Thirteens

by Kate Alice Marshall

  “My parents died in a car accident,” she said. Car accidents were normal.

  He looked stricken. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, feeling guilty. But the truth would have only made him feel worse for asking. She added the lie to her list.

  The bus pulled up in front of the school a few minutes later, and the rest of the students started grabbing their bags and rushing off. The school was a huge, imposing brick building, standing against the dark backdrop of the towering pines that were everywhere in Eden Eld.

  One side of the front courtyard had been decorated with hay bales and scarecrows and pumpkins, and fake spiderwebs stretched over the front archway, but the Halloween decorations somehow made the place less spooky. It was scarier by itself, with its tall, narrow windows and the looming clock tower on the north side of the building.

  Halloween. She’d been able to ignore that it was coming, holed up in Ashford House, but she couldn’t get away from it now. Today was Wednesday. Saturday was Halloween, and that meant it was her birthday. She was going to be thirteen.

  The first birthday she would celebrate without her mother.

  “Who do you have first period?” Otto asked. She forced herself to look away from the decorations.

  “Mr. Blackham?” she said. “Chemistry.”

  “Oh, he’s great,” he said. “He lets us light things on fire for science and make ice cream with liquid nitrogen, which is totally dangerous and awesome. I can show you how to get there, if you want. This place is kind of a labyrinth.” He said labyrinth with clear enthusiasm for both the word and the concept. There wasn’t any pity in his eyes at all. A little sympathy, but not that oh-you-poor-kitten look she was so used to. Her stomach balled up in one big knot. Now she felt even worse for lying to him. But how did you tell someone you just met I live with my aunt because my mother tried to kill me?

  You didn’t. Not if you wanted to be normal.

  “That would be great,” she said, feeling the puppet strings at the corners of her mouth. “That would be perfect.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE DAY’S LESSON did not involve lighting anything on fire, for science or otherwise, to Eleanor’s great relief. She knew fire too well now. She knew how different things smelled when they burned—walls, carpet, furniture. She knew the sound of glass cracking from heat and the grit of ash and soot that never seemed to scrub off her skin. So it was a relief to simply open a textbook and stare down at the diagram of a water molecule as Mr. Blackham directed them to the vocabulary lesson.

  But they had hardly begun when a boy with mousy brown hair and mousy brown eyes darted in and handed a note to Mr. Blackham. He squinted at it before calling out, “Eleanor?”

  She raised a tentative hand to shoulder height. He smiled a little, and she flushed. Of course he knew who she was. She was the New Girl. “Ms. Foster would like to speak to you,” Mr. Blackham said. At her blank look, he sighed and pulled his glasses down his nose so he could look over them at her. “The headmistress. Left, down the hall, right, the office is right there.”

  “Is something wrong?” she asked. Her mind raced through every terrible thing she could imagine—Uncle Ben hurt at work. Something wrong with the baby, with Jenny. The house—houses as old as Ashford House had old wiring, too. All it took was a spark to start a fire.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Mr. Blackham said, with the sort of tenderness that meant he knew about her mother and would be one of those adults who treated her like she was seven, not almost thirteen. “I’m sure everything’s fine.”

  If he didn’t know, he couldn’t be sure.

  She hopped off her stool and grabbed her bag. She hurried out of the classroom, a sour taste at the back of her throat. Her fingers found the shiny patch of skin on her palm. Without any students in the halls, her shoes echoed on the tiles, the sounds bouncing against the walls and falling back at her until it sounded like copies of her were walking to either side.

  Being called to the headmistress’s office wasn’t good, was it? Not on her first day. Had she done something wrong? She couldn’t think of anything. She’d been normal. Mostly.

  Except for the clock, maybe. And the bird, maybe. But no one else knew about those.

  Mr. Blackham’s directions brought her to a large oak door, like something borrowed from a castle. She reached for the knob, but it flew open of its own accord, nearly hitting her. The girl who hurtled out of the office did hit her—a glancing blow on the shoulder that still nearly took them both tumbling to the ground. The girl caught her by the arm, hauling her upright.

