The Year of Shadows (32 page)

We were wet, cold, weighed down with soaked clothes, and had asked (Henry kept a tally) sixty-seven people for their signatures.

H
ENRY GRIMACED AS
he pulled off his shoe. “Maybe if we showed people our feet, we could get more signatures. They’d sign so we would go away and they wouldn’t have to look at our feet anymore.”

Our feet were looking pretty bad after two hard days of pounding the pavement. I myself had three blisters, one of which looked ready to pop. And even Joan, who was wearing some kind of fancy cross-country shoes, had sores rubbed up and down the sides of her feet.

“How many signatures did we get, Joan?”

Joan compiled our clipboard lists. “Thirty-three.”

“That’s
it
?”

“I’m afraid so. Obviously our citizens suffer from cultural deficiency.”

“Either that or we’re bad salespeople,” said Henry.

I yanked my shoes back on, gritting my teeth against the blister pain. “Well, we’ll just have to try harder.”

“
How?
” said Henry.

“We’ll go out every day, before and after school, and
we’ll talk to people in the cafeteria at lunch, and in the halls between classes, and we’ll go to The Happy Place, too, and we won’t stop until we’ve gotten five thousand signatures, or ten thousand. Not until we’ve plastered every square inch of this city in fliers and pamphlets and posters and
whatever it takes.
Easy as that.”

“Oh, right.” Henry had slumped over, massaging his legs. “Easy.”

Joan was lying flat on a bench outside the Hall, humming what she called her zen exercises. “I admire your spirit, Olivia. Although my feet don’t.”

“Maybe this is unrealistic.” Henry put his head in his hands. “Are we crazy for trying this?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

And we were. But I liked it. It was hard work, and it kept me too busy to worry, and too excited to doubt.

Every day that next week, before, during, and after school, and every spare moment we could find, we kept working, tacking up fliers on every telephone pole, every bulletin board in every laundromat, recreation center, apartment building, and restaurant we could sneak our way into. We left huge stacks of fliers on shop counters and in the magazine sections at the libraries.

By the end of the first week of February, we had 241 signatures. It was Friday night—concert night.

This was the ultimate test.

How many people would show up? And how would they react to the ghosts?

“You remember your instructions, right?” I asked the ghosts. Our ghosts and about a dozen others we’d recruited huddled around me on the catwalk. Tillie kept nervously plucking ribs out of her chest and then shoving them back in topsy-turvy. Jax drifted back and forth across the catwalk, mumbling his part over and over to himself.

Mr. Worthington, naturally, stared at me. He would not let go of Joan’s arm.

“Of course,” said Tillie. “Once the concert starts, Jax and I will each take a side of the Hall. Me the west side, Jax the east side. Every now and then, we’ll show ourselves to someone and look pitiful.”

“And why will you look pitiful?”

“Because people are less likely to be frightened by ghosts and start some sort of stampeding panic if we look like innocent, tragic children,” recited Jax.

“Right. And you won’t ever stay visible for too long. Just long enough for people to think they saw something but not be totally sure.”

Tillie saluted me. Jax nodded solemnly.

“And Mr. Worthington?”

Mr. Worthington stuck his hand through Joan’s stomach and then pulled it out again.

“Merp,” Joan squeaked.

“Sorry, Joan. And yes, that’s right. You’ll try to touch as
many people as possible.” I paused. That sounded so wrong. But if enough people felt the strange, cold sensation of Mr. Worthington nearby, then rumors would begin. People would talk. And talk meant publicity. “Well, you know what I mean. And what about you guys?”

The other ghosts, most of whom were part of Mrs. Barsky’s latest fan club said, their voices overlapping: “We do what the second-in-commands tell us to do.”

Jax’s chest puffed up like a balloon.

“Right,” I said. “And if you see signs of shades coming to crash the party?”

“We’ll fly right into the center of everyone and cause a mass panic,” Tillie said brightly.

A flash of red caught my eye, and I looked down through the catwalk railing to see Henry, waving his arms to get my attention. The musicians were walking onstage. Soon the concert would begin.

Ed and Larry dimmed the lights. I peered down into the half darkness until I found Henry leading people to their seats on the mezzanine. In one of the dress circle boxes, Mr. Rue was shaking hands with Mayor Pitter and his wife.

Joan crouched down next to me and pointed. “Olivia, look.”

Throughout the audience, flashes of yellow flickered like fireflies. Clusters of people here and there whispered to each other, looking up at the ceiling, pointing.

Could they be looking for ghosts?

“Our fliers,” I whispered.

Joan grinned at me. “Olivia, this might really work.”

I clamped down on the bubbly fluttering in my chest.

“We’ll see,” I said, and then applause, a little louder than usual, broke out as the Maestro took to his podium and bowed. Trying to count the number of heads in the audience, I kept getting too excited and losing my numbers, and finally just gave up. Instead I found Richard Ashley’s head in the orchestra and thought good-luck thoughts at him.

