The Accident Season (6 page)

E
lsie has disappeared.

I don’t know how I know this, but it’s something I’m almost certain of, and not just because she isn’t in school on Tuesday morning either. Alice says she’s probably home sick or gone visiting relatives, but every time I look for her in the library and see Kim at the secrets booth, something twists inside me and tells me she’s never coming back.

Halfway through Irish class, Alice texts to tell me that almost all her friends have said they’re coming to the Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Ball.
They loved the invitations,
she says.
Stop obsessing about Elsie and concentrate on the party.

Alice thinks I’m being dramatic. Maybe before last week Sam would have thought so too, but something about looking through my pictures and seeing the dream catchers in the clearing has made him thoughtful. He believes me.

There was never any question of Bea not believing me. In French we sit at the very back of the classroom and Bea takes out her cards. Mrs. McCarthy has handed out written comprehension worksheets and is correcting last night’s homework at her desk. All around us people whisper, pages turn, pens scratch on the worksheets or on notes that’ll pass from hand to hand like a chain letter across the room to the person they’re intended for, music hums from earphones hidden behind hair, feet tap against desks, chairs are swung back on, their legs squeaking across the floor.

“
Quietly,
please,” Mrs. McCarthy says without looking up from her desk. The volume in the room lowers a fraction.

Bea spreads her cards out on the table. We are asking them about Elsie, pausing every few minutes to scribble down an answer in our worksheets.

“Who is she, where is she, what does she want?” Bea mutters as she places each card on the table with a soft
ffp
noise.

“And what does she have to do with us?” I add in a whisper, looking up at the teacher every once in a while to make sure she’s still busy with the homework.
Philippe préfère faire du vélo que la voiture parce que cela est mauvais pour l’environnement
, I write absentmindedly.

“Where does she fit into our story?” Bea asks the cards softly. She turns them over one by one. Then she is quiet.

“What does it say?” Sam nods down at the cards.

“It says,” says Bea slowly, “to trust.”

“To trust Elsie?” Abandoning my worksheet, I crane my neck to see the cards the right way up from Bea’s side of the table.

“To trust Elsie, to trust ourselves, to trust each other.” She rests her chin in the palms of her hands, her fingers just brushing her cheeks. “She has been through something—something she can’t get over. She needs us to help her find her way home.”

“I said
quietly,
” Mrs. McCarthy calls suddenly from the front of the room. Bea quickly covers her cards with a folder, but Mrs. McCarthy still hasn’t looked up.

“But why is she in all my pictures?” I hiss to Bea. “Is she following us?”

Bea shakes her head. “I don’t know. See this card?” She’s pointing to a card with ten stars shining over a castle. “Ten of coins. It’s saying she’s like a mirror.”

“A mirror? A mirror of what?”

Bea cocks her head to one side, then shakes it so that her hair falls almost to her shoulder. “I don’t know,” she says again. I can tell it’s hard for her to admit.

“Okay, class,” says Mrs. McCarthy, getting up from her chair. “Hand your worksheets up to the front of the room when you’re ready and take out your textbooks.”

I’ve only answered every second question, probably badly, but I hand my worksheet to the girl in front of me anyway. “So where is she?” I ask Bea.

Bea taps a card with four sticks stuck in the ground in a square. “At home, or wherever she feels that home is.”

Sam looks around the crowded classroom. Worksheets flutter from hand to hand to the front of the room. People whisper as they take out their books. The morning sun streaks in through the dirty windows. “Not here, that’s for sure.”

“So what do we do?” I ask. Mrs. McCarthy calls the class back to order and starts telling us which page to turn to, but her words hardly register.

Bea turns a card to face me. It has three stars hung above an archway. “Three of coins,” she says. She points to herself, to Sam, and to me, then to the three stars on the card. She says, “We work together, we trust each other. We find her.”

“And how exactly,” says Sam, “do we go about doing that?”

Bea’s eyes glitter like the sea. “I have an idea.”

Mrs. McCarthy’s voice cuts loudly through her words. “Miss Morris,” she says to me. “Mr. Fagan. If Miss Kivlan is distracting you with her magic spells, you can sit up at the front of the class.”

Bea quickly hides her cards, but half the class has already turned around to laugh and stare.

“Sorry, Mrs. McCarthy,” we mumble.

