Devilish (7 page)

“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said.

“Yeah.” He shook his head. “I know. People tell me all the time that I’m too serious.”

We settled into a comfortable silence as we waited out the storm. After about fifteen minutes, it slowed down. The deep green of the sky lifted to a more normal gray, then to sunshine. The ground was thick with ice balls, some smashed to pieces, some still perfectly round. I reached down and picked up one that was easily the size of an orange. People were coming out now, coming into the streets that were completely echoing with car alarms. The sunlight reflected off the ice, nearly blinding us all.

“And they say there’s nothing weird happening to the climate,” I said, throwing my ice orange into the ground and smashing it. “Global warming’s a myth.”

“I’ll walk you home,” Owen said.

“I’m fine.”

“Just let me,” he said. “Okay?”

We had to kick our way through the ice at points, but we got back to my house in one piece. My sister was coming up the sidewalk at the same time we were.

“You okay?” she asked. “This storm was the best!”

Then she noticed Owen. And the fact that I was limping. And that he was supporting me.

One thing I’m pretty certain of: My sister, Joan, will probably not end up on the faculty of MIT. The Nobel Committee will not be calling our house to inform us that she had won a prize. But let me tell you what my sister can do like no one else I’ve ever known: She can home in on an awkward situation involving me like an awkward-situation-seeking missile. She can read minds
and see through walls if something weird is happening to me.

“Don’t,” I said.

“What?” she answered.

“I mean it.”

“I’m not!”

She turned to Owen.

“So you are … a guy,” she said.

Owen neither confirmed nor denied. He just blinked at Joan. This conversation was clearly making him nervous.

“I should go,” he said. “Since we’re here. Oh. And here. This is my … e-mail. And phone number. You should call me or something. And can I have yours?”

He produced a pen and a piece of paper. With Joan looking on, I quickly wrote these down.

“Thanks for the help,” I said.

Joan was practically bouncing when he left. She took my bag so that I could hop up the steps to the door. I collapsed onto the sofa and propped up my leg.

“Who’s the boyfriend?” she said. “He had his
arm
around you!”

“The freshman is not my boyfriend.”

“Does that mean you’re going to stop obsessing over Elton?”

“I am not obsessed with Elton. I am not anything.”

“Would you say that you have a neuter charge?” she said, clearly trying to show off. “Like a proton?”

“
Neutral
charge,” I corrected her. “Protons are positive.
Neutrons are neutral. And neuter is what we did to Crick so he wouldn’t hump every spaniel in town.”

Crick, our little Scottie, looked up when he heard his name spoken. He looked like a grumpy old man who’d just been disturbed from reading his newspaper.

“Poor widdle wumpkins!” Joan cooed. “They wook his little noodle! Come here, wumpkins!”

Crick trotted over to Joan merrily, unaware that she had just been casually talking about what had to be one of the most painful and defining moments in his life.

“If you don’t want the number,” she went on, “give it to me. I’ll call him.”

“Forget it,” I said, quickly slipping the paper into one of my books.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Owen—it was more that I didn’t want to get Joan, or anyone else, started on discussions about me or my love life. I had taken a private vow not to even think about that stuff again until I was safely in college.

Thankfully, my father arrived home, and the subject was dropped.

The TV news trucks rolled into town all through the night. They came from Providence, Boston, New York … they shot from the tops of the highest streets, through broken church windows, did close-ups of the chunks that had been knocked out of the concrete river walk wall.

Our neighborhood had taken a pounding. There were holes punched through our neighbor’s car and our shed roof, so we spent the night watching my dad getting bright lights shone in his face while he happily rambled on about velocity and trajectories. (Not that they used any of that stuff in the end. They just said, “Professor Michael Jarvis of Brown University describes the damage to his property.” And my dad said, “The ice came through the shed roof.” And that was it. He was very disappointed.)

