The Year of Disappearances (20 page)

“A couple.” His silver-blue eyes were the color of topaz. Our encyclopedia at home had plates of gemstones, and I’d studied them, fascinated by their range of colors. I wondered if anyone had ever made photographic plates of human eyes. They seemed even more variegated than gems.

“Five, actually,” he said. “Six if you count a blind date. That time I was in love for all of two hours.” Suddenly he reached toward me, touched the amulet that hung from my neck. “What’s this?”

“An Egyptian cat.” I told him cat amulets were linked to the Egyptian goddess Bastet, who transformed herself into a cat with an all-seeing eye in order to protect her father from enemies. “Amulets are designed to protect travelers.”

He placed the cat back against my neck. “Enigmatic,” he said again. He sat up, reached into the canvas tote, and pulled out a bottle of rosé wine and two glasses.

We sipped the wine, light and floral as the air around us. We ate strawberries and tomato sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. For dessert we had meringues—stale clouds that melted and vaporized in our mouths. Walker had taken as much care with the food as he did with his magic tricks.

When we’d finished eating, I lay back against the blanket next to him. For a while we both watched the sky. Walker said, “Ever wonder what makes it blue?”

I knew why the sky appeared to be blue—the color was an effect of Rayleigh scattering. Air molecules disperse the blue wavelengths of visible light more effectively than longer wavelengths, such as red. But to say that would have broken the mood.

“It’s the same reason the Blue Ridge Mountains look blue,” Walker said. “It’s called Rayleigh scattering.”

“I know about light scattering,” I said. “I thought you’d come up with something more poetic.”

“What could be more poetic than Rayleigh scattering? Without it, we’d be looking up at black space.”

I thought of my telescope—I’d left it back in Sassa—and then my mind leapt to the night Mysty disappeared, to the moment when I blacked out.

“What’s the matter?” Walker leaned over me, his face full of concern. He had luminous skin, tinted sand-brown by the sun. I would never have skin like that, I thought. “Are you thinking about that friend of yours?”

I nodded. Then I realized he meant Autumn, not Mysty.

“It’s been rough on you.” His hand touched my hair, pushed back a strand. My scalp tingled. Then we were kissing.

Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquillity.” I will never be a poet; I can’t recollect my emotions in tranquillity, because the moment I think of them, the emotions recur, every bit as strong and overwhelming as they were that day in the peach orchard.

We kissed until our mouths hurt, and then we kissed more. My lips felt swollen. My blood surged, and I heard my heartbeat, loud and fast, against Walker’s chest. My eyes were closed, but, when we pulled apart to breathe, I opened them. The first thing I saw was Walker’s neck, pale, arced above me as he tipped back his head. I would be lying if I didn’t admit to having a sudden strong urge to sink my teeth into his skin.

I flung my hand over my mouth.

He bent forward again, breathing hard. “Ari, Ari, no one on this earth can kiss the way you do.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d managed to scare myself.

The next morning he slipped a letter under the door of my room. In it, he wrote a poem about kissing. He ended by saying that he would love me forever. I felt elated, frightened, and grateful that the letter didn’t use the word “eternity.”

In my dorm room that Sunday—a long brown day that pretended Saturday had never been—I used my cell phone to call Dashay. I didn’t dare call the cottage, in case the call might be traced. As arranged, we didn’t say a word about my father in case someone was listening in.

“How are things?” I asked.

“Things are about the same.” Her voice sounded so cold, so detached that it didn’t seem hers. “How are you?”

I still felt numb from the picnic, the kissing, the urge to bite. I said, “I am perfectly fine, ma’am.”

I
wanted to talk to Dashay about hormones. I wanted to talk to Dr. Cho about Revité.

But I couldn’t use the phone to talk freely, and I couldn’t get away. On the Internet I found some posts about Revité. Apparently the clinical trials were over, and the drug was now available through Vunderworld.

One posting, from the drug’s manufacturer, featured a photo of a woman running in a meadow, captioned with a line from a Beatles song: “Get back to where you once belonged.” And while part of me did want to go back—to being Ari, the home-schooled girl who cared only about learning and pleasing her father—more of me wanted to go forward. But to what?

Someone wrote: “Revité saved my marriage.” The poster said she’d been vamped “against my will, forced into a hideous dependence on human blood and foul-tasting supplements, unable to have a normal life, missing holiday celebrations, regular meals, safe relations with my mortal husband.”

I would have blushed, if I could.

“Those soulless nights, lying awake craving blood while he snored,” the post went on, “I thought about suicide.”

Did vampires commit suicide? I’d never thought of it until now.

“Then I found Revité.” The anonymous poster changed tone. “Now I can cook, and shop, and make love like a real woman! And someday soon, I may be a mother.”

It all sounded soppy, horribly wrong. Why, then, did I keep reading?

Professor Hogan was envious of me. So was Bernadette, and so were four or five other female students whose thoughts I heard. They could tell Walker was in love with me, and it made them feel unloved by contrast, and bitter.

