by Ali Standish
It’s Ruth, who has assumed her usual position just inside her gate. She’s still wearing her fuzzy bathrobe and pink slippers.
“No,” I say. “It wasn’t me.”
“Bah, I’m just kidding,” she says, swatting the air and—I think—trying to wink. “Want to come in? I’ve got a pot of coffee on.”
“No thanks,” I reply. “I don’t really, um, drink coffee. Since I’m a kid and all.”
She shrugs. “Well, you tell your mother we’re expecting her at the garden club next month. No excuses this time.”
She turns to hobble back to her house.
“Ruth?” I say suddenly, an idea popping into my head.
“Eh?” she grunts, looking at me expectantly. “Speak up, Emma. My hearing’s not what it was. That’ll be the first to go after your knees, mark my words.”
“Right,” I say, loudly this time. “Well, I was wondering—did Professor Swann ever have, like, a family? Kids or a wife or anything?”
Ruth squints her eyes, then shakes her head. “There was a wife once, but it didn’t last. I seem to recall he had a flame for someone else. But that didn’t work out too well—he’s been a bachelor ever since.” She lets out a bark of laughter, though I don’t really get what’s funny.
“So he wouldn’t have anyone to visit in the graveyard?”
“He only moved here when he started work at the college. His parents aren’t buried there, if that’s what you mean. What are you getting at, hmm?”
I smile and try to look casual. “Oh, nothing,” I say. “I just—I just wondered about him. Anyway, have a nice morning.”
Then I walk away, my mind buzzing so loud with thoughts I’m sure even Ruth can hear them.
And the flowers aren’t the only surprise I get on Sunday. Later that afternoon, Boomer and I run down to the meadows and slip into the Spinney to find that my pen pal has written again. As Boomer runs off to chase a stick floating down the stream, I draw Gram’s sweater tight around me, settle into the nook of Throne Rock, and begin to read.
When the wicked witch was done with her wicked spell, she blinked, and Ivy found herself able to move once more. Thinking only of escaping with her life, she spun round and ran. To her surprise, the witch made no move to stop her but merely cackled louder. “You can run, my child,” she cried, “but my curse will find you wherever you go!”
Back through the forest Ivy fled, and as she ran, a hard rain began to fall. It seemed to her as if every tree in the forest wept for her as she passed it by.
When she found herself once more at Poppy Cottage, she burst through the door and bolted it behind her. Shilling cried out when he saw her. Whether it was a cry of happiness or sadness, relief or fear, Ivy could not say, but perhaps it was all of these at once. The girl threw herself down next to him and buried her face in his fur. Then, finally, she began to weep.
It seemed to her that she wept for a very long time, but Shilling never moved, not even when his fur was soaked through with her tears. When finally Ivy could cry no more, she lifted herself up and looked around the empty cottage. It seemed smaller than it had before, darker and colder. Her eyes landed on the gloomy hearth, where the odd crutch her gran had been carving when she had taken ill still stood half-whittled. The little table was set for a meal Gran and Ivy would never share.
Ivy shivered. Her stomach pained her. She needed firewood and food to eat.
“Poor Shilling,” she said softly. “You must be hungry, too.”
And so it was that Ivy put her grandmother’s cloak around her shoulders and opened the door, only to find a village girl standing on the stoop. She looked nervous, and she held a pie tightly in both hands.
Ivy recognized her as the little girl she had seen in the bakery all those years ago. It was from this girl’s brother that Ivy had first learned of the witch. Ivy wanted to grab the girl by the shoulders, shake her, and tell her that her brother had been right, but he had been wrong, too. That the witch was far more wicked than he could have imagined.
“Yes?” she said instead.
The girl held out the pie. “It’s for your gran,” she said. “My mother is ever so thankful for the remedy she gave us. My brother’s cough has all but gone now.”
“Thank you,” said Ivy, stepping out onto the stoop. “But my gran is dead.”
