STONE AND SPARK
by Sibella Giorello
Dedication
This book is dedicated to T’liia “T-Bird” Franklin.
Thank you for the lessons. Thank you for the laughter.
Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.
— Rumi
CHAPTER ONE
I tiptoe across my bedroom, avoiding every floorboard that creaks, and stand at the old armoire, counting to fifteen.
Ten is never long enough.
At sixteen, I pull out the antique drawer beneath the double doors and listen again.
The seconds tick like they’re attached to time bombs. But when nothing detonates, I take the hammer from the drawer and slip it into my open backpack. I add my notebook, two pens, some Ziploc bags.
Another count to fifteen, listening.
Then: flashlight, camera—
"Are you in there?"
I freeze. Her voice pierces my bedroom door.
"I know you're in there."
Crap.
"Yes, ma'am," I answer. My heart feels like a clenched fist pounding on my ribcage. "I'm in here."
"What are you doing?"
I glance down. My backpack, which contains my rock kit, is covered with dirt. So are my jeans and my blue Converse All Stars.
"It's Friday," I say to the closed door, telling myself, this is not a lie. "I'm getting ready for dinner." Also not a lie.
"Three-oh-three!" Her voice pitches with suspicion, so sharp and pointed it goes right through the thick door. "The clock in the kitchen says three-oh-three and I believe it, I believe it. Why are you going to dinner at three-oh-three?"
I glance at my watch. It's three-ten. But splitting hairs with my mom is pure suicide. I take a deep breath. The air tastes of dust and antiques, the dirt on my clothes.
"Drew wanted help with her homework," I say to the door, hoping she will go away.
Nope.
"Drew?" Her voice rings with disbelief. "Drew Levinson," she adds, as if clarifying, even though we both know there's only one Drew. "She wants help with her homework?"
"It's for English." I shove the backpack inside the drawer. I raise my voice so she won't hear me closing it. "We're memorizing a poem. By Christina Rossetti."
I wait, hands on the drawer, eyes closed. I'm hoping the Rossetti reference will send my mom down a rabbit trail. She likes Rossetti. The kinship of tortured souls.
When there's no response, my mind starts ransacking things, scrambling for those just-right words that never seem to arrive in time.
She says, "I saw Brevaire Teager today."
Oh, crap.
"Good," I say.
"So you know Brevaire?"
I close my eyes. "Tinsley, her daughter. She's in my class. Remember?"
"Of course I remember." She pauses, making sure I understand what she's saying. "Brevaire also said there's a dance tonight. At school. Tinsley's going with that Fielding boy. They're an item."
Waiting . . .
Waiting, waiting, waiting.
I can sense the next thing rolling toward me like a rumble of thunder right before lightning strikes. Carefully, I open the armoire doors. My school uniform lies on the floor, bunched into a ball, like some polyester meteorite hurled to earth.
"You didn't tell me there's a dance," she says. "Did you?"
I scoop up the white blouse, plaid skirt, sliding off my shoes, shimmying out of my jeans and t-shirt.
"Raleigh always liked going to dances. She was always happy. The sweetest girl in the whole world."
My fingers shake as I button the white blouse. My mouth twists. If I could, I would shout at the door: Yes, I liked going to dances because it got me out of this house!
The doorknob rattles.
"You locked the door?! Raleigh never locked her door!"
I lunge for the knob and whip open the door to see my mother. She is beautiful. But today the color in her hazel eyes is cloudy and she's holding a pen and notepad.
My eyes start to burn.
"Let me see your foot," she says. “Socks off.”
She drops the notepad. It slaps the old wooden floor. I obediently yank my socks off and step on it.
"Not that foot.” She narrows her eyes as though she's caught me. "The other foot."
I switch feet and she kneels down. With the pen, she traces around my heel, my instep, brushing over every toe. I hold my breath until she stands up.
"Raleigh would be going to the dance," she says.
"I'm busy."
She flips through the pages, studying each one. "What fifteen-year-old is so busy she can't go to a school dance?"
