“This was left at the grotto,” she tells him. He squints at the object in her hand, bringing it into focus.
“Left?” Henry asks. Questions answered with questions.
“I saw something…someone. In the trees.”
Henry just nods.
“Someone with blond hair.”
“Oh,” says Henry. He tries to come up with something else, and fails.
Henry and Tess both know Suz had the knife in her pocket the night she died. The night he swam her out to the middle of the lake, her clothes weighted with rocks, her head bleeding, her face placid, calm.
“So what the fuck is going on?” Tess demands. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”
Don’t we all? Henry thinks.
Questions with questions. But what’s the answer?
“Metamorphosis,” he mumbles under his breath, because it’s the first word that pops into his head.
Chapter 17
SHE PICKS UP THE phone after the first ring.
“Yes?”
“This is Henry. Henry DeForge. Someone left this number in my mailbox.”
It’s nearly midnight. She was starting to think he wouldn’t call. She lets out a soft, breathy chuckle.
“Who is this?” he asks.
“Haven’t you guessed?”
“No—I mean, it’s impossible,” he mutters.
“Come for a swim, Henry. Right now. Our beach at the lake.”
She hangs up before he can answer. But he’ll come. She knows he’ll come.
Chapter 18
EMMA OPENS HER EYES. Danner is standing above her, holding out her hand.
“What do you destroy when you speak its name?” Danner asks. She’s wearing Emma’s Disney World T-shirt.
“What?” Emma asks. She sits up, rubs the sleep out of her eyes, takes Danner’s hand, which is always cold and fishy. Sometimes she expects to look down and see scales sparkling like tiny jewels on Danner’s long fingers. She can’t believe Danner woke her up in the middle of the night for one of her riddles.
“Silence,” Danner says, then leads her to the window where she looks down onto the circular driveway and sees a man lurking near the cars. He’s wearing a hooded jacket. Burglar. Prowler man. He fumbles with the door to Daddy’s Blazer.
Emma understands. Danner woke her up because there’s an intruder. Emma’s about to say, “I’ll go wake up Mom,” when she sees the man drop something. Then he bends down and nearly falls over. When he regains his balance, he looks up at the house. Emma ducks out of sight. But she saw his face. This is no burglar. It’s her dad.
She hears a car door shut, then the Blazer starts.
“Where’s he going?” she asks.
Danner only smiles. “Why don’t you ask him?” she says.
ONE TIME, DANNER SHOWED up at school, which was really weird because she’d never done that before. Emma went into the bathroom at the end of the hall near the gym, and there was Danner waiting for her in the stall.
“Don’t go to Laura Pelsinger’s house after school today,” Danner told her.
“I wasn’t going to,” Emma whispered. “She’s not even my friend. She’s kind of weird.”
“Laura’s going to ask you to go with her and you have to say no. Promise?”
“Okay. But why? And how do you know Laura’s even gonna ask?”
Outside the stall, Emma heard giggles.
“You talking to yourself again, DeForge?” a girl called. “Do you have to count when you take a piss too?”
There was more giggling, then another girl did an imitation of Emma’s whispered counting, “One I’m-a-mental-case, two I’m-a-mental-case, three I’m-a-mental-case, all the way to infinity I’m-a-mental-case.”
More laughter.
Frozen in the stall, Emma thought that was a stupid thing to say. No one can count to infinity. You’d never get there.
“Maybe she’s not talking to herself,” someone said. “Maybe she’s got someone in there with her.”
“Is that right, DeForge?” the first girl said, pressing up against the door, putting her eyeball right up to the crack. “Who’ve you got in there with you?”
“No one,” Emma said, jumping back, bashing her calf on the toilet. She’d been so wrapped up in what Danner was telling her that she hadn’t even heard the girls come in. How could she have been so careless?
Danner laughed. “I am too someone!” she yelled.
“Shut up,” Emma hissed. Danner pinched her arm.
“I bet it’s Chucky Hayden,” the first girl said. “Are you in there with Chucky?”
