The Belief in Angels (32 page)

We wait until the hallway clears and head for the exit on the stairway landing. We step into a sparkling, sunny spring day and run toward a small street next to the
school. The excitement of skipping class combined with the smell of damp earth and the ever-present ocean intoxicates me.

I feel light and careless, even happy. I wonder how long it’s been since I’ve felt this happy.

I’ve become Jules, the class cutter. Something I’ve never done before. For years I’ve been following rules at school, making rules for our chaotic family. It’s time to break some.

“I love this smell,” I say.

“Filamentous bacteria,” Leigh answers.

Who knows what this means? I love that she knows the science of the smell.

We head to the bay, where we shelter in a small, rocky cove and inhale the brine from the tide pools. A starfish clings to a seaweed-covered rock in the tiny pool below us. I pick round, green-colored pebbles out of the water and dry them beside me on the rock. Leigh talks about her sister, who’s been in trouble because she keeps staying out late with her boyfriend having sex. Leigh says her mom and sister, Annie, argue all the time and that home life is shitty. I understand how Leigh has missed what’s been going on with me. She has her own problems.

We look out at the boats moored on the bay. “I have something to tell you,” Leigh says. She pauses, a dramatic pause, and her face is serious.

“What?”

“I don’t know if I should tell you this,” she says.

“I’ve got something to tell you too. You go first,” I say. I figure I will probably give her a bigger shock.

“Look, you can’t tell anyone because I’m supposed to keep it a secret, but my sister’s pregnant. My mom is going to kill her when she finds out. Which is gonna be soon. She’s been wearing big jackets and stuff to hide her belly, but soon she’s going to start to show. The shit is going to hit the fan.”

“What’s she going to do?” I ask.

“She’s not sure yet. She thinks this guy might bail on her if she tells him about the baby. But she’s gonna have to decide soon. It’s so messed up, and my mom thinks Annie’s going to college next year. She keeps shoving college catalogs down her throat.”

“Maybe she could have the baby and still go to college?”

Leigh looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. She’s probably gonna have the baby and mooch off of my mom.”

I’m thinking how sometimes girls in Withensea get pregnant in their senior year, like Annie, and never make it out of Withensea. They marry their high school boyfriends and get stuck here.

“You know the new kid Timothy Zand who lives in your neighborhood? The one with the gorgeous eyes?”

“No.” The first time I heard his name was the other day when David told me he’d brought my books to our porch. I don’t know him. I don’t even know what he looks like. I have a feeling there are lots of peripheral things that have been going on all around me that I can’t remember.

“He lives right around the corner from you. He’s in high school, a freshman. He walks to school sometimes. I’ve watched him walk by my bus stop on his way.”

“What about him?” I smile at her to continue.

“Well, I have a huge crush on him. There’s something different about him. It’s almost like he comes from another country. We should try to meet him.”

I almost laugh. Leigh is totally boy crazy. This crush counts as one in fifty she’s developed since I became her friend. She’s gone on dates with lots of boys in the past—dates to school dances, dates at the bowling lanes. Her mother makes strict rules about dating, however. Leigh’s not supposed to be dating boys her mom hasn’t met. So she invents a cover for most of her dates. That was always
me
in the past. I wonder who has been covering for her in the last few weeks. “What have you been doing since we stopped talking?” I ask.

“Nothing much. I hang out with the chess club guys and my sister, but I only see her once in a while, after school and on the weekends she doesn’t spend with her boyfriend.” She squints down at the rocks on the beach. “Yesterday I joined the Methodist church down the street from the library.”

“Church?”

“Yeah, they have a teen group. Methodist Youth Friendship. I made some new friends there. I might date a guy there too, Edgar. …”

I decide I will see how much Leigh has noticed about what happened to me before telling her about my memory loss. “So, when we stopped talking, do you remember what happened? I mean, why do you think we haven’t been hanging out?”

Leigh seems thoughtful. She’s making a decision about what and how much she will say. “Please don’t think you’re going to hurt me. I want you to be honest. What happened?”

“I don’t think any one thing happened. I mean, we would hang out and everything, but you never wanted to do anything or go anywhere. You only wanted to go to the library and read. I got sick of reading. I felt like I had to talk you into doing stuff all the time. Every time I asked you to go somewhere, like to Quincy or something, you didn’t want to. You started acting weird. We would finally make a plan to do something, like go to the park or to a movie, and you wouldn’t show—or you’d show up an hour late and act like you were on time or something … I don’t know. And there was other weird stuff.”

“Like what weird stuff?” I ask.

“I don’t know … like the time with locking the door?”

Locking the door?

I don’t know what she means, but I think I should pretend I know, that not knowing might be even more bizarre-sounding.

“Yeah, I guess it seemed weird.”

I hope she will tell me more. I wait.

“Yeah.” Leigh avoids my eyes.

I stay quiet.

Leigh speaks softly. “Can you explain why you did it?”

I suck in a deep breath. I know this is the moment to tell her, to try and explain that I can’t remember what happened. But I’m terribly afraid of what she might think. I’m afraid of the complexities of my own secretive mind, which has become a maze that hides its entrance and its exit in a spot I can’t find. “I have something to tell you. It’s hard to talk about. I think you need to know something about me if you want to be my friend again.”

