The cold receded a little more, and I smiled.
Several hours later, I was in my seventh-eighth grade split class, listening to my students debate about the meaning behind different character names. I looked up from my copy of Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party. “Alright, who can tell me—Caitlin? Are you okay?”
The girl in question was gripping the sides of her desktop, her face slick with sweat. Before my eyes, an unnatural tremor ran over her skin like ripples in a pond. A shadow seemed to rise beneath her skin—the skeleton of something inhuman, with wicked fangs and pointed claws and gleaming golden eyes.
I blinked, and the shadow was gone. She was just a normal thirteen-year-old girl—albeit, one who was desperately ill. She shuddered and let out a pained groan.
I had only taken half a step towards her when the rest of the class sprang into action. The four kids nearest Caitlin hauled her to her feet and rushed her into the hall. The rest of the students gang-rushed me, forcing me into the corner behind my desk.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, trying to weave my way through them, and finding myself constantly thwarted.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Rossi. They’re taking her to Mrs. Teague—she’s Caitlin’s aunt,” Gwen Yidineeltot told me as she caught me around the waist and hauled me back. She was only a lanky thirteen-year-old, half a foot shorter than me, but she was wickedly strong. It took considerable effort to break out of her hold.
“All of you!” I snapped. “Out of my way!” I managed to force my way free of their blockade and burst into the hallway. Linnea Teague’s classroom was next to mine. Her door was closed, and when I tried to open it, the door was locked and a poster of the color wheel had been pressed over the window.
I pounded on the door. “Linnea! Is Caitlin in there?” I called.
“Yes,” Linnea called back. “I’ll handle it. You can go back to your room.”
An eerie, inhuman howl punctuated the end of her sentence.
“What on earth is happening?” I shouted.
There was a beat of silence, and then the sound of a struggle—something scrabbling heavily, desks squealing across the floor, and teenagers exclaiming incoherently.
“It’s a health condition that runs in our family,” Linnea called back, sounding strained. “I’ll take care of it. If you want to be helpful, get Margaret and send her to my room!” Her tone was brusque, bordering on angry. Even though I wanted to kick the door off the hinges, I backed off. I turned back to my classroom and found my entire class standing in the hall, watching me. There was a knowing wariness in their expressions. They knew exactly what was going on. But nobody wanted me to know.
Was it contagious? Historically, when isolated population groups made contact with outsiders, diseases ran rampant. But this wasn’t the Columbian Exchange. The people of the Teekkonlit Valley had access to the wider world via plane and, once the ice receded, by road as well. My initial thought had been that she was having a seizure, but with the way the class had been so intent on keeping me away from her, the wary way they watched me now, had me second-guessing that. So what was wrong with Caitlin—and why was it a secret?
“Alright,” I said, trying to project confidence and failing. “Everyone back in the classroom. Pick up where we left off with our discussion about character names. Michael, you’re the discussion leader until I get back.”
As soon as they were all inside, I pulled the door shut and sprinted down the hall to the administrative offices. Teekkonlit Secondary was small, and it took me all of ten seconds to get there. Joanne looked up when I burst in, half-rising from behind her desk.
“Grace, what’s—”
“Is Margaret in her office?”
“Yes, but she’s—”
I threw Margaret’s door open. She was on the phone, glasses on, frowning at something on her computer screen. “Yes, that’s—Grace?”
“Something happened with Caitlin Evers. She’s—I don’t know. Linnea told me to get you.”
“I have to go,” Margaret said into the phone. She dropped it in the cradle and was on her feet in the same instant. “What happened?” she asked me, already making her way out of the administrative offices.
“I really don’t know.” I had to jog to keep pace with Margaret’s urgent pace. “Caitlin looked really ill—like she was going to vomit? Or was it a seizure? I just don’t know. The rest of the class brought her to Linnea, and that’s the last I saw.”
“Good,” Margaret said, a small measure of urgency fading from her posture. “Linnea knows how to handle this.”
