Bleeding Violet Read online

  She gave me the pack, then shooed me out the back door. I stepped out into an almost cool breeze. Thunderclouds had hijacked the whole of the sky; heavy rain obscured the morning air like fog.

  “Do you want me to be home by a certain time?” I asked as Rosalee peeked her head out the door to watch the sky.

  “I don’t care if you ever come back,” she said, her voice almost lost beneath the thunderous rain. “I hope to God you don’t.”

  Rosalee slammed the door and locked me out in the storm.

  Chapter Four

  I’d arrived at the school so early, I hadn’t expected to see any kids, but they swarmed the pale blue corridors—every single one dressed in black, as though a goth had written the dress code.

  Country goths? Whoever heard of such a thing?

  The kids at Portero High weren’t as diverse as they’d been at my old school but were more diverse than I’d expected. A peppering of brown, black, and even yellow spiced up the sea of white faces. But no matter the color, the expression on each face was the same: watchful.

  They silenced as I went squeaking by in Rosalee’s horrid galoshes—and didn’t I feel ridiculous, like a clown squeezing a stupid, oversize horn at a funeral—so I made a point to smile and wave at everyone I passed.

  No one smiled or waved back.

  But I refused to let it shake me. I had plenty of time to make friends.

  I found the administration office almost right away, but when I stepped inside, I had to resist the urge to step right back out. The feeling that I’d walked into someone’s funeral intensified.

  Behind the huge counter bisecting the office, a huddle of black-clad people stood weeping around a life-size glass statue. The man’s arms were outstretched, his see-through palms flat against a long stretch of window that wasn’t nearly as crystal clear as he was. Numerous bloodlike, gelatinous stains pinwheeled hypnotically at either end of the long window, like two giants outside the school had blown their brains out against the glass. But even as I watched, the stains vanished from the window, as though the rain were washing them away.

  I decided to ignore the stains—probably all in my head anyway, no thanks to my stupid, useless medication—and concentrate on the statue, which made me feel somewhat at home. During ski holidays in Finland, Poppa and I had often stayed at a hotel made wholly of snow and full of whimsical ice sculptures similar to the glass statue—a charming absurdity no one here seemed to appreciate.

  “How could he have forgotten his earplugs?” said one of the weepers, a short, round woman with mascara trails on her cheeks. “It’s such a transy move.”

  The trio of office workers petted the statue as they sobbed, stroking it as if to console it. The uselessness of the gesture reminded me of how I’d held on to Poppa’s hand all night after he’d died, as though my touch had made him less afraid to be dead.

  “Whatcha need, gal?”

  One of the weepers, an extremely old man in a cowboy hat, wiped his eyes and gave me his full attention at the counter.

  “I need to register.”

  “Needcher birth certificate, medical and dental records, and proof of residency.” He patted the countertop, letting me know exactly where I was to set all this information.

  “I don’t have those things.”

  “Your folks at work?”

  “My father’s dead, but my mother is home.” Was she? She’d still been in that sleep shirt when I’d left, and she hadn’t acted as though she needed to be anywhere in a hurry. I hoped Cowboy didn’t ask me what she did for a living—I had no idea.

  “What’s the number?” he asked.

  That I knew.

  “What’s your ma’s name?” asked Cowboy, punching the numbers I’d recited.

  “Rosalee Price.”

  The weeping ceased abruptly; the mourners around the statue gaped at me, even Cowboy, who exclaimed, “You ain’t never the daughter of Rosalee Price.”

  What could I say to that? “Oh, yes I am!” Like a little kid? I just stared at him.

  Cowboy punched the final digits, eyeing me warily the whole time like he thought I was playing a tasteless trick on him.

  “Is this Miz Rosalee Price? Oh!” He snatched the cowboy hat from his bald head and held it to his chest. “Ma’am, there’s a young’un here claiming to belong to you.” He looked me over. “Yeah, that’s her. Look like somebody drownt her, though.”

