When You Believe Page 11

  “What you’ve told me is confidential, Lydia,” he said. “I know Charlie Stains is the teacher who cleared out his room today. I know there was a meeting. If I do any story about this, it will be based on my own research, on court records and official statements and police reports.”

  “For some reason,” she said to the stars that seemed to throb and move above the lake, “I already knew that.”

  One beat passed. Another.

  “Would you mind taking my coat off this kid while I hold him?” Gently, he held Taylor out toward her. “That way I’ll have something to cushion his head.”

  “Yes, I will.” Lydia smiled a little, the first time she had smiled in three days, as she unwrapped the boy’s willowy limbs and folded Brad’s heavy green army jacket into a pillow.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The porch light hadn’t been left on for him, which wasn’t a good sign. Sam mounted the three brick steps to the Olins’ house that night and rang the doorbell anyway. As its hollow ding-dong echoed somewhere far inside, he heard a distant muffle of conversation, approaching footsteps.

  When the light came on, it was the first time he realized Shelby’s door had a peephole in it. He saw the convex glass darken, knew that the lens and light were being blocked by somebody’s eye.

  Sam fiddled with the wallet in his back pocket, which contained thirty-seven dollars in wrinkled, limp bills. He craned his neck at the porch ceiling, whistled a few bars of a song he couldn’t remember the name to. In one corner of the cedar siding, a perfect web vibrated as a spider moved in toward a tiny, trapped gnat.

  The eye must have left, because Sam saw empty light through the peephole again. Then, as quickly as he’d noticed it missing, the eye came back again. He couldn’t figure out what was going on. Why was Shelby acting so strange?

  Sam rocked backward onto the heels of his father’s Sunday shoes, examining the polished Bordeaux toes. They were the only pair he’d been able to find in the house appropriate for a formal dance. With both hands he lifted, in offering fashion, the clear plastic box with its chrysanthemum corsage and its curled ribbons. He shifted his weight from his right foot to his left. From his left foot to his right. And felt his underarm Sport Speed Stick begin to fail.

  Finally, the door cracked open. A yellow cat with a tattered ear shot out, weaving a question mark between his legs. Tom Olin’s square frame filled the space. “Hello, Sam.”

  Sam shifted his weight from his right back to his left again. He started to speak but nothing came out. He cleared his throat. “I’m here to pick up Shelby for the dance.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Olin said. “I thought she would have called you before now. I’m afraid she doesn’t want to go.”

  Sam, his shoulders slumping, just stood there, wondering what he was supposed to say. He gave what felt like a foolish smile and scooped the cat off the ground. The feline dangled over his forearm as if it had no backbone. “Come on, Butterball.” Shelby had named the cat after the turkey last Thanksgiving. “You aren’t supposed to be outside.”

  In a fit of wisdom, though, Sam held on to the animal and handed over the enormous flower instead. Mr. Olin took it cautiously, as if he thought it might give him hay fever.

  “Maybe you could give it to her. Maybe she would see it and change her mind.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen, son.”

  “I’d like to at least try.”

  A man would have to be dead to resist such a plea. Tom glanced from flower to boy, from boy to flower, and back again. Tom wasn’t dead. He stepped back to admit both boy and Butterball. “Here. Got to close this fast. Don’t want to let the crazy cat out again.”

  From the direction of the kitchen Sam heard a rush of faucet water. At the latching of the door, it turned off.

  “You did the right thing sending that boy away, Tom,” came a woman’s voice. “This is something that needs to be handled inside our family.”

  “Well, dear,” the man said, his voice pitched about three notes higher in warning, “while you’re circling the wagons, you’d better come say hello to Sam. He’s standing right here.”

  Tamara Olin appeared, drying her wrists on an apron, unable to cover her surprise. “Oh, hello, Sam. Where did you come from?”

