The Yearbook (18 page)

Lola shifted on the scalding seat. “But other people go into the reserve room all the time, don't they? And nothing happens to them,” she said. “I've been in there a few times since I got here.”

“Yes, but still, it's some formula that involves that room and you, the junction of the two things. The door isn't always open, but it exists. It's like a short circuit in time that pulls you one way or the other,” he said. “It's as if time itself can't seem to decide where you belong.”

“I know where I belong,” Lola said.

She leaned over and kissed Peter. He kissed her back with a kind of desperation, and stroked her hair, still damp from the swimming hole.

“If you disappear again I think it'll kill me,” he said. “I want to be with you forever. I want to marry you.”

They kissed again in the hot car and she gripped him harder.

“But I won't disappear,” she said. “I promise. We can get married and go far away. We can get on a train and go all the way to California and not ever come back to Ashfield.”

Peter shook his head.

“As long as that doorway exists there is a chance that you will go through it,” he said. “And this time, you might not be able to get back.”

Not get back.

The words were like a shroud, suffocating her. They meant death. Because who would she be, back there? With each passing month, the old Lola had grown hazier, until now she could barely be remembered. She was like a friend who had died long ago, and whose concerns, dreams, routines, the new Lola had forgotten. She no longer existed, and could not exist again.

Peter's plan was simple. It involved a gasoline can, a box of matches, and the cover of darkness. Sentimentality toward his alma mater never entered the equation. The room must be destroyed, that was all. Lola went along, as the driver of the getaway car.

It was just after ten when they arrived at the school. Lola pulled into a gravel alley—long obliterated by her time—that ran behind the school, about fifty yards from the library window. She turned off the motor and got out. It was a humid, warm night without even the trace of a breeze. Everything was still except for the few crickets that chirped in the grass.

“This seems crazy,” Lola said, looking up at the building. She found herself staring into the eyes of one of the gargoyles, which looked down at her with amusement as if it agreed.

“I know,” Peter answered. He had left the car and was lifting the gasoline can from the back seat. “But I'm doing it anyway.”

Lola caught a whiff of the gas and felt afraid. “Let's leave. Let's just leave,” she begged.

“It's almost over,” he said as he kissed her. “Wait here. Don't come in.”

In a moment he was standing under the window. He lobbed a rock at it and smashed the glass on the first try. Then, standing on the low wall outside, he unlatched the window. In a moment, Lola could no longer see his dark figure. He had disappeared inside with the gasoline and matches.

Lola stood next to the car and kept watch, praying nobody would come upon the scene. A minute passed. After five minutes, Peter still had not reappeared. Then Lola saw a finger of smoke twirl from the reserve room window. The fire had started, but where was Peter? A cold fear came over her. She abandoned the car and in a moment was standing on the low wall herself, looking through the broken glass, a handkerchief over her mouth. She called Peter's name, but he didn't answer. Flames had engulfed the leather couch, and in their flickering light she thought, but couldn't be sure, that she saw a human form on the floor near the connecting door into the library.

“Peter! Peter!” she screamed, but there was no answer. Peter must have been overcome by fumes or smoke, Lola thought, or had been struck on the head, or had fallen. He would be burned alive if she didn't act.

She squirmed through the window, into the smoky room. “Peter!” She screamed, but the smoke was too thick.

Then she heard the sirens. The fire brigade. She hefted herself back up to the window and screamed out into the night. “Here! We're in here!”

She didn't care if she had to go to jail, she didn't care about anything but saving Peter. The door from the library opened and a man's silhouette appeared. It was dark, but even so, his shape seemed familiar. The uniform, the potbelly, the keys.

“Peter!” she screamed to the man. “He's in here. He'll be burned alive!”

“Burned?” the man said, looking past Lola into the reserve room. “What do you mean, burned?”

Lola whirled around to look behind her. There was no smoke. There was no fire. Just a dark room, and the smell of moldering paper. She cried out once more for Peter, and then everything went black.