  I wanted to snatch the phone away from Cowboy so I could hear what Rosalee was saying about me, if she was telling him to lock me in study hall and throw away the key; anything to keep me from coming home. But I restrained myself, marveling at how taking my pills at least made resisting silly impulses so much easier.

  “You can go ahead and fax ’em over,” Cowboy was saying. “No, thank you.” He hung up and replaced his hat, tugging it down to just the right angle. “That’s one kick in the head, all right.”

  “Is it?”

  He looked me over again in disbelief. “What’s your name?”

  “Hanna Järvinen.”

  I spelled it for him and he began to peck at his computer keyboard, searching for each letter like a participant in the world’s slowest scavenger hunt. The ä, in particular, gave him a run for his money. I gave him my vital statistics, and he had just given me a number of forms to fill out when the door to the office swung open.

  A pale, exotic girl strode up to the counter—no, not a girl; she had too much self-confidence to be in high school. She wore skinny green pants and a matching tank top; old scars crisscrossed her bare arms. Her long hair was the bitter black of licorice.

  An annoyed-looking boy trailed in her wake, tall and fit like her, but only his T-shirt was green. Aside from me, they were the only two people I’d seen so far wearing color.

  “Wyatt!” As he had done while speaking to Rosalee, Cowboy removed his hat. “Ain’t we glad to see you! And you brought reinforcements?” He smiled, flashing his big, fake-looking teeth at the green woman. “Sure nice of you to take time out—”

  “I’m not here to be nice to you!” The green woman spoke with such force, it drove Cowboy back a few steps. “Neither is Wyatt. We need his services for the rest of the morning, so your little project is gone have to wait. Indefinitely.”

  Cowboy’s face fell. “But …” He turned to the scowling boy, eyes pleading. “But we was counting on you to—”

  “What can I say?” The boy, Wyatt, lowered his head at the green woman in this strange, animalistic way, like a goat before it rams the hell out of something. “Apparently, it’s not my job.”

  “That’s right!” The green woman gave Wyatt a heated look that he turned away from in disgust …

  … and then he looked at me.

  He was clean-cut: neat clothes, ramrod posture, his dark hair shaved close to his scalp like a Marine. The kind of boy who would happily volunteer his services to a decrepit office worker at his school. One of those high-minded types.

  Much too high-minded for a girl like me.

  I looked away from his pretty brown eyes and went back to my forms.

  “But what’re we s’posed to do now?” Cowboy was saying. “I’m about sick of these things.” He tossed a set of red earplugs onto the counter; one almost rolled onto my form.

  “Put those back in!” the green woman snapped.

  “Oh. Sorry.” Cowboy did as she said, not caring that the green woman was young enough to be his great-granddaughter.

  But as he reinserted the earplugs, I noticed that red jellied blobs plugged everyone’s ears—the office workers, the green woman, Wyatt. Everyone.

  “Thing is,” Cowboy said, “I wouldn’t wish this mess on a dog I hated. A body can’t even look out the window without—”

  “Don’t whine to me about it,” said the green woman. “The situation here is isolated; that means it’s not a town concern. Besides, Wyatt’s already contained the problem. Against all sanction, as usual.”

  “Contained?” Wyatt said. “Is t
hat why everybody’s over there crying over a glass statue?”

  But the green woman ignored him. “Wyatt even made you earplugs,” she told Cowboy, “but are you people satisfied? No. Now you want him to play Sir Galahad and slay dragons for you.”

  “They ain’t anything like dragons, Shoko,” Wyatt said, refusing to be ignored. “Besides, I done it before.”

  “And you see what’s happened?” said Shoko, slapping her hand against the counter. “Now they want you to do everything for ’em.”

  “I’m not doing everything. Just this one thing. And if I don’t do it, who the hell will? The Mortmaine have bigger fish to fry, and these guys can’t do what we do.”

  But Shoko wasn’t impressed. “It’s not our responsibility.”

  “What about Ed?” asked one of the women by the statue.

  “Do we look like we’re in the storage business?” Shoko shrieked.