  At the touch, Eleanor’s skin crawled, like insects scuttling over her wrist—the same feeling she’d gotten when Otto took her hand. The girl dropped her arm and blew out a breath, kicking loose strands of coppery hair away from her face. The rest of it was back in a sloppy ponytail. She wasn’t wearing her school blazer, and her white polo shirt was wrinkled and only half tucked in to her slacks.

  “Watch out!” the girl chided her. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous around here?”

  “I—” Eleanor began, but the girl was taking off again down the hall already, her sneakers squeaking on the tile. Eleanor watched her go, rubbing her wrist, though the tingling had already stopped.

  She shook her head. It was probably nothing. Nerves.

  She turned back to the door, which had swung shut. Tentatively, she opened it. This time, nothing jumped out at her, and she stepped into the office. Inside, a gray-haired woman with purple lipstick sat typing at a computer. She looked up when Eleanor entered and pursed her lips.

  “She’s waiting for you,” the woman said in the kind of scratchy voice you got from smoking cigarettes all your life, and pointed over her shoulder at a second, much less intimidating door leading to an interior office. Eleanor slinked past her desk. The woman started typing furiously.

  The inner office door stood open a crack. Eleanor knocked tentatively, pushing it open a bit at the same time, and poked her head in.

  A woman about her mom’s age sat behind a huge oak desk that matched the large office door. The legs were carved into gnarled tree trunks that bulged outward before curving back in toward the wide, flat surface. The woman behind the desk had skin as milky as white marble, her features precise, giving her a sculpted look. She wore her orange-red hair scraped back in a tight bun. Her lipstick was bright red and her eyes bright green—everything about her was bright as polished gems. She made Eleanor think of serpents and of wicked queens, like in the fairy tales her mother used to read to her.

  “Miss Barton. Please, take a seat.” She waved at the armchair opposite her, across the desk, and Eleanor sank into it. She felt like she should say something, but she couldn’t imagine what. Ms. Foster folded her hands on top of the desk and peered at her through black-rimmed glasses. “How is your first day going so far?” she asked.

  “Um. All right,” Eleanor said. “I was only in class for a few minutes.”

  “But you haven’t encountered any problems?”

  “No,” Eleanor said. “No problems.”

  “Good. Very good. Now, I’m sorry that we haven’t met before today. Normally I insist on meeting all of our students at some point in the application process—but you didn’t have a normal application process, did you?”

  “No, I guess not. I don’t really know—I know my aunt—”

  “Jenny is a delightful woman,” Ms. Foster said with a wide smile. Her teeth were very white and very straight. “But it’s not really on her account that I waived the usual procedure.”

  “It isn’t?” Eleanor asked.

  “Your mother. Claire. She was a dear friend of mine,” Ms. Foster said. “We grew up together, here in Eden Eld. When my father was the headmaster. We got into all sorts of trouble.” She chuckled like she expected Eleanor to join in, b
ut Eleanor’s mouth was dry. No one had said her mother’s name out loud to Eleanor, not that she could remember, since the fire. “I know that you are having a very difficult time right now. But I want you to know that you can come to me. For whatever you need,” Ms. Foster said.

  Her words overflowed with warmth, but a cold shiver went down Eleanor’s spine. She mumbled that she understood. Her eyes dropped away from Ms. Foster’s. It was hard to hold that bright green gaze.

  A silver picture frame sat on the corner of Ms. Foster’s desk. The photo was of a smiling Ms. Foster, in the same dark blue suit she wore now. Next to her stood a weary-looking man with gray at his temples and a long, sorrowful nose. And between them, their hands on her shoulders, was the redheaded girl who’d nearly knocked Eleanor over, a smudge of dirt on her cheek and a grin stretched so wide you knew she was faking for the camera.

  “My daughter,” Ms. Foster said. “Pip.”

  “We’ve met. Sort of,” Eleanor said. If you could call that a meeting.

  “My one and only,” Ms. Foster said with a kind of sigh, and then she clapped her hands, making Eleanor jump in her seat. “Well! You had better get back to class. You don’t want to get too far behind. So much to do and so very little time.”

  She smiled with those perfectly white, perfectly straight teeth. Eleanor stood. And then she paused. “You said you were friends with my mom?” she asked.