Walker was not one to hide his feelings. One day he walked into class juggling paper roses, which he laid on the arm of my chair. Another, he sang a silly song he’d made up in which he rhymed
Ari
with
sorry, tamari,
and
Ferrari.
The song made Bernadette and Professor Hogan laugh, after which their envy only grew.

I tried to understand their feelings, but failed. At that point in my life, envy was something I’d experienced rarely, and only in the abstract: I’d envied other girls’ normal family lives, for instance. But what Professor Hogan and Bernadette felt went deeper, and it expressed itself in hostility toward me.

When Professor Hogan wrote “Wrong!” in red ink on one of my essays, next to a statement that I knew was true, I tried not to take it to heart. After all, she was in a relationship with a married man who would never be able to publicly acknowledge his feelings as Walker did. She had reason to be envious.

But when Bernadette began telling lies about me, it hurt. In spite of her moving out of the room, some part of me had thought we still were friends. (It embarrasses me now to recall how naïve I was. Is there anything more fickle than friendship among teenage girls?)

Walker was the one who told me about Bernadette. We were sitting under a tree one afternoon; I was reading our politics textbook, and Walker lay with his head on my lap, playing with my hair. He pulled it all forward, so it hung like a curtain over his face; then he separated it into strands, peering through them at me.

“Is it true that you slept around in high school?” he said suddenly.

“What?” I let the book snap shut.

“Bernadette told me that.” All I could see was one of his eyes, and it had a strange, hard brightness.

“First of all, I didn’t go to high school—I was home-schooled.” My voice sounded less indignant than I felt. “And second, I happen to be a virgin.” There—I’d said something I’d never imagined saying to anyone.

“Are you really?” He reached up, through my hair, and stroked my cheek.

“That tickles.” I brushed his hand away. “Why would she say something like that?”

“She’s jealous, I guess.” Walker sighed. “You know, she and I, we hung out a few times our first year. I thought it was no big deal, but maybe she still has some feelings for me.”

“Maybe she does.” Why hadn’t I picked up on that sooner? And what did he mean by “hung out”?

“What else did she say?” I asked.

“Just, you know, that I should be careful when I’m around you. That bad things have been happening. You know.”

“My friends tend to disappear or die.” It was the same thing Jacey had said.

“Forget about her,” he said. “She’s jealous. Ari, do you love me?”

This conversation was too confusing for me. I didn’t know the answer.

“In my family,” I said slowly, “when I was growing up, no one used the word
love
. It’s not something I’ve ever said, to anyone.”

Walker lifted my hair and sat up, letting it fall past my shoulders, against my back. His eyes had lost the hardness. “I want to be the first one you say it to,” he said, his voice close to a whisper.

As he kissed me, I felt the confusion grow.

Professor Hogan bombarded us with reading assignments the week before our field trip. We studied the history of political parties in American politics—how the Republican Party, for instance, emerged in opposition to slavery and became a primary party.

“Today, when someone chooses to vote for a third party, that vote is a rejection of the primary parties?” Professor Hogan said. Her hair was frayed and her skin had broken out, as if the added stress of the field trip was taking a toll. “Third-party voting happens only under extreme conditions, when voters feel so alienated from the positions of the major parties that they’re willing to sacrifice their votes for a party that they’re sure can’t win?”

Walker was folding a scrap of paper into an origami flower. He didn’t agree with what she was saying. He thought that people who bothered to vote did believe their party could win.

“Our election laws discourage the growth of third parties?”

Walker flicked the flower onto the arm of my chair.

“And how do they do that, Ariella?”

She almost always called on me, so I paid close attention, even when she was particularly dull. “They make it harder for third parties to obtain funding,” I said, careful to keep my tone neutral. “And many states make it more complicated for third-party candidates to get onto the ballot, such as requiring them to submit more names on their petitions.”

She nodded, grudgingly. Bernadette shot me a resentful look.

I hadn’t had a chance to say anything to her about the lies she told Walker. But I had plenty to say, when the right moment came. For now, I simply stared back at her, until she turned away.

Professor Hogan reminded us that we’d need to be on our best behavior in Savannah. “Please wear something that looks professional?” she said.

It was the first time several of the third parties had decided to hold a regional caucus, to meet both independently and collectively to share strategies for undermining the primary parties. Our group had been given special passes by the Third-Parties Caucus to attend some of the sessions. We wouldn’t all go to the same ones, however. At the end of class, Hogan handed out our assignment sheets.

“I got the Green Party.” Walker had been hoping for that assignment, and I felt pleased for him. Then I looked at my own sheet.

“What did you get, Walker?” Bernadette touched his arm.

“I’m Green,” he said.

She looked disappointed. “I’m Social Democrat,” she said.

He’d already turned back to me. “What are you?”

“The Fair Share Party,” I read. “Must be one of the new ones.”

“Maybe we can switch with someone so we’re together,” Walker said.

