Ruined

  "I wasn't acting like you don't exist! I've just been, you know, kind of preoccupied."

  "Preoccupied with what other people might think."

  "Why won't you listen to me? I'm telling you that an old friend of mine, an old friend of my family's, may be in real danger."

  "And I'm not your friend? You can't talk to me about it?"

  Anton didn't reply. His silence told Rebecca everything she needed to know. Whatever he'd said to her in the past, however much he seemed to like her, Anton saw her the way everyone else around here did -- as an outsider.

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  "I don't even know why we're having this conversation," she said softly. The sound of a bell was clanging through the cemetery, a signal that the place was about to close. Good: Rebecca wanted to get out of here. The humidity was making her feel short of breath. "You acted like you were different, but you're not. You don't like me any more than the rest of them."

  "I do like you!" he insisted. "I think I made that pretty clear at the party."

  Rebecca felt her cheeks flushing. He'd kissed her, and it seemed as though he'd meant it -- but then why had he basically dropped her right after that?

  "All you really care about is what your friends will think or what their families will say," she said. This sounded much more cutting and bitter than she intended, but it was too late: The words were out.

  "You don't understand anything about our families," Anton said, his voice sharp. He glared at Rebecca, his eyes boring through her. "You don't have our history, OK? You don't see things the way we do."

  "Whatever!" Rebecca retorted. They had no idea what she could and couldn't see. Irritation surged through her body like a boiling wave of molten lava, and before she could stop herself, Rebecca was snapping back at Anton. "Helena's not the only one who can see things, you know. I can see the ghost, too!"

  Instantly she knew it was the wrong thing to say. Anton was staring at her, his mouth open, his face pale as the tomb she was leaning against. This wasn't the time or the place to

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  reveal her secret, Rebecca knew, especially to someone like Anton. Whatever had happened between them, she couldn't trust him anymore. Why hadn't she kept her mouth shut?

  "I don't believe you." Anton's voice was firm, but the look on his face told a different story -- it was something between horrified and suspicious. Rebecca didn't know what to say. If she said he was right, that she was just making it all up, she'd seem like an immature idiot. But if she stood here arguing, insisting that she could see Lisette as clearly as Helena could ... well, it would serve no purpose at all. Anton would go racing off to the Bowmans', probably, with this hot-off-the-presses information. And though Rebecca wasn't sure what the Bowmans would do with the news exactly, she certainly didn't want to be a topic of discussion -- or derision -- in that particular household.

  Now the bell was ringing incessantly, its clangs echoing in Rebecca's head.

  "We should ... we should get out of here," she said, but then she remembered Anton had a key for the Sixth Street gate. Unlike Rebecca, he didn't have to play by the rules. And right now, he obviously wasn't in a hurry to go anywhere. He was standing there, staring at Rebecca as though the longer and harder he looked at her, the more likely he was to get out the truth.

  Now that the hot tide of anger had subsided, all Rebecca felt was confusion. Part of her wanted to continue this standoff with Anton: She'd said more than she'd meant to, but there wasn't any going back. If she ran away now, Rebecca would look like a wimp and a coward. Anton would write her

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  off as a silly girl and congratulate himself for dumping her so unceremoniously after the Bowmans' Christmas party.

  But part of her knew there was nothing else to say. Rebecca wasn't about to confide all the details of her friendship with Lisette to Anton, especially now that he seemed so hostile. Her head was pounding. The shrill ringing bell, the clammy atmosphere, the feeling she had of being surrounded by tombs and trees and high walls ... everything was oppressing her. If she didn't leave now, she'd be trapped in the cemetery, reliant on Anton's goodwill to get out. And goodwill wasn't quite the way to describe his mood today.

  "So that's it?" He sounded incredulous. "You make this insane claim, and then you've got nothing else to say?"

  One of the big gates was closing with a creak: Rebecca listened for the slam, for the rattling of the padlock's chain. She felt hot again, but not with anger this time. Just panic, sweeping through her, urging her to escape before the last of those gates was locked for the rest of the weekend. She had to get away from here. She had to get away from Anton.

  "I'm ... I'm sorry," she gasped, sidling toward the gap between the tombs. Once she felt the emptiness of the narrow alley, Rebecca bolted; as she hurried away, her elbows banged against the unforgiving marble walls hemming her in. Anton was calling her name, but she didn't turn around. The Sixth Street gate was already locked, so she ran toward Washington Avenue, where the caretaker, in his khaki uniform, stood jangling a set of keys.

  "Just in time," he said in a mock-stern voice, and Rebecca nodded, jogging into the street. She ran all the way home,

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  past the valet parkers outside Commander's Palace, and along the broken sidewalk of Coliseum Street. Her heart thudded with every step, because she knew the Lafayette Cemetery caretaker was right. She'd gotten away from Anton just in time.

