Five
Eleanor slept with the book beside her on the bed. She had odd dreams of something soft and almost uncomfortably warm on her chest, pinning her down, and she woke drenched in sweat and smelling faintly of ash. There were little smudges of it on her covers, too, and on her clothes. They must have come from the book. And the book . . .
She didn’t know if she wanted to think about where the book had come from.
She was afraid that Otto wouldn’t be on the bus again, but he came bounding on when they reached his stop, looking more rumpled than he had the day before. “Sorry I missed you yesterday,” he said immediately. “I went over to help my dad at the clinic. A border collie was giving birth. There were nine puppies. Nine. How would you like to have nine babies all at once?”
“One seems like more trouble than I’m interested in,” Eleanor confessed. “My aunt’s pregnant,” she clarified.
“Oh, neat. I love little kids,” Otto said. “I’ve got three little sisters—triplets—so liking them might just be a survival strategy. The only thing I like better than little kids is probably animals. All animals. Dogs, cats, horses, lizards . . .”
She wondered if, given the chance, he would name every type of animal in the ecosystem. But the bus went over a sharp bump, and it seemed to derail his train of thought. For the rest of the ride, Otto talked about the veterinary clinic his dad ran, his dog, his sisters, the relative size of the planets in the solar system, and the Yellowstone supervolcano. Eleanor listened, happy to let someone else fill the silence. Eden Eld Academy used a block schedule, which meant Eleanor had a whole new set of classrooms to find today. Luckily, her first class of the day—English with Ms. West—she shared with Otto.
“Pip’s in it, too,” Otto said. “You met Pip yesterday.”
“Yeah, I know,” Eleanor said, laughing.
“Right. Of course you do. My mom says I need to install a better filter between my brain and my mouth.”
“I don’t mind,” Eleanor said, shaking her head, and followed him through the echoey school hallways. The fairy tale book was in the bottom of her bag, and it seemed to make it heavier as she walked. She hadn’t opened it yet, but she didn’t feel comfortable leaving it at home. She didn’t understand how it had gotten into her room.
Had her mother left it for her?
But that was impossible. Her mother was gone. She’d run off—abandoned Eleanor and worse. Eleanor hated her. Hated her, and so hated the book, too. Except she also loved her mother and so she kept the book, kept it close, and wished she knew what she was supposed to do and what she was supposed to feel.
Otto led her to a corner table when they arrived, which was already occupied by two other students. The other two kids, a girl and a boy, sat so close together they kept bumping shoulders, and they were whispering about some show they had watched the night before.
Ms. West spotted Eleanor and smiled, then walked over with a textbook and a tidy stack of papers.
“Eleanor, isn’t it?” she asked. “Welcome to Eden Eld Academy. I’m Ms. West. Obviously!” She chuckled, like this was a grand joke. She had skin that reminded Eleanor of dough that had just finished rising. Soft and somehow vulnerable. She set the textbook and the papers in front of Eleanor and tapped them twice with nails painted the color of overripe blueberries. “Here’s everything you need for now. I’ve already checked out the textbook under your name, and this is right where I was going to put you.” Her eyes strayed to the empty seat on Otto’s right, but just then the door burst open and Pip skidded into the room, her cheeks bright red from exertion.
“I’m here! The bell hasn’t rung!” she said, just as it did.
Ms. West laughed. “Just in the nick of time, Pip! Well, now that we’re all here . . .”
Ms. West made her way up to the front of the class, already rambling about the plans for the week.
Pip scurried to the empty seat next to Otto and fell into it with a gusty sigh.
“You literally live on school grounds, Pip,” Otto said, eyes twinkling. “How are you always late?”
“My mom was on the phone with subject three,” she whispered. “I was trying to listen in. I got this dish thing in my spy kit that lets you listen to conversations from far away, and I was testing it out.”
“And?”
“Nothing interesting,” she said. “Just ‘How are things going? Oh, very good here, too. Everything should be set for the big event.’ And then goodbyes.”
