Ahead was a door with people milling around it. Corpse stepped through them, feeling her unIndianness like a neon sign, and entered a small gymnasium with a circle of thirty chairs. A few people were already seated. Angel was there. She nodded toward Corpse. Corpse walked to the chair beside her and sat down. Mr. Handler entered the room, saw Corpse, and came to sit beside her. I rose to the high ceiling, trying to put distance between us.
“My favorite part of the week,” he said. “Be warned, this first bit will be like the conference.”
Their eyes met. That moment after we’d come out of that conference hall bathroom, a total wreck spiraling down, was suspended in their gaze.
“Don’t worry,” Corpse said. “I’m past that now.”
“Really,” he said, like I don’t believe you.
“Really,” she said.
“What happened to your hands?” he said.
“I fell. Running down the mountain.”
“Really?” he said.
“Really,” Corpse said.
“Running.” He said it like it was something good to eat.
Dr. Yazzie strode across the room and sat on the floor. An inner circle was forming since the chairs were full.
“Dr. Yazzie is quite a runner,” Mr. Handler said.
“I heard,” she said. “He has a rock in his pocket that speaks to him.”
“Yes,” Mr. Handler said.
Their eyes met again. They smiled in a way that showed they both believed in that crazy rock.
William lumbered in and sat on the floor beside Dr. Yazzie. Corpse studied him as the lights dimmed. I drifted to the ceiling’s farthest corner.
No introduction this time. Dr. Benson rose from his chair. His hair was loose, and I worked to get used to the profile of a man with silky, flowing hair as he put his wooden flute to his lips in that clarinet way.
A reedy note seeped out. Goose bumps rose on Corpse’s flesh. The flute dove to lower notes, then arced high. So graceful. So simple. Just like I’d dreaded. Though seated in a chair, Corpse felt herself kneeling against the mountain, the sun’s warmth radiating through her. The flute was sound-wave honesty again, yet this time it seemed to embody the sunrise. She considered Yale and how hollow her words about not going to college had sounded. Her mind darted to Mom, how they’d grown to understand each other. To Sugeidi in her maid dress. To her promises. To the self she’d recognized in the mirror. To how her view of life was changing.
She sensed all my warnings and fears, and she pictured Dr. Yazzie and Angel as they’d looked at me. Corpse saw herself from my perspective. She felt how I constantly reasoned, doubted, judged. She whispered, “You have to stop.”
She heard Sugeidi say You are wise and strong. She heard Dr. Yazzie say It tells me you’re a good person. That you’ll be okay. She thought of Gabe, and felt, for the first time, worthy of his love.
The flute swelled, making her hunch forward, and she discovered that knife-of-honesty slice in her chest, the one I’d escaped through at the winter formal. She traced it, fury at me simmering. She whispered, “I am who I am.” She started from its bottom edge, sealing it together with her thumb and two fingers.
I rushed down before her. She glared at me, hand inching up. Would I become a ghost? I shot through the bit left of that slice. Corpse sucked in air and bolted straight.
My world turned murky. I ricocheted in her boundaries. So dark. So confining. This was my future? I shot back out, careening against the ceiling, just as Corpse closed the slice. She hunched over again. Our link diminished to threads and a hollowness consumed me. A tear leaked across her cheek and down her nose, then splashed onto her leg in the emptiness next to her right hand’s middle finger.
The flute music ended. She looked up from her feet as the room’s lights brightened. Dr. Yazzie was watching her. One side of Angel’s mouth turned up as she watched too. Roberta gaped. Around the circle, many eyes watched. I huddled in the corner.
“I need some air.” She lunged toward the door, glancing at Dr. Yazzie. He nodded once, like she’d won a race. I followed her, a balloon dragged by a string, and not a shiny new one. A deflating one, like from a dance long over.
Seventeen
From Oona’s journal:
Water vapor in the form of clouds covers half the Earth’s surface. Clouds form when microscopic droplets or ice particles suspended on the air
condense and gather.
—Mr. Bonstuber
Corpse skipped lunch. As she approached the office, Mr. Handler was waiting for her out front. “You okay?” he said.
She shrugged and pushed back her hair.
“That flute music always gets me,” Mr. Handler said. “I asked Dr. Benson to play today.”
Corpse glanced at him and snorted.
They listened to some jays and the clack of bare branches in the breeze.
“So you fell running?” he said.
Corpse held out her palms. “With Angel.”
Mr. Handler grinned.
Before I knew it, Corpse said, “I heard some teachers talking about a student scared by witches, maybe a ghost in somebody’s room here. Do you believe it could be true?”
Mr. Handler regarded the sky. “I hoped this place would help you see things in a different light. I hadn’t counted on it happening so fast.”
Corpse kicked a pebble. “I died once already. Remember? So maybe I’m part ghost.”
“It’s not a thing I’ll forget.”
“Well, do you? Believe? In witches? Ghosts?”
He sighed. “Here, I do. In our world, it’s not so easy.”
“Why do you think that is?”
He scanned the common area. The panorama out the valley’s funnel. “A quick, glib answer comes to mind, but I’d rather think on it and let you know.”
