Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (33 page)

He stirs the fire again, ducking behind his hair. “Did you call Eric?”

“I texted him, and Kayla too.” I didn’t tell either of them
anything except that I’m safe and I’ll be at the carnival tomorrow.

“Your parents are going to be worried.”

“My parents are asleep.” I can deal with my parents tomorrow. “They want to send me to religious counseling.”

He turns from the fire to look at me. “So you’re running away?”

“You make it sound so childish.” I pull the Hanged Man out of my pocket and study the guy’s face, his red leggings, the one leg bent behind the other at a strange angle. “I had to do something.” I keep my eyes on the card in my lap. “I told them everything. About not believing, and about the blog. I’m Divinia Starr, Darin. I’m the reason for all this stupid stuff happening.”

“You could have told me.” He looks back at the stove, into the fire, and then he slowly pushes the door on the firebox shut and clamps the metal handle down. “Well, that does make things messier.” He stands up, and I’ve never really thought of him as being tall or anything, but it’s like he’s towering over me.

And I feel small, and mean, and hateful. So I start to babble.

“I’m scared, okay? I made a big mistake, and Annika is turning everyone against me, and Blake and Ronnie or whoever is vandalizing my brother’s sculpture, and my parents took my cards away, but I sort of picked one card to tell me what was going to happen at the Winter Carnival, and this is it. The Hanged Man.” I push it toward him.

He shakes his head, doesn’t take the card. “What does it mean?”

“I … I mean, it’s a
hanged man
.” I didn’t look it up. Couldn’t look it up, actually, since by the time I saw it, my dad had confiscated everything. But look at it. What could be good about it?

Darin starts pacing, from window to door and back, and he looks so pissed. Does he hate me now? What happened to the freedom to not believe in anything? I scrunch my feet up on the bunk, still cocooned in the sleeping bag, and I pat the mattress beside me. “Hey,” I say. “Sit. You’re making me nervous.”

I’m making
myself
nervous. What if all of this is my own twisted attempt to be like Cassandra of Troy, singled out by the gods with a stupid curse, a tragic superpower that makes me more interesting?

He sits, but he looks disappointed in me. “You should have told the school right away.” He shakes his head and lets out a long sigh. “Damn, Cass. You should have moderated those comments.”

“I know that, okay? So … I’ve been living with that knowledge spinning inside me since it happened, and I’ve been trying ever since to figure out how to make it better, how to fix this awful mess.” I hug my knees to my chest. “I couldn’t tell Clark at school today because I knew she’d tell my parents, and it couldn’t come like that, from the school. I needed to tell them myself.”

“And it didn’t go well.” Darin leans against me, just a little, but it’s enough that I know he doesn’t completely hate me.

“I’ve never seen my mom look the way she did. My parents truly believe my soul is in terrible danger from this sorcery, or witchcraft.” I flick my fingernails against the tarot card, sending it spinning across the little room. “They’ve already been hurt more than any parents should be hurt, and I’ve always done whatever I could to keep from adding to their burdens. But now they probably think their two oldest children are lost. That our souls won’t be in heaven with them.”

Darin takes my hand. “Your little brother,” he says. “My mom told me.”

“Caleb.” I almost never say his name. “Yeah, he’s a part of this.” I can’t bear the thought of seeing my parents hurting the way they did when my brother died, ever again. I think it would have been awful and tragic no matter how he’d died, but the fact that it was so unexpected and inexplicable—
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—made it so much worse for my mom, who’d researched everything and followed every guideline to the letter.

“His death … it was like it cemented my parents’ belief in God’s mysterious ways,” I say. Caleb was perfect. A tiny, nearly translucent vision of perfection. Those skinny purple legs jerking this way and that on either side of the giant puffy diaper. The tiny hand, a miniature red fist stuffed into his perfect, slurping mouth. I couldn’t believe God would want to take him from us, but I can appreciate the comfort that the church offered to my family. “We wouldn’t even be part of Joyful News if it weren’t for what happened with Caleb. They were so kind, so
embracing
.”

