Chapter 1 of The Envisage

Chapter One

Watchers from The Underground

Sometimes I told myself I wasn’t being watched… that it was just a feeling. But tonight, it was undeniable. From my perch at the attic window, I shivered, wishing that things were different. Wind swirled leaves against a sky of steely storm clouds that smelled of brown sugar and rain, and maple tree shadows shifted in the flickering lamplight below.

What would anyone possibly want from me? I didn’t have anything—not even a family, no matter how much I wished for one. And the thing about this feeling about being watched was that every time I got it, anything or anyone I had let myself start to care about would disappear.

Someone would tell me I had to go live with a new foster family in a different place, but they would never say why. There would be a long ride in a train or car or plane… a new set of parents who pretended to care, and then waiting with knots in my stomach for it to all start over again. I wish I knew who was watching me. I wish I knew why.

I didn’t say goodbyes anymore, or let anyone get close enough for leaving to matter. But I had let Nia Lolohea get to me after she had kicked a kid at school who had tried to take my lunch. There she was with a smirk on her face and her shoe smeared with peanut butter, offering me her own sandwich after mine had ended up on the floor anyway. I didn’t know why in the world she ever cared in the first place, but now I was going to have a problem.

I stomped on the dusty attic floorboards and leaned further out the window, wondering who… and what was out there. Come and get me, whoever you are! I wanted to scream, but I was too scared to do it, and I hated myself for being afraid.

Like a strange orb vanishing from the air, the yellow streetlight flickered out completely, plunging the entire street into restless shadows that shifted unnaturally in the wind. Something felt different than it had on other nights that I had been watched. I leaned farther out the window, searching.

The lamp flashed on again, and in a lightning-quick instant, I saw it: a figure creeping very carefully over the fractured driveway toward the house. I held my breath. Was it one of my watchers?

A floor below me, the living room window made a low groan. No stranger watching me had ever come in the house.

Panicking, I scrambled away from the window, backing into the cardboard boxes. An empty one tumbled down and clapped onto the floor. The pullout stairs below groaned and creaked. I hid, watching through a slat in the boxes as the trap door burst upward.

A shape moved in the shadows, searching.

“Andelyn! Andi, where are you?” Her voice was as loud as ever despite the attempted whisper.

“Nia!” I exclaimed, nearly falling over.

She pulled the string hanging from the rafters, and the light clicked on. “What are you doing hiding up here all alone? There’s no school tomorrow, Andi! You should be out having fun!”

I shrugged. “It’s dark. I’m not supposed to go out after the sun goes down.”

“Oyoway!” Nia was always saying that, forgetting that I didn’t understand any of the words she said in Tongan. “What do you mean after the sun goes? You are fourteen years old! This crazy Albenstien person you live with is just being dumb!”

“Mrs. Albenien,” I corrected, lowering my voice. “Everyone I have lived with has had that rule… and the one about visitors not being allowed to come over…for me, at least.”

Nia put her hands on her hips. “For you at least is right! Nobody has stupid rules like that, even if they are orphans!”

I cringed. “Nia, you shouldn’t call people—you shouldn’t give them…“

“What?”

“Never mind. Listen, all I know is that sometimes the foster agency workers seem afraid when they talk about me, but I don’t know why. They whisper to each other or to the people who take me in, but will never tell me anything.”

“What?” Nia plopped down on my bed and kicked her feet up to rest them on the brass railing. I doubted that she had ever been afraid of anything in her life, and the last thing I wanted to do was to admit to her that sometimes, I was.

I leaned against the wall, crossed my arms, and shrugged.

Nia shook her head. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You can’t go out at night, and basically never leave the house unless you’re going to school. It’s like you’re hiding and running from something without even knowing what it is! It shouldn’t be like that, Andi!”

“Maybe something is wrong with me and I don’t know it.” I tried to force a smile, but felt it turn into an awkward line on my face. “Anyway, for a long, time, I’ve been trying to figure out why I have so many… unusual rules… and why I have to move so often, but I don’t think it’s anything that’s going to change at this point.”

