Cobwebs Read online

  “Want to jump?” asked Mina.

  “No.” With an eye on Niko, Nancy wrapped the jump rope around her hands, flipping and popping it into the form of a cat’s cradle. She held it up to Mina. “Know what to do?”

  But Mina didn’t know cat’s cradle. “Show me?” she said.

  “Another time,” said Niko.

  “Gotta go,” said Nancy. She rose, stuffing the jump rope into her backpack. She tapped the pole of the fish kite along the sidewalk jauntily. Have I made myself a target? she asked herself. That was the point: now she would no longer be invisible to Niko. Well, at least there are two angels now, she reassured herself shakily. Maybe three. Maybe a fourth, with red wings. Why did it matter so much what Niko thought? It did.

  Nancy leaned the pole of the fish kite over her shoulder, and let it ride the wind just over her head as she headed for the bridge back to Brooklyn. She ought to be a normal girl like Annette, thinking about the dance tomorrow night, shopping for a dress after dinner with her mother. Imagine Rachel staying out long enough for dinner and a dress. Nancy felt everything but normal. Normal girls thought of dancing at dances, that’s when they felt like dancing, not when they turned the corner by City Hall and started walking up the ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  It was really spring now, no doubt about it. Practically summer. Nancy’s green kite battled and blew, swimming against the warm current of wind.

  Nancy blamed Annette that she couldn’t get that dance out of her mind, blamed her pretty shaved legs, blamed the girls in homeroom, Shamiqua and the rest.

  “James is gonna pick me up at eight,” Annette had said to Shamiqua this morning. “Think he’ll bring me a gardenia/a camelia/a lobelia?”

  Sounds like Ophelia, thought Nancy. A loony girl who trusts the wrong boy. It happens.

  “He’s so sweet/real neat/complete.”

  Smelly feet. Try cornstarch.

  “Jenny says she’s going in a limo/a Lincoln/a Caddy.”

  She lies! Thinks so much of herself, that girl.

  “A Boxster/a Roadster/a—”

  “A monster,” Nancy had said out loud. Quasimodo.

  They’d all stopped and looked at her face, then resumed, slower.

  “Yeah, we’re just taking the train.”

  “The taxi.”

  “The bus.”

  “We’re walking.”

  “How about Nancy?” they’d asked Annette, as if she were a deaf moron. “She coming?”

  “Me?” Nancy spoke for herself. “Bet you wish you knew.”

  “Yeah? How you getting there?” asked Shamiqua.

  Over the roofs, she said to herself. I’m going to just drop myself down on a little woven string….

  “She coming?”

  “Are you?” Annette had asked, right in front of them all.

  “Who you coming with?”

  My Dion, thought Nancy, and nearly died of embarrassment right there in homeroom, though she hadn’t said the words aloud.

  “Oh, come on, ’Nette. You know Nancy’d never come.” That was Shamiqua, of course.

  “Whatsa matter, Nancy? You don’t like to dance?”

  Just because I’ve never danced doesn’t mean I don’t like to.

  Out in the middle of the bridge she told herself she didn’t care. Nancy couldn’t be anything but joyful here, strung between Brooklyn and Manhattan, on a web her great-great-great-grandfather had spun.

  I like to dance. I do like to dance. I would like to—

  “Weird chick, what you doing with that Chinese kite?”

  31

  Nancy jumped about a foot. Dion, brown as dust, gray as air, blue as sky, sat on the rail at the foot of the Manhattan-side tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Act normal, she told herself. Not Nancy-normal, but human-normal. Annette-normal.

  “I’ve been shopping,” she said. She held the kite high. “And my name’s not Weird Chick.”

  “No, it’s Nancy Greene-Kara. You think I don’t know?”

  There couldn’t be any place safer, really, than this bridge, this giant brown web in the big blue sky, the rose and gray and green city all around, people everywhere and airplanes and helicopters, all of New York City to hide in, and just her and Dion in the center of it. “You think I don’t know you’re Dion Papadopolis?”

