by Kit Alloway
Josh barely heard her. What did she care who had written the scroll, or if the rhymes were lousy? Good or bad, she had never wanted to see them at all.
Winsor reverently held out the scroll. “Here.”
Josh didn’t want to touch it. She didn’t even feel like it was hers anymore. “Just put it in the desk or something,” she said as she left the room, and she pulled the door shut hard behind herself.
Twenty-five
Another night, the gym might have looked nice to Josh, but tonight, she found the streamers and stage lights cheesy and somehow deceptive. She didn’t see either Haley or Deloise around. Louis noticed her and called her name, but she ignored him as she headed for the drink table, where Brianna Selts was slipping something acrid into the punch.
“Bri,” she said, “is the guy taking pictures still here?”
Brianna pointed to the far corner, where an arbor decorated with fake flowers had been erected for couples to stand beneath while being photographed. “I think he’s packing up.” She examined Josh’s jeans and gray sweater with a critical eye. “Interesting fashion statement,” she said, her voice laced with derision, but Josh was already cutting through the crowd.
She passed Jay Appleton, who was nursing a bump on the back of his head with a bag of ice, and Alece Vernon, who was breaking up with Evan Lovett right there on the dance floor. Somebody had spilled a drink, and the janitor was trying to rope off the mopped area. The latest boy-band release—coincidentally, from Josh’s father’s label—blared.
The photographer was just locking the case for his flashbulbs when Josh reached him. Will was rolling up a backdrop, but he stopped when he saw Josh.
For a moment words failed her. She almost punched him, but the photographer happened to walk in between them. Besides, it would have been irresponsible; she knew how to break his nose and drive it backward into his brain, killing him instantly.
“What’s wrong?” Will asked.
She still had the journal. It had rested on her lap throughout the drive like a live coal. She held it up for Will to see in the colored carnival lights.
He swallowed, then set the backdrop on the floor. “Alan, I’ve got to go. Can you give me a call tomorrow?”
“Sure,” the photographer said. “Good work tonight, Will.”
“Thank you,” he replied, already walking away.
He tried to take Josh’s elbow and she shook him off, but she held him with her gaze as if with a clenched fist. Without a word, she followed his lead out the double doors to the lobby. He glanced nervously at her several times as they exited the gym, but even when he was looking away she stared at the back of his head. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see little red sniper-rifle dots appear in his hair.
The doors swung shut behind them. The noise in the lobby was muted; only the music’s bass line could still be heard. There were no streamers here, no harlequin masks or sweet scents of punch and soda. A few security night-lights splashed into the lobby, but mostly it was dark.
Josh took advantage of the lobby’s emptiness by putting at least a dozen steps between herself and Will. She clenched Ian’s journal in one hand.
Will exhaled slowly, waiting for her to speak. She said nothing, just let him stew while she ground her gaze into his eyes. When he took a step forward, she stepped back. He got the message.
“I know that—” he began, and before he could finish, Josh hurled the journal at him.
It hit him in the forehead, hard, and then fell to the floor in a rustling of pages. Will stumbled back, his expression shocked. Josh closed the space between them and darted down to pick the journal back up.
“How dare you,” she hissed, poking one corner of the journal’s cover into his chest like a finger. “This was not your business, and it was not your place to go into my family’s private history and take it.”
“It was my business,” Will told her, and she didn’t know whether to be surprised or infuriated that he had the guts to speak back to her.
“You wouldn’t tell me,” he went on, “what happened to Ian.”
“And you wanted to hear the gossip,” she snapped.
“No, Josh, I didn’t. That’s not what this is about.”
“No,” she agreed, “it’s not. This is about respect.”
“Respect?” he asked incredulously. “I have nothing but respect for you.”
“Then why didn’t you respect me when I made it perfectly clear that I didn’t want to talk about Ian?”
