Emily turned to Lena and expertly shot her a look that managed to work its way from the very top of Lena’s un-highlighted hair, past her un-tanned face, down to the tips of her un-pinked fingernails. Eden and Charlotte swung around in their chairs to face Emily, as if Lena didn’t exist. The girl freeze-out—today it was negative fifteen.
Lena opened her tattered spiral notebook and started to write. Emily got out her phone and began to text. I looked back down at my notebook, slipping my Silver Surfer comic between the pages, which was a lot harder to do in the front row.
“All right, ladies and gentleman, since it looks like the rest of the lights will be staying on, you’re out of luck. I hope everyone did the reading last night.” Mrs. English was scribbling madly on the chalkboard. “Let’s take a minute to discuss social conflict in a small-town setting.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Someone should have told Mrs. English. Halfway through class, we had more than social conflict in a small-town setting. Emily was coordinating a full-scale attack.
“Who knows why Atticus is willing to defend Tom Robinson, in the face of small-mindedness and racism?”
“I bet Lena Ravenwood knows,” Eden said, smiling innocently at Mrs. English. Lena looked down into the lines of her notebook, but didn’t say a word.
“Shut up,” I whispered, a little too loudly. “You know that’s not her name.”
“It may as well be. She’s livin’ with that freak,” Charlotte said.
“Watch what you say. I hear they’re, like, a couple.” Emily was pulling out the big guns.
“That’s enough.” Mrs. English turned her good eye on us, and we all shut up.
Lena shifted her weight; her chair scraped loudly against the floor. I leaned forward in mine, trying to become a wall between Lena and Emily’s minions like I could physically deflect their comments.
You can’t.
What? I sat up, startled. I looked around, but no one was talking to me; no one was talking at all. I looked at Lena. She was still half-hidden in her notebook. Great. It wasn’t enough to dream real girls and hear imaginary songs. Now I had to hear voices, too.
The whole Lena thing was really getting to me. I guess I felt responsible, in a way. Emily, and the rest of them, wouldn’t hate her so much if it wasn’t for me.
They would.
There it was again, a voice so quiet I could barely hear it. It was like it was coming from the back of my head.
Eden, Charlotte, and Emily kept firing away, and Lena didn’t even blink, like she could just block them out as long as she kept writing in that notebook of hers.
“Harper Lee seems to be saying that you can’t really get to know someone until you take a walk in his shoes. What do you make of that? Anyone?”
Harper Lee never lived in Gatlin.
I looked around, stifling a laugh. Emily looked at me like I was nuts.
Lena raised her hand. “I think it means you have to give people a chance. Before you automatically skip to the hating part. Don’t you think so, Emily?” She looked at Emily and smiled.
“You little freak,” Emily hissed under her breath.
You have no idea.
I stared more closely at Lena. She had given up on the notebook; now she was writing on her hand in black ink. I didn’t have to see it to know what it was. Another number. 151. I wondered what it meant, and why it couldn’t go in the notebook. I buried my head back in Silver Surfer.
“Let’s talk about Boo Radley. What would lead you to believe he is leaving gifts for the Finch children?”
“He’s just like Old Man Ravenwood. He’s probably tryin’ to lure those kids into his house so he can kill them,” Emily whispered, loud enough for Lena to hear, but quiet enough to keep Mrs. English from hearing. “Then he can put their bodies in his hearse and take them out to the middle a nowhere and bury them.”
Shut up.
I heard the voice in my head again, and something else. It was a creaking sound. Faint.
“And he has that crazy name like Boo Radley. What is it again?”
“You’re right, it’s that creepy Bible name nobody uses anymore.”
I stiffened. I knew they were talking about Old Man Ravenwood, but they were also talking about Lena. “Emily, why don’t you give it a rest,” I shot back.
She narrowed her eyes. “He’s a freak. They all are and everyone knows it.”
I said shut up.
The creaking was getting louder and started to sound more like splintering. I looked around. What was that noise? Even weirder, it didn’t seem like anyone else heard it—like the voice.
Lena was staring straight ahead, but her jaw was clenched and she was unnaturally focused on one point in the front of the room, like she couldn’t see anything but that spot. The room felt like it was getting smaller, closing in.
I heard Lena’s chair drag across the floor again. She got out of her seat, heading toward the bookcase under the window, on the side of the room. Most likely pretending to sharpen her pencil so she could escape the inescapable, Jackson’s judge and jury. The sharpener began to grind.
“Melchizedek, that’s it.”
Stop it.
I could still hear the grinding.
“My grandmamma says that’s an evil name.”
Stop it stop it stop it.
“Suits him, too.”
ENOUGH!
Now the voice was so loud, I grabbed my ears. The grinding stopped. Glass went flying, splintering into the air, as the window shattered out of nowhere—the window right across from our row in the classroom, right next to where Lena stood, sharpening her pencil. Right next to Charlotte, Eden, Emily, and me. They screamed and dove out of their seats. That’s when I realized what that creaking sound had been. Pressure. Tiny cracks in the glass, spreading out like fingers, until the window collapsed inward like it had been pulled by a thread.
