Chapter 18

Do you have any idea how fast gossip flies at a prep school? Especially one where cable reception is spotty and it rains a lot?

Fiona is gone – having been arrested in her dorm room – and the entire school is abuzz about Fiona’s Escapades the next day. Speculation about her punishment runs the gamut from a mild slap on the wrist to an out-and-out dismissal, although the ones who believe the latter are in the minority and apparently don’t realize the influence a political family has on local law enforcement.

And school administration.

Aunt Beatrix accosts me in the quad between breakfast and my first class of the day. So much has happened in the past twenty-four hours; I still haven’t told her about my trip to cemetery and meeting Trey and Abigail but she doesn’t give me a chance. After fooling me with a smile and handing me a covered travel mug of coffee, she pulls me roughly down onto a bench. My butt is instantly numbed by the cold wooden slats. “Callie, some of the teachers have been talking…”

About what, I wonder. The vandalism? The arrest? The jump from a two-story window? There’s so much to choose from.

“I explicitly told you not to pursue Bell Book and Candle.”

Oh, crap. “Um…”

“What were you thinking, defying me like that?” My aunt’s stern face looks especially severe this morning; I wonder if she actually stuck hairpins directly into her skin to hold her bun up.

“Ugh, god, Bea, I was thinking it was time to have a little fun. What else would I be thinking?”

Beatrix sips from her own to-go cup; for all the world, we look like two people, a teacher and her student, an aunt and her niece, enjoying a hot cuppa joe and a simple happy chat on a cold Fall morning.

But we know better.

Bea is pissed.

“What happened up there in O’Brien’s office?”

This jolts me to attention. “Excuse me?”

“You were the one being hazed, Callie. You were the one marched to the headmaster’s office last night.”

I fix my gaze on the contents of my cup as I try to reason my aunt’s knowledge of this. More teacher gossip? Or did it come from O’Brien? Or Fiona herself?

“Bea, I…”

“Is it true? Were you in that office?”

“Um…” I could lie. I could say no. I could insist her source is lying. But my brain won’t do it. Too many years of being honest with my aunt, of trusting her and wanting her trust, prevents my tongue from forming the word no.

“Yes.”

“And was Fiona there too?”

“Kind of.”

Bea watches me, reading my every blink and swallow. The years have piled up on her side too: she has been with me since I was a baby. She knows when I have a secret.

“What did you do,” she whispers fiercely.

“It was a mistake, Bea, honest! I didn’t mean to do it.”

She gapes at me in horror. “What…did…you…”

I grab onto my aunt’s arm. “Bea, please, just listen to me. I didn’t die! I know you said it was dangerous—”

“It is—”

“No, it’s not. I’ve already done it three times and nothing’s happened.”

If it were possible for Bea’s eyes to get wider, they do. “Three times!”

I glance furtively around the quad but first class has started already and no one is around, thank god. Still, it’s a bit disconcerting to be talking to my aunt about something as monumental as shifting in the middle of a prep school campus. Shouldn’t we be in a dusty, old-fashioned office like Mrs. Gibson’s?

“Bea, the first time it happened, it was a complete shock to me. I didn’t try to, you know, manifest anything. It just…I got the aura and then instead of a headache, well, I shifted.” I neglect to tell her it was her body I shifted into.

Just as I release my grip on Beatrix’s arm, she grabs onto mine, holding fast. “What happened last night?”

I can’t help but smile. It was kind of a cool thing, I have to admit, a definite advancement in my abilities. “There was no aura or anything. I just thought of Fiona and—”

“Fiona?” She finally puts two and two and two together. “Oh god, Callie. You were the one they arrested?”

I shake my head. “No, I was the one who went out the window. Fiona was the one they arrested.” Wow, that sounds especially bad.

“But only because they found you in the headmaster’s office.”

“You’re not getting it, Bea. It was Fiona’s fault to begin with so she should have been the one to get in trouble, not me.” It’s all so logical to me; I don’t understand why she’s having a problem with what I did. In the end, the bad person got arrested, not the good one. And yes, I am the good one.

Beatrix raises her hand with the cup to her forehead and a bit of coffee splashes out the top and onto her crisp lapel, a fat brown blotch that mars my aunt’s otherwise perfect outfit. “Calliope, people are going to be asking questions. This isn’t good for you or us.”

“No one’s gonna figure it out. How could they? The truth is pretty far out there.”

Beatrix holds my gaze. “The girls who hazed you know you were the one locked in the room. How can you explain Fiona being in there and you’ve vanished?”

I think a moment. “Um, she got herself locked in there instead? Come on, seriously? No one on this earth can figure it out. I had to do it, Bea! I had to!”

I feel a ball of anger begin to form in my chest, an energy not unlike the start of the shift – and that both frightens and excites me. “Fiona can say whatever the hell she wants about me and the damage to O’Brien’s office but she won’t get far. She did it and if she gets expelled from school—”

“She won’t. Not with the endowments her father gives every year.”

