The Accident Season Page 6

  “Same as always,” I say, trying not to think about the look on my mother’s face as she pulled down shelf after shelf the other night. I shake my head and ask Ms. Byrne if she knows where Elsie is and if she will be back in school tomorrow.

  “Elsie, Elsie,” she says distractedly, as if she isn’t sure who I’m talking about. She has her head in the storage cupboard and is rummaging around for supplies. “Here it is,” she mutters, pulling out a roll of tracing paper.

  “Elsie? The secrets booth?” I say to jog her memory. I wonder if it is a characteristic of all artists to be so scatty.

  “Oh, someone asked me about that the other day,” she says, ducking back into the cupboard. “I put a senior in charge of it. That . . . um . . . whatshername—Kate?”

  “Kim?”

  “Kim, of course, sorry.”

  “Yeah.” I bend over toward the cupboard as if that’ll make her hear me better. “But it’s not Kim I’m looking for, it’s Elsie. She’s usually the one with the booth?”

  Ms. Byrne’s phone rings from across the room. “Dammit,” she mumbles. “Sorry, Cara, I have to take that, I’m expecting a call.” She pulls a box of paints out of the cupboard with her when she stands up to answer her phone.

  “Sure, but do you know if Elsie’s off sick or when she’ll be back?”

  “Elsie?” she says, her eyebrows furrowed. “Oh, well, no, I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  “Do you know where she lives?” I ask.

  Ms. Byrne reaches her desk, still looking at me with a vaguely confused air, as if she isn’t quite sure what I’m asking her. “No,” she says, picking up her phone. “I don’t. But I’m sure one of her friends could probably give you her address. Or her phone number.”

  I thank Ms. Byrne without telling her that Elsie doesn’t have any friends, or a cell phone. At least, I’ve never seen her with one, which is unusual in a school full of surreptitious under-the-desk class-time texters and loud lunchtime music-players.

  I slip into English class just as the bell rings and take my usual seat beside Bea by the window. Sam sits alone at the desk behind us.

  “So?” Bea says as Mr. Connolly calls the class to order.

  “Nothing.” I drop my books on the desk with a dull thump. “Not a thing.”

  Sam leans forward so that his breath tickles my neck. “Did she at least say why she’s not in?” he asks.

  I half turn in my seat and spread my hands palm up. “She didn’t seem to remember who Elsie is, let alone where she is.” A small knot of frustration has gotten caught just below my breastbone. It feels like butterfly-nerves.

  Bea is chewing on her pen. “Kim’s kind of right on this one, though,” she says. “Ms. Byrne is particularly spacey, you have to admit.”

  I purse my lips glumly. “I know. I just . . . It’s stupid, you know? I haven’t talked to Elsie—or even really thought about her—for years, and now there’s this huge big question mark about her and this is when she’s not around?”

  “Cara,” Sam says calmly, “it’s been three days. Seriously. She’s probably just at home with a cold.”

  “I know.” The wedge of frustration is like a lump of bread that hasn’t gone down right. What he says makes me think of Alice. I think there’s a rational explanation for everything. “I just want to talk to her.”

  “So we’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  At the front of the classroom, Mr. Connolly clears his throat loudly. A few of our classmates titter. “Cara?” he says, as if he’s repeating himself.

  “Sorry, yes?” Louder laughter comes from the back of the class. I can feel Bea twist in her seat to glare.

  Mr. Connolly sighs. “I’d like you to stay with us, please,” he says wearily. “Class has started, so I expect your private conversations to stop—and will you please cease that tittering in the back, Mr. Jones. I really don’t see how this is funny.” Beside me, Bea turns back around with a smirk.

  “Okay, Cara,” says Mr. Connolly heavily with an expression that is pure, unadulterated Monday morning. “As I was saying, will you please start us off on Act Four, Scene One, and let’s see what this ghost child has to tell the Thane of Cawdor about his future.”

