Four
The next morning, Eleanor wedged herself into the back seat of the bus and wrapped her arms around her backpack. At the next stop, Otto plopped down next to her, looking frazzled, with his dress shirt untucked from his slacks and his tie loose around his neck.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she answered. They looked at each other glumly. The bus trundled along—then slowed and stopped, pausing at a stop sign.
“Why are we stopping?” Otto asked.
“There shouldn’t be a stop sign here, should there?” Eleanor replied, peering out the window. Were they going a different way?
This was the right street, with the U-pick strawberry farm on the left and the pasture of fat, lazy goats on the right. The road intersecting it, though, had never been there before.
It looked in every way like a normal road. The asphalt was the same gray as the street they were on, and it neatly divided the strawberry fields as if it had always been that way. The only thing wrong about it was that it existed at all.
“I’m not imagining things, right? That road wasn’t there on Friday?” Otto whispered. Eleanor nodded. She looked at the bus driver, who had started forward again. Eleanor could see the woman’s reflection in the rearview mirror, an expression of utter bafflement on her face. As soon as they picked up speed, though, her expression smoothed. She reached over to turn on the radio, cranking Taylor Swift as loud as she would go.
Eleanor twisted to watch the strange road. She kept her eyes fixed on it, waiting for it to shimmer and vanish or to sprout teeth or something equally horrific, but it just stayed a road, until she couldn’t see it anymore.
“The Wending?” Otto whispered.
Eleanor pulled her journal out of her backpack and opened it to a page titled Possible Signs of Wrong Things, Mr. January, Etc. Most of the items on the list had been crossed off or were labeled “resolved” or “harmless” or “avoid.”
Roads that shouldn’t be there, she wrote at the bottom of the list, and strained to hear the sound of a ticking clock—the surefire sign of approaching trouble in the past. But there was only the rumbling of the bus and the nervous tapping of Otto’s fingers against the vinyl seat.
PIP WAS WAITING for them near the front steps, and she looked just as tired as they did. She had dark shadows under her eyes and her hair was a helpless tangle. She yawned and waved blearily to them as they approached.
They told her about the extra road as they meandered down the hall. They didn’t have classes all together until the afternoon, which meant as soon as the bell rang, they’d be split up. “So nobody hears the clock?” Eleanor finished.
“Not a tick or a tock,” Pip said. She peered at the two of them. “No gray eyes today. That’s something.”
“How long will that last, though?” Otto asked. “You’re forgetting more things, too.”
Pip shrugged. “Nothing important. Just kid stuff.”
Otto’s expression was hurt, but he looked away as if to hide it from Pip. Otto and Pip had been best friends all their lives. “Kid stuff” meant memories of their childhood together. Pip was acting like it didn’t matter at all.
The bell rang, giving them five minutes’ warning to get to class. They parted reluctantly, agreeing to meet up at lunch like they always did, and Eleanor headed for science class and slouched her way over to the table she shared with her lab partner, Katie Rhodes, a girl with a cheery round face and blond hair that always managed to look mussed.
At the next table over, Andy Park sat with his best friend, Ryan Wylie. Andy caught Eleanor’s gaze and gave her a friendly wave. Eleanor looked away quickly, the memory of last night’s cocoa debacle making her cheeks hot, and slid into her chair as casually as she could.
“Do you like Andy?” Katie asked, and Eleanor almost squawked.
“Why would you ask that?” she demanded. Katie blinked rapidly, holding up a Starburst.
“Because I have extra?” she said meekly.
“Do I like candy,” Eleanor repeated, blushing even harder. It could be worse, she thought. She could actually have a crush on Andy, and then this would be mortifying. Since she didn’t have a crush on anyone, it was totally fine, really.
Katie blinked some more. “Do you like Andy?” she whispered, connecting the dots between Eleanor’s embarrassment and the Starburst.
“No,” Eleanor said a bit too loudly. Katie stifled a laugh as Andy and Ryan glanced over.
“I kind of thought you liked Mabel,” Katie confessed, and Eleanor groaned. Katie laughed good-naturedly as Eleanor buried her head in her arms on the table. “It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone. And I promise not to bring maple cookies next time.”
There was nothing to tell, Eleanor wanted to say. There was absolutely no point figuring out who she liked if she was never going to get to go on a date or have a first kiss or even hold hands under the table, was there? So she didn’t know if she liked Andy or Mabel or even whether she liked girls or boys or both or neither.
Katie poked her shoulder. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she said.
“It’s fine,” Eleanor said into the tabletop.
Eleanor had been Katie’s lab partner all semester. She always felt kind of bad, because Katie was really nice and clearly wanted to be friends, but Eleanor just didn’t have room for the regular kind of friends. The kind you went to the movies and played board games with, instead of researching curses and experimenting with magical concoctions. The kind where you wrote Have a nice summer in their yearbook, instead of Hope we’re still alive in the fall hahaha.