  “Very good friends. Everyone knows each other in Eden Eld, of course, but Claire and I shared a number of interests in common,” Ms. Foster said, tapping one long nail on the desktop thoughtfully.

  “What kind of interests?” Eleanor asked.

  “Oh, you know the sorts of things that teenage girls can get up to,” Ms. Foster said. A strange look flashed over her face. Something that was nearly sadness, and nearly satisfaction. “Or you wouldn’t know quite yet, I suppose. Claire and I had a special interest in local history. Though it led us to quite different places.”

  “I see,” Eleanor said, though she didn’t. She could tell that Ms. Foster wasn’t going to say any more about it, though, and there was something very uncomfortable about standing in front of that huge desk with those perfectly green eyes fixed on her. She swallowed. “I should go, then.”

  “Wonderful,” Ms. Foster said with another sparkling smile, and Eleanor backed away two steps before turning and hurrying from the room. She shut the door behind her and started to walk back out past the secretary’s desk, but then she froze. The secretary had stopped typing and was staring in confused puzzlement at the last line she’d written.

  Get out gET out GET OUT get OUT GeT OuT get oUt of Eden eLd

  “Well,” the secretary said in her hoarse, cigarette-wrecked voice. “Well.” Her chin wagged back and forth, an odd sort of twitching, and she stabbed one yellow-stained finger against the backspace key. “Well. Well,” she said with each stab, and one by one the letters vanished, until all that was left was a normal email. Then she blinked and smiled brightly at Eleanor. “Is there anything else you need, dear?” she asked.

  “No,” Eleanor said hastily. “Nothing, thanks.”

  She fled.

  Three

  Eleanor made it through chemistry without any more interruptions. Then she had math class (her second-weakest subject), and lunch (she looked for Otto, but didn’t spot him), and then it was time for history, where they were informed by the energetic teacher, Ms. Edith Green, that they would be walking into town to conduct an educational scavenger hunt.

  The rest of the class was pulling on their coats and chattering with the buzzy excitement of being let out of the stuffy classroom for the day when Pip Foster skidded into the room, every bit as disheveled as she had been that morning.

  Ms. Edith—she insisted on being “Ms. Edith” rather than “Ms. Green”—sighed. “Late again, Pip,” she lamented. “Punctuality is an important life skill.” The corner of her mouth curled up in an odd little smile, one Eleanor would almost call smug. “Though I suppose it doesn’t . . .”

  She didn’t finish that trailing sentence. Pip wasn’t paying attention, anyway. She’d spotted Eleanor and was staring at her openly, frowning. Eleanor’s cheeks got hot. She looked away. And then she sneaked a quick sidelong look at the redheaded girl.

  Eleanor hadn’t liked Ms. Foster—hadn’t liked the way she looked at Eleanor like she was a specimen in a jar, hadn’t liked her too-sweet smile and the way she spoke to Eleanor as if she didn’t really understand. The way you spoke to a pet. To be perfectly precise, she gave Eleanor the creeps. And when Pip had touched her, she’d gotten that crawling feeling over her skin. But then, it had happened with Otto, too. And she liked Otto.

  So what did that mean about Pip? Pip seemed nothing like her mother—like she’d gotten her looks and nothing else. Every inch of Ms. Foster was polished and controlled, while Pip seemed like she had so much energy that it knocked everything a little askew, from her mussed hair to her untied shoelaces. She’d doodled in purple pen on her arm, squiggles and stars and exclamation points, and there was a birthmark peeking out of the collar of her shirt, where her neck and her shoulder met.

  Was that a key?

  Eleanor blinked, looking more closely, but Pip had shifted her bag on her shoulder, and the birthmark—if that was what it was—disappeared.

  “It’s rude to stare,” Pip told her, but half her mouth hooked up in a grin. Then she darted out of the classroom after the rest of the students, leaving Eleanor to trail behind.

  She’d probably just imagined the birthmark. And she’d probably imagined the thing in the tree, and the wickedness in Ms. Foster’s smile. This place was normal. She was normal.

