Broken Circle

by J. L. Powers

Something is wrong with Sarah’s shadow. It’s halting, not the usual limpid flow of gurgling water. Like it’s been dammed up somewhere. Something’s wrong. I mean, deep down, not just a surface thing.

  Sarah glares at me. I look at her face carefully. There’s something strange in her eyes. “I took the train all the way up from New York City, not even sure if you were really going to be here like you said you would, and you bring another girl to have coffee with us?”

  “Um. Yeah?”

  She sighs heavily and heads to the line to get coffee. Rachel stops me from following her. “Is she your girlfriend?” she whispers.

  “No,” I whisper back.

  “But you like her?”

  “No,” I lie. Then: “Yes. Yes.” And I think about Liliana and wonder if it’s still true.

  She shakes her head and sighs almost exactly like Sarah just did. “You better tell her I’m just a friend.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Find a way. This is a bad idea but if we’re going to be here, I’m not going to sit here and watch you fuck it up. Go get me a coffee.”

  “What?”

  “You dragged me here under false pretenses, the least you can do is buy me a coffee.”

  “You don’t think that’ll give Sarah the wrong message? Anyway, I don’t have any money.”

  “You are useless.” Rachel gives me a five-dollar bill and shoves me toward the line, where I wait miserably because Sarah ignores me, even though I’m standing directly behind her. I get our coffees from the guy dressed like a lumberjack, the one who served me the last time we were here, his eyes instantly riveted to me, now just like then. Then I follow her to a plushy couch by the window.

  Sarah tries to smile but it falters. She’s either going to cry or hit me in the face, one or the other, so I don’t sit very close.

  “How’s school?” I ask.

  “It’s okay,” Sarah says. “It’s nice to be a sophomore. To feel like I know what’s going on, you know?”

  “Not really. I feel like a freshman again this year.”

  “Why’s that?” Her eyes look glassy, like she’s not all there, or like she’s on something.

  “Oh, being the new guy and all. But it’s cool,” I add hastily. “I like it. I like my classes. I like my classmates.”

  “Oh,” she says softly.

  I look out the window at the overcast sky, the people meandering past on Main Street. I realize suddenly that I like it here, maybe better than I ever liked New York. I feel at home here. I mean, it’s not Maine that feels like home. It’s freckled, smart-ass Rachel, sitting here beside me. It’s Sean, going to Mass even if the priest would be horrified to know what or who he is. It’s Tomás, greeting the morning sun. It’s Gen, obsessed with music. Maybe even smug Zachary with his boisterous ways.

  “So I guess it’s better than you thought it would be?” she says.

  I stare at a patch on the floor where the tile is slightly cracked. “It feels like everything I’m learning is . . . useful. I know that sounds lame but it’s true.”

  “What are you learning that’s so . . . useful?”

  I have no idea how to answer that one but Rachel comes to my rescue: “Practical things so we can take over our family businesses as soon as we graduate.”

  I shoot her a grateful look. She glances back as if to say, Why are you being such a dumb-ass, Adam? Tell her I’m just a friend.

  Sarah barely acknowledges Rachel. “Don’t you miss us?” Uh-oh. I feel the undercurrent of tension in that question. Actually, it’s not a question.

  “I do,” I say. “I miss you guys a lot.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “There’s no but.”

  “There’s always a but,” she says. “Unless you’re miserable, there’s a but. Are you miserable?”

  “No, but—”

  “See,” she interrupts. “I told you there was a but.”

  I’m losing the thread of this conversation or argument or whatever it is we’re having. I look desperately for her shadow, the limpid one I love, but it’s hiding behind her glazed eyes. Are we having a fight? I feel hot all over. Rachel’s face is as red as mine, in sympathy. What does Sarah want me to say? I don’t know. I settle for the truth.

  “Sarah, I was miserable coming here. I didn’t want to leave New York. I wanted to keep going to school with you and Jeremy and Carlos and . . . and you. But I didn’t have a choice. And now it turns out that there are some really cool people at that school. Like Rachel here. You’d like them too, if you ever met them. You’d like Rachel if you’d give her a chance.”

