Torment

SEVEN TWELVE DAYS

“I don’t get why you’re being so weird,” Shelby said to Luce the next morning. “You’ve been here, what, six days? And you’re Shoreline’s biggest hero. Maybe you’re going to live up to your reputation after all.”

The Sunday-morning sky was dotted with cumulus clouds. Luce and Shelby were walking along Shoreline’s tiny beach, sharing an orange and a thermos of chai. A strong wind carried the earthy scent of old redwoods down from the woods. The tide was rough and high, kicking up long swaths of knotted black seaweed, jellyfish, and rotting driftwood into the girls’ path.

“It was nothing,” Luce muttered, which wasn’t exactly true. Jumping into that icy water after Dawn had certainly been something. But Steven—the severity of his tone, the force of his grip on her arm—had put a fear into Luce about ever speaking of Dawn’s rescue.

She eyed the salty foam left in the wake of a receding wave. She was trying not to look out at the deep, dark water beyond—so she wouldn’t have to think about hands down in its icy depths. For your own protection. Steven must have meant your in its plural form. As in, it’s for all the students’ protection. Otherwise, if he only meant Luce …

“Dawn’s okay,” she said. “That’s all that matters.”

“Um, yeah, because of you, Baywatch.”

“Do not start calling me Baywatch.”

“You prefer to think of yourself as a jack-of-all-trades kind of savior?” Shelby had the most deadpan way of teasing. “Frankie says some mystery creep’s been lurking around the school grounds the past two nights. You should give him what for—”

“What?” Luce almost spat out her chai. “Who is it?”

“I repeat: Mystery creep. They dunno.” Shelby took a seat on a weathered flat of limestone, skipping a few stones expertly into the ocean. “Just some dude. I overheard Frankie talking to Kramer about it on the boat yesterday after all the hoopla.”

Luce sat down next to Shelby and began to root around in the sand for stones.

Someone was sneaking around Shoreline. What if it was Daniel?

It would be just like him. So stubborn about keeping his own promise not to see her, but unable to stay away. The thought of him made her yearn for him that much more. She could feel herself almost on the brink of tears, which was crazy. Odds were the mystery creep wasn’t even Daniel. It could be Cam. It could be anyone. It could be an Outcast.

“Did Francesca seem worried?” she asked Shelby.

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“Wait a minute. Is that why you didn’t sneak out last night?” It was the first night Luce hadn’t been woken up by Shelby coming in through the window.

“No.” Shelby’s skipping arm was toned from all her yoga. Her next stone skipped six times in a wide arc, coming almost all the way back to them, like a boomerang.

“Where do you go every night, anyway?”

Shelby stuffed her hands in the pockets of her puffy red ski vest. She was staring at the gray waves so intensely that it was clear she’d either seen something out there—or she was avoiding the question. Luce followed her gaze, almost relieved to see nothing in the water but gray-and-white waves all the way to the horizon.

“Shelby.”

“What? I don’t go anywhere.”

Luce started to stand up, annoyed that Shelby felt she couldn’t tell her anything. Luce was brushing damp sand from the backs of her legs when Shelby’s hand tugged her back down onto the rock.

“Okay, I used to go see my sorry-ass boyfriend.” Shelby sighed heavily, pitching a rock artlessly into the water, nearly pelting a fat seagull swooping down for a fish. “Before he became my sorry-ass ex-boyfriend.”

“Oh. Shel, I’m sorry.” Luce chewed on her lip. “I didn’t even know you had a boyfriend.”

“I had to start keeping him at arm’s length. He got way too into the fact that I had a new roommate. Kept bugging me to let him come over late at night. Wanted to meet you. I don’t know what kind of girl he thinks I am. No offense, but three’s a crowd in my book.”

“Who is he?” Luce asked. “Does he go here?”

“Phillip Aves. He’s a senior in the main school.”

Luce didn’t think she knew him.

“That pale kid with the bleached-blond hair?” Shelby said. “Kind of looks like an albino David Bowie? You can’t really miss him.” Her mouth twitched. “Unfortunately.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you broke up?”

