Iris sits at our usual table in the cafeteria, hunched over her phone, and I hope she’s not looking at photos of the lights because I really will cry if I see another one. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t even move until I drop my tray of spaghetti and wilted salad on the table, and then she almost falls off her stool.
“Eli!” she gasps, sliding the phone inside the wide cuff of her sweater. “You never texted me back. Are you feeling better today?”
“Yes,” I lie. “Sorry I didn’t write back.”
More than anything, I want to tell her what happened last night. Even though I promised not to tell my dad about my mother, I never said anything about my friends. This is too massive to not share with Iris, and maybe there’s a way I could explain without giving her specific details. I shuffle through the words in my head, searching for the right combination. Another story, perhaps.
“So, I was thinking,” says Iris, slipping her phone from her sleeve into her bag and zipping it shut. “We should try sitting at a new table today. Branch out a little.”
“Are you serious?” Iris never talks to other people unless it’s strictly essential.
“We’re like hermits. Let’s go sit with Maisie Maddigan for a change.” She inclines her head at the long, noisy table full of drama kids.
I tuck my ankle around the leg of my stool. “But you hate Maisie.”
“Of course I don’t hate her.” Iris lets out a nervous laugh. “I just don’t know why she speaks with a British accent when she’s from Marshfield. But she’s not that bad. And it’s probably not healthy for me and you to be so codependent all the time. What if one of us got sick or had to go away or something?”
I narrow my eyes. “What do you mean, go away?”
“Nothing. Just come on,” she says, heading across the cafeteria. This is so utterly unlike Iris that I’m more fascinated than annoyed. Gathering up my tray and bag, I follow her.
Surrounded by chattering chaos, Maisie looks up from her silver container of kiwi slices and beams at us. She’s wearing a purple velvet Victorian-style jacket that she sewed herself. Maisie takes her role as the school’s costume designer very seriously—co–costume designer with me, that is. A monocle dangles from a silver chain around her neck.
“Darlings!” she cries, and I can feel Iris cringing beside me. Maisie drags over two empty stools from a nearby table and squeezes them in on either side of her. “I’m so glad you popped over. We need a plan of attack for the fur on those god-awful wolf costumes.”
A draft slithers up the back of my neck. I scan the cafeteria, searching among the tables for a glimpse of that cloaked person I saw in the hall. Straining my ears for that whisper that spoke my name . . . if it can even be called a whisper. On Maisie’s other side, Iris is absorbed in her phone again, her wispy blond eyebrows creased with worry.
“. . . but that should be the last of it,” Maisie is saying. “Worst-case scenario, we can split them up and take them home.”
“Okay.” I’m not sure exactly what I’m agreeing to, but it doesn’t matter. Iris is still focused on her phone, lips moving silently, and I want to ask her what’s wrong, why she dragged us over here in an effort to be more social but is now ignoring everybody.
“As I was saying.” Maisie leans forward to block my view of Iris. “We should also think about—”
There.
A cloaked figure stands alone in the back corner of the cafeteria. Tall and slim, with their head dropped low so the hood covers their face. Nobody’s looking at them; nobody seems to care that there’s a stranger lurking here while we all eat our lunches. Slowly, the figure’s head lifts, and from deep inside the hood comes a silver flash.
I’m halfway out of my seat when a thunderous bang sends me reeling backward. The emergency exit doors have flown open. Napkins and paper wrappers soar off the tables, caught and swirling. People are jumping up, yelling, chasing their tumbling lunches, but as the pandemonium grows, my body stills and the noise fades to a dull hum. A single, unfolded napkin flutters up, up, up toward the ceiling.
“Poppet, are you all right?”
I don’t understand why Maisie is looming over me. Then I realize I’m sitting on the floor, surrounded by napkins and trash. As she and Iris take my elbows and help me upright, I notice a french fry caught in the pocket of her jacket.
“Did I fall?” I say.
“You stood up and then just sort of . . . sat down on the floor.” says Iris.
“I didn’t eat breakfast,” I say, like that explains anything.