Chucky was the fat boy who wore a blaze orange winter hat all year round. Emma’s cheeks burned.
“I’ve got a riddle,” Danner said. “What is coming, but will never arrive?”
Emma ignored the question; she couldn’t even believe Danner had asked it—this was so not the time for riddles. Emma took a deep breath, pushed the door to the stall open, and found Erin LaBlanc and Vanessa Sanchez in front of the row of white porcelain sinks. They peered into the empty stall behind her.
“Tomorrow!” Danner called from behind the door of a stall farther down. “Got it?” Emma got it all right. And right then and there, as the snickering girls stared her down, she found herself wishing that tomorrow would never arrive.
By recess, everyone was talking about her invisible friend and saying she was a mental case for sure. Everyone but Laura Pelsinger, who got on the swing beside her.
“I don’t think you’re mental,” Laura said.
“Thanks,” Emma said.
“I know some people who really are. Like my aunt Lynn. She’s a real nutcase.”
“Oh,” Emma said.
“My mom’s picking me up after school. We’re going to the Tastee-Freez. She said I could bring a friend. Wanna come? We can go to my house after. My dog just had puppies. You can pet them. They’re real soft.”
“No thanks,” Emma said. Her heart was pounding. She wanted to go. She was so rarely invited anyplace and she loved dogs, had always wanted one. But she remembered what Danner had said.
The next day, there was a special assembly first thing in the morning. The whole school was there. The principal said there had been a terrible car accident out on Ridge Road, just past the Tastee-Freez, and Laura Pelsinger had been airlifted to the children’s hospital in Boston. The principal said she wouldn’t be in school for the rest of the year, and asked that each homeroom make their own card to send her.
HANDS BUNCHED INTO TIGHT, nervous fists at her sides, Emma puts her face back in the window, calls through the screen, “Daddy!”
But he’s already pulling away. He’s got the radio turned up loud to his rock-and-roll station. Emma hears the scream of a lone guitar, the boom of bass and drums behind it.
Emma’s nose is pressed against the window screen; she imagines the marks it’s leaving there, a tiny grid, as if her nose is a map with longitude and latitude lines. She opens her mouth to yell again, touches the screen with the tip of her tongue—the metallic taste is so sharp she jerks her tongue away, but then makes herself lick it again. Once, twice. Three more times. She watches the taillights of her dad’s truck disappear down the driveway.
“Daddy!” she yells, louder this time, worried that maybe Danner somehow knows something terrible is going to happen. He’s going to get into a wreck just like Laura and her mom. “Stop!”
The lights above her come on and she turns, blinking from the sudden brightness, to see her mother in the doorway.
“What’s the matter, Em?” her mom asks.
“Where’s Daddy going?”
“Going?”
Her mother comes to the window, looks out, and frowns at the empty parking space where the Blazer used to be.
“Where’s he going, Mom?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
“I think something bad is going to happen. That’s why Danner got me up. I think I was supposed to stop him,” Emma says.
/> Her mom wraps her arms around Emma and rocks her as if she’s little again. Her mom has just come from the shower. Her hair is still damp, her skin warm and moist.
“Would you like some hot cocoa, sweetie?”
“With whipped cream?” Emma asks, smiling into her mother’s flowered nightgown. She smells like soap and sunshine, if sunshine had a smell.
“With whipped cream.”
“Can Danner have some?”
“Absolutely. I was hoping she’d come. I think it’s time Danner and I had a talk.”
Chapter 19
DRIVING OUT TO THE lake, Henry remembers helping Suz stretch the canvases for the nine moose paintings. She was edgy, keyed up. She always got like this before a project. Once Suz started a new piece, she was transfixed. She could go days without sleep, living on cigarettes, black coffee, and peanut M&M’s, which she claimed were the perfect food.
“You got your protein, you got your sugary carbohydrates, you got your red dye number forty, what else do you need?”
She was also on edge because of their most recent mission: the night before, they’d broken into the records office at Sexton to destroy any evidence of any of them ever having attended the college. Suz said it was important because their new lives had begun and it was time to destroy all proof of who they used to be.
