The Stranger

by Caroline B. Cooney

  The sick humiliation in her heart was so painful that she found herself distanced from the world. The rules were hard to remember and not meaningful when she did remember them. She was facing a terrible empty time in which the group she loved forgot her. If she filled the time by going home, she’d have a crabby sister, a small house, and a nervous mother. She’d have television reruns played too loud, a fattening snack she didn’t need, and homework she couldn’t face.

  So Nicoletta crossed the road, and followed the boy down the little lane.

  She had his attention now. An odd, keep-your-back-turned attention. He didn’t look around at her. At one point he paused, and stood very still. She matched him. He walked on; she walked on. He walked faster for a while; she did, too. Then he slowed down. So did Nicoletta.

  Her head and mind felt light and airy. She felt as if she might faint, or else fly away.

  She was mesmerized by the task of making her feet land exactly when his did. He had long strides. She could not possibly cover as much ground. She was carrying her books, hugging them in her arms, and they grew heavy. She hardly noticed. Her head was swimming and there was nothing in the universe but the rhythm of their walking.

  The houses ended.

  The road narrowed.

  The trees that had neatly stayed inside hedges and yards now arched over the street. Latticed, bare branches fenced off the sky. In summer this would be a green tunnel. In winter it was grim and mean.

  The asphalt ended. The road became dirt ruts.

  Nicoletta would have said there were no dirt roads in the entire state, let alone this city. Where could the boy be going?

  Trees grew as closely as fence posts. Prickly vines wrapped the edge of the woods as viciously as concertina wire. Stone walls threaded through the naked woods, the lost farms of early America. For a moment, she felt their souls: the once-breathing farmers, the vanished field hands, the dead wives, and buried children.

  At the end of the dirt lane, an immense boulder loomed like a huge altar from some old-world circle of stones.

  Nicoletta had the strangest sensation that the stone greeted the boy. That the stone, not the boy, changed expression. They knew each other.

  Nicoletta kept coming.

  Some boys would have readied for combat. They would have slipped into the athletic stance used for obstructing or catching. This boy was simply there.

  Very, very slowly he turned to see whose feet had been matching his, what person had trespassed on his road. Dark motionless eyes, falling heavy hair, smooth quiet features. Not a word. Not a gesture.

  People often asked Nicoletta if her shining gold hair was really hers. They often asked her if her vivid green eyes were really hers. The general assumption was that extremely blonde hair and very green eyes must be the result of dye and contact lenses. She hated being asked if parts of her body were really hers.

  And yet she wanted to ask this boy—Is that really you? There was something so different about him. As if he wore a mask to be pulled off.

  There were about twenty paces between them. Neither he nor she attempted to narrow the distance.

  “Hi,” she said at last. She struggled for a smile, but fear gave her a twitch instead.

  He did not ask her what she was doing, nor where she was going.

  “I followed you,” she said finally.

  He nodded.

  A flush of shame rose up on her face. She was a fool. She was utterly pathetic. “It was just something to do,” she offered him.

  Still his face did not move.

  She struggled to find explanations for her ridiculous behavior. “I had a bad day. I lost all my friends. So—you were walking—and I walked, too—and here we are.”

  His face did not change.

  “Where’s your house?” she said desperately.

  At last he spoke. But he did not tell her where his house was. He said softly, “You can’t have lost all your friends.” His voice was like butter: soft and golden. She loved his voice.

  “No,” she agreed. “Probably not. It just feels like it. It turns out I’m not as important as I thought.”

  He said, “I’ll walk you back to the road while you tell me about it.”

  She told him about it.

  He simply nodded. His expression never changed. It was neither friendly nor hostile, neither sorry for her nor annoyed with her. He was just there. She wondered what his mouth would look like smiling. What his mouth would feel like kissing.

  Nicoletta talked.

  He listened.

  She poured out her feelings as if he were her psychiatric counselor and she was paying by the hour. She had to face this boy tomorrow, and every day for the rest of the school year! And yet here she was describing the workings of her heart and soul, as if he were a friend, as if he could be trusted.

