The Suburban Strange (23 page)

The woman had glimpsed Celia’s drawings. “Are you an artist?” she asked.

Celia started to respond with something modest, the way she always did.
I draw
. Or
I’d like to be
. But then she raised her chin and said, “Yes, I am.”

The woman looked at the paper in her hand. “I’ll have to see. I can’t make any promises.”

“I understand. Thank you,” Celia said. She turned and walked away, forcing herself not to look back as she wrestled with the conversation. Tomasi had run away? Why? Where had he gone? Was that why his parents would treat him like a prisoner when he came back, or was there more that she didn’t know? Her fantasy of a dark green sedan and nights spent watching foreign films was gone. Now she imagined him creeping out of that house in the early morning, carrying everything he owned in a little black case. Where had he gone? What kind of home was that? What could have caused him to do something so extreme? One idea rose to the top: apparently Tomasi had broken out of his own house to see her. She remembered his smile just before his father hauled him away, and she believed that to Tomasi, it must have been worth getting caught. She blinked away tears.

16. TWIST OF SHADOWS

C
AN I MAKE YOU
a dress?” Marco asked Celia. “What? I thought you only made men’s clothes.” “I do, and normally Ms. Vong lets me do whatever I want, but she’s decided we all have to make a dress. The only reason I take that stupid home ec class is because there’s nothing else at this school,” Marco said, sighing. “Here at distinguished Suburban High you can learn French, music, and
washing
. But I think you have a free period when I have class on Tuesdays, so it would be really easy to do fittings with you. If you want to?”

“Sure, I’d be honored!” Celia said. She wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to see Marco work, and she was sure he would make her something beautiful. He was obsessed with the details of haberdashery, and there was no doubt he was accomplished. His clothes looked made-to-measure. Almost weekly he or Brenden had on some new piece he had made, whether it was a pair of pants or a parka. Marco’s prodigious sewing talents far exceeded anything taught in the most advanced home economics class.

Outside the home ec room, Celia had a lovely moment preparing to walk into a new place—for the first time since the art institute, she didn’t feel the hair-dryer blast of panic on her back.
It’s because Marco’s in there,
she told herself. But that didn’t change the reality that Celia was going to walk into a strange place and not be completely self-conscious. She smiled and stood up even taller. And when she opened the door, she actually was tickled by the bizarre scenario. In a room chock-a-block with sinks, stoves, ironing boards, and sewing machines, Marco was the only guy among a few dozen girls. He came to her and made a show of kissing her on both cheeks while his classmates regarded her as if she were a minor celebrity.

“Hi! Thanks for coming!” Marco showed her to his worktable.

“Of course! I haven’t been here two minutes, and I can tell you are completely out of this class’s league,” she whispered to him.

“They’re all freaked out because they’ve never made anything more complicated than an apron,” he said, wielding a cloth measuring tape confidently as Celia stood in front of him. “I think a buttonhole will be enough to push most of them over the edge.”

“Well, I’m excited,” Celia said. “What are you thinking of making for me?”

Marco pulled out a sketch. “A sleeveless dress, with a series of pin tucks that form a kind of corset on the bodice, full length, very dramatic, and I’m toying with some kind of stand-up collar. Definitely Diaboliques material,” he said. “And you are the perfect model for it. What do you think?”

“It looks beautiful.” Celia studied it.

“I don’t sketch as well as you do,” Marco said.

“What do you mean? I can tell exactly what you have in mind from this drawing. It’s a totally different thing,” Celia told him. “I draw things that already exist. You draw things that don’t exist yet.”

“Still, your drawings look like they’re alive. And I’ll bet you could do it with your eyes closed.”

“I never tried,” Celia laughed. Marco handed her his pad and a pencil. “You want me to try?” She closed her eyes and thought of his face, letting her hand flow easily over the page, concentrating on her sense of the tip of the pencil against the paper. When she opened her eyes, she was surprised it had worked.

“See, you draw better blind than most people with twenty-twenty vision.” Marco shook his head in disbelief. “I will not be drawing any clothes blindfolded, I promise you.”

