Starcrossed (5 page)

around the house. She sat down for a spell, staring out at

the fat, black slick of the ocean beyond the neighbor’s lights.

She hadn’t been up there in a while, but it still gave her a romantic

thrill to think about how women in the olden days would

pine away on their widow’s walks as they searched for the masts of

their husbands’ ships. When she was really young, Helen used to

pretend that her mother would be on one of those ships, coming

back to her after being taken captive by pirates or Captain Ahab or

something just as all-powerful. Helen had spent hours on the widow’s

walk, scanning the horizon for a ship she later realized would

never sail into Nantucket Harbor.

Helen shifted uncomfortably on the wooden floor and then remembered

that she still had her stash up there. For years, her dad

had insisted she was going to fall to her death and forbidden her

from going up to the widow’s walk alone, but no matter how many

times he punished her, she would eventually sneak back up there

to eat granola bars and daydream. After a few months of dealing

with Helen’s uncharacteristic disobedience, Jerry finally caved and

gave her permission, as long as she didn’t lean out over the railing.

He’d even built her a waterproof chest to store things in.

She opened the chest and dug out the sleeping bag she kept in

there, spreading it out along the wood planks of the walk. There

were boats far out on the water, boats she shouldn’t be able to hear

or see from such a distance, but she could. Helen closed her eyes

and allowed herself the pleasure of hearing one little skiff as its

canvas sails flapped and its teak planks creaked, way out on the

gently lapping swells. Alone and unwatched, she could be herself

for a moment and truly let go. When her head finally started to nod

she went down to bed to give sleep another shot.

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She was standing on rocky, hilly terrain, blasted so hard by the

sun that the bone-dry air wriggled and shook in streaks, as if

parts of the sky were melting. The rocks were pale yellow and

sharp, and here and there were angry little bushes, low to the

ground and lousy with thorns. A single twisted tree grew out of

the next slope.

Helen was alone. And then she wasn’t.

Under the stunted tree’s crippled limbs three figures appeared.

They were so slender and small Helen thought at first they must

be little girls, but there was something about the way the muscles

in their gaunt forearms wove around their bones like rope that

made Helen realize that they were also very old. All three of them

had their heads bent, and their faces were completely covered by

sheets of long, matted, black hair. They wore tattered white slips,

and they were covered in gray-white dust down to their lower

legs. From the knees down, their skin grew dark with streaks of

dirt and blackening blood from feet worn raw with wandering in

this barren wilderness.

Helen felt clear, bright fear. She backed away from them compulsively,

cutting her bare feet on the rocks and scratching her

legs on the thorns. The three abominations took a step toward

her, and their shoulders began to shake with silent sobs. Drops of

blood fell from under the skeins of rank hair and ran down the

fronts of their dresses. They whispered names while they cried

their gory tears.

Helen woke up to a slap. There was a prickly numbness in her

cheek and the steady note of a dial tone whining in her left ear.

Jerry’s face was inches away from hers, wild with worry, and starting

to show signs of guilt. He had never hit her before. He had to

take a few shaky breaths before he could speak. The bedside clock

read 3:16.

“You were screaming. I had to wake you,” he stammered.

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Helen swallowed painfully, trying to moisten her swollen tongue

and closed-off throat. “S’okay. Nightmare,” she whispered as she

sat up.

Her cheeks were wet with either sweat or tears, she didn’t know

which. Helen wiped the moisture away and smiled at her dad, trying

to calm him down. It didn’t work.

“What the hell, Lennie? That was not normal,” he said in a

strange, high-pitched voice. “You were saying things. Really awful

things.”

“Like what?” she croaked. She was so thirsty.

“Mostly names, lists of names. And then you started repeating

‘blood for blood,’ and ‘murderers.’ What the hell were you

dreaming?”

Helen thought about the three women, three sisters she thought,

and she knew she couldn’t tell her father about them. She shrugged

her shoulders and lied. She managed to convince Jerry that

murder was a pretty normal thing to have nightmares about, and

swore that she would never watch scary movies by herself again.

Finally, she got him to go back to bed.

The glass on her nightstand was empty and her mouth was so dry

it felt tender and sore. She swung her legs out of bed to get water

from the bathroom and gasped when her feet touched the hardwood

floor. She switched on her lamp to get a better look, but she

already knew what she was going to see.

The soles of her feet were cut deep and peppered with dirt and

dust, and her shins were scratched with the hatch-mark pattern of

thorns.

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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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Chapter Three

In the morning when Helen woke up and looked at her feet,

the cuts were gone. She almost believed that she had imagined

them—until she saw that her sheets were dirty with

dried, brown blood and grit.

In order to test her sanity, Helen decided to leave her

sheets on the bed, go to school, and see if they were still dirty when

she came home. If they were clean when she got home, then the

whole thing was an illusion and she was only a little crazy. If they

were still dirty when she came home, then she was obviously so

crazy that she was walking around at night and getting dirt and

blood in her bed without remembering it.

Helen tried to eat a bowl of yogurt and berries for breakfast but

that didn’t work out very well so she didn’t even bother to take her

lunch box. If she got hungry she could try buying something more

tummy friendly like soup and crackers later.

Riding her bike to school, she noticed that it was unbearably hot

and humid for a second day in a row. The only wind was the breeze

created by her spinning wheels, and when she locked her bike up at

the rack she realized that not only was the air still, but it was also

lacking the usual insect and bird sounds. All was unnaturally

quiet—as though the entire island was nothing but a ship becalmed

in the middle of the vast ocean.

