Some crews gathered trash from campus buildings and brought the bags there, where another crew spread the assorted materials over the sorting tables, separating usable items from recyclables from future compost. My first assignment was to be a sorter.
The first time I walked into the room where the sorting took place, two students were scanning trash spread across a table, and near them the boy called Walker was juggling oranges. Everyone wore gloves.
I saw Walker first. When he saw me, he dropped an orange.
Since then I’ve read theories about what attracts people to each other—speculation that they’re drawn by physical and psychological traits that remind them of their parents. I’m not sure how much any of that applies to vampires.
I prefer a simpler explanation: my eyes were drawn to Walker first because he was the most visually appealing person I’d ever seen, and second because he was volatile and enigmatic. His sun-streaked hair; his lean, tan body; his loose-fitting, raggedy clothes—none of the parts of him explained the appeal of the whole.
“Who are you?” His voice had a soft Southern accent.
I let my eyes linger on the table a second before I looked up at him. “My name’s Ari.”
His eyes were a lighter shade of blue than mine. They reminded me of the color of my mother’s new guest room: Indian Ocean blue.
“You going to do any work today, Walker?” One of the other students pushed back the sleeves of his flannel shirt with his gloved hands.
He took a step to the side, then moved away from me, stumbling over nothing that I could see. It was one of the few awkward moves I ever saw him make.
I put on my gloves. Students threw away all kinds of things: photos, books, CDs, clothing, and even old TV sets, as well as genuine garbage. We took out the usable items and put them in a cart. Later they’d be cleaned and placed in the campus Free Store. We sorted out glass, paper, and cans for recycling, and we put food items in a wheelbarrow that would go to the compost pile.
The next time I reported for work, Walker stood at the sorting table next to me. We didn’t talk much as we worked, but we were aware of the proximity of our hands on the table. He smelled fresh, like the woods around campus, in sharp contrast to the trash we were sorting.
He asked me what I was majoring in, and when I asked him the same question, he said, “I’m majoring in magic. My plan is to become a notable eccentric.”
Later that afternoon we both reached for an apple at the same time. The shock of contact felt electric, even through our gloves.
The next day, I went to American Politics for the first time. Walker was there, sitting in the back row. I took the seat next to him. As the lecture grew monotonous, he did surreptitious magic tricks, pulling coins out of his ear and feathers out of his hair.
“Inner sanctum” hardly described the room I shared with Bernadette. People came and went at all hours of the day and late into the night. They came to borrow books and CDs, to bring offerings of food or books or CDs or clothes. (Most of my new clothes had been “distressed” by Bernadette to make them cooler, and now they were much in demand.) Most of our visitors were Hillhouse students, but some were students from other schools or vagabonds who roamed from city to city, campus to campus, all across America. For a self-styled outcast, Bernadette was very popular.
She had a boyfriend, she said, back home in Louisiana. He never called or came to visit, but she showed me his picture: a skinny boy with a shaved head and eyebrow piercings, holding one hand outstretched toward the camera, as if he were asking for something.
From time to time, Walker showed up, and usually he’d ask me if I wanted to study with him. That meant he and I would walk across campus and find a quiet spot in the library. On the way, we talked about where we’d lived before (he was a North Carolina boy, and his accent struck me as sexy), and we talked about where we’d like to travel (both of us wanted to tour Europe; Walker particularly wanted to go to Prague, where his grandfather had been born).
One night Walker played his guitar for me. It was a battered acoustic, but he played well, I thought. That was the first time he told me I was beautiful. The word glimmered silver as it crossed the air between us, and when it reached me, I felt myself begin to glow with the compliment.
Did we study? Not often. We went to classes and completed assignments without thinking much about them. The class work, for me, was far less difficult than the lessons my father had set.
Contra dancing and drum circles were regular events at Hillhouse. So were poetry readings and bonfires. Smoking pot and drinking were popular recreational activities, but Bernadette said they were much more prevalent at the state schools. She didn’t indulge in either. “It’s all too banal,” she said.