“I prefer downloading Vampire Weekend songs that I lip-sync to when you’re not around. Better for my chakras. Besides”—she pointed a stubby finger at Luce—“you’re the one being all moody and weird today. Daniel treating you wrong or something?”

Luce leaned back on her elbows. “That would require us actually seeing each other, which apparently we aren’t allowed to do.”

If Luce closed her eyes, she could let the sound of the waves take her back to the very first night she’d kissed Daniel. In this lifetime. The humid tangle of their bodies on that languishing Savannah boardwalk. The hungry pressure of his hands pulling her in. Everything seemed possible then. She opened her eyes. She was so far away from all of that now.

“So your sorry-ass ex-boyfriend—”

“No.” Shelby made a zip-it motion with her fingers. “I don’t want to talk about SAEB any more than I guess you want to talk about Daniel. Next.”

That was fair. But it wasn’t exactly that Luce didn’t want to talk about Daniel. It was more like, if she started talking about Daniel, she might not be able to shut up. She already sounded like a broken record in her own mind—cycling on repeat through the total of oh, four physical experiences she’d had with him in this life. (She chose only to start counting once he stopped pretending she didn’t exist.) Imagine how quickly she would bore Shelby, who’d probably had tons of boyfriends, tons of experience. Compared to Luce’s next to none.

One kiss she could barely remember with a boy who’d burst into flames. A handful of very hot moments with Daniel. That just about summed it up. Luce was certainly no expert when it came to love.

Again she felt the unfairness of her situation: Daniel had all these great memories of them together to fall back on when things got rough. She had nothing.

Until she looked up at her roommate.

“Shelby?”

Shelby had her puffy red hood pulled over her head and was poking a stick into the wet sand. “I told you I don’t want to talk about him.”

“I know. I was wondering, remember when you mentioned that you knew how to glimpse your past lives?”

This was what she’d been about to ask Shelby when Dawn fell overboard.

“I never said that.” The stick plunged deeper into the sand. Shelby’s face was flushed and her thick blond hair was frizzing out of her ponytail.

“Yes … you did.” Luce tilted her head. “You wrote it on my paper. That day when we were doing the icebreaker? You grabbed it out of my hands and said you could speak more than eighteen languages and glimpse past lives and which one did I need you to fill out—”

“I remember what I said. But you misunderstood what I meant.”

“Okay,” Luce said slowly, “well—”

“Just because I have glimpsed a past life before doesn’t mean I know how to do it, and it doesn’t mean it was my own.”

“So, it wasn’t yours?”

“Hell no, reincarnation is for freaks.”

Luce frowned and dug her hands into the wet sand, wanting to bury herself in it.

“Hello, that was a joke.” Shelby nudged Luce playfully. “Tailored especially for the girl who’s had to go through puberty a thousand times.” She grimaced. “Once was enough for me, thank you very much.”

So Luce was That Girl. The girl who’d had to go through puberty a thousand times. She’d never thought about it that way before. It was almost funny: From the outside, going through endless puberties seemed like the worst part of her lot. But it was so much more complicated than that. Luce started to say she’d go through a thousand more pimples and hormone fluctuations if she could look into her past lives and understand more about herself, but then she looked up at Shelby. “If it wasn’t yours, then whose past life did you glimpse?”

“Why are you being so nosy? Damn.”

Luce could feel her blood pressure rising. “Shelby, ohmigod, throw me a bone!”

“Okay,” Shelby said finally, making a chill-out motion with her hands. “I was at this party one night in Corona. Things got pretty crazy, half-naked séances and shit, and—well, that’s not really the story. So I remember taking a walk to get some air. It was raining, hard to see where I was going. I turned the corner in an alleyway and there was this guy, kind of beat-up-looking. He was bent over a sphere of darkness. I’d never seen anything like it, shaped like a globe, but glowing, kind of floating above his hands. He was crying.”

“What was it?”

“I didn’t know then, but now I know it was an Announcer.”

