Uncertainty (13 page)

I thought about everything Jenna had told me. Was that where she resided now, Limbo?

"That must be the world's most interesting book," Henry said. I jumped, startled. I hadn’t even heard him approach, and now he was sitting across from me, watching me curiously. "What's it about?"

"Girly things," I said, shutting the cover and sliding it away, as if disavowing knowledge of the book. "Makeup application, PMS remedies."

He chuckled, looking at the mystical cover, the swirling silver letters. "Uh huh. Getting in touch with the moon goddess, huh?" He took a deep breath, his broad shoulders rising and falling. "So. You're here."

My heart beat erratically again. I couldn't believe it, either. "Apparently I am."

"And you're not going to run away?" he asked.

"I'm not promising anything. Especially not that I won't run," I warned. I was very guarded, and didn't want to sound too casual. The problem was, it was easy to slip into casual mode with him, to let my guard down, even with everything that had passed between us. It was like time had stopped. I would have never thought it would be that way.

I fidgeted in the chair, with no idea what to do with myself or my hands.

"So where's your girlfriend this afternoon?" I asked, looking out of the window beside me onto the slushy street. As cars passed through the muddle puddles, waves of muddy water spurted up onto their undercarriages.

"Let's not talk about that right now," Henry said.

"Okay. So what do you need to talk about with me so urgently?" I pried.

"I told you I don't know where to start. I still don't." He leaned back in his own chair, which creaked against his back as he put his hands behind his head and stretched. I tried to ignore the way the pose elongated his stomach beneath his polo shirt, and focus on the ridiculousness of him wearing a polo shirt instead.

"How about this...why did Thornhill buy up that old ballroom?"

"They've been buying up property all over the place. Part of it seems to be having free access to Hell. They donated a bunch of money to this library, for example, and now my mother" — his lips twisted upon saying that — "comes here all the time and harasses them about drapes and furniture."

"I just first-hand witnessed a display of said harassment," I muttered.

"Oh, you met mom?"

"Uh, no. I don't think she noticed me, the pee-on."

"Remember that orphanage we went to last year?" he asked. "I'm sure you do, since it was your idea. Anyway, they bought that up, and they're fixing that to be some kind of historical museum."

"They bought Dexter?" I asked incredulously. "Why?" It explained the SOLD sign I'd seen on my last visit.

Henry shrugged. "Like I said, a historical place. It's a pretty huge old building. And there are five acres of property; I guess it stretches back a lot farther than we saw, through the trees. It used to be a farm, or something. Back in the woods is the wreck of an old crop barn."

"Dexter put the orphans to work farming," I recited, remembering. "Warwick told us that." Saying his name gave me chills, and I shuddered. Henry's hand shot out to take mine across the table, but I pulled it back into my lap.

"How are you doing now?" Henry asked gently. "I'm sorry I never got a chance to give you my condolences about your friend. Life was such a mess after what we found in the basement."

"It looked pretty simple to me," I said, the tone of my voice hard and unforgiving. There was still a lot of hurt lurking just below the surface.

"Nothing about it was simple," Henry said, equally as stubborn. I could sense whatever he wanted to tell me, words lingering silently at the back of his throat. But I didn't want to hear them. I changed the subject.

"Do you remember seeing graffiti back when we went for our seance?" I asked.

He looked confused. "That's random."

"I know. But I'd really like to find out. And my memory is a little faulty."

"Truthfully, I don't remember much about that night."

"I remember it saying
Hell is closer than you think
. But..." I didn't want to tell him I'd been trespassing, especially now that I knew it was partly his dad's property. Not to mention it just sounded crazy. "I can't recall."

Henry looked thoughtful for a moment, still leaning back, watching a teacher and her pupil struggling through worksheets at the next table. I was getting frequent, achingly pleasant wafts of his cologne again, and tried to breathe out my mouth instead.

"I remember that, actually," he said. "Not from that night. But we went to the place a few months ago, when the real estate company was assessing the property. Dad dragged me along. I remember thinking well, yeah, we live in Hell. It was just somebody failing to be clever, I think."

"So I didn't imagine it," I said.

"What do you think it means?" he asked. "Because obviously you don't think it means nothing."

I shook my head, looking out at the rain sheeting down the glass again. Down on the street, a woman was standing with an umbrella above her. Her daughter was running in circles around her. She was laughing, which is why, even though she was still wearing her blue raincoat, I didn't recognize her at first.

But it was Alyssa Chapman. I wasn't mistaken this time. Her mother peered down lovingly, then shut her eyes and seemed to come to her senses. Her face fell, and she meandered towards the bus stop. Alyssa stood alone, watching her mother curiously, then scurried after her.

Theo, Ms. Vore and I were together in their kitchen the next day. Theo sat on the Formica counter, rifling through a cookbook and tapping the occasional page with a wooden spoon. Ms. Vore had gotten home earlier; she was teaching summer school, after all. Collage making for hoodlums, she said jokingly.

"They want to bake me brownies, but I wouldn't trust eating one," she'd informed us earlier.

The cluttered kitchen had a definite farm theme. There was a huge clock with a cow's face, a bunch of wooden roosters on the wall, and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of barns on the windowsills. Plastic Autumn corn hung in the window from a ribbon.

I was standing beside her. Ms. Vore was cutting up vegetables on a barn-shaped cutting board, to go with the tofu sizzling on the stove. Theo kicked the cupboards gently with her pink Converse. The patterns on the laces didn't match.

"I've never eaten tofu before," I admitted, eying the white, slimy-looking brick. "It always sounded like something out of a Goosebumps book to me, attack of the giant bean curd."

