by Amy McAuley
“That was the scariest thing ever. Worse than ripping my pants at Sam Pratt’s party.”
I pick up her towel and hand it to her. “C’mon. Unless we want to get fried by lightning, we need to go inside.”
She and Megan trail along behind me, chattering.
Under the cover of the tree-lined path, my anger hits its boiling point. “You know, I can’t believe you were dumb enough to do that,” I say, spinning around to face them. “I specifically told you not to go swimming.”
“A wave sucked me out when I was sitting down,” she says, crying. “I called to you, lots of times, but you ignored me.”
I wince. “Oh man, Kalli, I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep.”
“It’s okay.” She snorts back a sniffle and wipes her eyes with her towel. “You knew exactly what to do to save me.”
A clap of thunder booms overhead. It seems to split the swollen clouds open at the seams, and we race to the cottage to take cover. We soak the kitchen floor and joke about what happened. We all got out of it safe and sound.
If only I could stop thinking about what Kalli said. How did I know what to do to help her, anyway? I have absolutely no idea.
10
I’m back to normal, as normal as I can get anyway, which means I use the top bunk when it’s dark outside, not round the clock. But I can’t get back into jogging. I don’t want to run into Jogging Girl again. I don’t understand all the weird things that keep happening to me, and if I stay away from Jogging Girl, I can pretend the dreams and my real life don’t coincide. It’s all too bizarre.
Right now Kalli and I are watching TV. Dad is in the kitchen. I can hear him banging pots around, cleaning up the supper dishes.
“Kalli, you should help Dad clean up.” I sigh, stretching out to hog the whole couch.
Without glancing away from the TV, she says, “F-you.”
A commercial I hate comes on. I lug myself up from the couch.
Dad stops drying a glass to give me a smile. “Taking Sandy for a run?”
Sandy, splayed out on the kitchen floor, glances up at me, moving only her eyeballs.
“Yeah, I guess I will,” I say, surprising myself. “I’ll help you clean up first.”
“Oh, no, you don’t. Get out there and go for a run.” He swishes the dishtowel at me.
All of a sudden, I’m pumped about going for a jog. But I’m still nervous about seeing Jogging Girl. I don’t want to think about how Dad came to live in the same town as somebody I’ve dreamed about. That’s one more coincidence I don’t want to deal with.
“Dad, why did you move here?” Hey, you don’t want to think about that, remember?
“Because I was offered a job here.”
“Yeah, I know. I guess what I’m saying is, how did the job offer come about?”
Dad puts the clean glass away and shuts the cupboard door. “It was good luck, that’s what it was. A friend of mine, Mark Talford, who I hadn’t seen since I was still with Mom, called me up out of the blue last year. He’s a supervisor at the plant here.”
“He got you the job?”
“Yeah.” Leaning against the counter, Dad says, “Everything came together at the right time.” He shrugs and goes back to washing dishes. “Getting the job and the chance to move here were the best things that could have happened to me. It was meant to be.”
It was meant to be.
Silverware slips from Dad’s soapy hands and clatters into the sink, splashing bubbles all over the counter. I grab a dry dishtowel from the oven door handle and throw it to him. When he turns to catch it, his face is red and he won’t meet my gaze.
Talking about this is upsetting Dad for some reason. I stare at the floor, counting the tile squares. Is it because he had to leave us to be happy in life?
“Well,” Dad exclaims, startling me. “I think there’s a doggie here who’s waiting very patiently for a certain homebody to take her jogging.”
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but when things got tough, I went and hid out on the top bunk. I can’t stop living my life just in case something strange happens to me.
“Sandy, get your leash,” I say, and she excitedly hurries to standing, her pink tongue lolling out through a big dog smile.
I can do this.
* * *
As I’m approaching the entrance to the beach playground, I nearly burst out laughing. All I had to do to avoid running into Jogging Girl was jog to somewhere else. Okay, I never claimed to be a genius. And, with my luck, she would have changed her route to match mine and we’d pass each other anyway.