The village girl looked at Ivy then, and her face drained of color. She pointed to the ground behind Ivy, but when Ivy looked, she saw nothing at all.
“What is it?” Ivy said. “What’s frightened you?”
“You’ve got—you’ve got no—” The girl’s voice trembled. “You’ve got no shadow.”
Then she thrust the pie into Ivy’s hands, turned away, and fled.
27
When Monday morning arrives, I can’t wait to get to school so Fina and I can talk about the flowers. Professor Swann left them for Gram, I’m sure of it. Could he have been the person in the graveyard on Halloween night, too?
When the bus pulls up to Ruby’s stop, she’s standing on the sidewalk. I wave to her.
But she keeps her head down and doesn’t look at me at all. Not even once she’s on the bus.
She walks right by me. Straight down to where the Graces are sitting on either side of the aisle. The Graces were particularly rude this morning, shaking their heads and staring at me with looks of disgust. Ruby hesitates, then slips into the seat beside one of them.
What is she thinking? I wait for the Grace she’s chosen to look shocked, to shriek at Ruby to get out of her seat. But she doesn’t. She gives Ruby a sideways look and simply shrugs.
The bus pulls away, and I turn my eyes forward, my stomach suddenly flipping over.
When we pull up at Edie’s stop, she climbs to the top of the stairs. She pauses there, staring hard at me for a moment, and then her face does a funny thing.
One second, she’s wearing her usual annoying smirk, and the next, her mouth and eyes are screwing up into this weird worried look. Her shoulders turn inward, and then she brushes past me as quickly as she can.
Totally confused, I perk my ears to listen to what she and the other girls are saying as the bus starts off again. I catch the words “sick,” “not fooling anyone,” and “so dangerous.”
When I peek over my shoulder, they’re all staring at me. Even Ruby.
Oh, Ruby, I think. What did you do?
I hurry off the bus at school, bumping into Sean—one of the guys who sits with Edie at lunch—as I step down onto the pavement.
“Watch it!” he barks, shooting me a dirty look. The kind that should really be reserved for the dog poop currently on the bottom of his shoe.
By now, the heat in my cheeks is like fire, and my hands have begun to shake. This feels like the dream where you show up naked to school. Except I’m wearing all my clothes. And I put makeup on like usual this morning to cover my spots.
So what is going on?
Fina’s standing in our regular place in front of school. Head down, I scurry toward her. But even with my eyes on my feet, I can still see people parting around me, giving me a lot of space as I pass.
“Is that the girl?” someone to my left says.
“Oh yeah,” says someone else. “I think so.”
When I reach Fina, her eyes are full of thunderclouds. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “What’s—what’s happening?”
“You didn’t see it?”
“See what?”
“Come on,” she says, linking her arm through mine and guiding me into school. We don’t stop until we get to the library. I collapse into the chair closest to the door. My legs are all wobbly.
“What’s going on, Fina?”
She has a look on her face like she’s about to get a shot at the doctor’s as she pulls out her phone and hands it to me. “I’m so sorry, Emma.”
On the screen is a huge group message. ATTENTION!!! it screams. BEWARE OF EMMA TALBOT. SHE IS HIDING A RARE SKIN DISEASE THAT I
S HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS!
Below the text is a picture of me that Edie took on the bus the day I hadn’t blended in my sunscreen. The morning light glares off the white layer of sunscreen in an unnatural way so that I do look a little like a zombie freak, just like Edie said that day.
And now everyone thinks that’s what I look like under my makeup.
There’s another message, this one just a link. I click on it, and it takes me to this site about vitiligo. It’s not one I’ve seen before. It’s really more of a blog than a site, full of typos. It has all these horrible pictures, most of which I’m pretty sure have nothing to do with vitiligo, and says all these bogus things that aren’t true. At the bottom, in bold, I read this:
Though rare, vitiligo is HIGHLEY contagious and can be life-threatning!!!
As I read, I feel my heart breaking into little pieces that go knocking around my chest like coins being rattled in a cup.
