After Obsession Part 2

"Does that happen?" I ask. "Do people get lost in storms, then turn up later?"

"It could happen," Courtney says, her voice suddenly shrill. She spins away from me and runs through the living room to the stairs, leaving me holding the front door open.

A sudden wind blows across the porch. It's cold, but gone as fast as it came. I look at the old leaves it blows past me as they scatter off the edge of the porch. There's a shadow racing with the wind. Strange. I hear a bedroom door slam upstairs.

Above me, something seems to scratch in the s.p.a.ce between the inside and outside walls of the house. I don't bother to look up. Mice are mice, whether they live in the Great Plains or on the East Coast.

I do my homework because there's nothing else to do and Aunt Lisa only has basic cable. I'm just finis.h.i.+ng up my science reading when Aunt Lisa's car rumbles into the driveway.

"I got the job," Mom yells as she enters the house. There are yellowish wood shavings still clinging to her sandy-blond hair and her face is glowing as she pushes past her sister and comes to me for a hug.

I hug her back, but not with a lot of enthusiasm.

"You could have let us know," I say in a teasing tone.

"I left a message on the machine," she says, pointing behind me to the telephone. A red light on the answering machine is blinking.

"Oh, I didn't think I should listen." Never mind that I hadn't even noticed.

"Don't be silly, Alan," Aunt Lisa says. "You live here now. Mia casa is you-a casa."

This is the first thing I've heard Aunt Lisa say that wasn't tinged with sorrow, so I force a chuckle at her butchering of Spanish.

"Okay, I'll remember that. Congrats on the job, Mom. I guess you started today, huh?" I pluck a curly shaving from her hair. It looks like pine.

Mom laughs and puts her hands in her hair to shake it. "You told me I got it all out, Lisa."

"You're such a rookie, Holly," my aunt says as she walks by Mom and s.n.a.t.c.hes another shaving from her hair. She asks me, "Did Courtney make dinner?"

I hesitate, wondering if I'll be getting my cousin in trouble if I tell the truth. They're going to find out anyway. "No. She went upstairs as soon as we got home. I haven't seen her since. They gave me a ton of homework."

"You can handle it," Mom says. "Is Courtney okay?"

"I think so." I'm no shrink, but believing your dead father may return after his boat was lost in the North Atlantic doesn't seem okay to me. I saw t.i.tanic. I know people can't survive for long in cold water, especially during a storm.

"Well, I think we should go out to dinner to celebrate your mom's new job and you guys moving to Maine," Aunt Lisa says.

Celebrate moving to Maine? Yeah, right. Mom claps her hands and says that's the best idea she's heard in weeks, that she's dying to try some fresh seafood.

"Sure," I say. "Why not? I'll go up and get Courtney."

Courtney's bedroom is at the end of the hall, just past my new room. The hallway seems very dark, even though the overhead light is on. I know there's something wrong. The hair on my arms p.r.i.c.kles as I come to Courtney's closed door, and I feel cold, like I'm standing in front of a freezer with a leak.

"Courtney?" I knock on the door. The scratching noise comes again, right beneath my feet. I consider stamping my foot to silence the mice, but don't. Why point out to Aunt Lisa that I know she has rodents in her house?

"Courtney?" I knock again, louder.

The cold air around me vanishes. It's been sucked back under Courtney's door. She still doesn't answer, so I turn the k.n.o.b and push. For an instant, there is resistance, then the door opens easily.

Courtney's lying on the bed, her eyes open, her arms rigid at her sides, her palms pressed against her thighs. It looks very weird.

"Courtney? You okay?"

Slowly, she turns her head to look at me. Behind her gla.s.ses, her eyes seem strange, magnified and too bright.

"We're going out for dinner. You ready?"

"Sure. I'll be right down," she says in a dazed voice.

I close the door and back away a step. Behind the door I can hear her moving, the rustle of her clothes as she sits up on the bed. Deciding she must be okay, just emo-weird, I go back downstairs. Aunt Lisa is picking the last of the wood shavings from Mom's hair and talking about somebody at the mill.

A couple of minutes later Courtney bops down the stairs. Her eyes seem normal again and she hugs her mom, asking, "Where are we going? Charlie's?"

"Sounds good to me," Aunt Lisa says. "You guys ready?"

Mom and I follow them out to their SUV, where I sit in the back with Courtney.

"You're in cla.s.s with my best friend," Courtney says as we hit the road.

"Oh yeah? Who's that?"

"Aimee Avery."

I shake my head and shrug. "I haven't learned many names yet. What cla.s.s?"

"She didn't say."

"What does she look like?"

"She's gorgeous, but she thinks she looks like a Muppet. She has red hair."

I remember the gum-smacker in Swanson's biology cla.s.s. "I think I know who you're talking about."

"She's nice," Courtney adds. "Check out the cop car."

I watch as a tall officer pushes some guy over the hood of a truck and cuffs him. The guy fights it all the way. "I wonder what he did."

"Probably drunk," Aunt Lisa says. "More people have been getting drunk and disorderly lately. You hear about another fight almost every day. Must be the weather."

That night I wake up from a dream and sit up straight in bed. My eyes are open wide and staring in front of me but not seeing anything. It was a totem dream, a vision. Onawa, my totem cougar, was trying to tell me something. I lay back in the bed, my eyes still open. Reaching to the table beside the bed I find the leather thong of my medicine pouch and pull it to me, clutching it in both hands over my chest.

My heart continues to race.

Onawa was afraid. We were in a forest. I remember that. She stood on a rock so that her beautiful tawny head was level with my face. Behind her, though ... it was all black, like the forest was being swallowed in a black fog. Shapes moved in the darkness.

