The Poison Apples (10 page)

“Molly,” someone said.

The voice sent a chill down my spine. I recognized it but couldn't place it.

A hand reached out and shook my wrist.

“
Molly
,” the voice said again.

I raised my head up, painfully. Candy was sitting in a chair across from my bed, her hands folded across her lap.

It took all of my strength to stop myself from groaning out loud.

“How are you feeling,” Candy said. She said it like a statement, not a question.

“I'm okay,” I murmured. “Where's Dad?”

“At home with Sandie and Randie.”

“Why aren't
you
at home with Sandie and Randie?”

“Do not mouth off to me, missy.”

“Okay, okay.”

There was a long pause.

“I want you to come back to North Forest,” Candy said.

I shot up in bed. Pain seared through my skull.
“What?”
I yelped.

“You should come home.”

“Why?”

“We need your help.”

I stared at her. Her face was expressionless. Her mouth formed a tight little line. Her blue eyes looked dull and blank.

“You need my help doing what?”

“Your father and I are both working full-time. Spencer is practicing for the statewide twirling competition. Sandie and Randie need someone to—”

“No.” My head throbbed. My whole body was trembling. My fingers clutched at the edges of the sheet. I made direct eye contact with Candy. “I will not come home.”

“You don't belong here, Molly.”

“Yes I do.”

“Look at you. You get a, a
concussion
within twenty-four hours of—”

“Shut up!” I yelled.

Candy shook her head. “You're being irresponsible,” she said after a while. “Your father and I need someone else to help out. The fact that you think you can just abandon your family and—”

“You're not my family,” I told her.

“Excuse me?”

“You're not my family.”

“Oh, yeah? Then who's your family?”

My stomach sank.

Candy gave me a rueful smile. “The rest of your family is checked into the loony bin.”

“It's a residential treatment facility.”

She laughed. “Right. Whatever.”

“I'm never going back to North Forest,” I said, trying to sound full of conviction.

“You're abandoning your sisters.”

Spencer's face flashed through my mind. I shook my head and tried to push it away. “I'm not leaving.”

“We'll see how you feel after first semester.”

“No. No. No.”

She stood up and folded her purse into her chest. “Well,” she said, gazing down at me, “you might not have a choice.”

And then, her high heels clicking neatly across the linoleum floor, she was gone.

SEVEN

Alice

It was a pleasant,
breezy morning. The sun was peeking through streaks of gauzy white clouds. The bells of Putnam chapel were ringing.

I was miserable.

It was the first official day of classes. I had managed to get through three days of orientation without making a single friend, and now I was walking up a grassy hill toward the humanities building, toward my first class, all by myself. Surrounding me were clumps and pairs of my fellow students, giggling and talking and swinging their book bags by their side.

I walked through a set of big double doors and stopped in the lobby. It was a beautiful old building, with wooden floors and beams of light shining through stained-glass windows. I squinted at a sign with little arrows indicating classroom numbers and locations and then walked down a narrow hallway. My mouth was dry. I was worried nothing would come out if I tried to talk.

“Hi, Alice,” a high, nasal voice piped up next to me.

I turned and looked. It was the same shrimpy girl with glasses from the first night of school. Except this time she had a white band of gauze wrapped around her head.

“Hi,” I croaked, and kept walking down the hall.

She trotted alongside me. “You like artichokes, right?”

“What?”

She giggled. “Remember? From the name game? You couldn't think of a word that started with
A
?”

Great. Even the nerdy girl thought I was a loser.

“I'm Molly Miller, by the way,” she added.

“Oh. Right.” I glanced up and down the hall, trying to find an escape route.

“I like the all-black thing,” she said. “It's very Hamlet. Have you read
Hamlet
?”

I shook my head.

“You have to. By Shakespeare? It's my favorite play. Hopefully we'll get to read it sometime this year. Are you in Humanities 101?” she continued brightly.

“Um, yeah.”

“Me, too!”

“Oh. Cool.”

“Hey!” she exclaimed, and stopped in her tracks. “This is our classroom!”

She flung open a door on our right and held it out for me like a bellhop.

I sighed. Maybe this made me a Bad Person, but I really didn't want to walk into class at the same time as Molly Miller. She was kind of a … dork. And I wanted to make friends.

People who looked like Molly Miller didn't usually have friends.

I entered the classroom with my head ducked down and slid into a seat. I could see my classmates talking and laughing out of the corner of my eye. I was too freaked out to look at any of them directly. Molly immediately plunked herself down in the desk next to me and leaned over, propping her chin in her hands.

“English is my favorite subject,” she said in a loud whisper. “By
far
.”

I nodded.

“I wonder what's gonna be on the reading list.”

I nodded again. The last thing on my mind was the reading list.

Someone cleared his throat, and the classroom fell silent. I looked up. A young man—he was probably in his late twenties—was leaning against the desk at the front of the classroom, his arms folded. He was small and compact, with sparkling eyes, and his black hair was streaked with gray.

“Hi, everyone,” he said.

There was a general murmuring in response.

“My name is David Newman,” he said. “Welcome to Humanities 101. I'll be your teacher for the entire school year. So here's hoping we don't all hate each other.”

There were a couple of chuckles. Molly let out a burst of high-pitched laughter. I winced.

“In this class,” David Newman began, moving behind his desk and sitting down, “we're going to spend most our time studying the Greats.
Gilgamesh.
The
Odyssey.
Henry the Fifth
. Wharton's
House of Mirth.
”

I could see Molly Miller nodding vigorously to the right of me. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“But,” he continued, “I'm going to start us off with a piece of twentieth-century literature. This is a fantastic work by a contemporary novelist, and it synthesizes many of the disparate themes and works we'll be discussing this fall.”

