The Secret Year

  “Michael—”

  He looked up at me. “You came to the funeral, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was nice of you. Considering you didn’t know her very well.” I just stood there, and he moved around me to the cashier. I followed him then, an electric hum in my brain, a queasy heat rising up from my stomach. I didn’t know exactly what he was after, but I didn’t like it. After he’d paid for his own lunch, he waited for me to finish with the cashier. I saw him waiting and wished he’d get lost—sink through the floor, fly out the window, anything. But he was still there when I got through the line.

  “You can stop squirming,” he said. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  Shit. I kept my face blank. “Not going to tell anyone what?”

  He gave me a thin smile and shook his head. “Are you going to play stupid now? When I mentioned my sister, you panicked.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Maybe nobody else would notice, but I can read faces.” He sipped his juice. “Besides, you’ve just confirmed a few other things for me.” He glanced around, but there was no one near us. “I know about the letters. I know you’re C.M.”

  This time I could honestly say, “Michael, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Well, I don’t believe that, but never mind.” He stared at me as if he could peel off my skin with his eyes. “I have something for you from my sister. If you’re interested, meet me outside the east entrance after school.” He took his tray to a table in the corner without giving me another look.

  I went to my usual table, numb. I know about the letters. What letters? He obviously knew something about Julia and me, or thought he did, but whatever code he was speaking, I didn’t get it. I had no idea what he wanted to give me, either. A picture of Julia? A lock of her hair? A punch in the face?

  I made sure not to look over at the table of Black Mountain royalty, where Austin Chadwick sat, where Julia used to sit. I had gotten so used to avoiding her at school that now I avoided even the spaces she should have filled. But today I had another reason; I didn’t want them to see whatever Michael Vernon had supposedly seen on my face.

  I checked out the rest of my table to see if anyone else thought I was easy to read. Syd picked through her salad as if checking for bugs. Fred was trying to do his homework for his afternoon classes. Paul wasn’t there—probably making out with his girlfriend behind the school. Nick leaned over and gawked at the sandwich on my tray.

  “What is that, turkey?”

  “I guess.”

  “You shoulda got the roast beef.” He lifted his own sandwich, mayo oozing out onto his fingers.

  “Something wrong, Colt?” Syd asked.

  “Like what?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. You look a little off. Like you’re having second thoughts about the turkey.”

  I shoved Michael and Julia to the back of my mind. “I’m not sure it is turkey.” I poked the sandwich. “It’s more of a turkeylike substance.”

  “Good point,” she said, and went back to her salad.

  I took a breath. “I can’t ride home with you guys today,” I told Nick.

  “What, you got detention?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” he said, grinning around a mouthful of roast beef, “enjoy the bus.” And none of them gave any sign that they knew I was lying.

  I didn’t hear anything that went on in my afternoon classes. The teachers could’ve scheduled three tests for the next day, and I wouldn’t have known it. All I did was watch the clock hands creep around to the final bell.

  Michael was waiting for me, right where he’d said. He smiled grimly. “So, you’ve decided you did know Julia after all.”

  I didn’t answer.

  He pulled something out of his backpack and held it up: a purple notebook with a diagonal black stripe across its cover.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Come on. I know you’re C.M.”

  “I’m what?”

  “C.M. The C.M. she wrote all these letters to.”

  Letters? I couldn’t stop staring at that book. Julia used to write me short notes sometimes (“Meet me at the bridge tonight”), always unsigned, slipped through the vent in my locker. But I didn’t know anything about any letters.

  “I put the clues together,” he said. “It wasn’t difficult. She mentioned that you lived on the flats, near Higgins Farm Bridge. She also wrote that you were younger than she was, and that you’d been in Calvert’s class with her.” He paused to adjust his glasses. “The only other person it could have been was Carlos Mendez, and I’ve ruled him out.”

  I wanted to know what was in that notebook, but he was only holding it up, not handing it over. For a second, I wondered if he might not even show it to me, just hold it over my head. Not that he had a reputation for that kind of viciousness, but he was definitely strange.

  Nobody could figure Michael out or predict what he might do. Julia had told me a few things about him: He’d painted the ceiling of his room black. He’d taken pictures of potatoes for his freshman art project. He’d once fasted for a week as part of a report on Gandhi. I also remembered that he’d tried to start an ethics and philosophy club at school last year, but he couldn’t get anyone to join. None of those facts helped me guess what he was up to now.

  “You’ve really never seen this book before?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “But you knew my sister.” It wasn’t a question. His eyes nailed me to the wall, reminding me of an old insect collection my science teacher had once shown us, bugs splayed out and frozen with pins.

  “Yes,” I said. It was the first time I’d admitted it to anyone.

  He handed me the notebook. “Then you might as well look.”

  I opened it to the first page. It was Julia’s, all right: black ink on lavender pages, each word bold and dark, the same writing I used to find on notes in my locker.

  Dear C.M.,

  I had to write this down because I don’t believe what just happened.