“This site says that I’m contagious,” I say in a small voice. “It says I’m dangerous.”
“Which is total crap,” Fina replies. “Anyone with half a brain cell can figure that out.”
But she’s wrong. All those people moving away from me. They didn’t want to “catch” my vitiligo. Tears bead my eyes.
“It was Edie,” Fina says quietly.
I remember the way Edie smirked at me on the bus before her face went all scared and worried. And I realize that she knows my vitiligo isn’t dangerous or contagious. And she sent this out anyway.
“Ruby must have helped,” I say. “How else would Edie know about my vitiligo? That’s why Ruby sent me that apology text.”
Fina nods. “I heard some girls talking. Apparently, Ruby wanted to go to Edie’s Halloween party. For reasons beyond human comprehension, she wants to be friends with that little brat.”
“She wasn’t popular in her old school,” I mutter numbly. “Remember? She told us that first day at lunch.”
“Being popular isn’t the same as having friends,” Fina says, scowling. “And Edie is never going to be a real friend to Ruby. She only let Ruby go to her stupid party so Ruby would give her dirt on you.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything. How could Ruby have done this to me?
“No one is going to believe this stuff,” Fina says. “Seriously.”
“They do believe it,” I cry. “You saw how no one wanted to get near me when I got off the bus. And look at this picture she took. People are going to think that’s how I really look.”
“People are probably just acting weird because they don’t want to go against Edie,” Fina says. “I swear, next time I see that girl, I’m going to—”
“Don’t, Fina,” I interrupt. “It’ll just make things worse.”
“But—”
“She’s doing this because of that stupid poem,” I say. “The one I wrote on the first day of school. She’s been waiting to get back at me ever since then. And if you do something, she’ll just come after you. Or she’ll make things even worse for me.”
Though, honestly, I don’t really see how she could.
The first bell goes off, and through the windows, we can see kids hustling to get to class before the tardy bell. A girl I’ve never even seen before looks into the library and tugs at her friend’s shirt to get her attention. The two of them stare for a second, then shriek and run away.
Like I’m a dangerous animal in a zoo.
A tear falls onto the table between me and Fina.
“Don’t pay attention to them, Emma,” she says. “They’re jerks.”
“They think I’m a freak, Fina,” I whisper.
“No they don’t,” she replies firmly.
“Yes they do!” I cry. “And maybe they’re right!”
Fina’s jaw drops. “Emma, no!”
Mr. Yardley has spotted us and is striding over.
“I’ll see you later,” I say. Then I grab Gram’s satchel and, clutching it for dear life, burst through the library door and out into the hall. Fortunately, there’s a bathroom just around the corner. I run into it before anyone sees me, shooting into a stall and locking it behind me.
I don’t think I’m ever going to come out.
28
I know I’m going to be in trouble for skipping first period, but anything is better than facing what’s beyond the bathroom door.
Between first and second period, a group of girls comes in talking about me.
“I can’t believe she would come to school,” says one. I don’t recognize her voice.
“Seriously. It’s like she doesn’t care that she’s putting all of us in danger. So wrong.”
I put my palms over my ears and press as hard as I can.
When I drop my hands, the girls are gone, but the door soon swings open again.
“Emma?” Fina calls softly. “Are you in here?”
I bite my lip and say nothing, and after a minute, she leaves.
A little while later, someone else comes in and knocks on the door of my stall. “Emma? It’s Ms. Singh.”
When I don’t answer, she adds, “I know you’re in there. Fina told me.”
Fina must have recognized my shoes. Slowly I get up and unlock the door. Ms. Singh stands on the other side. “We have to stop meeting like this, Emma,” she says with a hint of a smile that I can’t return.
“Did Fina tell you why I’m here?” I ask.
Ms. Singh shakes her head. “Do you want to tell me?”
“No,” I say. I don’t ever want to repeat the things I read on that website, or the lies Edie wrote about me to everyone.