“Okay,” Corpse said.
“What do you believe?” Mr. Handler said.
She had my full attention. She shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’m realizing I was wondering about things like this before I got here. I just didn’t understand I was wondering. You know? Like, I think water is alive somehow. Sort of the key to … ” Footsteps approached.
Mr. Handler winked at her. “Hello, Tina,” he said. Tina was another other girl who’d been at the conference. The one we’d never heard read. Corpse pressed her palms together like prayer and then followed them into the office.
Corpse scooped mashed potatoes next to the baked chicken on her plate. She spooned out green beans and put those in her plate’s remaining third. She filled a glass with water, grabbed silverware and a napkin, and looked around for Mr. Handler and his faculty table. Instead, she saw Angel and William. Angel patted the space between them.
As Corpse passed Mr. Handler’s table, she felt Louise and Dr. Yazzie watching too, all of them like proud parents.
Angel and William were in a conversation. They kept talking as she sat down. Next to Angel sat Pauline, who Corpse had helped with her applications the day before. Pauline came from Oklahoma, but she’d applied to Arizona State University and University of Arizona. She wanted to be an engineer.
Corpse dug into the mashed potatoes, self-conscious about her wobblier-than-usual fork. After one bite she switched to her left hand and wondered if she’d ever be normal.
“Harvard this summer again, huh, William?” Pauline said. “I thought you hated it.”
“The program was really good. There were just some lugheads there.” He shrugged. “Good chance they won’t be back.”
“Brave.” Angel snorted.
William let out a war-whoop.
They all laughed.
“What are you doing this summer?” Angel said to Corpse.
She shrugged. I hadn’t even considered summer. Would it be the usual shopping spree in New York followed by a month on a yacht? We actual
ly liked that camp, the way they lived on and in that turquoise sea, ate mostly fish. She especially liked the dolphins that would dive with almost no splash around the boat. “Not sure,” she said. “I usually I go to New York and then to a camp.”
“Camp? Like with counselors? Where?” William said.
Corpse couldn’t make herself say St. Lucia. She shrugged. “What happened at Harvard?”
William watched her for a minute, but went along with her change of subject. “Just some students who’d say things like ‘I didn’t know Indians wore normal clothes,’ or ‘I didn’t know Indians cut their hair.’” He took a thoughtful bite of potatoes. “I don’t think they were trying to be mean. I think they were just that dumb.”
“Right,” Angel said.
“Seriously?” Corpse said. “You believe they knew that little about Indians? That’s impossible.” She remembered how many times she’d said “Oh” and bit her lip.
“Honestly?” William said. “We’re the last ethnicity where it’s still okay to be racist.”
Angel blew out her breath and let her hand drop. “Here we go.”
“What do you mean?” Corpse said.
“Well, for starters, our nation’s capital has a football team called the Redskins,” William said.
“How about the Cleveland Indians logo?” Pauline said.
“Or Kansas City?” William said.
“Chiefs?” Corpse tried to remember if that was football or baseball.
“Can you imagine the riots if a team was named the Washington Negros?” William said. “The Cleveland Asians? Maybe the Kansas City Rabbis?”
Corpse laughed with everyone else. But it wasn’t actually funny at all. How had she not noticed this before?
“That doesn’t bother me,” Angel said, dismissing it with a wave. “The comments bothered me.”
“You were there too?” Corpse said.
“Well, they should,” William said.
“For a writing program.”
Corpse slouched back. “I’ve just been going to camp in summers.”
To Pauline, Angel said, “What did you decide to do?”
Pauline opened her mouth to speak, but Roberta arrived, thumping down her tray and slouching into her seat. She picked up her fork, rocked it in her fingers. The anger and confusion from when she’d stormed through me came right back.
“Louise just offered me five hundred bucks not to dance anymore.” Roberta poked her potatoes twice, pushed her tray forward, crossed her arms on the table, and rested her forehead on them.
Money, Corpse thought, created a lot of problems. As I studied how Roberta’s hair fanned out on the table, Corpse felt her butt against that hard leather chair in Dad’s office.
Eighteen
From Oona’s journal:
Water covers most of the planet, and its high specific heat holds the Earth’s temperature within a range that allows life. Organisms, made mostly of water, also benefit in the same way.
—Biology: Life’s Course
“It’s already Thursday,” Corpse said.
“All day,” Angel said.
“Time is different here,” Corpse said.
“Uh-huh.”
They strolled toward the dorms through moonless black. After living next to two rivers, one of water and one of cars, Corpse couldn’t get used to the quiet, and she realized her ears had been straining to hear rushing since she’d arrived. Such darkness, no water. Her mouth felt dry, and she tried to count the number of times in her life she’d been in a place this still.
One. Now.
A coyote darted across the road. Another flashed after it. Moments later, eerie howling rose from the mountainside. Angel looked toward the howling, then ahead, seeming to think hard. I was thinking hard too. About Roberta. About money. About my future. They arrived at our door, and Corpse dug out her key.
“Well, good night,” she said.
“Want to come to my room?” Angel said.
“Sure.”
