Sugar Castle, Chapter 3
Colin had died again. Jory had been eaten by one of the ghouls and Kimi was still imprisoned in the mausoleum. He imagined her to be in a small room with no windows, and maybe a coffin, like pictures he’d seen of the inside of a pyramid in Egypt, part of last year’s geography section. He thought Kimi was probably something like his friend Madison, who was pretty tough. A tough cookie, which was something his grandmother used to say. Usually about herself. You can’t keep a tough cookie down, she’d say. When he was little, this had bothered him because cookies weren’t tough, or weren’t supposed to be. Chewy was OK, or crispy. But tough was like meat that you had to keep in your mouth for a long time until it was tasteless and maybe you could spit it out if no one was looking.
Colin’s eyes were dry and burning. He took his glasses off and rubbed over his closed eyelids, trying to make the scratchy feeling go away. Then, remembering something Gindy had taught him, he made himself yawn very wide, once, and then again, which made his eyes wet. Gindy could make herself cry this way, she had told him, but according to her, she didn’t do it anymore now that she was a teenager.
Sophie was gone, he noticed. He listened to the house. He could hear his mother saying something, probably on the phone. He wondered if he could get Gindy’s attention without his mother noticing, because he wanted a drink. He could get it himself but he didn’t feel like it. He listened for sounds from Gindy’s room. From here, he could see the edge of her door at the top of the stairs. It was open, and that probably meant she wasn’t there, because when she was in her room she always wanted to have privacy.
Once, long ago, they had all slept in the same room. He remembered this, a little. He remembered that he and Sophie slept in bunk beds, her on top and him on the bottom. Gindy had her own bed across from them. That was when they lived in town. He didn’t remember the rest of the house. His bunk bed had a bar along the side so that he wouldn’t fall out. Were you more likely to fall out of things when you were little than when you got older? It didn’t really make sense to him. Maybe it had something to with having CP that he didn’t know about or had forgotten.
Holding on to the back of the chair, he reached down to the floor and got hold of one of his sticks and then the other, fitting his wrists through the loops. He levered himself up, leaving Jory frozen on the screen, lying on the mausoleum floor, his eyes Xed out. Why did Xes mean you were dead? Colin swung himself along, avoiding the stuff on the floor, Sophie’s homework books and her backpack, some Legos and a couple of Spidermans. He got a Capri Sun from the bottom shelf on the refrigerator door and, leaning against the cabinet for balance, stuck the straw in. Then, holding onto it with his teeth, he went into the frontroom to look for something to do. A new game or a book. As he passed the front door, he noticed it was open, and then, looking out, saw Sophie and Gindy going off down the road, which made him instantly mad. They were leaving him behind again. He’d have to find a way to get back at them for that.
Sophie and Gindy hurried down the road by the creek. When they turned onto 56 they’d be out of sight from their mother’s office window. “Come on, hurry up, Gindy,” Sophie said.
Gindy made a huffing noise. “Why can’t you call me Virginia? Or at least Ginny.”
“Why should I stop calling you what I’ve been calling you since I was zero years old?”
“Because it would make me happy?”
Sophie said in her head, why do I want to make you happy, but not out loud, since she didn’t want Gindy to go back and leave her. Even though she was sure she could get into the school, she didn’t want to do it alone. If Gindy were there, the blame could be split, if they were caught. Also, although she’d never admit it, she missed doing things with her stupid sister.
On 56 they scurried across so as to be on the left side of the road. A pick-up went by, the man in it hollering something at them that was whipped away by the wind of his passing. Gindy pushed her hair out of her eyes and straightened her sweater, which annoyed Sophie. “What do you care about what someone in a beat up truck thinks about how you look?”
“I don’t,” Gindy said. “But there’s nothing wrong with wanting to look nice.”
They were almost to the corner, by Etta’s Store, where they used to buy milk when they ran out in between trips to town. “It’s superficial.” Which was what their grandmother used to say about things she disapproved of. “Besides, you look fine,” Sophie said, remembering that she wanted to keep Gindy sweet while they were on their mission.
“Much you’d know about it.” Gindy gestured to the raincoat, which besides being too big had some ancient stains down one side. “Why are you wearing that anyway? Where did you get it from?”
“It was in the closet. In the back.”
They both contemplated the fact of the raincoat for a minute as they trudged up the road, avoiding the ditch where last night’s rain was running merrily down toward the creek. All of their father’s other clothes had disappeared a few months back. Their mother and their aunt had done it while they were at school, back when they still went, which had made Sophie cry . She had screamed at their mother, and the worst thing was that her mother didn’t yell at her or tell her to go to her room. She had just turned around and gone into the kitchen to start dinner.
“You should put it away,” Gindy said at last.
Ahead was the very small town that the school was in. It was hardly a town at all, more of a place on the road where the speed limit slowed down to 40. There were a handful of houses, a post office, a rickety building that used to be a general store and now sold antiques, and their school, Uniontown School. The school was the newest building by several-a-many decades, as their grandmother used to say. She had gone to a school on almost the same spot, a little wooden building smaller than their house, according to her.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Gindy said. “What are you going to tell mom when your art project suddenly shows up?
