Rose felt an angry flush pass over her face. “Who? The boys or the girls?”
“Two guesses,” Blanche tried to smile and pushed back her hair from her face. “Don’t worry about me, Rose.”
“I do, though.” Rose bit her lip. “You know, the kids in your class must have awfully low self-esteem to get such a charge out of being bullies.”
“If we believe Bear, they’ll grow out of it someday,” Blanche said ironically. Blanche already seemed less tense, being able to talk about it, just as Rose had hoped. Rose was heartened. She and Blanche had always been very different people, but since they had come to this new school together, Rose felt a closer kinship between them. She was Blanche’s sole ally in an environment neither of them felt a part of.
“Keep your chin up,” Rose urged. “I’ll find those boys and pound them.” Rose was not afraid of any kind of male creature. She had already made a reputation among the boys at school by bawling them out for harassing her sister. Some of them looked the other way when they saw her coming, but she couldn’t care less.
“Sister Geraldine gave me this neat poem,” Blanche said, changing the subject. “I’ll show it to you at home. It was written by one of her old students. Just our luck—the one student here who seems to have any grasp of the higher things graduated a long time ago. But it’s a cool poem.”
“We’ll read it together tonight,” Rose said, smiling at her sister. “Two more hours!” Blanche grinned back. She turned into the doorway of her next class.
Rose had the last lunch period of the school day, which was sarcastically nicknamed “the supper lunch” since it came so late in the day. As she walked down the stairs to the basement where the cafeteria was, she saw Rob Tirsch at his locker. She couldn’t help slowing down a bit. Rob was tall, black-haired, and terribly good-looking. Unfortunately, he seemed to know it. He was part of the popular crowd in the senior class, but he had been pretty friendly to Rose.
“Hey, Red,” he said to her as she passed him.
“Hi, Rob,” she said, smiling, and he turned around.
“What you been up to?” He flashed a smile at her, indicating that he would like to talk.
“Oh, nothing much.” Despite herself, Rose leaned against the wall to talk to him, hoping that the three zits on her face weren’t too obvious.
“You don’t do much, do you?” He slammed his locker shut. “Break’s over. Can you believe it? It went by so fast,” Rob ran his hands through his curly hair.
Rose, whose Christmas vacation had been lonely, if leisurely, simply nodded. “What did you do over break?”
“Went skiing a couple of times. You ever gone?”
Rose shook her head. “I’ve done cross-country a few times, but not downhill.”
“It’s the best. Man, this year is dragging by. I can’t wait till I’m out of here.” He cast his blue eyes on her again. “You going to the prom?”
“The senior prom? I’m only a junior. Why’d you ask?”
“Just taking a survey.” Rob glanced behind him and winked at her. “Hey, bet you didn’t know this. See that iron door over there?” He indicated a much painted-over door beside the furnace room.
Rose nodded.
“D’you know there’s a tunnel there?” Rob asked.
“Really?” Rose was intrigued.
“Yeah,” Rob lowered his voice mysteriously. “It goes over to that abandoned church next door. A long time ago, the two buildings were connected.”
“Why was the church abandoned, anyway?”
“Ah, the floor was going to fall in or something. So they closed it down. They say there’s all sorts of treasure buried in the basement.”
“You’re kidding,” Rose said, not sure whether to believe him.
“No, no, I’m not.” Rob was earnest. “The old priest over there—Fr. Raymond—he used to collect hundreds of chalices and gold stuff for the altar—all the stuff churches were throwing away when they got rid of the Latin in the Mass. He collected it all, and hid it in the church. Then one night, when he was polishing his collection, he was murdered.”
“Murdered?!”
“Yeah. Some crazy guy came and shot him in the back, right behind the altar. They say they’ve never gotten the bloodstains off the floor.” He grinned at Rose, who was shuddering. “You’re pretty gullible, you know that?”
“Did he really shoot him?” Rose flushed. She was gullible.