“She said it’s a health condition that runs in their family.”
“Yes. It’s nothing to worry about. Happens from time to time. Caitlin will probably need a little time off of school, but she’ll be perfectly fine.”
We rounded the corner to the short hall where mine and Linnea’s classrooms were. Linnea’s door was still shut, the poster still pressed over the window. I wanted to ask Margaret what the health condition was—why my students had reacted the way they did. But it wasn’t my business, and it was illegal for me to ask.
“Go ahead and get back to your class,” Margaret told me, giving me a squeeze on the arm. “For the sake of Caitlin’s privacy, leave your door shut until the end of this class period. We don’t need the rest of the student body gawking at Caitlin while we get her out of the building.”
The cloak-and-dagger mystery of it all had me completely unbalanced. It couldn’t be diabetes, or a food allergy, or asthma. Teachers were always made aware of those conditions, given instructions for an emergency. What could possibly be so serious that everybody else seemed prepared to respond—but that I wasn’t allowed to know about? I recalled the unnatural way her skin had rippled over her body and the shadow that had seemed to pulse beneath her skin. That last bit had been my imagination or a trick of the light, but I could still picture it so clearly.
“Grace?” Margaret squeezed my arm again. “She’ll be fine, I promise. Go back to your class.”
There was nothing else I could really do. “Okay. Well. Let me know if I can help.”
I stepped back into my classroom and the buzzing conversation died immediately. They definitely hadn’t been discussing Octavian Nothing.
I returned to the spot where I usually leaned on my desk while teaching. “Alright. Where’d we leave off?”
I was distracted for the rest of class. My students were suspiciously well-behaved. Not that they were ever bad, but their participation was so universally enthusiastic—never letting the discussion lull, never letting a question go unanswered—that it was like teaching an entirely different class. They’re probably all keyed up from the excitement with Caitlin, I told myself. This is not a conspiracy to keep you distracted while Caitlin and her mystery-ailment are secreted away.
When the bell rang, I walked to the door behind my students. Linnea’s classroom door was open again, her own students filing out. I thought about walking over to ask her if everything was okay, then decided against it. It was clear nobody wanted me to know anything. I tried to tell myself that the uneasy suspicion I felt was unwarranted. Their family had some kind of genetic disorder, and they didn’t want to make it public knowledge. Fine. I could understand that.
As the day progressed, it preyed less and less on my mind. By my final class, I hadn’t stopped worrying about her, but I’d come to accept reality. Caitlin’s health condition was private. In this case, “private” meant that all the locals knew about it, and how to respond to it. But I didn’t, and couldn’t, because I was an outsider. To the Teekkonlit Valley, no matter how hard I worked at my job, no matter how much I cared about my students, no matter how friendly I was to my neighbors or how much of an effort I made, I would always be an outsider. It wasn’t a new feeling. But Longtooth had started to feel a little different from everywhere else I’d lived, and it was the first place where I felt my outsider status as an insult. I wasn’t allowed to care for them the way they cared for each
other.
The realization of where I stood in Longtooth hung over my head for the rest of the day. The cold inside of me seemed to deepen, becoming sharper and more brittle. My whole body ached. My fingers and toes were ice. I put another sweater on top of the one I was already wearing, but I couldn’t stop shivering. I wanted to go back to The Spruce and sit in front of the big stone fireplace in the dining room, but I also wanted to lock myself in my room where my unfixable loneliness wouldn’t be exacerbated by the empty friendliness of everyone else in the dining room.
When I finally got back to The Spruce, I parked in my assigned spot in the garage and, for a moment, I just sat there. I couldn’t bring myself to trudge into the dining room and face the gulf between me and the locals. They were friendly to me, and they were content to let me live here, but it was becoming more and more clear that I wasn’t truly one of them, and I never would be.
It’s Valley business. Margaret’s words continued to ring in my head. She’d tried to walk it back, but it was too late. She’d said what she meant. I wasn’t privy to Valley business, because I didn’t belong in the Valley.
