Philip stopped, as if that were the end of the story.
"And?"
He glanced up at the empty shelves, then pulled away from her.
"Go on," Ivy prompted.
"You're just going to yell at me."
"No, I won't," she said. "And neither will Gregory." She gave Gregory a warning look. "Just tell us what you remember."
"You heard a voice in your head," Gregory said, "and it was telling you that Ivy needed help. The voice sounded something like Tristan's."
"It was Tristan," Philip insisted. "It was angel Tristan!"
"Okay, okay," Gregory said.
"Did this voice tell you why I was in trouble?" Ivy asked. "Did the voice tell you where I was?"
He shook his head. "Tristan said to put on my shoes, go down the stairs, and go out the back door. Then we ran across the yard to the stone wall.
I knew I wasn't supposed to go over it, but Tristan said it was okay because he was with me."
Ivy could feel Gregory's body tense next to hers, but she nodded encouragingly to Philip.
"It was scary, Ivy, climbing down the ridge. It was hard to hold on. The rocks were real slippery."
"It's impossible," Gregory said, sounding frustrated and perplexed. "A kid couldn't have done it. I couldn't have done it."
"I had Tristan with me," Philip reminded him.
"I don't know how you got to the station, Philip," Gregory said heatedly, "but I'm tired of this Tristan story. I don't want to hear it again."
"I do," Ivy said quietly, and heard Gregory draw in his breath. "Go on," she said.
"When we got to the bottom, we still had to get over another fence. I asked what was going on, but Tristan wouldn't tell me. He just said we had to help you. So I started climbing, then I kind of messed up. I thought because Tristan was an angel we could fly"-Gregory got up and started pacing around the bedroom-"but we couldn't, and we fell off the top of this high fence."
Ivy glanced down at her brother's wrapped ankle. His knees were cut and bruised.
"Then we heard the train whistle. And we had to keep going. When we got closer we saw you on the platform. We shouted to you, Ivy, but you didn't hear us. We ran up the steps and over the bridge. That's when we saw the other Tristan. The one in the cap and jacket, just like in your picture," he said, pointing to it. Ivy shivered.
"So," Gregory said, "angel Tristan is in two places now-with you, and on the other side of the tracks as well. He's playing a trick on Ivy, calling her over to him. It wasn't a very nice trick."
"Tristan was with me," Philip said.
"Then who was across the tracks?" Gregory asked.
"A bad angel," Philip replied with complete certainty. "Someone who wanted Ivy to die."
Gregory blinked.
Ivy sank back against her headboard. As bizarre as Philip's story sounded, it seemed more real to her than the idea that she had taken drugs and thrown herself in front of a train. And the fact remained that somehow her brother had gotten there and he had pulled her back at the last moment. The engineer had seen the blur in front of his train and radioed in that he could not stop in time.
"I thought you saw Tristan," Philip said.
"What?" Ivy asked.
"You turned around. I thought you saw his light." Philip gazed at her hopefully.
Ivy shook her head. "I don't remember it. I don't remember anything from the train station."
Perhaps it would be easier if she never recalled what had happened, Ivy thought. But every time she looked at the photo now, there was a prickling in the back of her mind. Something wouldn't let her look away and forget. Ivy stared until the picture ran blurry. She didn't realize she had begun to cry.
"Ivy… Ivy, don't."
Suzanne's words jolted Ivy back into the present. As she lifted her head her friend crouched down next to the school locker. Her mouth was a grim, lip sticked line. Beth, who had also come back from orientation, stood above her, fumbling through her knapsack for tissues. She glanced down at Ivy, her own brimming eyes reflecting Ivy's tears.
"I'm okay," Ivy said, wiping her eyes quickly, looking from one to the other. "Really, I'm okay."
But she could tell they didn't believe her. Gregory had driven her to school that day, and Suzanne would be taking her home. It was as if they didn't trust her to drive herself, as if they thought that at any minute she'd lose it and steer right off a cliff.
"You shouldn't have that picture taped inside your locker," Suzanne said.
"Sooner or later you're going to have to let go, Ivy. You're just making yourself-" She hesitated.
"Crazy?"
Suzanne smoothed back her mane of black hair, then toyed with a gold hoop earring. She had never been shy about speaking her mind before, but now she was being careful. "It's not healthy, Ivy," she said at last.
"It's not good to have his picture here to remind you every time you open the door."
"But I wasn't the one who put it here," Ivy told her.
Suzanne frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Did you see me do it?" Ivy asked.
"Well, no, but you've got to remember-" her friend began.
"I don't."
Suzanne and Beth exchanged glances.
"So someone else must have," Ivy said, sounding a lot more certain than she was. "It's a school picture.
Anyone could get a copy of it. I didn't tape it here, so someone else must have."
There was a moment of silence. Suzanne sighed.
"Did you see the counselor today?" Beth asked.
"I just came from there," Ivy told her, closing her locker, leaving the picture inside. She stood up next to Beth, whose outfit had also been selected by Suzanne. But Beth, no matter how fashionably dressed, would always look to Ivy like a wide-eyed owl, with her round face and feathers of frosted hair.
"What did Ms. Bryce say?" Beth asked as they started down the hall.
"Nothing much. I'm supposed to come talk to her twice a week and check in if I'm having a bad day. So you're both coming Monday?" Ivy asked, changing the subject.
Suzanne's eyes brightened. "To the Baines Bash? It's a Labor Day tradition!" She sounded relieved to be talking about a party.
Ivy knew that the last month had been hard on Suzanne. She'd been so jealous of the attention Gregory paid Ivy that she'd stopped speaking to her oldest friend. Later, when Gregory told Suzanne that Ivy had tried to commit suicide, she blamed herself for turning her back. But Ivy knew that she herself was partly to blame for the rift. She'd gotten too close to Gregory. In the three weeks since the incident at the train station, Gregory had cooled toward Ivy, treating her more like a sister man a girl he was romantically interested in. Suzanne had reached out to Ivy again, and Ivy was glad for the change in both of them.
"We've been going to the Baines Bash since we were kids," Beth told Ivy.
"Everybody in Stone hill has."
"Except me," Ivy pointed out.
"And Will. He moved here last winter, like you," Beth said. "I told him about the party, and he's coming."
"Is he?" Ivy had noticed that Beth and Will were hanging around together more and more. "He's a nice guy."
"Real nice," Beth said enthusiastically.
They studied each other for a moment. Were Beth and Will getting to be more than friends? Ivy wondered. After writing all those romantic stories, maybe Beth had finally fallen. It wouldn't be hard to do: A lot of girls had crushes on Will. Ivy herself found that whenever she looked into his dark brown eyes- She caught herself and quickly shoved aside that thought. She would never let herself fall in love again.
The girls pushed through the school doors, and Suzanne led them on a roundabout route to their cars that conveniently ran past the field where the football team was practicing.