  Sam’s red-and-black diagonal necktie, which he’d also pilfered from deep inside his dad’s closet, had begun to chafe. He yanked at the knot, playing it back and forth like the pendulum on the grandfather clock beside the stairs. His ribs ached. He’d loaded up with Vioxx again.

  “I come from Mizzura,” he said, teasing, trying to erase her awful expression, trying to bring back some hint of a smile to her face.

  A smile never came. “You’ve got to know this is hard, Sam. There are too many sad things happening around here.”

  “What’s hard?”

  “I just don’t think Shelby’s going to be able to go to the dance with you.”

  Shirt. Shoes. Belt. Trousers. The hardest thing Sam had done in six months was piece together an appropriate outfit for this thing. He hoped that nobody noticed his pants were black and that his jacket was navy blue. Underneath everything else, he was still wearing his favorite white athletic socks.

  “If you’d just let me talk to her,” Sam said. “I know she isn’t sick or anything. She was at the game. I saw her.”

  Shelby’s mom untied her apron strings in sharp little tugs. She laid it aside and her hands folded in on each other. “Some things are helpless. Some things, you just can’t change.”

  Mr. Olin didn’t invite Sam to join him when he settled in on the couch. Instead he sifted page by page through real-estate listings, which Sam read upside down. EXPANSIVE LIVING ROOM, JUST REMODELED, BROWNBRANCH VIEWS, SELF-CONTAINED RV PAD. “For Pete’s sake, let the kid off the hook, Tamara. We are in control of this thing. We know the legal steps we need to take. We will make happen what needs to happen. Nothing’s going to be helped by keeping her locked up in this house like a criminal.”

  “I just can’t send her out into the world right now, Tom.”

  “Look, I’m not telling you this isn’t a desperate situation. But I think you’re making it worse.”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “You’re the one she needs to remind her that she’s worth something, that she’s still the same.”

  “So help me, Tom, she’ll never be the same. She’s been ruined.”

  As if the woman’s words were meant as introduction instead of lament, Shelby’s figure, waiflike, appeared at the head of the stairs. “Sa-am?”

  “Shelb.” He raced to the middle of the room where she could see him.

  “I’m so sorry about all of this.”

  “About what?”

  “I-I can’t go.”

  “Of course you can go. I’m here to pick you up. It’s homecoming.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Give me one reason why.”

  “It’s better if you do this without me.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “You know how much fun you have when you hang out with everybody else. You’ll get to dance with all your friends.”

  “Why would I want to dance with anybody else, Shelb?”

  “You just should.”

  “You tell me why.”

  “I just. I’m not… maybe you need to find somebody who isn’t me, Sam.” She stood clutching the rail, staring down at her fingers. “There’s reasons I’m just not… a person you should be interested in anymore.”

  “Is it me?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  Seeing his number painted on her cheek had made him brave. “You tell me this one thing,” he pushed. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

  Tears glimmered in her eyes. She shook her head. Said quietly, “No.”

  “Well, then—”

  She stood over him, leaning, looking as if she wanted to hand him her whole soul with her eyes.

  “There isn’t anything yo
u can do to make me feel anything different about you than I already feel.”

  “You don’t know that, Sam. We’re just kids.”

  Shelby’s mother flicked a rag over the surfaces of things on the shelves. The woman’s shoulders lifted and fell as if she were grieving for some dying friend. “I just don’t think we need to face anybody with this yet.”

  “Mama—”

  The dust rag wafted over a row of books, all sizes and shapes of them, some leather-bound, some trade paperback, some gold-leaved. “You know I invited Grandpa to have dinner with us tonight. I thought having a family-time together might help. It’s your favorite, Sauce Pot Meatballs.” She began to arrange the books one by one on the shelf. She made certain each spine stood flush with the one to its right and to its left. The volumes aligned perfectly, like soldiers, their dustcovers smooth and straight.

  “Shelb—” Sam tried.

  But at last her stepfather slapped down his real-estate Multiple Listing book and leapt up from the couch. “She can’t hide away forever, Tammy. If you ask me, this young lady is very brave and smart, doing everything she’s done. I’d like to see you give her some credit for that.”

