Under the Light

  It had a soft cover, plain black, no title.

  “Is that a journal?” asked Jenny.

  “Sketchbook.” He opened it to the first page, where there was a beautiful pencil depiction of what looked like a wooden ladder and a kind of carpenter’s table. I recognized it but apparently they did not.

  “Did you draw this?” Jenny touched the paper tentatively.

  “No. Someone living in my room did it with my pencils and left it under my bed.” Billy turned to the second page. Another drawing, this one of the tree under which James and I had shared a picnic. “It’s the tree from school, across from the cafeteria.”

  Jenny nodded. He kept turning the pages, five in all, not in chronological order of when James and I had visited them, but laid out as if James had been recalling random moments from our handful of days together. The third was a phone booth (the one where James and I spoke—he was holding the receiver to his ear, but he was speaking to me, and I was inches from him though invisible to everyone else); the next a sketch of two empty chairs and a table in the school library (where we did Billy’s homework assignment together); and the last was a drawing of a face, not mine, and not Jenny’s, but somehow both.

  “Is that her?” Jenny asked out loud. An elderly man with an armful of art books was passing their carrel and stopped as if Jenny had spoken to him. Billy motioned her to hush. But the man did not move away—instead he stood a few feet from them, reading book covers in the adjacent aisle.

  Billy turned to the next page in the journal and snatched up one of the little pencils from the shelf where scratch paper is left in small trays. On the blank page he wrote: She would have looked like you, right?

  Jenny slipped the pencil out of his fingers and under this line wrote: What should we do now?

  Billy smiled, and instead of taking the pencil from her, he wrapped his hand around hers and moved her hand, just as I had done with James when I was Light. Jenny read the words they had written together: Field trip.

  They boarded a city bus and sat together near the back where no one was close enough to overhear their conversation. I sat across the aisle trying not to think about riding this kind of bus with James’s arm around me—it made me miss him too much.

  “What if we get caught?” Jenny asked.

  “Caught at school during school hours?”

  “But my mother tells me I’ve been pulled out,” she said. “I’m going to be homeschooled.”

  Billy was distracted by some thought he didn’t share. “Yeah, Mitch is sticking me in night school if I get probation.”

  “Because of me?” Jenny looked guilty. “Is that another in-joke? Does probation mean your brother grounded you?”

  “No.” Billy shrugged it off. “It’s a long story you do not want to hear.”

  I followed them a few paces behind as they were dropped off a block from the high school and as they made their way onto the campus through the rows of lockers during passing period. Billy found that his locker combination still worked, and there was a soft hooded jacket rumpled up at the bottom. Jenny put it on over her prim, acorn-button cardigan, and Billy carried her book bag over his shoulder.

  No one paid them any attention and they remained inconspicuous, staying near the bicycle racks until the second bell rang and the paths between buildings were empty again.

  “So.” Billy walked up to the tree in front of the cafeteria and looked around. “This is the tree he drew.” Jenny scanned the lawn and looked up into the branches. All I could think of was the glory of tasting fresh orange and the crunch of an apple, the familiar softness of a boiled egg, things I had not eaten in 130 years until I sat under this tree with James.

  “Do you get any hits off this place?” Billy asked.

  “Hits?” Jenny smiled out from under the black hood. “I’m not a medium.”

  “You told me a ghost was trying to talk to you,” said Billy. “Can you try saying something to them right now?”

  I bristled at this childish game. I am not a Halloween party prank, I snapped at him, but he was oblivious.

  A woman in kitchen whites came out of the cafeteria and frowned at Billy and Jenny. “Why aren’t you in class?” she called.

  “We’re going,” Billy called back. He pulled the notebook pages from his back pocket and waved them at her in a blur. “We got hall passes.”

  The woman propped the door open with a wooden wedge and left them alone again.

  They gave up trying to conjure a spirit at the tree and moved on to the phone booth beside the gymnasium. My soul fluttered with nerves at this place. It was where I first learned James’s name and where we shared our secrets, my bondage to hosts, his imprisonment to the land where his childhood home had once stood.

  Billy opened the squeaking door and stepped inside. He looked for clues, but all the scratched and painted messages were from others and in a quite different tone than any note James or I might have left behind. Jenny stepped up to the opening and looked up and around through the cracked glass.

  “Maybe one of them called the other from here,” Billy suggested.

  Jenny shrugged. “Does it even work anymore?”

  Billy lifted the receiver and clicked the button hidden underneath.

  I had the odd idea, just then, that only Billy’s fingerprints would be found on the phone, if a detective were working to piece together the mystery of my days with James. For our conversation in this tiny booth was before I had fingers.

  They paused at the school library window, but Jenny grabbed Billy’s sleeve, holding him back. “There are too many people,” she said. “The librarian knows me too well.”

  For a moment I thought, I have spent more hours here than either of you. Remembering how I had helped James compose an essay as if he were Billy, sitting at a table in this little library, made me miss James again. But as I tried to recall the last time I had seen him, heaven did not come into focus in my mind. I wanted to remember the last thing he said to me before I left heaven to find Jenny, but there was only silence. This bothered me so much that as I dragged behind Billy and Jenny toward the auditorium it felt as if I were wading through a drift of snow.

