She listens to me cry and when I’m done, she calmly looks at me.

“We’d better go get those scooters, child.”

She walks up the drive with me, and we push them back, and I ask her a million questions.

“Why does Richard hate Dare? Why is he so mean? Why isn’t Dare supposed to leave Whitley?”

Sabine listens but she doesn’t answer until long after we’ve put the scooters away and returned to the kitchen.

“Things aren’t what they seem, little Calla Lily,” she tells me. “It’s time that you wrap your young mind around that.”

No amount of prodding will get her to say more, and when I go to bed that night, all I can think about is Dare and his dark eyes staring at me as that car disappeared down the driveway.

When the screaming starts, I close my eyes against it, trying to tune it out, because when I hear it, all I can do is imagine those beautiful dark eyes filled with pain. It crushes me, and I sleep to escape it.

Chapter Eight

Price Funeral Home and Crematorium

The Oregon sky hangs misty and cloudy and dark. I watch the lightning stretch from one end of the horizon to the other, illuminating the darkness, exposing the night. It casts a purple light upon everything, and the world seems mystic.

I hold Dare’s letter in my lap because it’s precious. He seldom writes to me and when he does, I save them.

Dear Calla,

This one says.

How are the dead people? Whitley is the same. I’m practically living with dead people too, you know. Eleanor is close to 200, or at least she looks like it. And Sabine, God. Who knows how old she is?

I’m sending a picture of Castor and Pollux. They were swimming in the ocean and Pollux caught a fish. Someone on the beach thought he was a bear and started screaming. It was the funniest thing ever. Castor hunts for you when you’re gone, and he sleeps next to your bedroom door, until I make him come with me.

See you this summer,

Dare

His words are etched on the paper, scrawled with a nonchalance that is typical of Dare. Somehow, he makes me miss Whitley, even though the estate is huge and scary and everything there feels wrong. But Dare is there, and my dogs are there. I miss Dare during the winters, although I’d never have the guts to tell him.

I pin the picture of the dogs on my bulletin board, and do my math homework, and then when I go to sleep, I dream about Dare.

I dream and dream and dream. My dream turns my stomach to warm sunlight, and a weird sensation travels through my thighs and belly, a hot feeling like fire.

I dream that sunlight filters in through the Carriage House windows, and that I’m seated on the couch, lounging on my side. I’m completely naked but for high heels and my cheeks are flushed, and I’m older. Maybe seventeen? My hair is long and red and curls around my shoulders, flowing down my back .

Dare sits in front of me and he’s got a pencil in his mouth, chewing on it as he studies me, then he draws on the paper. He’s drawing me, and he’s beautiful and he’s beautiful and he’s beautiful.

“You’re so beautiful, Calla-Lily,” he murmurs. “You’re so much better than I deserve.”

The light shines into his eyes and they seem like gold instead of black, and his teeth are ever white. A silver ring gleams on his finger and it spins in my mind,

Spinning

Spinning,

And I startle awake,

And when I gather myself,

I realize my cheeks are flushed, just like in my dream.

It’s hours before I finally go back to sleep, and even the next day in school, I find myself thinking about that dream. It’s a situation that I would be unlikely to be in… exposed like that in the sunlight. It’s so out of my character.

I manage to focus my attention for long enough to take my math test, and then Finn and I are out for the day, and on our way home in the brisk cold Oregon air.

As we hike up the road lugging our heavy backpacks, our Chucks squeak on the rocky road, the light sheen of rain making it slippery. I curl my hands inside my mittens while I inhale deeply. Breathing in the salty smells of the ocean, I absently stare over the side of the cliffs toward the beach below.

Something bright blue catches my eye in the rocks below. The blue is out of place against the drab winter background of the beach. I pause, interested, dropping my backpack as I inch closer to the edge to get a better look.

Someone stares back at me, and the eyes aren’t friendly.

They’re dead.

I gasp, loud and long and Finn’s hands yank me away from the edge.

“What’s wrong with you, Calla?” he demands in agitation. “You could’ve fallen over the side. You know not to mess around with these cliffs.”

I can’t answer. I’m so completely shocked and appalled as I point with a shaky mitten-clad finger.

That couldn’t be what I thought it was. Who I thought it was.

But it is. I lean forward and look again and I see that I wasn’t wrong.

I also see that no matter how much death a person is exposed to, nothing prepares you for the dead and unexpected face of someone you know.

Finn peers around my shoulder, and I feel him startle as he recognizes the body on the rocks below.

“Is that Mr. Elliott?” he asks in shock. I nod dumbly, unable to make my lips move.

Mr. Elliott is one of the few teachers who has ever been nice to me, although he never really liked Finn. Apparently, skinny underdeveloped boys don’t impress him much, and so he never stepped in when the football guys stuffed Finn into trashcans in the locker room.

I hated that. But I can’t deny that I still liked him…for how he treated me.

Specifically, he never made me participate in dodge ball.

He knew I’d be pummeled into a bloody pulp, so he always let me sit it out. And he never acknowledged that he knew why. He never said the humiliating words, I know everyone hates you so I won’t make you a target. I always appreciated that.

But now, he’s dressed in jogging clothes and lying in a broken heap at the bottom of the cliffs. One of his knees is bent, and his foot is cocked at an unnatural angle, pointed up at the sky.

As Finn pulls out his phone and calls the police, all I can focus on are Mr. Elliot’s socks. They’re the old-school kind, the gym socks that you pull up to the knee…the ones with the stripes. His stripes are bright blue.

A man is dead, and all I can think about are his socks.

Maybe everyone is right and there really is something wrong with me.

Two hours later, my mother rushes to assure me that there isn’t.

“It was shock, honey,” she tells me, stroking my hair slowly away from my face. “Most people don’t get upset right away. It’s a delayed reaction.”

She wipes my face with a cloth, and makes chocolate chip cookies, and everything is fine until two days later, when it’s my turn to help my father.

I stare at my father’s perfectly manicured hands, the fingernails that are cut into perfect squares, as he pulls the crisp sheet back up over Mr. Elliott’s body.

“I wonder if he had a heart attack and fell from the cliffs?” My dad muses calmly. “Or if he slipped? Poor guy.”

My dad is unflappable, his voice matter-of-fact and speculative.

He doesn’t ask me if I’m okay, because it doesn’t occur to him that I might not be. Death is his business and he deals with it on a daily basis. Nothing bothers him anymore, and he forgets that it might be unnerving for someone else.

I swallow.

“Is the M.E. coming?” I ask, and my voice sounds tremulous in this large sterile room. It’s cold in here because it has to be, and I rub the goose-bumps off my arms. My dad glances at me as he wheels the metal gurney into a cooler.