Believing

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Twenty minutes later, Mr. Bombeck lets her go at last. She hurries through the almost-empty corridors to her locker.

  “There you are!” Evangeline calls as Calla walks toward her. “I was just about to leave, but I didn’t want to walk home without you.”

  “Sorry . . . I had to stay after for math.”

  “I know. I saw Jacy and I know he’s in your last period so I asked him where you were. Any excuse to talk to him, right?” she adds with a wry smile.

  Calla smiles back, hoping it doesn’t look too forced. She gathers her things from her locker as her friend changes the subject to homecoming.

  “I heard Russell Lancione is going to ask me to go with him,” Evangeline says. “I don’t know if I want him to. I mean, it would be nice to go to the dance, but . . . maybe not with Russell.”

  “Why not?” Calla asks, even though she knows the answer will probably have something to do with Jacy.

  Evangeline shrugs. “He’s nice and everything, but . . . you know . . . he’s . . .”

  Not Jacy, Calla thinks, seeing her friend’s wistful expression. Yeah, I totally hear you.

  But Evangeline says only, “He’s just kind of blah.”

  Calla grins. “I guess blah isn’t your type, huh?”

  “I guess not. What about you?”

  “Blah’s not my type, either.”

  Evangeline laughs. “No, I mean, what about you and the homecoming dance?”

  For a split second, Calla wonders if Evangeline possibly read her mind and knows that she, too, is longing for Jacy to ask her.

  “Nobody’s asked you yet, right?”

  Oh. Phew.

  “No . . . why?” Calla slams her locker door closed and pulls on her jacket.

  “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but . . .”

  “But what?” Calla prods, as they head toward the exit.

  “I heard Blue’s going to ask you to homecoming.”

  Calla’s jaw drops. “Who said that?”

  “Linda Samuels, this girl who goes out with Ryan Kruger, told me. She said Blue’s thinking about it.”

  “Really?” Then why is he sending e-mails to Willow York about the homecoming dance? Is he planning to ask her first, and I’m just the backup in case she says no?

  “Don’t tell him I said that, though,” Evangeline says.

  “Oh, please. As if.” Calla laughs and shakes her head.

  No way is she going to get her hopes up that Blue will ask her.

  Still, as she and Evangeline head toward home, despite everything she’s been through, Calla finds her heart a little lighter for the first time all day. Thinking about a school dance—even if part of it is worrying about who may or may not ask her—feels welcome and normal compared to dwelling on ghosts and death, as she has been.

  THIRTEEN

  Tuesday, September 11

  7:39 a.m.

  The next morning, Calla steps out onto the porch with her backpack to find Lily Dale draped in heavy gray fog. The air feels like a warm, wet blanket and a dank smell is coming from the lakefront. Oh, ick. What a change from yesterday’s crisp, sunny weather. All that’s missing is the gloomy sound of a foghorn and a clanking bell.

  “Gross out, isn’t it?” Evangeline calls as she heads down the steps next door with her own backpack. They’ve already got their morning timing perfectly in sync.

  “I never know what to expect around here,” Calla says as they fall into step together, heading toward the gate though they can’t see more than a few feet in front of them. “I thought it was supposed to be nice out today.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “The weatherman on the news last night.”

  “Oh, please.” Evangeline dismisses that with a wave of her hand. “Around here, it’s impossible to predict. Did you ever hear what Mark Twain said about the weather in western New York? He used to live around here, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know. What did he say?”

  “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”

  Calla smiles. “Yeah, no kid—” She breaks off abruptly, startled to glimpse a familiar figure just ahead in the mist.

  Kaitlyn.

  “What’s wrong?” Evangeline asks.

  Kaitlyn is shaking her head ominously, just as before.

  “Stop him!”

  Her words shriek through Calla’s brain and then she disappears, enveloped in fog.

  “It was Kaitlyn,” she tells Evangeline shakily. “She wants me to stop him.”

  “Still?” Evangeline grabs her hand and squeezes it. “Breathe. You look like you’re going to faint.”