  I sidled away from her.

  “Have his people come for him!”

  “Does he have people?” Wyatt asked in a more reasonable tone.

  “I already called his wife,” the woman began, but the rest was lost in tears.

  “And stop puling!” said Shoko. “The transy’s keeping it together better than you are.”

  The sudden silence again caught my attention, and I looked up from my completed forms to find them watching me.

  “She probably don’t even know what’s going on,” said the mascara-streaked woman defensively. “And never mind that she’s Rosalee’s daughter.”

  Wyatt’s and Shoko’s mouths dropped in unison. They drew together, argument forgotten in their astonishment. “Our Rosalee?” Shoko flipped her hair out of the way to get a better look at me. “But she’s so …”

  So what? So disgusting that words failed her?

  I took the forms Cowboy had printed for me and huffed out of the office.

  “Wait!” Cowboy called. “Your earplugs!”

  Chapter Five

  It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

  I let the soothing mantra run a loop in my brain as I entered my first-period geometry class. The teacher, Ms. Harrison, a friendly-looking woman with a tattoo of a dodecahedron inked onto the nape of her neck, was dressed in black like her students.

  Like everyone at the school but me.

  With the black rain gear stashed in my locker, I stood out in my purple dress like a bird of paradise among crows.

  It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

  “Hey there,” Ms. Harrison greeted me.

  “Hello. I’m supposed to give you this.” I handed her my schedule.

  Ms. Harrison took it and smiled at me, which I appreciated, even though she was just a teacher.

  “Class, we have a new student. Hanna Jarva …” She looked up from the schedule, turning to me for help.

  “Järvinen. The J makes a Y sound.”

  “What an unusual name!”

  “It’s Finnish.”

  “I wondered about the accent,” Ms. Harrison said, signing the schedule. “I would’ve guessed Russian. You hear that, class? Hanna’s joining us all the way from Finland. How cool is that? Sweetheart, why don’t you take the empty seat next to Carmin? Carmin, watch her while I get her a book and some earplugs.”

  A boy sitting near the back of the room with cobalt blue glasses and hair as red as his name gave Ms. Harrison a thumbs-up before she disappeared into a closet near her desk.

  The gaze of thirty pairs of eyes swept over me like a chilly waft of air.

  I walked to my desk, feeling as though I’d been thrust into the spotlight and now needed to do something—act, sing, juggle, and quickly—before I got booed offstage. I smiled, looked everyone in the eyes, let them marvel at my prettiness. Everyone wanted to be friends with pretty people.

  Everyone except Ms. Harrison’s geometry class.

  I was smiling so widely my ears hurt, but no one smiled back. I intercepted leers here and there, but mostly the kids had this look of unholy anticipation, like a pack of hyenas sizing up a lone gazelle.

  I stopped smiling and sat.

  “What’s with the purple?” Carmin asked, practically into my ear.

  I turned to face him.

  He wore a T-shirt with the words DISCO FEVER stamped across it in silver. A carefully knotted silk tie lay against the shirt, and he played with it as he watched me.

  “What’s with the black?” I said.

  “Ain’t safe to draw attention to yourself. Ain’t safe to stand out.”

  I stared at the other kids in the class, who weren’t even pretending not to listen—they did seem to blend into one another.

  “This is the only color available to me at the moment,” I told Carmin. “I’m in mourning.”

  He smirked. “We’re all in mourning.”

  “For who?”

  He reached forward and snapped one of my dress straps. “Stupid transies who never listen.”

  But he was wrong.

  I heard it clearly:

  COMECOMECOMECOMECOMECOMECOME

  I stood before one of the windows on the right side of the classroom, straining forward, my fingertips inches from the rain-streaked glass, but I couldn’t close the distance.

  “Nice save, Carmin,” someone said, setting a fallen chair upright.

  Carmin had the sash of my dress in a death grip as he reeled me in and half carried me back to my seat.

  A path of destruction led from where I’d been sitting to the windows—overturned desks, books and notebooks scattered on the floor along with one or two disgruntled kids, who climbed to their feet and dusted themselves off.

