The Year of Shadows (9 page)

“All right, Joan. You’re coming too.”

“Fine.” Joan put her arm around me stiffly. “I
will
come, and I’ll be her defendant. I witnessed everything. I know the truth.”

In the principal’s office, Mrs. Farrity whispered some things to Ms. Renshaw, who had a cloud of blond hair and gave us pieces of chocolate when Mrs. Farrity’s back was turned. Then Mrs. Farrity filled out some papers and left, and Ms. Renshaw led us into Principal Cooper’s office.

Principal Cooper watched me and Joan for a minute. We sat across from him in hard black plastic chairs. I don’t know about Joan, but I stared at the ceiling, refusing to look at him. I didn’t have anything to say to Principal Cooper. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Well?” he said. “Why don’t one of you tell me what happened?”

“Principal Cooper, my name is Joan Dawson,” Joan said, breathlessly, “and I witnessed the incident myself. I’m here to offer testimony on behalf of the accused.”

“Miss
Dawson
,” said Principal Cooper. He rubbed his forehead. I got the feeling he and Joan had done this before. “Why don’t you let Miss Stellatella talk first?”

Joan cleared her throat. “I, Joan Elizabeth Dawson, do solemnly swear—”

“Miss Dawson, that’s quite enough.” Principal Cooper called Ms. Renshaw to take Joan into the other room.

“Don’t let him pressure you, Olivia,” Joan hissed, digging in her heels at the door. “You’re innocent!”

After Joan left, Principal Cooper’s eyes crinkled tiredly at me. Was everyone tired these days? Richard Ashley, Mr. Rue, even me. I wanted Mom. I wanted to go home—to
the home we’d had, the home where Mom had watched me draw like it was the coolest thing in the world.

The home before everything started to go wrong, when the Maestro still had dinner with us and let me sit on his lap while he studied his scores.

“What key is this in, Olivia?” he would say.

Four sharps. Easy as pie. “E major!”

Principal Cooper cleared his throat. “How are things at home, Miss Stellatella?”

I stared at his desk. “Fine.”

“Are you sure?”

I opened my mouth, closed it, and opened it again. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what he knew, and I couldn’t say,
I live at Emerson Hall, in the back storage rooms with bad plumbing, and Nonnie is small, and Richard Ashley is tired.
I couldn’t tell him about the ghosts or show him my burn. What would he say? What would he think?

Even worse, what would he
do
? Somewhere there was probably a law against kids living in music halls.

So I said nothing.

“I know about the Philharmonic,” Principal Cooper said gently. “About the orchestra. I know it must be . . . difficult.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

After a long time, Principal Cooper said something about a counselor and a letter home, but I wasn’t really listening. They let me stay in the nurse’s office for the rest of the day. They wanted to watch me, they said. When they pulled
down my scarf to inspect my arm, they found nothing; my burn had disappeared. They asked me questions about my eating habits, and other things too, but my brain was too shocked to think. When they left me, I peeled back my scarf again.

Nothing. It was gone. I tried to find some sort of explanation, and couldn’t, except for one: None of it had been real. We really had hallucinated the whole thing, me and Henry, like mass hysteria or something. The burns had never actually been there.

But when I got to The Happy Place after school, I checked again, just in case.

The burn was back, its black color slowly seeping back into my arm. Maybe it only showed up near the Hall. Maybe it faded when I left the Hall, for some reason.

Whatever it was, I was glad. I couldn’t stand the thought of it all being a hallucination. I needed to find these ghosts, and I knew that, somehow, the burn connected me to them.

That night, I dreamed about the world of Death. It was black and glittering, like my burn. I walked into it through an archway of comets, and Igor was right beside me.

OCTOBER

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
a couple of weeks into October that everything clicked.

Wednesday morning. October 13. I woke up with my teeth chattering, like I’d been sleeping in a freezer. My breath puffed in little white bursts. So did Igor’s and Nonnie’s. I dressed fast, skipping around on the cold concrete floor.

“Stupid drafty old place,” I muttered. “You’d think we lived in the Arctic or something.”

Nonnie watched me happily from her cot, wrapped up in our quilts. “You’re grumpy lately,
ombralina. Scontroso.
”

“Well, Nonnie, that’s what happens when a girl gets moved from a house into a meat locker.”

Nonnie clucked her tongue. “Is not so bad, now.”

She was right; the temperature in the room had increased, and my breaths were back to invisible. I looked at Igor. “Weird, huh?”

He glared up at me from my rumpled sheets.
When will you stop talking so I can go back to sleep?

“But not just today,” Nonnie said, tying her scarf over her eyes. “You are strange all the days. You are distracted.”

Guilt sank into my stomach. I
had
been pretty distant lately. All I could think about were the ghosts; I spent hours drawing them after work, hours I should have spent with Nonnie.

Nonnie peeked out from beneath her scarf. “You missed cards last night.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just . . .” I sighed and plopped down beside Nonnie. “What would you say if . . .” I looked at Igor for reassurance, but he wasn’t much help, already half asleep. “. . . if I told you I’d seen ghosts? And that I wanted to find a way to talk with them?”

Nonnie’s eyes widened.
“Il fantasma. Lo spettro!”

I patted Nonnie’s arm. “Shh, shh. It’s okay. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No, no!” Nonnie shook her head, grinning. “I saw
lo spettro
once. Once, when a girl. In old country. Oh, I was beautiful,
ombralina
! I wore lace scarves. Everyone said, ‘She is so beautiful!’ ”

“I bet you were, Nonnie.”

