A black cloud formed over Josie’s space.
“Though I’d like to take this one back to the office.” He spread his fingers to enlarge a pic.
“Really?” said Candy. “Bit blurred, isn’t it?”
“I might be able to work with it,” he said. “It’s amazing what you can get from a digital shot.” He glanced at me again as he flipped out the memory card.
Before any of us could object, he’d fed the card into a slot on his camera and was busily uploading Josie’s images.
Meanwhile, Candy turned to Mom again. “Could we have a picture of Michael, anyway? Just as a backup. Out here, maybe?” She grinned like a weather girl predicting sunny spells.
Mom’s chest expanded with air.
“I don’t mind, Mom.” I just wanted to be done with it now so I could go to school and forget about the cliff. I was missing English, my favorite subject. I touched Mom’s arm and stepped out of the house.
They arranged me on the lawn, but away from the cedar tree, wanting the meadow in the background, they said. Eddie asked me to raise my hands level with my chest, as if to say, Hey, it was nothing. I save dogs all the time. He took shots of me smiling and a few more of me looking concerned. The camera seemed to click about fifty times before he was satisfied he’d got what he wanted.
“All done. Camera loves you,” Candy said. She reached up and tousled my hair.
“My mom’s waiting,” I muttered, and tried to push past, but Candy stopped me and drew me so close I could see the faults in her peach-colored makeup.
“Why did you think the dog was going to jump?”
“Don’t know.”
“But you sensed it, right?” Suddenly, her tone had changed, as if she’d sharpened her tongue on the bare edge of truth.
“I don’t know,” I said again. “I’ve got to go.”
“What about the cliff?” She stepped across me slightly. “The dog was half a soccer field from the road. How did you get to the edge so fast?”
I glanced at Eddie, who was watching me keenly. “I’m good at running.”
“Really?” She pulled her eyebrows tight. “You don’t strike me as a sprinter, Michael. Tall, a little skinny, more marathon man than Usain Bolt.” She picked a piece of random fluff off my jacket. “Let me tell you the thing I’m struggling with here: None of the cops remembers seeing you catch the dog. Do you want to comment on that?”
“Excuse me, are you done there?” Mom had my school bag in hand and was locking up the house.
“Almost!” Candy turned to me again. “They’re saying it was like something superhuman took over. Like a force they didn’t understand rushed in.” She tilted her head. Her hair fell down as straight as harp strings.
Eddie swung his camera to the opposite hand.
“It was misty,” I said, and this time I got away from her. Candy sighed and clicked her tongue in frustration. But how could I possibly describe what had happened when I didn’t even understand it myself?
“Right,” said Mom as I reached the porch step, “no more shenanigans.” For the second time that morning, she bundled us into the car.
At the end of the driveway, we had to pause for traffic. Candy was walking back to her car, swinging her hips like Holton Byford’s next top model. Despite the tension of the last few moments, there was still one thing I needed to know. Lowering the window, I asked her again, “Did you find out who owns the dog?”
She put her hands into her pockets and shivered. She tumbled my question around on her tongue before deciding she would give me an answer. “The dog’s called Trace and it seems to belong to —”
“Candy, let’s go,” Eddie called over. He was leaning on the open door of their car.
“Yeah, one moment.”
“The office wants us. Now.”
“Chill out,” Candy said to him. “What’s the rush?” She fished out a notebook. “The girl’s name is Freya Zielinski.”
“Freya?” I almost spat the name back.
I thought I saw Eddie frown.
Candy’s pencil-thin eyebrows twitched. “You know her?”
Of course. Everyone knew Freya. She was in my class. The weirdo in the corner who everyone ignored. “Is she dead?” I asked. I didn’t like the girl much. None of us did. Even so, it made me sick to think of her jumping.
Again, Candy didn’t try to answer quickly. But before she could offer any sort of reply, Mom had gunned the throttle and we were on our way.
“Who’s Freya?” Josie asked as we sped toward Holton.