  Everything was going to be fine.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WAS A short walk from the Academy to the town square. If it weren’t for the modern cars, it would have been like walking through a time warp. Eden Eld was all cobbled streets and stately pines, quaint little buildings with bright white shutters, and, even this late in the season, tidy little beds of flowers everywhere. Even the autumn leaves had fallen in an orderly fashion, the perfect shades of red and yellow and orange, not one of them turned brown and lumpy.

  The few flowers that were still in bloom peeked out from window boxes and along the edges of walkways. They were all the same kind, one that Eleanor had never seen before she came to Eden Eld. They had reddish purple petals that were oddly thick, and their leaves were long, with jagged edges. They were beautiful, Eleanor supposed, but unsettling, too. Those leaves looked like they might prick you. But something about them was familiar.

  “Gather up!” Ms. Edith called, waving them toward her in the center of the town square. It was a tidy little plaza with trees—ringed by the flowers—on each corner and a monument at the center, a stone pillar with words carved on its imposing granite surface. “Take a worksheet, find a partner, and fill in the answers as you find them. You are free to wander, but be back in thirty minutes to turn in your papers. And if you’re not sure where to search, ask around! Learning is connection! History lives in all of us!”

  Ms. Edith’s eyes were feverishly bright with the power of learning. Off to Eleanor’s right, Pip snorted and rolled her eyes a little. Eleanor hid a smile. Ms. Edith was a little overenthusiastic. She was younger than Aunt Jenny, and Eleanor was guessing she hadn’t been teaching long.

  But she was thinking less about Ms. Edith and more about the assignment. Letting them wander? Talk to the locals? It would have been unimaginable at her old school. But she’d heard it over and over again: Eden Eld is the safest town west of the Mississippi. Why the Mississippi, she always wondered.

  But they were right. She’d looked it up. Eden Eld’s crime rate was effectively zero. They only had one police officer, and she mostly directed traffic. The perfect place to raise a family, their website said. Our children are our future.

 
“Do you want to buddy up?” Pip asked her, shuffling over with a look of bored resignation. She gestured vaguely with the pair of worksheets already in her hand. “I’ve done a million of these things. We can probably knock it out in five minutes and go get some cocoa or something.”

  “I, uh—”

  “Otto said to look out for you,” Pip said, like this explained something. “He said you’re all right.” She seemed unconvinced, but open to the possibilities.

  “You know Otto?” Eleanor asked.

  “Everyone knows everyone here,” Pip said. “It’s the worst. Except Otto, obviously. He’s the best. Even if he is a giant dork. So what do you say?”

  Eleanor bit her lip. She wanted to be friends with Pip, in a way that also made her want to hide in a very deep hole or a very dark closet and hope that Pip never looked at her again because what if she did something weird and Pip told Otto and then neither one of them ever spoke to Eleanor ever again and she had to change her name and move to Poughkeepsie and—

  “Great!” Pip declared, as if Eleanor had answered her, and shoved the second worksheet into her hands.

  “Oh. Okay. Thanks,” Eleanor managed. She took the offered worksheet and looked at the first question. “‘What is written on the Founders’ Monument?’”

  “I already got that one,” Pip said. “I can fill it in for you.” She reached for the paper.

  “Philippa, the spirit of the assignment is as important as the letter of the assignment,” Ms. Edith said, drifting by on a cloud of instructional bliss.

  Pip sighed. “I liked her better when she was my babysitter. At least then I didn’t get graded,” she confided. She jerked her chin toward the granite pillar, which several students were clustered around. Eleanor hadn’t had a chance to learn people’s names yet, which made her feel as if there were a barrier between her and the rest of them, like a foggy pane of glass she was stuck on the wrong side of.

  She hadn’t felt that with Otto. And strangely not with Pip either, who shouldered her way through the small crowd. Eleanor clung close, taking advantage of the gap behind her. Pip reached the monument and flourished her hands. “Ta-da,” she said, and then, conspicuously looking away, recited the words on the monument. “‘In honor of those present at the signing, for ensuring the safety and prosperity of Eden Eld for generations to come.’” She continued with the three short lines inscribed in blockier text beneath. “‘Eden Eld. Founded 1851. Drawn Onward.’ Kind of a terrible town motto, if you ask me, but weirdly they didn’t.”