“Honest, he did. The guy who shot him stole everything. All the gold and stuff. My old man says most of it was junk. They’ve never found the guy who did it.”
“That’s horrible!” Rose was indignant.
“Yeah. It happens. They had to close down the church because they said they couldn’t raise money to fix it, but it was really because they couldn’t find a priest who would work in that church again. You see, it’s haunted now.”
He looked at Rose to gauge her reaction. She half-believed him.
“It’s the truth,” he said, cocking his head. “Just be careful when you pass the church after dark. The ax murderer who lives there will get you!”
“I thought you said the priest was shot,” Rose accused him. The bell rang.
“Yeah, by an ax murderer who mislaid his ax. Next best thing. Oh, and he strangled the priest, too.” Rob grinned, slapping his books out of his locker. “Must have been a real sicko.”
He punched Rose playfully on the shoulder. “That should put you to sleep at night. Did you know they took the word gullible out of the dictionary?”
Rose made a face at him as he bounced off down the hallway to class.
He was about the only boy at St. Catherine’s that Rose felt a more than passing interest in. It was a pity he acted like a jerk sometimes, usually when he was with his buddies. Blanche disliked him, but Rose found him appealing. He was almost always nice to her, and that was flattering. Just about every junior girl she knew had a crush on him. He had this fascinating charm that melted the hearts of even the most sensible teenage girls. His singling Rose out hadn’t made her terrifically popular among her classmates.
But unlike Blanche, who had resigned herself to occupying the lowest social strata in the school, Rose preferred to stand defiantly outside the structure.
Going into the cafeteria, Rose found a place at a table with some girls from her biology class. Something cold touched the back of her neck right over her collar and she jumped. There was a burst of male laughter behind her, and she turned to see Manny sitting at the next table.
“Hi, Rose,” he grinned, tossing and catching the cold pack he was carrying around for his leg in one hand. He played on the basketball team with Rob and always seemed to be recovering from some kind of injury.
Rose allowed a deliberate look of disgust to come over her face, and cued her eyes. She had chameleon eyes—hazel eyes—and she believed that she could make them change color on command. So now she mentally cued herself. Show temper. Let him know he’s in trouble if he keeps this up. Eye color: stone grey.
With a toss of her red hair, she turned back to her sandwich, took a bite, and began to chew slowly. She rolled her eyes at the girl across from her, who grimaced back.
“Hey, Rose,” Manny leaned over beside her. “You going to the senior prom?”
“Of course not,” she said, not looking at him. “I’m a junior.”
“Would you go with Rob Tirsch if he asked you?”
Rose’s heart almost stopped beating for a minute. Rob? She gave a faint gesture. “Probably,” she said at last, with feigned lightness.
“Ooh,” Manny said, and moved back to say something to his friends, who all laughed.
Probably? She had meant to say “maybe!” She moaned inwardly and crumpled her napkin. Nothing like looking desperate. She glanced around at the other girls, most of who hadn’t overheard Manny’s remarks, and shrugged.
Inwardly she debated about asking Manny what he meant. He was probably just teasing her. Guys thought it was terribly funny when
girls had a crush on one of them (Rose, apart from her own situation, found it pretty funny too, considering). Manny was no doubt looking for ammunition to tease Rob with.
Her heart sank inside her. If Rob knew she liked him…how embarrassing! But he probably has some inkling already, Rose thought mournfully.
She sighed and tried to join the conversation going on around her. I won’t say anything to Blanche about this unless something real happens, she decided.
When two-thirty came, Rose bounded the steps to the south door to meet her sister. Blanche was already there, looking out, her petite figure almost overwhelmed by her black hair. Her books were held in front of her defensively as she gazed at the chain link fence at the other end of the parking lot. She looked upset again.
“What’s wrong?” Rose asked worriedly.
Blanche nodded with her head towards the fence. “That’s where I usually see him standing.”
“Who?”
“Bear. He wasn’t there today,” Blanche said.
“Are you sure it was him the other times?” Rose glanced skeptically towards the fence, where Rob and a group of other guys were standing in clumps, talking.