“Well, I can’t let you stay in this bathroom all day,” she says.
“I can’t go to class.”
She hesitates for a moment. “Then I’ll take you to the office,” she says finally. “And you can call your parents to come get you.”
I nod, and let Ms. Singh lead me out of the bathroom and into the empty hall.
She waits while I call Mom from the office. I tell her I have a stomachache, and she says she’ll be here soon. Ms. Singh is frowning at me when I hang up. “A stomachache, huh?”
I shrug. I feel exhausted all of a sudden.
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about what’s wrong?” she asks. “I could help.”
I shake my head. “Really, it’s okay, Ms. Singh. Thanks for letting me call my mom.”
“No problem, Emma. I hope you feel better.”
Shooting me one last look of concern, she turns and walks out the office door.
When Mom arrives, I have to fight the urge to run to her and wrap my arms around her and cry into her shoulder. Instead, I focus hard on making up answers to the questions she immediately starts asking. Do I feel nauseous? Have I thrown up? Do I have any other symptoms?
When we get home, she sends me to bed and brings up some ginger ale and crackers. Boomer follows her and jumps onto the bed. Mom sits next to me and runs her fingers across my back the way she used to when I was little and woke up from a nightmare.
Things were so much easier back then, when nightmares were only in dreams.
I wish so bad I could tell Mom what is really wrong. But if I do, she’ll stop rubbing my back. She’ll want to know every single thing that every kid said, and she’ll be horrified. Then she’ll start strategizing.
So when she asks me if there’s anything else she can do, I tell her I just want to sleep. Then I pull the covers up over my head and stay there the rest of the day.
29
I stay in bed on Tuesday, too. I tell Mom I got sick in the night.
Fina calls and texts me about a thousand times, so I set my phone to silent. I know she wants to talk about what happened, but I just want to pretend it didn’t. Pretend that when I have to go back to school, things are going to be normal again.
The one person I do want to talk to about everything is Gram. I don’t think I’ve ever missed her so badly.
There was this one time a few years ago when I was staying a
t Morning Glory Cottage and couldn’t find a bracelet Mom had given me for Christmas. It had been Mom’s growing up, and it was one of the few presents she’d ever given me that I hadn’t asked for but had actually liked. It was made of silver links, and attached to one of them was a bell that rang when the bracelet shook.
“There, there, darlin’,” Gram had said when she’d found me crying, pulling me into the flowy fabric of her long dress. “What is it?”
I told her what had happened and she listened, nodding seriously.
“Whenever I have a problem,” she said, “I like to retrace my steps. Go back until I figure out where things started to go wrong. Or, in this case, where I might have lost the thing I’m looking for. So, when was the last time you saw the bracelet?”
I thought hard until I remembered hearing the church bell ring that afternoon, and looking down at the bell on my wrist, shaking it to make it chime along with the real one. I had gone with Gram to read while she painted a landscape of Old Joe’s farm, and we’d been walking home through the fields.
We set out, retracing our route like Gram said, until I spotted something shiny in a muddy puddle in the middle of the bumpy farm road. The bracelet must have come loose when I’d shaken it and dropped straight off my wrist.
All I want now is for Gram to tell me how to fix things again. How to retrace my steps back to the way things were before Edie’s texts, before my diagnosis, before Gram died.
“Just remember next time,” Gram had said once the bracelet was safely around my wrist again, “that you’ve always got me, Emma. And with the two of us together, things can’t be too bad.”
But that wasn’t true, was it?
Now, when I need her more than ever, I don’t have Gram.
And it makes me wonder what else Gram said that wasn’t true, either.
On Wednesday morning, I tell Mom I’m not ready to go back to school. Which is true.
When I get up to go to the bathroom, I hear her downstairs, talking on the phone in low tones, probably to Dad, who left early for work. I know I can’t stay home forever. Eventually they’ll take me to the doctor, who will see that nothing is wrong with me. Nothing she can fix, anyway.