“Shit. They’ve got Berussi’s letters to the dean in my transcripts,” Suz said, looking up from a thick folder. Winnie and Tess were struggling to delete any computer records, Suz and Henry were pulling the hard copies from the enormous bank of file cabinets.
“Listen to this,” Suz said, clearing her throat. When she spoke again it was in a low, raspy voice, a tinge of Bronx accent: Professor Berussi’s. “‘Suz Pierce is obviously a girl in emotional distress, but more important, a person seemingly without a moral compass. She seems to have no remorse for the destructive acts she and her group have perpetrated upon the campus. Her delusions of grandeur and narcissism are clearly symptoms of some sort of personality disorder. I believe she is a danger to our community and recommend a full psychological evaluation, and ask that she be expelled if she does not comply.’”
“‘Delusions of grandeur’?” Suz said in her own voice. “Can you believe that pompous motherfucker?” She threw the whole stack of papers down on the floor.
Winnie placed a hand on Suz’s arm. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Damn right it doesn’t,” Suz said.
“We fixed him,” Winnie said.
“Rat bastard,” Suz mumbled, kicking at the papers on the floor.
HENRY HELPED HER HANG the nine canvases up on the wall behind the bed she and Winnie slept in. Every now and then, Suz would stop, mumble, “Delusions of grandeur” or “Personality disorder,” shake her head angrily, then go back to what she was doing. She pushed back the mattress, threw down a drop cloth, and went to work, mixing paints on dinner plates, filling the cabin with the dizzying scent of turpentine. Only once she actually started work on the painting did she seem to forget her fury over Berussi’s letters.
Suz stood on a chair to do the top row of paintings: the moose’s head, neck, and broad back. She roughed it out with brown lines, circles, Xs and Os as if she was playing a giant game of tic-tactoe.
Over the next three days and nights, the others watched as Suz created a moose on canvas, mixing hair, sand, and ash into the paints that she applied with brush, fingers, and a knife and fork. She wrote down words on a paper bag, then tore pieces off, chewed until they were pulp, and mixed this into the paint too.
“Alchemy,” Winnie said.
What struck Henry most, what he could never truly reproduce in his memory years later, no matter how hard he tried, was the sound she made. When Suz was lost in it, completely caught up in the act of creation, she made this low, soft, droning buzz.
“The static noise,” Winnie called it.
But there was more than static there. Sometimes, Henry would sit and listen and swear he heard words hidden inside the buzz, not just one voice, but many, all different pitches and tones; different accents and languages, all talking so fast over one another that it was impossible to make out what they were saying.
Chapter 20
TWO A.M. EMMA’S ASLEEP, her belly full of cocoa. Henry’s god knows where. What a long, crazy day it’s been: the meeting at the gallery with Julia, the words on the trees, the knife at the grotto, and now, to top it off, the strange conversation she’s just had with Emma.
“Is Danner here?” Tess had asked.
“Yes.” Emma was sitting with her elbows on the table, blowing into her hot chocolate. She was wearing her Minnie Mouse pajamas.
“Good.” Tess smiled. “I’m glad she decided to join us.”
Emma chewed her lip, stared down into her cocoa.
“Is something wrong, Em?” Tess asked.
Emma looked up, her face worried. “Danner says she doesn’t really like you.”
Tess bristled. She knew Danner had never really liked her, but had never heard Emma admit it. Over the years, Tess had been the victim of countless pranks blamed on Danner. Little things of hers went missing—lipstick, car keys, sunglasses—they all usually turned up later in Emma’s bedroom. And there were more mischievous things too—Tess would get into her car and turn it on to find the radio blaring on some Christian station, the wipers and heater turned up to high; a load of dark laundry somehow ended up being washed with a cup of bleach. The answer, when Tess confronted Emma, was always the same: Danner did it.
Tess took a sip of her own cocoa. “Does she say why she doesn’t like me?”