“I’m almost positive.” Blanche turned towards her sister, tossing her heavy curtain of hair back over her shoulders. “Rose, he really might be a drug dealer, for all his talk about poetry and whatnot.”
“Can you picture Bear hanging out with people like those?” Rose asked derisively, mentally excluding Rob from that group.
“I don’t know. There are a lot of contradictions in him,” Blanche admitted as they started to walk home.
“Well,” Rose decided to be amiable, “who knows if we’ll ever even see him again?”
Chapter 3
IT WAS ROSE’S turn to do the dishes that night, so while she and Mother chatted in the kitchen, Blanche slipped out to the living room to play the upright piano that stood in one corner against the wall. She used to practice all the time, but now only played occasionally as a way of consoling herself when she had a bad day. Dad had bought the piano for her and its worn walnut surfaces reminded her of him in a way that was distant enough to be comfortable. She pulled out her sheet music, spread it out in front of her, placed her hands on the keys and began.
First, some scales. Then, Mozart’s “Rondo,” because it gave her fingers a good workout. Then the “Arabian Dance” from The Nutcracker Suite, a Chopin interlude she was learning, and Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”
She tried her hand at a new duet for piano and violin that Rose had gotten from her violin teacher. Back in the country, she and Rose had often played together for their family and friends. Rose still took violin lessons—now from a teacher at school—but Blanche had laid aside her study of piano, maybe for good. She ran quickly through the piano part of the new duet once, then put it aside and took out the “Moonlight Sonata” by Beethoven.
From far off in the city came a car alarm, and the wailing warning of a police siren. Blanche shivered to herself and moved the bench closer to the piano. Fingers adjusted, she began to play the first bars of the “Moonlight Sonata” and let the notes murmur from her fingers in a ceaseless repetition that carried her away down a broad river in her imagination. When she felt she had the current going sufficiently, she moved her right hand into the melody, let the notes drop haphazardly from her fingertips, like rain on the surface of a pond with a deep undercurrent. She let the melody slide away until she felt like playing it again, barely glancing at the music. This definitely wasn’t the conventional way to play the “Moonlight Sonata,” but it was very relaxing.
Eventually she began the rising melody of the piece, the uncertain question that drove her eyes back to the notes and made her left hand unsteady. Striving to keep the continual motion of the lower notes, she pounded out the hard, short, anxious notes of the climax, then let her right hand fall. Beethoven never answered the question in this piece. The left hand just kept doing what it had been doing all along, until it eventually sank to the lower end of the keyboard, and then into silence.
Blanche was still, contemplating the vibration of that last low note when the doorbell sounded. The delicate tranquility she had experienced was shattered.
“I’ll get it,” Rose sang out, drying her hands on a dishtowel as she went to the door. Blanche remained on the piano bench, wary.
“Oh, it’s Bear again,” Rose sounded surprised. Blanche heard the house door open, and Rose say, “Come on in, Sir Bear!”
Unsure of what this portended for their family, Blanche stared at the black and white bars in front of her.
“I just wanted to drop off a thank-you gift and bring back the boots and stuff,” Bear was saying.
“Well, come on in!” Rose replied merrily.
Mother came from the kitchen looking like a Swedish housewife in an old denim dress with her long hair braided and pinned up. She stood smiling at Bear. “Welcome again, Bear,” she said.
Bear came into the living room uncertainly, a small package in one hand and a lumpy grocery bag in the other. “I just thought I’d get you a little gift to thank you for saving my toes last night,” he said, a bit sheepishly.
“That’s very kind of you, Bear,” Mother said. “Please take off your coat and stay a while. We were just finishing in the kitchen.”
“I was going to make hot chocolate—would you like some?” Rose took Bear’s coat, hung it on the old-fashioned coat stand, and skipped to the kitchen to get out the mugs.
