“Yep.” I grabbed a banana from the large wooden bowl on the counter but didn’t peel it. The queasiness wasn’t completely gone. I would save it for later.
“Thank goodness you’re laying off the Pop-Tarts.” Mom grabbed a nonfat yogurt from the fridge and peeled off the foil lid.
I debated grabbing a package from the pantry cupboard just to spite her.
Dad glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a few extra minutes. Wanna catch a ride with me?”
“Yes!”
Mom cringed. I’d hurt her feelings without even meaning to. I said goodbye to her and wished her a good day, trying to make amends. She answered with a frosty smile before turning back to her yogurt.
The drive to school was not long enough. Dad chatted about work and Mom’s latest redecorating scheme, and about baseball and the firm’s season tickets to the Nationals games. When he pulled into the roundabout, I was reluctant to leave the safety of his company. For ten solid minutes, I had not thought of Leo or Noel, or even the stone that was tucked in my pocket. I didn’t know what would be waiting for me on campus, if Noel would offer any answers or if I would be confronted with even more questions.
I walked with my head down, past the main building and into my first class of the day, Geometry. I moved quickly between classes as the day progressed, breathing a sigh of relief each time I arrived at my next class, encounter-free. But lunch would be the true test. I thought about going to Mr. Connor’s classroom for lunch. I’d eaten there before, usually to discuss a project or paper I was working on. I could make up a reason for being there and hide within the walls of his classroom. My stomach growled then and I knew it wasn’t a realistic option. I was starving, the banana I’d brought to school devoured in between first and second period. I checked my pockets for change but came up empty- handed. A vending machine lunch was definitely out.
I sighed and headed to the cafeteria. Maybe I could find another table to sit at, one where I wouldn’t be alone and exposed. I saw Molly Mickelson, a girl in my history class. She was nice and had made overtures of friendship when Jess had moved, inviting me to sit with her that first lonely week after Christmas break. I’d refused and she hadn’t asked me again but she was polite, nice even, in class. She glanced at me and smiled. But there wasn’t an empty seat.
I took my place in line and grabbed a plate with a turkey sub. I signed my name to the lunch list and worked my way through the cafeteria. I sat down and waited for the ambush. It never came.
Noel wasn’t in art class, either. We were finishing our fruit sketch before moving on to candlesticks. I worked for a few minutes, pressing the lead hard as I outlined the edge of the bowl I’d drawn. The lead broke and I stood up to retrieve a sharpener from Mr. Pinkney’s desk. Ashley reached out her hand to stop me.
“Where are your boyfriends?” she asked. There was a smile on her face but it was decidedly unfriendly.
“They’re not my friends. And I don’t know where they are.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How do you know them?”
I shrugged. “Same as you. From school.” It was true, I told myself. I’d met Leo at St. John’s and had only been introduced to Noel at the campground.
“You mean you didn’t know them before?” She looked confused. “Well, then why are they hanging around you?”
I swallowed my anger. “I really don’t know. Why don’t you ask them?”
“Maybe I will.” She turned back to her sketch in dismissal.
I didn’t let her bring me down. And when class was over, I almost skipped to chemistry, relieved that Noel and Leo—for whatever reason—were not in attendance today. And when Mom picked me up, shopping bags once again covering the front seat, I smiled at her, not letting her frivolousness ruin my good mood. I’d survived the day, Geoff would hopefully have information to share and I was going to my favorite Chinese restaurant for dinner.
Chapter 16
The answering machine signaled a new message. I hit the play button while I rooted through the refrigerator for a snack. I found a vanilla pudding cup and opened it while I listened to the message.
“Valerie, it’s Geoff. Call me when you get this .”
“Geoff again?” Mom asked. She’d stopped at the grocery store before picking me up and had a bag of groceries in her hands in addition to her Nordstrom bags. She opened the refrigerator, swapping a gallon of milk for a Diet Coke.
She leaned against the counter. “What’s going on with the two of you?”
“Nothing,” I said. But then realizing I might, in fact, be spending quite a bit of time with him, I added, “We’re kind of working on a project together.”
“Really?” She took a sip of her soda. “What kind?”
“Well…” I hedged. “He’s helping me with a history project. For school.” Did two half-truths comprise a whole? It was a history question—discovering the meaning of the cross symbol embedded in the stone—and it was sort of for school, since that was where Leo and Noel were stalking me.
“Oh.” I wondered why she was frowning. “He’s a smart kid.”
“I’m gonna go call him,” I said. I finished my pudding cup before heading up stairs. I didn’t want her around, eavesdropping on our conversation.
He answered on the first ring.
I asked, “What did you find out?” I couldn’t hide my eagerness.
“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “I found a bunch of information. We should go over it, see if anything sounds significant. What are you doing this afternoon?”
“Just homework.” I’d been too nervous to tackle any during lunch hour, glancing between my tray of food and the cafeteria doors every few minutes.
“OK. I’ll figure out a reason to come by. Give me half an hour.” He hung up.
I didn’t want to wait a half hour. I sighed and got started on my homework.
Thirty minutes later, there was a knock on my bedroom door. “Val?”