I check my watch. It’s a little after eight. When I glance up, I fully expect to see Jogging Girl come bouncing around the corner at the end of the street. But she doesn’t materialize. Sandy and I trot to the corner. Still no girl. We’ve never made it this far without meeting her. As a test of the Emergency Telepathy Broadcast System, I yell inside my head, Hey, Jogging Girl. I’m out for a jog. Bring it on.
I count my footfalls. At two hundred, I start to get tense. Where is she? Is she sick? Didn’t she receive my telepathic message? Does she actually have a life, unlike me?
There’s a gradual downhill slope at the end of this street, which gives me a chance to catch my breath. It’s only about a hundred steps away. Thinking about the hill is the one thing that keeps me going up to this point in the jog. My leg muscles relax to take me down the hill nice and easy. Taking advantage of the sudden ease of running, I inhale a few deep breaths to refill my oxygen stores for a while.
Halfway down the hill, I hear a girl call out, “Hey, you’re back.”
The voice came from the other side of the street, and it can only be one person. I jog a few more steps, wondering what I should do.
Sandy, unfortunately, decides for me. In an uncharacteristic display of bad behavior, she darts behind me, practically wrenching my arm out of its socket. Legs kicking out, I struggle to hold Sandy back as she drags me into the path of an oncoming car. Lucky for me, the car is now driving well below the town’s Old Lady speed limit, so the driver can better observe my amusing display of dorkiness. Jogging Girl’s still there, staring at me with wide eyes. Her mouth does this hilarious grimace to the side.
“Sandy, no!” I holler, but I’m fighting to contain a fit of hysterical giggling. There’s no way the dumb dog will take me seriously. I yank hard on her leash and wrestle her back to the sidewalk, yelling, “Sandy, sit! Sit! I said sit! Sit down!”
Sandy’s tongue flops out through her open, grinning mouth and she plants her butt on the sidewalk. I am never, ever, ever having kids.
Jogging Girl glances right and left to check for cars and then does this super-athletic walk to cross the street. A super-athletic walk that’s leading her straight to me. I quickly check out the street she came from, a tree-lined side street that disappears into what I call a Minivan Neighborhood. Everybody drives a minivan, the kids have stay-at-home moms, the lawns are mowed regularly by cute dads who wear suits during the week and baseball caps, jeans, and T-shirts on the weekends.
“Sorry,” Jogging Girl says, stepping up to the curb. She holds her hand out for Sandy to sniff. “I didn’t know your dog would do that.”
“Neither did I.” I smile. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Keep the manic giggles safely locked away.
It’s even harder to act normal when I look into Jogging Girl’s huge almond-shaped eyes, so brown they remind me of chocolate. Her face and lips are fuller than Raven’s, but her eyes are identical. My mental image of her isn’t coming from a dream memory this time. I feel like I’ve spent years staring into Jogging Girl’s face.
“I’m Katherine,” she says. “Actually, I’m only Katherine to my mom. Everybody else calls me Kate.”
“I’m Penelope. To my mom, when she’s angry. Everybody else calls me Penny.”
Kate pulls her ponytail tight. “I’m going for a run. Is it okay if I join you, Penny?”
Oh, great. It was easy to pretend to be a
good runner around Jogging Girl before. I only had to put on my act for the one minute we were in each other’s sight. I don’t like the idea of running with accompaniment, and it seems a little strange to me that Kate wants to jog with me in the first place. She doesn’t even know me.
“Sure, you can come. But I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep up with you.”
“Of course you will,” she says, with an exaggerated swish of her hand. “You’re already warmed up, which means you’re probably running about eight miles an hour, whereas I’m just starting out, which means I’ll be running at about six miles an hour. If anything, I’ll have trouble keeping up with you.”
Okaaaaay. Jogging Girl is quite possibly the oddest person I’ve ever met. Cool.
In sync, we jog and talk for about twenty minutes. Actually, I don’t do much talking; I’m too busy trying to breathe. Kate takes care of most of the conversation, and she has interesting things to say. When we near Dad’s street, I contemplate running past it, not wanting to go home yet. But Sandy knows our route and she turns the corner, dragging me onto our street.
