The Suburban Strange (17 page)

12. THE ART OF FALLING APART

C
ELIA NOTICED A PALPABLE
suspense in the seniors, which grew as December began. First, Ivo got the letter accepting him into the architecture program at his top school, Metropolitan. The next day, Liz found out she was going there, too, as a creative writing major. Finally, Brenden’s letter came, accepting him into Metropolitan’s interdisciplinary studies program, which he wanted so badly to enter. It was exciting, but there was bleakness to it—it was the first indication that the days of the Rosary were numbered. Metropolitan was a few hundred miles away. When Liz caught the flu, her absence gave them a firsthand experience of what it was like to have someone missing from the group, and no one could ignore the sober truth that lurked behind the seniors’ good news about college.

The afternoon after Brenden received his letter, Celia went to meet Marco in the library, but she didn’t see him at their usual table. She wandered through the stacks and finally turned a corner in the farthest reaches of the room to find him at a carrel by himself, his head down on his arms. The black rosary beads around his neck between his curls and the aubergine collar of his shirt told her he was trying to reassure himself the Rosary was intact. She put her hand on his shoulder and he looked up, wiping his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m just thinking about him leaving,” Marco said softly. “I know it’s not for another nine months, but he’s going to leave. And I knew he would, but it wasn’t real until he got accepted.” Marco looked drained. He glanced around to see if anyone else was nearby. “Metropolitan’s four hours away, so it’s not like I can visit him that easily. He won’t be able to come home most weekends.”

“I’m sorry,” Celia said, largely because she didn’t know what else to say.

“I do love him,” Marco said. “And he loves me. I know we’re young, and maybe I’m foolish for thinking he’s the one.”

Celia pulled the chair over from the next carrel. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you guys are perfect for each other.”

“When he goes to school he’s going to meet all these other amazing people. How can I expect him to want to stay with me, even if I get there the next year?”

“You have to ask him that,” Celia said.

“I know. I just don’t want to bring it up because I know he’s excited about getting accepted, and I don’t want to be a wet blanket. He deserves to be excited.”

“Well, Brenden hasn’t said anything to me, but I bet he knows how you’re feeling, even if you haven’t talked to him about it,” Celia said. “He has to be thinking about the same things. I mean, who’s to say you couldn’t meet someone else while he’s gone?”

“I don’t
want
to meet anyone else,” Marco said. “You know, I stay over at his house almost every weekend. His parents are so cool about us. On the weekends it’s almost like we live together. When we all had that ridiculous conversation about sex the other day, I wanted to say you don’t have to lose your virginity with someone you love, but when you love somebody, sex becomes something completely different.”

“I thought we weren’t talking about my virginity until April.” Celia was happy to get a chuckle out of Marco. “Listen, you two can figure this out. You’re both great guys, and you have a great relationship. I think you should try to enjoy the rest of this year with him, and then figure out what’s going to work for you. Just don’t let it spoil the time you have left before he goes.”

“I know.” Marco wiped his eyes again.

“And no hiding from me in the library,” Celia said. “We’re supposed to be getting our homework done.”

Celia’s heart went out to Marco. He was always so stylish and self-assured, yet she still could see the dreaming child in him, who gave his love and then depended on those he loved so much it made him fragile. She had decided to make portraits of the Rosary for Christmas presents, and she thought more about him when she was pulling up her mental pictures for his drawing. Marco’s joy was close at hand so often. The moments when it strayed, like that afternoon in the library, were shocking. Celia thought of love as a kind of miracle, something beyond her control, to be hoped for but never expected. Most of the relationships she saw at school were not nearly as convincing, but when Marco spoke of love with Brenden, she believed. Maybe love was a miracle, but there it was in front of her. Celia wondered when she might feel it herself.

She thought about each of the members of the Rosary as she worked on their portraits—the way they carried themselves and the way they fit into the group. Celia was better at describing people with her pencil than she was with words, and she worked very hard to capture each of them. She had picked up another copy of
The Awakening
to give Mariette but decided she would make a portrait for her, too.