  It was horrifically cold. She had not worn clothing for a hike in the outdoors. She shifted her books, trying to wrap her cold hands inside one another.

  The boy took off his long scarf, which was plain, thin black wool, with no fringe and no pattern. He wrapped it gently around her freezing ears, brought the ends down and tucked them around her icy fingers. The wool was warm with his heat. She wanted to have the scarf forever.

  She had to know more about him. She wanted to see him with his family, standing in his yard. She wanted to see him in his car and in his kitchen. She wanted to see him wearing jeans and wearing bathing trunks.

  “Will you be able to get home from here?” he asked instead. They were standing next to the bright yellow DEAD END sign. A few hundred yards ahead, traffic spun its endless circuit.

  She could not let their time together end. In fact, standing with him, they did not seem to be in normal time; they were in some other time; a wide, spacious ancient time. “Were you just going for a hike or do you live down there?” Nicoletta said.

  He regarded her steadily. “It’s a shortcut,” he said finally.

  He’s very, very rich, thought Nicoletta. He lives on an immense estate by the ocean. Acres of farm and forest between us and his circular drive. Perhaps his mother is a famous movie star and they live under another name. She said, “I’m Nicoletta Storms.”

  “Nicoletta,” he repeated. How softly he sounded each consonant. How romantic and European it sounded on his lips. Antique and lyrical. Not the way her classmates said it, getting the long name over with. Or switching without permission to Nickie.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  For a while she thought he would not tell her; that even giving out his name to a classmate was too much personal expression for him. Then he said, “Jethro.”

  “Jethro?” she repeated. “What an odd name! Are you named for an ancestor?”

  He actually smiled. She was lifted up on that smile like a swallow on a gust of summer wind. His smile was beautiful; it was wonderful; it was buried treasure, and she, Nicoletta, had uncovered it.

  Their city was one of the oldest on the East Coast. She had never previously met a native, but there had to be some. Perhaps Jethro was a descendant of the Mayflower. That was the kind of name they gave boys back then. Jethro, Truth, Ephraim.

  “Ancestors,” he agreed. The smile slowly closed, leaving behind only a sweet friendliness.

  “How did you like Art Appreciation?” she said. She did not want to stop talking. “Do you know a lot about art or were the slides new to you?”

  “Everything is new to me,” the boy answered, and gave away the first tiny clue. Slightly, he emphasized everything. As if not just art were new—but everything. The world.

  “Let’s have lunch together tomorrow,” she said.

  He stared at her, eyes and mouth flaring in astonishment. And blushed. “Lunch,” repeated Jethro, as if unfamiliar with it.

  “Meet me in the cafeteria?” said Nicoletta. She wanted to kiss him. Rachel would have. Rachel would have stood on her tiptoes, leaned forward, and kissed long and slow, even the first time. Rachel felt kissing was the wo
rld’s best hallway activity. Teachers were always telling Rachel to chill out.

  Instead the boy touched her face with his fingertips.

  And Nicoletta, indeed, chilled.

  It was not the hand of a human.

  Chapter 3

  “OF COURSE HE’S A human,” said her sister Jamie. Jamie was absolutely disgusted with the end of the story. “Nick, you blew it. I cannot believe you turned around and ran!” Jamie was always convinced that she would handle any situation whatsoever a hundred times better than her older sister. Here was yet more proof.

  Nicoletta hated defending herself to a child of eleven. But it happened constantly. There was no decision Nicoletta made, including, of course, being born, which met with her sister’s approval. “I was scared.”

  Jamie flung up her hands in exasperation. “If you had enough guts to follow him into the dark and dank and dreary woods …”

  “They weren’t dark or dank or dreary. The sun was shining. There was still snow on the ground in the forest. It was more silver than dark.”