Luce was mesmerized. “And you saw some of the past life he was glimpsing? What was it like?”

Shelby met Luce’s eyes and swallowed. “It was pretty gruesome, Luce.”

“I’m sorry,” Luce said. “I was only asking because …”

It felt like a big deal to admit what she was about to admit. Francesca would definitely be opposed to this. But Luce needed answers, and she needed help. Shelby’s help.

“I need to glimpse some of my past lives,” Luce said. “Or I need to at least try. Things have been happening recently that I’m supposed to just accept because I don’t know any better—only I could know better, a lot better, if I could just see where I come from. Where I’ve been. Does that make any sense?”

Shelby nodded.

“I need to know what I had in the past with Daniel so I can feel surer of what I have with him now.” Luce took a breath. “That guy, the one in the alley … did you see what he did to the Announcer?”

Shelby scrunched her shoulders. “He just sort of guided it into shape. I didn’t even know what it was at the time, and I don’t know how he tracked it down. That’s why Francesca and Steven’s demonstration freaked me out so much. I saw what happened that one night, and I’ve been trying to forget about it ever since. I had no idea that what I was seeing was an Announcer.”

“If I could track down an Announcer, do you think you could guide it?”

“No promises,” Shelby said, “but I’ll give it a shot. You know how to track them down?”

“Not really, but how hard can it be? They’ve been haunting me all my life.”

Shelby cupped her hand over Luce’s on the rock. “I want to help you, Luce, but it’s weird. I’m scared. What if you see something you, you know, shouldn’t?”

“When you broke up with SAEB—”

“I thought I told you not to—”

“Just listen: Aren’t you glad you figured out whatever it was that made you break up with him, sooner rather than later? I mean, what if you got engaged or something and only then—”

“Blech!” Shelby put up a hand to stop Luce. “Point taken. Now, come on, find us a shadow.”

Luce led Shelby back across the beach and up the steep stone stairs, where dashes of battered red and yellow verbenas had pushed up through the wet, sandy soil. They crossed the neat green terrace, trying not to interrupt a group of non-Nephilim students in a game of ultimate Frisbee. They passed their third-story dorm room window and wound around the back of the building. At the edge of the forest of redwoods, Luce pointed to a space between the trees. “That’s where I found one the last time.”

Shelby marched into the forest ahead of Luce, shoving through the long, clawlike leaves of the vine maple trees among the redwoods and stopping under a giant fern.

It was dark under the redwoods, and Luce was glad of Shelby’s company. She thought back to the other day, how quickly time had passed while she was harassing that shadow, getting nowhere. Suddenly she felt overwhelmed.

“If we can find and catch an Announcer, and if we can even get a glimpsing to work,” she said, “what do you think the chances are that the Announcer will have anything to show about me and Daniel? What if we just get another awful Bible scene like we saw in class?”

Shelby shook her head. “Daniel I don’t know about. But if we can summon and then glimpse an Announcer, then it will have to do with you. They’re supposed to be summoner-specific—though you won’t always be interested in what they have to say. Like how you get junk mail mixed with your important mail, but it’s still addressed to you.”

“How can they be … summoner-specific? That would mean Francesca and Steven were at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Well, yeah. They have been around forever. Rumor has it their résumés are pretty impressive.” Shelby stared oddly at Luce. “Put your bug eyes back in your head. How else do you think they scored jobs at Shoreline? This is a really good school.”

Something dark and slippery moved over them: a heavy cloak of an Announcer stretching sleepily in the lengthening shadows from the limb of a redwood tree.

“There.” Luce pointed, not wasting any time. She swung herself up onto a low branch that stretched behind Shelby. Luce had to balance on one foot and lean out all the way to the left just to graze the Announcer with her fingertips. “I can’t reach it.”

Shelby picked up a pinecone and pitched it at the center of the shadow where it draped down from the branch.

“Don’t!” Luce whispered. “You’ll piss it off.”

“It’s pissing me off, being so coy. Just hold out your hand.”

Grimacing, Luce did as she was told.

