Doll Bones Part 9

"Okay," he said. "So you swing the boom, and I'll pull the tiller."

Alice nodded. Zach steered toward the sandy bank to give them plenty of room to come about. "When the sail s.h.i.+fts, we're going to have to change sides too," he told Poppy. "So get ready."

He pulled on the tiller, and Alice pulled in the rope so that the sail tightened and swung. The boat turned in a single graceful movement, and then, with the wind and the current coming at them the wrong way and almost no idea what they were doing, the boat listed to one side and went over, dumping them all into the river.

The water was shockingly cold, and the impact of it rattled him down to his bones. He grabbed for the side of the boat.

Alice sputtered to the surface. Poppy was treading water, holding on to the mast and the sail.

Zach swam to the keel, which rose from the hull like a shark's fin. "Get clear for a second."

Poppy kicked away from the boat, dog-paddling toward Alice.

Zach threw his weight against the hull, and it righted itself, its sail lifting up off the water. He scrabbled to pull himself on board.

Alice heaved herself onto the deck, and then both of them grabbed for Poppy, who kept one arm pressed across her chest to hold the doll in place even as she was hauled onto the boat. Another barge was pa.s.sing to their left, creating a rippling wake that made their boat rock wildly again. And Zach could see that two barges followed it. For a moment they just drifted farther in the wrong direction, sail slack, holding on.

Alice lunged at Poppy. "This is enough. The end. Enough with the creepy doll and the lying and the trying to make this true." With those words, her hand darted out and s.n.a.t.c.hed the doll from where it was half zipped inside Poppy's wet hoodie.

Poppy screeched, and Zach gasped, but it was too late. Alice threw it overhand, up and out toward the barge and the deep water.

Everything froze for a long moment. The Queen hit the waves with barely a splash, the water seeming to soak her dress in slow motion, drawing it down. Her hair spread in a golden wave, and her dull black eyes looked up at them as she bobbed for a moment before sinking in a froth of bubbles.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

ZACH DIDN'T THINK ABOUT IT. HE DOVE.

When he was a little kid, his mom had taken him to swimming cla.s.ses at the YMCA. He remembered the bleachy smell of the chlorine and the feel of the orange swimmies inflated too tightly against his upper arms and the way all the kids' shouting bounced off the ceiling to echo. And he remembered how to kick like a frog.

He kicked now, over and over, toward the Queen, reaching for her, opening his eyes in the murky brown river.

His fingers closed on a sc.r.a.p of her dress. Striking his other hand out hard, he caught her arm and hauled her to him. For a moment the cold deadweight of her small china body seemed warm against his. Before he could think too much about that, he was swimming toward the surface. His head broke through the waves, and he sucked in a grateful lungful of air.

His whole body was shaking with cold. His teeth chattered. His toes had gone numb. Behind him, Poppy and Alice were fighting, but it was hard to focus on their words.

Then the wake of the barge hit, the waves sending him under again, this time without him holding his breath. He came up choking.

The sailboat was at a strange angle, closer to sh.o.r.e. The waves had carried it to shallower water, where the keel caught in the mud. The Pearl had run aground.

The girls were wading through the shallow water.

They were shouting at each other, but Zach didn't pay attention. The water was too cold, and it took too much energy for him to do anything but put his head down and swim.

He kicked and kicked and kicked.

Clutching the Queen to his chest, leaving only a single free arm with which to paddle, reaching the sh.o.r.e seemed to take forever. And when he finally got there, the bank of the Ohio River was muddy, sucking at his feet, making wading ash.o.r.e even harder than swimming had been.

Poppy was sitting on a fallen tree trunk, looking bedraggled and miserable. Her lips were blue with cold. Alice had sloughed off her coat somewhere and had her arms around herself like she was trying to physically restrain herself from s.h.i.+vering.

"The backpacks are gone," Alice said. "They must have fallen out when the boat rolled the first time."

Zach sank down on the sandy, muddy bank and looked at the doll in his arms. The Queen's dress was torn, and it seemed ready to disintegrate further as it dried. One of her arms had been pulled free from the socket and was hanging limply from a dirty string. He stared down at her and wondered why he'd been willing to jump back into a freezing river to get her.

He hadn't even thought about it. He didn't even remember deciding. He'd just known that if he didn't, he would lose something he wasn't ready to give up.

As the Queen's dull black eyes rolled up at him, he remembered what Poppy had said about breathing in the dead. Maybe when he'd opened up her bag of ashes, he'd inhaled some by accident. And if that was true, then maybe she could possess him anytime she wanted, just like the dead people who possessed you when you pa.s.sed by graveyards. He wanted to drop her on the riverbank, but his hands wouldn't obey him.

"What time is it?" Alice asked. "My phone's dead."

