The Year of Shadows Read online

  “The holidays can be a hard time of year for some people,” Counselor Davis was saying. “Did you know that?”

  I couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

  Counselor Davis seemed surprised. “You’re awfully cheerful today. How is everything at home?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s going okay.”

  And I meant it.

  This time, when I left his office, I didn’t smash my candy on the door.

  On the last day of school before break, the sky started spitting out pathetic little snowflakes while Henry and I walked to the Hall. The last holiday concert was that night, and we planned to binge on the leftover candy canes afterward.

  At the corner, right outside the Hall doors, Henry started clearing his throat a lot and then pulled out a wrapped package from his backpack.

  “Merry Christmas, Olivia,” he said, grinning as I unwrapped it. Oh, he was so proud of himself.

  And he should have been. I held the sketchpad in front of me for a long time, staring at its perfection. The clean, unused white pages; the crisp corners; the endless worlds just waiting for me to uncover them with my charcoals.

  “Henry, this must’ve cost you a lot,” I whispered.

  Henry rolled his eyes. “You’re supposed to say thank you.”

  “Thank you.” I swallowed hard, my throat hot and itchy.

  “You’re a real artist, and you’ve been drawing on napkins and newspapers for a long time now.”

  “Henry, I—” I kept swallowing. I thought I would choke. “I didn’t get you anything. I don’t have . . .”

  “It’s okay.” Henry cuffed me on the shoulder. “I didn’t expect anything.”

  That popped the whole moment right into smithereens. I shoved the sketchpad into my bag. “What, so I’m that poor and rude that you didn’t even bother thinking I could get you something? Is that it?”

  “No. I don’t know, it’s like . . . we’ve died together, Olivia.” Henry frowned in that serious way of his. “We’re way past needing to give presents and stuff. But I know you want to be an artist more than anything in the world, so I just had to do this.”

  Oh. “That’s really nice, Henry.”

  Would he ever stop grinning? “I know, isn’t it?”

  “Idiot.” I kicked him on the leg, but not nearly hard enough to hurt, and hugged my bag to me for the rest of the night. It held a new sketchpad inside it, like a precious egg.

  JANUARY

  ON NEW YEAR’S Eve, Henry stayed the night. We watched the ball drop with the Barskys, and then they walked us back to the Hall.

  “You’ve done a nice job back here, Olivia,” said Mrs. Barsky, a cluster of ghosts trailing after her with these dopey looks on their faces. Ghosts were always following Mrs. Barsky these days. They were like her fan club or something. “It really feels like a home.”

  I stepped back and tried to look at the backstage rooms like I was seeing them for the first time. Then I tried to remember what they’d looked like the first day we arrived. I guess there was a big difference. I’d strung up paper birds across the kitchen ceiling and tacked up my drawings on the walls. For Christmas, I’d bought myself this nice round orange rug from the charity store and put it under the kitchen table. A sign on my and Nonnie’s door said OLIVIA AND NONNIE, AKA, THE COOLEST, LIVE HERE.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it’s all right.”

  “Is your father around?” Mr. Barsky said.

  I shrugged. “Who knows?”

  The Barskys exchanged these looks that made me shrink inside my clothes. I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me. I just wanted to return to the nice night we’d been having. My belly was bulging with cookies. Henry was wearing a pointy foil hat.

  After I finally convinced the Barskys to leave, I helped set up a pallet for Henry on the floor of my room.

  “Henry is sleeping here?” Nonnie sat on the edge of her cot, her knees up to her chest like a kid. She was practically drowning in her nightgown. “Is una festa? Party?”

  “Sure, Nonnie.”

  Nonnie waved her hand at Henry. “Come here, boy.”

  Henry stood there like a champ while Nonnie turned him around and around, inspecting him.

  “You are gentleman?” she asked.

  Henry’s eyebrows went up. “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “I mean, yeah. Yeah, I am.”

  “You’ll sleep by door? Watch for shades?” Nonnie looked past him to smile at me. “Olivia tells me about shades.”

  Tillie buried her head in my shoulder and giggled.

  “Yes, ma’am, I will.”

  “You like scarves?”