I developed an ugly green bruise on my ankle but was otherwise okay. I didn’t reply to an e-mail that arrived late that night that read:

Really good meeting you. Give me a call, okay? Owen

•  •  •

The first thing we noticed when we got to school the next morning was the statue of St. Teresa that stood by the front door looked like she’d just been in a bar fight and lost. She was pockmarked and blistered, and two of the finger-tips at the end of her bashed, outstretched arms had broken off. Eight huge windows at the front of the school had been smashed, and the beveled glass sign above the door was fragmented into a cloudy mess of filaments held together by nothing but luck, on the verge of blowing into a rain of glass shards.

Inside, things were worse. The fire alarm kept going off. A massive power surge had blown out all the lights, and the hail had broken through a pipe. It was very dark. Water fountains and toilets kept turning themselves on, gushing high, spilling onto the floors. The baffled maintenance men rushed along with Sister Anna Thomas, our hale and hearty head of school. Some tapped on walls and dragged buckets, while the others carried long boxes of fluorescent lightbulbs.

As I was struggling with my lock in the dark, there was an announcement that classes were postponed for an hour and that we were to go and wait in the gym. It was obvious that there was no way they’d be able to enforce this, and everyone seemed to know it. For the first time in my memory, orderly St. Teresa’s became a bit of a real free-for-all. It was impossible to really tell who was who, and there was a huge amount of noise as everyone started talking
and randomly screaming when they got splashed and the alarms started going again.

In the chaos, I almost didn’t notice the large figure of Brother Frank hustling through the dark, guiding Sister Charles in my direction.

“Jane,” he said, clasping me by both shoulders and startling me. “Quite a storm, that. Last night, eh?”

He was out of breath, for no apparent reason. It wasn’t like you walked that fast when you were with Sister Charles. Worry also made him more Irish-sounding.

“Yeah. I got trapped on a porch with a guy.”

“A guy, eh? What guy is this, then?”

“Some freshman from Sebastian’s.”

He turned and glanced back at Sister Charles. I could have smacked myself. Everything must seem sexual if you’re a nun or a brother.

“It wasn’t anything,” I added quickly. “We just got stuck walking home. It was pretty bad.”

“Right. No. Grand. Grand. Got home safely, then? Quiet night otherwise?”

He heaved himself against the lockers with a deep puff of breath, as if he liked to have these kinds of casual talks with me every morning. Which he sometimes did, just not in the hall, in the dark, with Sister Charles wobbling next him and the entire school coming down around us.

“Well, yeah. I was, you know, doing homework,” I said.

He seemed to relax now.

“Don’t lie to a man of the cloth, Jane,” he said. “I’ve been in this business too long. As long as you’re safe. As long as you’re safe.”

“Mother Mary was with you,” Sister Charles said sternly, but, to my surprise, with a real sound of relief in her voice. She reached over and put her veiny hand on my arm and gripped it with surprising strength.

“Right,” I said. “Definitely.”

She withdrew and took hold of Brother Frank’s heavy arm, and they continued their slow way through the hall. I managed to get the locker open and was fumbling through it blindly when Allison crept up.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I was just feeling weird.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

An announcement came over the intercom saying that they were giving up the effort. The school was too dark and too wet to stay open, and we were all being directed to go home. Buses were coming. Parents were being called.

“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. Come to my house with me. We’ll feast on leftovers and watch TV until our irises explode!”

Ally hesitated, gripping my locker door for a moment.

“I can’t,” she said. “Maybe later?”

“What do you mean, can’t?” I asked. “It’s not like you had other plans. It’s a free day.”

“I promised I would do something for someone if we closed,” she said, looking down. “I’m really sorry.”

There was almost no use having a day off with no best friend to spend it with. I slammed my locker door in frustration, thinking that for once, I would not be identified because of the dark and could get away with it. And I did. I stormed off, only to meet up with Sister Rose Marie as I flew through the lobby and got flagged for “lack of caution in adverse conditions.”

It’s fair to say that up until this point in our history, Allison had been the most predictable person I’d ever known. When she wasn’t at school, she was at either one of two places: at home and easy to reach or with me and therefore extremely easy to reach. She didn’t go out, except with me. Predictable was good. We were best friends, always together. No secrets. Our lives and schedules were open books.

