one of them drowned,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“Was it Helen?”
I squeezed her shoulder, but she made no sign of feeling my presence this time.
“At first I thought it was someone I’d met, maybe, during the time I can’t remember.” Jenny handed the pages back to Billy. “But he was probably just something I dreamed.”
“A ghost tried to talk to you?” he asked. “How?”
“I could have imagined it,” she said. “I’ve had a really strange week.”
“Tell me about it,” Billy whispered. He returned the pages to his pocket and pulled out a small, thin book from his other back pocket and held it out to her. “And it’s about to get even stranger.”
It had a soft cover, plain black, no title.
“Is that a journal?” asked Jenny.
“Sketchbook.” He opened it to the first page, where there was a beautiful pencil depiction of what looked like a wooden ladder and a kind of carpenter’s table. I recognized it but apparently they did not.
“Did you draw this?” Jenny touched the paper tentatively.
“No. Someone living in my room did it with my pencils and left it under my bed.” Billy turned to the second page. Another drawing, this one of the tree under which James and I had shared a picnic. “It’s the tree from school, across from the cafeteria.”
Jenny nodded. He kept turning the pages, five in all, not in chronological order of when James and I had visited them, but laid out as if James had been recalling random moments from our handful of days together. The third was a phone booth (the one where James and I spoke—he was holding the receiver to his ear, but he was speaking to me, and I was inches from him though invisible to everyone else); the next a sketch of two empty chairs and a table in the school library (where we did Billy’s homework assignment together); and the last was a drawing of a face, not mine, and not Jenny’s, but somehow both.
“Is that her?” Jenny asked out loud. An elderly man with an armful of art books was passing their carrel and stopped as if Jenny had spoken to him. Billy motioned her to hush. But the man did not move away—instead he stood a few feet from them, reading book covers in the adjacent aisle.
Billy turned to the next page in the journal and snatched up one of the little pencils from the shelf where scratch paper is left in small trays. On the blank page he wrote: She would have looked like you, right?
Jenny slipped the pencil out of his fingers and under this line wrote: What should we do now?
Billy smiled, and instead of taking the pencil from her, he wrapped his hand around hers and moved her hand, just as I had done with James when I was Light. Jenny read the words they had written together: Field trip.
They boarded a city bus and sat together near the back where no one was close enough to overhear their conversation. I sat across the aisle trying not to think about riding this kind of bus with James’s arm around me—it made me miss him too much.
“What if we get caught?” Jenny asked.
“Caught at school during school hours?”
“But my mother tells me I’ve been pulled out,” she said. “I’m going to be homeschooled.”
Billy was distracted by some thought he didn’t share. “Yeah, Mitch is sticking me in night school if I get probation.”
“Because of me?” Jenny looked guilty. “Is that another in-joke? Does probation mean your brother grounded you?”
“No.” Billy shrugged it off. “It’s a long story you do not want to hear.”
I followed them a few paces behind as they were dropped off a block from the high school and as they made their way onto the campus through the rows of lockers during passing period. Billy found that his locker combination still worked, and there was a soft hooded jacket rumpled up at the bottom. Jenny put it on over her prim, acorn-button cardigan, and Billy carried her book bag over his shoulder.
No one paid them any attention and they remained inconspicuous, staying near the bicycle racks until the second bell rang and the paths between buildings were empty again.
“So.” Billy walked up to the tree in front of the cafeteria and looked around. “This is the tree he drew.” Jenny scanned the lawn and looked up into the branches. All I could think of was the glory of tasting fresh orange and the crunch of an apple,