  Henry paused. Then he took off his hat, found a yellow scarf from the pile on Nonnie’s bed, and tied it around his head like a pirate. “I love them.”

  Nonnie clapped him on the arm. “He can stay.”

  Once Nonnie had fallen asleep, and the Maestro had stumbled into his bedroom from some party uptown and started up his music, Henry and I gathered onstage with our ghosts and a few of the others. We needed the backup.

  It was time to share with Tillie and Jax.

  We had planned on sharing with Mr. Worthington first, because he was looking darker every day. But he wouldn’t let us. He kept pointing at Tillie and Jax and shaking his head, grunting like a caveman. So Tillie and Jax it was.

  “Mrs. Barsky wouldn’t like this,” Henry whispered as we set up. “She’d want to do it herself.”

  “Yeah, but these aren’t her ghosts,” I said. “They’re ours. Someone else helping them move on would be wrong. Besides, don’t you want to see their memories for yourself?”

  “Isn’t that kind of selfish?”

  “Look, do you want to do it or not?”

  Henry sighed. “Just hurry before I change my mind.”

  Like the previous five times, Henry and I held each other’s hands and braced ourselves for the cold and darkness of sharing, for the stifled feeling of not being able to breathe.

  It had been a while. He had to be as nervous as I was.

  “It will be okay,” Jax said. But he kept looking around the darkened Hall. Other ghosts stood guard for us, hovering around us in a circle. They were twitchy, flinching at every noise. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know we were all thinking the same thing:

  The shades had been awfully quiet since Mrs. Barsky had opened up The Ghost Room. They stayed far away from us, lurking in the corners, watching. It was like they had given up or something.

  Only they didn’t seem like the kind of creatures who gave up easily.

  I set my jaw. “Just do it, guys. And hurry.”

  Tillie and Jax rushed into us, pouring through our skin, into our ears, under our fingernails. Everything in the universe was clamping down on me, trying to split me apart into pieces. When I breathed, it hurt, so I stopped breathing and thought I would pass out.

  But then I found Henry’s hand and squeezed. His hand squeezed back. It said, I’m here, Olivia.

  When I opened my eyes, I was still me, Olivia, but I was also Jax. When I held my hands out in front of me, I saw a boy’s hands, crisscrossed with scrapes and dirt. Across from me was a girl with wild braids and beautiful honey-colored skin. White dust, bandages, and strange markings—maybe burns?—covered her from head to toe.

  Tillie? I whispered. Or . . . Henry?

  The girl nodded. “Both of us are here,” said Tillie’s voice, but I knew it was really Henry speaking with Tillie’s voice, because Tillie sounded gentler than she usually did. That thought startled me: Was Henry gentle? I tried to find him through the mask of Tillie’s face. It was nice, the thought of a boy like Henry being gentle. Baseball stars who sat at popular tables weren’t the kind of people you might first think of as gentle.

  You’re distracted, said Jax, from inside my head.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “What?” Henry-Tillie said.

  “I was talking to Jax.”

&
nbsp; Henry-Tillie frowned. “This is confusing. It’s like . . . okay, so Tillie is inside me, and Jax is inside you. And I’m kind of inside Tillie too. It’s all mixed-up. When you talk, Olivia, I know it’s you, even though it’s Jax’s voice.”

  “Same here, with you and Tillie. So . . . Tillie, can you see Jax? Er, me?”

  Henry-Tillie paused, listening to the voice inside him. “She says she can’t see anything. She says she’s stuck inside my brain, and that it’s gross and gray, just like she thought a brain would be. Thanks, Tillie.”

  That’s how it is for me, too, Jax said quietly. I thought maybe I would be able to see Tillie, in our memories like this. But it’s just like always. I can’t see her. I can’t hear her.

  I’m sorry, Jax, I thought to him. But I can see her. She’s right here, I promise you.

  Does she look okay? Where are we?

  “Tillie says this is stupid, because she can’t see anything,” said Henry-Tillie, putting his hands on his hips. “Also, when I put my hands on my hips just then, it was mostly Tillie moving them. That’s completely weird.” Henry-Tillie started waving his arms around and turning in circles like some crazy dance. “Okay, she’s making me do this, too. Stop it, Tillie.”