She watched the pinecone ricochet off the shadow’s exposed side, then heard the soft swishing sound that used to fill her ears with dread. One side of the shadow was sliding, very slowly, away from the branch. It slipped off and landed across Luce’s shaking extended arm. She pinched its edges with her fingers.

Luce hopped off the branch where she’d been standing and approached Shelby, her cold, musty offering in her hands.

“Here,” Shelby said. “I’ll take half and you take half, just like we saw in class. Ew, it’s squishy. Okay … loosen your grip, he’s not going anywhere. Let him just kind of chill and take shape.”

It seemed like a long time passed before the shadow did anything at all. Luce felt almost like she was playing with the old Ouija board she’d had as a kid. An inexplicable energy on the tips of her fingers. The feeling of slight, continual movement before she could see any difference in the Announcer’s shape.

Then there was a whoosh: It was contracting, folding slowly in on its dark self. Soon the whole thing had taken on the size and shape of a large box. It hovered just above their fingertips.

“Do you see that?” Shelby gasped. Her voice was almost inaudible over the whooshing sound of the shadow. “Look, there in the middle.”

As had happened during class, a dark veil seemed to lift off the Announcer, revealing a shocking burst of color. Luce shielded her eyes, watching as the bright light seemed to settle back inside the shadow screen, into a foggy out-of-focus image. Then, finally, into distinct shapes in muted colors.

They were looking at a living room. The back of a blue plaid recliner with the footrest kicked up and a badly fraying bottom corner. An old wood-paneled television airing a rerun of Mork & Mindy with the volume off. A fat Jack Russell terrier curled on a round patchwork rug.

Luce watched a swinging door push open from what looked like a kitchen. A woman, older than Luce’s grandmother had been when she died, walked through. She was wearing a pink-and-white patterned dress, heavy white tennis shoes, and thick glasses on a string around her neck. She was carrying a tray of cut fruit.

“Who are these people?” Luce wondered aloud.

When the old woman put down the tray on the coffee table, a liver-spotted hand extended from around the chair and selected a chunk of banana.

Luce leaned in to see more clearly, and the focus of the image shifted with her. Like a 3-D panorama. She hadn’t even noticed the old man sitting in the recliner. He was frail, with a few thin patches of white hair and age spots all over his forehead. His mouth was moving, but Luce couldn’t hear a thing. A row of framed pictures lined the mantel of the fireplace.

The whooshing in Luce’s ears got louder, so loud it made her wince. Without her doing anything other than wonder about those pictures, the Announcer’s image zoomed in. It left Luce with a feeling of whiplash—and an extreme close-up of one framed photograph.

A thin gold-plated frame around a smudged glass plate. Inside, the small photograph had a fine scalloped border around a yellowing black-and-white image. Two faces in the photograph: Hers and Daniel’s.

Holding her breath, she studied her own face, which looked just a little younger than it did now. Dark shoulder-length hair set in pincurls. A white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. A wide A-line skirt brushing the middles of her calves. White-gloved hands, holding Daniel’s. He was looking directly at her, smiling.

The Announcer started vibrating, then quaking; then the image inside started to flicker and fade away.

“No,” Luce called, ready to lunge inside. Her shoulders connected with the edge of the Announcer, but that was as far as she got. A brush of bitter cold pushed her back and left her skin feeling damp. A hand clamped around her wrist.

“Don’t get any wild ideas,” Shelby warned.

Too late.

The screen went black and the Announcer dropped from their hands onto the forest floor, shattering into pieces like broken black glass. Luce suppressed a whimper. Her chest heaved. She felt like a part of her had died.

Lowering herself to all fours, she pressed her forehead to the ground and rolled onto her side. It was colder, murkier than it had been when they’d started. The watch on her wrist said it was after two o’clock, but it had been morning when they came into the forest. Looking west, toward the edge of the woods, Luce could see the difference in the light hitting the dorm. The Announcers swallowed time.

Shelby lay down next to her. “You okay?”

“I’m so confused. Those people—” Luce cupped her forehead. “I have no idea who they are.”