  “How am I supposed to stop him if I don’t know who or where he is?”

  “I think it’s time,” Evangeline says slowly, “that you sat in on one of my beginning mediumship classes. You need to learn how to develop your abilities. I know you’re going to say you can’t, and come up with a million excuses, but—”

  “Okay.”

  There’s a pause. “Okay?” Evangeline looks confused. “Okay, what?”

  “Okay. I’ll come to one of your classes. This is crazy. If I’m going to do this sort of thing—and it really seems like I don’t have a choice—then I’m going to do it right.”

  “Hey . . . what are you doing all by your lonesome?”

  Munching on an apple, Calla looks up from her book to see Blue standing over her. “Oh, hi. I’m trying to read Shakespeare. Hamlet.”

  “For pleasure?”

  “Are you kidding? For English.” And she’s read the same page at least three times just now, preoccupied with her decision to accompany Evangeline to a class. Evangeline thinks her Saturday-morning instructor will let Calla sit in.

  “We’re reading King Lear in my section,” Blue comments. “I’d rather do Hamlet. We did it in my old school, so at least I know it.”

  His old school, Calla knows, is a fancy boarding school he attended until he got kicked out. He didn’t tell her why, and she hasn’t felt comfortable asking, but she’s definitely curious.

  Grabbing a chair from the next table and straddling it backward, he asks, “So, where are your friends today?”

  “Oh, you mean Willow and Sarita?”

  He nods.

  “They had to go to the computer lab to work on a flyer for the homecoming dance.”

  “Oh. That. Is that the only thing they ever think about?” he asks with a good-natured roll of his blue eyes.

  She’s spared having to answer, because a wadded up ball of paper sails through the air and hits Blue on the head.

  “Hey!” He looks around to see his friend Ryan, the obvious culprit, beckoning him from two tables away.

  “Looks like you’re being summoned,” Calla observes.

  “Yeah. I’ll let you get back to your Shakespeare. See you later.”

  Watching him walk away, Calla can feel the curious attention from a group of girls sitting at the end of her table.

  Sure enough, moments after she goes back to her reading— or pretends to—one of them comes walking over. She’s a petite blond, just short of pretty thanks to close-set eyes and a narrow, pointy nose.

  “Hi,” she says. “You’re the new girl, right? From Florida?”

  “Right. Calla.”

  “I’m Pam.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she says politely.

  “Are you seeing him?”

  “Who?” Calla asks, knowing darn well who.

  “Blue Slayton.”

  “We’ve gone out,” Calla admits.

  “Really? Are you guys going to homecoming together?”

  “I don’t know . . . I mean, no. Not that I know of.” Officially feeling like a tongue-tied idiot, she shrugs and wishes Pam would go away.

  “Want to come over and sit with us?”

  Normally, Calla would welcome the invitation, but she really isn’t in the mood to field curious questions about Blue and homecoming.

  Still, maybe it’s bett
er than sitting here alone with Hamlet.

  “Sure,” she tells Pam. “Let me just get my stuff together and I’ll come right down. Thanks.”

  It can’t hurt to make some new cafeteria friends, she decides as she sticks a straw wrapper into her Shakespeare text as a bookmark. After all, who knows if Willow will want to sit with her after this?

  Why wouldn’t she? Because you were talking to Blue? Isn’t that a little extreme?

  She wonders if Blue would even have come over if Calla had been sitting with Willow as usual. Probably not, if he’s sending Willow e-mails about homecoming.

  It’s being held in October, kicked off with a pep rally after school, then the big varsity football game against the school’s archrivals, the Brocton Bulldogs. Afterward is the formal dance in the gym, with a live band this year instead of the usual DJ.

  Calla keeps telling herself it’s no big deal if she doesn’t get to go. After all, she’s new here and it’s not like it’s a prom.

  Prom. Hah.