“Uh, sure,” he said bit awkwardly. With his coat off, he looked a little smaller in a khaki flannel shirt and old jeans. He sat down carefully on the sofa and crooked his fingers through his matted dreadlocks. His eyes met Blanche’s as she sat guardedly in her corner. She saw that he realized she knew about him.
“You play piano?” he asked.
“Not in front of other people,” she said quickly, getting up from the bench and sitting down on the chair. She lingered tensely to see what he would do next.
“You know, I’ve seen you before,” he said finally, when Mother moved into the kitchen to help Rose.
Blanche said nothing, waiting.
“At St. Catherine’s,” he said. “On the school grounds.”
“I’ve seen you there, too,” she said flatly.
A faint red came into his cheeks. “I keep pretty lousy company, don’t I?” he observed, quietly.
“It’s your choice,” she said offhandedly.
Rose came into the room with mugs of hot chocolate.
“I feel like talking poetry,” she said cheerfully. “Blanche, where’s that poem you got today?”
Blanche felt aggravated at being forced to share something that she found moving with this outsider. But what could she say without being rude? So she went to fetch the paper.
Mother opened Bear’s package. “Italian cookies!” she exclaimed. “Bear, how did you know to get our favorite kind?”
“I didn’t know, but I’ve always liked them, too,” Bear admitted, clearly pleased.
“The perfect thing with hot chocolate!” Rose said approvingly, and went to fetch a plate. She arranged them artistically in a spiral on the plate and set them on the coffee table for nibbling. Mother and Rose both ate them with relish, but Blanche didn’t take any until after Bear had helped himself a few times.
Rose read the poem by A. Denniston with interest and passed it to Bear, who perused it with a frown on his face.
“I like the rhyme scheme,” Rose said. “Really good for someone our age. What do you think?”
Bear coughed. “Well, I think it’s a bit overdone myself,” he admitted. “But I can be pretty critical.”
“The images are good,” Mother said, looking it over as she rocked on her rocker.
“Well, what don’t you like about it?” Rose wanted to know, sipping her hot chocolate.
“It’s an okay rhyme scheme, but I get the feeling the guy who wrote it didn’t know much about death, or suffering,” Bear said. “He j
ust seems to answer the question too easily. It’s sort of trite, really.”
Blanche cupped her warm mug in her hands and felt her cheeks flame with annoyance at his criticism, almost as though she had written the poem herself.
“I think it’s a remarkable attempt,” Mother said, taking another cookie. “It makes me think of our apple orchard back home.”
Mother handed the poem back to Blanche as Bear asked casually, “Where’d you find a piece like that?”
“Sister Geraldine read it to us in class,” Blanche said quietly, still hot. “She said it was the best poem she’d ever seen written by one of her students.”
“Did she?” Bear shrugged. “Well, I still like Robert Frost’s poem—the one it’s copying off of—better.” He paused, and quoted, “‘So Eden sunk to grief. So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.’”
There was a stillness in the room, and Bear looked so pensive that Blanche almost forgave him for not appreciating A. Denniston’s poem. She admitted to herself that he really did seem to have a genuine love for poetry.
“Sister Geraldine is one of those rare specimens of people,” Rose announced, after some musing. “I don’t think she’s really who she says she is. Well, I suppose that she really is a nun, but she’s more than just an old schoolmarm. I think she was a queen who became a nun. Or better yet, a battle-maiden who forsook her shield and sword for holy vows.” She eyed Bear carefully. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure,” said Bear, looking interested.
“Have you ever felt that there was something going on in life that not everyone was aware of?” Rose asked, turning her mug around in her hands. “As though there’s a story going on that everyone is a part of, but not everybody knows about? Maybe ‘story’ isn’t the right word—a sort of drama, a battle between what’s peripheral and what’s really important. As though the people you meet aren’t just their plain, prosaic selves, but are actually princes and princesses, gods and goddesses, fairies, gypsies, shepherds, all sorts of fantastic creatures who’ve chosen to hide their real shape for some reason or another. Or have forgotten who they really are. Have you ever thought that?”