The Year of Shadows (5 page)

I
DIDN’T SLEEP
much that night. The next morning I’d have to go back to school, and I wasn’t sure which was scarier to think about: school, or the ghosts.

Every time a sound rustled through the cracked door of my bedroom, or Nonnie shifted in her bed, I sat up, listening hard.

I kept seeing those shadow fingers curling out from underneath the basement door. The feeling of those gray, foggy shapes rushing through me lingered all through the night. I couldn’t stop shivering. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mom—what she would think, how she’d make me feel better.

I couldn’t stop peeking at the burn on my arm either.

After a while, I got tired of tossing and turning, so I took a few deep breaths and headed into the kitchen. Underneath the flickering fluorescent light, I examined my burn.

Yes, there it was, glittering again. It caught the overhead light like I had a million tiny prisms embedded in my skin.

“Beautiful,” I whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

“Olivia?”

I jumped, stubbing my toe on the sink. The Maestro stood just past the light, rubbing his eyes.

“What do you want?” I said.

“What are you doing up?”

“Nothing.” I shifted my burned arm behind me. “Getting some water.”

“Are you—?” He cleared his throat, slicked down his hair. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“My
life’s
a bad dream.”

Then I stalked past him back to my room. He didn’t follow me.

I grabbed my umbrella from under my bed and tucked it into the sheets with me. If ghosts
did
come after me, it probably wouldn’t do much good. But it made me feel better to have it, to hold it tight and pretend like it made me safer.

Sometimes you have to lie to yourself like that. Sometimes that’s how you get through things.

The next day, when I woke up, the cat had returned.

He was cleaning himself, perched on the metal foot-rail of my cot much more gracefully than such a large cat should have been able to perch. I stared at him, too afraid to move because then he might disappear again. My heart still pounded from the night of strange dreams I’d had—dreams of gray shapes and black shadows and terrible shrieks.

Dreams of ghosts.

Don’t think this means anything,
said the cat’s bored expression.
I’m keeping you around as a curiosity, pet. This isn’t romantic.

“Don’t go.” I stretched my hand out one slow inch at a time. “Don’t go, you weird cat. Please?”

The cat’s whiskers twitched.
Of course I’m not going anywhere. If I were going anywhere, why would I have come here in the first place?
He sat down after circling once to inspect the area, then blinked at me.
Idiot.

I smiled.

“Is a strange name, ‘Weird Cat’,” said Nonnie, from across the room. She sat up in bed, swaying, like someone was playing a waltz only for her. “Is that his name?
Gatto
,
gatto
.”

“Put your scarf on, Nonnie.” I didn’t like seeing Nonnie like that, without some kind of scarf on her naked head.

“Which scarf?”

“The yellow one with the blue polka dots.”

“Oh, I like that one, Olivia!”

“I know.”

“So, is that his name,
ombralina
? Weird Cat?”

I pulled on my boots to go use the bathroom. I had these scuffed black army boots I wore everywhere, and we couldn’t trust the plumbing in this place. “I don’t think so. That’s kind of quirky, but it’s not him.”

“Igor.”

“What?”

Nonnie smiled at me. Her eyes nearly disappeared in wrinkles. “His name. Igor.”

“Igor?”

“Like Stravinsky!”

I made a face. “I am
not
naming him after a composer, Nonnie.”

Nonnie clasped her hands under her chin. “I love Stravinsky!
Molte bene
!” Then she started to hum the trumpet solo from
Petrushka.

I scowled. It was difficult to argue with Nonnie when she looked so happy. Plus, Stravinsky wasn’t the absolute worst or anything. His music was odd and sometimes disturbing. I wondered if he had been a “little shadow” when he was a kid too.

“Fine.” I sighed. “If you really think so.”

The cat jumped down next to me, butting his head against my boot.
Well? Are we going to brave the plumbing together or aren’t we?

“Igor, Igor!” Nonnie cried, throwing up her hands.

And so, his name was Igor.

I walked to school alone, getting more nauseated with every step.

School wasn’t always so bad. It used to just be school, with homework and people messing around in the halls and passing notes in class. I always decorated my notes with elaborate drawings and folded them into origami shapes,
like Mom had taught me. Once, when Mr. Fitch had caught me passing a note, he’d taken it up and asked to see me after class.

“If I catch you doing this again, Olivia, I’ll have to give you detention,” he had said. “You need to pay attention. You need to take notes. Sixth grade is a big year, an important year. Do you understand?”