“Did I bring it up with you? Did I push when you kept changing the subject? No. Never. I never asked for more than you wanted to give me. But I did wonder, and I did read Ian’s diary.”
“Why?!” She was shouting by then, her voice echoing off the walls. “Why did you think you had the right to do that?”
His face darkened with an anger Josh had not foreseen. “Because—like it or not—I am in this as deep as you are.”
“In what? In Ian’s death? You barely even knew him!”
“No, this has nothing to do with Ian, Josh. This is about you and me. I wanted to know what happened to Ian because it happened to you. It didn’t have anything to do with gossip or disrespect. I wanted to know why you’re afraid to talk about him and why you don’t want to open your scroll and what had happened between you and Winsor that wrecked your friendship. And most of all, I wanted to know why you’re so terrified of getting close to me.”
“You don’t have a right to know why! That’s my business, not yours—”
“How can it not be mine?” he shouted back. “We work together for hours every day. When I go into a nightmare, all I have to defend myself with are the tricks you’ve taught me. I eat food your stepmother cooks, and I wear clothes your sister picks out, and I sleep in a room full of furniture your father paid for.”
“And that’s not enough?”
“Not enough?” he repeated in disbelief. “Do you have any understanding of what my life was like before this? Do you know how bad things have to get before a twelve-year-old kid will tell his mother that he’d rather be a ward of the state than live with her? I threw my family away, Josh. I didn’t expect to be handed another one—especially not one as happy and perfect as yours. I know I don’t have a right to any of it.”
Will’s words cut Josh. They were fighting about her privacy—she wanted to fight about her privacy—but she wasn’t ready to talk about Will’s place in her life, and she was nowhere near being ready to assure him of his own worth.
Will deflated, shaking his head. “I didn’t ask Lauren and Kerstel to adopt me. I didn’t ask Deloise to be so sweet and innocent that I start feeling protective every time I see a guy making eyes at her. I didn’t ask for daily updates on my life from Haley, or for Dustine to look out for me, or for Whim to be my friend. I didn’t ask for any of this, but I would be a fool to throw it away.”
Josh turned her back on him, trembling, aware for the first time of how impossibly enmeshed his life was with hers, how close he was to her heritage, her family’s secrets, her own secrets. They were all a hairsbreadth from being revealed to an outsider.
And he was right. He was right about all of it. That was the worst part.
Will spoke again, and she heard tears choking his voice.
Don’t cry, Will. I don’t know how to comfort you.
“I know it was a mistake that I ended up in your life,” he told her. “I know I’m the last person you want near you, and that you resent me. But I see these things eating you up inside and I … I would do anything to help you, if you’d only tell me what to do.”
She didn’t move for fear that the world would shatter around her like cheap crystal, that one of those glass shards would split her down the middle and the half of her that wanted to turn and put her arms around Will would do so while the rest of her collapsed, broken and unwilling to let him in.
“Josh.” He touched her arm and she couldn’t control the shudder that ran through her body. She didn’t wan
t to look over her shoulder and let him see the damp lines running down her face.
She heard his steps retreat. “I’m going now,” he told her hoarsely. The door to the gym opened and a slow song poured into the lobby. Below it, Josh could just hear Will’s departing words, spoken almost to himself.
“I don’t even know your full name.”
Then the door closed, and she was alone again.
* * *
What did you just do, Josh?
She fled through the school’s main doors and into the night.
Why did you let him go?
She splashed through a puddle, and the frigid water soaked her shoes and socks.
You’ve lost him.
By the time Josh reached the car, her lungs were rattling with the effort not to cry. She put Ian’s diary on the hood—although she was loath to unfurl her hands and let go of it—and reached into her pockets.
They were empty. All four of them. She peered inside the car and saw her key ring hanging from the ignition. She tugged on the car door, but it was locked.
“Oh, shit, shit.”
I can’t go back in and face him, she thought, and the helplessness of her situation ruined her last bit of self-control. She pressed her forehead against the car’s hood, her skin contracting against the touch of the icy metal, and cried.
