“Since when are you an adrenaline junkie?” I ask. “And no, it was not a rush. Just terrifying. I-hope-I-don’t- soil-myself, I-hope-I-don’t-die kind of terrifying.”
“The Black Wing was magnificent though, wasn’t he? Was he something spectacular to look at? Did you see his wings?”
“He’s not an animal in the wild, Ange.”
“Definitely not a moose, that’s for sure,” she says with a sniff.
“Did I mention the terrifying? The whole time I was thinking, that’s it, that’s why Tucker’s not at the cemetery. Samjeeza’s going to kill him.” She stops mid-bite with her apple. “What cemetery?”
Crapzol.
Angela looks at me intently. “Clara, what cemetery?”
I might as well tell her.
“My recurring dream is a vision. That strange forest with the stairs, it’s Aspen Hill Cemetery. It’s a graveside. At first I thought it was Tucker who was going to die, because he’s not there, in my vision, but then it turned out to be my mom.” She puts her hands to her head like I am blowing her mind. “How’d you figure it out?”
“Christian. His mom is buried there. Although I probably would have figured it out on my own, eventually. It’s pretty obvious now.”
“So you told Christian.” She looks truly hurt. “You told Christian and not me.” I try to come up with a good excuse, like that I didn’t want to distract her from her purpose, I didn’t want to say anything until I knew for sure what it was about, point out that I didn’t even tell my mom until I had to, but all I can say is, “Hey, you’re the one who made me tell Christian about the dream in the first place.”
“Don’t you trust me?” she asks.
She’s about to say something else, but suddenly there’s an upset in the cafeteria. A public breakup, that much is obvious right away, in the middle of the lunchroom. A girl starts crying, not a hysterical kind of cry, nothing so dramatic as, like, Kay last year, but the crowd still moves away from her. Then I recognize this pathetic creature as Kimber, my brother’s girlfriend. And Jeffrey, like an impassive stone statue beside her.
“Jeffrey,” Kimber says, between gasps of air. She has hold of his letterman’s jacket. “You don’t mean it.”
“It’s not working, Kimber,” he says, and without another word, he twists, pulls her hands away from him, and heads for the door.
I catch up with him before he gets there. “Jeffrey, you can’t dump her in front of everybody,” I whisper, trying not to attract any more attention. “Come on.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” is all he says. Then he’s gone.
Kimber’s friends have all gathered around her by this point, making sympathetic cooing noises, shooting glares in the direction that Jeffrey slunk off to, loudly declaring that he’s a jerk, he didn’t deserve her, his loss. She doesn’t say anything. She sits at a table, shoulders slumped, the very picture of dejection.
I wander back to my table. “What’s going on with him?” Angela asks. “Or can you not tell me that, either?”
Ouch. “He’s not taking this thing with my mom very well.”
“Makes sense,” she says with a flash of sympathy in her eyes. “Too bad, though.
Kimber’s a sweet girl. That was kind of. . cold.”
I remember this one time when we were kids, when a bird flew into our window. We were watching Saturday morning cartoons, and then,
He picked the bird up, held it gently in his hands, asked me if we couldn’t fix it, somehow. It was a starling with its neck broken. It was already dead.
“Where did it go?” he asked when I tried to explain it to him.
“Heaven, maybe. I don’t know.”
He’d wanted to bury it in the backyard, said things like a miniature pastor about the life the bird must have lived, flying free, how its brother birds would miss him. And when we covered it with dirt, he’d cried.
What happened to that kid? I wonder now, struggling to push down the lump that’s risen in my throat. Where did he go? And I suddenly want to cry. I feel like everything is falling apart in our lives.
“So,” Angela says. “We should talk.”
“Um—” This could be a problem, being that we’re under lock and key all the time. “The thing is, I’m grounded—” I say. But then I stop, because something else catches my attention. A feeling, lingering on the edges of my mind. Something that shouldn’t be here, not this way, this heaviness pushing in.
Sorrow.
I go to the window and look out. Storm clouds, blue-black and threatening, cover the mountains. There’s a charge in the air, like lightning.
And sorrow. A very definite flavor of sorrow.
Samjeeza is here.
“Clara?” Angela says. “Earth to Clara.”
It’s not possible, though. The school is on hallowed ground. Samjeeza can’t come here.
I scan the distance, past the parking lot, past the fence where the school grounds end and a field begins, an empty grove of cottonwood trees. I don’t see Samjeeza, but he’s there. There’s a pull to his sorrow this time, a loneliness that calls to me. I lay my hand on the cool glass and let it tug at me. I strain my eyes to see into that field. There’s something black in the tall grass.