My throat tightened. It was just like Chicago. I had a job, and a home, and people I could even consider friends, but I was a second thought to all of them. Nobody considered me a priority. My staying or going wouldn’t really affect anybody’s lives in the long run.
Hollowness seemed to cave in my chest. I hated this feeling. I hated feeling sorry for myself.
I heaved a heavy sigh. I’d thought it would clear my head, push away the bad feelings, but the sigh just brought them up to the surface. I couldn’t remember not feeling lonely. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt welcome and loved and wanted. Was it when grandma was still alive? That long ago? Hot tears pricked at my eyes.
Until now, I hadn’t really admitted to myself that I’d chosen to move to a small place like Longtooth partly because I’d been hoping to find a way out of the loneliness. Maybe a smaller community, more tightly knit, would be the answer. But witnessing that tight bond only made my loneliness more stark in comparison. One tear streaked down my cheek, then another, and then I was just hunched over my steering wheel, dragging in shuddering breaths and squeezing my eyes against the hot flood.
Sudden pounding slammed against my window. I jerked upright.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. It was Caleb. He was peering into my window, frowning as if he’d just caught me doing something criminal.
“What are you doing in here?” he demanded, his voice slightly muffled by the closed window.
I pressed my hand to my face. “Please just go away.”
“Did somebody do something to you?”
“No.”
“Grace,” he said skeptically.
“I said I’m fine,” I growled. “Nobody did anything to me.”
“Then why are you—”
“Because I’m a fucking mess! Alright?”
Caleb didn’t say anything for a moment, just regarded me with that steady, expressionless gaze. Finally, he stepped back from my truck. “Don’t let the cold get you.”
He left.
I leaned against my seat, head tipped back, blinking over and over until my tears dried up. I stayed in the truck for a while afterwards, letting the cold soothe the redness from my eyes and nose.
When I went inside, dinner was already in full swing. Natasha greeted me brightly and I forced a smile for her. I ate quickly, quietly, then went upstairs.
I knew that isolating myself away from everybody else was self-defeating. But if I tried to hang around and forge a meaningful connection with people who saw me only as a visitor in their lives, I’d end up crying again. So I shut myself in my room, pulled out an old comfort read, and crawled into bed.
Chapter Eleven
Things were a little stilted at school the next day. Caitlin was conspicuously absent, and everybody was very carefully not talking about her.
At the end of the day, as I watched my last class pack their things and file out of the classroom, I resolved to stay late at school. I wouldn’t have to face all the regulars at The Spruce and pretend I didn’t see the invisible wall between us. I had protein bars in my desk, so I wouldn’t starve, and I’d be able to get a bunch of grading done.
Before I could slump into my chair and get to work, I realized one of my students had hung back. Daniel Gray, a quiet, stern-faced kid who never spoke up in class.
“Hey, Daniel. What’s up?”
“Um, do you have any more books like Unwind?” he asked, referring to the book we’d just finished last week.
The dark cloud that had been hovering over me suddenly evaporated. I straightened, trying to keep myself from leaping out of my chair in excitement. Excessive cheer might chase him off. I managed to restrain myself to a smile.
“There are sequels to Unwind, actually,” I told him. “I don’t have a copy, but you might be able to get them through an interlibrary loan system.” The school’s library was housed in a room no bigger than my classroom, erratically organized, and entirely unstaffed. Checking out books operated on an honor system, in which the only form of accountability was a self-policed logbook. I wasn’t sure if the library was connected to a wider system, or if an interlibrary loan was even possible.
Daniel’s expression shuttered. “That won’t work.”
“It might. I’ll have to look into it and get back to you. In the meantime, I think you might like—” I turned to my bookshelves, considering the spines “—The Hunger Games.”
“I already saw the movies.”
“Hmm… how about The Maze Runner?”