Professor Hogan heard him, of course. “No substitutions?” she said.

As we left the classroom, Walker said, in a low voice, “Can you imagine being in a relationship with her? You’d never know when she actually asked a question.”

The philosophical and linguistic implications were intriguing, I thought. “Someone should write a paper about Professor Hogan’s voice,” I said.

He grinned. “Title? Maybe ‘The Sound of Madness’?”

“How about ‘The Abuse of Aural Ambiguity’?”

“Or ‘Everything’s Hypothetical’?”

We kept joking for a while, but part of me thought: What if her continual questioning
was
deliberate? How could you hold a person responsible for what she said when everything she said sounded speculative?

Bernadette came up behind us. “Walker?” she said.

He turned around. When he saw who it was, he slipped his arm across my shoulders. “What do you want, Bernie?” he said. “Want to talk more trash about my girlfriend?”

Everything he’d said was phrased as a question. I appreciated that. There were moments when I thought that yes, I might indeed be in love with Walker Pearson.

Someone wrote once that the best moments in life occur just before you arrive.

Actually, I wrote that, in my journal. But it doesn’t sound original. Surely someone else thought it first.

In any case, as our bus rolled and braked and cornered through the squares of downtown Savannah, I felt excited. I’d explored these streets on my own last spring, and now they were familiar to me. There was Colonial Cemetery, and across from it, the brick house where my mother once rented a flat she said was haunted. There was the Marshall House, the first hotel I’d ever stayed in. Up ahead lay the river, and somewhere close by was the café where my parents had met for the first time as adults. I wanted to walk through all of those places, reclaim old memories and make new ones.

Walker squeezed my hand. He had his own plans for our time in Savannah. I tried not to listen to his thoughts, but I didn’t try hard.

It’s probably a bad idea to listen to the thoughts of someone who loves you. Love makes minds soft and sentimental, prone to even more digressions and lapses of logic than usual. Of course, the average mortal thought process is pretty messy to begin with, continually interrupting itself with observations and expressions of physical need and desire; vampires, by contrast, tend to think in cooler, more linear patterns (though my mother was one notable exception).

Walker was thinking about himself, as most mortals do most of the time. He felt a little sleepy, fairly hungry, and consistently amorous. He had a desire to devour me (his words) and simultaneously revere me. I listened long enough to learn he was planning a romantic evening for us in Savannah; then I felt uneasy about eavesdropping. My mother would have called it meddling, but how could I resist?

I resisted. I didn’t want love to turn out to be a mere jumble of feelings.

I turned to look out the bus window. We were passing the rough stone streets that led down to River Street, the place where I’d turned invisible for the first time. My father had given me the metamaterials clothing and shoes that bend light rays, and I’d taught myself the process of absorbing the heat of my body’s electrons and deflecting light. The process had been physically tiring, but the experience entirely justified the expense of energy—being invisible was the most fun I’d ever had. Moving through crowded streets as if you’re flying, weightless, and free—could anything be better than that?

And yes, I’d packed my special trouser suit, underwear, and shoes for the field trip. After all, they were the most professional-looking clothes I owned.

The conference hotel overlooked the muddy brown river. We clustered in the lobby under a high arched ceiling made of glass and steel. Professor Hogan checked us in and announced the room assignments. I was in room 408, along with Bernadette and a girl called Rhonda.

Bernadette immediately went up to Hogan and talked to her in a low voice.

“No substitutions?” Hogan said.

We all crowded into an elevator, and Walker, Richard, and four other boys got off on the third floor. Walker blew me a kiss as he left.

Bernadette sighed—a sigh of frustration and anger, not sadness. Her thoughts were scattered, but I detected enormous jealousy and fear at the root of her feelings about me. Autumn’s murder had been Bernadette’s first experience of death, and she hadn’t yet come to terms with it. Blaming me was the best she could manage.

In our room, Rhonda talked nonstop while I unpacked, and Bernadette lay on a bed. “You can have the sofa bed,” she said to me.

“Let’s flip coins.” I pulled three dimes out of my backpack.

When we flipped, Bernadette got tails while Rhonda and I got heads. I almost regretted that she was the odd one out, because it gave her one more reason to resent me.

The keynote speaker for the caucus was Neil Cameron, a thirty-year-old U.S. senator from Georgia who had quit the Democrats to join the Fair Share Party. He ignored the podium and walked to the edge of the stage to address us. Walker and I sat in the third row. From the moment he appeared, we couldn’t take our eyes off him.

Was Neil Cameron good looking? Every woman in the room would have said so, although he wasn’t conventionally handsome. His nose looked as if it might have been broken once, and he was probably five-foot-ten at most. But his dark blue eyes were warm; I’d read the phrase “dancing eyes,” but I’d never seen them until that night. His eyes moved from face to face in the audience, lingering long enough to create the impression that he was fascinated by each one. His hair was thick and dark, his hands square and strong looking. As he spoke, his hands did a kind of dance of their own.