From time to time Bernadette tired of the constant activity, slammed the door, and locked it. Then she’d pull out a deck of tarot cards or volunteer to braid my hair.
In her tarot readings, Bernadette always represented me with the Knight of Cups card, because she said its profile resembled mine. In the last reading she gave me, the Knight was covered by the Ten of Swords, which she said signified misfortune, pain, perhaps the death of a loved one. The influence directly ahead of me was the Four of Swords, which she said meant solitude, convalescence, or exile. “It’s not a card of death, even though that’s what it looks like,” she said.
On the card, a knight lay upon a tomb, his hands clasped as if in prayer. “Great,” I said.
I was tempted to dismiss her readings entirely, but I didn’t. I recalled my father talking about Jung’s concept of synchronicity—the opposite of causality. Synchronicity finds patterns and meanings in seeming coincidences, and in the case of the tarot one could argue that the subject’s state of mind or psychic condition is reflected by the choice of cards and their interpretation.
Was I concerned with misfortune, solitude, illness, exile? Of course. These are fears that most vampires and many humans live with every day.
As for the braiding: the light touch of her hands on my hair made me think of my mother, so I tried politely to say no. (I’d called Mãe twice, and each time the conversations had been strained, only reminding us of how much we missed each other. It felt better not to call.)
Some nights Bernadette read aloud her poetry, which was usually about death. Her villanelle about seeing her father in his coffin troubled me, even more because I knew he was alive and apparently healthy.
She was reading aloud a new sonnet. It began “Roses black as onyx crown my grave/And dew like pewter teardrops cannot save/Their youth, or mine—”
At which point my cell phone rang. I bolted from the room to answer it and stood in the corridor to talk.
“Hey, Ari.” It was Autumn’s voice. “Want to go to the mall?”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m not there anymore.”
I told her I was at college, and she said she hadn’t realized I was old enough. She had never heard of Hillhouse.
“It’s a small college in Georgia,” I said. “It’s pretty here.”
“Maybe I’ll come and visit,” she said. “I got my license back, and it looks like I’ll be getting Jesse’s car.”
“He’s giving it up?”
“He’s going into the marines,” she said. “Didn’t you know that?”
“I’m not there anymore,” I said again.
“I thought he’d have called you.” Autumn sounded confused. “I gave him your number.”
“Why is he joining the marines?” I couldn’t picture Jesse wearing a uniform.
Autumn said, “He’s always liked to fight. And it’s a good time for him to get out of town.”
She said the police and the FBI were leaving him alone, but Mysty’s mother had taken to following him around, asking questions. That was something I could picture easily.
“Any news about Mysty?” I asked.
“Nothing. It’s like she dropped off the face of the earth.” Autumn coughed, and I wondered if she might still be smoking. “Y
ou got a bed for me if I come visit?”
I hesitated to reply. Hillhouse was still new to me, and I didn’t know if Autumn would like it—no, to be honest, I wondered if she’d fit in. Then I felt guilty. With Mysty gone, I was probably the closest thing to a friend she had.
“Better bring a sleeping bag,” I said. “That’s what most people do.”
Chapter Eleven
The night before our field trip left for the Okefenokee Swamp, Walker put on a magic show.
Like most of the Hillhouse community events, the show was staged in the old theater building next to the gym. The theater smelled of cedar and woodsmoke, scents that made the rigid metal chairs more tolerable. Bernadette and I had seats in the second row; we’d arrived early, but the first row was fully occupied.
The boy sitting in front of me turned around—he was Richard, the president of the Social Ecologists Club. (Aside from occasionally circulating pamphlets denouncing liberal politics, the Social Ecologists Club was largely inactive.) He also sat in front of me in American Politics. I’d grown very familiar with the back of his head; his short blond hair lay in tufts that curled tightly against his scalp and threatened to explode if allowed to grow longer.