He looked at his watch. The center of the crystal face had fogged up, but even if it had stopped, it couldn't be too far off. "Three twenty."

"We've got to get moving," Alice said, clearly panicked. "Get up. We've got to go."

Zach's feet felt like they were filled with lead. "Alice . . ." We're not going to make it, he wanted to tell her. There's no way. We don't even know where we're going. But he could see in her face that she already knew all those things. That she'd figured them out on the boat before she'd hurled the Queen into the waves.

"How could youa"?" Poppy said to her, but then bit off the end of the sentence as Alice stalked off. Poppy pulled the doll from Zach's hands silently. He let her take it.

Alice walked with determination, and although Zach wasn't sure she knew where she was going, he and Poppy followed her.

They stumbled through the woods and then along the side of an empty stretch of road, past a raggedy wire fence that looked like it was keeping zombies back after an apocalypse rather than cows. As they tripped over rocks and stumps, wet hair sticking to their faces and necks, soaked socks squelching in their shoes, the silence stretched between them, making him even more panicked. Zach kept looking at his watch, which wasn't running entirely right anymore but still seemed to be ticking along faster than he wanted.

They were all s.h.i.+vering. Alice kept asking what time it was in a smaller and smaller voice. At three thirty, she kept marching with grim determination. At three thirty-four, she sped up to a near run. At three thirty-seven, she started to cry, quietly and to herself. He reached out a hand toward her, but she gave him such a terrible look that he pulled back and let her alone. At three forty-three, she set her jaw and kept going.

At three fifty-four, when the bus was well and truly gone, she whirled on Poppy.

"You promised this wouldn't happen!" she shouted. "You promised, and then you broke your promises over and over again, and now my whole life is going to be ruined because of you!"

"You never cared about the quest!" Poppy shouted back. "You threw Eleanor into the water. You threw her away like she was garbage."

"I thought maybe if she was gone, you'd go back to normal," Alice said. "I know you're just making all this up. Stop acting like it's so important, like you actually believe in it. Maybe you have Zach fooled, but you don't fool me."

"Is that what you're mad about? About Zach?"

"I don'ta""

Poppy whirled on Zach. "She loooooves you. That's her big secret. She wants you to be her boyfriend and go to the movies with her and make kissy faces. That's the only reason she even came with us."

Zach took a step back, glancing over at Alice, expecting her to deny it.

Her trembling hands went to cover her face. She and Poppy were both s.h.i.+vering as hard as he was. But she didn't deny anything and he didn't have room in his brain to know how to process that. He felt a little embarra.s.sed and a lot shocked. And it didn't matter anyway. They were all cold and miserable, and he had to do something before the fight they'd been having all along bubbled over into something so bad that it couldn't be taken back.

"Alicea"" he started, not quite sure what he was going to say, but hoping he'd figure it out as he spoke.

She shook her head, keeping her eyes on Poppy. "Of course you would say that. You're horrible. Now I know why Zach is sick of you. He answered those Questions you gave him, you know. He obviously cares about the game, even if he's lying about it. He still wants to play. He just doesn't want to play with you anymore. And you know what? I don't either. He hates you, and I hate you too."

Then, as Poppy stared at her, stunned, her skin flushed in that blotchy way it got, Alice turned and ran from both of them. She pushed her way into the tangled brush of the woods.

"I don't hate you," Zach told Poppy. He hesitated a moment and then raced after Alice.

He knew he'd been the bad friend, the liar, the one that had started everybody fighting. He'd been hurt and mad and afraid of letting anyone see how he felt. But he'd thought they would go on being Poppy and Alice, playing the same game, being best friends, sleeping over at each other's houses.

He'd taken it for granted that he'd be able to go back to being friends later, if he wanted, and everything would be the way he'd left it. He'd counted on that.

But maybe he'd messed up everything.

It didn't take long to find Alice. She was sitting with her back against a tree, head tipped forward so that her wet braids hung in her face. He thought that maybe she'd been crying again, but he wasn't sure. The skin around her eyes was red and swollen.

"You didn't have to go looking for me," she said.

He went over and sat beside her. "Why did you say all that stuff?"

She shook her head, not looking up. "I don't know."

"You were really good on the boat. At sailing." Which sounded lame now that he heard the words out loud, although it had made sense in his head.

She shrugged. Zach had no idea how to make things better. He wanted to ask her if it was true that she liked him, but he didn't want to make her more upseta"and since she'd gotten pretty upset already, it probably was true. But he wasn't sure why she'd been willing to follow Poppy onto the boat just to keep Zach from finding out. It wasn't an insult or anything. It was kind of a compliment.

Zach hadn't really thought about asking a girl out in any kind of real way, but if he was going to ask a girl out to get pizza or play video games, he'd want her to be like Alice.

The silence stretched until, unexpectedly, she broke it. "It was fun." She smiled lopsidedly. "Sailing. Even if we capsized. And I can't believe you stole that boat."

