The Accident Season Read online

  “We should have a party,” I say to Sam.

  “A Halloween party?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What,” Sam says, “you, me, and Bea?”

  “No.” I narrow my eyes at him. “A real party. Like the ones we went to with Alice this summer. Like the ones Toby Healy and that crowd are always talking about. We should have a party like that.”

  Sam bites off the bottom of his cone and sucks the ice cream through it. “No one would come if we threw a party,” he says. “It’d end up just being you, me, and Bea.”

  “Not necessarily.” I think of Alice smoking with us behind the soccer field. “It’s like Bea said. People need a distraction from study and mock exams and college applications. I know a couple of people in our year who’d go. And if we can get Alice to invite her friends, who’d then invite their friends, we could get a really good crowd.”

  We cross the bridge at Spanish Arch and make our way down to the pier. Sam squints at me, the sun reflected on the water blinding us both. “Not that I’m against the idea,” he says, “but wouldn’t most people already have parties to go to? Like you said, Halloween’s six days away.”

  But the idea is growing in my head like a balloon. “Not if ours was better,” I say, and I can hear the excitement building in my voice. “Not if we make it a story.”

  “A story?”

  “Like in my dream,” I explain. “Where everybody takes off their human masks and comes as who they really are. So, it’s a costume party, but you have to come as what you feel like on the inside. All our demons, right there in the open.” I point my melting ice-cream cone at him. “Now, doesn’t that sound better than any old house party?”

  Sam smiles, but I can tell he’s not convinced. “It does, yeah, but—”

  “And we can make fancy invitations, like for a ball. We can explain that people are invited to take off their human disguises and come as their true selves behind the human mask.” I stop and grab Sam’s arm. “A masquerade! We swap our human masks for masks that represent our true selves! Who’d go to some stupid Halloween party when they could come to the changelings’ masquerade?”

  Sam laughs and covers my hand with one of his. “Well, I’d definitely go to a party like that.”

  “Right?” I practically bounce on the spot, close enough to step on Sam’s toes. “And we could do it, we could. If Alice can persuade her friends—”

  “If we can persuade Alice . . .”

  I shrug and we walk on. “I think she might like the idea.” I picture Alice’s bruised face at lunchtime yesterday. Alice avoiding her friends. I pause for a second to get my thoughts in order. “I think she’d be happy to have people talking about something other than our accidents for once,” I say softly.

  Sam has heard me; he nods thoughtfully. Then a glint comes into his eyes. “And,” he says as we finish our ice creams and wipe our sticky hands with paper napkins, “maybe Nick would let us have it at his place.”

  “Yes!” I squeal. “Sam, you’re a genius.”

  Nick and his four band mates rent a house in a development at the edge of town. Most of the houses in the development were never bought or lived in, so he has very few neighbors to object to them holding band practice until four in the morning or throwing wild parties on weekdays. And Halloween falls on a Friday this year. My mother would never have to know.

  “I know, I know,” Sam says modestly. “What can I say? I’m brilliant.”

  He links arms with me and we cross the road to avoid a gaggle of angry-looking swans. The sails of the ships in the mouth of the river clink softly in the breeze. When we reach the end of the pier, there are children drawing hopscotch squares on the ground in colored chalk. In the sky the seagulls swirl, and on every bench there seems to be a couple kissing. We walk out to the edge of the water and sit on the stone wall facing the wide Atlantic and Sam whistles one of Bea’s sea shanties—a particularly rude drinking song—and I laugh and call him a drunken sailor.

  “I should buy myself a better hat,” Sam says, touching the top of his bare head as if there is a hat there already. There would be if my mother had seen us leave this morning; as it is, we are already bundled up too warmly for the unseasonable weather with our big boots, our scarves, and second sweaters. But it’s hard to get my mother’s voice out of my head even when she isn’t there; if I don’t wear enough layers, I can almost hear her saying, Take another sweater, would you, Cara? You’ll catch your death out there.