As close as she had become to Mariette, Celia was even more at a loss to describe that relationship. She felt like a guest in Mariette’s world, where fantastic, inexplicable things happened—a world in which she didn’t have a place. On the one hand, she wanted to know more, wanted to see more, wanted to share with Mariette the things she had glimpsed. On the other hand, she was scared Mariette would be disappointed when Celia turned out to be merely a citizen who never should have been told any of this. She feared for Mariette, and she feared the terrible thing that was happening at Suburban—a plot that could kill a girl, and perhaps Mariette, if she got in the way of someone with Unkind powers and the desire to use them. How was Celia supposed to make sense of that? And what was she supposed to do, when every option she considered was laughably implausible? Celia focused her energy on the drawings. It was reassuring to do something familiar.

AT HER LOCKER THE NEXT
day, Celia was so preoccupied, she didn't notice that someone had approached her until he spoke. "Hi," he said. "Celia, right?"

It was Skip. She had watched Liz watching him so many times, and they had crossed paths over a number of girls on their curse days, but it was a surprise to find him in front of her. “Yes?” Celia looked around, confused. He stood there, at ease in his denim shirt and orange sweater, smelling of cologne, a string of tiny shells around his neck. He was generically good-looking, in the healthy way jocks were, but there was too much gel in his bangs and not enough in the rest of his hair.

“I’m Skip. You’re friends with Liz Fourad, aren’t you?” He was friendly and completely confident. Celia couldn’t imagine being so nonchalant when speaking to a stranger for the first time. She tried to be cool.

“Yes, why?”

“I was just wondering if she’s okay. She hasn’t been in school for a few days.” He looked her straight in the eye and smiled a little, and Celia fought the melting response she knew he was used to getting from girls.

“She has the flu.”

“She does? That’s too bad. Does she need anyone to get her assignments for her?”

Celia was pleasantly surprised by his question and a little touched by his sentiment, but she couldn’t offer him any encouragement. “I think her brother is doing that.”

“Sure, of course. Okay, well, thanks for letting me know. I hope she feels better.” He hesitated.

“Do you want me to tell her anything?”

“Um, you don’t have to,” Skip said. “I don’t think it’ll make much of a difference to her. I’ll see you around.”

“Okay.” Celia watched him go. She turned back to her locker and was trying to make sense of the conversation when Mariette appeared on her other side.

“Do you know him?”

“Who? That guy? No. Well, kind of. Why?”

“His name is Skip, right? He’s on the football team.”

“Yeah, I know. Why do you care?” Celia had become accustomed to Mariette’s knowing unexpected things, but she couldn’t guess why Mariette would be interested in Skip.

“I think he might be a suspect,” Mariette said, looking down the hall after Skip, who turned a corner and disappeared from view.

“You think he’s a suspect? Why?”

“I finally got my new admonition, and it warns against someone who is marked by the number seventeen.” Mariette pulled out her notebook. “Here.” She wiped the page with her hand and four lines appeared in place of her notes:

Beware the one who hides in sight
And seeks the darkness, not the light
Who knows seventeen many ways
And offers wrong disguised as right.

“Where’d you get your admonition?”

“This one came in a fortune cookie! It was crazy. We went out to dinner, and I took one of the cookies off the little tray at the end, and there were
three
slips of paper in it, with all this tiny writing. I can’t understand how it happens. I mean, what if my brother had picked up that cookie?”

“Where’s the rest of the admonition?”

“I can’t show you that,” Mariette said. “But Skip is number seventeen on the football team.”

“I didn’t know his number. What about the basketball team?”

“No, no one has that number on the basketball team. Or the soccer team. I don’t know if he’s Unkind, but just be careful around him, okay?”

“It is weird that you would say that. I was going to tell you I’ve seen him around almost every time a girl has been injured.”

“Really?”

“He was there in the parking lot when Elsie got stung, and he was there in the hallway when Tillie passed out. He was there when Lacie had the seizure.” Celia hesitated. “But he wasn’t in the chem lab when the beaker blew up. Maybe it isn’t a pattern. And it’s not like I’ve witnessed
all
the injuries.”