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  ***

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ***

  Although it was still too early for parades, Rebecca soon realized that carnival season was already underway. Everyone at Temple Mead was obsessed with the fancy balls they or their parents were attending, chattering in the hallways and the lunchroom about which parades were taking place this year and what the Krewe of Septimus had chosen as its theme.

  Septimus was held in particularly high regard in this neighborhood, Rebecca kept hearing, not least because of its unique parade route. Unlike all the other parades, which rumbled through the city downtown to Canal Street, Septimus curled back at Lee Circle and looped its way back along Magazine Street, finishing on Jackson. But those in-the-know, according to Jessica, often ran up to Prytania at the end of the parade, because the floats of the "royal" court kept going, all along Prytania to Louisiana Avenue.

  "You get to see them up close, without anyone else around, pretty much," Jessica gushed at the beginning of English: Amy had a dentist's appointment, so Jessica could talk to

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  Rebecca without getting into trouble. She pulled a recycled paper napkin out of her bag and drew a shaky map of this apparently peculiar route.

  "Do you see what I mean now?"

  "Kind of," Rebecca said, squinting at the squiggles Jessica had drawn, complete with arrows and scrawled street names. She seemed to forget that Rebecca had never been to a single Mardi Gras parade and had only the vaguest idea about their traditional route -- from Napoleon and along St. Charles Avenue, she remembered, thinking of the beads she'd seen dangling from oak trees the day she and Anton took their walk. But Jessica, like everyone else at Temple Mead, obviously thought that the royal progress of a parade was general knowledge throughout the rest of the country.

  However out of the loop she was, one thing was soon clear to Rebecca. Because no other parades had this special route, Septimus required dedicated police and barricades and ambulance services and fire trucks and cleanup for stretches of streets unused by any other krewes. And this meant that the people who controlled Septimus obviously had a lot of money, as well as a lot of sway in New Orleans. That was no surprise at all.

  At lunchtime, nobody seemed to object when Rebecca slid her tray onto the end of the sophomore table -- possibly because Amy wasn't there, possibly because they were all deep in conversation.

  "I've heard there's no way Helena Bowman can ride this year," someone at the other end of the table announced.

  "She's way too sick. Nobody's seen her for weeks and wee
ks, not even Marianne or Julie."

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  "Maybe she's got leprosy!"

  "Duh -- nobody gets that anymore. It's probably cancer."

  "Maybe she's been bitten by a vampire. What? It's just as likely as her having leprosy."

  "Well, I've heard she's mentally unstable. No, really! She went all hysterical at the Bowmans' Christmas party."

  "I heard her mother had to slap her."

  "I heard that when the ambulance came to take her away, they put her in a straitjacket."

  "How do you know? You weren't there."

  "Please. I wasn't at, like, the Gettysburg Address, but I know about that."

  "Rebecca was there," Jessica piped up. She smiled at Rebecca, as though she was glad -- for once -- to claim the association.

  "What happened exactly?" The entire sophomore cabal turned their attention to Rebecca.

  "Um ... not much." Rebecca had no appetite for this conversation -- about as much as she had for the sticky grilled cheese. She was too worried about giving anything away. One thing Rebecca had learned from her last encounter with Anton: She had to keep her mouth shut.

  "You must have seen something." Jessica was practically pleading with her.

  "I saw the band," Rebecca said, wiping her hands on a paper napkin. "They were really good. And I saw a whole lot of champagne and barbecue shrimp. Yum, yum."

  Her classmates were not impressed.

  The next day, Amy was back, and Rebecca decided to smuggle her homemade sandwich into the library. Nobody

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  else was around yet, so Rebecca checked her e-mail -- there was one from her father, who didn't have anything interesting to say about work, and one from Ling, who didn't have anything interesting to say about school -- and then spent some time paging through the old map book left open on the big oak table. She liked looking at the maps of Louisiana and the Caribbean, back when France and Spain and Britain were fighting over territory and power. It made her think of pirates and buccaneers, of plantation ladies and dashing explorers -- though, she knew, this was a naive and romantic view.

  Back in the days when Haiti was called Saint-Domingue, it was known as the "Pearl of the Antilles," a place of incredible riches where the French produced sugar and coffee and rum for their entire empire. But this was only possible because of the work of hundreds of thousands of slaves. And the brutal treatment of these people led to the slave rebellion and Haitian revolution, which was incredibly bloody and terrible: Rebecca's class had been studying it in history. Anyone with the means to escape Haiti fled the fighting, and thousands of these refugees came to New Orleans -- like Lisette's grandparents. With them they'd brought their music and their food and their religion, voodoo. According to her teacher, they changed the culture of New Orleans forever.

  And now, since the hurricane, people had moved to the city from Mexico and Central America, to work on rebuilding houses; the city would change again. People like the Bowmans and the Suttons might want everything to stay the same -- with them rich and in charge of everything, of course -- but that wasn't the way history worked, Rebecca was learning. Anton had told her she didn't understand "their"

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  history, but one thing she was sure of: Cities couldn't, wouldn't stay the same. They moved with the times, whether they were New York or New Orleans.