"The blob that ate Detroit," Theo offered.

Ms. Vore, or Lucy as she had told me I could call her out of school, chuckled.

"Well, it doesn't have much flavor in itself," Lucy explained. "It's all about how you cook it and what you cook it with. The way I'm making it now, it'll taste a little like chicken. And not like just like people always say. The texture is pretty close."

"Can I help you with anything?" I offered.

"You can get the red pepper out of the fridge. In the bottom drawer. Thanks, Ariel. Theo never wants to help with cooking."

"Because I like raw meat," Theo said cheerfully. As I retrieved the pepper, Theo tore the top of a bag of bacon bits with her teeth and ate them like raisins. I set the pepper down in a bowl next to Lucy, already brimming with vegetables.

"You won't love it when your cholesterol skyrockets," Lucy muttered, continuing to chop up the huge, purple-skinned red onion in front of her.

"My cholesterol is just fine," Theo said. "I don't want to live over 50, anyway. Gray hair would be hard to dye this color."

"Never have daughters," Lucy said to me, circling the chef's knife. "They will drive you nuts."

"Love you too, mommy," Theo said.

Lucy scraped the chopped up onions into the skillet and stirred them around with the tip of the knife. She joined me back at the kitchen island. "So what have you been doing with your summer, Ariel?"

"Oh, not much. Watching a lot of TV," I said. I couldn't vocalize how it really was, like my life had split in two — the time I had with Jenna, and "real" life with other people. Too bad being with Jenna sometimes felt the most real.

"She was waiting for me to stop being spastic," Theo said, a touch of forlornness in her voice. She pushed her glasses up. "But now that I'm rich, I think I'm okay."

"You know that money is going in your college fund," Lucy said sternly.

"Yeah, how dare you invest my money in higher education and not let me waste it all on candy and gadgets?" Theo said, rolling her eyes. Her phone buzzed, indicating a text. She peered at it and scoffed, shutting it. She then smacked me in the chest. "Hey, did you hear about this Hell Day crap?"

"The what with the huh?" I asked.

"Hell Day," Theo said, setting down the bacon trough and waving her arms around. "Apparently those Thorn Valley weirdos —"

"Thornhill," I corrected automatically.

"Whatever, anyway, they are having some big festival thing in a couple weekends. Complete with balloons and food on a stick and crap. And they're calling it
Hell Day
, because that just sounds like a fun family affair, with pitchforks and Satan dropping by."

"You couldn't pay me to go," Lucy said. It was a stark contrast to Claire, who I assumed would want nothing more than to go. "I can't stand a single one of them. Don't tell anyone I said that."

"Oh, but mommy please?" Theo said. "It'll be so much fun having them look down on us and call us peasants..."

Lucy rolled her eyes and preheated the oven. I helped her finish everything up. Dinner was surprisingly good, although the textures were something to get used to. The tofu was close to chicken, and I ate most of what was on my plate, not just out of politeness.

Afterwords, we excused ourselves up to Theo's room to watch TV. On the walls of her room, she had framed many of her sketches and butted them up against each other. Like ivy crawling west across the drywall. On the other side of her bed, the wall was empty, where she hadn't filled it yet.

"It's not like I'm not a vegan just to spite her," Theo was explaining, even though I hadn't asked. "It's cool for my mom, and I know it's healthy. But I just can't give up on crap. Crap has done me well. And cheese! Oh the cheese!"

"You are the cheese," I said, laughing as she tossed a pillow at me. She had a great many pillows in different animal shapes. I rolled off of the bed onto the floor amass a pile of purple blankets.

"So how are things with you and the boyfriend going?" I quizzed. "Since now
I'm
the one living vicariously through
your
love life."

She sighed, smoothing out the sheet below her. "There's been some tension. We went out to the big fancy dinner. At a steakhouse, mind you, because that is Alex's idea of fancy. That was a nice time. But he's been texting me nonstop and I don't feel like I have room to breath."

We were watching a
Lifetime
movie marathon about jilted women and drawing mustaches on catalog models with markers. Currently the actress' over-Botoxed face was on display, eye drop tears spilling down her cheeks. She reminded me a little of a young Cheryl Rhodes.

"What emotion is she trying to convey?" Theo asked. "Acid reflux?"

I laughed and rearranged her fallen blankets at the end of her bed.

"Your dad wants me to paint some more," she said, still watching the woman's acting attempt.

"Uh oh. You're not going to go into stress overdrive again, are you?" I asked.

"No. But it's going to take me some time to be ready again. I feel like I drained myself doing that mural. I just really want to excel at one thing, you know? Be really good at just one thing." She leaned back against the mountain of pillows.

"I think that's all anybody really wants," I said softly.

"That's who they've been fighting over?" Theo asked, looking over my shoulder. A beefy guy with ginormous eyebrows had sauntered onto the screen, fumbling over his lines. Both of us laughed again.

I looked up and was startled. Jenna stood just outside the room, scowling at me. Her look almost said that I'd been cheating on her. Her arms were crossed tightly, but after a moment of glaring at me, she dropped them to her side and walked away.

CHAPTER 11

THE LIBRARY BECAME
my respite. Not always to meet up with Henry, although I did on several occasions. Almost every few days, he texted me. But to read
Other Worlds
. And it felt like a neutral place, a place where I didn't have to pick one side or the other to live on. A place where I could leave the world outside, waiting, especially since the ghost of my friend always kept out.

Jenna had not been happy when I came home from Theo's sleepover. She complained to me that I'd picked a new friend over her.

"That's why you kept going off," Jenna said. "I kept wondering. Leaving me here to fend for myself."

"It wasn't intentional, Jenna..."