Circle of Secrets (8 page)

Mirage is out the door and gone before I can hardly turn around. After a year, she’s perfected her talent at leaving. A mix of mad and sad tangles up inside my chest. I never knew homesickness was a real disease before. It’s like a stick is stabbing at my heart, although I suppose a stick jabbing at your heart isn’t a disease, more like a terminal condition.

The woman in the pantsuit stops in front of me. “New student?” she asks Mrs. Benoit.

“Mrs. Trahan, this is Shelby Jayne Allemond,” the secretary says. “Daughter of Mirage Allemond.”

The woman’s eyebrows lift so high on her forehead, they’re lost in a poof of teased curls and hairspray. She extends her hand for me to shake, which makes me feel like I’m here for a job interview. “I’m Maureen Trahan, the principal. So you’re the
traiteur’s
daughter.”

I feel a little ping of surprise. “You know Mirage — I mean — my —?”

Mrs. Trahan searches my face. “You look just like her. All
that dark curly hair and those big brown eyes. She and I went to high school together.”

“Really?” All I can do is stare at her and blink. Mrs. Trahan seems normal. Mirage used to have normal people friends. ’Course, I knew that already. At least I knew that a year ago, but not anymore. Everything is so different, so strange now, Mirage most of all.

“It’s a small town and everyone knows everybody else, Shelby. She’s a wonderful
traiteur.
With your
grand-mère
passed on, we really need her. She’s helped a lot of folks lately, ’specially the Mouton family down the bayou.”

I’m so surprised I can’t think straight.

After I leave the office and follow the map to my classroom, I wonder about the principal in her regular pantsuit and hair fixed real nice knowing Mirage and talking about her like she’s any other normal town citizen.

I can’t think about all that anymore because Mrs. Daigle’s room looms in front of me.

I hate walking into a new class by myself.

I gear up my nerve and take lots of little breaths and right then the door swings open and almost smacks me in the face. A boy with a round face and streaked blond hair darts out. “Sorry!” he calls back at me as he runs down the hall.

I grab the door before it closes and every student looks up from their desk as I cross the threshold. My stomach cartwheels. Sweat breaks out on my palms.

Everyone stops working and I can hear a buzz of murmurs. The teacher, a woman with dyed red hair and glasses perched on the lower half of her nose, puts down her grade book and walks over to reach for my paperwork. “You’re Shelby Allemond then?”

A fresh burst of whispers breaks out behind me and Mrs. Daigle cocks her head at the class. “You should be writing, class, not talking.”

The room goes quiet as Mrs. Daigle retrieves a textbook from a metal cabinet and points to an empty chair in the middle of the room. “That will be your seat. We’re writing our first essay. Something unusual you did over the summer. Write at least a page by the end of the hour. We’ll share our stories tomorrow.”

My sneakers keep squeaking as I make my way to my assigned desk. I cringe, slipping off my backpack where it thuds loudly to the floor.

No sooner have I taken out a notebook and a pencil than the boy who almost knocked me over whooshes back into the classroom like he’s been sprinting the whole way. He grins around at everybody, then takes his seat in the far row.

The girl behind me taps me on the shoulder. Her breath is in my ear, and I see a flash of long brown hair and baby-blue eyes from the corner of my vision.

“That boy there is Jett Dupuis,” she tells me.

“Oh.”

“Jett’s Bayou Bridge’s school track star. He bumps into everybody, so don’t take it personally. He can’t do nothing slow. He’s also the cutest boy in the whole sixth grade.”

“That’s nice.” As if I’ll be here long enough to care. “Where was he going?”

“Forgot his lunch and his mom brought it to the office. He probably burns a thousand calories a day with all that running so he eats constantly. I mean,
constantly.
You’ll be amazed.”

I can’t help smiling at the way she talks but any second now Mrs. Daigle is going to yell at us.

The girl switches sides and attacks my other ear. I swear she’s as good as a ventriloquist because her lips barely move. “Jest in case you get any ideas, Tara has already claimed him, so stay away.”

Oh, so this was a warning message, I realize, and my stomach sinks just a little. “Who’s Tara?”

“Only the prettiest girl in sixth grade. And the daughter of the president of Bayou Bridge Garden Club. And my best friend.”

