Dark Hope Read online

  As I closed my eyes, Tabitha’s youngest brother, Sam, began to intone in his tiny voice, “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”

  “Amen,” everyone added gravely. That is, everyone but Tabitha.

  When I looked up from my folded hands, she was scowling at her father, who had a smug look on his face. “Romans 3:23,” she said, her chin lifting defiantly.

  “Colossians 3:20,” Dr. Franklin retorted, peering down the table at us over his glasses.

  “Nice, Dad,” Tabitha said, her voice dripping with sarcasm as she reached across the table for a corn muffin.

  Dr. Franklin laughed. “Just my little Friday night reminder before you two go out to join the festivities.” Bowls and platters began to pass around as everyone filled their plates.

  “How much trouble can we get into at a youth group social, Daddy?” Tabitha sweetly replied, kicking me under the table when I started to correct her.

  “Besides, Tabby looks scary,” Tabitha’s brother David said, grinning wickedly. “No boys are going to talk to her.”

  “David,” warned Mrs. Franklin, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Tabitha is just expressing herself.”

  “And I will be more than happy if no boys talk to her,” added Dr. Franklin. “Now, Hope, we are counting on you to be a good influence and keep Tabby out of trouble.” He looked at me over a forkful of salad.

  “Sir?” I said, with a grin. “I don’t think there is much risk of Bible-quoting teenagers going astray. First Corinthians, chapter ten—”

  “Verse thirteen,” Tabitha added triumphantly, finishing for me with a flourish of her napkin and then smiling at me gratefully.

  Not a good idea to start sparring with a biblical scholar. The voice in my head reprimanded me so clearly that I looked around, thinking surely someone else must have heard it.

  The Franklins’ forks hovered mid-air. The boys eyed the scene with delight, shoveling in their food and watching the biblical repartee as if it were a heated tennis match.

  “Well, then,” Mrs. Franklin said after a long pause, her eyes sparkling with amusement as she set down her fork and tried to repress a grin. “I believe Hope has a point, dear.”

  “How did you come to know the Holy Book so well, Hope?” Dr. Franklin pinned me with a curious stare while Tabitha smiled to herself, taking in a bite of macaroni and cheese. “It’s very unusual these days. Unless you come from a family of clergy, that is.”

  “Uh,” I said, squirming uncomfortably, regretting that I’d spoken up. “I went to Catholic school before I moved back to Dunwoody. And my dad is kind of religious.”

  He looked at me, full of speculation. “Interesting. But I take it you’re not?”

  I looked at Tabitha for help, but she just shrugged.

  “Um. I’d say I have more of an academic interest.” My face burned with embarrassment. I didn’t want to get into my belief—or lack thereof—with a minister. I certainly couldn’t explain the heightened sense of antagonism I felt toward religion without getting into my entire confusing past with my father.

  “I see,” Dr. Franklin mused. “But let’s take this piece of scripture. If we take the full context of Corinthians—”

  “Daddy,” Tabitha moaned, rolling her eyes.

  Mrs. Franklin nodded to the boys, who were squirming in their seats, silently dismissing them. They threw down their napkins and dashed away.

  “Roger,” she said firmly as she rose from her own seat, beginning to clear the table. “I don’t think the girls want to engage in theological debate right now. I believe they need to get ready for their night out. Girls?”

  Tabitha beamed at her mother.

  “Can we help you clear, ma’am?” I asked.

  “House rules,” she responded with a smile. “The cooks get the night off. Dr. Franklin and I will clean up.”

  Dr. Franklin grumbled in his seat as we scraped our chairs away from the table. “Bested by two teenagers,” he muttered.

  “Like father, like daughter,” Mrs. Franklin laughed as we ran upstairs to Tabitha’s room.

  Her door was covered with dark posters, dramatic Keep Out signs, and caution tape. As I swung the door open and crossed the threshold into her room, I let out an involuntary gasp at what I saw.

  “What?” Tabitha crossed her arms defensively, jutting one bony hip out.