  When the task of reading Macbeth aloud has passed along the rows of desks to Stephen Jones at the back and Mr. Connolly looks like he’d easily murder one of us for a cup of coffee, I judge it safe to lean very slightly in toward Bea. She is scribbling in a notebook and is clearly not listening to the desecration of Shakespeare’s words that is happening at the back of the class.

  “Did you bring in the invitations?” I ask her in an undertone.

  Sam and I told Bea all about my idea for the masquerade ball over the phone yesterday, and since then it’s almost all we’ve been able to talk about. Even Alice thinks it’s a great idea, especially because Nick has said he’ll let us have it at his place. The dresses Sam and I bought for her and Bea fit perfectly. When Alice tried hers on last night, she actually laughed at how perfect it was.

  Sam leans forward in his seat at my words.

  Mr. Connolly looks over at us sharply, so we fall silent for a few minutes while Emma McNamara stumbles over her lines. Bea quietly takes out a notebook that seems to already be entirely dedicated to the party. She flicks through pages of sketches of masks and lists of songs to put on the party mix-tape. Spooky, witchy folksongs, drowning sailor ditties, black cat and whiskey moon waltzes. She takes out a stack of fancy lacy invitations she has clearly made herself.

  “You are cordially invited to the Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Masquerade Ball,” she reads reverently. “All great parties should be named.”

  Sam reaches forward and tussles Bea’s already-messy hair. “It’s perfect,” he says.

  The smile he gives her leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

  ***

  Before our last class, Sam reminds me that we’ve a note from my mother excusing us from chemistry experiments this month. The chemistry teacher, Mrs. Delaney, shakes her head but hands the note back to Sam and lets us go, leaving Bea sitting in front of a line of Bunsen burners emitting long pale flames.

  Sam caught his finger in a locker door this morning. The nail is mottled and blue. I press the heel of my hand hard into the bruises on the side of my left arm. Pain glows like a flare. As we walk down the road toward the river, Sam complains halfheartedly about getting bad marks on our experiments this term, but I am secretly glad to be away from unstable chemicals and open flames.

  When we’re halfway home I lose my footing and almost slip, but Sam takes my hand and steadies me. His bandaged finger feels rougher, slightly swollen still from where the locker door caught it. Suddenly I think of the Elsie doll in the mousetrap.

  “I want to show you something,” I say to Sam, and I pull on his arm and we turn around and go back along the river toward the town, to the big stone bridge that people throw their fishing lines off of in summer. There is a family with two small children crossing it from the other side. The children’s bags are almost as big as they are, but the kids run like they weigh nothing at all.

  “Why aren’t we crossing at our bridge?” Sam asks me.

  “It collapsed,” I say simply. Sam just stares. We cross the bridge and walk along the bank on the opposite side of the river.

  “And you were nowhere near it at the time of the collapse, right?” Sam says with a pained expression.

  I wince. “I was kind of on it,” I admit. “Don’t tell Mom.”

  Sam stops for a second, and closes his eyes.

  “I’m fine,” I tell him, and I pull on his elbow to lead him toward the woods.

  Sam walks on, but his expression is strange. He says something too low for me to hear. Then he clears his throat. “So,” he says at normal volume, “where are we going?”

  I tell him ab
out the mousetrap while we walk; about the doll that looked just like Elsie, which had been set like bait in the trap.

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I think she put it there herself. I just don’t understand why.”

  Sam isn’t looking at me like I’m crazy, which is reassuring. He just says, “Show me,” so I point through the trees to the clearing and tell him it’s right up ahead.

  When we come to the clearing, we both stop and stare.

  “Was it like this when you came here the last time?” Sam whispers.

  “No,” I whisper back. I’m not sure why we’re whispering, but it feels appropriate. All around the clearing, hanging from the branches of every tree, is a flock of dream catchers, the kind you can get at the Saturday market in Galway: colorful webbed circles hung with little beads and feathers. There are maybe fifty of them, all different shapes and colors, just hanging there at head height.

  “What is this place?” Sam reaches up as if to touch one of the dream catchers but then drops his hand.

