Winter Falls

by Nicole Maggi

  Carly leaned over her desk toward me, her perfectly plucked eyebrows arched high. “Bree Wolfe was in my first-period English, and Mr. Tanner almost sent her to the principal’s office. In her first class!”

  “What did she do?” I asked.

  My desk nearly tipped over sideways as Jenny leaned her entire upper body onto it, joining the conversation.

  “Well, first she—” Carly pulled back, sat up straight, and coughed.

  I turned. Jonah Wolfe stood in the doorway, his broad shoulders nearly as wide as the frame. He marched over to Madame Dubois’s desk and laid the transfer slip on it for her to sign.

  “There’s a free seat in the back,” Madame Dubois said.

  I darted my gaze around the room. The only free seat was behind me.

  Jonah grinned and plunked down in the chair.

  I took a deep breath and turned around. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey, yourself.” His voice made the hairs on my arms stand up.

  “How was history?”

  He leveled his gaze at me. The shadows across his face hid any kind of depth from me. “Oh, you know. You’ve seen one revolution, you’ve seen them all.”

  “Yeah, so many coups, so little time.”

  The second bell rang. I spun forward in my seat as Madame Dubois called the class to order. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jenny scribbling fiercely in her notebook, no doubt a note to me. I cleared my throat and flipped open my French book.

  “Now, class, settle down, or I won’t tell you the exciting news.” Madame Dubois stood in front of the blackboard and bounced on her toes, her hands clasped in front of her.

  I shot a look at Jenny, who slid forward to the edge of her chair.

  The noise level dropped a decibel.

  “The grant I applied for from the Board of Ed has come through. We’re going to Paris!”

  “Ooooh!” squealed Jenny, and she wasn’t the only one.

  I twisted in my seat to meet Jenny’s smiling face and clapped. Carly bounded out of her chair and joined us.

  “We’re going to Paris!” Jenny crowed, and we all laughed.

  The whole class was in an uproar, shouting and whistling.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Jonah, who doodled absently in his notebook with a bemused grin.

  “Okay, quiet, everyone,” Madame Dubois called out, but it took a few minutes for everyone to return to their seats.

  I could barely sit still. Finally, here was the escape I longed for, the chance to see the places I had always dreamed about. I thought about what Heath said; now I would get to see those purple fields for myself.

  “You will have to pay a little something—some fees and of course whatever souvenirs you might want to buy,” Madame Dubois shouted over the hubbub. “But airfare, hotel, and meals will all be covered by the grant.” She handed a stack of papers to the first student in the front row. “These are the permission slips that I’ll need signed by your parents. And there’s a spot on the slip for your parents to check off if they want to be a chaperone—we need at least five.”

  “Melissa is going to be so pissed that she took Spanish,” Jenny whispered when the permission slips reached her. She handed the pile to me.

  I took one and passed the stack to Jonah, who handed it to Carly without taking one.

  “Aren’t you going to go?” I asked him. An image of the two of us sitting on the Champs-Élysées, eating bread and cheese, popped into my head.

  Jonah snorted without looking up from his notebook. “Like that’ll happen.”

  “Why not?” I stayed turned in my chair, facing him, while Madame Dubois told us to start conjugating the verbs on page seventy-three in our books.

  “By the time spring break rolls around, we’ll probably be in a different state.”

  My ribs tightened at the thought of him moving away. “You never know. You could at least ask your dad.”

  Jonah shrugged, his gaze still on his doodles.

  “What’s going on back there? Mademoiselle Jacobs?”

  I faced front so fast that a crick shot through my neck. “Nothing, Madame Dubois.”

  “Monsieur Wolfe?” Madame Dubois made her way through the chairs and stopped in between mine and Jonah’s. “What do you have there?” she asked, nodding to his open notebook.

  I expected him to flip it closed, like any normal kid would do, but instead he tilted it up and displayed his drawing. It was a highly detailed caricature of Madame Dubois lying on her desk in her underwear with the words Voulez vous coucher avec moi? in a bubble over her head.