Do not cry. I tell the burn in my eyes to leave. Do. Not. Cry.
"What have you done with her?" she demands.
My hands go numb.
"Look at your shirt!"
I glance down.
"It wasn't wrinkled when you came home—what have you done with Raleigh?"
"It's Friday." My voice sounds dead. "I'm meeting Drew. For dinner. Like always." "You're not fooling us." She turns the notebook, holding up the page so I can see it, showing me my own foot, which is somehow evidence that I'm not me. "We know you're not Raleigh."
We. Not the royal ‘We.’
The crazy ‘We.’
In my eyes, the burn is too hot, ready to break through. I force myself to stare at her tracing of my foot until it's only a blue line on yellow paper, until I see nothing more than a sketch, nothing that matters, nothing that can hurt me.
"Mom, I—”
"How dare you call me that!” She backs away from me, eyes wild. "We're watching you. Whoever you are."
CHAPTER TWO
I run.
Down the back stairs, through the kitchen door, across the slate patio. I fly for freedom. But just before the gate, I glance back. Just once. Is she watching? I've changed back into jeans and a t-shirt, my socks and Converse. My backpack slung over my shoulder. Will this "prove" I'm not her real daughter?
But the curtains are drawn over every window.
Throwing open the gate, I haul down the alley. It runs behind our house, the old cobblestones bisecting mansions from carriage houses. Its far end spits me out on Monument Avenue where Friday afternoon traffic circles the statue of JEB Stuart. When I race past the Confederacy's cavalry hero, his bronze face glares at me. Sword drawn, he urges me onward—onward!
I cover the mile to downtown in just under seven minutes. But my pace drops as I hit the city. At 3:32 p.m. on a Friday in October when the sun glows like an advertisement for the last good day of autumn, everyone wants out. Dodging the suits and skirts that swell the sidewalk, I scurry to the other side of the city.
Just off Williamsburg Road, I take an immediate left. Suddenly the sun disappears, sinking behind a thick stand of gum trees. Slowing to a walk, panting, I feel my lungs burn. The pain feels good.
About a block down, I see a spot where the long grass has been trampled flat, fading to beige. I kneel down, unzipping my backpack. My hands are shaking. Some of it from dealing with my mom. Some from the hard run. But now the shaking will get worse.
I hold my rock hammer in my right hand and follow the trampled grass down into a ravine. Rising from the ground like green hands, kudzu vines climb the gum trees and grip abandoned buckets next to warped wooden pallets. I even see a brick chimney, lying on its side on the ground. No house in sight. The stench of urine bites at my nose.
But when I look up, I see it.
The curved gray stone is high enough to catch the last rays of sunshine. Below the arch, the signs warn:
DO NOT ENTER.
DANGER. NO TRESPASSING.
Long, flat boards seal
the entrance, the kudzu nibbling at the edge. I kick my way to it, wiping my sweating, shaking hands on my jeans. When I wedge the hammer's claw between the boards, one of them swings open like a teeter-totter.
I peer inside. The dark is so enormous, I actually feel my eyes dilating. I shrug my backpack forward and find my flashlight. When I flick it on, the beam flickers into the tunnel's black mouth.
I want to quit. Right here.
Just pat myself on the back, turn around, and run for the sun.
But the bitter taste of defeat is fresh in my mouth. I've already lost my mother. And I don't want to see the disappointment on Drew's face when I tell her that I chickened out. Again.
I step into the tunnel. The board slams shut behind me. I jump.
The flashlight cuts the dark like a saber but there's not enough of it. And the shaking light is giving me vertigo. When I shine it up, toward the curved wall, I see water weeping from the ceiling, sliding down the quarried stones, sobbing on the ground.
I count my steps. By thirteen, I'm forced into a crouch because the dirt floor is climbing toward the ceiling. At twenty-two, I'm duck-walking. The soil smells dank, mildewed. At thirty-four, gasping for air, I crawl forward on my stomach, feeling my heart pound the sand beneath my chest.