  I feel a lump forming in my throat. I can hardly breathe past it. My heart thuds in my chest and goose bumps prick up along my arms. “Elsie did this.” I turn around and around so that the trees revolve about me, and the dream catchers blur. I can feel my heart beat in my ears.

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.” I stop spinning and close my eyes. It takes a few seconds for my balance to steady, for my breaths to slow, for my heart to beat normally again. I take Sam by the hand and lead him over to the little bush that hid the mousetrap. When I carefully part the branches, we can see it clearly: an ordinary mousetrap, wood and wire, with a tiny little doll sitting on top of it.

  Sam laughs, but I recognize it as disbelief rather than humor. “Who is she?”

  There is a strange sinking feeling in the bottom of my heart. I say it again. “I don’t know.”

  6

  Elsie has disappeared.

  I don’t know how I know this, but it’s something I’m almost certain of, and not just because she isn’t in school on Tuesday morning either. Alice says she’s probably home sick or gone visiting relatives, but every time I look for her in the library and see Kim at the secrets booth, something twists inside me and tells me she’s never coming back.

  Halfway through Irish class, Alice texts to tell me that almost all her friends have said they’re coming to the Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Ball. They loved the invitations, she says. Stop obsessing about Elsie and concentrate on the party.

  Alice thinks I’m being dramatic. Maybe before last week Sam would have thought so too, but something about looking through my pictures and seeing the dream catchers in the clearing has made him thoughtful. He believes me.

  There was never any question of Bea not believing me. In French we sit at the very back of the classroom and Bea takes out her cards. Mrs. McCarthy has handed out written comprehension worksheets and is correcting last night’s homework at her desk. All around us people whisper, pages turn, pens scratch on the worksheets or on notes that’ll pass from hand to hand like a chain letter across the room to the person they’re intended for, music hums from earphones hidden behind hair, feet tap against desks, chairs are swung back on, their legs squeaking across the floor.

  “Quietly, please,” Mrs. McCarthy says without looking up from her desk. The volume in the room lowers a fraction.

  Bea spreads her cards out on the table. We are asking them about Elsie, pausing every few minutes to scribble down an answer in our worksheets.

  “Who is she, where is she, what does she want?” Bea mutters as she places each card on the table with a soft ffp noise.

  “And what does she have to do with us?” I add in a whisper, looking up at the teacher every once in a while to make sure she’s still busy with the homework. Philippe préfère faire du vélo que la voiture parce que cela est mauvais pour l’environnement, I write absentmindedly.

  “Where does she fit into our story?” Bea asks the cards softly. She turns them over one by one. Then she is quiet.

  “What does it say?” Sam nods down at the cards.

  “It says,” says Bea slowly, “to trust.”

  “To trust Elsie?” Abandoning my worksheet, I crane my neck to see the cards the right way up from Bea’s side of the table.

  “To trust Elsie, to trust ourselves, to trust each other.” She rests her chin in the palms of her hands, her fingers just brushing her cheeks. “She has been through something—something she can’t get over. She needs us to help her find her way home.”

  “I said quietly,” Mrs. McCarthy calls suddenly from the front of the room. Bea quickly covers her cards with a folder, but Mrs. McCarthy still hasn’t looked up.

  “But why is she in all my pictures?” I hiss to Bea. “Is she following us?”

  Bea shakes her head. “I don’t know. See this card?” She’s pointing to a card with ten stars shining over a castle. “Ten of coins. It’s saying she’s like a mirror.”

  “A mirror? A mirror of what?”

  Bea cocks her head to one side, then shakes it so that her hair falls almost to her shoulder. “I don’t know,” she says again. I can tell it’s hard for her to admit.

  “Okay, class,” says Mrs. McCarthy, getting up from her chair. “Hand your worksheets up to the front of the room when you’re ready and take out your textbooks.”

  I’ve only answered every second question, probably badly, but I hand my worksheet to the girl in front of me anyway. “So where is she?” I ask Bea.

  Bea taps a card with four sticks stuck in the ground in a square. “At home, or wherever she feels that home is.”