  I inhaled sharply through my nose, my face burning, and looked up at Madame Dubois. She was red to the roots of her hair, her nostrils white.

  The other kids close enough to see the drawing wolf whistled and laughed.

  Madame Dubois flushed even brighter. After a deep breath, she said, “Well, since you seem to have such a knack for art, perhaps you should visit Mr. Morrissey to see about getting into an art class,” and pointed to the door.

  “Oui, Madame,” Jonah said without a trace of apology. He stood and gathered his things. As he moved to the door, I heard him whisper to Carly, “I beat Bree,” and then he was gone.

  Chapter Four

  The Escape

  When I got home that afternoon, I dropped my backpack onto a kitchen chair and went out the back door to find Lidia. Goats dotted the hillside, grazing in the last few hours of daylight before we corralled them for the night. The whole scene was peaceful, in total contrast to my swirling thoughts.

  I kept reliving the events of the day. Registering Jonah. His behavior in French class. And the incident in the office. What was that? A hallucination, I told myself. Lidia was always saying I had an overactive imagination; it had just gotten the better of me. That was all.

  Meanwhile, the permission slip for the Paris trip burned a hole in my backpack. I jogged along the gravel path past the barn and around the curve of the hill to the Cave. That was what we called the cheese cave my father had built into the hillside years ago. He’d modeled it on the cheese caves in Europe, and we were one of the only farms in the northeast to have one. Once upon a time I’d find my parents in here, laughing together as they worked with the cheese molds, but now when I opened the door I saw Lidia and Heath, their backs to each other.

  Lidia looked up when I came in, but Heath’s concentration never broke. He went through the motions like a ballet dancer.

  “How was school, cara?” Lidia asked as she ladled curd into a mold.

  “Fine.” I hugged myself. It was never more than fifty degrees in the Cave to allow the cheese to age properly. “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  I leaned against the knobby edge of the long table that dominated the center of the Cave. “Madame Dubois got a grant from the government to send our whole class to Paris for spring break. Isn’t that awesome?”

  Lidia froze for an instant before she half turned away from me. “That sounds very exciting,” she said in a flat, guarded tone.

  I tilted to the side, trying to see her expression, but she kept her face hidden, her hair falling in front of it as she returned to her cheese mold. “I need you to sign a permission slip. Oh, shoot, I forgot it in the house.”

  “That’s all right; we’ll talk more about it when I come in.” She pushed her hair off her face.

  I looked past Lidia. “I’ll get to see those lavender fields. Right, Heath?”

  He glanced up. “Right.”

  Lidia gave me a salty little smile. “Go do your homework. I’ll be done in a little while.”

  I trudged back up to the house, my feet heavy with the gnawing feeling that Lidia was not doing cartwheels over the trip to Paris. As I sat at the kitchen table with my books spread around me, my mind spun in all different directions. None of them included biology, math, or Wuthering Heights, although I was thinking about French class. Okay, so Jonah’s drawing of Madame Dubois had been pretty obnoxious. I twirled my pen in between m
y fingers. But there was more to him than that . . . something softer . . . I had seen it in the office and last night outside Joe’s. I stared out the window, replaying those conversations with him.

  By the time Lidia came into the house, I had barely made a chip in the mountain of homework before me. She laid out four chicken breasts on the kitchen island and seasoned them without a word.

  I decided not to read into her silence and pulled the slip out of my French folder. “Hey, Mom, here’s the permission slip you need to sign for the Paris trip.”

  Lidia set down the pepper mill in a deliberate motion and pressed her palms flat to the counter. “Cara, I can’t sign that paper.”

  “What?” I twisted around in my chair to face her. “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t let you go.”

  “Why?” It came out much louder than I intended.

  “You’re too young to be traipsing off to Europe.”

  “But—but I’ll be with the class. And there’ll be chaperones. You could even chaperone if you want. Madame Dubois said—”

  “No. I’m sorry. I know you want to go, but I can’t allow it.” Lidia turned her attention to the chicken as if the discussion were over.