Lola was dreaming about the Blue Hole. She stood on the rim and the water looked cool and welcoming. It was not an ordinary blue but the dazzling blue of a sapphire. The loose ground where she stood crumbled as she shifted her feet, and a few stones fell into the water with a plinking sound, headed down into the bottomless pit toward the other side of the world. She was watching the rings that floated out from where the stones had fallen when odd, high voices came from somewhere up in the sky. At first they sounded like birds, but then they gathered themselves into human voices. Lola opened her eyes. She was in a hospital room, and
The Simpsons
was on the television.

She sat up and looked around. In the next bed, a girl of fourteen or fifteen was eating a grape Popsicle. Lola closed her eyes again and begged to wake up, knowing she was already awake. A terror came over her, like the terror in a dream. She leaned over the bed rail and vomited.

“Hey. You're alive,” the girl croaked cheerfully. “They wondered when you were going to wake up. Are you barfing? Gross.”

Lola wished that her heart would stop, that her brain would burst, anything but this. She had believed that she was out of reach of her origins, that she had safely crossed a frontier as impenetrable as the one between life and afterlife. It had been months since she'd felt the cord that held her to her old life fray and then snap. She had been light as the wind, and free. But all that was an illusion. She had never been safe. The cord was still strong, and it had brought her back, just the way Peter said it could, through the reserve room.

“Hey. Didn't you hear me?”

It was the girl in the next bed. Lola turned now and looked at her, taking in the hospital gown, the messy red hair, the face full of freckles.

“What?” Lola said dully.

“I said,” the girl continued, gesturing with her Popsicle stick. “They've all been wondering when you were going to wake up.”

“Wondering?” Lola said. “Who was wondering?”

“The police, and a couple of ladies were here, too.”

With the mention of the police, and the unnamed “ladies” waiting to question her, Lola felt the heavy return of her old self. It entered her body like a block of iron, crashing against her new one.

“The police?” she said, almost as a reflex. “When?”

“This morning. They said you stole money and broke into the school. I was pretending to be asleep and I heard them.” The girl snickered with guilty glee. “Did you do it?”

“No,” Lola said. “What day is it?”

“October thirtieth,” the girl said.

“What year?”

The girl smiled, as if Lola was cracking a joke, but she answered the question.

Lola had been gone ten months, but it was the same night she had left. She had climbed down the tree only hours before, fallen asleep in the reserve room, and been caught without delay by the security guard.

She felt groggy and strange, as if she'd been given medicine. The cartoon voices penetrated her eardrums like sharp little forks and made it hard to think. She stood up. She felt it was time for urgent action, the nature of which she was still trying to grasp.

“I had my tonsils out,” the girl said. “What's wrong with you? I saw the nurse give you a couple of shots.”

“Shots?” Lola looked at her arms. Sure enough, there was a red spot on her right shoulder, and another on her forearm.
How dare they?
she thought.
How dare they?
She noticed she was wearing a hospital gown and a pair of thick socks that weren't hers. There were no bandages anywhere. Her arms and legs could move. It seemed incredible that she could still appear to be in one piece.

“Nothing's wrong with me. Must have fainted. Where are my clothes?”

“Dunno,” said the girl. “Maybe they confiscated them.”

Lola moved around the room, searching for her clothes. Standing up made her dizzy. She felt her head plunging toward the floor and grabbed the bed rail.

“You okay?” the girl asked. “You gonna puke again?”

Lola ignored her. She went to a basin beside the wall and splashed her face with cold water.

“Hey. You gonna make a run for it?” The girl seemed to be enjoying the sudden drama in her dull little hospital routine.

“What if I did run away?” Lola said. Her tongue felt thick.

“You'd be a fugitive. On the run from the law.” She unwrapped her second Popsicle and looked Lola up and down. “I think you're about my size. You can take my clothes. But you better hurry.”

“Where are they?” Lola said. She could almost hear the policemen's heels sounding along the corridor, just as she had heard them on the stairs at the Wrigley Group Home.

