The Accident Season (8 page)

“Well, he’s no sad-eyed guitarist or brooding Victorian rogue,” says my mother, who likes to tease me about my taste in music and books. I tell her that the river makes better
music than any musician and that brooding rogues are totally making a literary comeback.

“And what’s your type?” I say to Sam. “Dreamy-eyed witch-girls?” My words sit uncomfortably in my throat.

“Something like that.”

It’s funny how quickly the ghost of a kiss can turn sour. Too-sweet incense and stale cigarette smoke.
He’s your brother,
I tell myself angrily.
Why shouldn’t he like your best friend?

“And Alice’s type is too ordinary for a wild child like her,” says my mother, handing Alice her tea. Alice raises an eyebrow. My mother is joking; Nick is anything but ordinary.

When my mother goes upstairs to finish up some sketches, I tell Sam and Alice about the ghost house. When I get to the part about holding our Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Masquerade Ball there, their eyes light up in exactly the same way so that they look like they really
are
brother and sister. I take out my phone to show them some of the pictures Bea and I took of the dusty rooms. Sam and Alice crowd close. I show them the pantry with the river running invisibly under it, I show them the view of the staircase from the hall, I show them the cluttered, abandoned bedrooms, and when I get to the picture of the master bedroom, all the breath whooshes out of me at once.

I took the picture from the farthest corner of the room, the one by the double doors. In the frame we can see the peeling walls and the dusty floorboards with the shuffle
tracks made by our booted feet. We can see the fire pit in the middle of the empty room, but that’s not what’s making my skin crawl. I tap the image to zoom in. There are the dirt-streaked glass panes of the bay windows, there are the heavy, moth-eaten drapes, and there, half hidden by the curtains, pointed face peeking out with that familiar worried look, is Elsie.

I
keep expecting Elsie to reappear. I glance around every corner on my way to class the next morning. I jump when I hear footsteps and turn around quick, but it’s only some eighth graders trekking mud in from the soccer field, or older girls in heels. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being followed.

After roll call, Bea and I go to see Mr. Duffy, who is the seniors’ class advisor. He is barreling past a flock of first years on his way down the corridor to the music room. I shoulder a couple of tussling boys aside to catch up with him.

“Mr. Duffy?” I say loudly.

Bea waves her arms to get his attention. “Sir?”

He stops in front of his classroom door and looks at us over his glasses. “Ah. Miss Kivlan. And Miss . . . Morris, isn’t it?” he says. “Alice Morris’s sister?”

“That’s right.” Alice and Bea both do music, but Sam and I wanted to take German, and because of the way the timetables worked out, we couldn’t do both. “Sir,” I say, “we’re looking for a senior called Elsie. She’s the one who does the secrets booth, you know?”

Mr. Duffy shakes his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he says. As if on cue, the bell for the beginning of our first class rings. “Your sister would be a better person to ask.” He turns to unlock his classroom door. A group of ninth graders is beginning to form in the corridor behind us.

“She doesn’t know her,” I say quickly. “I just need her phone number. Or an address? It’s just . . . she hasn’t been in for a few days and I really need to find her.”

“It’s about the secrets booth,” Bea adds. “We wanted to do an interview with her for the school website.”

Mr. Duffy unlocks the door and the third years all file into the music room. “Who’s her homeroom teacher?” he asks me. “They would have all that information. Although, to be honest, it’s probably against school policy to give it out.”

“I don’t know who her homeroom teacher is,” I tell him. “But I thought you might . . .”

“I’m afraid I don’t know the girl. But I’m sure she’ll be back before midterm, and if not, you can interview her after the break.”

Mr. Duffy makes to follow his form into the classroom,
but Bea subtly squeezes her foot into the doorjamb so that he has to stay and answer. Mr. Duffy looks at her foot and sighs. He says to me, “You know, when you’ve been teaching as long as I have, Clara—”

“Cara.”

“Cara—you can get a little muddled. I’ve had a couple of Ellies—”

“Elsie.”

“Elsies. And a couple of Ellas and Essies too. You see what I mean?”

“Yeah, but . . .” I say, trying very hard not to sound impatient or rude. “But she’s in your year. I don’t know if she does music, but she’d be at assemblies and—”

Mr. Duffy looks at me shrewdly. “Not all students are as . . . vocal in class as others,” he says, looking pointedly at Bea, who stares back, unabashed. “And I’m sorry to say that not all students are equally memorable either. I have a lot of students like that in my classes. They work hard, they keep their heads down, they give me no reason to complain about them. Now I suggest that you two take a leaf out of her book and do the same.” And he closes the classroom door.

We get similar answers from every teacher we approach; nobody seems to know where Elsie is, and most people think we’re being silly worrying about her not being in school.

“Well, even if it’s just that she’s off sick,” Bea says, “I wish someone would actually talk to us about her.”