  Sarah’s face, which should be softening at the sheer desperate truth in my words, is slowly turning to stone. “Well, that’s cool,” she finally says. “But someday you’re going to have to come back to the real world and what are you going to do then?”

  “No, that’s just it. This is the real world. For me.”

  Rachel makes a throat-cutting motion with her hand. I’ve said too much. Revealed too much. Because who in their right mind would ever say a boarding school was the “real world”? But I’m talking about everything. All of it. The whole soul guide way of life.

  Sarah’s eyes sparkle with tears. “So you like it here better than New York.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I reply, even though it’s true.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m saying everything wrong.”

  I stare at my cup of coffee, which I haven’t even touched. Rachel was right, way back on our first day at school, when she told me we can’t be with so-called normal people. I imagine telling Sarah the whole truth, the real truth: Hey, baby, I’m the Grim Reaper. You want to have a really sick time? You can party with me until you drop. Like, literally drop. As in, drop dead. But hey, we can disco while doing the Limbo because even suicide can’t separate us. I guarantee, I’m dead right for you. Yikes. Even I want to run away screaming.

  “Well, just so you know, I have new friends too,” she says. “After what happened when we had our fortunes told, I started searching. I belong to this new movement called The Light. We have youth groups all over New York. All over the world. We believe you don’t have to die. That death is just a myth.”

  Sweat beads pop out on my forehead. I suddenly wish I was anywhere but here. “I’ve heard of something similar,” I say slowly. “I wish you’d stay away from them.”

  “Well,” she snaps, “you don’t have any right to say what I can or can’t do. I like the people I’m meeting there. I like what they have to say. I don’t want to die. Do you? If you could learn the secret to eternal life, wouldn’t you do it?”

  She grabs my arm and it feels affectionate, as if, for just a moment, she’s overcoming her anger about Rachel. “You should come. At Thanksgiving break.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know yet if I’ll be home for Thanksgiving.” This is the first time I’ve gone out of my way to tell her a lie. After all, Dad said he sent money so I could come home. And I want to see Sarah then, I do. But if she’s involved with La Luz—I just can’t. No matter how badly I want to.

  “Okay,” she says, then pauses. “So is it all right if I start going out with Jeremy?”

  I sit back. I hadn’t even realized I’d been sitting forward until this moment. Now I need the support of the couch on my back. “Are you . . . is he . . . I mean, do you really like him?” I’m surprised that my voice shakes.

  “I’m just asking if you’d be okay if I go out with him.”

  “It’s fine if you really like him.” My voice is quiet, so quiet, I can’t believe how quiet. “I can’t tell you who to go out with. But if you don’t really like him, then I think it’s a crappy thing to ask me.”

  She laughs then, this I-can’t-believe-it snort. “As if what you did isn’t totally and completely crappy,” she half-yells.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I come all the way from New York to Maine, traveled all night
to be here to meet you, thinking maybe we could talk. About us. I always thought maybe there might be something between us. Like, more-than-friends something. But instead you bring your girlfriend with you. And now you tell me it’s crappy that I might think about going out with Jeremy.”

  She gets up so fast, hot coffee spills all over the front of my jeans. As my brain catches up to my lips and I open them to say something, she slams the cup on the table, stares at me wildly, then runs out the door.

  The words come too late. It’s not like that, I say in my head. Rachel’s just a friend.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Well, you sure screwed that up,” Rachel says.

  “Thanks a bunch.” I glare at her. “You could have spoken up.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure that would’ve made everything so much better.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, it seems she’s hooked up with La Luz. Bad news, my friend.”

  I look sharply at her, words on the tip of my tongue, but whatever I was going to say is lost as my heart suddenly freezes in terror. Sarah’s outside the café and she’s talking to somebody who looks suspiciously familiar and pointing toward the coffee shop and then he looks up at us and I draw my whole breath in at the sight of the bookseller/fortune-teller grinning at me.