The girl pointed the Popsicle toward a locker near her bed. Lola moved to the locker and opened it. She found a pair of jeans, a sweater, and a red wool winter coat. There was a pair of galoshes, too. Lola put them on. The jeans were too short, but everything else more or less fit.

“You look great. Just like another me,” the girl laughed. “Even the necklace. That
L
for
Liz
. That's my name. Liz.”

Lola put a hand to her neck and felt the familiar
L
.

“Now. Down to business,” Liz went on. “What should I say when the cops interrogate me? How 'bout if I say you were headed for Cincinnati, while meanwhile you go in the opposite direction. Chicago, maybe. Or Canada. That's it. The Canadian wilderness.”

“Just tell them you woke up and I wasn't here.”

“Play dumb. Gotcha.”

“Thanks,” Lola said. She reached up and took off the necklace, and handed it to the girl. She didn't need it anymore. It wasn't a real heirloom, and she'd received so much nice jewelry for her seventeenth birthday.

“You're giving me this?” Liz said. “But isn't it special for you? With the
L
and everything?”

“It's just something I found once.”

“Thanks,” Liz said, and started putting it on.

Lola opened the door a crack and looked both ways. There was no one. She turned back toward the girl and gave a thumbs-up that was conspiratorially returned, and then slipped out into the hall.

Lola noticed the stillness and realized that it must be the middle of the night. She got to the elevator and pressed the “down” button. There were three or four people in the lobby, staring sleepily at a television that was showing a commercial. She felt raw, conspicuous, glowing, but nobody noticed her as she walked out.

Danielle came back from pottery class, accompanied by her cousin Beth, to find her room full of people and a thrilling crisis under way. There was a policeman and a policewoman, Mrs. Hershey from the Social Services department, Mrs. Graham, and even Mr. Terry from Golden Recipe Fried Chicken.

“Where is she?” Mr. Terry sputtered at the girls as they came into the room. “You know. I know you know.”

“Where's who?” Danielle said.

“Yeah, where's who?” Beth said.

“Where's who? Where's
who
?” Mr. Terry squealed. He turned imploringly to the police officers. “Are you listening to this?”

“Lola's missing,” Mrs. Graham said bluntly.

“They all stick together, these gangster girls.” Mr. Terry shouted, taking a step toward Danielle and Beth. “Now where is she?”

Mrs. Hershey went red in the face and imposed herself between Mr. Terry and the girls. “You've got no business here. I'm telling you for the last time. Get out. Get out or I'll cite you for trespassing. And I can do it, too, buddy.”

Mr. Terry clenched his fists in fury. But the threat of a trespassing fine, on top of losing a hundred dollars plus at least four dollars in gas money, was too much for him. He huffed out of the room. “I've got my rights, too.” His voice echoed in the stairwell as he stomped away. “You'll be hearing from me, or my appointed representative.” The front door banged behind him.

A chilly wind was lifting the curtains.

Mrs. Hershey went over and shut the window. “Sit down, please, girls,” she said.

Danielle and Beth nervously lowered themselves side by side onto Danielle's bed.

“Are we in trouble?” Beth whined.

“Not if you're honest with me. Do either of you girls know where Lola is?”

Danielle and Beth glanced at each other in alarm, then looked back at Mrs. Hershey and shook their heads.

“Try to think, Danielle,” Mrs. Hershey continued. “Did Lola ever mention a hiding place, somewhere she might escape to?”

“No,” Danielle said. “She's run away a lot, huh?”

Mrs. Hershey ignored the question. “What mood would you say Lola's been in lately?”

“Just her normal one. Quieter, maybe. She's got this old yearbook from the school and she spends all day staring at it. Hours and hours. If you ask me, it's creepy.”

“A yearbook? A school annual, you mean?”

“A real old one. In black and white. With olden-days people.”

“She stares at it? Do you know why?”

“She says she's interested in the clothes.”

“The clothes?” Mrs. Hershey said. It didn't sound like Lola Lundy. She didn't believe it for a second. She turned to the two officers. “Finding anything else?”