  I recognized the date: the first night I’d ever met her at the bridge, last September.

  I closed the book because I didn’t want to read more in front of him. “Why are you showing this to me?”

  “I thought about throwing it away,” he said. “Burning it, pretending it never existed. But I know what Julia would’ve wanted. She—” He cut himself off, and swallowed. “Well. Read it if you want. I believe that’s why she wrote it.” He turned and walked away. He was halfway across the school lawn before I realized I probably should’ve thanked him.

  chapter 3

  Alone in my room that afternoon, I placed the notebook on my bed and stared at it for a minute. It wasn’t that I was debating whether to read it. I knew I was going to read it. But at the same time, I was scared. What the hell had she written?

  I flipped open the cover.

  Dear C.M.,

  I had to write this down because I don’t believe what just happened. If anyone had told me this morning that we would do what we did down by the bridge, I would’ve thought they were crazy. But it happened. Maybe that’s why I want to write about it. I need to make it real.

  I didn’t even notice you much last year, when you were in Calvert’s class. You sat in the back and kept your mouth shut. But tonight it felt like you could see right into me, like you knew what I was going to say next. That never happens with Austin. What I have with him doesn’t go far enough.

  I have to break up with him now. All I want is to be back with you, standing thigh-deep in the river, feeding you my tongue.

  I closed the book. She had a pretty good way of describing that first time we kissed. That didn’t surprise me, since I knew she liked to write. She
wrote poems, and she’d even shown me some. Most of them were about her family or nature or something like that, poems she could hand in or publish in the school magazine. There were a few poems that she showed to me but not to her English teacher. Poems about nights we spent together. Why hadn’t she ever shown me this notebook, though? She was supposedly writing to me, after all.

  “Standing thigh-deep in the river, feeding you my tongue.” I couldn’t get that phrase out of my head now. That’s the way it happened, all right.

  That night I’d been on one of my rambles, walking along the riverbank from where it ran behind my house down to the bridge. Higgins Farm Road was just a two-lane street, its bridge nothing more than a low-railinged bump in the road. They should’ve made the bridge higher; it flooded every time we had a storm. It made a good meeting place because everyone knew where it was, and when you went under it you were out of sight of the road. And there were streetlamps, so it was never totally dark.

  Kids did party there sometimes, and they had marked the bridge’s underside with so much spray paint that you couldn’t read any of it anymore. But most partiers liked the vacant lots on Oldgate Road better. That was especially true when the riverbank was muddy. Since it had rained a lot that week, I didn’t expect to see anyone at the bridge. I had good boots, so I didn’t mind the ooze and muck. In fact, I kind of liked it. Everything smelled wet.

  When I got to the bridge, I saw a shiny car parked off to the side of the road. Then I noticed a girl standing up to her knees in the river. She wore a black dress, which she had hoisted up so she could wade deeper.

  “What are you doing?” I called out. Ordinarily, I would’ve left without letting her see me. I didn’t feel much like talking to anyone that night. But this was so strange—a girl wading into the river all alone in a fancy party dress—that I figured I should speak up. In case she was trying to drown herself or something.

  She looked over her shoulder at me. The dress had a low back, and her white skin was the same color as the moon. “Who the hell wants to know?” She laughed.

  I recognized her then. I knew a lot of Black Mountain kids by sight, even if we never talked, because they were in some of my classes. She was a year older than me, but she’d been in my math and science classes. “You going swimming, Julia?”

  “Sure.” She kicked up a foot, spraying drops. “Who are you?” She squinted at me. “Oh, I know you. You were in my math class last year. But I don’t remember your name.”

  “Colt Morrissey.”

  “Right. You live around here?” She swept out an arm like she was welcoming me to the neighborhood, like it was perfectly normal to be standing in the Willis River in the middle of the night.

  “Yeah. But you don’t. What are you doing here?” She’d let go of her dress, and the bottom of it dragged in the water. “You always wear that to come wash your feet?”

  She ran her hands down the top of her dress, the sides of her hips, her thighs. “You like black satin? I thought it would be nice for a dip in the river.”

  “Okay. Just so you’re not drowning yourself or anything.” I hadn’t meant to say it that bluntly, but after talking to her for a couple of minutes I still had no idea what she was doing, and it made me nervous.

  “Drown myself? Over Austin Chadwick?” Her laugh made me shiver—something about the way it tore out of her throat, like it shouldn’t be a laugh at all. “Yeah, that’ll happen.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to hear about Chadwick. I figured that she’d come here to cool off after having a fight with him. “Your dress is getting wet.”

  “I could take it off.” She smirked, but when I didn’t say anything, her mouth softened. “You know, when I said that, your eyes didn’t even bug out of your head. I like that.” She held out a hand. “Come join me?”

  “In the water?”

  “Well, that’s where I am.”

  I don’t know why I did it. I took off my boots, because they were good boots and I didn’t want to fill them with river water. I took off my socks, too. Then I waded out to her. My jeans got soaked and heavy, clinging to my legs. “Happy now?”