Onawa had been saying something. Something important. I clutch the medicine bag harder, thinking, trying to remember.

I was distracted. There was somebody else in the dream. A girl? Yes, it was a girl. She was holding a torch, or some kind of red light. Or maybe she had red hair? Maybe. But there'd been something about light, too. She brought light. Onawa, though, told me something, and now I can't remember what it was.

Then the mice start scratching under the floor again. Moonlight filters in through the thin curtain over my window. I feel sure there wasn't that much light in the room a few minutes ago. It was pitch-black when I woke up. It was dark when the mice were scratching. Clouds? Maybe.

I must have fallen asleep, because my alarm clock starts beeping way too early, jarring me back into consciousness. I turn it off and roll out of bed. The bare wood is cold under my feet. This is crazy. It's never this cold in Oklahoma this early in the school year. I slip the leather string of my medicine pouch around my head and let go of the bag. My left hand cramps from holding it so tightly for ... what? Four hours? Five? I flex my hand as I paw through a box of clothes with my right, choosing a black Metallica Kill 'Em All T-s.h.i.+rt for the day. It's a little wrinkled, but so what? I slip it on, hesitate, then pull the medicine pouch out to wear over the s.h.i.+rt. I yank out the rest of my uniform for the day: black jeans, black socks, and my Army-surplus combat boots.

I am not good at math. My transfer grade in algebra is a C minus, and it looks like it has nowhere to go but down as I sit in first hour staring at Mrs. Bailey while she scrawls numbers and letters across the chalkboard. She's a short woman, late thirties, and not ugly for someone her age, but what she's doing with those numbers and letters seems unholy. She tells us to work the problems on page 42, then goes to her desk.

Finally the bell rings and books snap closed, feet shuffle, backpacks are hefted, and the teenage Pavlovian dogs move to the next kennel. I move with them, trying to remember my way to biology cla.s.s.

"There he is."

I look over my shoulder and see three girls standing beside an open locker, all of them making sure they're not looking at me. I turn away and keep walking. The bell is ringing as I walk through the cla.s.sroom door.

There she is.

Red.

Courtney's friend. The pretty girl with red hair. The dream rushes back to me. We were falling, clutching at each other, with twisting darkness all around us. Onawa had been there, too. The girl looks up at me and I realize I've stopped walking and am staring at her. I get my feet moving again but can't stop staring. I see something in her eyes, something like recognition.

I take my seat, finally breaking the gaze we've been holding as I face the front of the room.

"Hey."

It's her. What's her real name? Angel? Agnes? Something with an A. I turn around and say, "Hi."

"How was your first day?" she asks.

"Pretty good."

"Yeah? You're Courtney's cousin."

It doesn't sound like a question, but I nod. "Yeah."

"She's my best friend."

"She told me. I forgot your name, though."

"Aimee," she says. "Aimee Avery."

"Right."

"People call me Aim, or-"

"Red," I say. "They call you Red."

She looks surprised. "Yeah. They do. Did Courtney tell you that?"

I'm not about to start telling some girl I've just met about my visions. Definitely not about Onawa. No matter how hot she is or how good she smells this close.

"Yeah, Courtney told me," I lie.

"Miss Avery, are you about finished entertaining our new student?" Mr. Swanson asks from the front of the room. I didn't even realize he'd come into the cla.s.s. I give Aimee a quick wink and turn around.

"Yes, sir, Mr. Swanson," Aimee says behind me. "He's all yours now. Please teach us."

Biology isn't much easier than algebra, but at least it's a little bit more interesting. Every time Aimee s.h.i.+fts in her desk behind me, though, I get a distracting whiff of her perfume. I can feel her foot tapping out some rhythm on the back leg of my desk. The bell rings and the ritual of shuffling toward the door begins again.

"See you later, Alan," Aimee says, pus.h.i.+ng past me at the front of the room and waving with her fingers. They look like one wing of a b.u.t.terfly flitting away. She's out of range before I think to say anything.

One thing is consistent: School lunches are school lunches, whether you're in Oklahoma or Maine. The hamburger tastes like flavored cardboard and the Tater Tots have no taste at all until I cover them with salt. I'm sitting alone, chewing the crud, when I'm suddenly surrounded by girls. Four of them put their trays on the table around me.

"Can we sit with you?" one of them asks. She's a blonde with big blue eyes and a tiny nose.

"You looked so lonely," a brunette in a cheerleader jacket says as she sits across from me.

"Yeah, I guess," I say. A cheerleader? Do I look like a guy who'd be interested in talking to a cheerleader? They all sit down and start firing questions at me.

"You're from Texas?"

"Oklahoma," I say.

"That's where the Dust Bowl happened, right?"

"Uh, yeah, like eighty years ago."

"Did you have a horse there?"

"No."

"I heard you played football."

"Uh-huh."

"We don't have football here," the cheerleader says.

"I heard," I say.

"Do you like Li'l Wayne, or do you just listen to that head-banging stuff ?"

"Just the head-banging stuff."

"Why? I so can't see the point in that."

"Well, Li'l Wayne, Little Boosey, and all those other Little guys cornered the market on synthesized pop," I say. A-ha! They can be quiet. Eight eyes stare at me, blink, blink, blink. Reboot. Then they start again like nothing happened.

"Did you live on a farm or ranch?"

"Is Oklahoma really just a big wheat field?"

"Alan? You're supposed to come sit with us, man. Remember?" I look up from the hamburger I'd been studying to see Blake, the counselor's aide, standing beside me. "Come on. Cross-country sits together."