“It’s probably just some January Society thing,” Otto said.
“Obviously it’s a January Society thing. An evil January Society thing.” Pip’s voice barely rose above a whisper, and Eleanor got the feeling she wasn’t supposed to be listening—but she couldn’t help it.
Otto rolled his eyes. “They are not evil. They do bake sales. Evil cults don’t hold bake sales.”
“Apparently they do,” Pip said.
Eleanor couldn’t tell if she was joking. She had been trying not to stare too hard while they talked, but Pip fixed a hard look on her.
“Are your parents in the January Society?” Pip asked.
“No,” Eleanor said at the same time as Otto. He blushed a bit.
“Eleanor just moved here,” Otto said. “Remember?”
“I know. But she’s a Barton. So your family’s from here, aren’t they?” Pip asked.
“Shemovedheretolivewithheraunt,” Otto said, very fast and rather loudly. “At Ashford House.”
“And I don’t think Ben and Jenny are part of any societies. They donate to the ACLU?” Eleanor supplied, uncertain if this counted.
Pip lit up. “Wait, do you really live at Ashford House? That’s awesome. You should have told me that yesterday, Otto! Jeez.”
“Pip! Please keep cross talk to a minimum,” Ms. West said. Pip’s ears turned scarlet at the tips, and she started quietly scribbling in the margin of her class notebook, twisting lines with jagged bits like thorns.
Eleanor glanced out the window as Ms. West handed out study packets. It looked out over an empty meadow beside the school, more of a random break in the looming pines than anything intentional. The grass grew a good foot high, and a low morning mist clung near it, giving everything a hazy, spooky look.
In the middle of the field stood the black dog. Steam spilled between its fangs. A gob of saliva dripped from one side of its jowls, and though she couldn’t hear it, she was sure it was growling.
Ms. West had reached her. She followed Eleanor’s gaze and smiled. “It’s such a lovely campus, isn’t it?” she asked. She set her hand on the back of Eleanor’s chair and sighed. “Positively picturesque. Oh, that I were a poet, and could describe it as it deserves. But that’s what I have all my budding young Wildes and Byrons and Shakespeares for!” She clapped Eleanor on the shoulder and wandered away again.
Otto bumped Eleanor’s hand with the very tip of his smallest finger. He looked down at his paper as he whispered. “Don’t stare at it,” he said. “You don’t want them to know you can see.”
Eleanor’s fingertips felt cold again, ice creeping up toward her knuckles.
He’d seen it.
She wanted to ask him what he saw, but he had his head down, reading the story in the copied pages. Pip had the exact same pose, shoulders bowed, head down, but her eyes were lifted to Eleanor. Her look was intense and serious. She saw it, too.
She’d seen it yesterday. She’d pretended not to, but she must have. Why hadn’t she said anything? Surely she knew that Eleanor could see the dog, so why let her think that she was the only one?
Why let her think she was alone?
Eleanor chanced one last look out the window. The dog was gone.
LOOK OUT OF the corner of your eye, her mother had said to her, sometime in those last few horrible days. Don’t look straight on. Always look at them sideways. That’s how to keep yourself safe.
She’d never told anyone. Certainly not now. They’d think she was like her mother. They’d think she was sick and needed help. Maybe she was.
But Otto and Pip had seen it, too. That had never happened before.
Lunch was quinoa and a fall vegetable curry made from locally harvested vegetables (ALL WITHIN THIRTY MILES! said the placard in the lunch line). At Eleanor’s old school, Thursdays were usually sad, flat hamburgers that didn’t even have any toppings. She wished she were hungry enough to enjoy the change.
Otto and Pip found Eleanor in the lunch line. As soon as she had her food, they dragged her off to the edge of the front courtyard near the hay bales. There was a little wooden sign next to the decorations that read DONATED BY THE JANUARY SOCIETY. Pip kicked it over with her toe as she sat down.