“J.D.?”
She looked up and saw Ian—no, it was Haley, goddammit—striding toward her. He stood straight and tall and took her hands between his without the slightest hesitation.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked. “You’re shivering.”
Words failed her. She shook her head.
“Are you crying?” he asked, leaning down to peer into her face. “What happened?”
“I just…” Her shoulders twitched uncontrollably. “I had a fight with Will,” she managed to tell him. “And now I’ve locked my keys in the car.”
“You and Will fought? Over what?”
She wanted to blurt it all out, how she had rushed to school ready to behead him and, in trying to push him further away, had opened the door for him to say everything she didn’t want to hear.
Oh, yes, she wanted to tell Ian all about it.
“It doesn’t matter,” he assured her. “So you fought. It happens. But your scroll says he’s destined to be your apprentice—it’ll work out.”
“Oh my god, Haley,” she murmured, suddenly remembering who was standing in front of her—that he was insane, that he’d read her scroll.
“No, it’s okay,” he told her. “The scrolls don’t make mistakes.”
“Forget the scroll!” she shouted at him, shocking herself.
He stepped back, all traces of laughter vanishing from his face.
“Forget the scroll,” she told him again. “It doesn’t make anything all right; it doesn’t fix things. Just because the scroll predicted that I’d have an apprentice doesn’t mean I’m a good teacher. It doesn’t mean I know how to let anybody in. It doesn’t mean that Will being here is the best thing for either one of us.”
Her voice broke, and then she was crying again, sinking down the side of the car into a heap on the asphalt. She pressed her hands against her eyes, and the warm tears stung as they dripped between her frozen fingers.
Fix it for me, Ian. Just fix it all. Tell me what to do.
“Oh, J.D.,” Haley said. No one else had dared to use that nickname since Ian died, but when she heard it, the last eight months might never have happened—Ian was there, with her, and whatever had fallen apart he would put back together. She felt him blocking the wind as he sat down next to her, and she didn’t protest when he pulled her into his arms. “It’s okay, love.”
“Oh my god,” she whispered again. She knew he wasn’t Ian. She knew. But if he wanted to make believe, how could she stop him? She couldn’t stand his touch but neither could she push him away. She needed Ian so much. She had tried to live without him, but she didn’t know how.
“Stop crying,” he told her. “We can fix this.”
His words only made her cry harder, because they were exactly what she wanted to hear, and because it was so painful to hear Ian’s voice and know he wasn’t really with her. But Josh didn’t move away from him. He was warm all around her, his inherited Brooks Brothers suit was soft against her cheek, and she smelled the amber cologne beneath his shirt.
“I still love you,” he said, pressing his lips to her temple.
She hid her face in his shoulders, kept her eyes shut against his jacket. “Do you even know,” she asked him, trying not to moan, “which one of you came out of the archway that night?”
He rocked her. “Not really,” he admitted.
She didn’t know either. Sitting in the freezing parking lot, lying against Haley’s chest while he wrapped his jacket around her shoulders, she realized she didn’t care. She needed his strength, needed him to distract her from thinking about Will and the pain of their argument, needed him to be decisive when she was so torn she didn’t even know which decisions to make.
Forgive me, Ian, for missing you so much I’ll settle for your ghost.
She nestled deeper into the comfort of his arms, finding peace in the scent of amber that clung to him. One of her hands crept up to touch his chest and feel the heart beating beneath his skin, and she smiled. Then her fingers crept, like the little legs of a spider, up his chest to trace his collarbone, as she had so many times, and she slipped her hand up to cup his neck, finding his pulse again.
His arms tightened around her. She looked up at him and his face was so close, the parking-lot lights reflected in his hazel eyes, and she could feel his shallow breaths move across her lips. He lowered his head at the same moment she tugged on his neck, and they leaned close to kiss.
