The Little Woods Page 14

  “Do you know who Kuan Yin is?” she asked.

  “No. Does she go to St. Bede’s?”

  “No,” she said, laughing. “No, not at all. She’s a goddess. She protects women and children. You can call on her and ask for her protection, and when you die, she comes and holds you, and she takes away all your karmic debt. She just holds you, and you’re free. I’m not sure it would be too bad, being held like that.”

  “I guess not,” I said, trying to keep the skepticism from my voice.

  “Cally, do you ever think about it?”

  “About what?”

  “About suicide.”

  “Whoa,” I said, nearly spilling my wine. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice soft and quiet. “I don’t think I’d ever do it, but in a way it does seem kind of noble, or beautiful, or something.”

  “Noel, listen to yourself. Suicide is terrible. It’s not beautiful. It’s horrible. And not every culture thinks it’s noble or whatever. Catholics think suicides go to hell.”

  “Lucky I’m not Catholic, then.”

  “Well, whatever, it seems pretty stupid to me.”

  “So if you do something horrible, you don’t think you should make amends for it?”

  “Noel, what could you possibly have to make amends for?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” She shrugged.

  “You talk about this goddess coming to hold you, but what if there aren’t any goddesses to hold you? What if there’s just a cold black nothing?”

  She opened her eyes and gave me a brilliant smile. “But there are goddesses. I know for a fact.”

  “How do you know that?” I laughed.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “I know someone who saw one.”

  “Seriously?” I said, and took a sip of wine, the bitter warmth running through my veins. “Someone told you they saw a goddess?”

  “Yes,” she said, laughing. “I swear.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Oh my God, you have to tell me. I promise I won’t tell.”

  She leveled her gaze at me. “Asta.”

  “No. She must have been kidding.”

  “She was serious. I was at her place borrowing a book and we got to talking and she was drinking, like, a lot of wine, and she told me that I was her favorite student and that she wanted to tell me a secret. See, I tell her lots of secrets.”

  “You do?”

  “Oh yeah. I’ve told her stuff I’ll never tell another living soul. I’ve told her terrible things. She’s like my father confessor. Anyway, I guess since I tell her all my secrets, she decided to tell me one. She said she’d never told anyone else.”

  “Okay, so what was it?”

  “Well, she said that the night that her daughter disappeared, she went out to the pond in the woods. It was midnight, and there was a storm coming and the sky was strange and filled with magic, and she had to go and be out in it. Asta’s like that. She’s a nature person. So she lay there looking at the stars, and then a goddess came to her and whispered in her ear that there was an afterlife, and that she and her daughter would meet there when the time came to pass. It didn’t make any sense to her at the time, but when she went back to her house and the girls were missing, it was like, oh my God. She said whenever she gets upset about her daughter, she remembers what the goddess told her, and she feels better.”

  I couldn’t speak. I felt like I’d been kicked in the teeth, my gums numb with shock. I needed to say something. I needed to get the knot out of my chest. I shook my head.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Sure it does. Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what I mean. The night Asta’s daughter disappeared, she couldn’t have gone out to the pond.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the whole forest was on fire.”

  “Oh,” Noel said. “This was earlier, then, before the fire started.”

  “It couldn’t have been. The fire started when it was still light out.”

  “How do you know so much about the fire?” Noel asked, looking confused.

  I froze for a moment, certain I’d revealed too much, but then I saw a way out. “I got curious. I read about it in some old papers in the library.”

  If Helen had been there, she would have grilled me, but Noel accepted my explanation without question.

  She took a large swig of her wine. “Oh,” she said. “Maybe you’re right. I guess I misunderstood. Sometimes Asta says some weird stuff. She gets things wrong when she’s drinking.”

  “It’s kind of weird that she drinks around you. Isn’t that, like, not kosher?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t judge her just because you don’t drink. She’s had a really tough life, you know,” she said, nodding to herself. “Even before her daughter died. She told me once that she was supposed to get a PhD. She was halfway through her dissertation when she got pregnant. The guy left her for her best friend, and she had to drop out of school to raise the baby. She never finished. Her whole life got derailed.”

  “Wow,” I said, distracted. “That sucks.”

  Noel nodded and started saying something about Freddy, but I couldn’t concentrate. Why would Asta make a mistake like that? Hadn’t that night been etched into her memory? Had she really gone out to the pond, like she’d said? If so, which night had it been, and while she was out there, had she left my sister and Laurel alone in the house?

  I knew these were questions I couldn’t ask Asta, but if Asta had left them alone in the cottage, it really did change things. Maybe there was another reason the girls weren’t in their room the night they disappeared. Maybe they hadn’t left the house that night. Maybe they’d been taken.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I COULDN’T BELIEVE HOW REFRESHED I felt after the break. Who knew that people needed to eat and sleep? Soon after I got back to my dorm, I looked over my notes and then started down to the art barn to talk to John.

  I’d never spoken to him before, though I’d seen him around a lot—the curly-haired brunette with the kind eyes. But he seemed to know who I was as soon as I walked in. He was slicking a streak of black onto a canvas, and when he looked up, he smiled.