“This is where I live,” I say, and we jog to a stop in front of Dad’s place.
“Feel like coming over to my place to hang for a while?” Kate asks. She shrugs, like it’s no big deal if I say no, but I can see in her face that she’d like me to come over.
“Sure, I’ll come over. Just let me take Sandy into the house and tell my dad.”
Kate waits for me at the edge of the yard. I race toward the cottage, beaming like crazy. Boom. Instant friends.
* * *
How was I supposed to know Jogging Girl’s post-jogging routine occasionally involves getting drunk? When we got up to her bedroom and Kate asked me if I wanted a drink, I said sure, thinking she’d return with juice or water or milk. Instead, she came back with soda of the hazardous-waste variety.
“Your room’s really nice, Kate.”
“Puleeeeze,” she says, rolling her eyes. She chugs her drink and drags a hand across her full lips. One thing I like about Kate is that every move she makes is exaggerated. She’s like a stage actress. “My mother had professional painters come in to do my room. This is my mom’s I-wish-I-were-a-teenager-again room. If I had my way, the whole room would be lime green with mathematical equations hand-scrawled across the walls. And I’d load every wall with Pre-Raphaelite paintings.”
Taking a chance on embarrassing myself, I ask, “What’s a Pre-Raphaelite painting?”
“Pre-Raphaelite means before Raphael. The Pre-Raphaelites used a lot of nature in their paintings. They wanted to create art the way it was before Raphael.”
Wow, Kate’s smart. Art-smart like Diana.
“I have a journal with a Dali painting on it,” I say.
“Dali’s cool. Totally whacked, but cool. What’s your favorite Dali painting?”
Uh oh. “Persistence of Memory,” I say nonchalantly, like I know a whole bunch of Dali paintings and chose that particular one after great deliberation.
“His trompe l’oeil paintings are my favorites.”
We’ve entered into foreign language territory. I think I’ll let this conversation die.
“How old are you?” I ask, studying Kate’s face.
“I’m two hundred months old.”
Is that math right? Beats the hell outta me. I just nod and sip my drink.
“I’ll be seventeen on Halloween,” she says, laughing at me. “An old wives’ tale says that people born on Halloween are able to see and talk to spirits. If I wasn’t afraid of ghosts, I’d give that a try.”
“Not me. I’ve seen enough movies to know I don’t want to see a ghost.”
“You like horror movies?”
“I do. But they scare me.”
In the middle of taking a sip, Kate sputters and coughs. “That’s the point.” She wipes her chin with the corner of her floral comforter. “Do you like photography?”
Do I like photography? What kind of question is that? If she means do I enjoy getting my picture taken, the answer is an emphatic no.
“We have a darkroom downstairs,” she says. “I’m obsessed with taking pictures.”
My brain on vodka immediately associates sex with whatever it is Kate just said. Something about taking pictures, do I like photography, I have a darkroom.
“You have a darkroom? In your house?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Kate smirks and takes a drink. “Photography is my dad’s life, when he’s at work and when he’s not. You saw the framed photos on the way upstairs?”
I couldn’t have missed them. They took up most of the wall. “Your dad took them?”
“We both did,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to be just like my dad. But my mom thinks a bright girl like me should be a lawyer or a surgeon. Or a Director of Nursing, like her. Those are important jobs. By important, she means they pay more money than the ‘artsy-fartsy job’ I’ll really end up doing. I could have gotten out of this town a year ago, if my parents had let me skip second grade.”
“You were supposed to skip a grade? Are you really smart?”
“That’s what my mom likes to think. I think that I was an annoying little smart-ass, and my teacher just wanted to get me the hell out of her class.”
“I see,” I say, playing along. “Your high school grades must suck, right, since you’re not smart and all.”
“They’re okay. Mid-nineties.”