  The double doors had been left propped open even though there didn’t seem to be anyone inside. The house was dark, but there was a pool of light on the stage and a can of paint and two wooden chairs nearby sitting on a tarp. Nothing else.

  Billy paused at the back of the house, perhaps listening to hear if there was anyone about. Jenny let the hood of the jacket drop off the back of her head.

  “Your ghost didn’t draw this,” she pointed out.

  Billy motioned her to come and I walked behind them as slow as smoke might, though I was not even that substantial. I was melancholy and thinking in dreary metaphors. I was the moon by day, displaced and faded.

  We followed Billy, watched him explore the stage right wings until he found what he was looking for. He grinned at Jenny and started up a built-in ladder beside the stage crew’s work table, just as it appeared in the drawing. It was dark—Jenny came to the foot of the ladder and gazed up at the shape of Billy climbing into the blackness, ten, twenty feet up, then disappearing.

  She had begun to ascend when his voice made her hurry.

  “Wow.”

  I remembered the feeling of the hard wooden rungs through the soles of my shoes, but this time I floated up to the loft. When Jenny got to the top, Billy put a hand on the back of her head to make sure she didn’t hit the slanted wooden beams. They had discovered the platform, no bigger than a bed, which would’ve been plain wood except for the thick black cloth that James and I had left there, a faded pile of curtain, spread across the surface. Jenny simply stared, but I dropped to the boards and wept.

  The material was wrinkled, yet even in the low light it remembered the shape of two bodies.

  CHAPTER 18

  Jenny

  IS THAT WHAT I THINK IT IS?” asked Billy.

  It was like we’d found an animal’
s den but the imprints left there were in the shape of two humans.

  “How did you know this loft was here?” I asked him.

  “Last year in carpentry we built a set for one of the plays.”

  Ever since Saturday night I had been almost remembering a dream I had about a boy who liked me—it was right on the edge of my brain. Every time I thought about it, I got that kind of joy rush like when I was little and woke up remembering we were leaving on vacation after breakfast. But it was also like the wave of nerves I got when I woke up remembering I had to give an oral report in history class that day. It wasn’t the first time I’d dreamed I fell in love, but this dream was different.

  In church the day before I thought I might have dreamed of a real boy, but one from the past. He might have been the spirit trying to make contact with me. I didn’t want him to be dead or imaginary.

  But now I was changing my idea about who had sent me messages in the pages of the Bible and about where that vision of a flood came from. Two spirits had been visiting my life, apparently, during my lost days, one in my body and one in Billy’s. She was called Helen and I was starting to believe she was the one who guided my finger over the verses of Scripture.

  I lay down on the cloth—Billy did the same, lying with his arm pressed to mine. We stared up into the jungle of ropes, lights, and electrical cords that hung above us, shifting almost imperceptibly in the blackness.

  “I think Helen was trying to talk to me,” I said. And I thought, When she lay here with Billy’s body, this is what she saw when she looked up.

  “How do you know it wasn’t the male ghost?” Billy asked. “He was the one who fell in love with her in your body. Maybe he can’t let go of you.”

  You would think this would be the answer—I dreamed of a ghost boy because Helen was in love with him and when he held her, the lips he kissed and the body he lay with was mine. You’d think I’d jump at the idea of my dream being a leftover memory of Helen’s. But it didn’t feel right at all.

  The boy I dreamed about was on another planet, light-years away.

  A voice from the stage below us made me jump. “Are these the only two things we have to paint?”

  I grabbed Billy’s hand.

  “I think there’s a table in the shop we’re supposed to do, too,” came another voice from twenty feet below us. “Or maybe a little desk.”

  I could hear the clink of a bucket handle, the shuffle of feet; I could smell paint.

  Billy squeezed my hand.

  “This can is half empty,” said one boy.

  “It’s water-based, I think,” said the other boy. “Maybe we could thin it out.”

  “We should go,” I whispered to Billy, but he shushed me. A little too loudly.

  “Shit!” said one of the boys below. “Did you hear that?”

  I held my breath, frightened. Of what—being sent to the principal’s office? Billy stifled a laugh.

  “Hear what?” whispered the other boy. Then they both listened for a few moments while Billy and I stayed pressed together, trying to be still.

  “This place is haunted,” said the first boy.

  “Really?”

  “There’s supposed to be a cold spot on stage.”

  “Weird.” The second boy sniffed. “Hey, ghosts, don’t bother us and we won’t bother you.”

  Billy watched me, studying my face and throat, then held up a hand that said, Don’t worry, Miss, I’ll take care of this. He let out a long, low groan, just soft enough to be believable.

  “Holy shit!”

  Billy grinned as we heard paintbrushes clack to the floor and footsteps running away.

  After a moment of silence, we climbed down. He took my hand as I stepped off the last rung—something about his treating me like a lady gave me a sudden jolt of pleasure. Here was a cute boy who liked me, and we had a secret story together—something no one else would ever guess at or understand. I knew my parents wouldn’t let me date him, but he was my boyfriend anyway, I thought. I’d never had a boyfriend. I stared at him, amazed.

