The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

Maddie.

She wants to know what we’re doing tonight.

A knot of guilt ties itself in my stomach. It’s a pretty unfamiliar feeling, too, given that for most of high school girls didn’t seem to know I existed. I was always the guy that girls would take to dances as friends when the guy they were really interested in was going with someone else. If my high school girlfriend knew I was now juggling two girls at once she’d laugh so hard she’d probably get a nosebleed. I text back with my left hand that I can meet her at the same bar we went to before if she wants.

When? She wants to know.

I chew my lip, and then suggest seven. Tyler’s looking over my shoulder, but in the glare I don’t think he can see what I’m doing.

“Well?” he prods me.

I shove the phone back in my pocket and smile.

“All right,” I say. “Sure. Come on.”

I stride away from the library, turning right and heading downtown, away from Washington Square.

“Where’re we going?” Tyler asks as he trots alongside me.

“I think,” I say, “that she’s able to find me, no matter where I am. She showed up in my room late last night, but I’d never told her where I was staying.”

“She did? Wow. Did you freak?” Tyler asks with a grin. “Was it like that scene in that movie, where the woman’s floating over the guy with her hair streaming behind her and then she goes invisible and then his belt starts undoing itself and his eyes roll up in the back of his head?”

“God! No! Shut up!” I smack him on the arm, laughing. “Jeez.”

Tyler laughs.

“But that’s me assuming she has control over where she goes,” I say. “Right? And we don’t know for sure that she does. So let’s say she doesn’t. She wouldn’t just show up somewhere random, would she? No. She’d show up where she’s comfortable.”

Tyler’s nodding along with my logic, his hands shoved in the pockets of his skinny black jeans. “So. Where’s she most comfortable?” he asks.

We’re making good time now, and we jog across Broadway to Great Jones Street, heading for the Bowery. I look at Tyler, somehow completely certain that I’m right.

And I say, “She’d go home.”





CHAPTER 8


I am laughing so hard I almost can’t catch my breath. My whole body is shaking with it, and I’m starting to get a stitch in my side. Oh, it’s perfect! I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out sooner. How can I have been so stupid?

My father looks down on me, his sallow face twisted.

“Annatje, get ahold of yourself,” he says, eyes shifting left and right as though afraid someone’s going to burst in on us and accuse him of something.

“What for?” I cry, laughing so hard that tears are squeezing out of my eyes and rolling down my cheeks. “Are you afraid, Papa?”

“What! No!” he raises his voice and grabs hold of my upper arm as though to shake me back to my senses. The beggar woman outside the drawing room window shades her eyes with her hands to peer in at the commotion.

The laughter rises in my chest until I’m screeching, hyena-like, at the peeling plaster rosettes that decorate Aunt Mehitable’s drawing room ceiling.

“Stop it!” he shouts, rattling me back and forth. “Stop it this instant!”

I swallow my guffaws and smile prettily up at him. “They were right, about you,” I tell him.

The drawing room door flies open and we’re met with the shocked face of my aunt. Her eyes jump between my father and me, and quickly land on the woman spying in on us through the window.

“What’s all this, then?” she asks. “Mr. Van Sinderen? Is everything all right?”

My father releases my upper arm, and I stagger sideways with the force of it, reaching up to rub the bruise that’s been pressed into the flesh under my nightgown sleeve. My aunt hurries to the window and slaps the curtains closed. She folds her arms and stares accusingly at us.