“Did you make Brenden’s trench coat?”

“Yeah, that turned out really well. He’s my favorite male model.” Marco grinned. “If I’m going to be a designer, though, I have to start making clothes for people other than my boyfriend.” After a moment, he added, “I want to learn to knit so I can make him sweaters.”

“You’re so cute,” Celia laughed.

“I thought you were going to say queer.” He smiled.

“I wouldn’t say that!”

“I know you wouldn’t. But I kind of like it.” Marco examined a seam on her sweater. “It fits, somehow. Everything is queer these days . . .” He reflected for a moment. “Why aren’t you dating?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Who would I date?”

“Well, that’s a good point. Nobody here, that’s for sure. You still haven’t seen Tomasi?”

“No.” She lied without a second thought, and Marco didn’t see through her. Who was she becoming?

“I know he’s your tall, dark, and handsome nightclub fantasy,” Marco said playfully, “but maybe you should consider other candidates, too.”

“Maybe. I probably need more experience talking to guys. At some point I guess I’ll have to consider someone else,” she said.

“At some point you should do a lot more than that.” Marco winked at her.

But it wasn’t such an obvious course of action in Celia’s mind, because Tomasi had earned the privileged spot in her heart—even though she didn’t know his last name, even though she was as infatuated with her idea of him as she was with the little she actually knew about him, and even though it was possible he was essentially a prisoner in his own home.
This must be the province of love,
Celia thought: no roads ran straight; no blocks were orthogonal; no bells rang on time. But Tomasi lived there. Just as she had been content to know he was watching her at Diaboliques before they ever spoke, Celia was content to pin her hopes on him now, despite all the uncertainty. The potential was as sweet to her as its realization. She fully believed she would see Tomasi again, and so she was content to wait.

"COLLAPSED LUNG? WHO GETS
a collapsed lung in high school?" Brenden asked.

Liz exhaled. “Why did the girl come to school? Was a group project
that
important? We’re supposed to be figuring out what we want in this crazy mosaic. Can you focus for a minute?”

Regine said, “Is she, like, a gymnast, or anything?”

“Do they get collapsed lungs?” Brenden asked, ignoring Liz.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been gladder I’m not a sophomore, that’s for sure. I’m sorry, Celia.”

Celia paged idly through her sketchbook, trying to avoid being lured into the conversation. She still carried her sketchbook out of habit, and would have felt naked without it, but these days she went weeks at a time without drawing. Celia looked through it guiltily, as though it were a beloved relative she’d neglected to visit. She stopped when she reached the page with markings she didn’t recognize. The page was missing a top corner—it was the scrap she’d torn out to write her name and phone number on, to give to Tomasi’s mother. Next to the torn edge there was a line of faint letters in a hand she didn’t recognize.

Brenden was speaking. “At what point do we say, okay, it’s crazy, but is there really some kind of curse? I still feel like if something, I don’t know,
supernatural
really is going on, don’t people call psychics, or exorcists? What are we supposed to do?”

“Have sex with all the sophomore girls?” Marco offered.

Celia looked up and caught Ivo staring at her. Immediately he looked away, and she pulled her sketchbook into her lap to read the faint words she had found there:
Can you see this?

“Are we even sure that does the trick? I mean, has anyone really looked at this, case by case?”

“You mean, has someone asked each girl if she was a virgin on her birthday? That would be quite an interesting science project.”

“I thought people had pretty much concluded there was a connection.”

“But has it been proven?”

“To prove it, you’d have to have a set of twins, and have one of them lose her virginity, and see what happened to each of them. And there aren’t any twins in the sophomore class.”

Below
Can you see this?
Celia wrote,
Yes. Who is this?

Next to her Brenden continued, unaware. “I’m really sick of talking about girls and their virginity. Why couldn’t this be happening to guys, for once? I wish we could put all the guys under a microscope and interrogate them about their sex lives.”

“They would all just lie,” Regine answered.

“Not if they were going to get a collapsed lung and have everyone find out they were lying.”