“Hey, Bernadette,” Richard said. “Why aren’t vampires invited to parties?”
My heart jumped. Did he know about me?
“Shut up, Richard,” Bernadette said, her voice disdainful.
“You should know. Because they’re pains in the neck!” His voice was jubilant, and that’s when I realized he was telling a joke, aiming it at Bernadette. With her hair dyed black and her pale skin, she looked more like a stereotypical vampire than I did.
“What’s a vampire’s—excuse me, what’s your favorite mode of transportation?”
“Shut up, Richard.”
“A blood vessel!”
Bernadette and I didn’t laugh once, but the girl sitting next to Richard giggled incessantly.
“Where do vampires keep their savings? In blood banks!”
“Shut up, Richard.”
I was delighted when a boy from my literature class came onto the stage and began pounding on a large African drum. Richard turned around, pleased that he’d managed to annoy us. He wanted attention, any way he could get it. Bernadette shot me a look of disdain and shook her head.
Walker took the stage, accompanied by a drum roll. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt—no cape or sequined suit. His hair and skin glowed in the stage lights. “Welcome,” he said, “to the art of misdirection.”
The first few tricks involved eggs and impressed me more than some of the later, more elaborate ones, because their magic was, in a sense, real. On a table in the center of the stage, a Bunsen burner was lit, and Walker, using tongs, passed an egg through its flame until the egg was black. Then he dropped the egg in a bowl of water, and it turned iridescent, almost silver.
I knew some kind of chemical reaction must be responsible for the color change. But what made the trick magical was the story Walker told while he did it.
“For thousands of years, magicians have studied the practice of scrying,” he said. “It’s another word for crystal-gazing—for seeing the future in a reflective surface. Crystals link our mundane world with the one lying beyond it. In the moment that we gaze into the crystal, time dissolves. Our inner self grows calm. Our spirit connects with the light of the universe, making us clear and pure.
“Poor magicians like me can’t afford to buy a crystal ball, so we make our own with eggs.”
After the transformation was complete, he invited a member of the audience to come onstage to look into the bowl of water. Richard volunteered.
“Anybody else?” Walker asked.
“I’ll do it.” Bernadette was on her feet in a second.
“That’s not fair,” Richard said, and she said, “Shut up,” as she passed him.
“Relax and breathe deeply,” Walker told Bernadette. “Look deep into the silver ball, and tell me what you see.”
“I see the reflection of the candle flame.”
The theater was so quiet that I heard the sounds of people breathing on either side of me.
“Try to unfocus your eyes,” Walker said. His voice was soft, with a twinge of North Carolina in its inflections. “Try to see the mist forming in the crystal.”
“It’s an egg,” Richard said, but people shushed him.
“I see it,” Bernadette said. “It’s like smoke on the surface.”
“Let the smoke grow until it’s all you can see.” Walker signaled the drummer, who began to play a slow, rhythmic beat.
“It’s all I can see.” In her black shirt and jeans, her long hair hanging on either side of the bowl as she bent over it, Bernadette looked like a creature from another time, another world.
“Now let your eyes focus.” Walker’s face, intent and serious, was almost too handsome to watch. “As the smoke clears, tell us what you see.”
“I see…” Bernadette paused. “It looks like—it’s a skull.”
“Of course it is,” Richard said. “She’s a vampire. All she sees is death.”
But no one was listening to him, except me.
“I really saw it,” Bernadette whispered. She’d resumed her seat, and the magic show went on.
Walker did several tricks using scarves and coins that multiplied, thanks to the sleeves of his shirt, talking all the while about ancient India and Tibet and the tradition of magic. He used thin black threads (was I the only one to see them?) to move earthenware bowls across the table; he called them Babylonian demon bowls, explaining that they were placed in the corners of ancient houses to catch demons. I later learned that his story was true, and that the bowls were also used to gather demons to visit upon one’s enemy.
