Harbinger (5 page)

Another wave rushed toward her, and unflinching, she let it engulf her. Her song cut out and I shook off my terror, springing into action. I dove into the water and raced after Faye. Groping for her in the dark waves. Pushing my way through ropes of seaweed and clouds of sand, till my hands found her tiny body. I clutched her to me, our wet clothes dragging as I fought my way back to the beach.

Footsteps pounded across the sand and my parents, disheveled and dirty, ran toward us, shouting. Faye struggled in my grip and cried for her mom and dad. She yanked her hand out of mine.

And the connection was severed. I was me and not Dr. Mordoch. The sea disappeared and the harsh morning sun returned. I was back in the room, staring up at Dr. Mordoch, yanking my own hand out of hers.
What was that?

Dr. Mordoch also looked shocked, and for a second, I thought she’d seen the vision too.

But she just looked down at her empty hand and repeated to herself, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Then she turned and walked out.

“No!” I started toward her. But I slammed into the closing door.

With the darkness, the vision came back and with it, the blue-black sea. Swirling around me, tugging at my feet.

“Help!” My fingernails scraped against the crack in the door, trying again to claw my way out. “Somebody! Please.”

“It’s time,”
the waves whispered. They dashed against me, pulling me under. Pounding at me like drums.

I wanted out of this place. Out of this room. Out of the fences. Out of my mind.

But the rhythm rang out louder and louder, eddying around me in that same insistent song. Until I was chanting along.

“Now you. It’s time. For you.”

One last thought surfaced through the panic.
Maybe they’re right to leave me here.
Maybe I needed to be locked up in a place like this, surrounded by barbed wire and security guards and rooms with bolts on the outside.

Maybe I am crazy.

6

KNOCK, KNOCK.

The noise sifted down through my terror, cutting across my whimpering.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there? So crazy. So crazy who? So crazy. So crazy who? So crazy So crazy So crazy.

Knock, knock. There it was again. Someone knocking on the wall.

Blinking in the thick darkness, the ocean waves threatened to crash over me again. I tried to sit up, but my body seemed locked in its position, curled tightly against the wall. A terrible animal sound came from somewhere, and I realized it was me.

I reached out my hand to answer back, then stopped. It could be a trick. Some test to see if I was behaving. But if it was, it was a stupid one. I knocked back.

My knock was returned, this time a little ways down the wall from me. I succeeded in sitting up, ungluing my sweaty legs from each other. A sharp twinge from my stiff knees cleared the fog from my mind. I followed the noise and knocked back. The next time was a few feet farther, moving away from the door.

It was a pointless game. But, the Marco-Polo back and forth was slowly returning me to myself. I followed the knocking down the wall, finally army-crawling under the platform at the end of the tiny room. The solid cement floor pressing against my skin made me calmer somehow, and some of my fear evaporated.

I knocked again, right near the floor, and my knuckles grazed a rough spot. It was too dark to see, but I traced the area with my fingers. There was a small knothole in the wood.

“Mayday. Mayday.” A muffled voice drifted through the hole. A guy’s voice. “Can anyone hear me?”

It was like someone turning on a night-light. Just to hear another voice in the crushing darkness. I nodded, then remembered that whoever he was couldn’t see me, and tried out my voice.

“Yeah?” The darkness weighed heavy against me while I waited for an answer.

“You okay? Are you hurt in there?”

My face flamed, thinking about the horrible mewing sound I’d been making.

“No.” My throat was raw from shouting or singing or whatever that’d been.

“No you’re not okay or no you’re not hurt?” There was real concern in the muted words, and I closed my eyes, grabbing on to it.
I am not alone.

“No, I’m not hurt.”
Okay is another matter entirely.

“Oh. Good . . .”

Then the room fell quiet again and I could hear him breathing through the knothole. Even with the wall, the physical closeness was comforting in a way I wasn’t used to. My breath fell into rhythm with his and I laid my cheek against the cool floor. The warm scent of ginger on his breath mixed with the chalky concrete.

“I feel like a dog in a cage. In hell.” His low whisper was raw, and tinged with panic. “And there’s no way out . . . The walls, the door, everything’s solid. Just this friggin’ hole. God, it’s way too hot for September.”

I belly-crawled, inching closer to the hole, craving this new connection that kept away the dark and the waves. His voice sounded a little clearer.

“By the way, I’m Kel.”