I caught Mom’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “No one,” I muttered, looking away.
“She must be someone or you wouldn’t have recognized her name.”
“She’s a new girl at school.”
“The one who looks like she lives in a coffin?”
A common description of Freya, yes. Vamp was a name they taunted her with. Or Crow. In the eyes of the popular crowd, Freya’s dress sense was lifted right out of a scarecrow manual.
“I’ve seen her around,” Josie babbled on. “Mad hair, like it’s been cut with a hedge trimmer. Massive sleep bags under her eyes. Slums about in a hoodie. It was her dog?”
“Josie, just shut up, okay?”
“Only asking.” She stuck out her tongue.
“All right, you two.” Mom had heard enough. She put the radio on to break up the argument.
“She’s no one,” I said to my reflection in the glass.
The pale-skinned goth who sketched pictures of dragons. The freak who’d left behind an orphan dog. Freya Zielinski, victim of a horrible bone-crushing death.
She was no one.
No one at all.
I finally got to school around ten fifteen. I slipped into the classroom as quietly as I could. Mr. Hambleton was reading what sounded like a poem. Something to do with the sea, bizarrely. He raised his voice to quash the swell of catcalls that greeted my entrance and gestured to my seat without pausing to ask for an explanation. I looked over my shoulder at Freya’s desk.
Empty.
I felt sick.
“Thought she’d got you.” I glanced sideways at the class clown, Ryan Garvey. He pulled his collar away from his neck and placed two fingers where the bite holes ought to go. That piece of pantomime somehow escaped Mr. Hambleton’s attention, but the tongue-lolling death rasp that followed it didn’t.
“Thank you, Ryan.”
Garvey snapped to attention. “What for, sir?”
“For volunteering to explain the metaphorical significance of that final stanza.”
“That what?”
The class erupted with laughter.
Mr. Hambleton walked down the room and placed the open book on Ryan’s desk. “Forgive me. I seem to have mistaken your display for an artistic interpretation of the hungry sea. Clearly, I was wrong. So perhaps you’d like to copy the poem out in full and present me with your real thoughts during recess.” He tapped the page.
“Sir?”
“That’s not an invitation, that’s an order, Ryan. Mr. Malone,” he said, turning to me. “How good of you to join us. I take it there’s a reason for your delayed engagement?”
I explained about the flooding.
“Well, I got here on time,” Lauren Shenton said. She lived on the next road over from me.
Mr. Hambleton’s face said she’d made a fair point. Several kids had come through the center of Holton, where the main had burst.
“We took the coast road,” I said, fidgeting a little. “We were stopped by the police.”
“How exciting,” Mr. Hambleton said, raising his hand to quell the tide of comments. “I never had you down as a villain, Michael. Nothing serious, I hope?”
I shrugged. They would find out soon enough.
“Well, you’re here, that’s all that matters. Right —”
“Sir?”
He was about to go striding back to the front. “Yes, Michael?”
“Where’s Freya?”
&nbs
p; “Avoiding sunlight,” someone muttered.
Mr. Hambleton let the taunt pass. “I believe Freya called in this morning to say she was taking care of her father, who’s been ill.”
“Bet she’s staked him,” someone else said. And even though the logic didn’t really add up, the class collapsed in laughter again.
“That’s enough!” Mr. Hambleton had reached his limit. He glared at the bigmouths and troublemakers. “I have it on good authority that Freya went through a difficult, life-threatening operation when she was younger. She came to Holton with her father to make a new start. If I hear one more slur about vampires or crows or staking of hearts, I will make all of you read Bram Stoker’s Dracula and then require an essay from each of you on the moral agenda that underpins the general story arc. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” we said, like terrified rabbits.
Lauren Shenton flapped a hand in the air.
“Yes, Lauren, what now?”
“Sir, no one really wants to dis Freya, but, you know, she won’t get involved. It’s like she doesn’t want to make friends with us. Like she’s scared of people or something.”
“Then you must be patient and give her time.”