Mrs. McCarthy turns to Bea. “Miss Kivlan,” she says. “We are not in Hogwarts, we are in fifth-year French. So you can now lead the class in a chant about irregular verbs.”

The entire class starts to laugh. It might be my imagination, but the laughter seems less mean today than it usually does. Maybe the idea of magic spells is more appealing when the people doing them have invited everyone to a Halloween ball along with the most popular seniors. Bea gives me a small smile as she opens her book.

***

After all our classes are over, we sit out on the steps of the main building and wait for the school to empty. Cars drive into the parking lot and drive back out (our mother’s is not one of them; she is working late at the studio but calls every half hour to make sure we are all well wrapped up, protected, not jumping in rivers or running with scissors). People walk home in twos and threes. Outside, on the road, the buses chugga-chug, waiting for everybody to come aboard. Teachers’ heels clatter past. Little brothers and sisters shout, dogs bark, the wind whistles. Our extended Indian summer is finally coming to a close.

While we wait, we are joined by Alice and Kim and some of Alice’s friends: Niamh; her boyfriend, Joe; his brother Martin, who is in our year; and Carl Gallagher, who is Toby Healy’s obnoxious best friend. Carl sits up on the top step, very obviously close to Bea, but she doesn’t seem to notice. I can’t help but think that nobody sits that close to me. I look over at Sam, who is on the other side of Bea. Then I look down at my hands.

Everybody is talking about the Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Masquerade Ball. It’s the only reason Alice’s friends are sitting with us in the first place, I think, but I like that they’re sitting with us at all.

“You got some Metallica on that playlist?” Carl is asking Bea. “You need some old-school stuff for a Halloween mix. Pink Floyd? Guns N’ Roses? Here, let me play a couple of songs I think you’ll like.”

Joe, who doesn’t look particularly impressed at Carl’s sudden interest in Bea, is asking Alice about liquor. “Do you think Nick could do a beer run for us before the party? I mean, I have a fake ID, but it’d be cool if he could get it for us—you never know when you’ll run into a neighbor at the liquor store, you know?”

Before Alice can answer, though, her phone rings.

“Speak of the devil,” Joe says.

While Alice walks away to talk with Nick on the phone, Niamh and Kim discuss costumes. “I heard Katie Donoghue’s going as a bunny. Like, in a headband with ears and a fluffy tail.”

Kim snorts. “A bunny. To a masquerade. Does she not get that this
isn’t
just some stupid old Halloween party? That’s the whole point.”

“I know, right?”

Bea has taken out her ukulele and is singing softly. A train trundles by on the tracks at the far end of the school. Little by little the parking lot empties. Soon only the last few
stragglers, the janitors, the principal and her office staff, and the few pupils and teachers who stay around for detention or supervised study are left on the school grounds.

“So, hey,” says Carl, standing up to leave, “we’re heading to this open mic thing in the bar at the university. Want to pretend to be college students for the evening?”

“It’ll be great,” says Martin. “We’ll sit around and talk about philosophy lectures—”

“It’s easy to do,” Joe cuts in. “Just make shit up and sound pretentious.”

“And drink a few beers, play some songs. You guys in?”

“Sounds great,” Sam says. He turns to us. “Melanie’s staying late at the studio, right? We can get a lift home with her.”

I give Sam a look that tries to convey the sense of
Remember the plan?
but I can’t fault him for wanting to go hang out with the popular guys for the evening.

“Bea and I have . . . some stuff to do,” I say vaguely. Bea nods and Carl looks slightly disappointed. “Definitely next time, though.”

“More spells to cast?” says Martin, who is in our French class. He waves his arms as if brandishing a magic wand, but his smile is playful.

“That’s right,” says Bea with a wicked grin. “Lots of dancing naked around bonfires and sacrificing virgins. Would you like to volunteer?”

Martin’s expression flickers. “Next time, maybe,” he
says, only slightly frostily. I give Bea a kick. She spreads her hands to me as if to say
What?

Alice tut-tuts. “Bea, play nice with the other children,” she says, and Martin and Joe laugh. Bea winks at Alice with a shake of her curls.

“Okay,” Alice says, looking at her phone. “I’m meeting Nick in the city in an hour anyway, so I’ll get the bus with you.”

“See you two later.” Sam gives me and Bea a one-armed hug good-bye and follows Alice and her friends to the bus stop.

