Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (9 page)

In my
sleep that night, I dreamed that I fell all the way to the bottom of the Gap and struck the earth hard. The jolt woke me, and my heart pounded in my chest as I sat up. That was what should have happened, crashing and dying on the ground, yet I was here in my bed. The tree groaned outside my window despite there being no wind. Branches scratched furiously along the walls as something beat onto the roof like a drum. It was a singular beat and then everything was still.

I should be dead.
Right this minute, I should be cold on a table at the morgue. My devastated parents should have been flying back to California, with arrangements made to send my body to Bellangame. There should have been a hole being dug at the cemetery, a heap of fresh earth growing beside it. Yet I breathed, in and out in this bed, twenty-four hours after being run off a cliff.

Mysteriously,
I was alive. Something glinted from moonlight in the tree, and I rose in curiosity. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid, not when technically I should be dead. Opening the window, I reached out to the glinting object caught in the branches.

It was a feather over a foot long.
I turned on the light, which glinted off the points of gold at the tip of every white barb. That was such a harsh word for these downy filaments in my fingers. They trembled at a breeze coming through the window, which I closed with a shiver. Some bird must have been perched on the branch just outside, but I couldn’t imagine what species had feathers like this.

I
couldn’t throw out such a pretty thing, so I stuck it into the pencil holder on my desk. Turning off the light and getting back in bed, I lay awake and watched the golden points glint. Then I closed my eyes and tried to force my mind to recall what happened when I spun over the side. The van had clipped the scooter and I’d been spinning so crazily . . . tipping and shooting over the cliff . . .

. .
. music . . .

Dawn had barely touched Spooner when I drove away from the house in the mail truck
after leaving a note for Grandpa Jack that I’d be back soon. If this went as planned, I’d return before he even woke up. I just had to see where I went over with the scooter. That might jolt my memory about what happened afterwards.

It was far too early for anyone to be on the streets and I drove down deserted Jacobo without seeing a soul.
This time I didn’t miss the turn onto Sutter. The truck bounced up and down with the potholes as it wound around the curving road. I didn’t know where exactly it was that I’d gone over the edge, so I watched carefully for a clue.

Around another two turns and it was
screamingly obvious with the skid marks. There were even shards of brown glass from the thrown bottle still on the road. Doubling back to the last rest area, I pulled over and parked. It would have been smart to bring a jacket, but I’d gotten up with a single purpose in mind. Rubbing my hands over my arms for warmth, I hurried along the road. There was no traffic going in either direction.

The bottle struck down . . . I swerved to avoid it just as the van yanked back into the lane . . . it had happened too quickly.
The blow, the tipping, the spinning . . . I followed the skid marks and tried to recreate the accident. It felt like I’d spun a dozen times, but that part had happened only in my head. The road wasn’t wide enough, and the marks showed I’d spun only once.

The black marks went to the edge of the road and over.
Hesitantly, I looked down. The angle was about seventy degrees. Treetops were far below, and no scrub grew on that sharp drop down to them.

There was nothing for me to have caught, and nothing there to have caught me.
The drop was rock and dirt, nothing more. Even if I’d snagged one of those rocks jutting out, I couldn’t figure out how I would have hauled myself back up. They were widely spaced, and it had been dark. And I’d been going forty miles an hour over the side, which would have shot me out farther from the edge.

I
inhaled, thinking this life of mine was over. That was a death drop beneath me, a hundred feet down to the treetops, and perhaps another hundred feet through them to the hard forest floor. People didn’t survive falls like that. But here I was, cold and shivering on the road instead of cold and still in a coffin. I went back to the broken glass and walked the skid marks a second time. I had no explanation.

Could this be heaven?
Maybe it was, me believing that I’d survived when in truth I hadn’t. If heaven was Spooner, California, I was going to be mightily disappointed. I walked back to the mail truck and drove home, pinching myself at the red lights on Jacobo since dead people shouldn’t feel pain. It hurt.

Someone should have seen a bloody girl
walking that distance! With everyone rushing to the road to look, they would have passed me staggering home. I parked the mail truck in the driveway and went inside, my brain circling on this. I could have gone some other way, yet with Spooner streets the way they were, I doubted that I would have found my way to the house. Grandpa Jack was still asleep, so I threw away the note and fixed some breakfast.

The
day was full of visitors. Very few of them came without a plastic-wrapped plate of food or a bowl of soup. I sat on the love seat under a blanket as the living room filled with more flowers and balloons. The coffee table was covered in plates of cookies and brownies. A cop dropped by with questions about the specifics of the van, but I didn’t have much to tell her. It was dark and had happened too fast; I hadn’t gotten a glimpse of the license plate or seen a bumper sticker. The destroyed scooter was being examined for evidence.

“Starting to look like a florist shop in here,” Grandpa Jack mumbled.
Even the cop had brought a little bouquet from the station.

Nash
arrived at lunch and stayed for hours, sitting on Grandpa Jack’s recliner and greeting everybody like it was his place. I smiled and talked, but really just wanted him to go. Fortunately, Kitts came to visit and redirected some of his attention. Someone knocked in the late afternoon, Nash rushing to get it and turning back with a gorgeous bouquet of orchids in a pink vase. The flowers were pink and white and magenta, and absolutely stunning. Plucking out the card, he started to open it. I motioned for the card with some irritation and said, “May I?”

“It
is
hers,” Kitts said with equal annoyance.

“Ah!
From the Graystones,” Nash said obliviously, passing me the opened card. I took it in aggravation and read the message. That was all it said,
to Jessa, from the Graystones
in elegant script.

“These aren’t from the flor
ist,” Kitts said about the orchids. She looked at the back of the card when I set it on the table. “Wow, they came from Yunner’s.”