  “It’s just so … pink,” I said, unable to keep a straight face. The room was a six-year-old’s fantasy: rainbows, unicorns, and every sweet pastel you could imagine. Clearly her “self-expression” had been stopped short of a redecorating budget. “The princess wallpaper is definitely you.”

  She scowled. “Make all the fun you want. I just haven’t had time to redo it.”

  “I see that,” I said, spinning around to take it all in. The posters of goth and emo bands looked wildly out of place next to the “Hang in There!” kitten calendar.

  She ignored me, throwing open her closet doors. It was a bipolar closet: starched and preppy good-girl clothes on one half, lots of black and neon on the other. She roughly shoved the J. Crew half to one side, muttering “Sunday stuff.” Then she began whipping through the dark side of her closet, looking for who-knows-what.

  “Aha!” she declared, pulling out a T-shirt that looked like it had been ripped to shreds and holding it up against my chest. “This will be perfect on you.”

  “Uh, what’s wrong with what I have on?” I asked, looking down at my layered tee and polo shirt. I nervously fingered the fringe on my scarf.

  “Bo-ring,” she judged, rolling her eyes. “Don’t you want to try something different for a change?”

  “But nobody is going to see it anyway,” I protested, pushing the shirt away, “since we’re going to have our jackets on.”

  She tossed her hair back, impatient with me. “At least let me do your makeup and hair, then,” she said, throwing down the shirt and dragging me into her bathroom.

  Before I could protest she’d plopped me down on a stool and started rummaging through drawers, pulling out tubes and bottles and all sorts of things I didn’t even know how to use. For all of her studied antisocial behaviors, she sure cared about fashion.

  This is not going to turn out well, I thought, sighing inwardly.

  She stepped behind me to take an appraising look in the mirror. “You have good bone structure. We just need a little drama, a little edge. Here, let’s get this hair out of the way,” she said, sweeping my long hair back with both hands.

  “No!” My hands flew back to stop her, but it was too late. My hair was tucked high on my head in a tie, and she’d flicked away the scarf I’d wrapped around my neck. I tried to cover myself, but she swatted my hands away.

  My whole body stiffened. Her jaw fell open as she stared at the back of my neck. I watched her in the mirror as she stared for a long time, cocking her head to one side, eyes narrowing, as she tried to work out this new development.

  “Hope, you little devil,” she said, eyeing me with new respect as she jumped up onto the counter. “Pretending to be Miss Goody Two-Shoes when all along you have a big old tattoo on the back of your neck.” She peered closer and rubbed her thumb against my Mark, hard. “And it’s a real one, too—not even I have the guts to do that. What else do you have going on that I don’t know about?” She started pawing at me and my clothes with curiosity. “More tattoos? Piercings?”

  “There’s nothing else,” I said, rushing the words out as I pushed away her hands and tried to create some distance between us. “And it’s not what you think,” I said, my face burning. “Please, believe me.”

  “What is it then? I’m all ears,” she demanded, crossing her arms and laughing at my discomfort.

  My mind raced, trying to find an easy way out. “It’s hard to explain.” I stuck my chin out, my body daring her to continue.

  “I bet it is,” she said, arching a brow. “And
not just any tattoo, either. Aramaic and Greek! That must have been some highbrow tattoo parlor you went to.”

  My mind stumbled over what she’d just said. “It’s Greek?” I said, bewildered that after all this time, someone seemed to know what my Mark was.

  She gave me a searching look. “Part of it is Greek. Symbolic ancient Greek, to be precise. See this pattern along the edges? It’s called a Greek key. They used it in ancient Greek architecture. The rest of it is letters. It’s written vertically and is a bit blurry, but I’m pretty sure it’s Aramaic. I think it spells ‘key,’” she said, coming back behind me to trace the symbols down my vertebrae. “Or maybe ‘guardian of the key’? Natchurat kleedah,” she pronounced carefully, her tongue thick as she attempted the ancient language. She was engrossed in studying the markings, like a scholar poring over her books. “Though why anyone would go to such lengths to label themselves a ‘key’ is beyond me.”