  “Hey there,” he said. “You’re the new kid.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m Cally.”

  He put down his brush and nodded. “I heard you specifically petitioned to get out of my class.”

  “Yeah,” I said, leaning my back into the side of a tall worktable. “I don’t like art.”

  “Really?” he said, laughing. “Not even when you were little? Not even finger paints?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I kind of liked watercolors. I just didn’t want to take art as a class, so I petitioned. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said, wiping his hands on his smock. “I thought it was funny. So what’s up? Did you change your mind?”

  “Um, no. I was wondering if I could ask you something.”

  “Sure. Ask away.”

  “Well, I’m wondering about Iris Liang.”

  “Okay,” he said, sadness flooding his eyes. “If I can help with something, I will, though I don’t know that I’ll be able to. I didn’t really know her well.”

  “I heard she was down here a lot.”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “All the time. There are a lot of kids like Iris, kids who find art calming. I think it helps relieve the stress of the more academic stuff, and it helps with the emotional strain of being away from home. That’s why I like to keep an open-door policy down here.”

  “Did she ever do any woodworking?”

  “Sure,” he said. “She did everything. Sometimes she’d have several projects going at once.”

  “Were there ever any boys down here with her?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “I’d say there was usually a boy down here with he
r.”

  “Do you remember which ones?”

  He frowned for a moment, as if attempting to retrieve a stubborn memory. “I don’t know. Last year she mostly brought Kyle Lily down here, but he graduated. This year, you know, I don’t know that I can say for sure. I had a death in my family this fall. I usually sit out here and work on my own stuff and make myself available in case anyone needs help, but that was a rough time for me. I shut myself up in my office a lot,” he said, indicating a door at the back of the room. “I don’t know that I can say with any certainty who was down here and when. I’m not even sure Iris was down here as much as she was last year.” He paused and looked at me, concern in his eyes. “Why are you asking?”

  I had a lie prepared about a school project, a kind of homage to Iris, but he’d been so open with me that I couldn’t bring myself to tell it.

  “It’s complicated,” was all I said.

  He nodded, satisfied and unprying, two qualities I’d never before observed at St. Bede’s.

  “Do you remember anything she might have been working on during the fall semester?”

  “Sure.” He nodded. “She did several oil paintings that were really good. She also made a bowl. Do you want to see it?”

  He was so enthusiastic that I couldn’t say no. I was just being polite, but when he returned a moment later with a shallow bowl the color of sea grass, my heart felt like it might break. It was beautiful, but there was something else to it, a sense of despair.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s sad,” I said without meaning to. “Or maybe that’s dumb. Bowls aren’t sad, are they?”

  “No,” he said. “You’re right. It is sad. Everything Iris made was sad.”

  “Did you …,” I said, shifting uncomfortably. “Did you think she was in trouble?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. In retrospect I think maybe she was and that I should have seen it. Someone should have seen it, and if not the teachers, then who?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s our job to take care of you guys, but obviously we didn’t take care of her. I just … I don’t know.”

  A couple of students showed up at the door, regulars back from vacation, and quickly he pulled himself together and waved them in. I decided it was time to go.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said, making my way to the door.

  “Sure thing,” he said, smiling at me with genuine kindness. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. And if not, the door’s usually open, and the watercolors are on that shelf over there.”

  I smiled at him and headed back out into the night.

  On my way back up to the heart of campus, I ran into Alex.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice soft. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Can we talk for a minute?”

  “Sure,” I said, falling into step alongside him. I slipped my hand into his. We walked to an alcove near the science buildings, and then we stopped. I hopped up onto the wall and smiled at him, and only then did I see the wariness in his eyes.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Wood, listen. I just want you to know I really like you. Like, I really, really like you. I don’t know that I’ve ever liked anyone this much so early in a relationship.”

  Cold swept over me.

  He put his head in his hands. “I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just gonna say it. I took some ecstasy, which I know was stupid, and I hooked up with someone else.” He breathed out a sigh, seemingly relieved. “I’m sorry, Cally. Really I am.”

  It took me a minute to understand what he was saying.

  “I really wanted things to work out between us, but …”

  But what? I wasn’t pretty enough, smart enough, worth it? I didn’t want to hear the end of that sentence, so I slipped down off the wall and walked quickly away. When I did, I went numb. I didn’t feel a thing. I started back to my dorm, trying to remember how to walk, the world teetering.

  “Wood,” he said, grabbing my arm. And I turned on him, and whatever look was in my eyes must have been enough, because he didn’t follow. The bell rang. I was walking, oblivious to everything around me, when someone caught hold of my arm.

  “Whoa, are you okay?” Jack asked. We were right outside his dorm and about twenty feet from mine, but there was no time to talk.

  “Alex cheated on me.”

  “With someone from home?”

  I nodded.

  “That dick,” he said, and then pulled me close to him, up tight against his body, and for a moment I was sure he was going to kiss me. It was in his eyes. And for the first time, the obvious dawned on me. Jack’s whole asexual thing was a total pose.