I take another big breath while Leigh waits. “On Friday, walking back to my house, I realized I didn’t know where I’d been. It seemed like I was waking up from a dream. When I got to school today I wouldn’t have known what we were studying if I hadn’t found some homework or a recent quiz. I can’t remember last week. I can’t even remember the weeks before.” I add.

I realize as the words hang in the air how completely scary it is and how freaky it must sound to someone else. Leigh doesn’t say anything for a while. I can tell she can’t decide whether to believe me or not. I think she’s waiting for me to tell her I’ve been teasing or tricking her.

“When’s the last day you remember?” she asks.

I start to cry. I can’t stop. I heave and choke and my body shakes violently. I bend over to try to catch my breath.

Leigh puts her hand on my back. “Oh God, are you gonna be okay?”

I try to tell her I’ll be fine, but I can only shake my head from side to side.

“N-n-noo,” I stammer.

I’m not okay. My brain’s been hijacked. Nothing is okay. Leigh sits still with me while I cry. We sit like that for a long time. She lets me cry and puts an arm around me when the shaking gets more intense. After a while, my body feels weak and I’m tired. I lie across one of the flat rocks. After a while I start to drift into sleep in the warmth of the sun.

I must have slept for a few hours, because the sun has shifted over the horizon. I squint up to see where the sunlight bends over the sky. Finding the northern
point on the horizon, I look behind me for my shadow and see it reads about two o’clock. I search for Leigh. The tide has gone out and the rocky sand stretches far out beyond the boat launch. At first I can’t find her, but then I see her down at the water’s edge, her head a small sunlit pale-reddish speck against the black rocks.

She’s crabbing. The bay side of Withensea is the best for crabbing because there are tons of small tide pools. The crabs cling to the sides of the rocks and slide inside pools loaded with seaweed and snails. Leigh found a bucket somewhere. She drags it beside her.

“Hey,” I shout out to her.

Leigh turns around. “Hey!” She yells back and waves at me join her. It takes me a while to walk out to her.

“I fell asleep.”

“Yeah, I figured I should let you sleep a bit, but I didn’t want to leave you out here alone. I saw a crab and found this bucket. I’ve got lots. See?” Leigh’s bucket swims with crabs.

“Let’s go to your place and boil these. Do you think your mom’s home?” she asks.

“I have no idea if she’s there today or not. Jack’s in California. It’s hard to say. But let’s go anyway. If there’s a party, we can go down to your place, right?”

“Okay, but if we go to mine we’ll have to wait until later, when school is out, or my mom will know we skipped. Oh, and we don’t have a big enough pot for the crabs. Remember?”

I do remember this. Ms. Westerfield doesn’t like shellfish and never cooks it. David and I practically live on the stuff we dig out of the sand when the weather allows. Crabs, clams, snails.

Leigh and I take turns carrying the bucket of crabs and walk along the bay beach so no one can see us and catch us out of school. We have one section of Withensea Avenue to cross that lies out in the open, and we run as fast as we can when we get there. I hold the bucket this time. As we make it over to the ocean-side beach we hear a car cross the land bridge. We duck behind tall beach grass and watch as Ms. Westerfield drives by.

“That’s so weird. What are the chances? Do you think she saw us?” Leigh asks.

“No. But it freaked me out.”

We crack up with laughter until our sides hurt.

“How lucky that I caught you outside class today. I’m sorry we went this long without talking, Jules. Let’s never do it again.” She squeezes my hand tightly.

“I know,” I say. “It was serendipitous.”

Leigh giggles.
“Serendipitous,”
she mimics me playfully.

She turns serious. “I’ve missed you so much. I’m sorry. I thought you didn’t want to be my friend anymore, like maybe I asked you too many questions about Moses. I even thought you blamed me because I kept you late that morning and maybe you would have made it back to go fishing with him or something.”

“Oh, no. I don’t blame you. I never blamed you. It’s my fault I stayed. It’s my …” My throat catches. “It was
all
my fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault Moses drowned,” Leigh says angrily.

At first, I can’t meet her eyes. I have wanted someone to say those words to me for a long time, but she sounds angry and I can’t figure out why.

She goes on.

“I wish we could have adopted you after it happened. I asked my mom if maybe you could come to live with us. I think she considered it, but decided you should stay with your family. I think she knows how much you take care of everything, and she said …” Leigh stops.

I can tell she’s leaving things out. Things she thinks she shouldn’t say, because I haven’t said them to her, but that we know are true.

“She said you needed to stay put and take care of David.” Leigh shakes her head and says, “I wonder if your memory is having trouble because you feel so badly about Moses. Maybe you just want to forget everything so you don’t have to remember the one really sad thing?”

No one is home when we get to my house. We cook the crabs, but of course there’s no butter or lemon in our refrigerator to flavor them. Still, they’re a sweet and salty treat. We play a killer chess game. Leigh teaches me all the new sequences and openings she’s been learning from her new friends on the chess team. Later,_Wendy waltzes in and asks us how school went. I don’t answer. Leigh speaks up. “It was boring.”

Wendy smiles and chats with Leigh a bit. She acts like a normal mother even though she’s wearing platform shoes, a blouse made of crochet flowers, and a miniskirt that shows the bottom of her butt when she bends over.

I’m annoyed with how Wendy acts all fakey nice around other people, and I’m relieved when she walks upstairs and leaves us alone until it’s time for Leigh to go home.