The Year of Shadows (26 page)

DECEMBER

C
OUNSELOR DAVIS CALLED
me into his office for another session, right before winter break.

“How are we doing this month, Olivia?”

I thought about that for a second, and I guess he took that pause to mean I was struggling with some kind of awful emotion.

But for the first time in what felt like forever, I wasn’t. I had ghosts for friends. The Maestro was keeping out of my way, which was just how I liked it. I’d found this great purple scarf for Nonnie at the charity store and already had it wrapped under our tabletop tree in the kitchen. The new ghosts were down to twenty-six. Mrs. Barsky was going through them like wildfire, but of course more kept popping up, so now she’d opened up this side business in The Happy Place, called The Ghost Room. She and Mr. Barsky had made it all official, turning their office into a space properly decorated for séances and conferencing with ghosts and meeting with sad people who’d lost their loved ones—candles,
incense, floor cushions. And complimentary tea, of course.

And then there was Henry. Studious, organized, sky-eyed Henry. He’d started helping me with algebra after work most days. And he requested drawings—a drawing of Igor, a drawing of the ghosts, a drawing of him in a Superman costume. I made him a superzombie instead. He didn’t seem to mind.

“The holidays can be a hard time of year for some people,” Counselor Davis was saying. “Did you know that?”

I couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

Counselor Davis seemed surprised. “You’re awfully cheerful today. How is everything at home?”

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s going okay.”

And I meant it.

This time, when I left his office, I didn’t smash my candy on the door.

On the last day of school before break, the sky started spitting out pathetic little snowflakes while Henry and I walked to the Hall. The last holiday concert was that night, and we planned to binge on the leftover candy canes afterward.

At the corner, right outside the Hall doors, Henry started clearing his throat a lot and then pulled out a wrapped package from his backpack.

“Merry Christmas, Olivia,” he said, grinning as I unwrapped it. Oh, he was so proud of himself.

And he should have been. I held the sketchpad in front
of me for a long time, staring at its perfection. The clean, unused white pages; the crisp corners; the endless worlds just waiting for me to uncover them with my charcoals.

“Henry, this must’ve cost you a lot,” I whispered.

Henry rolled his eyes. “You’re supposed to say thank you.”

“Thank you.” I swallowed hard, my throat hot and itchy.

“You’re a real artist, and you’ve been drawing on napkins and newspapers for a long time now.”

“Henry, I—” I kept swallowing. I thought I would choke. “I didn’t get you anything. I don’t have . . .”

“It’s okay.” Henry cuffed me on the shoulder. “I didn’t expect anything.”

That popped the whole moment right into smithereens. I shoved the sketchpad into my bag. “What, so I’m
that
poor and rude that you didn’t even bother thinking I could get you something? Is that it?”

“No. I don’t know, it’s like . . . we’ve died together, Olivia.” Henry frowned in that serious way of his. “We’re way past needing to give presents and stuff. But I know you want to be an artist more than anything in the world, so I just had to do this.”

Oh. “That’s really nice, Henry.”

Would he
ever
stop grinning? “I know, isn’t it?”

“Idiot.” I kicked him on the leg, but not nearly hard enough to hurt, and hugged my bag to me for the rest of the night. It held a new sketchpad inside it, like a precious egg.

JANUARY

O
N NEW YEAR’S
Eve, Henry stayed the night. We watched the ball drop with the Barskys, and then they walked us back to the Hall.

“You’ve done a nice job back here, Olivia,” said Mrs. Barsky, a cluster of ghosts trailing after her with these dopey looks on their faces. Ghosts were always following Mrs. Barsky these days. They were like her fan club or something. “It really feels like a home.”

I stepped back and tried to look at the backstage rooms like I was seeing them for the first time. Then I tried to remember what they’d looked like the first day we arrived. I guess there was a big difference. I’d strung up paper birds across the kitchen ceiling and tacked up my drawings on the walls. For Christmas, I’d bought myself this nice round orange rug from the charity store and put it under the kitchen table. A sign on my and Nonnie’s door said
OLIVIA AND NONNIE, AKA, THE COOLEST, LIVE HERE.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it’s all right.”

“Is your father around?” Mr. Barsky said.

I shrugged. “Who knows?”

The Barskys exchanged these looks that made me shrink inside my clothes. I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me. I just wanted to return to the nice night we’d been having. My belly was bulging with cookies. Henry was wearing a pointy foil hat.

After I finally convinced the Barskys to leave, I helped set up a pallet for Henry on the floor of my room.

“Henry is sleeping here?” Nonnie sat on the edge of her cot, her knees up to her chest like a kid. She was practically drowning in her nightgown. “Is
una festa
? Party?”

“Sure, Nonnie.”

Nonnie waved her hand at Henry. “Come here, boy.”

Henry stood there like a champ while Nonnie turned him around and around, inspecting him.

“You are gentleman?” she asked.

Henry’s eyebrows went up. “I think so.”

“You
think
so?”