Darin produces a small sketchbook and one of his trademark black pens from a shelf above our heads. He pulls his feet up onto the bunk and sits with his back against me, drawing. I feel the weight of him, solid and warm against me—a sign that he, at least, can forgive me for my stupidity.

“It was the first time in my life, I think, that I looked at my family and saw that they were different from me,” I say. “Their reactions, their beliefs. What they needed to feel strong.” I yawn. The little studio is cozy and warm now that Darin built up the fire, and I’m feeling sleepy and heavy. “What’re you drawing, anyway?” I let his weight tip me over, curled on my side in the bag, my heart jittery against my ribs. I’m here, in this moment, in this
bed
, with this boy. What if he were to lie down here beside me, scrunch himself into this narrow space? What if he put his arms around me? What if …

It hurts, to be happy. Right now, how can I be feeling this? I force myself to think about Drew, about her stricken face in the hall the last time I saw her—I make myself imagine her opening a bottle of pills with shaking hands. Lying in a hospital bed.

Darin laughs. “No big deal, I’m just drawing you in your underwear,” he says.

“
Whaaaaat?”
I sit up fast and make a grab for the sketchbook, but he holds it out of my reach, and I’m all tangled up in the sleeping bag. I shove him, and we grapple for a moment, both of us laughing. “Let. Me. See!”

He holds his hand up, grins, and shakes his hair out of his eyes. “Relax, Cass, I’m messing with you.” The book has fallen closed in his hand, so he flips it open and holds it out to me, a shy smile on his face. “All comic book heroes wear their underwear on the outside,” he says. He chews on the side of his bottom lip and watches my face. I look down at the page.

“It’s me!” It’s his spiky-haired version of me, except I’m wearing a cape, and … yeah, it pretty much looks like I’m wearing my underwear. I blush.

“It’s us,” says Darin, “saving the day.” The two heroes are flying, hand-in-hand, over a field of snow sculptures, ready to swoop down at the first sign of danger.

He takes my hand in real life, gives it a squeeze. “I’m glad you’re different, Cass.” His voice is soft. “Your family is stronger than you think.” Gently, he pushes me back down onto the bunk and leans over me, his lips brushing my forehead. “You can have this sketchbook,” he says, setting it beside my head. “My studio is always a good place for inspiration.”

I roll my eyes. “Are you talking about the English poem again?” Tomorrow’s the deadline, but it’s not like it matters now.

He smiles, stepping into his boots. “I would never,” he says. “Get some sleep, and I’ll be in to wake you up for the carnival.” He turns off the lamp and leaves me to the dim glow and the quiet crackling of the fire in the stove.

I roll toward the wall, hoping my mother is sleeping now, hoping she’s oblivious to my disappearance. Hoping I can make amends in the morning.

54. What are you
waiting for …

When I wake up, it’s not quite light, and the world is fuzzy and all one color. Darin is tapping softly on the door. “Hey, good morning,” he says when I hop over in the sleeping bag to let him in. “My sister wants to talk to you.”

I grab my backpack and pull on my coat and boots, shivering, and follow him to the house. The snow squeaks under my feet—a sign of the deepest cold—and Darin turns and smiles as we get to the door. “Did you stay warm enough?”

I nod, but I’m afraid to speak. What if I have morning breath? We step inside, into a high-ceilinged hallway paved with tile. “Be right back,” I whisper, and I scurry into the bathroom to clean up. I’m queasy, running on very little sleep.

When I wander out to the kitchen, Darin is perched on a tall chair at the granite breakfast bar, and a curvy girl with long, dark hair stands beside him on one bare foot, cradling her other foot in front of her like a tiny, pink baby. She wears pale blue silk pajamas, and when she turns to smile at me (still on one leg), her eyes are identical to her brother’s—a calm, steady gray. “I’m Claire,” she says, then tucks her foot against her standing leg, yoga-style. “You look like you could use some coffee.”