And then I'm stuck.
The ceiling, just six inches from my head, has grabbed my backpack. I rake the flashlight but find only darkness. When I reach up, touching the curved ceiling, the stone feels slimy, cold. I use the hammer to scratch up soil from the ground. But when I toss the dirt forward, it doesn't land.
So I start counting.
One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. Three-one-thousand. . .
Still nothing. Down and down and down, the soil continues to fall, until finally I hear the faintest little plunk.
Six-one-thousand.
I swallow, feeling nauseated. Not just by the dark, the sudden drop. I feel sick for the four men buried down there, locked inside a steam train for almost one hundred years. When the tunnel collapsed, the city sealed it. Nobody wanted to revive this route to the rest of the world, even though it was supposed to revive a city limping along after the Civil War. Nobody wanted to think about what happened.
And nobody bothered to check the geology either.
I reach back, manage to tug open my backpack, and rummage until I feel the thin, slithery plastic of Ziploc bags. I yank them out. Then freeze.
The bags.
Did she count the bags—find some missing? Is that what triggered her paranoia? Or was it the gossips at the grocery store?
Or both.
That's the problem with my mom. She goes crazy over nothing. And everything.
Setting the flashlight on the gritty floor, I lift the hammer with both hands. In the glow, I can see the stones’ quarry marks. They look like deep cat scratches. I wedge the hammer's claw into the cracks and rock the tool back and forth. I can hear the water dripping, a relentless plop-plop-plop. It sounds like footsteps. Suddenly dust rains from the ceiling, falling through the light. I squint to protect my eyes but keep rocking the hammer.
Then a snap.
A solid object drops through the light. It lands with a thud.
Reaching out, I pat the ground. The soil feels cold, dead. My fingers tingle. Rats. I imagine rats, darting from the dark to bite. Bats. Rabid, stirred awake by the sound of cracking rock. Something sharp pricks my palm. My hand flies back. I hold it to my chest, heart pounding, breath chugging off the stone right above me.
When I reach out again, tentatively, my fingers tap what feels like stone. I grab it, throw it into the baggie and take off.
Snatching the flashlight, wiggling backwards, I get free enough to spin around. Using my elbows for leverage, I combat-crawl as fast as possible, a soldier under enemy fire. When the soil suddenly drops, I'm up, duck-walking behind the light, praying this is the same way I came. But everything looks different. The ground, the weeping walls. I worry there's a turn I missed. Suddenly the ground drops again and I fall forward, dropping the flashlight. The beam rolls across the soil. I lunge for it, but in the sudden dark I see pinpricks of light. Up ahead. The boards. Sunlight leaking through.
I snatch the light off the ground and run. Fall, run again.
When I reach the entrance, my fingers shake across the planks. I yank on them until one swings open. I leap out.
Sunlight spears my eyes. Blinking, I run forward, but my feet get tangled in the vines. I trip, plunging into the ravine, falling into shadow. I grab the kudzu, holding on to stop my descent, then scramble back up the hill. I find the trail, sprint down the trampled grass. When I hit road, my feet suddenly hurt. Dirt in my shoes. All that gritty soil from the tunnel is now rubbing across my toes. It feels like I'm wearing sandpaper socks.
But I don't stop.
The tall buildings are still purging people, choking Main Street with adults toting briefcases, firing orders into cellphones, clicking down the concrete in heels. I run past them, covered in dirt, every stride sending up a fresh bolt of pain. My shoes suddenly feel too small.
But something else. A feeling. It rises in my chest like a bubble, helium-light, freed from all the gravity around me. I feel almost giddy: I have a secret. And I'm bursting to tell it to the one person in the whole world who will understand.
I run faster, knowing she's waiting for me.
CHAPTER THREE
But no sparkly purple bicycle is parked outside the small brick building in Scott's Addition. Keeping pace, I glance over my shoulder. The potholed road is empty. Trucks wait at the plumbing supply warehouse. Workers smoke outside the Sauer’s spice factory. And two men skulk into a black door that advertises a "gentleman's club" which, obviously, isn't.
