Chapter 17
I curl up on my bed and stare at my phone.
I don’t know how to pluck up the courage to call him, but I need to talk to someone who was there, who saw what I saw.
We didn’t meet at lunch after all. Rasmus was summoned to see Ms. Granberg just before. We finish early on Fridays, so that was our last chance to talk before the weekend.
The phone screen glows in the semidarkness. The lamp on my desk casts long shadows across the room.
It’s already pitch black outside. I can’t see anything through the window.
But someone could see inside.
I dismiss this unwelcome thought and pull up his contact details: Rasmus School.
Why did I name him that? It’s not like I know anyone else called Rasmus.
Can I call you?
With sweaty fingertips, I tap send before I can change my mind.
Then I wait. He answers in under a minute.
sure
I hear two rings before he answers. I lean my back against the wall.
“Rasmus.”
“Hey.”
Silence.
“I hope I’m not bothering you,” I say tentatively. I hate how timid I sound. “You’re not busy, are you?”
I have a frog in my throat and try to cough subtly.
“No, it’s cool. Mom and Dad are out; they had something to do on the mainland.”
“Right. Good.”
I have so much to say but don’t know where to begin.
“Did you see Axel’s mom at school today?” he asks out of the blue.
I nod, then realize he can’t see me. Duh.
“Yes.”
“She hasn’t stopped searching. She’s been in the woods, out with the boat, everywhere. They’ve been all around the island too.”
“Gosh.”
I wonder for a minute if Mom would search for me every day if I went missing.
“I was thinking . . .” says Rasmus. I can hear him breathing over the phone. “Maybe we should say something to her. About what happened. Those things we saw . . .”
I’m gripping the phone hard. My palm is sweaty.
“I don’t know,” I say after a pause. “Would she believe us?”
Rasmus sighs.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I wonder if I should go out and search in the woods as well. I was there with Axel. Maybe more will come back to me if I go back but . . .” He trails off.
“I understand,” I say quietly, staring at the floral pattern on my wallpaper.
There’s a large damp stain in one corner.
“Isn’t there something we can do?” he says. “To help?”
“Help with what? Looking for Axel?”
“Yeah, or at least talk to someone. The police are coming back on Monday, remember?”
I hear fear in his voice.
“Talk to the police?” I snap. “Are you out of your mind? We can’t say anything to the police!”
As soon as the words come out of my mouth, I regret it.
“They won’t believe us,” I say in a gentler tone, hoping I didn’t make him angry. “Why would they? You want to tell them that Axel was whisked away by fairies? They’ll just think we’re lying or making jokes.”
Rasmus makes a muffled sound. I can’t hear what it is at first.
He’s laughing.
“If I were going to lie, I’d try to come up with something better,” he says and laughs again.
He goes quiet and I swallow. I don’t want to end the conversation. I’m not ready to hang up just yet.
“Do you miss him?” I manage to squeeze out.
“Yes.” No more laughter. “Yes, of course.”
I regret asking the question. I wish there was something I could say, something that would make him feel better.
“No one asks me about Axel,” he continues in a small voice. “Hanna and Isabelle cry and say they miss him, but they never ask how I feel. They just want me to comfort them.”
I hear him choking back his frustration.
“Axel was my best friend out here, but nobody seems to care. No one asks me how I am, how I’m feeling. Sometimes, when they think I don’t notice, they look at me like . . . like they think I did it.”
I press the phone closer to my ear.
On the opposite wall is a picture of a sunset. My great-grandfather painted it. It’s been hanging over my desk for as long as I can remember.
Such luminous colors.
Axel will probably never see a sunset again.
“I understand how you feel,” I say.
“No, you don’t.”
Rasmus’s voice takes on a new tone, hard and bitter. He sounds broken. He sounds a lot like how I feel when a whole school day has gone by without any of the other students so much as glancing in my direction.
“Believe me,” I say, more sharply this time, “I do.”
Rasmus is silent.
I don’t know if he has run out of things to say or if he’s too upset to continue.
Suddenly, I hear myself say something I’ve never spoken out loud before.
“When I was little, I used to see . . . things. Out in the woods.”
I’ve never told anyone this before. I’ve tried to forget.
“Things that couldn’t have been real, I mean. Which shouldn’t exist.”
“Like fairies?” Rasmus asks with curiosity in his voice.
“Not fairies,” I say. “But other things.”
I don’t want to keep talking, but I do anyway. “Elves. Forest trolls.”
I swallow.
“I tried to tell my parents a few times, but I guess they just thought I was making it up. And who knows—maybe I was.”
My eyes drift over to the window. It’s too dark to see the sea. But I know it’s there, waiting for me.
“When I was little, we had a dog,” I continue. “His name was Taube. I used to play with him at the edge of the woods outside our house. One day when I was five, I came in and told my mom that Taube was hurt. She found a nasty wound by his ear, like he’d been hit by a rock. She went nuts.”
It still hurts to think about it. I get a lump in my throat. I have never gotten over the memory of that day. I was so little, but I remember to this day how frightened I was when Mom got angry. I’d never seen her that furious, and haven’t since. I thought she was going to smack me.
“I tried to explain,” I say after a while. “I hadn’t done anything. It was one of them, a forest troll. I saw it happen. The troll had been frightened by Taube’s barks. But when I told her, it just made Mom even angrier.”
My heart is pounding like a drum. I can’t believe I’m actually telling Rasmus this.
“He healed fine,” I go on. “He lived for four more years. We have another dog now. Bellman. And I wasn’t allowed to take him out at first. Even though it had been like seven or eight years since Taube got hurt, and I was just a little kid at the time.
But Mom didn’t trust me after that day. It was months before she would even let me play with Bellman unsupervised. ”
Rasmus still doesn’t say a word. I barely dare to breathe while I wait for him to respond.
I wish he would say something. Anything.
“Do you really believe that’s what happened?” he asks at last. He doesn’t sound like he doubts it. More like he wants to make sure he understands.
“I don’t know.” Now I’m really being honest. “Mom and Dad said it wasn’t true, that I was just making it up so I wouldn’t get in trouble. I tried to convince myself that they were right. I tried hard.”
I bite my lower lip.
The picture of the sunset blazes before me. It’s painted with broad strokes of red, orange, and yellow. The canvas is textured with clumps of congealed paint.
“But I never would have hurt Taube on purpose.”
“I know you wouldn’t,” Rasmus says with warmth in his voice.
A tension I wasn’t even aware of starts to release.
“We have to do something, anyway,” says Rasmus. “If we can’t tell anyone what we saw, we’re just going to have to find him ourselves. We’re the only ones who can.”
“Yes,” I whisper into the phone. “You’re right.”