  Tamara stopped working and stared at him. She stood gripping one hand with the other as if she had to struggle not to cry.

  Shelby leaned farther over the railing as the cat loped up the carpeted stairs on weightless paws.

  And Tom propped up the cushions on the couch, obviously something his wife had spoken to him about in the past. The sofa looked like he hadn’t been sitting there at all.

  “Pumpkin, I have to say I agree with Sam. You ought to go have a good time and forget about everything else for a little while.”

  “Thomas. She’s my daughter, not yours. How can you usurp me like this?”

  But Tom winked at Sam. Tom lifted his palms in acceptance toward Shelby. “I saw you carrying in that pretty dress from the mall in Springfield last week. It would be a shame not to get the chance to wear it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rolls of black paper plastered the doors at the school to block out the fluorescent lights. As dance-goers entered the gym through a confusing maze of room dividers and disco balls, strobe lights made it look like they were walking in jerks, illuminating them as if they were clicking through the frames of a disjointed black-and-white movie.

  A makeshift stage had been set up at one end of the gym and on that platform a small-town disc jockey reigned, gigantic speakers and amplifiers heaped around him like moving boxes, giggling girls shouting requests and, like groupies, hanging on to his every word. Lightning-bolt letters sizzled along one side of an amp. VOLTSTAR PRODUCTIONS, they announced. BOOK VOLTSTAR FOR YOUR ST. CLAIR COUNTY WEDDINGS, BAR MITZVAHS AND BARBECUES.

  “Hey, Sam. Buddy.” A variety of high fives all around. “About time you showed up.”

  “Hey, Shelb. That’s a nice dress.”

  “Thanks. Hi, Will. Hey, Tommy.”

  Friends crowded up around them and Sam had the claustrophobic feeling, all of a sudden, of being encroached upon by a wolf pack. “So, what took you guys so long to get here?”

  “Yeah, where you been?”

  Sam’s eyes met Shelby’s. “We took our time, that’s all.”

  “People are starting to wonder what Shelby looks like. She missed all the royalty introductions again.”

  “How come you’re being so quiet, Shelby?”

  Shelby, who’d been walking right beside Sam, grabbed the collar of his shirt hard enough for him to feel her short fingernails. “Let’s just dance, okay? Let’s don’t talk to anybody for a while.”

  “Okay.”

  Sam was torn between worrying about her and thinking how amazing she looked. She hadn’t put on any perfume, but she smelled like clean itself—earth and air, with just a hint of lemon that must have been her shampoo. When she stepped out in front of him, the sight of her white dress billowing from the small of her waist like a lily bloom, the way her hair swung long against her bare shoulders tonight (she almost always wore it up in a comb with sunglasses on top at school)—all of this made him slightly dizzy.

  They’d walked in to a slow dance with a strong beat. He held his arms out to her, expecting her to move into them. “Watch out,” Will bellowed. “Things are going to get hot in here now!”

  Tommy Ballard came down to the end of the chairs to watch. “You go, Leavitt. You go.”

  “You go,” Sam hollered back at them. “You go and dance with your own girls.”

  So much was going on that he was the only one who noticed it—how Shelby hesitated, queerly distant, as if suddenly she wasn’t certain whether she should touch him or not.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t want to hurt your ribs.”

  “I’ve been playing football, Shelby. I don’t think there’s any more damage you could do.”

  The music changed. One minute they were in the twenty-first century and the next, “The Hokey Pokey.” A yell went up in the crowd as everybody put their right arms in, out, shook them all about. Shelby jumped into the dance as if it were the most important musical performance she’d ever participated in. Sam narrowed his eyes in concern, began to go through the motions beside her.

  OF COURSE, none of the girls at the dance would go to the ladies’ room by themselves.

