The Amanda Project: Book One

The Amanda Project: Chapter Twenty-Four

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Hands shaking, I opened the envelope. Inside was a folded-up piece of paper, and when I spread it out, half a dozen pressed leaves and flower petals fell on the bed. On the paper was a collage of drawings of plants and pieces of plants intertwining and forming a border around a quote written in large, beautifully calligraphied letters, which read:

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Underneath, in Amanda's bold script, it said:

The quote is from Edward Burke, but the drawings are all Beatrice Potter’s. Like Beatrix (Beatrice, Bellatrix), we warriors fall, but so too do we rise.

And for the first time since Vice Principal Thornhill had called me into his office, I felt really, truly afraid. My heart pounding in my chest, my brain could only form one thought over and over again.

How does she know? How does she know? How does she know?

It was raining so hard that night, December21, the longest night of the year. Icy rain coated the apple tree branches in the yard until they knocked against the windows of my room as if they wanted to come in. I used to love cold, rainy December nights. My dad would light a fire in the living room and make mulled cider and we'd all sit downstairs and wait for the power to go off (if you live in the country, you get used to power failures during winter storms). When it did, we'd light candles and read or watch a DVD on my mom's laptop until it got late, then go upstairs with our candles like we were characters out of Little House on the Prairie.

 

But for the past two months my house had been creepy enough without the lights being off, and sitting in my room with a candle and trying to read only made me think of what life was going to be like if my dad really did get fired (he still had a job back then, but he was missing work a lot and sometimes I heard him having shouting matches on the phone with his boss when I came home from school). So when I heard someone pounding at the front door, my first thought was (and I know this is completely insane, but if you'd been there and felt the creepiness of the night, you might have thought this, too) that I'd heard a ghost.

 

But then the person must have realized the door was unlocked and less than a minute later, I heard someone calling, "Callie! Callie! Callie!" and crying, and I took my candle and ran downstairs thinking, Mom! Instead there was Heidi, soaking wet and sobbing and she threw her arms around me and just kept saying my name.

 

I'd never seen Heidi hysterical like that. Even when she cut her finger really bad on an X-Acto blade in art class, she just calmly walked over to Mrs. Rose-holding her left hand, which was literally gushing blood-and asked if she could please go to the nurse. So the combination of her sobbing and seeming to barely realize where she was made me think someone must have died, and I just hugged her and rocked her back and forth like my mother did with me and said everything was going to be okay even though I really didn't know what "everything" was yet.

 

Finally she pulled away from me and walked toward the dark living room. Still crying, she said, "Oh, my god, Callie, you have to help me." She had a tissue in her hand, and she ripped it as she walked.