“Is that good?” I asked.

“They beat Spooner’s Flower Power hands down! Yunner’s is in Quilling. That’s a little south of here.” Checking over the flowers with an expert eye, she said, “No defects. These are beautiful. My boss tries to sell orchids in pots for home growers, but she can’t even grow them herself. She overwaters something fierce.”

In the evening
, I pleaded exhaustion. Kitts got the message and quit the scene. Stuffing a cookie into his mouth, Nash said, “Hey, do you think next Friday you’d like to go to the movies rather than swan dive off a cliff?”

“That would be great,” I said, “a big group of us!”

He flushed. “I kind of meant . . .”

I knew what he
kind of meant, and I was thoroughly uninterested. Getting up to head for my room, I said, “We’ll have a lot of fun.” Hopefully Nash wasn’t going to be one of those guys who pestered at a girl like a gnat until she gave in and said yes. He was cute enough, or he would be with a haircut, but he just wasn’t my type. Even without the belching introduction, I wouldn’t be interested in him.

God, had it only been a week since I came to Spooner?
It felt like an eternity as I walked to my locker the next morning. Progress was slow since everyone wanted to stop and chat about the accident. Riding off a cliff was one way to become popular. Even teachers stepped out of their classrooms to say hello and check me over. At the door to first period, Mr. Rogers shook my hand with his other hand clasped over the back of mine.
Swine flu
. It was just a matter of time.

Everyone rushed to open doors and Nash tried to carry my backpack.
At lunch I went to the nurse’s office to take off my jeans and tend my road rash in privacy. The dressings had bunched up uncomfortably over the morning. Beneath them, the skin was pink and angry down the outer side of my left leg. It wasn’t oozing much, but the doctor wanted me to keep it covered in gauze for a week. Redoing the dressings, I asked the nurse for an icepack. Then I leaned on the wall and ate my lunch in solitude with the icepack pressing to my leg.

Tired of people, I pleaded pain to get out of fifth period.
But there was nothing to do without a cell phone. By the time the next bell rang, I was returning the icepack and going out the door. Even shaking Mr. Rogers’ hand was better than staring at the white walls of the nurse’s office.

Adriel arrived at class seconds after me and walked wearily down the aisle to our back table.
He looked frighteningly tired, like he’d gotten no sleep over the weekend. There were gray rings beneath his sunken eyes and the pallor of his skin made him appear ill. All of the color was in the blue of his eyes and the threads of gold woven through his dark blond hair. As he sat, I asked, “Are you feeling all right?”

He s
aid politely, “I want to say bad weekend, but yours was worse.”

“Hey, I’m here,” I said.
“You should go home.”

“I’ll be okay.”
Turning away, he unloaded the binder from his backpack.

Frustrated at how he ran hot and cold, I said, “Look, could we start over?
I’m Jessa Bright. I don’t know what you don’t like about Zakia. He’s just a friend of mine. If this is going to be a really long semester of uncomfortable silences and you disliking me, I’ll go ahead and switch seats with someone. Let me know.”

Students came in slowly, since Mr. Rogers was running an errand to the office to make copies.
Adriel’s hands stilled on his binder, and he closed his eyes briefly. Then he turned and smiled, sweeping me away with its sweetness. “Hi, I’m Adriel Graystone. I don’t mean to dictate your friends, and I know what century it is. You just shouldn’t trust too easily. People aren’t always what they seem.”

“
I don’t trust too easily,” I said. “But Zakia is just a homeschooled boy who lives in the Gap.”

“That’s what you’re allowed to see.
I won’t say any more about it, and I don’t want you to switch seats. I don’t dislike you at all. You just . . . you remind me of someone I lost a long time ago.”

Intrigued, I said, “Who?”

“Just a girl. She had eyes like yours, a really vivid russet. Did you like your orchids?”

“I love them,” I said, embarrassed that I hadn’t started off our conversation with
thanking him for those.

Students flowed back and forth between the buildings, Nash appearing among them to wave enthusiastically through the window at me.
I hid my grimace and Adriel smiled with his eerie ability to sense how I was feeling. “You’re not into him.”

“No.”
I wanted to know more about this girl that he had lost, but it was rude to ask when he hadn’t offered more information. It was clearly very private and painful to him. “How is your brother?”

“He’s going to run soon.
I can feel it coming. Maybe Wednesday or Thursday. So I’m getting the bags ready for the drop points-”

“The what?” I asked. The
bell rang. The teacher still wasn’t back, so everyone in the room just kept on talking.

“He typically runs north and hangs out in the woods.
You can’t catch him until he’s ready, but I hike up there and leave bright red backpacks with supplies in some of his favorite places. Food, water, socks, a blanket, those kinds of things.”

It was incredible that this was allowed to go on as a regular part of their lives.
“Is there really nothing you can do to stop him?”

“No.
This is who he is, and right now we’re in his bad season.”

“But . . . don’t you worry that he’s going to start a forest fire
or something?”

“He would never
do that.” Adriel spoke with total certainty, leaving me no choice but to believe him. Mr. Rogers walked in with a stack of short stories and class began. The stories were handed out for us to read and answer the questions at the end, which took up the whole period. When class ended, Adriel said goodbye in a friendly tone and stayed after to give the teacher some of his missing work from last week’s absences.

I passed
Zakia on the way out of school, with the words
people aren’t always what they seem
ringing in my ears. No one else disliked him. In fact, he wasn’t even a student at this school and still managed to be pretty popular. Guys were hanging out to chat while he worked outside the office, filling a planter with the trenching shovel while the janitor hogged the good one to do the same across the concrete.