I wondered what Walker would say if I told him I’d seen an actual demon. As if he heard my thought, he looked up from a trick and winked at me. Then he turned a lump of coal into a diamond. I stopped watching for the strings and sleights of hand and let myself be charmed. For a moment I fantasized about being the magician’s assistant, dressed in my metamaterial suit, turning invisible when the trick required it, letting the magician take the credit. But how would Walker react to knowing what I was capable of—no, knowing what I was? He’d probably be terrified.
His final trick required an oversized trunk and the assistance of Jacey, a student notable for being the shortest person on campus. Under five feet tall, she sprang nimbly into the trunk, her thick blond braids trailing her.
Walker tucked in her braids, then closed and locked the lid. “Jacey volunteered to be disappeared,” he said. “She’s fully aware of the potentially devastating physical risks.” He began to chant words that made no sense, and he tapped the trunk lid three times with a tree branch that he called a Druid wand.
Of course the trunk was empty when he opened it. I figured it had a false bottom, and that once it was closed and tapped again, Jacey would be inside.
But when Walker opened the lid, the trunk was empty. “Let’s try this again,” he said, sounding worried. Was he acting?
He closed the lid, muttered the nonsensical words, tapped the wand. He opened the trunk and it was empty.
“You screwed up, Walker.” Jacey’s voice came from the back of the room, and we all turned to watch her. Now it was clear to me that she and Walker were acting.
“So the stage has a trapdoor?” Bernadette whispered.
But I didn’t answer. Someone was standing in the aisle behind Jacey. Autumn had arrived.
“Since I quit smoking, I got fat.” Autumn sat on the floor of our dorm room, ripping plastic from a cupcake. She’d stopped at a gas station and bought a variety of junk food, which she’d spread on the floor like a picnic.
I didn’t like sugary stuff, but Bernadette took a brownie and a thing called a Twinkie. “You’re not fat,” she said.
Autumn was at most ten pounds heavier than the last time I’d seen her. Her face was fuller and her hips a little rounde
r. I felt a twinge of guilt, as if I were responsible for her weight. But wasn’t quitting smoking worth gaining a few pounds?
To be sociable, I reached for a bag of potato chips.
We’d left Walker surrounded by a crowd of admirers, and I wondered which of them he might be talking to at that moment.
“Dreamy eyes,” Bernadette said, looking at me. “Somebody has a crush.”
Was it that obvious? I said, “How can you tell?” There was no point in denying anything—Bernadette was too observant for that.
“Every time you look at Walker, your eyes go gooey.” Bernadette bit into the Twinkie and waved its creamy center at me. “Like that,” she said.
“Walker is the magician, right?” Autumn wiped frosting onto the knees of her jeans. “That means you don’t like my brother anymore?”
I didn’t care for this conversation at all. “How’s Chip?” I asked.
“We broke up.” Autumn reached for a plastic-wrapped brownie. “He was cheating on me.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “I can see why you’d like that boy Walker. He’s cute.” She made cute have two syllables.
Then she and Bernadette began laughing, and I had no idea why until Bernadette stopped long enough to say, “Ari, you should have seen your face when she said that!”
“I think she’s still a virgin, “Autumn said to Bernadette, who said, “No way.” Then Bernadette turned to me. “Are you really?”
I took a handful of chips. “None of your business.” But knowing that they weren’t made me feel young and naïve, once more excluded from their world.
Autumn and Bernadette chatted late into the night. I mostly listened, surprised at how quickly they found things to talk about. The room was dark except for the light from my lithophane lamp, which illumined the little birds on the shade but kept our faces in the shadows.
Bernadette talked about the field trip we’d be taking. “Too bad you can’t come with us,” she said to Autumn, who was sleeping on the floor. “We only have room in the canoes for ten. You can stay in the room while we’re gone.”
The Year of Disappearances Page 14