The bell to start class rang, and Mr. Crouch moved to the front of the room, clasping his hands in excited anticipation. “Today is an amazing day,” he declared. Then he paused. “Actually, today isn’t the amazing day. Today is the day we get ready for the amazing day. Saturday will be amazing,” he said, and looked at them, grinning, as if waiting for them to burst into spontaneous applause.
Eleanor put up a tentative hand. “Mr. Crouch? Why is Saturday amazing?” she asked.
“Oh!” he said. “Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Or possibly behind. On Saturday morning, we are going to be witnesses to a rare event: a total eclipse. Eden Eld will be directly in the path of totality, meaning that for a few wondrous moments, the moon will completely cover the sun. Day will turn to night.”
Eleanor’s jaw dropped. An eclipse.
A time when day and night switched places.
A magical time.
It was exactly the sort of thing the People Who Look Away adored, and Eleanor and the others had missed it.
“Today, we’re going to make pinhole cameras,” Mr. Crouch said. “They’ll allow you to observe the eclipse safely, without damaging your eyes. I’d like you all to use your cameras this Saturday and record your observations.”
There were a few groans—Saturday homework? Eleanor just sat, still and tense, trying to breathe slowly so her pulse wouldn’t race.
If they were wrong and the People Who Look Away were coming for them during the eclipse, not the solstice, they had a whole week less than they’d thought to prepare.
“If at all possible, I’d like you to pair up with your lab partners to take your observations,” Mr. Crouch was saying.
Katie nudged Eleanor’s shoulder. “Want to come over to my place Saturday?”
Eleanor winced. “I’m not sure. I might have other plans,” she hedged. Katie’s face fell. “But maybe,” she added quickly, feeling bad, and Katie perked back up.
“Now, because of our position, totality—when the moon is fully covering the sun—will last only a few minutes, so you all need to be ready well before then,” Mr. Crouch went on.
Oh, we’ll be ready, Eleanor thought with determination. But even if she couldn’t hear it, she could now feel the ticking of a clock. Time was running out.
KATIE KEPT UP a pleasant stream of conversation the whole time they made their camera, and Eleanor found herself grateful for the distraction. Katie was really very nice, if a bit boring, and Eleanor couldn’t exactly fault her for that given that Eleanor’s definition of “interesting” usually involved magic and mortal peril. Boring was good, actually. With Katie she could almost pretend she was a normal teenager with normal teenager problems.
They left class together, Katie still chattering about nothing in particular. Eleanor had math class next. She started to turn the corner—then stopped dead. She’d turned too soon. This wasn’t the hall to math class. There were red lockers lining the walls and the maroon-and-white floor tiles like the rest of the school, but there shouldn’t have been a hall there at all—this should have been Mr. Ryland’s social studies room.
Through the doors along the hall, students sat in orderly rows, staring forward with their hands on their laps. Their shoulders didn’t seem shaped right—too soft and smooth. And Eleanor couldn’t read the teachers’ names on the doors or the posters on the walls. It wasn’t that they were blurry—it was more like trying to read in a dream, the words refusing to surrender their meaning no matter how hard you stared at them.
She swallowed. She tried to turn away only to find that she couldn’t; her right foot was in the hallway already. It was stuck. She gritted her teeth and hauled backward, but instead her body twitched forward. Her left foot lifted up, stepping out.
Katie grabbed her elbow and yanked her backward, and Eleanor yelped. She stumbled back into Katie, who stumbled back into a passing sixth-grader, who stumbled into the lockers, dropping his books.
“Oh my gosh, I’m sorry!” Katie said, and she and Eleanor hastily picked up the dropped books, straightened the dazed-looking sixth-grader’s jacket, and sent him on his way. By the time they were done, the strange hallway had vanished, and Mr. Ryland’s classroom was back where it belonged. Eleanor stared at it. She looked sideways at it—sometimes you could see Wrong Things better out of the corner of your eye. Mr. Ryland’s room remained.
Eleanor looked at Katie, whose cheeks were flushed but who did not look like someone who had just witnessed the impossible. “Did you see . . .” she started.
Katie’s eyes got a blank look that Eleanor knew well. It was the look of someone forgetting what they’d just seen. “You almost went into the wrong class,” she said, and giggled.
“Thanks for pulling me back,” Eleanor said with feeling. Katie gave her a confused look.
Eleanor didn’t want to know what would have happened if she’d kept walking down that hallway. The rest of the way to math class, she checked every turn carefully before she stepped around the corner. No more phantom hallways appeared, but when she sat down at her desk, she opened her journal to the page where she’d written Roads that shouldn’t be there and underlined it three times.