  She studied the design intently again, and then looked up at me in the mirror. “Please tell me you didn’t just choose this because it looked pretty. And you had to have chosen it—no parlor is going to offer something like this on its normal menu.”

  She cocked her eyebrow and waited for my answer.

  “I didn’t choose it.”

  Her other eyebrow shot up. “So someone else chose it for you? That doesn’t sound like you.”

  My hands crept back up to touch the spot she’d just traced, my mind racing. “I didn’t know it meant anything. Are you sure?”

  “My dad taught me some Aramaic when I was little. He had to learn ancient languages in seminary. We could show him—”

  “No!” I didn’t even allow her to finish speaking before I’d ruled it out. It was bad enough that she’d seen it.

  She knotted her eyebrows together, trying to puzzle me out. “Is this why you’re always wearing those turtlenecks and scarves? Why are you so touchy about it? It is sort of pretty, in a totally geeky kind of way.”

  Don’t tell her anything, said the little voice in my head.

  I sat in silence, staring at the faded white linoleum of her bathroom. How could I explain to her that the Mark had just shown up on me? How could I tell her without having to go through the whole story of my abduction? Would she even believe me if I told her how my parents had tried again and again to get it removed, subjecting me to countless hours of pain, only to have the thing show up again, fresh and dark, only hours later?

  Finally she let out a long sigh.

  “Fine. I’ll keep your secret, though I have to say you’re totally overreacting.” She tossed my scarf back in my lap. I wound it around my neck as if I was binding up an open wound.

  The price for Tabitha’s silence was giving her a complete free hand with my makeup. We turned up at Stone Mountain looking like two ghouls straight from the gates of Hades. She’d streaked my dark hair in hot pink and somehow managed to make it hang halfway across my face, drawing attention to my eyes, which glittered in pools of coal made by eyeliner and black shadow. A thin layer of pale foundation made me look sickly and glow in the dark.

  “I look ridiculous,” I said, pointing to my North Face jacket. “Goths don’t wear fleece.”

  She shrugged as she stomped ahead, dragging me in her wake. “It’s emo, not goth,” she shot back over her shoulder. “And you could have changed your clothes.”

  We skirted the stream of people coming through the high wooden gates of the park and headed for the woods. Many people gave us frightened looks and steered their children away, making Tabitha chuckle. The twinkling lights inside the park disappeared as we strode into the trees.

  “Where are we going?” I called after her.

  “We’re cutting around to the hiking path. We’re supposed to meet near the summit.”

  “The summit?” I stopped in my tracks. “What are we going to do up there? And won’t it be cold?”

  She turned and stood in the darkness of the trees, shining a flashlight in my eyes so that I winced. “Are you coming or not?” The sharpness of her tone told me how frustrating she’d found me this evening. Without waiting for my answer, she turned and kept walking away from me in her tall, black boots.

  “Okay,” I said meekly, walking swiftly to catch up. I had to stay on good terms with her, at least until our project was finished.

  The path was clearly marked, winding around the base of the mountain through the trees. Nobody else was in sight, but just in case, Tabitha drew a finger over her lips, telling me to be quiet. We veered away from the noise of the park until all I could hear was the wind whistling through the pines. The further we walked, the darker it became as the parking lot lights faded out of sight.

  We came to a clearing, the intersection of two trails. To our left, the mountain stood in a heap. Bald granite twinkled as the beam from Tabitha’s flashlight danced across the surface. The path seemed to go straight up.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” she urged, starting up the trail.

  The hike seemed interminable in the dark. The naked rock was marked with a faded yellow line, but the range of the flashlight was limited, leaving us with the eerie feeling of walking into space, with no signs or landmarks along the way to let us know how far we’d gone. We scrabbled over rocks and pebbles rolling down the trail, our shoes slipping on the slick surface. Periodically, we’d enter into a small stand of windswept trees or underbrush, or we’d pass an emergency telephone posted on a pole along the trail. Other than that, there was nothing: no buildings, no animals, and no people. Every now and then I thought I heard an owl or some other sort of bird screeching, but I could never convince myself it was more than just the wind. If I took my eyes off the trail, all I could see was black. But I could only do so for an instant, at the risk of slipping and falling.