  A strange noise caught Rebecca's attention -- a muffled, strangled little yelp. It sounded as though a stray kitten had wandered into the library and was mewing for attention. Rebecca looked around to see if the librarian had noticed, but she couldn't see her anywhere at all. The noise erupted again, from deep in the stacks, a sort of hiccup. Or maybe, Rebecca thought, walking slowly toward the source of the sound, like a sob.

  Pacing the length of the towering wooden bookshelves, Rebecca peered down each aisle, looking for the creature making this plaintive little noise. But there were no stray kittens in the library--none that she could see, anyway. There was just a girl, slumped on the floor, wedged between two shelves. Her face was buried in her hands, but Rebecca knew instantly who it was.

  Marianne Sutton.

  Rebecca stood at the end of the row, not sure what to do. Marianne's shoulders were shaking, and it was obvious that she was crying quite piteously.

  'Are you ... are you OK?" she asked, even though she knew this was a stupid question. Of course Marianne wasn't OK -- she was sitting on the floor of the library, sobbing her heart out. She didn't even look up when Rebecca spoke; maybe she hadn't heard her. Maybe the polite thing to do now was walk away before Marianne noticed she had unwelcome company.

  "What?" Too late. Marianne had lifted her head; she was

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  staring at Rebecca as though she couldn't see her clearly. Her chalk-pale face was streaked with tears, and her eyes looked watery and red. Rebecca almost felt sorry for her.

  "I just wanted to know if ... if you were OK. If there was anything I could do." Rebecca took a step toward her, stopping when Marianne flinched.

  "No." She shook her head. Her fair hair was a mess, half pulled out of its ponytail.

  "OK -- well, then ... see you." Obviously she didn't want Rebecca around, so the only thing to do was back away, leaving Marianne to wallow in her private misery.

  "I'm just worried about Helena, that's all," Marianne said. This was surprising -- not that Helena's condition was making Marianne anxious and upset, but that she would share the information with an outsider like Rebecca. Her tone was much softer than usual, maybe because Helena wasn't around and Marianne didn't have to act all snooty and rude. Maybe this was the real Marianne, someone who wouldn't be half so objectionable if she were out of Helena Bowman's sphere of influence.

  "Do you want me to go get someone?" Rebecca asked her. Marianne would prefer it, no doubt, if she had one of Them to confide in. "Should I try to find Julie?"

  She didn't have much idea of where to start looking, but Rebecca was sure one of the J.C. acolytes among the Plebs could help track Julie down. Marianne shook her head, almost dislodging the slipping elastic band.

  "It's all right," she said, looking forlorn. "I have to pull myself together before class. Everything's just really starting to get to me."

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  Marianne wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, brushing back a damp strand of hair.

  "I'm sure they'd let you go home," Rebecca suggested. "You know, if you're not feeling well."

  In fact, she was sure that the principal would let Marianne go home for any reason whatsoever, even if she was in the best of moods and/or health. That was the thing about being one of Them: You got special treatment, whether you were a student at Temple Mead or a float in the Septimus parade.

  "It's all right," Marianne said again, though her voice faltered, and Rebecca wondered if she was trying to convince herself. "I have a French test this afternoon that I shouldn't miss. It's just so hard to concentrate when I'm so worried about Helena, and ... I mean, we've been looking forward to being maids in Septimus for years, and now it looks like it's not going to happen."

  "Maybe she'll be feeling better by then?" Rebecca thought that not riding in Septimus was the least of Helena's problems, but she knew how important this kind of thing was to girls at Temple Mead. "Or there's always next year."

  This was the wrong thing to say. Marianne's eyes welled with tears again.

  "There may not be a next year," she said, her voice catching. "That's the thing."

  The bell signaling the end of lunch chimed through the loudspeaker. Saved by the bell, Rebecca thought with some relief: She just didn't know what to say to make Marianne feel better. All she could do, when Marianne began scrambling to her feet, was extend a hand to help her.

  "Thanks." Marianne gave a weak smile, dusting off her

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  skirt. Rebecca couldn't help thinking that Helena would not approve of this little scenario. She certainly couldn't imagine Helena taking her hand or giving Rebecca any kind of grateful smil
e. "And ... Rebecca? You won't tell anyone about this, will you? About finding me crying, I mean."

  "Of course not," Rebecca said. She had nobody to tell, but Marianne didn't know that. "Don't worry. Just ... you know, take care of yourself."

  It was pretty lame, she thought, but she didn't know what else to say.

  "I will," Marianne said, smiling again. "You, too, OK?"

  That was an odd sort of reply, Rebecca thought later, climbing the stairs to her next class, but maybe Marianne didn't know what to say, either. This whole acting-civil-thing was entirely new to them both. Who knew where it would lead?