She turns to Maisie. “Can you keep an eye on her while I go get a Coke?”
Maisie helps me onto my chair like I’m a frail old person while Iris hurries over to the lunch line, where perplexed ladies in hairnets are leaning over the counters. The exit doors are shut now, the wind is gone, and Mrs. Janowski is waving her arms and shouting at everyone to help clean up the mess.
The figure in the cloak is gone. It’s colder in the cafeteria now, and conversations are hushed. Maisie picks a wayward straw wrapper out of my hair and presses two fingers to the inside of my wrist.
“Are you taking my pulse?” I say.
“Shh.” She points to the clock over the lunch line and holds up a finger every time I try to talk until the second hand makes half a revolution. “Thirty-three, thirty-four . . .”
Iris’s phone lies forgotten on the table, its screen still lit.
“Forty-one, forty-two. Hey, don’t move,” warns Maisie as I reach for it.
Leaving my right arm with her, I stretch out my left and slide the phone closer. The screen’s beaming so bright, it’s like it wants me to look. Over in the cafeteria line, Iris is arguing with the lunch lady for some reason.
“Bloody hell, I lost count again,” says Maisie. “Will you please hold still?”
I scroll to the top of the message on Iris’s screen.
Dear Ms. Pells,
We are pleased to welcome you as a member of the Dickinson School . . .
“Dickinson School?” I mutter. It’s not a place I’ve ever heard of. I know I shouldn’t be reading Iris’s email, but my finger scrolls down, down, down anyway. The message talks about character and merit and the importance of hard work, and it makes no sense whatsoever. Even if the Dickinson School were a college, we won’t start applying to those until next year. Iris and I still have more than a year left together. And there’s a good chance we might both go to college in Boston. Iris is a million times smarter than I am, but we could still see each other if we went to different schools in the same city.
We look forward to welcoming you to Amherst this fall, says the final line of the email.
I set the phone down carefully like it’s poisonous and rub my eyes hard, wishing I could unsee everything.
A can plunks down beside me. “They can’t sell soda during school hours,” says Iris. “The lunch lady said apple juice would work, but if it doesn’t, I’ll go back.” Her brow furrows as she picks up her phone. “Why is this . . .” She trails off as she sees the email that’s still on the screen. “Oh, Eli. Oh, shit.”
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have been reading that.” I start piling napkins and random trash onto my lunch tray, but there’s such an enormous mess everywhere and I just want a trapdoor to swing open and swallow me away forever.
“No, it’s fine.” Iris’s voice is small and quavering. “I was going to tell you.”
“What’s the Dickinson School?” I want her to tell me it’s spam, it’s a joke, it’s some random program that invited her to join and there’s no way she’d actually do it. But I saw the worry in her eyes earlier. She wouldn’t be worried if it didn’t mean something.
Iris catches my sleeve. “Let’s go somewhere quiet so we can talk.”
I don’t want to go somewhere and talk about this like it’s something rational we can form words and sentences about. I don’t want to know what’s going on if it means Iris is leaving me this fall. It’s all too much, too much after everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours. My hearing is starting to fade out again.
“My cousin went to the Dickinson School,” says Maisie, but I don’t want to hear it, don’t want to acknowledge that it’s a real place. Leaving my tray, I grab my bag and run out into the hall, and I don’t stop until I’m in the parking lot.
The darkening sky sags with the weight of unreleased rain, and the wind is working up to gale force. Halfway across the lot, I have to stop and bend over, hands on knees, because I can’t breathe. It’s not the running that’s killing me; it’s the betrayal.
“Hey!” Iris staggers up to me, one arm inside her coat and the rest of it flapping behind like a broken wing. “Eli, please talk to me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I say through gasping breaths.
Iris struggles with the other sleeve of her coat, but it’s inside out. “Because I haven’t decided yet if I’m going.”
A fat drop of rain splats onto my nose and I wipe it off. “What even is the Dickinson School?”
“It’s for high school kids who want to start college early,” says Iris. “I’ve been so bored here, Eli.”