I stare after them until Bea pulls me up. I sigh. “We had better find what we’re looking for,” I say. “And it had better be worth missing
that
.”

Bea and I sneak back into the main building. Bea sticks her head up to see through the mottled glass window in the top of the door to one of the classrooms that is used for supervised study. She makes a little whistling noise and quickly ducks her head back down. We giggle and run down the corridor to hide around the corner. A few minutes later, Toby Healy comes out of the classroom.

As well as being quite possibly the prettiest boy in school, Toby is also the son of the secretary. Alice has somehow managed to persuade him to steal his mother’s keys to the office for us. I don’t know how she did it; Toby is hardly the rule-breaking type.

When he hurries toward us, I get a butterfly-fluttery sense of nervousness and excitement that is either because
we’re about to break into the secretary’s office, or because Toby is one of those guys who looks more like a character in a film than a real boy. And a little voice in the back of my mind wonders if maybe, just maybe, he might be helping us because he’s slightly interested in me. I’ve certainly noticed him smiling and saying hi to me in the halls lately, although maybe that’s just because I’m Alice’s sister.

Toby looks back over his shoulder and turns the corner to join us. “Right,” he says. “Mrs. Delaney thinks I’ve gone to the bathroom, so I better be quick.” He fishes a set of keys out of his jacket’s inside pocket. He holds them out but stops before Bea can grab them. “What do you want these for, anyway?”

“Never you mind,” says Bea.

Toby gives her a look. “I could get into a shitload of trouble over this—you know that, right?”

Bea rolls her eyes. “Don’t be dramatic,” she says, which I think is kind of funny coming from Bea. Toby mutters something that sounds a lot like
witch
.

“We’re just looking for someone’s phone number, that’s all,” I cut in quickly.

“Does it have anything to do with the masquerade ball? I’m really looking forward to Friday.”

I feel a little flustered all of a sudden. I knew Alice had invited her friends, but I didn’t know that Toby Healy was actually going to come.

“Yes,” says Bea emphatically. “It’s very important.”

Toby looks curious but he doesn’t ask any more questions. “Cool,” is all he says. He hands me the set of keys, pointing out the one that opens the office. “Slip it in my locker when you’re finished,” he says. “It’s number 503 outside Mr. Connolly’s class.” Then he flashes us a grin, says, “See you there, then,” and winks at me before he hurries away. I exchange a look with Bea, who barely suppresses a smile as I hand her the key to fit into the lock.

We try to be in and out of the office lickety-split, like lightning. The filing cabinets squeak and we muffle our laughter. Bea whispers that we’re lucky our school still lives in the Stone Age, that most schools’ files are on computer, password-protected, but here they’re kept in cardboard files in cabinets that don’t lock. This is one of the good things about living in a tiny speck of a town in Middle of Nowhere, County Mayo: We haven’t all quite caught up with the twenty-first century yet.

“What’s her last name again?” Bea asks, thumbing through the alphabetical files.

I open my mouth to answer, then frown. “I’ve been blanking on it for the last few days,” I say. “I
know
I know it.” I rub my forehead with exasperation. “Try under
M
?”

Bea shuffles through a few files before pulling one out triumphantly. “Got it!”

Elsie’s file has a tea stain on it, straight across the last
name. The cardboard is stuck together—the tea, I imagine, was milky and sugary, turned to syrup when it dried—but the information we want is on the front cover. Bea jots down an address and a phone number in her homework notebook and we hightail it out of the office like bandits, running low under the classroom windows.

Once we’ve sped out of the main building, through the parking lot and out of the school, we screech and whoop in triumph. We skip and jump along the grassy side of the main road, and once we hit the smaller country road out of town, we spread our arms and spin like tops. Our uniform skirts swish out like tartan bells.

When we are properly breathless we throw ourselves down by the side of the road near the river and Bea pulls out Elsie’s phone number. Without saying anything, she hands it to me and I take out my phone and dial the number. Everything goes very quiet. Above us the trees rustle and the birds chirp. In the field, the sheep bleat. The air smells a little like rain. I put the phone to my ear and hold my breath. The call takes a moment to go through, then my phone makes a sad little
beep beep beep
noise and the connection dies. Bea looks at me expectantly. I shake my head. “Either her phone’s turned off, or this isn’t a real number.” I don’t know why, but it gives me a sinking feeling.