  “What’s wrong, Adam?” Rachel asks.

  I look to the right and left. The lumberjack slouches against the wall, arms crossed, watching us. His shirt shifts, revealing a tattoo on his right forearm—the symbol from the copy of The Book of Light, a circle with a half-circle inside it, rays like sunbeams shooting off it.

  My stomach drops. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The lumberjack stands upright and starts to walk toward us. He waves at somebody behind me, and I glance back out the window. Sarah’s gone but the bookseller is standing there, nodding. Nodding at the lumberjack.

  I grab Rachel’s hand. “Don’t look back.”

  We walk outside swiftly, taking the side door instead of the front door. I turn my head just enough to see the lumberjack following us out of the café. He’s balling up his apron and throwing it into a trash can and then he breaks into a run, heading straight for us. The bookseller comes wheezing from the other direction but I’m not worried about him. He’s old and in bad health. It’s this young guy we have to escape.

  “Rachel,” I say, half under my breath, “run back to the boat as fast as you can.”

  We dash between two buildings, then out to another street, heading downhill toward the harbor. I thought the boat was just a couple blocks away, but now, with the lumberjack on our heels, it suddenly feels like we’re running from Maine to Massachusetts.

  “Stop, come back!” the lumberjack hollers.

  “Leave us alone!” Rachel shrieks.

  “You can’t escape us!” he yells. “We know what you are!”

  We pass the bus station. I look over and see Zachary leaping up the stairs two at a time, ready to board the bus. Our eyes meet and he stops, his eyes shifting behind me to the lumberjack chasing us and the bookseller puffing behind.

  “What’s going on?” he shouts.

  “Get out of here, Zachary!” I scream.

  Principal Armand, Jacob, and another teacher—this enormous guy I know simply as “Rock”—are standing at the edge of the water near the boat. I turn just in time to see the lumberjack slip between two buildings and disappear. I hope Zachary boarded the bus safely.

  Jacob holds out his arms to intercept us, as though we’d keep running right off the dock into the water. “Hey, hey, hey, you guys look like you saw a ghost.”

  We stand with our hands on our knees, panting, trying to catch our breath.

  Principal Armand assesses us. “What happened?”

  “The guy from the coffeehouse started chasing us when we tried to leave,” Rachel starts to explain.

  “Did you forget to pay for your coffee?” Principal Armand interrupts with a little cackle.

  “He had this tattoo on his arm, like a half-sun or maybe an eye inside of a circle.” I have this feeling I shouldn’t say the words “La Luz,” I should just let them figure it out for themselves.

  The teachers exchange glances and without a word, Rock takes off, jogging heavily toward town.

  “I’ll round up the troops,” Jacob says.

  “You have the list of churches?” Principal Armand asks.

  Jacob’s already heading toward Main Street, but he waves a slip of paper behind his back and keeps running.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “La Luz.” Principal Armand’s fierce expression forbids further questions so Rachel and I step meekly onto the boat to wait.

  Jacob soon returns with six students who climb into the boat. Immediately, he turns around and heads back toward downtown.

  Gabe La Muerte sits next to us. “What’s up?”

  “Some lunatic chased us to the dock and Principal Armand thinks he’s La Luz,” Rachel says.

  Sofia pales and sits down immediately.

  “What would they do to us anyway?” I ask. “I mean, I would think they’d want to avoid us.”

  We sit in frozen silence until Jacob returns with another armful of kids, including Sean. Jacob and Principal Armand confer briefly, then Jacob heads back in the direction Rock disappeared.

  Sean sits next to Rachel and yawns. “I bet it turns out to be a big crapload of nothing.”

  “You should have seen that guy,” Rachel says. “He was serious. I mean, seriously intent on catching us—at least, until he saw our teachers at the dock.”

  “Nobody can beat soul guides at their own game,” Sean says cheerfully. “Our real threat is civil war. You know, the whole crazy La Muerte–Angel feud.” His words echo in the ocean breeze and Sofia and Gabe glare at him. “Or when the Reaper territory goes up for grabs.”