Helen arrived earlier than she had the day before, and the halls

were crowded. Claire saw her come in. When her face broke into a

smile, Helen knew she had been forgiven. Claire fought the flow of

traffic to double back and join her on the walk to homeroom.

As they made their way toward each other, Helen suddenly felt

like she was trying to trudge through oatmeal. She slowed to a

stop. It seemed to her that everyone in the hallway vanished. In the

suddenly empty school Helen heard the shuffling of bare feet and

the gasping sobs of inconsolable grief.

She spun around in time to see a dusty white figure, her

shoulders slumped and quivering, disappearing around a corner.

Helen realized that the sobbing woman had passed behind

someone—a real person staring back at her. She focused in on the

figure, a young girl with olive skin and a long, black braid trailing

over one shoulder. Her naturally bright red lips were drawn into an

O of surprise.

Then the sound switched back on and the corridor was full of

rushing students again. Helen was standing still, blocking traffic,

staring at a glossy black braid swinging against a tiny girl’s back as

it vanished into a classroom.

Helen’s whole body shook with an emotion that took her a moment

to recognize. It was rage.

“Jesusmaryandjoseph, Len! Are you gonna faint?” Claire asked

anxiously.

Helen made her eyes focus on Claire, and she took a wobbly

breath. She realized that she was drenched in cold sweat and shivering.

She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

“I’m taking you to the nurse,” Claire said. She grabbed Helen’s

hand and started to tug on it, trying to get her to move. “Matt,” she

called out over Helen’s shoulder. “Can you help me with Lennie? I

think she’s going to faint.”

“I’m not going to faint,” Helen snapped, suddenly alert and aware

of how strange she was acting.

She smiled bashfully at them both to try to take the sting out of

her words. Matt had put his arm around her waist and she patted

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his hand softly to let him know he could release her. He gave her a

doubtful look.

“You’re really pale, and you’ve got circles under your eyes,” he

said.

“I got a little overheated riding my bike,” she started to explain.

“Don’t tell me you’re fine,” Claire warned. Her eyes were flush

with frustrated tears, and Matt didn’t look much happier. Helen

knew she couldn’t brush this off. Even if she was going crazy, she

didn’t have to take it out on her friends.

“No, you’re right. I think I might have heatstroke.”

Matt nodded, accepting this excuse as the only logical one.

“Claire, you take her to the girls’ room. I’ll tell Hergie what

happened so he doesn’t mark you late. And you should eat

something. You didn’t eat any lunch yesterday,” he reminded her.

Helen was a little surprised he remembered that, but Matt was

good at details. He wanted to be a lawyer, and she knew that

someday he would be a great one.

Claire drenched Helen in the girls’ room, dumping cold water all

the way down her back when she was supposed to just wet her

neck. Of course they wound up having a gigantic water fight, which

seemed to calm Claire down because it was the first normal response

she’d had out of Helen in a few days. Helen herself felt like

she had passed an exhaustion barrier and now everything had become

funny.

Hergie wrote them hall passes, so the two friends took their time

getting to their first classes. Having a hall pass from Mr. Hergeshimer

was like getting one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets—a student

could go anywhere and do anything for a full period and not

one teacher would put up a stink.

In the cafeteria they got oranges for Helen’s low blood sugar, and

while they were at it they split a chocolate chip muffin. Helen

choked it down and miraculously started to feel better. Then they

went and stood in front of the six-foot-tall fan in the auditorium to

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cool down, taking turns singing into the whirling blades and listening

to each other’s voices get chopped into a hundred pieces until

they were both laughing their faces off.

Helen felt so giddy after playing hooky on a Hergie hall pass and

eating raw sugar on an empty stomach that she couldn’t even remember

what class she was supposed to be going to. She and

Claire were casually strolling down the wrong hallway at the wrong

time when the bell signaling the end of first period rang. They

looked at each other and shrugged as if to say, “Oh well, what can

you do?”, and burst out laughing. Then Helen saw Lucas for the

first time.

The sky outside finally exhaled all of the wind that it had been

holding for two days. Gusts of stale, hot air pushed through every

open window into the sweltering school. It caught loose sheets of

paper, skirt hems, unbound hair, stray wrappers, and other odds

and ends, and tossed them all toward the ceiling like hats on

graduation day. For a moment it seemed to Helen that everything

stayed up there, frozen at the top of the arc, as weightless as space.

Lucas was standing in front of his locker about twenty feet away,

staring back at Helen while the world waited for gravity to switch

back on. He was tall, over six feet at least, and powerfully built, although

his muscles were long and lean instead of bulky. He had

short, black hair and a dark end-of-summer tan that brought out

his white smile and his swimming-pool blue eyes.

Meeting his eyes was an awakening. For the first time in Helen’s

life she knew what pure, heart-poisoning hatred was.

She was not aware of the fact that she was running toward him,

but she could hear the voices of the three sobbing sisters rise into a

keening wail, could see them standing behind the tall, dark boy she

knew was Lucas, and the smaller, brown-haired boy next to him.

The sisters were tearing at their hair until it came out of their

scalps in bloody hanks. They pointed accusing fingers at the two

boys while they screeched a series of names—the names of people

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murdered long ago. Helen suddenly understood what she had to

do.

In the split second it took for her to close the gap between them,