  Billy adjusted his sweatshirt jacket on me, zipped me in, flipped the hood over my hair. I thought he was taking more time than he needed to.

  “Am I disguised?” I asked. “Do I look like someone else?”

  “Not to me,” said Billy.

  We waited until the bell rang for the next passing period and then slipped into the foot traffic, making our way back to the lockers. I saw Jill Sugden from church coming our way, so I ducked my head and pulled Billy in the other direction, toward the quad. Then out of the general crowd noise, someone behind us called out.

  “Hey, Blake!”

  This time it was Billy who changed our direction—he tugged me to the right, onto the path that led to the school office. I didn’t want to be seen by anyone in attendance—they’d know I wasn’t supposed to be at school today—but Billy was right. Whoever called out for him didn’t follow us toward the principal’s office.

  We headed for the corner of the building where the bike racks were, but a teacher came out of the attendance office and almost ran into us. Mr. Brown paused to read one of those little phone message notes, and Billy and I stopped just in time. I had taken composition with him freshman year, and he was nice and sometimes funny, but it wasn’t like I knew him very well. It took me a moment to remember that the ghost Helen said he had been her host. To my surprise, I was clutching his arm.

  Mr. Brown looked down at me, expecting some student to ask for a makeup quiz or to explain how they’d lost their book report, I suppose. His expression was open and relaxed, but when he saw my face in the shadow of the hood, he froze. He actually dropped his briefcase at his feet and the little note he’d been reading blew out of his fingers.

  I was in shock, speechless. I wanted to let go of him, but it was like my hand belonged to somebody else. My shoulder felt heavy and tingling all the way down to my fingertips.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted out.

  Slowly he reached to put his hand over mine, but I was so embarrassed to be touching him that I tried to pull away. My hand wouldn’t cooperate. In my clumsy struggle to free him I kicked his briefcase and a cardboard box slid out of it. My hand opened suddenly, letting go of him just as a gust of wind swept through the corridor and lifted the lid of the box on the ground and papers started blowing out of it.

  We watched the pages blow around like birds. Then I had the irresistible urge to catch them. I ran at the papers, snatching them out of the air as they traveled past the bike racks and toward the parking lot. I reached and grabbed with my right hand and kept the captured ones in my left. I could hear Mr. Brown and Billy helping in the paper chase. Some of the pages were handwritten and some were typed, but as I lifted one from the ground and peeled another from where it stuck to someone’s bicycle, I noticed that they weren’t student homework. The handwriting was all alike and the typed pages had high numbers: 107, 113. It was all one manuscript. His manuscript, maybe. He carried it around hidden in a plain brown box in his briefcase.

  I paused and looked at him. With hair ruffled in the wind and a mess of papers under one arm, he jumped up and caught another page in midair—he seemed like a kid, not like a teacher at all. He had a secret, like my photographs.

  I dove at another page as it cartwheeled by my feet. I guessed the handwritten ones were especially important because these probably weren’t entered into his computer yet.

  Now Mr. Brown was ordering the papers in his hands and Billy was balancing on the bike rack to pull one from a tree branch. We gave our papers to Mr. Brown, who said, “Good work, team.” He turned pages front-wise, right-side up, and flipped through, and as he started to order them by number he stopped and scanned the top one in puzzlement.

  “Did we lose some?” I asked him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he muttered.

  I felt guilty—I was the one who’d kicked his manuscript box open.

  “I actually think this would make a better page
one,” said Mr. Brown.

  “Did you write all that?” asked Billy.

  Mr. Brown smiled, held his fat, wrinkled collection of pages to his chest, and gave a small bow. “To you, the patron saints of unpublished novels, many thanks.”

  If we’d had questions or apologies for each other, we didn’t seem to anymore. We didn’t even say goodbye. Billy took my hand, and as we walked away, Mr. Brown gave me a simple wave that lifted all the heaviness out of my arm.

  We had to go back to the library because my mother would be wanting to pick me up. I hoped that if I called her before she got impatient and called me, she might let me study in the library again the next day. Billy and I got muffins at the coffee house across the street from the main branch and sat on the steps. I picked at mine, not feeling hungry anymore.

  “I have an idea for our next field trip,” he said. “If I’m still around.”

  “Are you going somewhere?” I asked. The idea that he might be moving or going on vacation shook me up.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Where?”

  He looked into the distance and decided not to describe it. “Out of town.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  This question seemed to pull all the energy out of him. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  A wave of fear swam up my spine as I saw something from the corner of my eye that had often given me a stomachache—rolling up to the curb, the white bulk of my father’s van.

  CHAPTER 19

  Jenny

  I RUMMAGED THE CELL PHONE out of my bag—I’d forgotten to turn the ringer back on after we’d left the library. I’d missed a call from home two minutes ago.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Billy.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Don’t follow me.” I started down the steps toward the van as the phone rang. My father parked in the no waiting zone as if rules didn’t apply to him. He got out looking happy. He held a cell phone to his ear, a bright blue one I’d never seen before. The number on my mom’s cell in my hand showed the word “Judy”—was he actually using his lover’s cell phone to call me?