But after the storm, all of that changed. I had no idea why. For the next week, I only saw Ally in class and maybe a few minutes before or after school. Every night, she had “something” she had to do. A few times she told me that her mom needed her help or her family was going out. If this was true, the Concords were more active than they had been in the entire time I’d known them. And apparently, they were going shopping because on each day, I noticed Ally had something new. One day, a brown leather jacket. The next, a black-and-silver Coach bag. Then came a silver bracelet, followed by a chunky silver choker to match.
Finally, there was a new cell phone that Ally didn’t seem to know how to use. Her slim little bag would start to vibrate in class, and she’d smack it desperately, trying to get it to stop. Who was calling her, I had no idea.

When I tried to ask her where these things had come from, she said her aunt Claire had sent them. This was sort of possible—Allison’s aunt Claire worked for a multinational bank and made a ton of money. But she was also mean and gave famously cheap Christmas presents, like five-dollar gift cards wrapped up in novelty socks, which Ally would dutifully wear.

Then the week was over. The weekend was a silent one. I sat around, bored and miserable. I convinced Joan that Earth actually had a second moon, which we could never see because it was made of glass, but even that didn’t provide much joy. I called Ally, but she never answered, either because she was busy or because she couldn’t figure out how to. So I fell back on my standard activity for when I had too much time on my hands—I wrote a six-page note to Elton, which took me four hours and which I promptly destroyed when I was done.

But I wasn’t totally forgotten because my e-mail in-box was full of notes from my new friend, Owen. They streamed in, relentless and terse:

Hey, it’s Owen. Want to talk?

Haven’t heard from you. Want to hang out?

Doing anything today? Call me?

This alarmed me. This was crazy fresh-guy behavior. When he showed up at our door on Sunday evening, I had Joan send him away. She had to make up a story on the fly, so she told him I was out getting “a really complicated waxing.”

“Why won’t you talk to him?” she asked. “He’s cute.”

“He’s a freshman,” I said, moving the dog and throwing myself onto the sofa. “And he’s stalking me.”

“Yeah, but stalking is kind of cool. My friend Kiera got stalked by this guy Ryan. He used to break into her locker and read all of her e-mail, and one time he took her phone and wrote down all the phone numbers. But then they got together, and they’ve been dating for like a year! Which is kind of creepy but also really romantic.”

I decided not to comment.

“And he’s cute. So cute! He has little vampire eyebrows!”

“Vampire eyebrows?”

“You know how vampires have eyebrows that are pointy like their teeth? It’s, like, the teeth point down, and the eyebrows point up? His teeth aren’t pointy, though. And vampires are always trying to get into your house. They can’t come in unless you ask them….”

She trailed off thoughtfully and jumped when the phone rang. I was wondering why both my sister and my best friend devoted so much thought-time to vampires when the phone landed in my lap.

“No,” I silently mouthed to Joan. “I’m not home.”

“It’s some girl,” she said, waving her hand.

It was Lanalee.

“Get your galoshes on,” she said. “We’re going on a trip!” “Galoshes?” I repeated. I’d only ever heard my gran use that word.

“Whatever. Allison and I’ll be there in ten minutes. Be outside.”

“For what? Allison is with you?”

There was a click.

I’d been used to the steep streets of Providence all my life, but I’d never experienced taking them on with Lanalee Tremone tanking around at about eighty miles an hour in a car the size of a garden shed. The inside was deeply dark and reeked of clove cigarettes and musky rose. Lanalee kept fumbling with the radio, blasting a piano solo that rippled all around the inside of the car.

Allison sat in the front seat with her knees drawn up to her chest. She had cocooned herself in the snow-white pom-pom wrap she was wearing, another recent acquisition. I had the massive backseat all to myself. I couldn’t find the seat belt in the dark, so I kept sliding from door to door on the slick leather seats. I guessed this was the start of Lanalee’s “project.”

“You’re sixteen?” I asked, clawing for the handle on the right side door for support.