“See? No harm done to her.”

“You were very lucky.”

I shake my head. My aunt still doesn’t get it. “The shift was a good thing, Bea. It saved me. It may not have saved my mother but, well, I don’t know. Maybe the genes changed somehow when they were passed down to me. Maybe it had to do with who my father was. The genes mutated…they shifted,” I add with a nervous giggle.

My aunt’s eyes cloud over as she looks beyond me, far away from the quad. “Your mother used the shift too, Callie.”

“She did? Wait a minute.” I point a finger at her. “You said she never used it because she could have died. You told me I could have died.” Did Bea know this when she insisted I take those blue pills year after year?

“She was reckless. The shift made her reckless. She let it consume her and it drove her crazy.”

The way my aunt says this, she might as well be giving me an update on my grade in her poetry class. How can she remain so stoic and reserved when my world is suddenly aswirl like a tidal pool inside my head?

You lied! I think. You lied to me over and over again, but I don’t say this out loud. I’m stunned into speechlessness.

“Every time she shifted, she returned to me slightly different from when she left,” Bea says, her voice lilting and soft, as if she can see my mother as a teenager in front of her now. “It was like, a little bit of the person stayed with her, making her someone else, someone not Evie.”

My heart stops with these words.

“What do you mean? What kind of bits?”

“She would forget who she was sometimes, or who I was. She was different…disoriented. And occasionally, she could be violent and angry, depending on who she had shifted into.” A single deep line forms in the center of Bea’s forehead as she frowns. “I’m not explaining things very well.” She glances over at me, both apologetic and defiant, as if she knows she must say these things but she’s not happy about it.

I nod and gesture for her to continue.

“We knew it was affecting her so she tried to stop,” my aunt goes on. “She tried very hard to do what I did with you. The meditation, the pills, but she couldn’t, she didn’t have the patience. Each time she shifted, she wanted to do it again. She wanted more for herself. She didn’t want to be just Evangeline Bellflower from New Hampshire. She wanted what the shift could give her: excitement. New lives, new adventures.”

Adventures…

“Did it?” I hear my voice whisper.

Beatrix slowly shakes her head from side to side. I don’t know whether this is a negative response to my question or a way to re-focus her thoughts. She takes my hand between hers and rubs my fingers with her palms, still warm from her cup of coffee. “Callie, I had to put Evie in a hospital before you were born.”

“Hospital…was there a problem with me?”

“Not that kind of hospital.”

“Oh.”

“It was a facility in , very rural, very…bucolic,” she says with a hint of a smile. It was probably just the place she would have loved, not my mother who was more interested in seeking good times.

“Did it help her?”

“It might have. It could have. But she left.” Beatrix rolls her eyes as if my mother was an errant student, one who could have gone on to great success if only she had put her nose to the grindstone – and maybe that’s exactly who she was.

“About a week after you were born, she disappeared. And you know the rest.”

“How does someone leave a mental hospital?” I ask. My voice sounds demanding although I do realize Bea can’t possibly know the answer. “How does that happen? Does the person just walk out the front door? Ta-ta, going to Starbucks for a latte, be back soon…?”

My aunt shrugs. “Kind of. When you have the ability Evie does…”

I do.

“I’m sorry I never told you the whole truth,” she says. “But I never thought I’d have to.”

I always knew my mother was alive somewhere. I knew she had left me when I was a baby. I had always assumed she didn’t want to be a mother at seventeen. I didn’t realize she was…

I can’t say that “c” word. Not even to myself.

“You should have,” I tell my aunt. “You should never have kept anything from me. I had a right to know the truth.”

Beatrix pats my knee through my Darby Prep uniform, as if I were a dog, a pet, her child. I am not.

“Well, it’s all water under the bridge,” she says. “Now you know and I trust that you won’t do anything that isn’t smart…”

She goes on and on about how we’re on the same page now, we’re in sync, or the Backstreet Boys or whatever she’s saying and I’m nodding and smiling on the outside because I want her to trust me, I want her to believe I am with her, the Dynamic Duo, but inside all I can think about is how much she lied to me. All I want to know is what really happened.

Where is Evie?

Is she still insane?

Will that happen to me?

“…and if you do and I find out, I will have you committed, just as I did your mother,” Beatrix finishes with a cherub-like smile.

What?

My aunt holds my gaze, even as the quad begins to fill with students changing classes. My eyes capture one boy leaping over a bench, another girl’s jacket flapping behind her as she runs. A small co-ed group huddles outside the library, guys jostling each other, girls trading lip gloss. Normal activities, normal kids.

“Callie, we understand each other, yes?”

I am not normal. I will never be normal.

I nod again, numb and silent.

For so very many reasons.