  As the night wore on and the females of Shadrach High School began to rove and disappear in larger and larger numbers, the young men had their usual speculations: somebody’s zipper had split. Somebody’s chignon had sprung loose and needed fourteen more bobby pins. Somebody needed to borrow a tube of mascara.

  Tommy Ballard was the one who noticed it first. Perhaps it was because Sam had told him he had to find his own girl to dance with. Perhaps it was because Tommy kept a large and rather outlandish hickory slingshot stuck in the rear pocket of his dress pants and whenever he saw an interesting prospect without an escort tagging along, he grabbed a handful of ice from the cafeteria ice machine and let it fly.

  “Man,” he whispered when he managed to grab his best friend’s elbow and drag him over. “Sam, something’s really bogus.”

  “What?”

  “There are no females around. They all took off.”

  “What do you mean, they all took off?”

  “Take a look at this room. Who do you see?”

  “A bunch of guys.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, the ladies have to be somewhere. Definitely a serious lack of potential candidates in this room. Furthermore,” Tommy pulled out his slingshot and scraped it across the edge of his sleeve, “I guess you haven’t noticed Shelby’s friends. Do you realize that not one of them has come to talk to her since the two of you walked in?”

  “Say, Tommy,” and Sam had in mind telling him something sarcastic like, Butt out, Ballard. This isn’t your life; it’s mine. But just as he opened his mouth to say it, he swallowed his words. When he thought about it, Tommy was right. And now, all those girls Tommy had been missing were purposefully marching right toward them through paper-covered double doors, through the strobe lights, across the dance floor lit by jewel flashes from the overhead disco balls.

  Whitney Allen raised her hands, her mouth smirking. That’s when Sam’s stomach pitched—when he saw her fake smile, her dark, intent eyes.

  “Hey, Whit.” He tried to head her off. “How you doing?”

  She ignored his question. This was a bad sign. She made a megaphone out of her fingers and called over the music, “Shelby, hi.”

  Shelby turned, gave an innocuous smile. “Hi.”

  “Wanted to come over and tell you something.” The words in a neutral tone, not humble, not haughty. For a moment, when she said this, Sam felt a sense of relief. “I thought you had a great soccer game last Friday.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nothing to worry about, he thought. Just soccer. Just things girls always talk about when they disappear with each other.


  In the small of his back, he could feel Tommy poking him hard with the two prongs of his slingshot. The jabbing sensation seemed far away. The strobe lights pulsed, savage and fast, connecting to a throbbing hurt behind his eyes.

  “I really wish I could play games the way you do.” Whitney’s head was down, her face suddenly hidden, and Sam’s sense of relief started to slip away.

  “You can. You’re a good player, Whitney.”

  “Are your parents going over to the Fremont game next week?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I—I mean, I think they will.”

  “Well, I don’t see why they’d come, because you’re not going to play. My dad says they’ll kick you off the team because of all the lies you’ve told.”

  Sam looked up. Shelby’s fingers bore down, her nails cutting into the back of his hand. His belly swarmed with alarm, as if he’d been caught in something he couldn’t understand, like a bewildered child who only knows that he’s in the middle of something bad.

  Shelby, leaning against his left arm, pushing him forward as if he were the only thing standing between her and a deadly fall. Her voice was calm, firm, unafraid. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ha. I think you do. The newspaper reporter who snuck into the pep assembly yesterday.”

  It seemed impossible that she had missed all of that, he thought. Impossible that she’d been somewhere else in the building and hadn’t seen the disturbance the Democrat Reflex had caused.

  Sam heard the little, sarcastic bite rising in Whitney’s voice, didn’t like it, couldn’t stop it. “We know he asked all those questions because of you. You’re the one who made all those accusations.”

  Shelby didn’t move. Sam could feel her breath when she inhaled and didn’t let it go. The blinking strobe lights, their cruel pulse somewhere deep behind his temples. And he couldn’t stop himself. He had to ask it.

  Because he needed to know, too.

  “Shelby, is that really true?”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know anything about the pep assembly. I wasn’t there.”