  I got to my feet and came to the other side of the island. “Is it the money? Because it’s all paid for by the grant, and Mr. Salter is always willing to throw me some work at the hardware store.”

  “It’s not the money.” Lidia didn’t look up. She sprinkled a pinch of Italian seasoning over each of the breasts. “I just don’t think you’re ready to travel overseas.”

  “Not ready? What does that mean? I’m sixteen. I’m not a baby.”

  “Cara—” A note of pleading crept into the pet name.

  “It’s so unfair! You never let me do anything!” I shoved the island with my full weight, and it trembled enough to knock over the pepper mill. “You think I don’t have a mind of my own, but I do. I know you lied about that amulet thingy this morning—”

  “Alessia.” There was a warning tone in her voice, but I ignored it.

  “Dad would let me go.”

  Lidia snapped her head up. She stared at me, her eyes full of tears.

  I knew I had crossed a line, but I was too angry to apologize. I flung open the door and ran out into the chilly night, pretending I couldn’t hear her call my name.

  The air tinged my throat with the cold smell of salt from the distant sea. I rounded the side of the house and climbed over the hill, came to the fence that marked our property, and hoisted myself onto the top rail. Heat cramped my chest, and I dug my knuckles into my breastbone as I looked over this tiny corner of the world.

  Twin Willows was named for the two matching willow trees that marked the north and south ends of town. When I was a child I used to climb them, inching out along their bended boughs until I could see what lay beyond the “Welcome to Twin Willows” sign. In the last fifteen years I had discovered everything there was to know about the town. I wanted to see what lay on the other side of the two trees. I had never been anywhere except Nova Scotia on a family vacation. And even though I’d been born in Italy, I had never been back there. I was suffocating in this town, and I needed to escape, even if only for a week. Why wouldn’t Lidia let me go? Why was she so overprotective?

  I dug my elbows into my knees and took several deep breaths. I had to get out of here before I went crazy. I looked at the farmhouse, its windows yellow with light. I might not be able to go to Paris, but there were other ways I could get out of Twin Willows, with or without Lidia’s permission.

  I met Jenny on the way to school the next morning as usual, but when we got to the edge of town, I stopped and turned to her. “I’m going to Bangor for the day. Wanna come?”

  Jenny dropped her book bag onto the ground and stared at me, jaw open. “Who are you, and what have you done with Lessi?”

  I laughed and grabbed her wrist. “I’m not that much of a goody-goody. Come on—we’ll miss the bus if we don’t hurry.”

  Jenny jogged along next to me to keep up. “Seriously? What brought this on?”

  I didn’t answer. We walked to the opposite side of the street, and when we reached the corner where we would turn off to go to school, we continued down the block to the bus stop in the center of town in front of Joe’s. The coffee shop bustled with activity. I peeked in through the windows, hoping no one inside would snitch on me.

  In the far corner, I spotted Mr. Wolfe in a booth with his assistant, the man in the too-expensive suit. Mr. Wolfe sat with his head bowed, his hands clasped on the table in front of him. I watched his face as the assistant talked and gestured wildly. Mr. Wolfe’s pale skin and downcast eyes seemed at total odds to the cold, confident businessman I’d met at the town hall meeting. I leaned in close to the glass to see better.

  “They’re going to call Lidia the minute you don’t show up in the office,” Jenny said, pulling my attention away from the window.

  I peered down the road. The bus was nowhere to be seen yet. “I don’t care,” I said, and part of me really didn’t.

  “And she’s going to send a search team out if you don’t cover. Let me handle this.” Jenny took her cell phone out of her bag and dialed a number from her contacts, waited a moment while it rang on the other line. “Yeah, hi, this is Jenny Sands. I was just walking with Alessia Jacobs to school, and she totally threw up in the middle of the road.”

  “Jenny!”

  She flapped her hand in front of my face to shush me. “Yeah, she doesn’t look so good. I’m going to take her home, so I just wanted you to know that she won’t be there today. And could you let Mrs. Guilano know that I’ll probably miss first period while I get her home? . . . Thanks . . . Uh-huh . . . Okay, I’ll tell her. Bye.” She snapped her phone shut and grinned at me. “They hope you feel better.”