“There’s gotta be something you can do to figure out what’s going on!” Nia snapped up straight.

“Adults are weird about rules, but I bet you could find out why you are always being moved, at least. What have you done so far? You’ve tried asking questions and spying, right?”

I nodded, sighing. “Everywhere. It seems like all I ever catch them talking about is the money. But I don’t want to know what the people who are letting me live with them are getting paid! I want to know where I have come from and why no one ever says why I am leaving."

I looked down at my fist. It was wrapped tightly around the smooth rock I kept with me, and was shaking a little. I did not say that I was sure a move was going to happen again—and soon. That would require a weird explanation about what I had felt, and watchers who I could not see. Feelings like that didn't make sense to most people. They definitely didn't make sense to me, even though I got them.

Nia didn’t seem to notice my discomfort. She had a shifty-eyed look that I had come to understand meant that she was about to suggest something that could get us both in trouble.

“Listen, Andi, I bet you a stack of those pancakes you make that if you break the stupid rules, you will know what’s going on!”

I thought about this for a moment, my heart racing. “I want to have the answers, of course I do—but if I break the rules and then something happens… I mean… well, I’d rather know why they are there first. It could be something… something bad that those rules are keeping me from!”

“So… you’ve never broken them because you’re scared?” Nia asked, her mouth half-open.

I crossed my arms again. “I have nothing to say to that. I’m not scared.”

“Suit yourself,” Nia said, flipping one of her two long braids. “I’m going out to have a good time!”

And with that, she was off.

I sighed, listening to the click of each wooden step as she disappeared before I clicked off the light, a tightness in my chest.

Through the dark window, I could see Nia darting down the moonlight driveway. A twig snapped, and I could not see her any more. What kind of adventures was she planning for tonight? What was it like to be free?

I opened my hand and turned the rock over that I had been clutching, thinking about how dumb it was that this was the only thing I had never lost. I had tried to get rid of it, but somehow, it always ended up in my bag, coming with me to the next place as if it was actually something worth keeping.

I shook my head and held the cool stone up to the moonlight. When I was younger, I had imagined that fairy bones made up the sinuous cracks that were trapped inside its layers of milky, colliding prisms. Or that these pencil-thin lines secretly twisted into symbols of a lost land or a map of a buried treasure.

Of course there had been no fairies, no symbols, no treasure. I wasn’t naïve anymore about imagining that life would ever change. It was only a rock shaped on one side a little like a vase, and a little on the other like a Hawaiian island that Nia had called Oahu, claiming to have cousins there.

The wind lifted the curtain and I swallowed. I saw my reflection in the half of it where the glass was down and tucked my straw-colored hair behind my ears. My large eyes made me look timid as I searched the darkness outside.

That feeling that I was being watched was getting stronger now—so strong that if I could see the eyes watching mine, I would wonder if they could bore holes right through me.

Angrily, I threw my stone hard onto the wooden floorboards. It made a loud, hollow sound, bounced, and kept rolling, away from the boxes and toward the foot of the window, as if pulled by a magnet.

A gust of strange wind puffed into the drapes. Then came the sound of scraping—as hollow and deep as a tomb opening. I shuddered, inching near the window again.

There were no other sounds, no car lights streaking through the night, no creaking to indicate that Mrs. Albenien was even awake. Had no one else heard this?

Beyond the window frame and my own ghost-like reflection was the black of night. I looked at my stone on the floorboards and crouched down, staring at it.

Don’t go outside, Andelyn, I told myself. What if the rules are protecting you from whatever is out there now?

I scooped the stone up, glanced at the pullout stairs, and bounded down them, ignoring the apprehension I felt. For some reason I couldn’t explain, the thought of not knowing what had made the scraping sound was even worse than facing whatever it was.

The doorknob of the back door was cold in my hand. I twisted it, pushed, and stepped outside, listening. Every single lamp along the street was black. Something was out there.