I know she’s bored, but we have plenty of AP classes here. Those are college-level. Not that they’re exactly difficult for Iris. The wind falls away, like it’s taking a deep breath. Then with a huge gust, it spits sideways splinters of rain all over us. Neither of us moves.
“And you would live there?” I say. “In Amherst?” It’s over three hours away. My dad will never let me drive that far by myself.
Iris zips up her coat and hunches inside it. “If I decide to go. There are a couple of other places I applied to.”
There are more than one. She really does mean to leave me. On any other day, I might have been able to handle this news more gracefully. I might have tried to remember that Iris is wasting her time going to high school when her brain is light-years ahead of everybody else’s. On any other day, I would have tried to be happy for her, to figure out how to make this work.
But not the day after my mother fell from the sky.
Sudden, irrational fury bubbles up through my insides, molten and steaming. Poisonous words form on my tongue, words I’ll hate myself for if I let them out. I bite my lips together and unlock my car.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Iris says as I climb inside. “But listen, there’s—”
I shut my door and she stands there in the pelting rain, not bothering to pull up her hood as I reverse out of my parking space. I don’t look back as I head for the exit and then veer out onto the road. The wind is heaving now, hurling sheets of water at my windshield. My speed keeps wavering between crawling and careening, and I can’t seem to pull anything together. I should go back and tell Iris everything, explain that it’s not just her—it’s everything at once and I’m falling apart. But I can’t do it. She must have applied to that school months ago and kept it a secret all this time.
As I pull onto a back road lined with scrubby oak trees, the car wobbles across the center line and I tug it back into the lane. Between the rain and my streaming eyes, I can barely see the edges of the street. It wouldn’t matter if I went back to Iris anyway. She’d never understand what’s happened. No one can help me.
Something lurches out into the road. I cut the wheel hard, and the car skids and spins. For what feels like a lifetime inside one second, everything goes silent and slow and surreal. Then the car stops, facing the wrong way on the wrong side of the road. Once I’m able to pry my hands off the steering wheel, I throw the door open. A figure huddles in the ditch on the opposite side of the road.
If I’ve hit a person, if I’ve killed somebody, I don’t know what I’ll do. There’s nothing but woods for this whole stretch of road, no cars in sight. Leaving my engine running, I dash into the road.
The huddled shape twitches, and I freeze in the middle of the street, not daring to blink. Slowly unfolding its long limbs, the figure stands and shakes out its long cloak. As it pulls off its hood, all the breath goes out of me.
The girl’s face is striking, with silver eyes and rosy lips. Her corn-silk hair is braided and coiled on top of her head, and a thin circle of gold gleams among the braids.
“Are you all right?” I say. “Did I hit you?”
She licks her lips, her pale face glowing with delight, and climbs out of the ditch. Her cloak isn’t muddy—it doesn’t even look wet.
“Why are you crying?” Her voice is gritty as ashes.
“It’s nothing,” I say.
“What could you possibly have to cry about?” Her empty silver eyes bore into mine, making me feel exposed. Like she already knows the answer and just wants me to say it.
“My best friend is moving away,” I say.
She drifts closer, her feet invisible under the cloak. “Of course she is. Everyone leaves you, Eline.”
My mouth drops open. I can’t comprehend the level of ugliness it takes to say something like that out loud.
The girl smiles, teeth flashing like broken glass. “But that isn’t a bad thing. Good riddance to all of them.”
Dread washes through my gut. “How do you know my name? Were you the one who sent that letter?”
She shakes her head. “Don’t you remember us?”
I peer into the trees behind her, up the street in both directions, but there’s no one else here. There’s nobody to help me, nobody to witness this whole disturbing, nonsensical interaction.
“I have no idea who you are.”
But maybe that’s not exactly true. Maybe it’s more that I don’t want to have any idea who she is. I keep edging backward until my legs hit the fender of my car. “Leave me alone. Don’t come to my school again. I don’t want anything to do with you.”
The girl lets out a sandpaper laugh that sets my teeth on edge. Without waiting for her answer, I get back in my car, lock all the doors, and hit the gas.