  I wonder if he’s right. What is the worst threat—La Luz or each other?

  Before long, almost everybody’s returned, including Rock. But where’s the group of Angels that accompanied Zachary and Aileen to the bus station?

  Jacob stands at the prow of the boat and speaks to us, the camp spirit drained out of him. “Hey, listen,” he says. “If what we heard from Adam and Rachel is correct, we believe there may be a La Luz agent roaming around this town. Has anybody seen Zachary, Aileen, or the other Angels?”

  I raise my hand. “We saw them at the bus station when we were headed this way. Zachary and Aileen were about to board the bus.”

  “They’re not at the bus station anymore and the bus left without them on board. Does anybody—anybody at all—know where they might have gone instead of coming straight to the boat? This is really important.”

  We all stare at him. Nobody speaks.

  “This is serious, guys. Life-and-death serious.”

  The silence is something you can squeeze.

  Jacob steps off the boat. He and Principal Armand and Rock huddle together for a few minutes, then break apart and look in different directions, scanning the horizon. Jacob sets out for the town again while Rock and Principal Armand pace up and down the dock.

  All of us sit quietly on the boat for another hour. I think about Zachary, what an asshole he is. But then I think maybe he’s not actually that big of an asshole. I hope he’s off somewhere, goofing around—just being, well, assholey.

  Jacob finally returns, only this time he isn’t alone. Aileen and the other Angels—Lissette, Greg, Marcus, and Mandy—are with him. Mandy and Lissette are crying. Greg and Marcus peer out at the water. A muscle throbs in Marcus’s jaw. Jacob, Rock, Aileen, and Principal Armand confer again.

  Principal Armand steps onto the boat’s prow and says, “We have a serious situation on our hands. Apparently Zachary disappeared right when he was supposed to get on the bus. Jacob and Rock are going to stay here on the mainland and search for him. We’re going to send the rest of you back to the island so that you are safe. Please don’t speculate about what’s happened to Zachary. Rumors will only serve to create pa
nic. As long as we don’t know what’s going on, let’s maintain a respectful silence, shall we?”

  As the boat pulls out of the harbor and into the bay, Rachel grabs my hand. I squeeze it back. We watch Jacob and Rock getting smaller and smaller. Waves slap the sides of the boat and get higher as we move into open water.

  It feels like I’m going to my execution. Because I’m pretty sure La Luz took Zachary. And I’m going to have to tell them the truth about how La Luz ended up in Belfast.

  CHAPTER 24

  I don’t really want to see anybody after I come out of Principal Armand’s office later that night, but Rachel’s waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

  “How’d they take it?” she asks.

  “Not good.”

  She waits for me to elaborate but I don’t really want to say that I’ve been expelled. I’m afraid I’ll start crying. What am I going to tell Grandpa? What am I going to tell Dad? I’ve failed. I’ve managed to do the one thing they told me not to do.

  Rachel takes my hand and I can tell she already knows.

  “I don’t want to tell anybody. But you can tell them when I’m gone.”

  “When’s that?”

  “Tomorrow morning. First train out. Aileen’s taking me.”

  “I’m sorry.” She grabs my hand. It’s a nice feeling, holding her hand. Not like Liliana or Sarah nice, more like sisterly nice. I don’t tell her the other part. That the whole school is packing up and moving to a new location. Immediately. (“The school has been compromised due to your extreme . . . sheer . . . stupidity,” Principal Armand told me.) I have no idea where they’re going. And I guess I never will.

  We sit there for a while and then we go join everybody in the barn. They’re all just sitting around—the guys, the girls, and half the teachers. Aileen joins us; her eyes meet mine across the room. The disappointed look is still there. I’ve never seen anybody so frustrated. She didn’t say anything in front of Principal Armand but I have a feeling I’m in for an earful in the morning when she has me alone.

  I sit on the couch next to Tomás and his cousin Agwe. Usually they’re perfectly turned out but today their clothes are a little rumpled.