“There were parties, oh, so many parties. And at one party”—Nonnie held up her finger—“there was game. And we sat in a circle and lit candles. We spoke to
il spettro
. He was a pirate
capitano
.” Nonnie grinned, leaned back against the wall. “He liked my scarf. He told me he did.”

Chills skipped down my arms. “Nonnie?” I grabbed her
shoulders, gently. “You said you sat in a circle. You lit candles. And then you talked to ghosts?”

Nonnie nodded, moony-eyed. “
Il capitano
, he was in love with me, I think.”

“Nonnie!”

She waved me away. “
Ombralina
, it was
la seduta. La spiritica.
”

Spiritica.
Spirits.

“Oh my gosh, that’s it,” I said. I jumped to my feet, yanked on my boots, and grabbed my jacket from the bed. Never in my life had I been so excited to get to school. “That’s what we need! That’s how we can contact the ghosts!”

A séance.

At lunch that day, I walked to Henry’s table in the cafeteria and tapped him on the shoulder.

“What are you doing here, psychopath?” Nick Weber said. The others laughed, except for Mark Everett, who focused hard on his lunch. I think I’d really freaked him out that day, running at him like I had. The thought made me smile.

“Trying to decide what curse I should use on you,” I said. “So many choices.”

Nick flushed. “Shut up.”

“Careful.” I wagged my finger. “Henry, can I talk to you?”

Henry was watching me in that quiet honor roll way of his. “Sure.”

“Henry,” Mark hissed, but Henry ignored him. When we reached my customary table in the corner, Henry sat next to me like nothing had changed. He opened his milk carton.

“So, what’s up?” he asked.

“We need to hold a séance.”

Henry shook his head. “Gosh, I’m fine, Olivia, thanks. And you?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m fine. Now, can I continue?”

“Fine.”

“Like I was saying, we need to hold a séance. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking”—
while you’ve been avoiding me
—“and I think it’s the only way to contact the ghosts.”

“Why?”

I hesitated. “Nonnie told me.”

Henry raised his eyebrows. “Olivia, no offense, but . . . your, like, eighty-year-old grandmother?”

“So? What does that matter? A séance is a real thing. Look it up if you want. You can speak directly to the ghosts. Henry, we can find them, see where they’re hiding!”

“I don’t know . . .”

“A
séance
?” Joan appeared out of nowhere in the seat across from us. “Please tell me I heard you right. You’re holding a
séance
?”

Henry and I glanced at each other.

“Are you okay?” Henry asked.

Joan was practically vibrating. “If you’re holding a séance,
can I do it with you? I know all about séances. I’ve even held a couple. You know, just stupid things at sleepovers, but I’m telling you, I know
everything
there is to know.” She looked back and forth between us. “Please? How many people do you have so far?”

“Well,” I said, “just me and Henry, but—”

“Oh, you’ll never get it to work with just two people. No, you need three people. But no more than that. Just three.”

“Are you sure you know all about séances?”

“Oh, yes. Absolutely.” Joan paused. “Please, can’t I help you?”

Joan had this weird look on her face, a twitchy, tight-lipped kind of look, and I got this feeling that she actually had no idea whatsoever how to hold a séance.

I also got the feeling that I’d been wrong about Joan. Maybe it was a little lonelier being a one-woman protester than Joan let on. Maybe she liked having someone to sit with at lunch, even if that someone was me.

Henry sighed. “Look, I don’t even know what I think about having a séance in the first place. It seems kind of dumb.”

Joan’s eyes widened. “Oh no, it’s not dumb at all. The spirits are all around us, just waiting to be contacted. Sometimes they even want our
help
. But some of them aren’t very nice. That’s why you need an expert to help you, someone who’s done it before. Like me. So.”

I put a hand over my burn. Whenever my skin got
goosebumps, my burn stung like crazy. “Some of them aren’t very nice?”

“Just like some people aren’t very nice. It’s the same with spirits.”

I took a long, hard look at Joan. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Joan’s supposed expert knowledge. Plus, Joan was someone completely outside the world of the Hall. What would she think about it? What would she think about how I lived?

But Joan was throwing this pitiful face at me, and I just couldn’t say no. Plus, I wanted to contact the ghosts so bad it was like this hard knot in my stomach.

“Fine,” I said at last.

Henry looked at me in surprise.

Joan squealed and drew out some paper and a pencil from her bag.

“But I’m the boss of this operation. Okay? You’re the séance expert or whatever, but I run the show.”

“Of course,” Joan said.
Séance Instructions
, read the heading of her paper. “Now, where are we having the séance, and why?”

“At Emerson Hall. Henry and I . . .” I paused.

He threw up his hands. “Might as well just tell her now.”

“Tell me what?” Joan whispered.

“We’ve seen ghosts. At the Hall. But only once, and we haven’t been able to find them since, and we want to talk to them for real.”

Joan took a deep, centering breath. “Oh my gosh, oh my
gosh
. That is so . . . oh my gosh.” She bent over her paper and started writing frantically.

“What are you writing?” I said.

“A list of the things we’ll need.”

She finished with a flourish. We leaned closer to read it.

“A homemade Ouija board?” Henry said.

“The ones you can get at the store are just phonies,” Joan said. “
Much
more powerful to make your own. Don’t worry about it, I’ve got the supplies for that.”