  “That’s true,” I say to Sam. “Any good sailor needs a proper sailor hat.” I run my fingers horizontally across the chest of my yellow sweater. My hand bumps over the embroidered sunflower. “D’you like my stripy sailor T-shirt?”

  “It’s the stripiest T-shirt on the seven seas.” Sam draws more invisible stripes on the back of my sweater. Even under all my layers I feel his fingertips tickle my shoulder blades. I find myself wanting to lean in toward his touch.

  “We should find ourselves some wenches,” I tell him. “No sailor worth his salt makes port without finding wenches.”

  Sam moves his hand from my shoulder down to the ground behind me. He says, “There’s only one wench I want,” and then he starts to hum another one of Bea’s sea shanties, leaning back on his elbows and singing it to the sky. I stay sitting up, face to the sea.

  This is the first Sam’s mentioned about a girl in a long time, and I’ve been sort of secretly glad because I like the way our trio is at the moment and wouldn’t want anything complicating that. And then my mind registers that Sam is singing one of Bea’s songs. I think: Bea? He likes Bea? and I don’t know why, but suddenly the day seems a little cold. I hug my arms to my chest.

  “You cold?” Sam asks me. “Because I bet it’s a lot colder down there.” He points down at the water and moves as if he’s about to push me in.

  I make a face and bump my shoulder with his, and we mime pushing each other into the water for a while, and I try not to focus on the thought of his perfect scratchy voice singing Bea’s songs. I try not to think about why I’m trying not to think about it.

  When we make our way back to the bus station, the roads are more crowded. In front of a music shop, a woman is making her small dog jump and turn and even backflip in time with a raggedy old waltz. A crowd of tourists and families stand around and clap. The little dog is dressed as a Pierrot clown, black and white and tear-stained. His ruff looks uncomfortable.

  Because I am still looking behind me as Sam pulls me forward through the crowd, I walk right into someone. The someone is tall and makes a hollow ringing noise when I bump into his chest. I make to stop, meaning to apologize, but Sam is pushing quickly through the crowd, his hand hooked under my elbow. I twist out of Sam’s grip and turn around to look back at the man. For a few seconds I think he has disappeared, but then I see his reflection in the window of the shop beside me. He looks like one of the human statues that busk in the city, but this isn’t one I’ve ever seen before. He is dressed a little like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. His suit is spray-painted silver, and so are his shoes, his hat, and even his skin. I take a few steps forward toward the window, noticing the strangest details reflected in the glass. The metal man’s costume is flawless. He seems to be wearing silver nail polish on his fingernails and looks like he has painted the most realistic little hinges at each of his joints. There is something about him that seems strangely familiar. I search through my handbag for a few coins to throw in the box at his feet, but when I turn from the window, there is no one there. I shiver and quickly walk away.

  When we are halfway to the bus station, Sam notices the sign for a party shop down a little alley and he takes me by the elbow and pulls me away from the main road.

  “Sammy, we’ll miss our bus.”

  “There’ll be another bus,” he says. “Let’s go find things for the party.”

  Neither of us has ever no
ticed this place before. The shop front is grimy and plain, but the door is wide open. I follow Sam through.

  Inside, it’s like a little child’s dream has exploded. There are clown wigs and hula hoops, bats and spiders and scrunched-up rubber witch masks; there are Santa Clauses and Easter Bunnies and April Fools’ joke tricks all stacked haphazardly together so that it looks like the whole year just dumped all its holidays in the one small room.

  Sam rummages around gleefully. “So what would you go as?” he asks. “To the masquerade. What would your not-disguise be? The real you under the human mask?”

  I shake my head and hold up what looks eerily like a real stuffed crow. “A taxidermist?”

  “Now that’s a creepy costume.”

  There doesn’t seem to be a shop owner or anyone around, but even so I come up close to Sam and whisper when I say that this is the strangest shop I’ve ever seen. Sam is sorting through a bucket of eyeballs. “Everything looks too real.” Even the rubbery witch mask, when I take it down from its shelf, feels a little too much like human skin. I put it back quickly and wipe my hands on my sweater.