“So,” Pip said, as soon as they were all sitting. “You saw it. The dog.” Her voice was hushed.
“The one with glowing red eyes?” Eleanor said at a normal volume, and they both shushed her.
“Don’t stare. And don’t talk about them too loudly,” Otto said. “That’s how you stay safe.”
“Talk about who?” Eleanor asked, bewildered and more than a little afraid. “Stay safe from what?”
“Them. The wrong things,” Pip said. “Like the dog, but there are others, too. The dog is new. But there’s other stuff.”
“Like what?” Eleanor asked.
Pip hesitated. “I’m not sure we should tell you. It’s safer if you don’t notice them, and once someone tells you about them, it gets harder not to notice them. If they notice you noticing, or if someone overhears you talking about them . . .” She made a slicing motion over her throat.
“Don’t listen to her,” Otto said. He’d pulled a little bag of crumbs and birdseed out of his pocket and was making a small pile an arm’s length away. Within seconds, two squirrels bounded across the courtyard and began snacking, apparently unconcerned that he was right there. “No one’s going to kill you. But nobody will believe you, either, and you don’t want anyone thinking you’re crazy.”
“Millie Jenkins talked about the wrong things, and she disappeared,” Pip said.
“Millie Jenkins moved to Cleveland,” Otto said.
“Like that sounds real,” Pip said, rolling her eyes. “The January Society got her.”
“What’s—” Eleanor began, but Otto cut her off with a shake of his head.
“We shouldn’t talk about this now,” he said. “Millie might have moved to Cleveland, but August definitely got sent to an inpatient clinic and given a bunch of really strong drugs to make him stop seeing things that no one else believed were there. Don’t worry. We’ll help you. But you can’t go around looking right at wrong things and saying stuff in the middle of the school courtyard.”
“You guys brought me here,” Eleanor pointed out.
“Yeah, because it’s our spot,” Pip said. She jabbed her fork toward Eleanor’s untouched tray. “Are you going to eat that?”
“Um. I guess not,” Eleanor said. Pip, who had finished off her food while they talked, started in on Eleanor’s. Something about it made Eleanor’s stomach give a happy flip. Like once someone stole food from you, you were destined to be friends.
She hadn’t realized until she met Otto and Pip how much she wanted a friend. She’d thought she’d walled off that part of her, after the fire. But there it was.
She chewed the edge of her lip. A logical, rational part of her brain told her that none of this could be real. But a more rational part pointed out that if that was true, Pip and Otto couldn’t have known what she saw.
“I used to see things like that. When I was little,” she said. “But I stopped seeing them a long time ago. I thought I was done with all of it.”
“It’s Eden Eld,” Pip said. “There’s weird wrong stuff everywhere, but there’s tons of it in Eden Eld.”
“We don’t know why,” Otto said. “I’ve tried to track the frequency so I can form a proper hypothesis, but it’s hard to gather data on other locations when my family only takes one vacation a year to Pasadena to visit my grandma.”
“So all we’ve got is ‘Eden Eld is weirder than other places,’” Pip concluded.
Eleanor thought. She stared off into the distance, and though her thoughts wanted to race, she forced herself to think slowly. Think carefully.
She wanted to be normal. She’d been oh so careful. But this—
If this was real? If this was true? If Otto and Pip saw the things she saw, if they could find answers or reasons or even just be in it together, that was a hundred times better than normal.
“You said you wanted to see Ashford House, right?” she said.
“Yeah?” Otto replied, already smiling. The squirrels had finished their meal and scurried away with satisfied squeaks.
“So come over after school. We can talk there, without anyone overhearing. You can tell me about the—the wrong things,” Eleanor said.
“We can give you the crash course,” Pip said with an enthusiastic nod.
“And you can give us the grand tour,” Otto added.
“Deal,” Eleanor said. She shook Otto’s hand, then Pip’s.
She’d made two friends in her first week. Aunt Jenny would be so pleased.