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“Stop!” I yell out. “Santangelo, stop!”
He comes to a screeching halt and we’re all thrown forward in our seats.
“What?” they’re all asking me at once.
“Are you okay?” Raffy asks.
I unlatch my seatbelt, get out of the car, and begin walking back down the road. I hear the slamming of three doors behind me and feel them following.
In front of us, on the side of the road, among weeds and ferns and rocks and tangled bushes, are a group of poppies. Surrounding them is a pebbled border, which seems to convey the message to keep clear. I’m staring at the flowers in amazement and then I look at Griggs.
“Do you guys jog along here?”
He shakes his head. “We go the other way.”
“What is it?” Raffy asks. “One of those roadside shrines or something?”
“Makes sense,” Santangelo says. “There was supposed to be the world’s worst accident here about twenty years ago.”
I turn to him. “Who died?”
He shrugs. “My dad would know, obviously. I think two families got wiped out. But they weren’t from here.”
Griggs is watching me carefully. “You okay?” he asks quietly.
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to tell them the story. It’s like it belongs to me…and Ha
“There’s this story,” I begin, “that they were planted by these kids who went to the Jellicoe School and one day they were destroyed by the Cadets while they were jogging. It was the first year the Cadets came. But the next day, one of the Cadets came back and he planted them again. With the kids, that is.”
“Where did you hear that?” Griggs asks.
“From Ha
“The one who looks after you?”
I don’t answer. There’s just something about this spot. I turn around and look at the other side of the road where Jude first saw Narnie, thinking she was an apparition. They’re not real, I keep on telling myself. Those people aren’t real.
Griggs, Santangelo, and Raffy are looking at me closely and I walk back to the car.
Griggs convinces Santangelo that he should drive, in case Santangelo’s dad sees us. “So where to?” he asks.
Santangelo turns around in the seat, looking at me. “I’ll show you the spot where they found something that belonged to the missing kid.”
“That’s morbid,” Raffy says.
“What missing kid?” Griggs asks.
Santangelo turns back around but I catch his eye in the rear-view mirror and he looks away. Once again I get a sense that he knows something more than I do about my own life. I can’t imagine what it is but I suspect as the son of a policeman, he comes across all sorts of information. Stuck out at the school in the middle of a territory war, I have never had access to any information from town. Then again, I’ve never searched for it, because Jellicoe never seemed like anything more than a weak link between my mother and Ha
But it was never enough. And I resent her more for it now than I ever have.
But Santangelo seems to know something and, more than anything, he seems willing to tell.
“Take us there,” I say quietly.
The spot is way on the other side of town. As we drive I follow the river, right through town and back out into the middle of nowhere again.
The place is almost as majestic as Ha
We sit, the four of us, watching the river, not saying much because it’s not as if we’re friends who have things in common to discuss. But strangely enough, it’s not awkward—just silent, apart from the typical nature soundtrack buzzing in the air. Once in a while some little flying insect stations itself right in front of my nose and then it’s off doing a crazy three-sixty turn before flying away in a manic direction.
“You’re not another one who’s obsessed with that serial killer, are you?” I ask Santangelo.
“No.”
“Then why mention a boy who disappeared almost twenty years ago?”
“How do you know it was almost twenty years ago?” Santangelo asks.
“You said.”
“No he didn’t,” Griggs says, looking suddenly interested.
“And I didn’t say it was a boy.”
“Was it?” Griggs asks him.
Santangelo nods.
“I’ve probably been told about it before,” I say. I didn’t want to tell them about Ha
He shrugs, but I keep my focus on him until he fidgets uncomfortably. “I saw a photo of him once,” he says quietly. “It left an impression.”
“Because he was our age?” Raffy asks.
Santangelo thinks for a moment, as if he needs to figure something out himself while trying to explain it to other people.
“Do you ever wonder how someone our age can possibly be dead? There’s just something really u
I watch his face as he tries to explain.
“If you saw the photo you’d understand. You’d want to say to the kid in it, “Why weren’t you strong enough to resist death? Didn’t that look in your eye stop anything bad from happening to you?”
“But you’re not talking about someone’s age; now you’re talking about their spirit,” Raffy says.
“Maybe I am. It’s like when I was in year eight and we had to study The Diary of A
I’m very disturbed to find out that the leader of the Townies has a soul and I’m begi
“At the end of the day it’s about heart beats and blood flow,” Griggs says flatly. “People’s spirits don’t keep them alive.”
Santangelo looks at me again. “The kid in the photo…his hair was kind of wavy, like a golden brown, and his eyes were that colour that’s not blue or green and he was smiling, so he had this kind of cut in his face. Not a real one. As if the smile made cuts in his cheek, but they weren’t dimples.”
Raffy and Griggs look at me. I stare out at the river.
“I saw you once,” Santangelo says, and I know he’s speaking to me. “It was about two years ago and you were sitting next to Raf. There was this performer at the Jellicoe fair. You know, one of those travelling Shakespeare slapstick comedies and you were laughing and you kind of—well, not to be insulting or anything because you don’t look like a boy anymore…the guys always say, ‘That Taylor Markham, she’s not too bad-looking,’ so I don’t want you to think that I think you look masculine because I swear to God you don’t, you look—”
“Get to the point,” Griggs interrupts.
“It was like I was looking at him,” Santangelo finishes. “The kid in the photo.”
“This all based on one photo,” Raffy says.
“You’ve got to see it to understand. Actually, there are two photos. The other is of the group.”
“What group?” I ask. My heart is beating fast and my mouth is getting that churning sweet feeling of nausea.
“About five of them. One’s a Cadet; I could tell by the uniform. My father had the file out on his desk once when I was in there. All I saw were the two photos and the cap, which was found out there,” he says, pointing to the river.