  “I can’t believe you did that.” I shot a glance down the road. In the distance, the bus lumbered toward us, a cloud of smoke and exhaust billowing in its wake. “You know, they’re going to call your mom as soon as you don’t show up second period.”

  “Nah, it’ll take them a while before they figure it out.” Jenny linked her arm through mine and rested her chin on my shoulder. “We’re having an adventure! How fun!”

  I snorted, but a little jolt ignited my insides.

  The bus wheezed to a stop in front of us. After we paid our fare and found seats in the back, Jenny turned to me. “So, seriously. What’s going on?”

  I wanted to tell her about the weird daydream, but I knew it would sound crazy, so instead I settled for something believable. “Lidia won’t let me go to Paris.”

  Jenny pressed her lips together and nodded. “I’m not surprised.”

  “Well, I’m pissed.”

  “Clearly.” Jenny waved a hand, encompassing the bus, the world outside the grimy windows, and the fact that we were ditching school, which I had never done before.

  “But I guess I wasn’t really surprised, either,” I said, tucking my feet up onto the seat and resting my chin on my knees. “I mean, she doesn’t let me do anything. She’s so freaking overprotective. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenny said, rolling the words around on her tongue like they were marbles. “But she’s always been like that, right? It’s not just since your dad . . .”

  “No, I think it’s gotten worse since he died. Maybe he kept her chill, and now that he’s . . . not around . . . there’s no buffer.”

  “Maybe.”

  I waved my hand. I didn’t want to drag myself down so early in our adventure. “Whatever. Let’s just have fun today. What do you want to do in Bangor?”

  “Shop,” Jenny said without hesitation, and we both laughed.

  We spent the rest of the trip planning which stores to hit, where to eat lunch, and how late we could stay before suspicions were raised at home. I breathed a sigh of relief; Jenny never failed to cheer me up. I knew this day would come back to bite me in the ass, but I shoved all those cares asid
e and followed Jenny off the bus into downtown Bangor with an extra bounce in my step.

  We bought lattes and headed toward West Market Square where a number of boutiques dotted the street. They were still closed, so Jenny and I slid onto a sidewalk bench and sipped our coffee.

  Jenny balanced her cup on her knees and looked at me. “So what else is bothering you?”

  My heart skittered. I shrugged but didn’t meet her eyes. “Nothing.”

  “Oh, really? This new and adventurous Lessi wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain tall, dark, and mysterious new guy, would it?”

  I coughed on the hot coffee that burned the tip of my tongue. It was only half the truth but still. “That obvious, huh?”

  “Well, probably not to anyone but me. I’m your best friend, remember? You can’t hide anything from me.” My face flamed, but Jenny didn’t notice as she took another sip of her coffee. “Seriously. What’s up with you two?”

  “Uh, nothing. I’ve known him for a day. What could possibly be ‘up’ with us?”

  “You had quite the conversation in French class.”

  “Yeah, and that got him sent to detention. Please. Like he would look twice at me.” I buried my nose in the steam from my latte, let the delicious bittersweet aroma fill my nostrils.

  “He did look twice. He looked more than that.” Jenny’s voice softened. “Just be careful, okay? I mean, I know I’m always going on about the bad boys, but Jonah—I don’t know—he seems like he might be a badder boy than most.”

  I peered down the street, away from Jenny. “Stores are opening.”

  “Lessi? Did you hear me?” She tugged my elbow, forcing me to look at her.

  “Yeah, I heard you. Don’t worry. Nothing’s gonna happen.” But even as I said it, every fiber of my being wished the words untrue.

  The sun dipped precariously low in the sky by the time Jenny and I climbed on the bus that would take us back to Twin Willows. We had already called our moms, told them we’d be hanging out at Joe’s for a few hours and we’d be home in time for dinner. As long as there wasn’t too much traffic heading out of Bangor, we would make it.