My name jammed in my throat like an insidious glob of peanut butter. I swallowed, easing my sore throat. “Faye.”

“What’re you in for?” Kel’s tone was forced, trying to make a joke.

At Holbrook? In Solitary?
I didn’t even know where to start. Silence welled up around us, pressing in with the darkness.

“Sorry. Too personal. I’m just a little flipped.” He sounded as overwhelmed as I felt. “Yesterday, everything was normal. Then two guys bust into my room in the middle of the night and order me out of bed. I was about to scream bloody murder when my stepmom popped her head in and told me to brush my teeth. ’Cause, of course, dental hygiene is super-important when you’re being kidnapped.”

A smile tugged at my lips, but then it fell off when I remembered that my own mom hadn’t even been home when Dad and I left for Holbrook. No hug. No kiss. Not even a wave good-bye.

“And you know what my dad said?” The humor disappeared from his voice, and I could almost taste the bitterness in his words. I shook my head, forgetting again that he couldn’t see me. But it didn’t matter, Kel kept talking, his voice dropping into a gruff imitation. “He said, ‘Son, we’re only doing this because we love you so much
.
’ Bullshit. I mean, love may come in many forms, but kidnapping isn’t one of them.”

Lying isn’t one either.
I thought about my dad pulling that suitcase out of the trunk, and it stung all over again.

We sat there, both lost in our own betrayals. Kel’s story was totally different from mine, but it was like looking at a blurry reflection of my own life. I rested my hand against the wall between us. The wood seemed to vibrate under my fingers.

The boards creaked slightly as Kel shifted around on the other side of the wall, humming to himself. Was he waiting for me to say something? I wanted to. But I didn’t trust my voice. Or myself. As it was, it was hard enough to breathe in all this blackness.

Kel’s hum died out. “You still there?”

“Yeah?” My answer came out like a question.

“Mind if I keep talking? This sounds crazy, but I feel like the dark is strangling me.”

Sucking out all the air.

“It’s like this at night sometimes. With all that smog blanking out the stars. But talking helps.”

Then keep talking.

“Though I guess you could be some sort of spy over there, waiting for me to spill my guts. You’re probably infiltrating the student ranks, a tiny tape recorder in one hand and fake psychosis in the other. But I’m too tired to care.”

Pause.

He cleared his throat. “The thing is, last night? I wasn’t really surprised when it happened.”

I was.
But I should’ve seen it coming. My parents had turned their backs on me years ago, I just never realized it.

“I mean, some of the other kids in the van were. You could hear them yelling as the guards dragged them out of their houses. And some of them looked stunned, tears streaming down their faces while they got handcuffed to the van seats. But I just kept thinking, ‘Of course.’

“It’s just that Dad and I
never
got along. Even when I was little, before the war, we always moved around for his job and he was never home . . .”

I let Kel’s stream of words anchor me. My whole life, people had glanced at me and turned away. Whatever they saw in my eyes was enough to frighten them off. But with the wall, everything was different. Every word Kel spoke seemed to cinch us closer and closer together.

“I guess he never really got me, you know? I’m not sure anyone did, except Mom. And then . . . well . . .” Kel’s voice went quiet. “She died. Cancer.”

I pressed my hand into the wall. “I’m sorry.”

Kel’s faint humming filled the dark again, a melancholy song that wrapped around me like a blanket. I breathed it in along with Kel’s spicy scent.

Kel stopped mid-hum, as if embarrassed about a bad habit, and picked up the conversation again.

“Thanks. It’s okay. Well, it’s not. But that’s what we’re supposed to say, right?” His words tumbled out in a rush. “After Mom died, the whole world went to shit. Then I got sick too, and, well, maybe Dad just couldn’t do any more hospitals or doctors.”

Then Kel’s voice went hard and scary. “Like I could?” And a sudden blow struck the wall between us.

I jerked in alarm, crashing my head into the platform I was lying under.

“Shit!” Our voices chorused in the darkness. A bark of laughter came from the other side. Or was it anger?

“Sorry,” we both said. And he laughed again. A real one, this time.

“Wow.” The anger was gone from Kel’s voice. “That really hurt my hand. What’s that they say about an irresistible force meeting an immovable object?”

I rubbed the sore spot on my head. “Maybe you’re not as irresistible as you thought.”

“Ouch, that stings worse than my fist.”