Kicking her foot out, she twirls her way over to the coffee pot, filling a brown ceramic mug. She hands it to me, black, not asking if I take cream or sugar. I don’t.

“Tell Cassandra what you told me,” says Darin, and I watch as Claire sets her coffee on the granite countertop and performs a flawless backbend in the middle of the kitchen, her dark hair falling to the floor. One by one, her legs spring up into the air, the legs of her pajama pants bagging up around her knees, and she stands on her hands for a moment before twisting down and returning her feet to the floor.

“Are you a gymnast or something?” I’m still holding my coffee cup halfway to my mouth.

She smiles, tossing her hair. “Nah, my boobs are too big.” She sticks her chest out proudly to show me. “I want to run away with the circus, but my parents are making me do community college first.”

Darin throws a wadded-up paper napkin at his sister. “The freak show, maybe,” he says. “Tell her about the Hanged Man.”

Claire wrinkles her nose. “I’m sorry to hear about that girl who got bullied on your blog. I heard what happened to her. Mean people suck.” She reaches up and rummages through the cupboards above her head, pulling a box of cereal out. “Hungry?” She reaches in with one hand, pulls out a fistful of cereal, and offers the box to me.

“You know about the Hanged Man?” I take the cereal, but I’m not sure what to do with it. My mom would
kill
me if I reached into a box like that.

“I
love
that card.” Claire shoves the rest of the cereal from her hand into her mouth and holds up a finger while she chews. “It’s one of the few cards I can always remember, mainly because the meaning is so much better than what it looks like.”

“Really?” I stare at her, my hand snaking into the cereal box on its own. My stomach rumbles, and I toss a handful into my mouth and pass the box to Darin.

“Claire’s been talking up Divinia Starr since the beginning,” says Darin. “She’s way into things like that.” He slides a book over to me, already open to the page. The sight of the man hanging from the tree makes the cereal and coffee churn inside my stomach.

“It’s a card of change,” Claire says. “Life in suspension. Like this guy is hanging there, meditating. They talk about it being like a rebirth, like, you know, how babies turn upside down before they’re born?” She twirls.

“Life in suspension.” I look at the guy hanging there, except this time I try to imagine it as a good thing. Can he get down from the tree and move on? Be reborn? I stare at the picture, the tree, the man’s face. Is it serene, rather than stoic? “The leaves!” I notice that the tree is more than a gallows. It has green leaves sprouting out of it.

Darin passes the box of cereal back to me and I munch absent-mindedly, pulling out my card and holding it beside the black-and-white picture in the book.

“Oh, hey,” says Darin, reaching into his own backpack. “This is actually for you. I totally forgot, with all the craziness. It’s from Dawkins. He stopped me in the hall yesterday after lunch and told me to give this to you. He said to tell you that you’re too smart for this shit.”

My eyes widen. “He did not.” I look at the crumpled paper. It’s Mr. D’s email address, scrawled in his familiar green ink.

“Paraphrased,” says Darin with a shrug. He stuffs an extra hat and gloves into his pack. “But he did say, ‘Friday midnight, final offer.’”

“Damn him.” My fingers fiddle with the scrap of paper. “I could easily lose this address before midnight,” I say, but then I turn the paper over and catch more of his green script.
You’re making too much of this, Cassandra. Hang in there, and maybe try to look at the assignment from a different perspective.
The word “hang” is underlined twice.

“Did you know,” says Claire, “in the early days, this card was called the Traitor. Because that’s what they did with traitors, I guess. Hung them by one foot.”

“Traitors?” My face is hot. I skim the explanation in Claire’s book, which is much more in-depth than my guidebook with its little list of single-word meanings. With a book like this, Divinia Starr could … I shake my head. No. Divinia Starr is finished. I read how the Hanged Man card seems to have little to do with tragedy and everything to do with self-reflection, a change of perspective, a sacrifice, and … my eyes land on one word, written in all capital letters:
REPENTANCE
. I try to force a swallow beyond the giant lump in my throat.