  Sam looks around the crowded classroom. Worksheets flutter from hand to hand to the front of the room. People whisper as they take out their books. The morning sun streaks in through the dirty windows. “Not here, that’s for sure.”

  “So what do we do?” I ask. Mrs. McCarthy calls the class back to order and starts telling us which page to turn to, but her words hardly register.

  Bea turns a card to face me. It has three stars hung above an archway. “Three of coins,” she says. She points to herself, to Sam, and to me, then to the three stars on the card. She says, “We work together, we trust each other. We find her.”

  “And how exactly,” says Sam, “do we go about doing that?”

  Bea’s eyes glitter like the sea. “I have an idea.”

  Mrs. McCarthy’s voice cuts loudly through her words. “Miss Morris,” she says to me. “Mr. Fagan. If Miss Kivlan is distracting you with her magic spells, you can sit up at the front of the class.”

  Bea quickly hides her cards, but half the class has already turned around to laugh and stare.

  “Sorry, Mrs. McCarthy,” we mumble.

  Mrs. McCarthy turns to Bea. “Miss Kivlan,” she says. “We are not in Hogwarts, we are in fifth-year French. So you can now lead the class in a chant about irregular verbs.”

  The entire class starts to laugh. It might be my imagination, but the laughter seems less mean today than it usually does. Maybe the idea of magic spells is more appealing when the people doing them have invited everyone to a Halloween ball along with the most popular seniors. Bea gives me a small smile as she opens her book.

  ***

  After all our classes are over, we sit out on the steps of the main building and wait for the school to empty. Cars drive into the parking lot and drive back out (our mother’s is not one of them; she is working late at the studio but calls every half hour to make sure we are all well wrapped up, protected, not jumping in rivers or running with scissors). People walk home in twos and threes. Outside, on the road, the buses chugga-chug, waiting for everybody to come aboard. Teachers’ heels clatter past. Little brothers and sisters shout, dogs bark, the wind whistles. Our extended Indian summer is finally coming to a close.

  While we wait, we are joined by Alice a
nd Kim and some of Alice’s friends: Niamh; her boyfriend, Joe; his brother Martin, who is in our year; and Carl Gallagher, who is Toby Healy’s obnoxious best friend. Carl sits up on the top step, very obviously close to Bea, but she doesn’t seem to notice. I can’t help but think that nobody sits that close to me. I look over at Sam, who is on the other side of Bea. Then I look down at my hands.

  Everybody is talking about the Black Cat and Whiskey Moon Masquerade Ball. It’s the only reason Alice’s friends are sitting with us in the first place, I think, but I like that they’re sitting with us at all.

  “You got some Metallica on that playlist?” Carl is asking Bea. “You need some old-school stuff for a Halloween mix. Pink Floyd? Guns N’ Roses? Here, let me play a couple of songs I think you’ll like.”

  Joe, who doesn’t look particularly impressed at Carl’s sudden interest in Bea, is asking Alice about liquor. “Do you think Nick could do a beer run for us before the party? I mean, I have a fake ID, but it’d be cool if he could get it for us—you never know when you’ll run into a neighbor at the liquor store, you know?”

  Before Alice can answer, though, her phone rings.

  “Speak of the devil,” Joe says.

  While Alice walks away to talk with Nick on the phone, Niamh and Kim discuss costumes. “I heard Katie Donoghue’s going as a bunny. Like, in a headband with ears and a fluffy tail.”

  Kim snorts. “A bunny. To a masquerade. Does she not get that this isn’t just some stupid old Halloween party? That’s the whole point.”

  “I know, right?”

  Bea has taken out her ukulele and is singing softly. A train trundles by on the tracks at the far end of the school. Little by little the parking lot empties. Soon only the last few stragglers, the janitors, the principal and her office staff, and the few pupils and teachers who stay around for detention or supervised study are left on the school grounds.

  “So, hey,” says Carl, standing up to leave, “we’re heading to this open mic thing in the bar at the university. Want to pretend to be college students for the evening?”