We are standing by the wall of the gym in PE, where Mrs. Smith (who refused to excuse me from class two weeks in a row) has stretched a moldy-looking net across the middle of the hall and is trying to teach us to play tennis. Bea and I hang back as far away from the action as possible, vaguely swinging our rackets whenever the teacher looks our way. Sam, on the other hand, seems to be engaged in a deadly battle with Stephen Jones; both of them are hitting the tennis ball toward the other with vicious underarm swings that send Mrs. Smith into paroxysms of glee. Mr. Breslin, the boys’ PE teacher, is out sick, so Mrs. Smith is supervising both classes. Thankfully, this means that she is sufficiently distracted to allow me and Bea to continue our conversation uninterrupted.

“I just don’t know who else to ask,” I say over the
toc-toc
of tennis balls being hit, the squeaking of sneakers on the gym floor, the huffs and puffs of our classmates, who are far more engaged in the games than we are. “It just seems like nobody knows anything about her at all.”

Bea taps her racket on the floor thoughtfully. “I’d suggest looking online, but without a last name, we’re not going to get anywhere fast.”

“She doesn’t really seem like the social media type.”

“And Mrs. Healy wouldn’t tell you anything?”

I shake my head. I went to the secretary’s office between classes, but it was as fruitless an exercise as when Bea and I
broke in. “She said that none of the sixth years’ attendance records are cause for concern right now, and basically just told me to mind my own business.”

Bea sighs. “Adults are useless.”

We watch Sam and Stephen run up and down the net for a while. Sam swings hard and the ball almost hits Stephen in the face.

“No fouls now, boys,” Mrs. Smith shouts merrily. “Forty–fifteen to Mr. Fagan over here.” Sam brushes his hair out of his eyes with a shake of his head. Martin high-fives him as he takes his turn at the net. A couple of the more popular girls watching them cheer. I frown at them without really meaning to.

Bea’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “So, random question,” she says. “What do you think of Carl?”

“Carl Gallagher?”

“Yeah. What do you think of him?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“He’s kind of pretentious and has shit taste in music.”

Bea laughs out loud. One of the girls waiting for her turn at the net turns around with a frown, but Bea stretches her mouth out into a demon snarl and she quickly looks away. “I suppose you’re right,” Bea says. “Still, at least he’s interesting.”

I mutter that I don’t think he’s all that interesting
actually, and Bea laughs again. “Since when did you get so honest, Cara?” she says, which I don’t think is fair because I’m nothing if not honest. It’s just that sometimes I prefer to keep my honesty to myself. I tell Bea as much and she laughs even louder and bumps her hip against mine.

“I know that,” she says, more seriously. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” I ask her. “What do
you
think of Carl?”

Bea screws up her mouth, as if she’s thinking hard. “Same as you, mostly,” she says. “But I think every witch needs someone to kiss on Halloween.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You kiss a lot of people.”

“I do. Kissing’s important.”

I don’t disagree on that particular point, but I can’t stop there. “You kissed me.”

Bea smiles. “That was just part of the story.”

“Part of what story?”

Bea waves an arm vaguely. “Part of the story of the ghost house,” she says. “It needed a kiss to wake it up, to ready it for the party.”

I know Bea well enough to understand that this isn’t the reason she kissed me at all, but I decide to let the subject drop. “Well, it’s certainly awake now,” I say. Bea grins and winks suggestively, but behind it all she looks a little relieved.

“So you think Carl will find the witch’s kiss there?” I ask her, with another bump of a hip.

We’ve told everyone about the party’s change of venue,
and the fact that it will be held in an abandoned house has made everyone even more excited than before. We’ve also been very careful not to talk about the party around my mother, who thinks we’re just spending a quiet Halloween night at Bea’s house watching horror films and handing out candy to trick-or-treaters.

Bea grins and shakes her head. “Not a chance. But I’ll probably kiss him anyway.”

We both giggle a bit as the rest of the class takes turns serving.

“So who are
you
going to kiss at the ball, then?” Bea wants to know. Across the gym hall, Sam is splashing his face with water from a plastic bottle. The ends of his hair drip onto the collar of his T-shirt.

I turn away from him and punch Bea’s arm lightly. “No one,” I say. “Your kiss has ruined me forever.”

Bea ruffles my hair. “Nonsense,” she says.

But I am hardly listening. By the tennis net, Sarah Keogh, who has long brown hair and perfect eyebrows, has come up to Sam, who is talking to Martin. It would appear that Martin’s popularity is rubbing off. When Sarah smiles, her teeth are very straight. I force myself to look away and think of something else. I think about Toby Healy winking at me when we broke into the office yesterday. He has pretty lips, and his eyelashes are long like a girl’s. I say this to Bea.