Haley could have mimicked Ian’s walk, cut his hair, worn Ian’s clothes; but there was no way he could have guessed how Ian kissed—lips enclosing hers, his top teeth a hard line against her mouth, holding her so close that she couldn’t see past him.
I’m home, Josh’s heart said, and for one moment she felt true relief from the pain in her chest that had dogged her all these months. Ian was there in front of her, around her, touching her, so familiar, and her body lit up like a Christmas tree. For that moment, she didn’t care that it was Haley’s hand buried in her hair, Haley’s strong mouth molding hers, Haley’s arm pulling her tight against him. The relief that coursed through her was almost as intense as the desire that drove all vestiges of cold from her body.
That was when Whim arrived.
His car tore into the parking lot, rolled over the curb, and stalled. Josh and Haley pulled away from each other at the same moment to turn and watch as it rolled over a pair of shrubs. The sight of Whim’s hideous baby-blue Lincoln Town Car shocked Josh back to reality.
What did I just do?
“Wait here,” Haley ordered as he released Josh and stood up. She unconsciously tucked her arms into his jacket as she followed him. “Whim!”
The car had stopped moving after destroying several rosebushes and tilting the flagpole. Whim climbed out, startled, and then ran to Josh and Haley. Raindrops like scattered light fell from the sky as the three of them dodged between parked cars to converge beneath a streetlight.
“Where’s Del?” Whim asked.
“Inside,” Haley told him. “What’s wrong?”
Whim shook his head, looked away. He hardly appeared to be breathing. He moved constantly, turning away and then back, pushing at his hair, wetting his lips, as if he couldn’t decide what to say.
Josh had never seen Whim at a loss for words.
“Whim, what happened?” she whispered.
He met her gaze with his blue eyes and shook his head. “The trench-coat men,” he told her. “They came out of the Dream, right into the house.”
No, no, that’s not possible.…
“Did they…?” she asked, and couldn’t bring herself to finish.
“They attacked. Kerstel and Winso
r are on the way to the hospital.” He grabbed hold of Josh’s hand. She could feel the shocked pulse in his palm. “Josh,” he said, “they killed your grandmother.”
Josh remembered her lighter—the one Ian had given her—and how Gloves had been reaching for it when she escaped from the Dream.
He used it to open an exit, she realized. All of this is my fault.
The light bathing them from the parking lamp flickered with black spots, and Josh knew she was about to pass out. She felt Haley catch her before she hit the pavement, but she passed through his arms and then through the pavement and down into a void of silent guilt that closed and trapped her inside.
Twenty-six
Will had been down this hall before. Light fell evenly from the ceiling fixtures, but unaccountable shadows clung to every corner and doorway. Slits, like sniper sights, were built into the doors.
“Mom?” he called.
He went to the first door. The bottle of vodka in his pocket banged against his hip as he walked, ready to quench his mother’s thirst. Through the narrow window, he saw a woman lying on a rumpled cot. Her strawberry-blond hair was spread over the pillow, but she was curled up on her side and he couldn’t see her face. Blood stained the sheets beneath her.
“Mom!” he called. The woman flinched, but she lifted her head.
Will was almost afraid to believe he’d finally found her. It took so long, he thought, watching her rise slowly off the cot. Her arms unwound from around a white teddy bear with a pale-green bow tie, which she placed gently on the bed before climbing unsteadily to her feet. Matted hair fell around her face as she walked to the door, hunched over with pain.
“Will?” she asked.
Something was wrong, he realized. Something wasn’t right.
“I’ve been here before,” he said aloud. His hand closed around the bottle of vodka in his pocket. “Mom isn’t here. She’s never here.”
He turned back to the window. The woman on the other side wasn’t his mother. It was Kerstel.
She opened the door and leaned wearily against the frame. Her bottom lip was split open in two places and had turned a plum color that lipstick could never match. “Hon, what’s wrong?” she asked.