  “My point,” said Jamie, with the immense disgust of younger sisters who were going to get things right when they started dating, “is that he started talking to you! Flirting with you. You even invited him to meet you for lunch. Running away from him was stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  Their father said, “Jamie. Please. You are entitled to your opinion, but saying it once is enough.”

  The worst thing about this minihouse was the way they had to function in each other’s laps. There was no privacy. All conversations and confrontations became family property. Nicoletta thought of their lovely house on Fairest Hill, and how she should have had an entire suite in which to be alone and consider her—well, Jamie was right—her stupidity.

  “Besides,” said their mother, “of course the boy’s hands were cold. You’d been in the woods for hours and he didn’t have any gloves on and it’s January.” Mother sniffed. She did not like fantasy, and when the girls were quite small, and liked to make things up, their mother put a stop to it in a hurry. “Not human,” repeated Mrs. Storms irritably. “Really, Nicoletta.”

  Nicoletta had told them about Jethro because it was easier than telling them about Madrigals. She could not bring herself to say that part out loud. I’m not in it anymore. You won’t go to concerts anymore. You won’t have to iron my beautiful medieval gown ever again. Somebody else—somebody named Anne-Louise—gets to dress up and sing like an angel and hear the applause from now on.

  “Speaking as the only man in this family, …” said Nicoletta’s father. He looked long and carefully at his hands, as if reading the backs instead of the palms. “I want to say that if some girl followed me home, walked after me for miles through the woods, and told me she had a crush on me, and then I walked her all the way back to the main road, I would certainly have been hoping for a kiss. And if instead of throwing her arms around me, the girl fled … well, Nickie, I would feel I’d done something incredibly stupid or had turned out to be repulsive close up. I’d want to change schools in the morning. I’d never want to have to face that girl again.”

  Wonderful, thought Nicoletta, wanting to weep. Now I’ll never see him again.

  She struggled with tears. In the other house, she could have wept alone. In this one, she had witnesses. The small-minded part of her tried to hold her parents responsible, and hate them instead of herself, for being a complete dummy and running from Jethro.

  She remembered the cold touch of his hands. I don’t care what Mother says, thought Nicoletta. Jethro’s hands were not normal. He scared me. There really was something strange about him. Something terribly wrong, something not quite of this world. I felt it through his skin. I can still feel it. Even though I have washed my hands, I can still feel it.

  “So,” said her father, his voice changing texture, becoming rich and teasing, “what’ll we do tonight, Nickie? Want me to play my fiddle?”

  Jamie got right into it. Nothing brought her more satisfaction than annoying her big sister. “Or we could slice up a turnip,” Jamie agreed. “That would be fun.”

  Right up until high school, Nicoletta had loved the Little House books. How unfair that she had to live now where the family could go to McDonald’s if they got hungry, check out a video if they got bored, and turn the thermostat up if they got chilled. A younger Nicoletta had prayed every night to fall through a time warp and arrive on the banks of Plum Creek with Mary and Laura. She wanted a covered wagon and a sod house and, of course, she wanted to meet Almanzo and marry him. In middle school, Nicoletta had decided to learn everything Laura had to learn; quilting, pie making, knitting, stomping on hay. Nicoletta’s mother, who hated needlework and bought frozen pies, could not stand it. “You live in the twentieth century and that’s that. Ma Ingalls,” Nicoletta’s mother said, “would have been thrilled to live like you. Warm in winter, snow never coming through the cracks, fresh fruit out of season.”

  When she was Jamie’s age, Nicoletta had made her fatal error. “Daddy never gets out his fiddle and sings songs for me when it’s snowing outside,” she’d said.

  Her father laughed for years. He was always making fiddle jokes.

  The second fatal error came shortly after, when Nicoletta tried eating raw sliced turnip because the Ingalls considered it a snack. Nicoletta’s mother had never in her life even bought a turnip because, she said, “Even the word gives me indigestion.”

  Only last Christmas, Nicoletta’s stocking had included a raw turnip and a paring knife. “Instead of potato chips,” said the card. “Love from Santa on the Prairie.” It was Jamie’s handwriting.