“And she talks to herself,” someone said.
“She’s freaky. Her face is weird,” Ryan muttered.
“You should talk,” Lauren said.
“No, it is, though,” Ryan countered. “She kind of … changes. Don’t you think?”
Several kids nodded and someone else said, “And she’s always drawing stupid dragons. That’s like something you do when you’re nine.”
In the whirl of Mr. Hambleton’s exasperation, I managed to inject a meaningful question. “Sir, what operation did Freya have?”
The other kids looked at me as if I’d defected to a foreign power. Why the sudden interest in Freya Zielinski?
Mr. Hambleton took a moment to think. “I’m not sure I’m at liberty to discuss that, Michael. Right, let’s get on. Notebooks open, please.”
I swung my school bag onto my desk, giving Ryan enough cover to pass me a note: Blood transfusion, it said.
What? I mouthed.
Freya’s operation, he mouthed right back.
I wadded up the paper and threw it at his big, dense skull.
Somewhere up the road, I swear there’s a village missing its idiot.
The rest of that day passed by without incident. Although my thoughts were still jumbled by the morning’s events, school went on as normal around me, and no announcement came about Freya. Maybe she hadn’t been at Berry Head at all and someone else had been walking her dog? But as far as I knew, Freya lived alone with her father — who was sick. So what was the husky doing up there?
And something else didn’t compute. Later that day, I was passing the gym, when I looked in and saw Josie behind a music stand, practicing the flute. I watched for a minute, impressed by the way she moved her head to the flight of the music without ever shifting her gaze from the score. Eventually, Mrs. McNiece, her music teacher, opened the door a crack and asked if I needed to speak to my sister. I shook my head but asked, “Ma’am, is Josie good — at flute?”
She looked at me as if I’d swapped my brain for a sock. “Yes, of course she is. She’s a wonderful prospect. She’s at the level of a child much older than her years. But surely you knew that already?”
I nodded and got around it by saying that me and Mom just wanted to know how likely it was that Josie would get through her exam next week.
“Well, I’m not a betting person, but I’d say she’s a certainty. Are you all right, Michael? You look as if the world’s just folded in around you.”
Pretty good description. Maybe it had.
“I’m fine, ma’am,” I said, retreating into a stream of passing kids. I waved at Josie, who saw me and frowned but didn’t stop playing.
Mrs. McNiece sighed and closed the door.
And that was that. Josie played the flute and played it well. And with every note that followed me down the corridor, the more my mind began to accept it. Until, by the end of school that day, I was certain I’d known it all along. Josie had played since she was six years old. She had an ear for music. A precocious talent.
Why was I even asking the question?
The following morning, outside the school gates, everything I knew about my life began to change. Within moments of being dropped off by Mom, the heckling began.
“Hey, Flash, show us your laser-powered feet!”
“Did they send you for a DOPE test afterward or what?”
“Why didn’t you keep going, right over the cliff, and make an even bigger SPLASH, eh, hero?”
“What are they going on about?” Josie tutted as kids began to crowd around and jostle us.
Suddenly, Ryan burst to the front of the mob, thrusting a rolled-up notebook in my face, like it was a TV reporter’s microphone. “Mr. Malone. Ryan Garvey, BBC News. Have you anything more to tell us about your dramatic cliff-top rescue —”
“Thrilling cliff-top rescue. Get it right,” someone said.
Then I saw the newspaper.
Josie snatched it out of Freddie Hancock’s hands. “Michael, look,” she said, passing the paper to me. “There’s a picture and everything.”
Underneath a headline that said HEROIC BOY RESCUES DOG was a picture of me standing on Berry Head with a husky in my arms.
“No … it didn’t happen like that,” I said.
Ryan Garvey aimed his “microphone” again. “How did it happen, Michael? What was going through your mind when you grabbed the dog? Was it anything to do with how many cans of dog food you’d get as a reward?”
Laughter.