It was like learning a new language, this back and forth. Kel’s voice was sad and rough and funny all at the same time, and it made me want to tell him things. Things that had been chasing their tails around and around inside of me for as long as I could remember. But it wasn’t something I’d ever done before. I wasn’t even sure I knew how.

The scrape and shush of Kel settling on the other side of the wall filled the quiet, and I held my breath. Waiting for him to speak.

But instead he started humming to himself again. The closeness was intoxicating, even with the wall. Or rather, because of it. I knew only too well what would happen if it wasn’t there. He’d stay away like everyone else.

Still, I ached for it to be real. So I took a deep breath and started talking.

“My dad told me we were just looking around.” I blurted it out and rolled right into the next sentence, afraid to stop now that I’d started. “Then he dumped me here. And my mom didn’t even bother coming to say good-bye.”

“Did they say why?” The question hovered between us. Kel was looking for his own answers. But I could only give him mine.

“I’m different.”

“Everyone is,” he interrupted.

He thought I meant cheerleader versus art nerd kind of different. Not letter jacket versus straitjacket.

“No, I’m—” I’d never tried to explain before. Not to my parents, not to counselors, definitely not to other kids.

This must be what confession is like
.

“I see things sometimes. Stuff other people don’t see.”

A heavy silence filled the tiny room, choking me.
I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

“Like you imagine things?” he asked warily.

“No. Not imagining.”

How can I expect him to understand when I don’t?

But he was still listening, and that in itself was something. “One day at school, last spring, I was standing by my locker. Everyone was laughing and shouting and elbowing each other. They were swarming through the hallway like rats, and suddenly, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to get out of there.”

I felt the same anxiety now, just talking about that day. The same need to breathe fresh air. To see the sky. That morning, I’d bolted for the nearest stairway, my sandals smacking up the steps all the way to the roof, the door slamming shut behind me.

It’d just rained, purging nearby Pittsburgh of its perpetual film of smoke and soot. Leaving us with one of those shimmering days that had been getting rarer and rarer.

“Up on the roof, the sky was so clear that I could pick out the glare of beat-up solar arrays on the other side of the Monongahela River. The river was all yellow foam and mud, but all I wanted to do was follow it somewhere else.”

Kel started singing the same tune he’d been humming, the words carrying softly through the wall. “I wish I had a river . . . I could skate away on. I wish I had a river so long . . .”

The song tremored through me and I was lost in my memory. The dying river. The dirty city laid out in front of me. It wasn’t just that I’d wanted to get away from there. I’d searched the blue horizon, looking for something. Hungry for something I didn’t even understand.

“What happened?” His voice came through the hole and latched on to me again. Tethering me to the now.

“It was the first warm day we’d had, and I splashed through puddles up on the roof. I remember thinking how good the water felt on my toes.”

I also remembered thinking that it smelled like the ocean, even though I wasn’t sure how I could know what the ocean smelled like. And I heard the steady rhythm of the waves.

“Then, somehow, there was water everywhere, pouring in around me. I screamed and—”

The fear of that first vision was still with me. I hadn’t slept in days. All week I’d been avoiding the dreams, but up there on the roof, I could feel them waiting for me. I still didn’t know what the trigger was—the airless hallways or splashing through that puddle or how tired I was—but the indigo waves came, vivid and dangerous. Pulling me into a waking nightmare.

Just like today, I’d gasped for breath, drowning under the weight of all that water. Then a hand had grabbed my arm. The water disappeared and a fireman hauled me over his shoulder and lugged me down a ladder. The whole school was out there by then, along with the fire trucks and flashing lights, catching it all with their cell phones. I instantly went from being an invisible freak to a celebrity freak. And it wasn’t a good change.

“After the fire truck showed up and they’d dragged me down, people just kept asking me, over and over, ‘Why do you want to kill yourself?’ And over and over, I told them that I’d just wanted to find somewhere quiet, where I could hear myself. But no one would listen.”

Another Holbrook Academy brochure had showed up that same day. I remembered staring at it in a stack of mail on the counter, mixed in with the phone bill and our ration receipts, while Mom and Dad asked the same questions again and again. My parents latched on to that brochure like it was a godsend. I should’ve known then that my refusal wasn’t going to stop them.

“A couple of years ago, Dad and I stopped talking and I took off for a while.” Kel’s words had an edge to them, and I guessed there was a lot more to the story than he was telling.