“Stands away, everyone,” Miss Moody, our music teacher, calls out as students begin filing toward the door. “Chorus is in this room first period.” She comes over to where I’m sitting, putting away the pieces of my flute. “I’d like you to work on that first movement over the weekend, Eleanor. And do those exercises I gave you last week in our lesson. You need to strengthen your embouchure if you are going to hit the high C. We wouldn’t want you to go sharp, would we?”
I like Miss Moody, but she can be so annoying. I pull on my down jacket, shove my flute in my book bag.
It’s only four thirty, but already it feels as if night is falling. I hate Daylight Savings. The late October wind bites through my clothes as I trudge home alone down Madison Avenue. At Eighty-eighth Street, I stop at the stationery store to get a 3 Musketeers bar. When I exit the store, a young guy is leaning against the wall of the building. He is tall, his face covered in acne scars, wearing a Varsity basketball jacket—St. Christopher’s, the Catholic high school in our neighborhood.
“Hey.” He smiles at me, so I smile back. “Nice tits,” he says as I walk past him.
“I’m wearing a parka, moron.” But I hunch my shoulders and walk away as fast as I can, down the darkening street. I’d run, but I know better than to look afraid. I’m waiting to cross at the light when I hear footsteps behind me. It’s him, and he has a twisted, creepy smile on his face. I look around for a grown-up to walk with, but there’s no one else on the street. He reaches into his pocket. He has a switchblade.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” he hisses.
Cars are coming in both directions, but going into the traffic seems the safest option. A Checker cab barely misses me, and the driver rolls down his window to shout. But I keep going, running so hard that the cold air burns my lungs. At the bottom of the hill I make a sharp turn and run into the lobby of a doorman building.
“Can I help you, miss?”
I can’t catch my breath. “There’s a guy following me,” I gasp.
The doorman goes out onto the street, looks both ways. “No one out here,” he says.
I sit down on a radiator bench.
“Is there someone you’d like me to call?”
“No, thank you,” I say. Mum is sitting in on Leo’s sound check at the Village Gate. It’s Thursday, so Conrad will still be at wrestling practice. “I live around the corner.”
The doorman checks the street again and gives me the thumbs-up. “All clear, miss.”
I follow him out and look down the block toward Park Avenue. There’s a church on the corner. Its lights are on.
“I’ll be okay,” I say.
But the moment I hear the heavy doors closing behind me, I wish I had stayed put. I walk down the street checking every stairwell, walking close to the cars. The Christmas trees are already up on the center islands of Park Avenue, their fairy lights making a path down the middle of the avenue, all the way to Grand Central. In the spring, beds of tulips bloom there. They come back every year with the cherry blossoms. On our block, the tulips are bright red. When their petals begin to fall, they leave behind rows and rows of naked stalks crowned with small black clusters that look like eyelashes.
When I turn onto Park, he is there, waiting for me in the shadows, his back up against the wall of the church. His hand darts out and grabs my arm. “Here, kitty, kitty.” He flicks open his switchblade.
We’ve been watching public service messages in school. Short black-and-white movies that warn us about rubella, eating lead paint chips, the dangers of heroin, the importance of self-defense. And I remember, now, that I am meant to face my attacker.
“I don’t like Catholic boys,” I say. “They have pink skin. It’s disgusting.” I look directly into his mean, close-set eyes, his acne-scarred face. I stab the instep of his foot with the heel of my shoe as hard as I can. And then I run—panting, terrified, harder than I have ever run in my life—until I reach the safety of home.
5:00 P.M.
“I need to get back.” I stand up and brush the sand off.
“I want to show you something first.”
“I told Finn I’d take him canoeing.”
“Ten minutes.”
I follow him along the top of the dune to where it reaches the edge of the woods. He takes my hand and plunges us into the tree line. Jonas stops in front of an overgrown thicket. “Here.”
There’s nothing but a rage of green.
“Look underneath.”