“Saw that movie, too. Never mind, I gotta go. My uncle’s waiting for—”
“No, wait!” Taking a gamble, I pulled The Lightning Thief off the shelf. It also had a movie adaptation, but what popular YA book didn’t these days? “What about this one?”
Daniel looked down at the cover. I could tell whatever prompted him to ask for another book had already waned.
“Come on,” I wheedled. “If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. No big deal. But I think you will like it. It’s pretty good. The main character has to prevent a war between the gods. There’s mystery! And mortal peril!” I held the book in front of my face and made it dance enticingly. “You know you want to read me, Daniel,” I intoned in a ghostly voice. “Take me,” I crooned. “Flip my pages…”
Daniel looked more mortified than enthused, but he snatched the book out of my hands, which I counted as a win. From the hallway, I heard a derisive snort. I looked up to see Caleb Kinoyit leaning against my doorway. His expression was pensive as he watched the two of us. How long had he been standing there?
“Ready?” Caleb asked. For a second I was confused, and then I realized he was talking to Daniel. Caleb must be the uncle Daniel had mentioned. Once again, I was reminded of how tightly the Valley residents were connected to each other.
“Yeah.” Daniel slid The Lightning Thief into his backpack and turned to leave.
“Hey.” Caleb kicked at Daniel’s heel as he walked out the door. Daniel stumbled and scowled at him. Caleb’s expression was just as unhappy. “What do you say?” he demanded, tilting his head towards me.
Daniel flushed. “Thank you, Ms. Rossi.”
“You’re welcome, Daniel. Keep it as long as you want.”
Caleb regarded me over the top of his nephew’s head, his expression contemplative. He seemed like he wanted to say something. I watched him, trying to keep the warm flush on my chest from creeping up to my face.
Daniel elbowed Caleb. “You just gonna stare at my English teacher, or can we go?”
A low sound rumbled in Caleb’s throat. Daniel looked immediately chagrined and skittered out the door. Caleb pushed off the door frame, giving me a nod before following his nephew down the hall. I stared after the two of them. Had Caleb just… growled at his nephew?
I stayed at school until eight in the evening. When I came in the back door of The Spruce
, the dining room was empty except for Natasha, sitting at the diner counter refilling salt shakers.
“Gracie,” she looked up at me, dismayed. “Did you eat?”
“Yeah.” I plopped down on the stool next to her. “Natasha, do you think of yourself as an outsider?” Not only was she not from the Valley, or even Alaska, but she wasn’t originally from the U.S. Was she privy to the secrets that were being kept from me? Did she know about the health condition that ran in Linnea Teague’s and Caitlin Evers’ family?
Natasha considered me for a moment, her lips pursed. Finally, she resumed filling salt shakers. “When I first arrived in Longtooth, everyone called me ‘Arthur’s Polish girl’ instead of my name. My English was not as good back then, and some people thought that was funny. I did not know a lot of the little things that everybody who grows up here knows, and everybody thought that was very funny. Arthur’s mother and father ran The Spruce back then. I helped in the kitchen, and I am a very good cook, but Arthur’s mother was never happy with anything I made.” Remembered annoyance flickered over her features. “But Arthur was always on my side. The locals started to treat me as one of theirs. It happened faster with some people than others, but now I am one of them. Even his mother eventually acknowledged that people like my food.” She looked up from the salt shakers and smiled at me. “I was not born in the Valley, but I am from here, now. It is my home.” She set the last salt shaker aside and pushed the spout down on the salt canister. “Why do you ask? Has somebody insulted you?”
Not intentionally. “No. I just…” I shrugged. “I’m not sure I belong here. I think everybody sees me as a visitor.” A visitor they liked well enough, but not somebody worth trusting and confiding in. Not somebody who’d invested her own trust and effort into the community.
Natasha squeezed my forearm. “You have to do what I did.”
“Marry a local?”
Cold Hearted: An Alaskan Werewolf Romance Page 10