  Had I done all that in my inexplicable dash for the window? I didn’t even remember leaving my desk. I was afraid to meet anyone’s eyes.

  “Hey, Carmin?” a girl whispered, as he dumped me back into my chair. “The transy looks spooked. Why don’t you give her a little something to calm her down?”

  “Because,” said Carmin behind me, “drug dealing is against the law.”

  For some reason, everyone found this hilarious.

  “Let’s gamble instead.”

  “Yeah,” someone else whispered, “cuz gambling’s totally legal.” More laughter.

  “Seriously,” Carmin continued. “Transies can’t handle weird shit, that’s known. Who wants to bet this transy freaks and runs outta here screaming?”

  My classmates cut their eyes at me, waiting for some big meltdown.

  Who the hell did they think I was? My life was a continuum of weird shit. I’d just gone on a rampage, for Christ’s sake—they were the ones who should have been freaking out.

  “I say she faints,” said a girl to my left.

  “This ain’t Gone with the Wind. Nobody faints anymore.”

  Money exchanged hands in a flurry of fevered whispers and speculations.

  If I had been caught running amok at my old school, I’d have been sent to the nurse’s office, the nurse would have called Aunt Ulla, and then Aunt Ulla would have called my shrink. Here they just laughed and made bets.

  Rosalee’s words came back to me: Even if you were Hannibal Lecter himself, around here you’re nothing special.

  Ms. Harrison appeared beside me and placed a well-worn book on my desk. “Here you go. And here are your earplugs.” She shoved the cold, waxy things into my ears herself, like she didn’t trust me. Not that I could blame her after my rampage.

  “Okay, class,” she said. “Turn to page thirty-two.”

  That’s when I noticed that the book Ms. Harrison had given me wasn’t a geometry book. On the cover, a young girl smiled benignly beneath the title, A Teen’s Guide to Living with Bipolar Disorder.

  I opened the book to page thirty-two and squinted at the multiple-choice questions.

  12. All work and no play makes Hanna ______.

  a. eat Cheerios c. go crazy

  b. limp awkwardly d. very sad

  I circled d and closed the book just in time to see the cover g
irl clap her hands over her ears, a pained expression on her face. I bent close to the book, close enough to envy the sparkly red lip gloss coloring the cover girl’s mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

  “Can’t you hear that?” the cover girl asked. Her voice was flylike, wee and buzzy.

  “Hear what?”

  “Of course you can’t hear it.” Her little face pinched with bitterness. “You’ve got those precious earplugs. At least let me borrow one. Please?” She held out her hands and showed me the blood staining her doll-like palms, blood that had come from her ears.

  Her poor ears.

  I removed my right earplug and placed it on the book cover, curious whether the cover girl could reach outside the confines of her two-dimensional world to grab it.

  comecomecomecomecomecomecomecomecomecomecome

  A bolt of lightning sizzled, and for a second, the windows were full of color. Marvelous color. The voices—!

  “Oh no, you don’t.” Carmin hauled me back into my chair by my dress straps. He couldn’t get enough of my dress straps. I reached back and smacked him.

  “What’s the problem back there?” Ms. Harrison called.

  “She took out her earplugs.” Carmin withstood my frenzied attack, snatched the earplug from my desk, and shoved it back in my ear.

  My struggles ceased immediately, and I stared into Carmin’s slap-reddened face. Why had I been fighting him?

  “Hanna.”

  I turned to see Ms. Harrison staring at me from the front of the room. “I only removed one,” I explained, “and only because she asked me. …”

  But the cover girl was gone. The book on my desk was a geometry book with a plain blue cover. Page thirty-two was all about coordinates—nary a multiple-choice question to be seen.

  “Don’t remove either of those earplugs,” Ms. Harrison said. “Not inside this school.”

  If I had ever been more confused in my life, I couldn’t remember it. “But—in the window—weren’t there—?”

  “Ignore the things in the window.”