I hate these freaking stairs in the woods. I hate how well I know them, how I’ve got every inch of them memorized, the cracks, the grooves in the cement, the dark green moss like velvet pushing its way out. I hate the rough scrape they make under my feet. I hate the rail I cling to. If I had a choice right now, I’d take a jackhammer to these stairs, shatter them to pieces, take the pieces one by one and drop them at the bottom of Jackson Lake.
I’d bulldoze this entire cemetery.
I’d burn this black dress I’m wearing. I’d chuck Mom’s nice shoes in the garbage.
But I can’t. I’m in the dream, and in the dream the one in control is future-Clara, who hardly feels her feet moving. She wears her numbness like a cloak around her, hiding, weighing her down so each step forward is an effort. She thinks that she should cry. But she can’t. She wants to let go of Christian’s hand, but she doesn’t. It’s like we’re both paralyzed, incapable, in this moment, of any kind of action other than walking, always with the freaking walking, always up, to the spot where the people are gathering.
To the hole in the ground.
To death. My mother’s death. And there’s a Black Wing on the fringes of my mind, grieving, out-of-his-mind grieving, a gaping hole in his heart.
Mom wasn’t joking about it like being grounded, that next week. Every morning Billy drives us to school. She always acts casual, like it’s no biggie, but she’s hyperalert.
I made a case for quitting school altogether, spending the time with Mom, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “What would Stanford say?” she jokes.
“You have cancer. I’m pretty sure they’d understand,” I reply. A solid argument.
No go. Mom has this thing about normalcy. Acting like everything’s fine for as long as you can. It’s annoying, because since when have we ever been normal? It feels pointless to pretend otherwise. But she’s adamant. Normal kids go to school. So to school we will go.
I want my life back. I want to go to the Garter and hang out with Angela. I want to have dinner at the Averys on Sunday nights, smooch Tucker on the back porch. That’s what normal people do, right? See their friends? Their boyfriends? Plus I want to fly. Sometimes I feel the presence of my wings like they’re itching to stretch themselves out in the wide-open sky, aching to feel the wind carry me.
“That sucks,” Angela says at lunch on Thursday, four days post-crash. She takes a huge bite of a green apple and chews it noisily. “But you did get attacked by a Black Wing, Clara.
Better safe than sorry.”
“I feel safe and sorry.”
She gives me her no-nonsense, snap-out-of-it look. “Okay, better safe than dead.”
“Good point.”
“God, I wish I could have been there,” she exclaims, so loudly that two people passing by pause like, what’s gotten into Angela Zerbino? She glares at them and they move on.
“You have all the fun without me,” she whines more quietly.
“It wasn’t fun. Trust me.”
“I bet it was a rush. All that adrenaline pumping. Nerves firing.”
“Since when are you an adrenaline junkie?” I ask. “And no, it was not a rush. Just terrifying. I-hope-I-don’t-soil-myself, I-hope-I-don’t-die kind of terrifying.”
“The Black Wing was magnificent though, wasn’t he? Was he something spectacular to look at? Did you see his wings?”
“He’s not an animal in the wild, Ange.”
“Definitely not a moose, that’s for sure,” she says with a sniff.
“Did I mention the terrifying? The whole time I was thinking, that’s it, that’s why Tucker’s not at the cemetery. Samjeeza’s going to kill him.” She stops mid-bite with her apple. “What cemetery?”
Crapzol.
Angela looks at me intently. “Clara, what cemetery?”
I might as well tell her.
“My recurring dream is a vision. That strange forest with the stairs, it’s Aspen Hill Cemetery. It’s a graveside. At first I thought it was Tucker who was going to die, because he’s not there, in my vision, but then it turned out to be my mom.” She puts her hands to her head like I am blowing her mind. “How’d you figure it out?”
“Christian. His mom is buried there. Although I probably would have figured it out on my own, eventually. It’s pretty obvious now.”
“So you told Christian.” She looks truly hurt. “You told Christian and not me.” I try to come up with a good excuse, like that I didn’t want to distract her from her purpose, I didn’t want to say anything until I knew for sure what it was about, point out that I didn’t even tell my mom until I had to, but all I can say is, “Hey, you’re the one who made me tell Christian about the dream in the first place.”
“Don’t you trust me?” she asks.
She’s about to say something else, but suddenly there’s an upset in the cafeteria. A public breakup, that much is obvious right away, in the middle of the lunchroom. A girl starts crying, not a hysterical kind of cry, nothing so dramatic as, like, Kay last year, but the crowd still moves away from her. Then I recognize this pathetic creature as Kimber, my brother’s girlfriend. And Jeffrey, like an impassive stone statue beside her.
“Jeffrey,” Kimber says, between gasps of air. She has hold of his letterman’s jacket. “You don’t mean it.”
“It’s not working, Kimber,” he says, and without another word, he twists, pulls her hands away from him, and heads for the door.
I catch up with him before he gets there. “Jeffrey, you can’t dump her in front of everybody,” I whisper, trying not to attract any more attention. “Come on.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” is all he says. Then he’s gone.
Kimber’s friends have all gathered around her by this point, making sympathetic cooing noises, shooting glares in the direction that Jeffrey slunk off to, loudly declaring that he’s a jerk, he didn’t deserve her, his loss. She doesn’t say anything. She sits at a table, shoulders slumped, the very picture of dejection.
I wander back to my table. “What’s going on with him?” Angela asks. “Or can you not tell me that, either?”
Ouch. “He’s not taking this thing with my mom very well.”
“Makes sense,” she says with a flash of sympathy in her eyes. “Too bad, though.
Kimber’s a sweet girl. That was kind of . . . cold.”