Helen woke up to a slap. There was a prickly numbness in her cheek and the steady note of a dial tone whining in her left ear. Jerry’s face was inches away from hers, wild with worry, and starting to show signs of guilt. He had never hit her before. He had to take a few shaky breaths before he could speak. The bedside clock read 3:16.
“You were screaming. I had to wake you,” he stammered.
Helen swallowed painfully, trying to moisten her swollen tongue and closed-off throat. “S’okay. Nightmare,” she whispered as she sat up.
Her cheeks were wet with either sweat or tears, she didn’t know which. Helen wiped the moisture away and smiled at her dad, trying to calm him down. It didn’t work.
“What the hell, Lennie? That was not normal,” he said in a strange, high-pitched voice. “You were saying things. Really awful things.”
“Like what?” she croaked. She was so thirsty.
“Mostly names, lists of names. And then you started repeating ‘blood for blood,’ and ‘murderers.’ What the hell were you dreaming?”
Helen thought about the three women, three sisters, she thought, and she knew she couldn’t tell her father about them. She shrugged her shoulders and lied. She managed to convince Jerry that murder was a pretty normal thing to have nightmares about, and swore that she would never watch scary movies by herself again. Finally, she got him to go back to bed.
The glass on her nightstand was empty and her mouth was so dry it felt tender and sore. She swung her legs out of bed to get water from the bathroom and gasped when her feet touched the hardwood floor. She switched on her lamp to get a better look, but she already knew what she was going to see.
The soles of her feet were cut deep and peppered with dirt and dust, and her shins were scratched with the hatch-mark pattern of thorns.
Chapter Three
In the morning when Helen woke up and looked at her feet, the cuts were gone. She almost believed that she had imagined them—until she saw that her sheets were dirty with dried, brown blood and grit.
In order to test her sanity, Helen decided to leave her sheets on the bed, go to school, and see if they were still dirty when she came home. If they were clean when she got home, then the whole thing was an illusion and she was only a little crazy. If they were still dirty when she came home, then she was obviously so crazy that she was walking around at night and getting dirt and blood in her bed without remembering it.
Helen tried to eat a bowl of yogurt and berries for breakfast but that didn’t work out very well, so she didn’t even bother to take her lunch box. If she got hungry, she could try buying something more tummy friendly like soup and crackers later.
Riding her bike to school, she noticed that it was unbearably hot and humid for a second day in a row. The only wind was the breeze created by her spinning wheels, and when she locked her bike up at the rack she realized that not only was the air still, but it was also lacking the usual insect and bird sounds. All was unnaturally quiet—as though the entire island was nothing but a ship becalmed in the middle of the vast ocean.
Helen arrived earlier than she had the day before, and the halls were crowded. Claire saw her come in. When her face broke into a smile, Helen knew she had been forgiven. Claire fought the flow of traffic to double back and join her on the walk to homeroom.
As they made their way toward each other, Helen suddenly felt like she was trying to trudge through oatmeal. She slowed to a stop. It seemed to her that everyone in the hallway vanished. In the suddenly empty school Helen heard the shuffling of bare feet and the gasping sobs of inconsolable grief.
She spun around in time to see a dusty white figure, her shoulders slumped and quivering, disappearing around a corner. Helen realized that the sobbing woman had passed behind someone—a real person staring back at her. She focused in on the figure, a delicate young girl with olive skin and a long, black braid trailing over one shoulder. Her naturally bright red lips were drawn into an O of surprise. To Helen she looked like a china doll, so perfect she could not be entirely real.
Then the sound switched back on and the corridor was full of rushing students again. Helen was standing still, blocking traffic, staring at a glossy black braid swinging against a tiny girl’s back as it vanished into a classroom.
Helen’s whole body shook with an emotion that took her a moment to recognize. It was rage.
“Jesusmaryandjoseph, Len! Are you gonna faint?” Claire asked anxiously.
Helen made her eyes focus on Claire, and she took a wobbly breath. She realized that she was drenched in cold sweat and shivering. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
“I’m taking you to the nurse,” Claire said. She grabbed Helen’s hand and started to tug on it, trying to get her to move. “Matt,” she called out over Helen’s shoulder. “Can you help me with Lennie? I think she’s going to faint.”
“I’m not going to faint,” Helen snapped, suddenly alert and aware of how strange she was acting.
She smiled bashfully at them both to try to take the sting out of her words. Matt had put his arm around her waist and she patted his hand softly to let him know he could release her. He gave her a doubtful look.
“You’re really pale, and you’ve got circles under your eyes,” he said.
“I got a little overheated riding my bike,” she started to explain.
“Don’t tell me you’re fine,” Claire warned. Her eyes were flush with frustrated tears, and Matt didn’t look much happier. Helen knew she couldn’t brush this off. Even if she was going crazy, she didn’t have to take it out on her friends.
“No, you’re right. I think I might have heatstroke.”
Matt nodded, accepting this excuse as the only logical one. “Claire, you take her to the girls’ room. I’ll tell Hergie what happened so he doesn’t mark you late. And you should eat something. You didn’t eat any lunch yesterday,” he reminded her.
Helen was a little surprised he remembered that, but Matt was good at details. He wanted to be a lawyer, and she knew that someday he would be a great one.
Claire drenched Helen in the girls’ room, dumping cold water all the way down her back when she was supposed to just wet her neck. Of course they wound up having a gigantic water fight, which seemed to calm Claire down because it was the first normal response she’d had out of Helen in a few days. Helen herself felt like she had passed an exhaustion barrier and now everything had become funny.
Hergie wrote them hall passes, so the two friends took their time getting to their first classes. Having a hall pass from Mr. Hergeshimer was like getting one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets—a student could go anywhere and do anything for a full period and not one teacher would put up a stink.
In the cafeteria they got oranges for Helen’s low blood sugar, and while they were at it they split a chocolate chip muffin. Helen choked it down and miraculously started to feel better. Then they went and stood in front of the six-foot-tall fan in the auditorium to cool down, taking turns singing into the whirling blades and listening to each other’s voices get chopped into a hundred pieces until they were both laughing their faces off.
Helen felt so giddy after playing hooky on a Hergie hall pass and eating raw sugar on an empty stomach that she couldn’t even remember what class she was supposed to be going to. She and Claire were casually strolling down the wrong hallway at the wrong time when the bell signaling the end of first period rang. They looked at each other and shrugged as if to say, “Oh well, what can you do?” and burst out laughing. Then Helen saw Lucas for the first time.