Geoff peered in. He was wearing his red sweatshirt and baseball cap and I had a flashback to the campground.
I shoved my books in my backpack. “Come in.”
“I’ve got a half hour, tops,” he said. “Mom’s over at Fiona’s, signing some paperwork for the sun room. I convinced her to let me drive.”
“More behind-the-wheel hours?”
He smiled. “Yeah. I take my test this Friday.” He flopped on to my bed. At least he didn’t lay down, I thought. I did not need the visual of Geoff laying on my bed.
I turned sideways in my chair to look at him. I hadn’t known his birthday was so soon. “Really? That’s awesome. When’s your birthday?”
“It was yesterday.” He looked at me with a puzzled expression. “That’s what the cakes were for.”
“Oh,” I didn’t remember anyone mentioning this but maybe I’d been too consumed with my own life to realize what was going on in his. I felt bad. “Wow, sixteen. That’s a pretty big one. Happy belated birthday.”
Geoff shrugged. “Thanks. I think it’s a bigger deal for girls. All I want to do is get my license and drive. Alone.”
“Why are you waiting until Friday?”
He grinned. “It was the first available appointment.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and sat down on my bed. “So, I did a bunch of research today. Found a ton of information about the Celtic cross, its history, et cetera. There’s a lot to go through.”
“OK.” I straddled the chair backwards so I could face him. “Where do we start?”
“Come sit next to me so we can look at this together.”
I did as instructed, crossing my legs and folding my hands neatly in my lap. I liked the chair better.
Geoff began. “Well, for starters, I think we need to find out why this guy wants the stone. Are you absolutely sure he knows about it?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“And he knows you have it?”
“Definitely.” I’d told Noel as much.
“How? You never told me what happe
ned with him. We don’t even know if we’re talking about the same guy.”
I thought back to the weekend. “Tall, dark hair, blue eyes.” Utterly gorgeous, I thought, but I didn’t say this aloud. “The day you saw him he was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt.”
“Yeah, that’s the guy,” he muttered. “So, when did you see him? I was with you for practically the whole day. Did he come by the camp site while I was playing basketball?”
I shook my head. “No. I saw him the night before. At the bathroom. And then again while we were looking for wood.”
“On the trail?” He leaned forward, closer to me. “When?”
“Twice, actually,” I said. I wasn’t sure how much detail I wanted to share. I picked at a loose thread on my comforter. “Once while you were collecting branches by the dead tree, and again when you tripped.”
“How come I didn’t see him? Where did he go?”
I wrapped the thread around my pinky finger. “I don’t know.”
He was skeptical. “Really? What did he do—disappear?”
I glared at him. “Actually, he did. On the trail, anyway. And then the second time, he was with another boy. Down by the dead tree. Remember when I nudged you and the branches spilled?”
“Yeah, that was when we saw the deer.”
I nodded. “Right. But see, before you looked up, the deer weren’t there. Noel and Leo were. They disappeared or, I don’t know, turned into deer, when you looked that direction.”
“Noel and Leo?” His voice was incredulous, disbelieving. “You know their names?”
I bit my lip. Oops.
“Did you talk to them?” he demanded. He didn’t comment on my suggestion that they had somehow morphed from humans into deer. Maybe he hadn’t heard that part.
“It’s a little…complicated,” I admitted. I pulled harder on the thread and it tightened, puckering the fabric. “I talked to Noel that first night at the campground. But Leo didn’t show up until yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” Geoff’s eyes were nearly as big as his ears. “You mean he’s here in Alexandria?”
I knew then that I’d said too much.
Chapter 17
“Yes.” My voice sounded small, even to me. “Noel, too.”
He cradled his head in his hands. “Where?” His voice was muffled.
I sighed. “At St. John’s. Noel showed up on Monday, right after lunch. He’s in my art class. Leo didn’t come until yesterday. He sat with me at lunch. He and Noel both.”
Geoff looked up and let out a low whistle. “Whoa.”
“Whoa what?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Whoa—meaning hold on. Wait. I have no idea what is going on.”
“But you said you did research, looked stuff up…” My voice trailed off. I searched for another loose thread.
He stood up and began to pace. “I know. I did. I found a lot of info about Celtic crosses. But two guys who follow you from the campground and enroll at your school, all supposedly because you have some special stone they want? That wasn’t exactly part of my research this afternoon.”
“Great,” I said sarcastically. I leaned back against my pillow and stared at my ceiling, at the swirl of words that seemed to blend together to the untrained eye.
Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing. Aristotle. It was written in red, just to the right of my dresser, next to my closet door. I studied it and tried to hold my tongue.
His eyes narrowed. “Well, you could have told me about them yesterday.”
I’d already realized this but I tried to deflect the blame. “You had to go,” I reminded him. “There wasn’t time.”
“You could have called me,” he countered.
I didn’t have an answer for that so I said nothing.
He shook his head, frustrated. “Look, what’s done is done. We can still talk about the symbol…maybe you can come up with reasons why they’d want it. Based on what they’ve said to you and stuff.”
“OK.” I doubted it. They had told me nothing.