I thrust the paper back at them and knocked Ryan’s notebook out of my face. “The picture’s a fake.” Now I knew why Eddie had made me pose with my arms held out. It would have been a simple matter to paste a picture of the dog across my chest, then superimpose it on an image of rain-swept Berry Head. I wasn’t even sure it was the same dog. And if that had been his intent all along, why had he bothered to take the images from Josie’s phone?
“This is boring. I’m going in,” said Josie. She skipped away to be with her friends.
Meanwhile, the mob was still giving me grief. There were more dumb jokes about bionic limbs and sled dog teams (“When’s your next polar expedition, Michael?”). Then Ryan said something that stopped me in my tracks. “Where did you hide the body, Malone?”
The power of my stare actually made him back away. “They found someone?” I asked.
Then everyone was clustering around, wanting to tell me that I’d wasted my time. No, the police hadn’t found a body on the rocks. Just the dog wandering close to the cliff, with no apparent reason for its show of distress. There had been no jumper on Berry Head that day. It was a false alarm.
Loser.
But that didn’t stop the idiot Garvey saying, “Open his bag. Maybe he’s got Freya’s heart in there.”
I’m not a violent kid, but I was so going to stuff Ryan’s head down a drain, when a voice said, “Michael, I need to speak with you.”
Maybe it was because it was a female voice. Or the haunting measure of authority it carried. Or perhaps it was the way she said Meek-ell, not Mike-ell, that made nine rowdy schoolboys turn as one animal.
“Wow.” Ryan Garvey whistled.
For once, Mastermind spoke for us all.
She was across the road, leaning against a shining red scooter as slim and perfect in its breathtaking design as she was. Springs and brake hubs glinted in the sunlight; the mirrors stood up like two glass flags. The seat was so shiny and black that it looked for all the world like she’d only just torn off the shrink-wrap.
Stunning.
And so was she.
She must have been nineteen, maybe older. I’d have guessed she was French, even if I hadn’t heard her speak. Spikes of short dark hair stabbed at the ridges of her prominent cheekbones. Her eyes were caramel brown and
seemed to swirl at their center like the milky foam on a cappuccino. She was wearing a plain white dress. And on her feet were a pair of blue-and-white sneakers, their laces looped like butterfly wings. I had never really understood love at first sight. That day, I totally, totally got it.
She held out a helmet.
“Oh — my — God. Who is she?” Ryan hissed.
It took a few moments to find an answer. Under her riveting gaze, my mouth just didn’t want to work anymore. A sudden crosswind picked up Garvey’s notebook and blew it ten yards down the road, but even that couldn’t shift his focus from the girl. Then, for no reason I could possibly imagine, other than that the words were just there in my head, I heard myself saying, “She’s …” Another half second ticked by. The French girl gave me a nod of approval, as if she wanted me to speak my mind, no matter how weird the words might sound. And they were weird. “She’s … the au pair.”
“What?” said half a dozen guys at once.
She smiled like an early dawning light.
Ryan Garvey, BBC News, jabbed a finger in the girl’s direction. “She seriously lives with you? She does things? Washes your boxers and stuff?”
It sounded credible. A French au pair. Everyone knew we weren’t short of money.
So no one laughed.
And the girl just stared.
High in my skull, a school bell rang.
Almost immediately, she spoke again, guiding her gaze even deeper into mine, as if I were the toy she’d singled out and needed to grab from the arcade booth. “Michael, we have to go.”
I looked dizzily at the helmet she was holding out to me. Black with a purple floral design. The patterns were wandering all over the dome.
Someone spat on the ground and said, “Come on, Malone. Stop messing around.”
But I couldn’t help myself. I stepped toward the girl and took the helmet.
She jumped on the scooter and sat astride it. “Get on. Hold my waist, okay?”
A small piece of me was crying Danger! Danger! but I swung my leg across the seat, laying my hands just above her hips. Despite her slender frame, her muscles felt taut and firm, like an athlete’s. “Wh-where are you taking me?”
“That won’t matter till we get there. Hold tight.”