  Nicoletta’s Little House obsession ended with Madrigals: The singing, the companionship of a wonderful set of boys and girls from tenth to twelfth grade, the challenge of memorizing the difficult music filled Nicoletta the way her pioneer fantasies once had.

  She thought of her life as divided by these two: the Little House daydream years and the Madrigal reality years.

  And now Madrigals were over.

  She was not a Madrigal singer. She was just another soprano, good enough only for the ordinary non-audition chorus.

  Unwillingly, Nicoletta looked at the photograph of herself on the mantel. Every few years these photos were replaced, when the old one began to seem dated and ridiculous. Nicoletta’s portrait had been taken only last fall, and she stood slim and beautiful in her long satin skirt, crimson fabric cascading from her narrow waist, white lace like sea froth around her slender throat. Her yellow hair had just been permed, and twisted like ribbons down to her shoulders. In her hair glittered a thread of jewels. She seemed like a princess from another age, another continent, dressed as a Nicoletta should be dressed.

  Now she hated the portrait. People would come to the house—Rachel, Cathy, Christo—and there it would sit, pretending nothing had changed.

  I don’t want this life! thought Nicoletta, her throat filling with a detestable lump. Who needs high school? It hurts too much. I don’t measure up. I’m not musical and I’m a jerk who runs away from boys and makes them wish they attended school in another town. I don’t care what my mother says. Laura Ingalls had it good. Blizzards, starvation, three-hundred-mile hikes, scary badgers, and flooding creeks.

  She thought of Jethro. His profile. His odd, silent darkness. His quiet listening while she poured out her pain.

  “I got kicked out of Madrigals,” Nicoletta said abruptly. “Ms. Quincy tried everybody out again, and a new girl named Anne-Louise is better than I am, so I’m out and she’s in and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Chapter 4

  SHE DID NOT DREAM of Madrigals.

  She dreamed of Jethro.

  When she awoke much earlier than usual it was quickly and cleanly, with none of the usual muddleheaded confusion of morning. She arose swiftly and dressed without worry.

  That in itself amazed Nicoletta. Choosing clothing normally took her half an hour the night before, and then in the m
orning half an hour to decide that last night’s choice would not do, and yet another half hour to find clothing that would fit the day after all. It was amazing how an outfit that had been absolutely the right choice for last Thursday was never the right choice for the following Thursday.

  She did not brush her hair; Nicoletta’s permed curls were too tight for a brush to manage. She ran her fingers through it, fluffing and smoothing at the same time. She put on a simple black turtleneck, a plain silver necklace, and narrow dangling silver earrings. She wore a skirt she rarely touched: It had two layers, a tight black sheath covered by a swirl of filmy black gauze. The skirt was dressy, but the plain turtleneck brought it down to school level.

  She did not look romantic. She looked as if she were in mourning. For Madrigals? Or for the boy she would not meet for lunch after all?

  Jethro.

  Her school bus did not pass the strange little country lane she had never before noticed. When she got off the bus, she looked for him, but she had never seen him wandering around the school before, and she did not see him now. In the halls, her eyes scanned the taller people, searching for him, both aching and scared that she would actually spot him.

  First-period history, she covered a page in her notebook with the name Jethro. It looked historical. Where did it come from? It sounded Biblical. Who was Jethro and what had he done? She wrote it in script, in plain print, in decorated print, in open block letters. She wrote it backhand and she wrote it billboard style, enclosed in frames.

  Second-period English, the other person in her life with an O name sat beside her. Christo.” Hi, Nick,” he said cheerfully.

  She had always admired Christopher’s endless cheer. It seemed an admirable way to face life: ever up, ever smiling, ever optimistic and happy.

  Now it seemed shallow. Annoying.

  Am I comparing him to Jethro or am I angry with him for still being in Madrigals, for making peace in a single day with the fact that I have been replaced? “Hi, Christo,” she said. He had not even noticed how she skipped a beat before answering him.