When the opening notes of Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde Prelude
began, I whispered to the ghosts, “It’s time. Go.”

My ghosts swooped away in three different directions—Jax to the east, Tillie to the west, and Mr. Worthington right down the middle of the orchestra floor. The others split up and followed them.

With the lights off, their smoky bodies blended in well with the shadows. Tillie slunk past Henry, who was leading a mother and her two children to their seats. As Tillie passed, she dragged her arm through theirs, but so fast that by the time they looked to see who was there, they couldn’t find anyone.

Except for the smallest kid, a blond boy. He watched Tillie float up onto the mezzanine with a smile on his face.

I found myself smiling too.

And Jax, over on the other side, settled in gently beside an older woman sitting alone. When he brushed a kiss
against her cheek, the woman flinched and clapped a hand to her cheek.

But Jax was already gone.

And Mr. Worthington? He glided through the orchestra floor like an eel, snaking through people’s stomachs and then out through their mouths and ears, trickling softly like candlelight smoke. People shifted in their seats, putting hands to their stomachs, frowning.

“You okay?” I saw a man mouth to the woman beside him. She nodded, peering out into the dark aisle beside her, like she could find whatever had made her suddenly feel colder, nauseated, tingling with ice.

It was working—slowly, of course. If the ghosts did too much too fast, it could start a panic. We had been very specific with them about that. But it was working.

From down below, Henry flashed me a quick thumbs-up. I thought my heart would twist itself into permanent knots.

“Olivia?” Joan whispered after a long time. “Do you always watch concerts from up here?”

“Yeah. I mean, most of them, anyway. When I can stand it.”

Joan turned to me, her eyes wide and bright. “I don’t know how you
do
stand it. It’s so beautiful up here. I had no idea.”

“Beautiful?”

“With this tragic music playing, and the paintings on the ceiling. And the chandeliers, and the curtains draped
everywhere, and, oh, Olivia. Just look at everyone down there.”

At first I just rolled my eyes. Joan could be so dramatic. But then I saw it.

Have you ever watched people when they don’t know you’re watching them? Like in a movie theater or a concert. When people get caught up in watching something, their faces change. The lines on their faces get softer, because whatever they’re watching has made them forget how they think they’re supposed to be looking. Instead, they just
are
—just sitting there, listening and watching and being real.

Goosebumps broke out on my skin. It was about four minutes into
Romeo and Juliet
, when those spooky notes start out low in the strings and then drift up high, and the harp floats right on top of it. The orchestra actually sounded decent for once. I don’t know why, or maybe I was just imagining things, but I think the audience heard it too.

“It is beautiful,” I whispered, and I meant it.

Joan clutched my hand. “Oh, Olivia, we have to save this place.”

“We’re working on it, Joan.”

“No, but we
have
to. Not just for the ghosts, but because . . . oh, never mind, it’s getting louder and I want to listen.”

And we did. I listened like I hadn’t ever listened before, and I got that soaring, bursting feeling in my chest like when Frederick had played his concerto. But it of course
wasn’t Frederick doing it this time; it was an orchestra, led by the Maestro. And like it or not, we shared blood.

How strange,
I thought, watching him wave his arms around onstage, sweat on his forehead; watching the musicians blow red-faced through their parts. Their eyes darted up every now and then to catch the Maestro’s movements. Invisible wires connected them, and the wires vibrated with electricity so thick that by the end of the piece, I had to remind myself to breathe. The Maestro lowered his arms. The audience clapped, yellow fliers forgotten in their seats.

Henry was clapping too, and the ghosts dashed up to wrap me in ice-cold hugs that left me feeling light-headed.

“It’s working!” Tillie squealed in my ear. “We were really messing with people. They were shivering and a couple of people had to go to the bathroom and get sick!”

Together, we peeked through the curtains. Instead of bolting out of the Hall like people usually did after a concert, the audience had stayed in their seats. They pointed up at the ceiling, some of them looking through binoculars. They read their programs, they read their fliers. Their whispering and chattering rose up to us in a low roar of excitement.

Henry ran out onto the catwalk, making it shake. “Look!” he said, yanking down his sleeve to show us tally marks scratched up and down his arm in black ink. I’d never seen him smile so big. It was like the sun; I couldn’t look directly at it.

“This is how many times I heard people talking about
ghosts, or the fliers, or the petition. All the stuff we’ve been doing. It got to be so many, I stopped counting. But, Olivia.” He grabbed my arms and it was like there was no audience, no Joan, no ghosts. It was just me and Henry, and his sky-colored eyes, and all of our secrets that no one else knew.

“Olivia, I think it’s going to be okay. I think
we’re
going to be okay.”

Then he hugged me. And I held on for what felt like forever.