  Last spring, Kevin dumped her right before her junior prom. She wound up going—just as friends—with Paul Horton, who’s an inch shorter than her on a regular day. He was a good three inches shorter on prom night because of the heels she’d picked out when she thought she was going with Kevin. She stubbornly decided to keep the shoes since they went perfectly with the dress, and suffer through looking down at the top of her date’s head all night. Maybe deep down, she was thinking that at the last minute, Paul would uninvite her . . . and Kevin would simultaneously reappear in her life.

  So much for that.

  As for Lily Dale’s homecoming dance, she can’t help dwelling on that e-mail she saw and wondering if Willow is going with Blue despite being broken up and despite Evangeline hearing he’s going to ask Calla.

  She wonders, too—even though it’s ridiculous—whether there’s the slightest chance Jacy might ask her to go with him.

  If he does—not that he will—what would you do about Evangeline?

  It doesn’t matter, she tells herself as she walks over to join Pam and her friends. Because Jacy won’t ask you. Period.

  When Calla walks into the house after babysitting at Paula’s, she moodily lets the door slam shut after her.

  “Calla? Is that you?”

  “Yeah.”

  She spent the rest of her lunch period wishing she had stuck to Shakespeare. Pam and her friends were gossipy, and Calla was turned off by mean-spirited comments a few of them made about poor Donald Reamer.

  Later, she failed a quiz in Bombeck’s class, and Paula’s kids insisted on playing Candyland for two hours straight. Moving around and around the tedious game board was about as much fun as taking the pop quiz in math. Dylan insisted on an extra game piece for Kelly—who, Calla is starting to believe, might be nothing more than an imaginary friend after all. It’s not as if she herself has sensed a presence lingering around Dylan, or as if Kelly’s game piece moved itself around the board, which might have been a heck of a lot faster. Instead, Dylan did it, taking an extra and painstaking turn each round, so that the game lasted far longer than it should have.

  Home at last, Calla heads right for the stairs. She’d love to flop onto her bed and read or listen to music. That’s not going to happen, though. She has a pile of homework to do.

  “Come in here,” Odelia calls from the back of the house. “I have something to show you.”

  “What is it?” Calla drapes her backpack and jacket over the newel post and heads to the kitchen.

  The room is empty . . . or so she thinks.

  Then she hears Odelia’s voice again, coming from under the kitchen table.

  “Gammy?” Calla bends over to see her grandmother on all fours. “Are you okay? Did you drop something?”

  “She jumped off my lap when the door slammed. See her?”

  “Who, Miriam?”

  “No!” A laugh spills from under the table. “The kitten. I picked her up from Andy’s house this afternoon.”

  “Oh!” Calla peers into the dim space beneath the table. “Where is she?”

  “Back there, see? Here, kitty kitty kitty,” Odelia says in a high-pitched voice. “It’s okay, you can come out now. This is Calla. She’s nice.”

  Calla finally spots a tiny gray ball of fur and a pair of glittering eyes on the far side of the table, cowering between the table leg and one of the chairs. “Oh! Look at her . . . she’s so sweet!”

  “She is, isn’t she?” Odelia grunts, rubbing the small of her back. “I can’t stay down here like this. See if you can get her out, will you?”

  As her grandmother backs her hefty form out from under the table and stands with a loud groan, Calla inches forward. “Here, kitty. Come here, little kitty.”

  To her surprise, the tiny creature darts toward her. Calla scoops her into her arms, then quickly ducks out and stands. “Gotcha!”

  The kitten cuddles in her arms, blinking up at her.

  “Wow,” Calla says. “I think I’m in love. Is she the most precious thing ever, or what?”

  “She is that. What should we name her?”

  “She looks like a Gert to me,” Calla says promptly.

  “Gert? As in Gertrude?”

  “Don’t you think?”

  Odelia smiles. “Gert it is. How’d you come up with that?”

  Calla shrugs. “Sometimes things just pop into my head.”

  Odelia looks thoughtfully at her. “Speaking of that . . . we should talk about—”

  “I have a pile of homework to do,” Calla interrupts, knowing what Odelia is going to say, and not wanting to get into it now. “And I really need to keep my grades up while I’m here, or, you know . . . Dad will make me leave.”