Every year was an important year, according to every teacher I’d ever had. It got exhausting after a while. “Yeah. I get it. I’m sorry.”

Then he had sighed and turned the origami swan over and over in his hands. It had swirls and stars and forests all over it, like a quilt of sketches. “But this is quite beautiful, Olivia.” He had handed the swan to me and smiled. “You should do something with that. You really should.”

But now? Since Mom left? I think I became a shadow at school more than anywhere else.

People just didn’t get me anymore. That’s how I wanted it to be. I’d
made
it happen, in fact. It was embarrassing to be the girl whose Mom left her without even a good-bye. So I’d done my best to turn invisible. Like a sketch of me with my mouth sewn shut and my face scribbled over. That’s what I had created. No hot, bubbly feelings spilling out. No humiliating family secrets blurted out by mistake. No random screaming fits. I felt like doing that a lot—just throwing my head up to the sky and letting a scream rip out.

But people generally don’t approve of random screaming fits, even when they might be perfectly justified.

I even looked like a shadow. Short, skinny half-Italian girl with long black hair. Wearing my favorite striped socks (which I wore with everything) and my boots (ditto), whatever faded clothes I had left (I’d thrown out all the bright colors, keeping only the darks and the blacks), or whatever I found at the charity store. Shabby old jacket. Hair covering my eyes. Head buried in a sketchpad.

And now one of Nonnie’s scarves tied around my arm to hide my burn.

I used to have friends. Not real friends, I guess, but the kind you sit with at lunch and sometimes have sleepovers with, the kind you pass notes to in class.

But friends don’t stick around if you don’t talk to them. Not even halfway friends do that. Some of them tried for a while: “Hi, Olivia. How’d you do on the test?” “Olivia! Can you do one of those pen tattoos on my arm?” “Olivia? Are you okay? I heard about your mom.”

At first, I gave them one- or two-word answers. Then I stopped giving them any answers at all.

Before long, I sat by myself at lunch. I sat by myself in class, even though I was surrounded by twenty other kids. I was by myself everywhere. It was easier that way.

My sketchpad was a better friend than anyone else could be, anyway. As I turned off Gable Street and passed through the concrete courtyard of James S. Killough
Intermediate School, I held my sketchpad tightly to my chest.

Like a shield.

For a few days, everything went just like it was supposed to. I went to school. Class. Lunch. I watched for Henry and went the other way whenever I saw that bright red hair. I kept my head down and scribbled notes as much as I needed to so my teachers wouldn’t get suspicious. I went to The Happy Place after school and wiped tables and washed dishes. And the rest of the time, I drew.

Mostly, I drew ghosts.

I looked everywhere for them, every night—in the restrooms, in the rooms backstage, underneath every row of seats.

Nothing. Not one shadow finger, not one gray foot.

The picture I had of them in my head was pretty fuzzy, so I kept drawing them over and over, trying to capture the memory of them on the page. It wasn’t working very well; it’s harder than you might think to draw just the right amount of transparency, of driftiness. And those black eyes of theirs—I couldn’t quite get them black enough.

But, ghosts or no, my burn stayed the same, dark and glittering.

Henry didn’t talk to me for a whole week, although I always felt him watching me with this thoughtful look on his face, like I was his homework and he had to figure me out. The Maestro and the office staff, they all let him hang out at
the Hall even when he wasn’t working. He’d camp out in the middle of the floor seats and do his algebra problems like it was his living room couch or something.

The dork.

Then, the Thursday of the second week of school, Mark Everett decided I’d had enough time to myself, I guess, and started hollering at me across the cafeteria. Mark Everett was one of those boys who probably picked at scabs till they got infected. He just couldn’t leave people alone.

“Hey, what’s the deal, Olivia?” He was sitting a few tables away from me. Henry’s table. “Why so gloooomy, Olivia? Why so
sad
?”

The boys at the table laughed, except for Henry. He just kept chewing his sandwich. Heads all across the cafeteria turned to see what was happening.

“You going to a funeral or something, Olivia? Why you gotta wear so much black, Emoooolivia? Get it?”

Mark was truly cracking himself up over there. I sat at my table, alone, and started drawing. I wasn’t so hungry anymore.

A noise across from me made me look up. It was Joan Dawson. We’d gone to school together since kindergarten, but we’d never really talked or anything. All I knew was that Joan’s family was rich, and that she liked to make signs and hold one-woman protests in the courtyard outside. You know, antiwar stuff and antifascism stuff, things like that. The teachers called her
precocious
. And sometimes,
when they thought no one was listening,
obnoxious
.