  The paleness went out of his eyes and some deepness came in, so that instead of the washed-out blue of April sky, his eyes became more like the East River reflecting it, a blue-gray with a mood or message beneath it. Nancy’s knees wobbled along with the traffic on the bridge. She leaned hard on the rail.

  “You finally remembered my name,” he said.

  “I’ve remembered your name since the first time you told me,” she said, “but you never told me your last name. I figured that out myself.”

  “Congratulations.”

  She could see that she made him nervous. He wanted her to keep walking, she thought, just go away now. Maybe it was the setting, but she felt different around him today, closed off.

  “And your father’s Niko Papadopolis. And your sister’s Wilhelmina Papadopolis. And your mother”— she’d saved her for last—“is Rose.”

  She knew too much. He hadn’t counted on her hunting him the way he’d hunted her. She knew this in her head, but her body was telling her nothing. None of the usual shivers or vibrations, just the dull shuddering of the bridge as the cars thundered over it on the roadway below. Nancy cried out to him from inside, What’s wrong? But he didn’t seem to hear.

  The silence stretched out between them like the cables between the bridge towers, going a long, long way. She wondered what she could ask that would make him go. The kite dragged at her hands, pulling with the wind. She wondered what she could ask, instead, that would make him stay. “Do you like to dance?” Nancy heard her mouth say to Dion.

  “Do I like to dance?” He was as astonished as she was.

  She danced there on the brown bridge, gray Wall Street people and multicolored biker dudes and fashion models and freaks walking by, a black barge and a red tugboat making their way shoulder to shoulder down the river underneath, white traffic helicopters buzzing overhead, and, over there in the harbor, the orange Staten Island Ferry crossing in front of the mint green Statue of Liberty. She felt dizzy from all the motion. “The twist? The monkey? The swim? The cha-cha? Cotton-Eyed Joe? A little head-banging?”

  “The mashed potato,” said Dion quietly, and did a little hand dance, as if he remembered it vaguely. The water and sky were blue, and Dion was blue.

  “There’s a dance at my school tomorrow,” she said. Seen that Nancy at the dance with that Ghost Boy? Seen how his eyebrows aren’t there? Seen how still he is? Seen how she dances? A slow dance, thought Nancy. His arms around me. “But I’m not going,” she said, retreating.

  “Never? Ever?”

  She shook her head. “I’m different from them. The girls—”

  “What’s so different about you?”

  “You know,” she told him. She hopped up to sit on the rail, testing her nerve. She caught his eyes with hers. The kite rippled in the wind above their heads. Frizz pulled out of Nancy’s braids and blew over her cheeks, in her mouth, and everywhere. What am I keeping it all tied up for? She cupped his cheek in her hand, felt how he’d had to shave there as well as the rest of his head, felt him lean his cool cheek into her hand as if he didn’t mind that her hand was sweaty from her long walk and the climb up the bridge and the dancing. At least her hands hadn’t lost their way of sensing things.

  Wait. Was it her legs that had felt things before? Yes. Yes. The vibrations she felt were just from the cars. Beneath that, or above that, or wherever she’d gotten used to gathering information, there was nothing.

  Because I shaved? Nancy was alarmed. I’ve lost my senses, she said to herself, and made an effort to use what there was in her hands and eyes.

  She zoomed in on Dion as if she were a lens, and she saw that he wasn’t wearing his long coat
today—too warm—only worn old jeans and his dusty shoes, and, under a faded jeans shirt (like the kind his father wore), his Alta, Utah, shirt. He calmed her. “Have you ever been to Alta, Utah?” she asked him.

  He smiled, his cheek coming up under her hand.

  “No,” he said. “I stole the shirt off a clothesline.”

  “Criminal,” she said.

  She didn’t know how she had the nerve to keep her hand on his cheek, how she found the nerve to put the other hand on his other cheek. “But—”

  “But what?” His eyes on hers were so sweet, and the kite made luffing noises.

  “What difference would growing your hair make?” She wondered if it was like the difference her hair made.

  All he heard was sympathy. “It makes a difference to me!” he said loudly, and threw off her hands. A lady pushing a stroller scuttled by, in a hurry to pass the scary teenagers.

