Элизабет Чандлер - Soulmates

With her chin held high and her cloud of curly blond hair tossed back from her face, Ivy shut the school counselor's door and walked down the hall. Several guys from the swim team turned to stare as she moved toward her locker. Ivy forced herself to return their glances and to look confident. The pants and top she wore for the first day of the school year had been selected by Suzanne, her oldest friend and fashion expert.

Too bad Suzanne didn't pick out a matching bag to go over my head, Ivy thought. She walked past the senior class bulletin board. People whispered. People pointed her out with small nods. She should have expected it.

Anyone whom Tristan Carruthers had fallen for would be pointed out Anyone who had been with Tristan the night he was killed would be whispered about. So naturally, anyone who had tried to kill herself because she couldn't get over Tristan's death would be pointed to and whispered about and watched very, very carefully. And that was what everyone said about Ivy: brokenhearted, she had taken some pills, then tried to throw herself in front of a train.

She could remember only the brokenhearted part, the long summer after the car accident, the nightmares with the deer crashing through the windshield. Three weeks ago she'd had another of her nightmares and had woken up screaming. All she could recall from that night was being comforted by her step-brodier, Gregory, then falling asleep, looking at Tristan's photo. That photo, her favorite picture of Tristan, in which he was wearing his old school jacket and a baseball cap backward on his head, haunted her now. It had haunted her even before she'd heard her little brother's strange account of that night.

Philip's story of an angel saving her hadn't convinced her family or the police that this wasn't a suicide attempt And how could she deny taking a drug that had shown up in the hospital's blood tests? How could she argue against the train engineer's statement to the police mat he wouldn't have been able to stop in time?

"Chick, chick, chick." A soft quivering voice interrupted Ivy's thoughts.

"Who wants to play chick, chick, chick?"

He was calling to her from the shadowy space beneath the stairs. Ivy knew it was Gregory's best friend, Eric Ghent. She kept on walking.

"Chick, chick, chick…"

When she didn't react he emerged from the dark stairwell, looking like a skeleton startled out of his tomb.

His wispy blond hair lay in strings across his high forehead, and his eyes looked like pale blue marbles set in bony sockets. Ivy had not seen Eric for the last three weeks; she suspected that Gregory had kept his jeering friend away from her.

Now Eric moved quickly enough to block her path.

"Why didn't you do it?" he asked. "Lose your nerve? Why didn't you go ahead and kill yourself?"

"Disappointed?" Ivy asked back.

"Chick, chick, chick," he said softly, tauntingly.

"Leave me alone, Eric." Ivy walked faster.

"Uh-uh. Not now." He grabbed her wrist, his thin fingers wrapping tightly around her arm. "You can't blow me off now, Ivy. You and I have too much in common."

"We have nothing in common," she replied, pulling away from him.

"Gregory," he said, tapping one of his fingers. "Drugs." He ticked off a second item. "And we're both champions of the game of chicken." He grabbed a third finger and wiggled it. "We're buddies now."

Ivy kept walking, though she wanted to run. Eric bobbed along with her.

"Tell your good buddy," he said, "what made you want to do it? What were you thinking when you saw that train rushing down the track at you? Were you stoked? What kind of trip was it?"

Ivy felt repulsed by his questions. It seemed impossible to think she would have deliberately jumped in front of the train. She had lost Tristan, but there were still people in her life she cared deeply about-Philip, her mother, Suzanne and Beth, and Gregory, who had protected her and comforted her after Tristan's death. Gregory had been through a lot himself, his mother having committed suicide the month before Tristan died. Ivy had seen the pain and anger caused by that death, and it seemed totally crazy to her that she would try the same thing.

But everyone said she had. Gregory said so.

"How many times do I have to tell you? I can't remember what happened that night, Eric. I can't."

"But you will," he said with a quiet laugh. "Sooner or later, you will."

Then he stepped away from her and turned back, like a dog that had reached the end of its territory. Ivy continued toward her and her friends' lockers, ignoring more curious stares. She hoped that Suzanne and Beth were finished with their senior orientation meetings.

"Ivy didn't need to look at the locker numbers to find Suzanne Goldstein's new nesting place. Suzanne wasn't there, but the locker was being fumigated with an open bottle of her favorite perfume, which guided Ivy-and all guys interested in leaving Suzanne a note-directly to the spot Suzanne had found three new guys to date recently, but Beth and Ivy knew it was just a ploy to make Gregory jealous.

Beth Van Dyke's locker, which was close to Ivy's this year, already had a piece of paper sticking out of it, but it probably wasn't a note from an admiring hunk. More likely, she had shut the door on a scrap of a steamy romance, one of the many that filled her notebooks.

Ivy went ahead to her own locker to drop off her new books. Kneeling down, she dialed the combination and pulled open the door. She gasped.

Taped inside her door was a photograph of Tristan, the same picture that had haunted her for the past three weeks. For a moment she couldn't breathe. How had it gotten there?

Frantically she recalled everything she had done that morning: roll call in homeroom, then a general assembly, then- the school store, and finally a meeting with the counselor. She ran over the list twice, but she couldn't remember taping the photo to the door. Was she really losing her mind?

Ivy closed her eyes and leaned against the door. I'm crazy, she thought.

I'm really crazy.

"Am I nuts, Gregory?" she had asked three weeks earlier as she stood in her bedroom on her first day home from the hospital She held Tristan's photograph in her trembling hands. Gregory gently took the picture away from her, giving it to Philip, her nine-year-old savior.

"You're going to get better, Ivy. That much I'm sure of," Gregory said, drawing her down on the bed next to him, putting his arm around her.

"Meaning I'm crazy now."

Gregory didn't answer right away. She had noticed the change in him when he came to see her at the hospital. His dark hair was combed perfectly, as always, and his handsome face was like a mask, just as it had been when she first met him, his light gray eyes hiding his deepest thoughts.

"It's a hard thing to understand, Ivy," he said carefully. "It's hard to know exactly what you were thinking at the time." He glanced over at Philip, who was setting the framed photo on the bureau. "And Philip's story sure doesn't help much."

Her brother responded with a stubborn glare.

"Maybe now that no one else is around, you can tell us what really happened, Philip," Gregory said.

Philip glanced up at the two empty shelves where Ivy's collection of angels had once stood. He had the statues now. Ivy had given them to him on the condition that he would never again talk about angels.

"I already told you."

"Try again," Gregory said, his voice low and tense.

"Please, Philip." Ivy reached out for his hand. "It'll help me."

He let her hold his hand loosely. She knew he was tired of being interrogated, first by the police, then by the doctors at the hospital, then by their mother and Gregory's father, Andrew.