“Still, it’s very interesting if he’s been around for most of them. He might have been close by for the others and you just didn’t see him,” Mariette said. “I think we have to treat him as our strongest suspect.”

“But what do we do? Are we supposed to catch him doing something? How do we prove he’s the Unkind?”

“I don’t know. We have to think very hard about this. Anything could be a clue.” Mariette ran off to her homeroom, and Celia wondered if there was anything she could do, really. Then again, she had seen Mariette do things no one else had noticed. Perhaps if Celia watched Skip she might notice him doing things, too.

ONLY TWO WEEKS REMAINED
in the semester, and the next-to-last girl on the birthday list before the holiday recess got scalded when a pipe broke. Celia saw the concern in her friends’ eyes—not for the burned girl, but for Celia. The Rosary kept their promise not to bring it up, but the curse had draped its malaise over the whole school, making it both ominous and stagnant, like a room that has been shut up too long.

“Is that what I think it is?” Celia asked Regine in the library.

“The birthday list?” Regine showed it to her. “I’m surprised you don’t have a copy.”

“It just seems so, I don’t know,
callous
.”

“Yeah, probably.” Regine crossed the scalded girl’s name off the list. “Well, this is interesting. You know who’s next? Skip’s sister, Stella.” Regine pointed to the girl’s name. “The second-to-last day of school before the break.”

“Stella is Skip’s sister? I had no idea. She’s in my English class.”

“She is. Oh, there’s Ivo. He’s helping me with my Chem Two midterm. I have to get an A on it to get a B for the class, and I never thought I would get a B in a class, much less a C.” Regine left Celia with the list and shifted over to the next table, where Ivo was settling in. Celia watched as Regine pulled her chair in close to Ivo’s and Ivo eased his chair farther away from her.

Celia returned to the list and found her name, and then Mariette’s after that. She returned to Skip’s sister’s name and got excited.

She waited impatiently for chemistry class, and as soon as Mr. Sumeletso turned the experiment over to them, she told Mariette, “I think I know how we can find out about Skip.”

“Really?”

“Did you know Stella Miller is Skip’s sister?”

“She is? I never thought about it. Miller is a pretty common last name.”

“Well, she is, and her birthday is next week, the next-to-last day of school before the break.”

Mariette’s eyes opened wider. “If Skip is the Unkind one behind this, he wouldn’t try to kill his sister, would he?” Doubt crept into her face. “Do you think she’s had sex? If she has, it wouldn’t make a difference.”

“I don’t know. Stella is pretty quiet, and she’s not nearly as social or popular as her older brother. I’ve never heard about her dating anyone at school.”

“So it’s pretty likely she hasn’t lost her virginity, and she’s vulnerable to the curse! That means if nothing happens to her, we can be pretty sure it’s because Skip spared her.”

Now it was Celia’s turn to doubt. “Would it be conclusive? We might be wrong. She might have slept with someone outside of school and no one knows about it. Or she might figure out how to avoid the curse some other way.” Celia had regretted drawing the Rosary’s attention to Mariette, and she wondered if she should have learned a lesson about making accusations lightly. Or did the possibility of someone’s getting killed take precedence over that?

“You’re right, but if Skip’s our best suspect, we have to pay attention to this, even if it’s only circumstantial. Should we try to make friends with her, see if she’ll tell us whether she’s had sex?”

“That sounds horrible. ‘Hi, I know we’ve never talked before now, but we we’re just curious: have you had sex?’” Celia shook her head.

“Yeah. We may have to ask her afterward, though, if she isn’t hurt.”

THE NEXT DAY ONLY IVO
and Liz had lunch at the same time as Celia. With Liz still out with the flu, Celia was uneasy about eating alone with Ivo. She hadn't connected with him very much, and she wanted to ask him why he was suffering Regine's advances but not reciprocating, but that didn't seem like a wise topic. She decided to be optimistic and hope maybe this would be her opportunity to make some inroads with him.

“Are you excited about college?” she asked him at lunch.