“I mean, yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“You’ll sleep by door? Watch for shades?” Nonnie looked past him to smile at me. “Olivia tells me about shades.”

Tillie buried her head in my shoulder and giggled.

“Yes, ma’am, I will.”

“You like scarves?”

Henry paused. Then he took off his hat, found a yellow
scarf from the pile on Nonnie’s bed, and tied it around his head like a pirate. “I love them.”

Nonnie clapped him on the arm. “He can stay.”

Once Nonnie had fallen asleep, and the Maestro had stumbled into his bedroom from some party uptown and started up his music, Henry and I gathered onstage with our ghosts and a few of the others. We needed the backup.

It was time to share with Tillie and Jax.

We had planned on sharing with Mr. Worthington first, because he was looking darker every day. But he wouldn’t let us. He kept pointing at Tillie and Jax and shaking his head, grunting like a caveman. So Tillie and Jax it was.

“Mrs. Barsky wouldn’t like this,” Henry whispered as we set up. “She’d want to do it herself.”

“Yeah, but these aren’t
her
ghosts,” I said. “They’re ours. Someone else helping them move on would be wrong. Besides, don’t you want to see their memories for yourself?”

“Isn’t that kind of selfish?”

“Look, do you want to do it or not?”

Henry sighed. “Just hurry before I change my mind.”

Like the previous five times, Henry and I held each other’s hands and braced ourselves for the cold and darkness of sharing, for the stifled feeling of not being able to breathe.

It had been a while. He had to be as nervous as I was.

“It will be okay,” Jax said. But he kept looking around the darkened Hall. Other ghosts stood guard for us, hovering
around us in a circle. They were twitchy, flinching at every noise. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know we were all thinking the same thing:

The shades had been awfully quiet since Mrs. Barsky had opened up The Ghost Room. They stayed far away from us, lurking in the corners, watching. It was like they had given up or something.

Only they didn’t seem like the kind of creatures who gave up easily.

I set my jaw. “Just do it, guys. And hurry.”

Tillie and Jax rushed into us, pouring through our skin, into our ears, under our fingernails. Everything in the universe was clamping down on me, trying to split me apart into pieces. When I breathed, it hurt, so I stopped breathing and thought I would pass out.

But then I found Henry’s hand and squeezed. His hand squeezed back. It said,
I’m here, Olivia.

When I opened my eyes, I was still me, Olivia, but I was also Jax. When I held my hands out in front of me, I saw a boy’s hands, crisscrossed with scrapes and dirt. Across from me was a girl with wild braids and beautiful honey-colored skin. White dust, bandages, and strange markings—maybe burns?—covered her from head to toe.

Tillie?
I whispered.
Or . . . Henry?

The girl nodded. “Both of us are here,” said Tillie’s voice, but I knew it was really Henry speaking with Tillie’s voice, because Tillie sounded gentler than she usually did. That thought
startled me: Was Henry gentle? I tried to find him through the mask of Tillie’s face. It was nice, the thought of a boy like Henry being gentle. Baseball stars who sat at popular tables weren’t the kind of people you might first think of as gentle.

You’re distracted
, said Jax, from inside my head.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

“What?” Henry-Tillie said.

“I was talking to Jax.”

Henry-Tillie frowned. “This is confusing. It’s like . . . okay, so Tillie is inside me, and Jax is inside you. And I’m kind of inside Tillie too. It’s all mixed-up. When you talk, Olivia, I know it’s you, even though it’s Jax’s voice.”

“Same here, with you and Tillie. So . . . Tillie, can you see Jax? Er, me?”

Henry-Tillie paused, listening to the voice inside him. “She says she can’t see anything. She says she’s stuck inside my brain, and that it’s gross and gray, just like she thought a brain would be. Thanks, Tillie.”

That’s how it is for me, too,
Jax said quietly.
I thought maybe I would be able to see Tillie, in our memories like this. But it’s just like always. I can’t see her. I can’t hear her.

I’m sorry, Jax,
I thought to him.
But I can see her. She’s right here, I promise you.

Does she look okay? Where are we?

“Tillie says this is stupid, because she can’t see anything,” said Henry-Tillie, putting his hands on his hips. “Also, when I put my hands on my hips just then, it was mostly Tillie
moving them. That’s completely weird.” Henry-Tillie started waving his arms around and turning in circles like some crazy dance. “Okay, she’s making me do this, too. Stop it, Tillie.”

“We’re . . .” I looked around as the memories surrounding us grew less fuzzy. “I don’t know how to answer you, Jax. We’re somewhere very gray.”

Light gray flakes covered the world, as far as I could see. Some of them rained down from the sky like snow, but it wasn’t snow. When I touched one of those flakes, it crumbled in my hand like feathery dust. In the distance, ruined buildings jutted up into a black sky.

I described this for Jax in my head. And I described where we stood—in a camp of some kind, with fences surrounding us, and shacks lined up in the center of the camp. Filthy people huddled by tiny campfires, or worked beside tables loaded down with supplies. Staircases stood attached to chunks of crumbling wall. Columns stood without a roof over them.