“Another sad-eyed guitarist,” she says.

“He plays the guitar? Be still my heart.”

We both laugh. “He does seem interested in you all of a sudden, though,” she says. “I think there’s potential there.”

“All of a sudden? Excuse me,” I reply haughtily. “How do you know he hasn’t been secretly in love with me since first year and was just waiting for an excuse to let me know?” Then I snort a laugh. “Seriously, though, I’m sure it’s only that he’s just noticed I exist, not that he is interested in me in any way.”

“We’ll see,” says Bea with her eyebrows raised.

Suddenly there is a lot of noise and movement by the tennis net. A shout, gasps, a volley of curse words and calls for the teacher. It’s hard to see what has happened with all the people crowding around. Bea and I drop our rackets and run; this time of year, we always assume the worst.

At the center of the crowd Sam is hunched over, almost bent double. His hands are on his face and there is blood dripping from between his fingers.

“Sam!” I practically scream. Everyone makes room for me to rush up to him.

“Miss, it wasn’t me, miss, it wasn’t my fault,” Stephen Jones starts shouting as Mrs. Smith hurries over from the other side of the hall.

“It was
your
ball that hit him.” Sarah Keogh arches her perfect eyebrows. I put my arm around Sam.

“Yeah, but it was an accident. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I’m fine,” Sam says thickly. When he takes his hands away from his face, I can see that his mouth is full of blood. “I’m fine,” he says again, to reassure the teacher. “He’s right, it wasn’t his fault. I’m okay, it’s just my lip.” Blood drips steadily into his cupped hands.

“Let’s get you to the nurse,” says Mrs. Smith wearily; this is not the first accident Sam has had in PE class. She holds out an arm to help him to the nurse’s office, but he waves her away.

“It’s fine, Mrs. Smith,” he says, walking easily to the door with the air of someone who has suffered worse injuries than a busted lip. He shakes his hair out of his face with a bloodstained grin. “I know the way.”

***

Having a stepbrother should have made a lot of things easier, Alice thought. For one thing, it meant that she and Cara could have a referee when they played Steal the Bacon. Cara always tried to cheat when she’d gotten hold of the ball—or the shoe, or the rolled-up sweater, or whatever they had to hand to be the bacon. But it turned out that Sam couldn’t be trusted to tell on Cara, even if she cheated.

Normally, in October, Alice and Cara weren’t allowed to play outside unless Mom or Uncle Seth or someone was watching, but since Mom had married Christopher last summer, lots of little things had changed.

“You
did not
touch the edge of the driveway that time,
Cara,” Alice shouted after Cara got to the ball before she did.

“Yes I did!”

“You didn’t!
Sam
. Tell her she didn’t touch the edge.”

Sam shuffled his feet a bit on the concrete. “I dunno, Alice,” he said in a voice that Alice knew meant he totally
did
know. “I think she did touch it.”

Alice threw her hat down on the driveway in annoyance. “She did not and you both bloody well know it.”

Sometimes having a stepbrother just meant having one more person to gang up on you.

Mom and Christopher came into the garden, Christopher with a spade and trowel and gardening gloves. Mom never usually gardened during the accident season.

She shaded her eyes and looked over at them. “Why don’t you three play on the grass instead?” she said. “I don’t want you falling on the driveway.”

“You can’t run as fast on the grass,” said Cara. “Also, it’s way too long.”

Christopher kissed the top of Mom’s bright-orange-dyed hair. He was so tall he didn’t even have to raise his head. “I’ll get to that next,” he said.

Mom gave a small shudder. Alice knew she didn’t like having the lawnmower out at this time of year. There were a lot of things Mom hid away in October.

“So,” Christopher said to them, struggling to put Mom’s gardening gloves onto his big hands. “Who’s winning?”

“Me,” Alice and Cara said at the same time.

“Cara,” said Sam.

Alice gave Sam the evil eye. “Fine, then,” she said. “Your turn.”
Let’s see who wins when he’s playing against her,
she thought.

Sam and Cara played five rounds of Steal the Bacon while Alice refereed and Christopher weeded the flowerbeds and Mom watched nervously from a safe distance. Sam let Cara win every round.

By the time Cara’s new friend Bea rode up on her bicycle (Alice and Cara weren’t allowed to have bicycles even though Cara was ten and Alice was eleven and it wasn’t the accident season
all
the time), Mom had relaxed and was chatting and laughing with Christopher over the rosebushes. Alice and Cara and Sam and Bea decided to play relay races across the empty field next door. They got Christopher to count down THREE TWO ONE GO, and all four of them raced from the fence at the side of the garden to the other end of the field.

Alice and Sam were the fastest, but because they both had to swerve around a whole heap of cow patties right in their path, they ended up tied with Bea and Cara just before the finish line at the opposite fence.