Celia watched another faint line of writing appear slowly under her own, like lemon juice turning brown while the paper was held over a light bulb. It said,
Tomasi. Sorry.
She drew in her breath and then had to cough so it didn’t sound as if she had gasped.

Around her the conversation continued. “Well, that’s an interesting question. Why is it only happening to girls? Why isn’t it happening to guys? You can’t just say it’s someone playing pranks on girls, because these injuries—health problems, accidents—couldn’t be planned. It’s not like someone is sabotaging bathrooms or putting bombs in lockers.”

Celia wrote in her sketchbook.
Are you okay?

“So we’re really saying that there’s a curse? Is that just crazy?”

“Is it? I don’t know how many girls have turned sixteen so far this year, but either something bad has happened, or it’s pretty sure they’ve had sex, or they’ve been out of school on their curse day. We’re way past this being a coincidence, aren’t we?”

“But it doesn’t matter, because that’s the answer,” Liz said, exasperated. “If these girls are just smart enough to stay home on the day before their birthdays, this is over, and we never have to talk about it again. It might not explain what’s happening, but it works.
The end
.”

More writing appeared in Celia’s sketchbook.
Yes. I’ll tell U. 2night?

She wrote
Nine o’clock
and closed the book. Her friends on three sides of her hadn’t noticed.

In chemistry class she asked Mariette, “Can you write in other people’s notebooks?”

“What?”

“Look.” Celia pulled out her sketchbook and showed the page to her. “It was like a conversation. One line appeared, and I wrote my answer, and then the next line appeared . . .”

“Are you serious?” Mariette studied the page. “Tomasi?”

“That guy I met at Diaboliques,” Celia said. “But then he disappeared for a long time, until I saw him again over winter break, at the bookstore. But I think his parents keep him locked up in his house or something. They don’t seem to let him out.”

“I can’t do that.” Mariette pointed at the writing. “But I’m not surprised that it can be done. It’s pretty cool. You didn’t know he could do it?”

“No, I had no idea,” Celia said.

“You realize this pretty much proves he’s one of the Kind. You
really
had no idea?” Mariette watched Celia shake her head. “What’s he like?”

“He goes to St. Dymphna’s. He’s kind of big and strong. He loves to read. But I don’t think his home life is that great. He’s run away before.”

“How old is he?”

“He’s seventeen, but Mariette, please don’t bring up the thing about the number seventeen in your admonition!”

“I have to think about these things!” Mariette protested. “You said his parents won’t let him out of the house?”

“Well, I tried to visit, and his mother told me to leave him alone. Oh . . .” Celia replayed that conversation in her mind. “They must have seen something. They must know something about him having powers.”

“And they’re probably freaked out, and they think you have something to do with it.”

“But I don’t,” Celia said.

“
I
know that. What is it with you, though? You keep finding us! Do you see why I think you must be Kind, too? You have to be careful, Celia.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to make you mad, but someone is hurting girls here, and everyone is a suspect, especially if they have power like that. We know Tomasi has powers, but we don’t know if he is Kind or Unkind.”

“I knew you were going to say that! I thought it was somebody here at school. What happened to Skip as our primary suspect?”

“I can’t figure out how to prove it, short of catching him doing something! He could be casting a spell the night before. I’ve already tried to go to his house, but they have dogs that bark before I get anywhere near. I have no idea anymore. Every guess I’ve made could be wrong. But how many other people do you know right now who are capable of this?”

“You,” Celia said. “How do I know it’s not you?”

“Well, I guess you don’t,” Mariette said, looking wounded. “If there were a way for me to prove it to you, I would. But if I were doing all of this, why would I be telling you about it? And why wouldn’t I have succeeded by now?”

“I don’t know.” Celia’s forehead throbbed. “Even before you told me everything, and I was tempted to suspect you were somehow involved with all these weird things that were happening, I knew it couldn’t be you—you’re too good a person. And I just don’t think Tomasi has anything to do with this, either. He’s
not
Unkind. He can’t be . . .”