It was chaos. The girls were screaming. Everyone in the class was scrambling out of their seats. Even I jumped.
“Don’t panic. Is everyone all right?” Mrs. English said, trying to regain control.
I turned toward the pencil sharpener. I wanted to make sure Lena was okay. She wasn’t. She was standing by the broken window, surrounded by glass, looking panic-stricken. Her face was even paler than usual, her eyes even bigger and greener. Like last night in the rain. But they looked different. They looked frightened. She didn’t seem so brave anymore.
She held out her hands. One was cut and bleeding. Red drops splattered on the linoleum floor.
I didn’t mean it—
Did she shatter the glass? Or had the glass shattered and cut her?
“Lena—”
She bolted out of the room, before I could ask her if she was all right.
“Did you see that? She broke the window! She hit it with somethin’ when she walked over there!”
“She punched clean through the glass. I saw it with my own eyes!”
“Then how come she’s not gushin’ blood?”
“What are you, CSI? She tried to kill us.”
“I’m callin’ my daddy right now. She’s crazy, just like her uncle!”
They sounded like a pack of angry alley cats, shouting over each other. Mrs. English tried to restore order, but that was asking the impossible. “Everyone calm down. There’s no reason to panic. Accidents happen. It was probably nothing that can’t be explained by an old window and the wind.”
But no one believed it could be explained by an old window and the wind. More like an old man’s niece and a lightning storm. The green-eyed storm that just rolled into town. Hurricane Lena.
One thing was for sure. The weather had changed, all right. Gatlin had never seen a storm like this.
And she probably didn’t even know it was raining.
9.12
Greenbrier
Don’t.
I could hear her voice in my head. At least I thought I could.
It’s not worth it, Ethan.
It was.
That’s when I pushed back my chair and ran down the hallway after her. I knew what I’d done. I had taken sides. I was in a different kind of trouble now, but I didn’t care.
It wasn’t just Lena. She wasn’t the first. I’d watched them do it, my whole life. They’d done it to Allison Birch when her eczema got so bad nobody would sit near her at the lunch table, and poor Scooter Richman because he played the worst trombone in the history of the Jackson Symphony Orchestra.
While I’d never picked up a marker and written LOSER across a locker myself, I had stood by and watched, plenty of times. Either way, it had always bothered me. Just never enough to walk out of the room.
But somebody had to do something. A whole school couldn’t just take down one person like that. A whole town couldn’t just take down one family. Except, of course, they could, because they had been doing it forever. Maybe that’s why Macon Ravenwood hadn’t left his house since before I was born.
I knew what I was doing.
You don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.
She was there in my head again, as if she’d always been there.
I knew what I’d be facing the next day, but none of that mattered to me. All I cared about was finding her. And I couldn’t have told you just then if it was for her, or for me. Either way, I didn’t have a choice.
I stopped at the bio lab, out of breath. Link took one look at me and tossed me his keys, shaking his head without even asking. I caught them and kept running. I was pretty sure I knew where to find her. If I was right, she had gone where anyone would go. It’s where I would have gone.
She had gone home. Even if home was Ravenwood, and she had gone home to Gatlin’s own Boo Radley.
Ravenwood Manor loomed in front of me. It rose up on the hill like a dare. I’m not saying I was scared, because that’s not exactly the word for it. I was scared when the police came to the door the night my mom died. I was scared when my dad disappeared into his study and I realized he would never really come back out. I was scared when I was a kid and Amma went dark, when I figured out the little dolls she made weren’t toys.
I wasn’t scared of Ravenwood, even if it turned out to be as creepy as it looked. The unexplained was sort of a given in the South; every town has a haunted house, and if you asked most folks, at least a third of them would swear they’d seen a ghost or two in their lifetime. Besides, I lived with Amma, whose beliefs included painting our shutters haint blue to keep the spirits out, and whose charms were made from pouches of horsehair and dirt. So I was used to unusual. But Old Man Ravenwood, that was something else.
I walked up to the gate and hesitantly laid my hand on the mangled iron. The gate creaked open. And then, nothing happened. No lightning, no combustion, no storms. I don’t know what I was expecting, but if I had learned anything about Lena by now, it was to expect the unexpected, and to proceed with caution.
If anyone had told me a month ago that I would ever walk past those gates, up that hill, and set foot anywhere on the grounds of Ravenwood, I would’ve said they were crazy. In a town like Gatlin, where you can see everything coming, I wouldn’t have seen this. Last time, I had only made it as far as the gates. The closer I got, the easier it was to see that everything was falling apart. The great house, Ravenwood Manor, looked just like the stereotypical Southern plantation that people from up North would expect to see after all those years of watching movies like Gone with the Wind.