My brain was somehow unable to absorb anything this guy said. I looked around the classroom desperately. Could anyone else understand him?

He reached into his desk, pulled out a book, and held it up in the air. I couldn't see the title, but it somehow looked familiar. Something about its color and the blurry illustration on the cover …

“This is
Zen Ventura
,” he announced. “Has anyone heard of it?”

My heart stopped.

Molly Miller's hand shot up into the air. Slowly I raised mine, too. David Newman glanced in our direction.

“Okay. Two of you. Well, this was a seminal book in 1978. Just about everyone read it and was influenced by it. Nelson Bingley is one of the great writers in the post-1950 generation of—”

His words starting blending into each other.
Zen Ventura.
My father's first and most famous novel. The one I never bothered to read because it looked too thick and boring.

Now we were talking about it on the first day of school.

It had never occurred to me that this could happen.

I glanced over at Molly Miller. She was in the middle of talking.

“—one of my most favorite authors,” she finished, her cheeks flushed with excitement.

“I'm so glad,” David said. He nodded in my direction. “And what about you? When did you read it?”

I tried to swallow. My tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth.

“Um,” I said. There was a long pause. Everyone in the class turned to look at me. I stared into the sea of their blank, disinterested faces. “Uh … I actually haven't read it. I've just … ah…” I trailed off.

“Heard of it?” asked David.

Another attempt at swallowing. “Yeah.”

“Okay. Well. That's fine.” He turned to the rest of the class. I breathed a sigh of relief. “There should be twenty-five copies waiting for you guys at the school store. By this time next week everyone should have read the first three chapters. Okay?”

General shuffling and nodding and whispering.

“Okay.” He smiled at all of us. “So I guess that's it. I see no point in keeping you guys. I'm here to talk to you about literature, and since you haven't done the reading yet … we have nothing to say to each other.”

Molly Miller let out another high-decibel squeal of laughter. Everyone rose to their feet and started trudging out of the classroom. I saw my roommate, Reena, and her new red-haired best friend whispering to each other and glancing over their shoulders as they walked out the door.

I sighed. They were probably talking about what a big loser I was. Reena had managed to ignore me for the past three days, except in the middle of our second night when she'd reached across the gap between our beds, poked my shoulder, and yelled: “YOU'RE SNORING!”

“Sorry,” I'd muttered, my cheeks hot with embarrassment, and then I'd spent the rest of that night and the one after lying awake, paralyzed with fear.

So I was also pretty tired.

“Alice!” someone yelled.

I looked up. Molly Miller was standing in front of me, clasping her book bag to her chest. Except for us, the classroom was empty.

“I can't believe you like Nelson Bingley, too!” she said, and shook her head in happy bewilderment.

I buried my head in my hands.

“Alice?”

I didn't respond.

“Alice. Are you okay?”

I lifted up my face and gazed out the window. Green leaves shimmered in the sunlight. It was amazing how you could be in such a beautiful place and still feel miserable. I looked back at Molly Miller. She was staring at me. The gauze bandage around her forehead was starting to come undone. God, was she dorky.

“Why are you wearing a bandage on your head?” I asked. My voice sounded so cold and distant. Hearing it made me wince.

Her cheeks flushed. “Um … I fell.”

“You fell? How?”

She looked down at the ground. “I actually don't want to talk about it.”

There was a long pause. I stood up, slung my bag over my shoulder, and started walking out of the classroom.

“Hey, Alice?”

She was relentless. I turned around. “What?”

“You're really not at all interested in talking about Nelson Bingley? He's, like, one of the greatest writers in the—”

I couldn't stand it anymore. I threw my bag down on the ground.

“No. I don't want to talk about Nelson Bingley. You know why? Because he's my dad. And he's a huge traitor. You think I want to be here at this school? Well, I don't. But my mom died and he married a crazy person, so here I am.”

Molly stared at me, her mouth open.

“Happy?” I asked. “That's what I have to say about Nelson Bingley.”

I picked up my bag and walked out of the classroom, my heart pounding in my ears. I strode through the long hallway, burst out through the double doors into the sunlight, and stopped on the pavement. I squinted up at the treetops and bit my lip to stop myself from crying.

A small shadow approached me from behind.

“Please go away,” I said.

There was a long silence.

“Mine is named Candy Lamb,” Molly whispered.

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Her name is Candy Lamb.”

“Who—whose name is Candy Lamb?”

“My evil stepmother.”

I turned and looked at her.

“I have one, too,” she said quietly.

And then dorky little Molly Miller did the strangest thing. She held out her arms.

So I fell into them. And cried harder than I'd cried in a long time.

*   *   *

“There are like a million stars!”
I exclaimed. The wet grass prickled the back of my neck.

“This is nothing,” Molly said.

“You can see, like,
three
in New York City. On a good night.”

“Oh, you should see them from the top of Mount Austin in North Forest. It'll blow your mind.”

I breathed in the crisp night air. The two of us were lying on our backs on the lawn in front of our dorm. For the first time in four days I didn't feel terrible.

“Show me Orion again,” I said.

Her pale hand rose above our heads into the black air. “See those three little stars? In the diagonal line?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That's his belt.”

“And see that big one?”

“Mm-hm.”

“That's his knee.”

“Cool!”

The chapel bells rang out from the top of the hill. Molly sat up. “Oh, my God. I totally forgot. It's the fall commencement ceremony. We have to go.”

I yawned. “Let's skip it.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Nah. That kind of thing is stupid.”

Molly's little face hovered indignantly over mine. “You are such a cynical brat.”