  She couldn’t stop laughing. “I can’t believe you did it.”

  “Why not?” My toes sank into the velvety silt floor of the river. It felt slick, oily. I hoped we wouldn’t step on any of the broken glass or rusted cans I sometimes found here. Looking down at her legs, I said, “Aren’t you worried about leeches?”

  She shrugged. “They don’t hurt. I’d just peel them off.”

  I’d never thought a princess from Black Mountain would say anything like that. That was when I started to like her.

  We stood a few feet apart. The river swirled gently around our legs. “What are you doing down here?” she asked. “You always come to the bridge at night?”

  “Night, daytime, whenever.” It was none of her business what I was doing here. “I like it here.”

  “This town isn’t that big,” she said. “There can’t possibly be two of us who just like to come look at the river at night.”

  “Then what do you think I’m doing? Meeting my fellow secret agents? Passing them my latest surveillance notes?”

  She laughed and scooped up a handful of black water. “It’s like liquid ebony,” she said, and it ran through her fingers. “There was this dance tonight up at the country club. Austin got drunk. He thinks it’s fun to spend five hours hanging over a toilet bowl.” She shook her wet hand, spraying me with drops of the river. “I mean, God, when he gets drunk I can’t even talk to him! He can’t follow a conversation. He can’t kiss without slobbering.”

  “Austin the Teenage Alcoholic,” I said. “It would make a great TV movie.”

  “Ohhh, listen to that sarcasm. You don’t like him.”

  “Why should I like him?”

  She shrugged. “You’re right. There’s no reason you should.” She turned away from me, and the breeze caught her hair. “Anyway, it’s not like I’ve never been drunk myself. But there’s a difference between a little buzz and all-out drooling sloppy.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “If he needs it, I’m sure his daddy will buy him a new liver.”

  She turned back around. I thought maybe I’d gone too far with that one, and she’d slap me or something, but she grinned instead. “You think he’s got everything, don’t you?”

  That one didn’t even need an answer.

  “Colt,” she said, teasing, scolding. “If you’re lucky, you should know you’re lucky.”

  That was exactly how I’d always felt about the people who lived on Black Mountain. But I’d never put it into words before, or heard anyone else put it into words. “You talking about Austin?”

  “I’m talking about you.”

  “Me?”

  “You don’t believe it? You need me to tell you how?” She stepped closer to me. “I could go with the obvious, tell you how someone sleeping on the street would be glad to live in your house. Or how a ninety-year-old with a walker would love to be seventeen like you.”

  “Sixteen,” I interrupted. I wanted to choke myself as soon as I said it. It wasn’t even exactly true; at that point I was still a couple of weeks shy of sixteen. Why did I have to remind her I was younger than she was?

  “Whatever. But I won’t even go that basic. I can tell you how you’re luckier than Austin Chadwick.”

  “This ought to be good.”

  She took another couple of steps toward me, close enough now that I could smell her shampoo, a soapy peach scent that I got to know very well later. She counted on her fingers. They were long and white, with perfectly curved nails. I wanted to touch them, but I didn’t. “One, you’re smarter than Austin. Two, you’re probably not an alcoholic. Three, you’re better looking than he is. Four, you’ve got the balls to wade out into the Willis
River with me.”

  “That’s some list.”

  She laughed low in her throat and took one more step, and now I could feel the heat coming off her skin. “You still think Austin has it better than you? You’d rather be sprawled out on the floor of the country club men’s room than here with me?”

  “Not especially.”

  That’s when she kissed me.

  I’d had a girlfriend the year before—Jackie—my first real girlfriend. She’d moved away over the summer. We’d done everything together, but the first time I kissed Julia, I felt like I hadn’t done anything. Julia’s mouth was hot and the river was cold and her satin dress was so smooth it didn’t even seem to be there.

  “Five,” she said, breathing hard, “you’re a much better kisser than Austin.”

  chapter 4

  I didn’t really believe all that stuff Julia had said about me being better at kissing than Austin. I figured she was just mad at him, and horny, and I happened to be there, so what the hell.

  Nick once argued with the rest of us guys about whether girls get horny the way guys do. Nick said they didn’t. I said they did. To prove my point, I told him about the time Jackie dragged me into the toolshed in her backyard. Her family was having a barbecue, and her relatives were all over the place, but she pulled me into the dark shed and undid my belt. The place smelled of lawnmower gas and mildew, but we didn’t care. We knocked spiderwebs off a lawn-chair cushion and did it right there. It wasn’t like I fought her off, but she definitely made the first move. I never would’ve have tried to jump her in the middle of her family picnic.

  Jackie blew a gasket when it got back to her that I’d told Nick about that day. She didn’t talk to me for a week. And she was right that I should’ve kept my mouth shut; I wasn’t as good at keeping secrets back then as I became later. But it was true that she liked sex as much as I did, so I assumed it was true for Julia, too. Especially when I remembered the way she’d kissed me at the river.