“Oh.” I’m not sure what to say so I whisper, “Congratulations.”

She snickers and taps me again. “Me, I’m Alyson.”

“Twenty minutes,” Mrs. Daigle says. “When you’re finished, drop your essays in the basket and do silent reading for the remainder of the period.”

“I gotta get started,” I tell Alyson, not wanting her to quit talking to me because I like that someone has noticed me. Maybe this tiny little school won’t be so bad if all the girls are this friendly.

“Um, Shelby. Take this.” Alyson rummages in her pack and hands me a tissue. “You’ve got black drips under your eyes.”

“What is it?” I hiss.

“Just a moldy leaf or something streaked down your cheek. Spit on that and wipe,” she advises.

I rub at my face, feeling heat shoot up my neck, knowing everyone saw me walk in like that.

I do a quick glance across the room. Jett Dupuis isn’t even out of breath. I catch a flicker of his smile toward a girl sitting across the classroom from me on the far row.

She gives him a slow smile, and then bends over her paper again. Silky dark hair spills like a waterfall over the edge of her desk. She looks like a girl in a shampoo commercial.

Jett taps his pencil as he stares off into space, his right knee shaking up and down a hundred miles an hour as if he’s about to explode out of his chair.

The girl with the waterfall hair finishes writing, puts down her pencil, and rises from her chair. She places her essay in the basket on the teacher’s desk and glides back to her seat.

My eyes zero in on the girl sitting behind Pantene Princess. Pantene Princess acts as if the girl, who isn’t even a foot away, doesn’t exist. Like she’s invisible.

I can’t help stealing a second look, shocked at the bad scar on the side of the invisible girl’s face. Looks like she had a mess of stitches. Her cheek sort of sinks in right there, too. The girl frowns at her essay, then rubs her eraser across the page over and over again.

I turn sideways and whisper, “Who’s that girl?”

“What girl?” Alyson asks.

“The one behind Pantene Princess.”

Alyson giggles. “Pantene Princess! Oh, you mean Tara. That’s pretty funny.”

Alyson said Tara is the prettiest girl in sixth grade. I guess it’s true because she is the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my life.

“So who’s the girl behind Tara? She must have been in a terrible accident.”

Alyson frowns at her paper. “Don’t know. Just some girl.”

“She’s sitting right behind your own best friend!”

Alyson’s eyes flick away as we head into social studies and Mrs. Daigle starts passing out books, enlisting the help of Jett and Tara. “Can’t remember. She was new last year.”

The next moment, Tara stands in front of me and drops a thick textbook on my desk. Her eyes are so green I swear she received a set of emeralds at birth.

“World studies. We’re gonna be learning about Egypt and Rome and China.” She’s so cool and elegant. Like she’s already grown-up or something.

“World History through the Ages,”
I say, reading the book’s title.

Alyson turns around in her seat, jumping into the conversation. “This is Shelby, Tara. And, Shelby, this here is Tara, like I told you a minute ago.”

“Where you from, Shelby?” Tara asks.

“New Iberia.”

Her green eyes narrow at me, like she’s already figured me out. “Thought you were some city girl. Why you here?”

I’m surprised at the way she says it, as though I’m not supposed to be here. As though she needs to give me permission first.

Tara gives her head a little shake. “I mean, where do you live?”

“Uh, sort of near the swamp.”

“Near the swamp, huh? Near or in?”

A bell rings and my stomach gives a little jump. “What’s that?”

“Morning recess,” Alyson says, jumping up to get in the front of the line at the door.

Tara puts a hand on Alyson’s arm. “When the end of recess bell rings, we gotta come right back to the classroom. You’re bad about that and I don’t want detention.”

Alyson makes a funny face. “You’ve never had detention in your life, Tara Doucet.”

“That’s right. And I intend to keep it that way.”

The class stampedes out the door and I slowly follow, wondering what I’ll do during my first recess here. Don’t know if they play games or have a jungle gym or tetherball or hopscotch.

I barely take two steps into the hallway when suddenly, standing right in front of me, is the scarred girl from my class. Goose bumps prickle along my arms. I wish I could stop staring at her face, but I can’t. Her skin is red and crinkled around the scar. Looks awful, like it hurts bad.