Shelby cleared her throat and looked uncomfortable. “Don’t you think, um, maybe you used to know them? Like, a long time ago. Like, maybe they were your …”

Luce waited for her to finish. “My what?”

“It really hasn’t occurred to you that those were your parents from another life? That this is what they look like now?”

Luce’s jaw dropped open. “No. Wait—you mean, I’ve had totally different parents in each of my past lives? I thought Harry and Doreen … I just assumed they would have been with me the whole time.”

Suddenly she remembered something Daniel had said, about her mother making bad boiled cabbage in that past life. At the time, she hadn’t dwelled on it, but now it made a little bit more sense. Doreen was an amazing cook. Everyone in east Georgia knew that.

Which meant Shelby must be right. Luce probably had a whole nation of past families she couldn’t even remember.

“I’m so stupid,” she said. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to the way the man and woman looked? Why hadn’t she felt the slightest connection to them? She felt like she’d lived her whole life and only now found out she was adopted. How many times had she been handed off to different parents? “This is—This is—”

“Totally messed up,” Shelby said. “I know. On the bright side, you could probably save yourself a lot of money for therapy if you could look back at all your other families, see all the problems you had with hundreds of mothers before this one.”

Luce buried her face in her hands.

“That is, if you need family therapy.” Shelby sighed. “Sorry, who’s talking about themselves again?” She raised her right hand, then slowly put it down. “You know, Shasta’s not that far from here.”

“What’s Shasta?”

“Mount Shasta, California. It’s just a few hours that-away.” Shelby jerked her thumb toward the north.

“But the announcers only show the past. What would be the point of going there now? They’re probably—”

Shelby shook her head. “ ‘The past’ is a broad term. Announcers show the distant past right up to the events happening seconds ago, and everything in between. I saw a laptop on the desk in the corner, so there’s a good chance … you know …”

“But we don’t know where they live.”

“Maybe you don’t. Me, I zoomed in on a piece of their mail and got the address. Committed it to memory. 1291 Shasta Shire Circle, apartment 34.” Shelby shrugged. “So, if you wanted to go visit them, we could totally drive there and back in a day.”

“Right.” Luce snorted. She desperately wanted to go visit them, but it just didn’t seem possible. “In whose car?”

Shelby laughed a faux-sinister little laugh. “There was only one thing that wasn’t sorry-ass about my sorry-ass ex-boyfriend.” She dug into the pocket of her sweatshirt, pulling out a long key chain. “And that was his very sweet Mercedes, parked right here in the student lot. Lucky for you, I forgot to give him back the extra key.”

They tore down the road before anyone could stop them.

Luce found a map in the glove compartment and traced the line up to Shasta with her finger. She called out some directions to Shelby, who drove like a bat out of Hell, but the maroon Mercedes almost seemed to like the abuse.

Luce wondered how Shelby was staying so calm. If Luce had just broken up with Daniel and “borrowed” his car for the afternoon, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from remembering road trips they’d taken, or arguments they’d gotten into while driving to a movie, or what they’d done in the backseat that one time with all the windows rolled down. Surely Shelby was thinking about her ex. Luce wanted to ask, but Shelby had been clear that the topic was off-limits.

“Are you going to change your hair?” Luce asked finally, remembering what Shelby had said about getting over breakups. “I could help you, if you are.”

Shelby’s face pinched into a scowl. “That freak’s not even worth it.” After a long pause, she added, “But thank you.”

The drive took most of the rest of the afternoon, and Shelby spent it working herself up, bickering with the radio, scanning the channels for the craziest nutjobs she could find. The air got colder, the trees thinned out, and the elevation of the landscape rose steadily the whole time. Luce focused on staying calm, imagining a hundred scenarios about meeting these parents. She tried to avoid thinking about what Daniel would say if he knew where she was going.

“There it is.” Shelby pointed when a massive snow-capped mountain came into view directly in front of the road. “The town sits right in those foothills. We should be there just after sunset.”