  “We’re . . .” I looked around as the memories surrounding us grew less fuzzy. “I don’t know how to answer you, Jax. We’re somewhere very gray.”

  Light gray flakes covered the world, as far as I could see. Some of them rained down from the sky like snow, but it wasn’t snow. When I touched one of those flakes, it crumbled in my hand like feathery dust. In the distance, ruined buildings jutted up into a black sky.

  I described this for Jax in my head. And I described where we stood—in a camp of some kind, with fences surrounding us, and shacks lined up in the center of the camp. Filthy people huddled by tiny campfires, or worked beside tables loaded down with supplies. Staircases stood attached to chunks of crumbling wall. Columns stood without a roof over them.

  I felt Jax beginning to understand, to remember. The war, he thought. There was a war.

  “What war?”

  And there was . . . I was making something.

  Overhead, a low, wailing sound roared out of the sky.

  Me-Jax and Henry-Tillie threw ourselves to the ground and covered our heads.

  “Jax, what are you doing?” I hissed, choking on a mouthful of dirt and ash.

  Quiet, Jax said. The planes! Oh, no. I could feel him curling up into a ball in my mind.

  When I peeked up, I saw others around the courtyard doing the same thing we were: crouching in the dirt. Then everything was quiet, and we waited—one minute, two—and then everyone got up and went back to their business, like nothing had happened.

  “I think you’d better explain what’s going on, Tillie,” Henry-Tillie said.

  “Here, Tillie, you explain to Henry, and Jax’ll explain to me,” I said.

  Well, walk around and act like you’re talking to each other or something, Jax suggested. Otherwise everyone’ll think it’s weird if you’re both just standing there in silence, staring at nothing.

  He had a point. “Come on,” I said, grabbing Henry-Tillie by the arm. “Can you feel that, Jax? I just grabbed Tillie’s arm.”

  No, Jax said mournfully. I remember what it felt like, though, to grab her arm. Like everything would be okay, and no one could hurt me.

  “So, explain,” I said. I kept holding Henry-Tillie’s arm as we circled the courtyard.

  Basically, this is the end of the world, Jax began. Or at least, that’s what everyone said to us. I don’t actually know what happened after we . . . well, you know. After we died. But there was a war, and it was bad. There were these dangerous weapons that destroyed pretty much everything.

  “Is that why everything’s so gray here?”

  Yeah. The weapons created these clouds that blocked out the sun, and people kept getting sick and dying from the inside out, and it was winter all the time, but the war didn’t stop. Why didn’t they stop? I didn’t understand it.

  I felt sick to my stomach. I’d never seen war before. It was just one of those things that I pretended to read about (and that Henry actually did read about) in history class.

  “Jax?” I ran my fingers across the fence we stood beside. Something here was not right—besides the fact that I was inside a dead person’s memories. “Where exactly are we?”

  Jax frowned. It’s so hard to remember . . .

  “The future,” Henry-Tillie blurted. His eyes widened, like he couldn’t believe what he’d just said. “That’s what Tillie says. We’re in the future.”

  I had to hold onto the fence beside me to keep from falling down. “But how is that possible? You’re ghosts. If you died in the future, before me and Henry were even alive, how can you be ghosts with us now, in the present?”

  Jax shrugged. Time works differently for ghosts. Once you start heading toward Death, all the rules change. All we know is, we’re drawn to our anchors. Somewhere, in your present, are our anchors.

  “But you’re older ghosts than Frederick was,” I said. “Even though you died way after he did. How can you be older than him, then? Shouldn’t you be the youngest of all?”

  “Tillie says,” Henry said after a second, “that they are older than Frederick, because they’ve been ghosts for longer, even though they died later, when you look at it in normal time. But in ghost time, it’s just about how long it takes you to become a ghost. So, Tillie and Jax died in the future, but they’ve been ghosts for longer than Frederick, even though he died in the past, because it took him longer to become a ghost after he died than it did for them.” Henry paused. “Does that make sense?”