Emma was quiet a second, concentrating on her cocoa, and, apparently, on listening to Danner, who sat across from her with her own empty cup of imaginary hot chocolate with whipped cream.
“No.”
“Does she know where your father went tonight?” God, she couldn’t believe she was asking these questions. Great, she’d said to herself. First you’re talking to ghosts, now you’re giving your daughter’s imaginary friend the third degree. What’s next? Channeling Elvis?
Emma shook her head, ran her fingers through her sleep-tousled hair. “She knows, but can’t tell.”
“Why not?”
Emma shrugged. “She says she has a riddle for you.”
Tess smiled. “Okay then. Go ahead and tell me. I love riddles.”
A CRAZY DAY FOR sure. But it’s not over yet.
Tess grabs a small metal-barreled flashlight, turns on the old baby monitor in Em’s room, puts the other one in the pocket of her sweatshirt and heads for Henry’s studio. The floodlights come on as she walks the path outside the house. Prison-break time.
She gets to his workshop and enters like a criminal. Tiptoeing carefully even though she knows it’s foolish—Henry’s gone, not sleeping in the room next door—she makes her way to the large metal toolbox. The latch is rusty, but opens easily. Holding the small flashlight between her teeth, the metal cold and sharp in her mouth, she lifts the lid, then the tray on top with its array of screwdrivers and wrenches. The photos are right where she saw them earlier tonight, and under them, just like she thought, is Suz’s journal.
DISMANTLEMENT = FREEDOM
She flips through the photos: Suz and Winnie on the front steps of the cabin. Tess and Henry on their beach at the lake. All of them gathered around Henry’s orange van.
Tess takes the journal and sits on the floor, holding the flashlight in her mouth, using both hands to flip through. Then, she decides to start at the beginning.
November 11—Sexton, Junior year
Last night, I had a revelation as I watched my wooden man burn: true art isn’t just about creating. It’s about taking a thing apart. Tearing it down. Watching the fucker burn. As I watched the flames, I had a waking dream. I saw a circle of artists, a small band of the devoted, dressed in black, completely committed to dismantlement. And I knew this was the future.
November 17—Sexton, Junior year
I think I�
��ve got the first one. I watch her day after day, and it gives me a secret thrill because she has no idea what’s to come. That she’s about to be chosen for something great, something so huge it’s going to blow everything she’s ever done, everything she’s ever known, right the fuck out of the water.
Get ready, Val Delmarco.
The girl I’ve been crushed out on all semester. She’s a poet. She’s like the fucking walking wounded. You know the kind…won’t look you in the eye, always looks like she’s on the verge of tears. Now, I hate weakness in all its forms, but see, I’ve seen the true Val. I know she’s a mouse with a lion hiding inside. I know, because one night, I went to that godforsaken coffeehouse and heard her read a poem. She stood up there, head down, bangs covering her eyes, and she ripped the face off of the whole motherfucking world. She showed me the blood and skull and soul of every living, breathing person. I’ve never felt more alive than I did that night. It was this jolt, like cocaine, like speed, like falling in love times a thousand. That’s what Val reading her poem did to me. And now, I see her in the sculpture studio, making her little Cornell-like assemblage boxes and I just want to put my tongue in her ear, dig my nails into her back, make her mine, mine, mine. I want to wake up the lion inside her and hear it roar my name.
She’s got this idiotic boyfriend named Spencer who treats her like a six-year-old. He pussyfoots around her, talks in this soft, condescending voice, and acts like he is the greatest thing that ever happened to her. He’s such a jackass. And his art is shit. He makes huge wind chimes, only he calls them spirit voices. Makes me wanna puke. He’s got to go. Val will see that soon enough.
November 25—Sexton, Junior year
I have the next two members picked out.
Henry DeForge: Sweet, sweet Henry who is obviously so infatuated with me he can barely speak in my presence. He’s funny. He’s clever. And he’s the best fucking sculptor in the class. The morning after I burned my sculpture, I went to my studio space and found a small, typewritten note: I love you, Suz it said. And I knew, I just knew, he left it.
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