Luce didn’t know how to thank Shelby for hauling her all the way up here on a whim. Whatever was behind Shelby’s shift in attitude, Luce was grateful—she wouldn’t have been able to do this on her own.

The town of Shasta was wacky and artistic, with a good number of elderly people walking leisurely down the wide avenues. Shelby rolled down the windows and let in the brisk early-evening air. It helped settle Luce’s stomach, which was knotting up at the prospect of actually having to talk to the people she’d seen in the Announcer.

“What am I supposed to say to them? Surprise, I’m your daughter back from the dead,” Luce practiced aloud as they were sitting at a stoplight.

“Unless you want to totally freak out a sweet old couple, we’re going to have to work on that,” Shelby said. “Why don’t you pretend you’re a solicitor, just to get in the door and feel them out?”

Luce looked down at her jeans, beat-up tennis shoes, and purple backpack. She didn’t look like a very impressive salesperson. “What would I sell?”

Shelby started to drive again. “Hawk car washes or something cheesy like that. You can say you’ve got vouchers in your bag. I did that one summer, door to door. Almost got shot.” She shuddered, then looked at Luce’s white face. “Come on, your own mom and dad are not going to shoot you. Oh, hey, look, here we are!”

“Shelby, can we just sit in silence for a little while? I think I need to breathe.”

“Sorry.” Shelby pulled into a large parking lot facing a compound of small, single-story connected bungalow-style buildings. “Breathing I can do.”

Through her nerves, Luce had to admit it was a pretty nice place. A series of the bungalows stood in a semicircle around a pond. There was a main lobby building with a row of wheelchairs lined up outside the doors. A big banner read WELCOME TO SHASTA SHIRE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY.

Her throat felt so dry it hurt to swallow. She didn’t know if she even had it in her to say two words to these people. Maybe it was one of those things you just couldn’t think about too much. Maybe she needed to get up there and force her hand down on that knocker and then figure out how to act.

“Apartment thirty-four.” Shelby squinted at a square stucco building with a red Spanish-tile roof. “That looks like it over there. If you want me to—”

“Wait in the car till I get back? That would be great, thanks so much. I won’t be long!”

Before Luce could lose her nerve, she was out the car door and jogging up the winding sidewalk toward the building. The air was warm and filled with a heady scent of roses. Cute old people were everywhere. Split into teams on the shuffleboard court near the entrance, taking an evening stroll through a neatly pruned flower garden next to the pool. In the early-evening light, Luce’s eyes strained as she tried to locate the couple somewhere in this crowd, but no one looked familiar. She would have to go straight to their house.

From the footpath leading up to their bungalow, Luce could see a light on through the window. She stepped closer until she had a clearer view.

It was uncanny: the same room she’d seen earlier in the Announcer. Even down to the fat white dog asleep on the rug. She could hear dishes being washed in the kitchen. She could see the thin, brown-socked ankles of the man who had been her father however many years ago.

He didn’t feel like her father. He didn’t look like her father, and the woman hadn’t looked at all like her mother. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with them. They seemed perfectly nice. Like perfectly nice … strangers. If she knocked on the door and made up some lie about car washes, would they become any less strange?

No, she decided. But that wasn’t all. Even though she didn’t recognize her parents, if they really were her parents, of course they would recognize her.

She felt stupid for not thinking about that before. They’d take one look at her and know she was their daughter. Her parents were much older than most of the other people she’d seen outside. The shock of it might be too much for them. It was too much for Luce, and this couple had about seventy years on her.

By then she was pressed against their living room window, crouching behind a spiny sagebrush cactus bush. Her fingers were dirty from gripping the windowsill. If their daughter had died when she was seventeen, they must have been mourning her for close to fifty years. They’d be at peace with it by now. Wouldn’t they? Luce popping up uninvited from behind a cactus plant would be the very last thing they needed.

Shelby would be disappointed. Luce herself was disappointed. It hurt to realize that this was as close as she was ever going to get to them. Hanging on the windowsill outside her former parents’ house, she felt the tears roll down her cheeks. She didn’t even know their names.