But no purple bike.
I kick into my highest gear and tear down the last thirty yards, slapping the iron handrail and immediately doubling over, gasping for air. My backpack slides off my shoulders, hits the dirty pavement, and I'm too tired to even pick it up.
Finally, when I can stand, I see no purple bike.
I won.
I limp up the steps and push open the glass door. It triggers a cowbell. Everyone inside turns to look: six men, sitting on swivel stools at a counter, and a huge guy standing at the grill that's as black as his skin. Titus Williams. The big man in Big Man's Burgers.
"I won!" I announce.
But nobody says a word.
"Hello—I finally won!"
"We got it," Titus says. "What flavor?"
I stare at him for a long moment. "Chocolate."
The guys sitting at the counter have weathered faces, like broken-in baseball mitts. They’ve all swiveled back to the television. It's the playoffs for the World Series.
"Extra chocolate!" I call out.
Titus waves his spatula.
The guy named Journey points at the TV. "They oughta hang that pitcher by his thumbs."
"You'd have to go first," says Shortie, sitting next to him.
"Me? I caught pop-ups."
"I caught 'em!"
The bickering continues. I walk over to the red vinyl booth, specifically reserved for Drew and me. We've been coming here since April, and this is the first time I've ever beaten Drew to our Friday dinners. And first one here gets the free milkshake from Titus. It's also a big deal because my chances of ever winning this contest were slim to none. My best friend is my favorite person in the entire world. But she has some seriously compulsive habits, and one of them is punctuality. Like, extreme punctuality.
Scooting into the booth, I position myself so I can see Drew's face when she comes through the door and realizes I beat her. As an added bonus, I open my backpack and take out the rock I stole from the tunnel. I set it on the table. Drew said I'd never have the guts to go in there, being afraid of the dark.
But today is a banner day.
And I refuse to let anything ruin it. Even the pain in my feet. Even the crappy music on the jukebox--that croony stuff from the 1950s.
/> I pick up the rock. It's pale gray, almost blue, marbled with dark gray veins. I rub my thumb over it, feeling the grains.
Titus plunks the shake on the table. It's still in the tall silver container from the mixer, frosted on the outside.
"What's with the rock?" he asks.
"Nothing."
"So it's special."
"What? No. It's . . . it's just a rock."
He hands me the straw. I peel back the paper sleeve. According to Virginia law, trespassing on railroad tracks is a Class 3 misdemeanor—I know these things. I've also stolen property. So the punishment's even worse.
"What'd you do," Titus asks, "steal it?"
I give him my best are-you-insane expression. "It's a rock."
"Have it your way." He walks back to the grill, only when he passes the jukebox, he slaps its side.
The do-wop song dies.
"Thank God," says Journey. "That song was driving me nuts."
As the next tune warbles out, a collective groan rises from the counter.
"Can we send that jukebox to the Smithsonian?" asks Winder. "The thing's pure history."
I glance at the door. My mouth's watering, begging me to sip the shake. But it's rude to start without the other person. Drew never does. Closing my eyes, I say a silent grace. For one thing, it's a miracle I got here first; plus, I made it into the tunnel and back out. Alive.
When I open my eyes, the milkshake is still begging.
I glance at the clock above the entrance. An old Richmond Dairy farm clock. It says 5:05.
One sip. I decide one sip isn't rude.
Titus's shakes are so thick that when you sip through the straw, the roof of your mouth feels like it's going to collapse. But then the taste hits and all is forgiven. Cold, creamy, sweet. That hint of salt. Chocolate sending every taste bud into the Snoopy dance. I close my eyes again, relishing the flavor. My throat wants to hum.
"You want me to start the burgers?"
I look up. Titus is back at the table, wiping his enormous black hands on the apron that, once upon a time, was white.
I glance at the clock. Then lift my wrist, checking my watch because the clock has got to be wrong.
Stones and Spark Page 1