  Nancy thought to say, It won’t make a difference to your mother, but didn’t. The kite bounced off the netting around the tower.

  Dion said, as he had that time on the dome, “Sorry.”

  She nodded.

  “I sort of like you,” she said. “God knows why. You’re weird as anything, and I hate the creepy way you lurk around following me. You could just ask me to go somewhere, you know, instead of spying on me.”

  “Like you’d go.”

  Smile. “Not if I didn’t want to.”

  “Then I’d have to try—”

  “What?” She looked him sharply in the eye.

  “To make you want to.”

  “It’s just—I do want to.” She hurried on, don’t stop me now, I don’t lose my mind that often and I don’t know when it’ll happen again. He looked surprised, pleased. He turned away from the city to look up at the fish kite and the webbing and the tall bridge tower and the sky. Her glance swept over his shoulders, and she thought they seemed stronger, that again he seemed taller. She wanted to touch him again, but he’d turned away; she stared all the harder. “It’s just, you’re the most interesting person I’ve met so far. Even if it’s only because you’re so weird.” Nancy jumped down from the rail. It was a big jump, but she landed as smooth as silk, her knees like shock absorbers. Or was it the suspension bridge that absorbed the shock of her jump?

  “Come back,” said Dion in a voice she hadn’t heard. His voice was low and thrumming music like the cables that resonated, singing low chords along with the motors of the cars crossing the bridge.

  Somehow she made herself turn for home, tossing her backpack over her shoulder.

  “There are more things I have to do first,” shouted Dion into the wind.

  She whirled and called back, “Like what?”

  He held his hands up to the air. “There are things I have to know.”

  “Like your father wants to know? Things like that?”

  He looked stunned. Because she was right? Oh, God, she thought. All this spider stuff I’ve been saying, my version of flirting. All it’s done is given us away to them, worse than walking right up to Niko and telling him I’m the Angel’s daughter.

  She walked away from him as fast as she could, out over the barest widest openest part of the bridge where the cables dipped low. Was he following? She couldn’t tell without turning back completely. She was almost to the center before she dared one swift glance around to see Dion still sitting on the rail, blue-gray against the rose-shadowed skyline.

  Oh. Her stomach dipped. She had so wanted him to follow her. There had never been anything in the city—the world!—like him and never would be again.

  She whirled to face him. “Hey! Spider!” And, reeling, she stepped into the bike lane and got pasted by a bike messenger going forty miles an hour.

  32

  When she came to, she was draped like a little kid over Dion’s shoulders, riding him down the narrow steps that led off the bridge to Cadman Plaza. Cold. Hurt. Confused. Her leg hurt. There was hot liquid running down it.

  “Stop!”

  Dion turned and let her down onto the steps. It was dirty there, dark and smelly. Nancy thought she might throw up.

  “Put your head down!” Dion said, and pushed her head between her knees. Orange spots whirled inside her eyelids, but she did not faint again.

  “My backpack?” she asked, thinking, Knitting. Sweater. Clothespins. “My kite?”

  “Kite’s lost,” Dion said. “I’ll get you another one sometime. But your backpack’s here.”

  Honestly. He’d been carrying her on his back and her pack on his arm. He must have been some strong for someone so thin.

  He was on his knees, watching her face. When she looked down, big mistake: she saw her thigh. That biker must have plowed directly into her, his wheel smashing into her leg. Her skirt blew out of the way. One of Annette’s striped socks was in tatters. Nancy’s thigh bore an incredible gash, the skin around it pale and shaven, with goosebumps like a plucked chicken. She pushed her skirt down, mortified.

  Dion saw. “Don’t do that!” he said. “Keep the air on it.” He stood up and looked around. People bustled past them on the stairway, annoyed at the obstruction.

  Nancy tried to stand. It was rough, sore, hot, flaming—

  “Will you let me—” He touched his shoulder. “I was carrying you. You passed out.”

  Nancy didn’t want to be carried. She really, really didn’t want to. She took a few steps, but it was hardly worth it, it hurt so much, and it made her bleed more.

  He turned and lifted her onto his back.