  “Not really,” I said. In fact, my head hurt. “But enough for us to get this over with. How do we find your anchors?”

  Jax shivered inside me. There was a hiding spot. I remember that. There was a hiding spot where the organ used to be.

  “You mean the pipe organ?” I shook my head as if by doing that I could clear out my confusion. “This used to be the Hall, didn’t it? That’s why you can’t leave the Hall in my time. Because this is where you died—in this camp, which is where the Hall used to be.”

  “Tillie says she doesn’t remember the whole Hall being here when they were alive,” Henry-Tillie said. “It was just this camp that some people set up for survivors. And some of the Hall is old walls.”

  There was a hiding spot, and a tree, Jax whispered. Please, Olivia. Can we go find it?

  “Sure. Jax is saying something about a hiding spot . . .”

  “Tillie is too, and she says they each had their own spot, separately.”

  “Well. That’s a place to start, I guess.”

  It was over here. I could feel Jax’s memories pulling me, like invisible strings. This way, Olivia.

  But Henry-Tillie was walking the other way, and it gave me a bad feeling in my stomach. I didn’t want to leave him.

  “Henry?” My voice, Jax’s voice, sounded so small.

  “It’s all right,” Henry-Tillie said, smiling at me. “We’ll meet back here in ten minutes, okay?”

  Then he turned and walked away. I watched Tillie’s braids swing until they disappeared at the other side of the camp.

  We found Jax’s hiding spot in a ditch strewn with pipes and sludge. Shiny aluminum foil wrappers littered the ground. A deflated basketball, black with grime, sat against a gigantic old tree with bark scraped off its trunk.

  “It doesn’t seem safe to be crawling around in this junk,” I said.

  Well, just be careful, then. Jax sighed. I love this spot. I liked to come here and think, or when Tillie was on duty.

  “On duty?”

  We all had duty shifts. Just patrolling the fences with the grownups, you know. It was good to have lots of people watching the borders for raiders.

  I wasn’t even going to ask him what that meant. I didn’t want to think about raiders and fence patrols; I just wanted to go home. This place wa
s giving me the creeps.

  Stumbling over a rusty pipe, I sliced my hand.

  “Ouch!”

  Oh! Jax started spinning around in happy circles. My treasure chest!

  I sucked on my finger. Jax’s memory-blood had no taste. “Your what?”

  Open that box, that metal one with the jagged edge.

  As carefully as possible, I tugged on the handle of a metal box shoved beneath a drainpipe—a drainpipe that looked strangely familiar. Maybe a pipe that had once been in the Hall’s basement or our crummy bathroom.

  “This is too weird.”

  Open it up! What’s inside?

  “You don’t remember?”

  I remember there were rocks.

  “Seriously, rocks?”

  The weapons did neat things to some of the stuff in the ground. The rocks would glow purple and green sometimes.

  “You pick weird things for toys.” I pried open the lid of the box, using the ends of Jax’s shirt sleeves to protect my fingers. When the lid snapped open, I did see a bundle of rocks. A plastic sherriff’s badge. A whistle, the boxcar from a model train, a few bars of something wrapped in foil.

  Some scraps of . . . tree bark? And braided twine.

  That’s it. Jax was practically beating on the sides of my skull in his excitement. Olivia, that’s it!

  “You know, it’s pretty hard to keep my balance with you shoving yourself around in my brain like that.”

  Sorry, but Olivia, this has to be it. I feel it in my . . . well, I’d feel it in my bones if I had bones. I was making this for Tillie—this has to be my anchor!

  I gathered up the braided twine and the tree bark. Someone had peeled away pieces of the bark into thin strips. “You were making her a bracelet?”

  We were each working on one. Friendship bracelets, you know? Oh, I remember now! Olivia, this is wonderful. I remember everything. I remember so much.

  I tried to hug him through my brain, which was a very wobbly sensation. “Keep going.”

  We wanted to make bracelets for each other so that if I was on duty and I got scared, I could hold the bracelet or rub it, like for good luck, and it’d be like Tillie was right there with me. And she was going to make one for me, and we were going to switch them, so it’d be like we had pieces of each other all the time, no matter what.