went to a matinee with his friends.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking,
the friends he says he doesn’t have
. “I can come

back later.”

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“Oh, no,” she said. “Would you like to wait in the family room?”

“If it’s okay.”

Mrs. Monroe gave me a glass of juice, and I answered her questions about

my classes while glancing at the clock on the wall.

“I saw deer by the cottage last night,” I said.

“Did you? A herd lives here. We have other wildlife. There are the birds

and squirrels, of course and raccoons, possums, and skunks. There used to be

foxes, too, but no one’s seen one for years.”

“So some of the noises I hear at night are probably animals?”

“Certainly. One of the neighbors has peacocks, too, and their cries are

eerie. They sound like a woman crying,” she said. “Please stay out of the grove

at night, Jane. The raccoons aren’t cute cartoon characters – they’re huge and

rough. They’ve killed cats and gotten into bad scrapes with dogs.”

“They wouldn’t attack a person, though, would they?”

“Not normally, but an unhealthy animal will behave unnaturally and so will

a threatened animal. You’d be in danger if you got too close to a den with

babies,” she said. “We like providing a habitat for the animals, but it means that

we let the nocturnal animals have it at night.”

When I heard the front door open, my heart leapt.

Lucky came into the family room. He was wearing a narrow-brimmed hat,

aviator sunglasses, a long-sleeved black t-shirt and jeans. He looked incredibly

sexy.

“Hi, Mom. Hey, Jane.”

“Jane’s been waiting for you, Lucien.”

“I’m on time,” he said in a bored voice.

“Dinner will be in an hour and a half,” his mother said. “No hats in the

house, young man.”

Lucky took his hat off and twirled it around on his fingers and said, “Come

on,” to me.

I followed him, wondering about his gruff tone.

When we got upstairs and into the study he dropped onto the sofa with his

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long legs sprawled out. His eyes were unreadable behind the sunglasses. “Could

you be any more obvious?”

“I haven’t said anything!”

“You don’t need to say anything. Anyone can read it on your face.”

He sat there judging me, superior, and I snapped, “This is what you meant

by using me. You want me when it’s convenient for you, but you’re embarrassed

by me. You don’t think I’m worthy of you.”

My tone got his attention. He took off the shades and sat up. “I’m sorry. I

don’t know how to do this so neither of us gets in trouble, Janey,” he said. “If we

want to keep our relationship, we can’t let anyone know. You told me yourself

how Jack acted. You saw Sage. Can’t you be patient?”

“For how long?”

“Not long. A few months.” He reached for me and pulled me onto his lap.

“I don’t want to lose what we have, okay?”

I looked into his beautiful face and said, “Okay, but you have to be nicer to

me, Lucky.”

He smiled and said, “How’s your arm? Let me see.”

I pushed my sleeve up above my elbow.

He slowly peeled off the bandage. The area was purple and yellow around

red-brown scab.

He held me around the waist with one arm and bent his head to lick the cut,

making me tremble with anticipation.

Suddenly he lifted me off him and fell back against the sofa, breathing

heavily. “Not here. Someone could come in,” he said. “You are so good to me,

Jane, and I’m such a tool.”

“Why do you always put yourself down? So I can feel sorry for you?”

He grinned. “No, because I know I should be a better person.”

“Then try to be a better person,” I said. “Lucky, why does Hattie have a

knife like yours?”

“Lots of people have them. Didn’t your friends have knives?” He took the

penknife out of his pocket and ran the blunt edge of it over the rough surface of

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my new scab.

I tried to keep my voice steady, and said, “A couple, but for protection.”

Wilde used to hide a jackknife in her Doc Martens.

“Maybe it’s a Greenwood thing. If you want one, I’ll get one for you. As a

present. Maybe you’d like a Swiss Army knife, with all the attachments,

screwdrivers and scissors.”

He ran the tip of the knife ever so lightly down the inside of my arm to my

wrist. “The blood is a rush, like a drug,” he said. “It’s better than a drug because

it makes me healthier and stronger.”

“It couldn’t. The amount you take is insignificant in terms of protein.

What if I was sick?”

“You’re not sick.”

“It must wrong to let you do this to me,” I said, getting off the sofa and

crossing the room.

“No, it’s an act of kindness.” His blue eyes looked into mine. “You trust

me because you know I need you as much as... It’s not one-sided. I’ll always

take care of you, too. I promise.”

We heard footsteps coming down the hall. Lucky folded the knife and put

it back in his pocket right as Mrs. Monroe came into the room carrying a bowl of

purple grapes. “You don’t even have your books out!”

“Sorry, mom!” He spoke with innocent prep boy cheeriness. “I was telling

Jane what we’d reviewed last week in class.”

His mother handed the bowl to her son. “You were probably talking about

the party last night,” she said. “Jane, don’t let him distract you from his

chemistry.”

“No, ma’am.”

When she left the room, I said, “She’s paying me by the hour. Did you get

back any of your homework?”

He brought out his work and I tried to focus on the numbers and symbols.

Dinner was quiet because Jack wasn’t around. It was homemade lasagna

with thick tomato sauce. I’d glance at Lucky as he chomped into garlic bread and

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think about what he’d done to me and then I’d wonder if the Monroe’s had any

idea about their son’s
strangeness
.