He finally unfolded the paper he’d been holding. I craned my neck to see what it was; all I could make out were lines of slanted handwriting.
He sat back down. “Alright. Based on what we saw last night and the drawing I did, I’m fairly certain it is a Celtic cross.”
“You already said that. So, you think it’s a religious thing—like, I don’t know, a prayer stone or something? For monks or priests or—?”
“Not exactly.” He stood up and began to pace again, the paper clutched in his hand. I resisted the urge to grab his arm and yank him back down.
“See, the Celtic cross really isn’t considered a Christian symbol, especially if it has a circle around it,” he told me.
He’d said as much yesterday. “So it has nothing to do with religion?”
“I didn’t say that. I said—or I meant—that I don’t think it’s a Christian symbol. I think it goes back farther than that.”
I was confused. “The symbol or the stone itself?”
“Both. Here, let me see it again.”
It was a little easier this time, to fish it out of my pocket and drop it in his outstretched hand. It didn’t glow at all; the tiny cross remained hidden inside its milky depths.
Geoff studied it. “We’d have to get it analyzed, have a geologist look at it to know for sure.”
What if it turned out to be some rare artifact that would be confiscated and put on display at the Smithsonian? Or, worse yet, what if it was recognized as something precious by the geologist, then stolen or sold to the highest bidder? I tucked my stone back into my pocket as if this small gesture would safeguard it from those disturbing images.
“So, the cross…” I tried to get back on track.
Geoff nodded his head. “Right. The real mystery here is how the cross got inside the rock and what that might mean. But we need to look at the symbol itself, see if that provides any clues. This type of cross dates back thousands of years. There are various interpretations of its meaning: some believe the four points of the cross represent the four directions; others say they represent the four seasons. The circle is said to signify the wheel of life—birth and death and that continuous cycle—while others say it represents the Earth Goddess herself. Again, open to interpretation.”
I was getting impatient. “OK. So what does all this have to do with why it glows and changes temperature? And why Noel and Leo want it?”
And why I felt so possessive about it? But I voiced this question only in my mind.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I need to do some more research, especially now that I have new information.” He paused for a moment and closed his eyes as if trying to remember something. “There was one thing I read—”
His phone rang then, cutting him off. “Yep. OK, I’m coming.”
He snapped the phone shut. “That was my mom. She’s waiting in the car.”
Geoff grabbed a piece of paper and pen off my desk. He scribbled quickly and handed the note to me. It was his number and e-mail address.
“Gotta run.”
“Wait!” I reached out to stop him. “You didn’t finish telling me--”
“I know.” He grinned. “You’ll have to call or email me to find out the rest.”
I stayed on my bed after he left, thinking about what he’d said. I was frustrated by the whole situation. The not knowing. We really hadn’t gotten very far in our discussion, I realized. Geoff had confirmed the symbol was a Celtic cross; he’d mentioned the history of it and we’d decided the rock was old. Maybe even really old. I wanted more. I needed more.
I sat up and glanced at my computer. Who said I had to wait for Geoff?
I tapped my fingers on my desk while the computer loaded. Once ready, I opened my search engine and typed in Celtic cross.
It was verbatim what Geoff had told me. I clicked on the next two, finding more of the same. I scrolled through a few links before finding one that caught my
attention.
I scanned the screen.
Celtic crosses were important symbols in Druidism, as were stone carvings.
I kept reading. I clicked on an image link and my hopes fell: the Druid stones were massive monuments, similar in size to Stonehenge, not little stones like the one in my pocket. I thought about the boulders off of the trail, that mysterious circle of rocks, but these, too, paled in comparison.
Defeated, I returned to the previous page. I scrolled to the bottom and noticed the final paragraph, the words practically leaping off the screen.
The oldest examples of the "Celtic" cross are those engraved or painted on flat pebbles, dating from 10,000 BC and found in a cave in the French Pyrenees. These "ancestor stones" were believed to contain the spirits of the dead.
I pulled out the stone. It glowed, the tiny symbol inside barely visible. This particular cross was not engraved or painted—it was most definitely inside the rock—but perhaps there was a connection. I decided to call Geoff.
“What did you find?” he asked immediately.
I read him the passage.
“Hmm…” There was silence for a moment. “That’s the passage I found, too…the one I was going to tell you about.”
At least that mystery was solved, I thought.
He continued. “I think I might know someone who can help, who might know some stuff about--”
“No.” I was surprised how firm my voice sounded. “I don’t want anyone else involved.”
“I won’t say anything about the stone you have,” he offered. “But I can ask some other questions, maybe check out the spirit angle…”
“You think I’m walking around with a stone that houses the spirit of a dead person?”
He picked up on my cynicism. “I don’t know, Val,” he said. “We don’t exactly have a lot to go on. I think we should look at it from all angles, leave no stone unturned.” He chuckled and said, “I know, bad pun.”
There was a knock at my door. “Val, you ready to go? I’m starving.” It was my Dad.
“Look, it’s my turn to run,” I said. I couldn’t believe it was already time to leave for the restaurant. “Text me if you find anything interesting.”
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