  Sam thinks the shop is a treasure trove. “Here,” he says, and hands me a pair of wings. It is like somebody stretched a butterfly so it was as tall as a person, and then cut off its wings. I am used to the little gauze-and-wire contraptions you buy in toy shops or discount stores; the ones with the elastic straps that cut into your armpits. But these wings attach to the back of your dress (they are the type of accessory that would only ever be worn with a dress, I imagine) and they feel soft and supple, almost leathery, and, like everything else in the shop, just a little too real for comfort.

  “They’re beautiful,” I say to Sam, and we both stand admiring the wings. They are a strange bluish-brownish-green color that shifts when I move, as if it’s reacting to the light. After a moment I realize why I recognize this: The wings are the exact color of Sam’s eyes. I put them down and step away. I say to Sam, “I’m not sure I like it here.”

  “Don’t be such a scaredy-cat,” he says, and waggles a toy black cat in front of my face. “I’m getting you those wings. You can be like the fairy girl in your dream.”

  Only a little reluctant, I pick up the wings again. I think of the fairy girl in her silver Converse. I have a similar pair of shoes at home. “I do like them . . .” I say hesitantly. Sam has his back turned. When he faces me again, he is holding a top hat and a bow tie.

  “What is this place?” I ask him. Sam shakes his head. Behind him, hanging on the wall as if it’s being worn by the Invisible Man, is an old, moth-holed suit jacket, pinstripe trousers attached to black braces, and a pair of bright white spats. When I point them out to Sam, his eyes gleam.

  “Vaudeville zombie?” he suggests.

  I shake my head. “Flickering silent-film ghost guy.”

  When he understands that I mean the changeling boy in my dream, he sort of nods in wonder. “This isn’t a costume shop, I don’t think,” he says. “It’s a magic shop.”

  I turn around in circles, trying to find a salesperson amid the mess. “A magical shop,” Sam amends.

  When I spot what looks like an old-fashioned grocery-store cash register on a table at the far end of the shop, an old woman appears from behind a starry curtain. Her hair is gray and worn in braids that wind around her head like in those medieval paintings and her body is draped in multicolored scarves. Behind me, Sam mutters something that sounds like “Of course,” which I think means that this lady fits in with her shop perfectly.

  We make our way past the shelves and bins and baskets toward her. Beside the table with the cash register on it, there is a rack of dresses. One of them immediately catches my eye. It’s green and brown and wet-looking; it seems to be made out of seaweed and fishing nets. Next to it is a dress that looks like it’s been stitched together from moss and leaves. My skin prickles. I take both dresses off the rack and silently hold them out for Sam to see.

  I know he can’t possibly be thinking of the other changeling girls I dreamed of, but he thinks of Bea and Alice immediately.

  “For Alice and Bea?” he says. “Perfect!”

  Sam takes the dresses off me and hands them to the lady along with the wings, the jacket, the pinstripe trousers, the braces, the top hat, and even the spats. The lady says nothing as she folds everything up and puts it in two big paper bags. She punches some buttons in the old cash register and writes a price on a piece of paper. As we leave the shop, she smiles and smiles. I turn around as we walk away to see the name of the shop to remember for later, but there is no sign above the door and I can’t distinguish the shop from any of the other poky little buildings on the street.

  I stop in the middle of the road and quickly snap a picture with my phone. On the bus, I show the picture to Sam. We zoom the image in as far as the screen will let us, until we can finally make out a mannequin in a wizard’s robe in one of the windows on the street.

  “There it is.” Sam points at the purple starry fabric.

  I am more interested in the woman with the multicolored scarves, who is standing at the window looking straight at me. Standing behind her, almost in shadow but not quite, is someone else. Wordlessly, I point the figure out to Sam. It is blurry but unmistakable. It’s Elsie.

  5

  Before class on Monday morning, we go to the library. I have the picture of the costume shop saved on my phone and I want to see what Elsie has to say about it. I told Bea all about it over the phone yesterday, and on our way through the school she is uncharacteristically quiet.