I spit a mouthful of vodka-and-soda back into my glass. “I didn’t know there were grades that high,” I say, but inside I’m thinking, I thought only brown-nosed geeks got grades that high. “Do you study a lot?”
“Hell, no.” Kate slurps back a big gulp, crunches an ice cube between her teeth. “I hate studying. It’s boring. When I take a test, I can see my notes in my mind. If I couldn’t do that, my grades would be shit.”
Wish I was born with superhuman abilities like that, I think, taking another drink. The muscles in my shoulders prickle. I rub my temple, feeling lightheaded and giddy already.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I ask. I glance around her professionally decorated room, wondering where the bathroom is.
“No,” she says. “I’d rather have a pet leech.”
We stare into each other’s eyes and burst out laughing at the same time.
“The kids here in Kincardine,” Kate says in a mature voice, “all they want to do is party. That’s all they think there is to do in this boring town, screw their boyfriends and get drunk.” She shakes her head. “I’m above all that.”
We both glance at our nearly empty mugs and start laughing again.
Soda bubbles tickle my tongue. Vodka burns my throat, and I swallow quickly. “You know that Raphael guy?” I tentatively ask.
“Not personally.”
“Did he die young?” I feel silly right away for asking, but I have to know.
“A morbid question. I love it,” Kate says, setting her glass on the floor. She jumps up and grabs a massive book from the bookcase beside her bed. “He did die young. All the books mention that, how short his life was. He was one of the Master painters of the High Renaissance, you know, taught by Michelangelo and Leonardo.”
Kate lays the book out and flips crazily through the pages. “Here he is,” she says, sliding the book across the floor so I can see it. “See this painting? It’s called the Madonna Sixtina, or Sistine Madonna. It’s one of his most famous ones.” She points to two boy angels resting their chins on their arms at the bottom of the painting. “You’ve probably only seen that part of the painting before, right?”
“I’ve seen them on lots of stuff. I didn’t know they were part of a famous painting, though.” I study the Madonna. She’s standing on a layer of clouds above the angels. “She’s pretty.”
Kate puts her face close to the book. She looks at me. Her face zooms back to the book. “Well, it’s no wonder you think she’s pretty. You look just like her.”
“I do not,” I say, making a dorky
face.
“You do, too.” Kate jumps up again and strides over to her desk. Art supplies clatter across the desktop, pencils fly. She races back with a rosy red pencil. “Raphael made his women’s mouths too small,” she says, rolling her eyes. Evidently she has a problem with the Master. “I’ll shade the mouth out a little. And keep in mind that a portrait isn’t really like a photograph. An artist does his own interpretation of a face.”
With a few deft touches of the pencil, Kate fills out the Madonna’s mouth. I may not have seen a resemblance between the woman in the painting and myself before, but I can’t deny it now. I’m staring up at myself from the book, from a painting—I check the dates beside Raphael’s picture—that’s almost five hundred years old.
I look up, and Kate is staring quizzically at my face. “Wow, that’s eerie,” she says.
“You know what’s really eerie?”
“What?” Kate says, breathless.
I point to the blond-haired woman kneeling beside the Madonna. “She looks like my best friend, Diana.”
11
It’s school picture day. The line moves through the gym, one person at a time. Finally it’s my turn. I take a seat and nervously clasp my hands on my lap.
“You are perfection!” the photographer shouts, and I nearly teeter off the stool. His brown hair is held back in a ponytail and he’s wearing a tweed jacket and jeans. He tilts his head this way and that to scrutinize my face. “I want you.”
At the end of the line, Di steps out into view, her mouth set in a hard grimace. She looks ticked off about something, that’s for sure.
The photographer takes my hand. “I must do your portrait. Come with me.”
There’s no way I want to go anywhere with him. Something about him is making me nervous–an inner fervor that’s locked away, waiting to come out. I can see it in his eyes.
I shake my head. “I think I’ll stay here.”
“No, no, no,” he says, tugging me up from the stool. “You are the one I want.”
Unable to stop myself, I follow him. I glance toward the end of the line, hoping Diana can help me.