"We'll call the marina," he said, only a little defensively. "So it'll only be stolen for a little while."

She didn't reply, and he didn't want another moment of awkwardness. He gathered his courage. "I'm sorrya"about everything. We should have gone back before. You were right. I'll tell your grandmother it was all our fault."

"It doesn't matter. That's not even what I'm really mad about." Alice leaned her head against the tree. "I mean, I am, but there's more."

He waited, unsure of what she was going to say next.

"Do you think there's a ghost that talks to Poppy?" Alice asked. "I'm not asking if you believe in ghosts. I'm asking if you believe in this ghost."

Zach nodded. "There was all that stuff with the donut guy and the crazy bus guy seeming to see her, and there was the camp getting messed up, anda"and I had a dream about Eleanor last night in the woods. Just like Poppy. It wasn't the same dream, but it was kind of the same."

"You did?" Alice didn't look happy to hear it.

"I should have said something before," he told her.

"It's justa"" Alice looked down at her hands. She clenched them. "I don't want to believe in Eleanor. I don't want there to be a ghost that's talking to Poppya"and now, to you."

"You can't really be jealousa""

She cut him off, talking very fast. "You don't understand. There can't be a ghost, a real ghost. Because if there is, then some random dead girl wants to haunt Poppy, but my own dead parents can't be bothered to come back and haunt me."

Everything seemed to pause, as though the universe had taken a moment to draw its breath.

Alice wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. They were wet and glittering with all the tears she was holding back. "What if we bury the Queen and Eleanor is really gone? What if we actually put her to rest? What if it's real? Does that mean that my parents didn't even care enough to say good-bye? I didn't even get a single stupid dream. Not one."

He remembered Alice's parents only vaguely. He recalled sitting on a linoleum floor, playing Matchbox cars with Alice in a sunny yellow kitchen while her mother made them toast with jam, her father wearing crazy ties to his job at the courthousea"and, of course, Zach remembered that they'd died. But he didn't think of them as dead, the way ghosts were dead. And he'd never thought about how it would be to go on a quest to dig a grave when your parents were already in one.

He felt like a jerk for not even considering it. Now that he had, he wasn't sure there was anything he could say to Alice that wouldn't make him a bigger jerk. He was helpless.

"Maybe after we die, we don't get choices like that." He crouched down next to her. "And it probably sucks to be a ghost."

Alice snorted, the corner of her mouth lifting. "Maybe," she said.

Snapping twigs made them both look up. Zach stood. Poppy was walking toward them, wearing an uncomfortable expression, half relief and half dismay.

"I think I found the way to town," she said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

ALTHOUGH THE MAIN STREET OF EAST LIVERPOOL was full of big store windows and shops, many were no longer open at all. There was a place called Pants Unlimited that was covered in flyers advertising FINAL SALE! on everything, since they were going out of business, but by the aged look of the flyers, they might have been going out of business for years. The store owner stood in the doorway, smoking a cigarette. Zach and Poppy and Alice walked past him, still trailing water, their shoes making squelching sounds. Poppy hugged the Queen to her chest, the doll's face turned so that he couldn't see if her cheeks had grown even rosier. Next they pa.s.sed a gaming store with a few bikes leaned against the pavement and a couple more chained to a nearby STOP sign. And finally they came to a diner, the only restaurant they'd seen that was open.

They stopped to gaze at the menu on the door.

"I have four dollars and twenty-five centsa"aside from the bus fare home," Zach said. "How much do you guys have?"

"That I can spend?" said Poppy. "Zero."

"Eight seventy-five," said Alice, pus.h.i.+ng up her dress to rifle through the pockets of the jeans she had on underneath.

"So, not much before we start dipping into our bus fare home," Poppy said. "But something."

Alice looked grim at the mention of the bus, but didn't say anything, which was good, but also made Zach nervous. All the way from the woods, the three of them had only said things having to do with figuring out where they were going. He couldn't decide if the girls didn't want to fight anymore or if they were gearing up for an even bigger fight that was about to come.

Somehow he'd become at the center of their conflict, and he could tell it was just a matter of time before they figured out that they didn't have to be mad at each othera"he was the one they should both be mad at. He was the one who had messed up the game, the one who had hidden the Questions, the one who Alicea"

The one who Alice liked, which was weird too. It wasn't like he hadn't thought about girls or even like he'd never thought about Alice like that. He had. But actually asking her out? The idea was paralyzing.

"Okay," Zach said, pus.h.i.+ng open the door to the diner. "Let's go in."

The diner was warm, with a round display of desserts near the register that turned, showing huge cakes and pies piled with icing and oozing filling. There were little gla.s.s dishes of Jell-O and others of rice pudding studded with raisins, each one covered in plastic wrap.