She slammed her locker shut, walked alone through the crowd of students to the sidewalk that circled the school, and started toward the gym. On Turquoise, most of the kids were stubbing out their cigarettes and starting to wander off toward their classes, but Cherie Armstrong leaned against the side of the building, rummaging through her purse, showing no sign that she was planning to leave.
It was Cherie she had come to see, and Sasha walked over to her. “You going to PE?” she asked.
Her friend snorted. “What for? So that dyke teacher can check out my crotch while I’m changing? No way.”
Sasha tried to smile. The thought of going to PE alone did not sit well with her, and although she knew she’d better leave now if she hoped to get to class on time, she hesitated for a moment.
She looked at Cherie, nonchalantly searching through the contents of her purse. She had never ditched class before, but she had always hated PE, and if she was going to skip a period, this would be a good one to start with.
The other girl finally found what she was looking for and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
The bell rang, and there was a last-minute flurry of students running to their classrooms.
Cherie smacked the pack against her palm, withdrew a cigarette. “Want a smoke?”
Sasha hesitated only a second, then moved next to her friend and leaned against the gym wall, holding out her hand.
“Sure,” she said.
2
Their new home still made her uncomfortable.
Julia lay awake, listening to the muted electric hum of the alarm clock on the dresser. It was the only sound in the room, the noise of its imperfect workings absurdly amplified against the silence, and she stared into the darkness, trying not to hear it. She still wasn’t used to the quiet out here, the absence of nighttime traffic and city sounds, and these low, isolated noises seemed more intrusive to her than all of the cacophony of Southern California.
The electric clock was keeping her awake, making it impossible for her to fall back to sleep.
Well, that and the fact that her bladder was full.
But she was afraid to get up and go to the bathroom.
She was ashamed of herself. She was a mother, for God’s sake. She was supposed to be the one reassuring her children that there were no ghosts or monsters, that the world was the same at night as it was during the day, that darkness hid no terrors.
But she could not even make herself believe it.
She did not understand what it was about the house that unsettled her so, that engendered within her this feeling of dread, but it was there, and it had not abated one whit since their arrival. If anything, it had grown stronger. There’d been no incidents since the dishes, no overt examples of anything unusual occurring, but as much as she tried to discount what she felt, as often as she attempted to ignore her feelings and write them off as the result of culture shock or emotional strain, she could not.
Which was why she was lying awake in the middle of the night, afraid to go to the bathroom.
Was their new home haunted?
It was what she kept coming back to.
She had never been superstitious, had never even been totally convinced of the existence of God. Anything beyond the physical world had been, to her, entirely theoretical and more in the realm of fiction than fact. But that attitude was changing, and, as ridiculous as she would have found it a month ago, she was now seriously considering the possibility that some sort of ghost or spirit was living in their house.
A ghost or spirit? Was she serious?
She sighed. Hell, maybe it was stress.
Earlier, she and Gregory had lain awake for a long time, talking. It was the only time they really got any privacy these days, and once they were in bed, they snuggled together to share the thoughts and feelings they did not want to discuss in front of Gregory’s mother or the children.
When he started talking about the café and his plans to make it into a nightspot, an entertainment venue that would lure name acts to this little corner of the state, she suggested that perhaps she would find something to do, too.
“You want to help me out with the sound system?” he asked.
She shook her head, smiled. “No. I was thinking more like volunteer work.”
“I thought you wanted to—”
“I’ll get around to that,” she said quickly. “But I need some… adjusting time.”
“Volunteer work, huh? Let me guess. At the library.”
“Or Teo’s school,” she said defensively.
He chuckled.
“I want to be here when the kids get home in the afternoon.”
Gregory nodded, still smiling. He pulled her closer, kissed her forehead. “Whatever you want.”
His condescending attitude annoyed her, and she dropped the subject, letting him drone on and on about the café before they finally made love and went to sleep.
Or rather he went to sleep.
She was still awake.
And had to go to the bathroom.
She remained in the bed, wide awake, and it was another half hour before she finally gathered enough courage to get out of bed and walk across the hall to the bathroom, “accidentally” waking Gregory up in the process so that he would be conscious should anything happen. It was another forty-five minutes before fatigue finally overcame her and she fell asleep.
At breakfast, Gregory’s mother talked about angels.
She was telling Teo and Adam a story about how a guardian angel had saved her from falling off a boulder into a cactus patch, and between bites of cereal, the kids asked clarifying questions that indicated they believed every word. It was not the first time this had happened, and Julia felt a little uncomfortable having so much religious talk in the house, but she understood that if her mother-in-law was to live with them, this was something that she would have to learn to put up with. She and Gregory exchanged a look, and he shrugged resignedly.
Besides, who was she to say? Maybe there were angels. A completely separate race of beings existing on some other, higher plane. It was something that a lot of people seemed to believe in. But would angels take such an interest in specific individuals that they would monitor a person’s every move? It didn’t make any kind of logical sense, but perhaps angels sat around and discussed the impact of things upon people just the way people sat around and discussed animals and the environment. To a race of beings that advanced, humans would be like pets, like lower life-forms, and perhaps their intervention in human affairs would be the equivalent of saving redwoods or protecting the denizens of natural wetlands.
Sasha walked downstairs, poured herself a glass of orange juice, and quickly downed it. “I’m off,” she announced.
Her grandmother frowned. “You need good breakfast. You eat breakfast.”
“No time!” She was out the kitchen door and into the living room. “See you this afternoon!”
Gregory pushed his chair back and stood. “Come on,” he told Adam and Teo. “Better get ready.”