  In the library, there is a small crowd at the secrets booth. This happens sometimes, after a particularly boisterous senior party (when the booth becomes a new confessional for the heartsick and the lovelorn, the hungover and the lost) or whenever a local paper runs a piece on the booth (“Online Art Collective Influences Student-Run Secrets Project,” or “Connecting Through the Unsaid: Teenagers, Secrets, and Art”). When the crowd disperses, Bea and I come forward, but just like on Friday, Elsie isn’t at her seat in front of the antique typewriter.

  “Where’s Elsie?” I ask the girl sitting in Elsie’s place. Her name is Kim Brennan and she’s a friend of Alice’s, with straight, shiny hair and perfectly applied eyeliner. I’m vaguely surprised to see her here; Alice’s friends aren’t usually the arty library types.

  “Who?” Kim asks.

  “Elsie. The girl who’s usually at the booth?”

  “Oh.” Kim shrugs. “I dunno.”

  “But she’s always here,” says Bea.

  “Not today,” says Kim. “Clearly.”

  “Well, do you know where she is?”

  Kim shakes her head.

  “Well, did she say anything to you when she left you with the booth?”

  Kim starts to twist her hair into a braid. “Ms. Byrne’s the one who asked me to look after the booth today. I guess you could ask her.” She ties the braid off with a frayed elastic. It slips down her hair the moment her hands leave it. “Although you mightn’t get a straight answer. I don’t think she knows who’s supposed to be doing this.” She gestures vaguely at the secrets box. “For a teacher, she’s kind of a weirdo.”

  Bea puts her elbows on the desk in front of Kim and assumes her best scary-crone face. “Aren’t we all?” she breathes. I’m constantly amazed by how Bea just does or says whatever she feels the moment requires, but Kim doesn’t seem impressed. Alice’s friends aren’t terribly intimidated by Bea.

  “Do you want to leave a secret?” Kim asks us with a hint of impatience.

  Bea shakes her head; she likes to say she has no use for secrets because she tells her whole life like a story, secrets and all. She doesn’t need the anonymity of the typewriter text and the little wooden box.

  I sit down in front of the typewriter and Kim puts up the folders that act as privacy shields from both her and the rest of the library.
I run my fingers over the keys. The space bar is dented in the middle by so many thumbs. The secrets box sits on the floor beside me. I can spy the beginnings of one of the secrets inside through the slot on the wooden box. It says: I cheated on my girlfriend and I don’t regret it. I can just about make out another one underneath it that says something about not believing in God. I stare at the blank sheet of paper in front of me as Bea compliments Kim on her perfectly lined cat eyes. Do you want to leave a secret? Kim asked, but I can’t think of a single secret to leave.

  I look at the typewriter and my mind is a perfect blank. I write: I am afraid that I have no secrets. I look over at Bea and think of Sam singing her ditty on the pier. Then I backspace to the start of the line and I type: I am afraid of my secrets. Then I think about the accident season and Bea’s cards and Elsie’s worried face in all my pictures, and I backspace again, a little bit frantically, and write: I am afraid of everybody else’s secrets. My fingers threaten to slip into the space between the keys.

  When I look up, I see that I’ve made a mistake: I’ve backspaced like on a computer, but instead of erasing my words, the typewriter has written my second sentence over the first, the third over the lot. My secret is illegible. I fold it up and put it in the box anyway.

  Because I still have a few minutes before the bell rings, I leave Bea with Sam outside our English classroom and go to the art room to find Ms. Byrne, who is setting up the little studio for her first class.

  “Ah, Cara,” she says when I manage to catch her attention. “How is your mother?” Ms. Byrne has bought several of my mother’s prints, which is the only reason she knows who I am; I did a week of art in sophomore year to see if I wanted to pursue it but dropped it quickly, much to the relief of all involved. My mother may be an artist, but I can’t paint so much as a stick figure.