  “How can you—” Her voice was shaken apart by his steps and by the fainting feeling that came over her every time she thought of her leg, the skin, the cut, the shaved hair.

  Somehow he got her to her house. She didn’t ask how he knew where it was. “Mama!” she called as Dion banged on the door, and they practically fell into the basement apartment, collapsed into chairs in the kitchen.

  “Oh, my Lord,” Mama said when she saw what had been done to Nancy. She was out the door in two seconds, up the stairs in three. But it took a few whole minutes to bring Granny Tina down to the ground floor.

  Granny ought to have been in the wheelchair, Nancy could see that right away. Dion could have carried her down, maybe but Mama had helped her. And, judging by the expression on Granny’s face when she saw Dion, she wouldn’t have gone anywhere with him.

  “Here?” she said to him in a dark and thunderous voice like nothing Nancy had ever heard. “Does your father know?”

  Dion shook his head as though he were dizzy. He had only seen the Wound Healer once, and didn’t know she had glimpsed him in Rose’s hallway. He said, “It’s Nancy I’m here for.”

  “Nancy!”

  Some kind of steel came into Granny Tina. She leaned hard on the counter.

  “I need you up here, Nancy.”

  Dion helped her up, his hands on her waist, and for a moment she put her hands to his head. Granny elbowed him out of the way, and lifted Nancy’s skirt to find the cut. “Oh, honey,” she said. “What’s this you’ve done?” She stroked Nancy’s shaved calf.

  “Dion brought me home,” Nancy told her, not answering. “He carried me all the way.”

  “From where?”

  “The Brooklyn Bridge,” said Dion stubbornly, though Nancy was sure he knew she didn’t want him to tell. “She got hit by a biker.”

  “Carried you?” Granny straightened and regarded both Dion and Nancy with her darkest eyes. “Rachel, you take care of her.”

  Rachel was already at the sink, readying cloths and pads and liquids to clean the cut. Now she froze. “No!” she said ardently. She dropped the things onto the counter, leaned her hands on the edge, and glared at Granny. “No, Ma.”

  Granny stood stony as a statue and said: “Rachel.”

  It was as if the air stopped moving in the kitchen. Everyone held their breath, including Dion.

  Grandpa appeared in the doorway. He caught his breath when he saw Dion, and Dion backed toward the
garden door. “You?” Grandpa Joke said.

  Nancy had had enough of this. “I’d never have made it here without Dion,” she told them all. “It’s not his fault some fool of a bike messenger mowed me down. Maybe he should have taken me to the emergency room?” Trickster Nancy, testing them all in front of an outsider.

  “No,” Mama said steadily. “No, he did the right thing.” And she smiled at Dion and said, “I thank you.”

  Granny and Grandpa watched Rachel and decided somehow together, without even exchanging a glance, to give way to her.

  “Well, is somebody going to take care of my leg or what?”

  “Your mother is,” said Grandpa. He handed Nancy a clean sheet to drape over herself. Nancy tucked her shaved legs behind the ends of the sheet to hide them.

  “It’s too much for me,” Rachel protested, seeming so concerned about what they were asking her to do that she didn’t wonder what Nancy was being so modest about.

  “Exactly,” said Granny. She reached out and took Rachel’s hands. “I’m asking you to do it, though. We’re all asking.”

  “Is that best?” asked Dion. How dare he?

  Grandpa touched Dion’s shoulder. “It will be,” he said. “It would take too much out of Tina to do it.”

  Rachel pulled her hands harshly from her mother’s grasp and growled, “Everybody get out.” She stood over the sink, examining her hands—for dirt, Nancy guessed. She kept her back to them, and Nancy saw a tremble in her mother.

  “Yes, Rachel,” said Granny in another voice Nancy had never heard, an accepting voice, a you’re-the-boss voice. Dion went out with the grandparents, and shut the door.

  “All right, Mamba,” Nancy said. “What are you going to do that Granny couldn’t do? Cast a spell?”

  Rachel said, “Hush, Nancy. There’s no magic involved here. It’s just nature.”

  What kind of nature, Nancy was about to see.