“You should stay away from them,” she tells me, her voice dropping. She moves closer and her arms are so skinny, I wonder if she’s eaten in a week.

“What are you talking about?”

“You heard me.”

Her hair is brown and thin and floats in a spray around her head. The sides are held down with a row of plain black clips. Which remind me of someone, but I can’t remember who it is.

“Stay away from who?”

“Alyson Granger and Tara Doucet. Don’t talk to them. Don’t have lunch with them. Pretend they don’t exist.”

I take a gulp. “But why? They seem nice.”

“It’s dangerous, believe me.”

She’s so intense, I get a spidery feeling in my stomach. Then she steps closer. “And whatever you do, don’t go to the cemetery pier with them.”

I take a step backward. “What cemetery pier? Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She glances around as if she’s terrified someone will hear her. She’s also clutching her world history textbook in her arms like she forgot to leave it in the classroom. Maybe she reads it for fun during recess. But I notice that her arms are trembling a little bit so I also feel sorry for her. I don’t know whether to hug her or tell her to get lost.

“It’s this stupid secret the kids in this town have,” she whispers. “But ssh! Bad things happen at that cemetery pier.
If I tell you any more, they’ll make my life miserable. But I had to warn you.”

I feel her fear and my own fear level rises, too, when she talks about bad things and warnings. “What’ll they do? And what’s your name anyway?”

Her eyes go big like I just asked the worst thing in the world. I can’t help wondering why my questions seem to make her so scared.

“I’m not tellin’ you. You’ll tell
them.”

Before I can say another word, she turns and flees, her skinny spider legs stuttering across the floor.

I brush my damp hair out of my eyes. She sure is odd. Or is she right about those other girls? I don’t know what to think. Maybe she’s just jealous of Tara and Alyson, wants them to be her friends, and they ignore her instead. It is a sad but true fact that when it comes to school popularity, the prettiest girls never hang around the plain girls, or girls with unusual characteristics — like strange and ugly scars.

I dig out the school map from my pocket, wondering which is the fastest direction to the playground. Wondering if I just want to go back inside the classroom and read the history book.

Two seconds later, the school fire alarm goes off.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

T
HE FIRE ALARM SEEMS TO GET LOUDER THE LONGER IT GOES
on, seeping into my brain so I can’t think in a straight line. I need to get back to my homeroom, but I stand there in the middle of the corridor covering up my ears and feeling like I’ve just gone stupid.

Classroom doors bang against the walls and the kids who’d made it back to class before recess ended start emerging again in long, snaky lines.

My stomach is seesawing when I realize that I have no class to walk with, no buddy partner. I’m one of those lone fish, swimming in the wrong direction, looking for any familiar face.

Suddenly, someone grabs my arms on either side of me — Alyson and Tara — and my feet start walking with them.

“We won’t let you burn up,” Alyson says with a giggle, and then gasps as someone bumps into her and all three of us almost fall over.

“Hey, watch it,” Tara mutters, holding out her arms so the crowd has to walk around her, like she’s the queen of the corridor.

Maybe she really is.

A teacher blows shrilly into a whistle behind us, and a bunch of boys start yelling up ahead just to hear their voices echo.

“Boys are so silly,” Tara says, sighing like she’s a teacher. “They think they can get away with it because it’s so crowded and nobody will know who’s yelling.”

Me, I just want to get out of the crush. “You mean there really is a fire?”

“Nope, just a drill. Happens every month like an alarm clock.” Tara laughs as she flings her long, silky black hair over her shoulder and gives us a smirk. “Get it? Alarm clock?”

“Oh,” I say, trying to smile back. “Right.”

“Never saw a fire alarm on the very first day of school,” Alyson says. She leans in close. I can smell Tabasco sauce on her breath, like she pours it on her eggs for breakfast. “Hey, after school, our group is going down to the piers along the bayou. We play games and stuff. Want to come?”

The voice of the scarred girl rings in my head. Her warnings about the piers. Almost like she knew this was going to happen.

Finally, we get past the heavy doors and break through the mob.

I can breathe again. Alyson and Tara drop their arms from mine and start whispering together, leaving me out of their conversation. I hear something about Jett and some other boys, but at the moment I’m just glad we don’t have class.