The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“I don’t know! Bowl?” I sputter.

She looks desperately into my face, her nostrils flared, and for a fleeting second I’m worried she’s going to hit me on purpose this time.

But instead she drops my shirt and throws her head back and laughs.

When she laughs, her whole body shakes, and she opens her mouth so wide, I can see her molars. I grin out of one side of my mouth, watching, unsure what’s going on.

She wraps her arms around her waist, holding herself until her laughter collapses into a fit of hiccups. “Oh my God”—she wipes a tear from her eyes and smiles at me—“they sleep, Wes. Rip van Winkles sleep.”

I’m still smiling at her, not sure what’s so funny. Is she trying to tell me she lives on the street? Does she sleep in this alley?

“Are you saying this is where you . . . sleep?” I ask gently.

Her smile fades.

I knew it.

“Sort of,” she says quietly. “You really can’t see?”

She’s pointing at a marble slab built into the wall of the overgrown garden. There’s writing on it, but it’s too shady in the park for me to read. I shrug at her, helplessly.

She rolls her eyes. With a long, resigned sigh she sinks to the sidewalk, leaning her back against the locked garden gate with her knees drawn up. She looks up into the sky. A traffic copter goes chopping by overhead, and her eyebrows rise.

I sit down next to her. I’ve already made up my mind that if she needs me to smuggle her into my dorm for the last week of summer school, it’s no problem, and Eastlin can just deal with it. I mean, she may not want to share my bunk or whatever, but I guess I can sleep on the floor for a week. I indulge in a brief fantasy of us together in my bunk, her bare feet pressed to mine, talking about movies under the musky breath of the air conditioner.

“So,” she begins, not looking at me. “Remember how I said I last had my cameo at the Grand Aquatic Display?”

“Uh-huh,” I say, watching her face.

“You’ve never heard of that, have you?” she asks the treetops arching over us.

“No,” I say. It’s not like she has to remind me about parties I wasn’t invited to. I am already well aware of all the parties I’m not invited to.

“You don’t know anything about it. Not where it was held, what it was for, nothing.”

I flush. “I already said I didn’t.”

“So you don’t know when it was,” she presses.

“No idea,” I say.

She laughs, but it’s a dry laugh.

Then she levels her bottomless black eyes at me.

“It was in October. October twenty-seventh.”

Huh. That’s a while ago. Seems like if her cameo’s been lost since then, it’s staying lost. “So?” I ask. “It’s been lost for a long time. No big deal. We can still try and find it.”

“Wes,” she says with a sad smile. “The Grand Aquatic Display, which is the last place where I wore my cameo, and which is the last thing I remember being before I woke up in my parents’ house? It was a huge celebration put on by my father’s company. They’d been planning it for months. The whole city decked out and celebrating, you can’t even imagine how big. How many people. All the fireworks, and the lights. Bunting on every building. Newspapers, the governor, the mayor, Aborigines in breechcloths and paint. It was held the night of October twenty-seventh, 1825. Two nights from now.”





CHAPTER 4


I feel like I’m on five-minute tape delay. But there the idea is, it’s back, and it’s burst through a door in my brain and now I see that it’s the truth.

That’s how she could get into my locked room. She doesn’t need a key.

“What?” I ask, struggling to keep up.

“Asleep,” she says, giving me a meaningful look. Then she glances over her shoulder. “In there. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”