Lucky walked me home after dinner. He talked about his school and his

classmates. I tried to remember the names of his friends. Most of them had been

at the party: tall, loud young men with longish hair and self-satisfied expressions.

“So like Julian, he borrowed his dad’s new Beamer and when he came out

of this club, it’s gone, stolen. Hilarious,” Lucky said and let out a loud laugh.

“So I do him a bro
favor
and drive him home. He sneaks into the house and goes

to bed, and when the car is missing the next day and his old man thinks someone

stole it from the garage, and Julian acts all shocked.”

“That’s really irresponsible and dishonest.”

“Whoever stole it is the thief, not Julian, and besides the insurance will pay.

No need for the J-man to get hassled.”

Once we got to my door, he said, “Maybe I’ll come by sometime this week.

See you.”

As easily as that, Lucky established the ground rules for the relationship.

He would visit me when he felt like it and I wouldn’t complain. He got to indulge

in his strange compulsion and I got to be alone with him, to touch and be touched

by an exquisite man.

I was so fixated on Lucky that I didn’t care about my secret enemy.

Nothing else mattered, except having him with me as he fed his compulsion with

my blood.

I took my composition book from its hiding place and wrote everything that

had happened recently with Lucky, Jack and at the party. It was after 11 when I

finished so I went to bed.

ON MONDAY,
I raced home from class so I would be there if Lucky called or

came by. I finished the rest of my homework before I tried to read my
Night

Terrors
assignment, a story called
The Vampyre
by John William Polidari.

The story was about a young man named Aubrey, his best friend,

mysterious Lord Ruthven, and a beautiful young woman. Aubrey goes into a

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dangerous forest even though it was “the resort of the vampyres in their nocturnal

orgies.”

When vampires kill the beautiful girl, Aubrey becomes sick from grief.

Lord Ruthven cares for him. Then Lord Ruthven dies and returns to life, causing

Aubrey go insane because he’s promised never to tell. Then Aubrey’s sister is

slaughtered: “Aubrey's sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!” The end.

It was the stupidest story I’d ever read. I looked up the words I didn’t

understand, read the story again, and composed a 350-word synopsis.

Lucky didn’t call that night, and I fell asleep thinking,
tomorrow he’ll

come, tomorrow he’ll call, tomorrow he’ll hold me close, maybe tomorrow he’ll

kiss me…
Hope made me just as stupid as Aubrey going into the dangerous

forest.

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The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove – Marta Acosta

“We believe that co-curricular activities enrich our educational experience.

Students are encouraged to participate in clubs and activities. Every club

must be approved by administration and will be assigned a faculty sponsor.”

Birch Grove Student Handbook

“Jane? Jane?”

Mrs. Monroe was at the front of the classroom and I had been zoning out.

Her navy suit had white piping along the edges. She always looked so stylish.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, could you repeat that?”

She said calmly, “I asked what you thought of Aubrey in and his

predicament with Lord Ruthven.”

“The story makes no sense,” I said. “Why does Aubrey keep a promise to

Lord Ruthven when he believes Ruthven’s a vampire?”

“Do you think he should have broken the promise?”

“Of course --especially since his secrecy endangers others. Why is Aubrey

so delicate that he goes crazy so easily?”

“It’s a metaphor,” a senior said.

“A metaphor represents something, and I don’t think this does,” I answered.

“The author believes Aubrey’s stupid, too, because he describes him as trusting in

poetry over reality.”

Constance said, “I agree with Jane. I don’t think the author put a lot of

thought into the story. The structure was clumsy, the writing awkward, and the

characters were cliché. The young girl is described as…” Constance looked

down at her notes and read, “having an ‘almost fairy form,’ and being so innocent

that she is ‘unconscious of his love.’ Hah!”

The other students’ laughed with Constance, who added, “The author had

as many illusions about young women as his character did about life.”

The other students began speaking up about
The Vampyre.
One girl said,

“The vampire is only used as a mechanism. The author could have used a

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werewolf, or a ghost. It doesn’t matter, because he has no larger meaning to his

story.”

I’d never heard students criticize an assignment so freely.

Mrs. Monroe said, “Do you see any similar themes or symbolism running

through these works?”

We all began discussing how the main characters’ pursuit of pleasure led

them to ignore warnings of danger. Mrs. Monroe turned the discussion to the role

of nature and symbols of life and death. She was tying all the stories together in a

way that made sense.

I remembered something one of my Alpha pals said: “The whole is bigger

than the sum of its parts.” While it didn’t work in math, I saw that it could make

sense with literature and even with life.

I was thinking of the
Night Terrors
discussion as I walked to Latin class

and bumped into Catalina in the doorway. I said, “Sorry,” and stepped back to let

her go through first.

She pursed her full lips and snapped, “Clumsy girl!”

“I
said
I was sorry.” I followed her into the room and we both sat at our

desks.

As she arranged her books, she said, “Sage is jealous to anyone close to the

Monroes and always trying to climb the social ladder. You, at least, have no

pretension,” she said with a slow, bored bat of her long eyelashes. “So much

foolishness over Lucien, who is exquisite, but this is a very small village.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatu
.”

I had studied the quote before: The world wants to be deceived, so let it be