  “Okay. No rush. Your schoolwork comes first. I just know that things are happening to you here—things you can’t possibly understand. I remember when I was your age, trying to deal with my gifts and being scared out of my mind.”

  Calla’s hand goes still on the kitten’s soft fur as she contemplates that. She never really wondered what it must have been like for Odelia, coming to terms with her visions of dead people. She just figured her grandmother always took it for granted, the way she does now.

  She was once in my shoes, Calla realizes. She gets it.

  But what about the whole Kaitlyn Riggs thing? Her grandmother already told her it was wrong for her to get involved in the first place. Remembering Odelia’s reaction to Mrs. Riggs’s visit last week, she knows that her grandmother would freak if she knew about the call from that reporter, much less about Kaitlyn’s visits, and Calla getting caught up in the Erin Shannahan case.

  Which she isn’t . . . yet. Not officially, anyway.

  What if the killer strikes again . . . and again?

  Stop him!

  All she has to do is hang on until that class on Saturday, and maybe she can figure out if there’s a way to use her psychic abilities to zero in on the killer.

  “Oh!” Odelia slaps her forehead. “I almost forgot to tell you two things. One is, you got some mail today. I put it on the desk in the other room. The other thing is, I have a message for you.”

  “From Spirit?” Calla braces herself. Maybe Kaitlyn Riggs has been visiting Odelia, too.

  But her grandmother laughs. Hard. Then she says, “No, not from Spirit. From Blue Slayton. And he used the good old-fashioned telephone to get through.”

  “Really?” Calla breaks into a grin, wondering if Evangeline was right and he’s going to ask her to homecoming.

  “Really,” her grandmother assures her. “He called after school.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Odelia repeats again, with a smile. “Oh, but can you hold off on calling him back until after I order us a pizza for dinner? I was so busy with Gert here that I didn’t have time to cook.”

  “Sure. Here, give her to me. I’ll play with her.”

  As her grandmother goes to find the takeout menu and the phone, Calla brings the kitten into t
he living room. So Blue called her. Does he want to ask her to homecoming? Maybe that’s what he was about to do when Ryan hit him in the head with that stupid wad of paper.

  On the desk, she finds an envelope addressed to her in Lisa’s loopy handwriting.

  “What do you think this is?” she asks the kitten, balancing her with one hand while she opens the envelope with the other.

  Inside is an airline voucher. A yellow Post-it note is stuck to it.

  Calla, All yours. Let me know when to meet you at the airport! Love, Lisa.

  Smiling, she puts the voucher back into the envelope and tucks it into the top drawer. She’ll use it at some point. Just not yet.

  The kitten squirms in her arms.

  “What? You want to get down? Want to play? Okay.” Calla sets her gently on the floor.

  Odelia keeps several skeins of yarn in a basket by her chair, along with several needles, though she doesn’t knit or crochet . . . yet. She says she always wanted to learn and wants to be ready with supplies when she finally gets around to it. Just as she has a guitar she’s never learned to play, and keeps a bin full of scrapbooking supplies for the day she feels like, as she put it, “sorting through and organizing a lifetime’s worth of junk.” Typical Odelia—creative and chaotic, Calla thinks with a smile.

  She tosses a ball of yellow yarn across the floor, holding on to one end. Gert trips over her little paws as she scrambles to play with it, and Calla can’t help but giggle.

  A few minutes later, Odelia reappears and holds out the cordless phone. “Pizza is on its way,” she says. “Half anchovy and pineapple for me, half mushroom and pepperoni for you.”

  “Perfect.” They’ve been getting pizza at least once a week. So far, she’s refused to try Odelia’s unusual combo, unconvinced that it’s as yummy as she claims.

  “Calla, can you keep the kitten occupied for a while so that I can get a few things done around here? I’ve been distracted by her all afternoon.”

  Calla thinks of all the homework she’s supposed to be doing.

  Then she thinks of the call from Blue, and her conversation with Jacy today, and the math test she failed, and the endless rounds of Candyland.

  “Sure,” she tells her grandmother, “I’d love to play with her. Just . . . I have to call Blue first.”