Corpse followed her to the building’s far end. The coyotes sounded again, each yip and howl so unique, so mournful, it churned her guts. Angel unlocked the door of the room on the building’s other end.
Inside, it was like our room, except crowded and lived-in. One bed had a bedspread with big poppy blooms. The other, a bedspread with zebra stripes. There were two desks squeezed along the wall with the dresser, one on each side, and on them were framed photos and books. Another dresser stood against the wall before the bathroom. Covering the walls were posters of movies and bands. Angel walked to an iPod in an alarm clock on her nightstand and turned it on. Hip hop music pulsed out. Above the nightstand, her feathers hung from a rawhide cord tied to a nail.
“My roommate’s gone this week,” she said. “That’s her bed.” She pointed to the one with the zebra spread. “She went home.”
“Is everything okay?” Corpse said.
“Yes,” Angel said. “Sometimes we just need to get back home. You know?”
Corpse sat on the zebra bed and flopped onto her back, felt a little out of control. “No, actually, I don’t.” She could feel Angel studying her. She looked at the photos on Angel’s roommate’s desk. One showed six people in formal attire, corsages pinned to the girls’ dresses, boutonnières to the guys’ lapels. They stood in a line, arms around one another, obviously having a great time.
“Do you have prom here?” Corpse said.
“Sure.” Angel followed her eyes to the photo. “They hold it at the Oasis House. It’s really fun.”
“Where’s the Oasis House?”
“Farther down the road along the valley’s other side. It’s lush there. Pretty.”
In the photo, Angel’s head rested against William’s shoulder. “Was William your date?”
“Yes,” she said. “But we’re just friends.”
“I like your dress,” Corpse said. “Blue is my favorite color. My prom dress was blue.” My mind travelled to last April. To prom and Richie Leevers, our date. We’d hated Richie Leevers. Ash had insisted we go with him because he was best friends with Paul Thomas, who she was dating at the time. We’d met Gabe in the hall the week afterward, and it was strange to think of a time before him. I remembered our last dance with Gabe. How Corpse had kissed him for real because I’d left her. She moaned and sat up.
“We had a winter formal back in January,” she said to Angel’s puzzled look. “I left it, took the bus to a trail by my house, hiked out, and let myself freeze to death in a pink satin dress and strappy heels dyed to match. I was wearing a freaking crown. My heart stopped. The doctors said I was dead for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes.”
Angel didn’t say anything.
“I hate pink. My Mom made me get that dress. They must have sliced it open because they had to cut holes in my groin and pump warm fluid into me before my heart would start again.” Her fingers went to the tiny, precise scars. She’d forgotten those incisions. Funny, she thought, how these saved her body, while that slice in her chest saved her soul.
I had to think about that. Did she mean my leaving was good?
“I keep picturing the paramedics, the doctors, working to revive me and me wearing that crown.” She snorted. “Dad always called me princess. I made him stop.”
“So you’re on your second life.”
Corpse cocked her head. “Yes, I guess I am.” Second life. She liked the sound of that.
Would her second life include me?
“When do you go home?” Angel said.
“Saturday morning.”
“So you just have tomorrow left,” Angel said.
“I guess so.” She considered asking Angel about her dream but decided not to. “I never heard what you’re going to do this summer.”
“I’m going to work in the movie theater at home. I need money for
college.”
“Have you decided where you want to go next year?”
Angel looked at Corpse with a funny expression. “I think so.”
A knock at the door made them both jump. When Angel answered it, Dr. Yazzie stood there, hand in his pocket.
“There’s a wildfire down across the highway.” He gestured with his chin, as if they could see through the building across the miles out there in the dark. “This one’s spreading. We may have to evacuate. Pack a bag just in case. Stay in your rooms, so we know where to find you. It’s a ways off, and it would have to jump the highway, but the wind’s blowing this way.”
Angel closed the door, grinning.
“This is good?” Corpse said, but Angel didn’t answer.
Into a backpack, Angel stuffed a pair of jeans, two shirts, two pairs of underwear and socks, and two framed photos from her desk. She grabbed her toothbrush and a hairbrush. She took the prom photo from her roommate’s desk. She lifted the feathers reverently from their nail, slid them into a gauzy bag she pulled from her drawer, and zipped them into the front pocket. They went to Corpse’s room. Corpse packed the few things she’d taken out of her suitcase while Angel paced on the patio. Corpse joined her.
“I can see the flames.” Angel pointed ahead and left. Sure enough, there were flickers of orangish-yellow.
“I’ve never seen a forest fire,” Corpse said. “Let’s watch it.” She pulled the bedspreads off the beds and handed one to Angel. Smoke clogged the air.
Corpse wrapped herself like a burrito and settled into a plastic chair. Angel set her bedspread in the other chair and walked to the low wall bordering the patio, staring at the fire. The flames, an arm’s-length wide and tall as Corpse’s thumbnail, were hard to imagine as dangerous, yet it was mesmerizing, watching them waver in that space halfway to the invisible horizon.
“I wonder how it started,” Corpse said.
“A smoker, probably. Flicking his butt out the window. Butthead,” Angel said. “This happens a few times a year.”
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