Sophie didn’t bother to answer, because she didn’t know. They were walking across the parking lot, and suddenly, Sophie felt exposed. There were no trees around the school, only the parking lot and a couple of acres of grass huddled into the curve of the hill behind it. “It’s around the back,” she said, trying to sound confident.
The stairwell leading down to the basement door was full of dead leaves, dry and rustling. When they walked down it was like going into a pond, a murky one, because by the second step down they couldn’t see their feet. Gindy kicked at the leaves. If there was something lurking in there, she wanted to scare it away. The basement door was locked, with a padlock and a chain. But the window next to it was open a crack, as Sophie had said, just enough to get your fingers under.
Up until now, Gindy had assumed or hoped that her sister was wrong about that. It wouldn’t be the first time, she told herself. The window was made of frosted glass, so that they couldn’t see inside, with a crack running diagonally across the lower pane. It was smaller than the door, but big enough for someone to get through.
“Why would she leave it like this?” Ginny kicked at the leaves again, which at the bottom of the stairwell were halfway up her legs.
“Probably she forgot about it.” Sophie had gotten down on her knees. “You remember. One day we were here and then we were being remote. She used to close it on weekends, I think.”
“So how did you and Mrs. Marbel get to be buddies with all the insider data?”
“None of your beeswax.” Sophie had gotten her fingers in under the window and was straining to open it. “Come down here and help me.”
Gindy didn’t want to kneel because she was wearing a skirt. She couldn’t stand the idea of the leaves crowding up under it. She bent over and put her hands alongside Sophie’s. They pulled together, and the window inched up, creaking. When it was far enough, Sophie put her leg over the sill and half fell into the room. Gindy climbed down more carefully. Brushing leaves off of her, she looked around. It was dark. One end was lined with metal shelves that went up to the ceiling. In the corner nearest to the window a tangle of mops and brooms leaned against the wall, with a couple of wheeled buckets beside them. Sophie had made her way across to the opposite wall and she turned on the light.
“What’d you do that for? Someone will notice?”
“Who’s going to see? We’re at the back and the hill is behind us.”
Gindy looked out the window they’d come in. Beyond the leaf-filled stairwell, she could see the hill rising up, only fifteen feet away.
Sophie pointed to a nail beside the door, where a ring with a dozen keys hung. “See?”
“Fine,” Gindy said. “Let’s get your art thingie so we can get out of here.”
She followed Sophie out the door, and then up the stairs to the first floor. The glass doors at the end of the hall where the principal’s office was gleamed in the dim light, and as always Gindy felt a twinge of guilt, although she’d never been called to the office when she was at Uniontown for anything except to take a message from her teacher, or at the end of the year, to pick up an award. She wondered if Sophie felt the same, and then decided probably not. Sophie never felt guilty about anything.
The halls were dark, except for the red glow of the exit signs, and the big fish tank near the stairs to the second floor. The fish were gone but the purple underwater lights still glowed. “Where do you think they took the fish?”
“Mrs. Marbel took them home.” Sophie was peering into the classrooms as they went down the hall.
“How do you know that?”
Sophie didn’t bother to answer.
In the center of the school, the auditorium/lunch room/gym loomed, dark and empty. The tables were folded and stacked up against the walls. The only light came from the high windows and it was murky and dim at floor level. Something rustled under Gindy’s foot, but it was only a candy wrapper. The stage at the other end was like a cave, its curtains half closed. Sophie was making for the back stairs, and Gindy followed her, feeling more reluctant with every step.
“You’d better hurry,” she said. “Mom is going to come down and start making dinner pretty soon.”
Sophie ran up the stairs, her footsteps echoing, and Ginny ran after her, not wanting to be left behind. “How are you going to explain your art thing to mom?”
“I’ll keep it in my room for a while. By the time I bring it out, she’ll have forgotten about it.” Sophie chose a key and stuck it into the lock on the door of the art classroom, which swung open silently.
It was lighter here than in the halls, with one whole wall of windows. Gindy walked around, remembering being here when she still went to Uniontown School. She had liked to sit on the wall next to the windows so that she could look out. She hadn’t been very good at art, but she liked messing around with paint and chalk and clay. The art teacher then had been Mr. Fairweather. He was youngish and good looking. A lot of the girls in Gindy’s class had crushes on him, including Gindy although it embarrassed her to remember this. More than once, she had written Mrs. Virginia Fairweather in her sketchbook, and then had to black it out carefully with magic marker, each mark carefully laid against the next so that nothing showed from underneath.
She opened the closet at the back of the room, inhaling the art room smell, which was chalk and turpentine and papery dust. It was only two years ago, but it seemed like much longer. When she had taken her last class in this room, she had been almost four inches shorter. It was the next year that their mother had had to lengthen the hems on her new school clothes, already too short a month into fall.
Sophie was pushing things around in the storage area at the back of the room, making things clatter and fall. “Here it is,” she called.
Gindy closed the closet door. “Is that it? It’s enormous.”
“It’s not that big.”
“It’s almost as tall as you are. Not that you’re all that tall.”
“Shut up,” Sophie said.
“Well, let’s see your masterpiece,” Gindy said.