  The further we got, the chattier Tabitha became, returning to her normal know-it-all self. “You know, it’s not really just granite,” she said, randomly shifting the conversation to the geology of the mountain. “It’s partly quartz monzonite. That’s why it’s so pretty.”

  I huffed back at her, catching my breath after a particularly steep portion of trail. “Is there anything you don’t know about?”

  “Nope,” she said, turning back to grin at me. “At least not that I’ll admit.”

  “How much longer?” I complained. It seemed like we’d been climbing for an hour.

  “Shhhh. I hear voices.”

  We rounded a bend and looked up a few hundred yards to where a permanent shelter stood along the trail. A group of kids were already huddled around a small bonfire near the shelter. Others straddled benches, deep in conversation. The chatter built as we climbed closer.

  “Hey, Tabitha! You made it!” An older boy, his hair swept into a temporary mohawk by a shellacking of gel, spotted us and started scrambling down the hill. “Give you a hand?”

  Tabitha’s face broke open in a smile. “I told you I’d come,” she said, reaching out her hand. His hand swallowed her tiny one as he hoisted her up over the last big boulder.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “This is Hope,” she said, leaving me to scrabble up the rock by myself. “She’s new in town, and I thought it might be fun for her to come, too. It’s okay, right?” She twisted a piece of her hair and nibbled it nervously. She was seriously into this boy.

  “Hope, I’m Tony.” Under all his makeup, he had a nice smile. “You girls thirsty?”

  “After that climb, are you kidding me?” Tabitha playfully punched him in the arm. “I’m dying. What do you have?”

  “You’ll see,” he said mysteriously, leading us over to the bonfire. The flickering light from the fire cast weird shadows across the faces of the assembled crowd, making their pale skin and liberal doses of black eyeshadow appear truly sinister. They were all dressed like Tabitha, some in dog collars and chains with weird sets of locks hooked onto their belts and boots that looked like they came off of storm troopers. All of them seemed much older than me or Tabitha.

>   “Where do you know these kids from?” I whispered to Tabitha, but she silenced me with a stare, mouthing behind Tony’s back, “Don’t embarrass me!”

  “Hey, guys, let’s get these girls something to drink. What d’ya say?”

  They began jostling each other, trying to get into some big coolers, and I realized that almost everyone here was a boy. Someone pressed a plastic tumbler into my hands. I took a cautious sip and nearly choked on the bitter taste of liquor. I spat it out behind my back, being careful that nobody could see. For a split second, I thought I heard familiar harsh laughter—Lucas. I whirled around to confront him, but there was no one there.

  Tabitha was holding her tumbler, laughing and flirting with Tony. As soon as I could interrupt, I pulled her away.

  “Tabitha, where are all the other girls?” I whispered, a note of anxiety creeping into my voice.

  “I’m sure they are around here somewhere,” she said, her voice trailing off as she looked around and came to the same realization.

  “Tabitha,” I said urgently, trying to pull her away from the fire, “how well do you know these people?”

  “I know Tony well enough!” she snapped, pulling her arm away from me. “It’s fine. Everything is fine.”

  “But they gave us alcohol—”

  “So don’t drink it!” she spat, exasperated, through her clenched jaw. Over her shoulder she saw Tony watching us intently. She dragged me a little ways further, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Listen, if you don’t want to stay here, go hike up the rest of the way,” she said, her head inclining back to the trail. “I’ll be here when you realize how silly you’re being.”

  I didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone here, and told her so.

  She gave my hand a firm squeeze. “Tony’s dad and my dad go way back. He won’t let anything happen to me. And it will take you twenty, thirty minutes tops to hike up and back. You can go up and see the famous view of Atlanta. I’ll be here when you get back. I promise, we can go then.”