  He didn’t kiss me. He stopped just short, but my body got all hot and flustered in all the wrong ways just the same. He put his lips to my ear. “Meet me on the north side of the far gym. Three a.m.”

  I had nothing smart-ass to say. I just nodded and ran to the dorm, making it right before the second bell sounded. The lights were already out. I slipped into bed. I didn’t need to set an alarm clock. I knew I would be up until I met Jack. There was no way I could sleep.

  The dorm was silent when I pulled on my jeans and slid open the glass door as quietly as possible. I tried my best to keep thoughts of the Dragon Killer from my mind, though I noticed my breathing was more uneven than it should have been. Campus was dark and still as I crept across it, but my eyes had adjusted by the time I reached the gym. Jack was sitting up against the wall, his navy hoodie pulled over his eyes.

  He reached into his backpack and tossed a flashlight to me.

  “Where are we going that we need flashlights?”

  He pointed to the ground below him and I noticed for the first time that he was sitting on top of a metal grate.

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “What’s it look like, Wood? It’s a grate.”

  “Yeah, but why did you bring me out here to look at a grate?”

  “To cheer you up. Listen, this grate is no ordinary grate. It leads to a tunnel, which leads to a storeroom, which has the most ridiculous St. Bede’s reject paraphernalia you can possibly imagine. It’ll be an adventure.”

  “No one else knows about it?”

  “Sure people know about it, but normally it’s locked up. Every once in a while it isn’t. I don’t know who the hell unlocks it. I sort of think it’s one of the custodians who feels like we’re too repressed, but I don’t know. Anyway, tonight I noticed it’s open. Then I ran into you. Perfect timing. You ready?”

  I nodded and he lifted the grate, sat down, and dropped deep into the darkness. A moment later he reappeared with his flashlight. “Come down, I’ll catch you.”

  I let myself fall and Jack caught me by my waist. I could feel the warmth of his fingers sinking through to my belly. Then he dropped me to the hard earth floor. He crouched and indicated that I should follow him. At first I just needed to hunch and the tunnel was fine, but the farther we went, the more I felt like Alice in Wonderland, kneeling, then crawling on hands and knees, trying to avoid thick black wires, random metal spiky things, and of course the multitude of rats and spiders that apparently lurked beneath the school.

  “I think this is it. Just a few more feet. Okay. Hold on. Here we are. There’s a drop-off here, so you stay there and I’m going to drop down and try to find the light.”

  I did as he said. Something small and light with spindly legs moved quickly across my hand. I stifled a scream and shook it off. And then, with a heavy thunk and a blinding flash, light flooded the little crawl space. I had to close my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them, I found below me a storeroom of some kind, littered with boxes and sprinkled with dust.

  “Where are we?”

  “Part of the old gym basement.”

  I hopped down, and Jack caught me, sliding his hands along my hips, my waist. He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a fluffy pink-and-green-checked blanket.

  “Jack.” I laug
hed. “Is that yours?”

  He smiled and bit his lip. “I borrowed it,” he said, spreading it out and lying down on his side. He kept reaching into his backpack, pulling out things that didn’t make any sense. Water bottles, a stuffed animal, Pixy Stix, a deck of cards, some flowers. I just kept laughing.

  “Um, Jack? What are we doing?”

  “Well,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “I was planning on coming out here tonight and taking it all myself, because I really really hate sharing.”

  “Jack, what are you talking about?”

  “But … but as luck would have it, before in-dorm time, I ran into the one person in the world I’d want to share it with.” He opened his delicate fist to display two little white pills.

  “Oh my God. What are those?”

  “Ecstasy. It’s going around campus right now.”

  “So I heard,” I sighed, sitting down on the blanket.

  The smile fell from his face. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, hanging my head.

  “I don’t want to pressure you.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t take it, Jack.”

  Suddenly, I wanted to cry.

  “Oh man,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “You are so hard to figure.” He kissed my forehead and pulled back to look me in the eyes. “We don’t have to do it. I’ll save it for another time. We can just hang out. I didn’t realize you were so upset about Alex. We can talk and play double solitaire or something.”

  “I’m sorry.” I shook my head, trying to get myself together. “I’m just a mess. You can take it if you want. I don’t want to ruin your night.”

  He looked at me and squinted, then bit his bottom lip again and shook his head. “Not a good idea. I’ll save it for another time. Take the whole dose myself. Let’s play cards.”

  He hopped up and started walking swiftly around the room. He unzipped his sweatshirt to reveal his usual off-white button-down shirt. How did he manage to make something like that look so suggestive?

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m really confused right now.” He stopped near a tall box and started drumming on it, his eyes closed. And for the first time in my life, I shocked myself. Something about his hips, the way they crept up above his belt. Something about his torso, his eyes, his mouth maybe. Whatever it was, it drew me to him, and with uncharacteristic force I took his face in my hands and I kissed him. His lips were receptive, and I felt the first inklings of his desire as his hip crushed against my belly. He had been wanting this as much as I had. But then his body tensed and he backed away from me. I stared up at him, suddenly ashamed. Had I done something wrong?