by Val Crowe
I decided that it would be better if we set the room up at least a little like it had been when Heather lived there. There were bunk beds in the hallway, at least the frames of them, so Wade and I dragged those in.
Then we picked up a table to go near the window, which I remembered had a bottle of vodka on it.
I tried to picture the rest of the room—the posters, the music, all of that, but I couldn’t think of anything else we could pull in to help out. I did pull up “Your Love” on my phone. Maybe it would be enough. I hoped it would be enough.
While I surveyed the room, thinking, Wade and Charlotte were talking.
It wasn’t a full-on conversation, exactly, just snatches of back-and-forth here and there.
“It’s not like we’re anything to each other,” I heard Charlotte say at one point.
Wade said something back to her, but in a low voice, too low for me to understand.
She looked at me and then lowered her voice too.
They continued on like that, and I ignored them.
I turned and looked out the window. I wasn’t going to be able to remember all the dialogue, but I thought I got the gist of it. If I could make us all move properly, maybe it would work out.
“I didn’t know he was your best friend!” Charlotte suddenly burst out with.
I turned around.
They both looked up at me, and there was fury on both of their faces.
“Maybe we should get started,” I said. I wondered if Wade should be playing Paul. He seemed to have genuine anger against Charlotte. I’d ask him what he wanted to do.
“Fine,” said Charlotte, folding her arms over her chest.
“Fine,” said Wade.
“Okay.” I stepped into the center of the room. “So, in my vision last night, what I saw was Heather in the room with a guy. She was making out with him—but we can skip that part—and then she went over to this table—” I walked over to the table we’d brought in and put my hand on it. “And picked up a bottle of vodka. She took a drink, and it was too much for her. She lay down on the floor, curled up in a ball, and passed out. Right about… here.” I pointed. “So, then the guy called to Paul, who was outside the door. Paul slapped Heather in the face, trying to wake her up. She didn’t. So, he picked her up and slammed her against the wall.” I moved to the wall right next to the window. “Here.”
“How hard of a slam are we talking here?” said Charlotte.
“Not hard,” I said. “I mean, Paul did it really hard, but we’re not trying to hurt you.”
“Which of us is Paul?” said Wade.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can do it, if you want. Or you can. After he slammed her into the wall here, the other guy grabbed Paul, tried to stop him. But instead, they all lost their balance, tripped over themselves, and Heather went out the window. So, we don’t do that. Whoever is doing the part of the other guy, he shouldn’t go for Paul, he should go for Charlotte. Grab her and get her somewhere safe.”
“Okay,” said Wade. “Sounds good.”
“So, will you be Paul?” I said.
“I don’t think so,” said Heather. “I think Wade might actually try to throw me out of the window.”
Wade looked offended. “Of course I wouldn’t do that.” He turned to me. “But you can be Paul. No problem.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Cool. So, um, should I go over what we all have to do again?”
They nodded.
I did. Three or four times, in fact. When we all felt like we were pretty good on the specifics, we got into position.
I left the room.
Charlotte and Wade stood in the center of the room, at least a foot away from each other.
“Oh, come on,” I said, looking through the doorway. “Pretend that you like him.”
Charlotte inched closer. She spoke softly. “I don’t not like you, Wade, you know that, right?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Wade muttered back. “It’s like you said, we were never anything to each other.”
“Back on script,” I said. “Say the things I told you to say, Charlotte.”
“You want me,” Charlotte said, and she wasn’t exactly convincing. She sounded like she was reading the lines out of a book. She had no inflection or emotion in them at all. “Say it.”
“I want you,” said Wade, similarly emotionless.
I swore under my breath. This wasn’t going to work. If it didn’t tap into the real emotional turmoil between Wade and Charlotte, maybe it wouldn’t even call to Heather. Or maybe it wouldn’t work unless it was after dark. I wished I knew more about this. I was flying blind, trying whatever I could think of to see if it could work.
It would have been easier if I’d had an old granny who knew the ways of the spirits or something, and who could guide my path. Unfortunately, I was just a dumb guy who had accidentally been giving the ability to see ghosts. And turned into something that they wanted for whatever reason. I didn’t know anything. It was all guesses.
“You want me bad,” said Charlotte.
“I want you bad,” parroted Wade, no inflection at all.
Charlotte walked over to the table and mimed picking up the vodka and drinking. Abruptly, she crumpled to the floor, like Sleeping Beauty getting pricked on a spindle.
“You okay?” said Wade, rushing forward, startled.
She opened her eyes. “Yes, I’m fine. I’m just trying to follow the script.”
“Oh,” said Wade. “Sorry.”
“Shut up,” said Charlotte.
Wade nodded. “Sorry,” he said again. He turned to me. “Deacon, should we start again?”
“We can’t start again,” I muttered. “Just get back into it. Call for Paul.”
“I’m not really sure this is working,” said Charlotte. “It doesn’t feel like anything’s happening.”
I wanted to strangle them both. “Just shut up and stick with it,” I said. “Come on, Wade, call for Paul.”
The barnacle snickered in my ear.
To hell with that thing. I really hoped this got rid of it.
“Paul,” said Wade in a blank voice. “Heather’s passed out.”
I came into the room, trying to funnel the rage that I had seen in Paul. But I couldn’t feel anything in the air, nothing except the presence of the barnacle, dark and heavy against my skin. I went to Heather and grabbed her by the shoulders. I shook her.
“Ouch,” said Charlotte, annoyed. “You said you wouldn’t do it hard.”
It wasn’t working. We had to try something. I ignored her. “Wake up, you bitch,” I snapped, and then I slapped her. But I couldn’t do that very hard, because there was no way I could hit a girl hard, especially not a girl who’d I had sex with the night before, even bad sex. Being close to Charlotte was bringing all that back. It had been awkward and awful, but it had been intimate, and I knew her smell now, and so my hand didn’t even make noise when it connected with her cheek.
She licked her lips, looking into my eyes.
“You’re supposed to be passed out,” I growled.
“Let go of her,” said Wade, coming over to me, taking me by the arm.
“Not yet, man,” I said, and I grabbed Charlotte and swung her up, like a shield.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” said Wade.
“Well, it hardly matters, because it’s not working,” I said.
“Get your goddamned hands off of her,” Wade said in a low, tight voice.
The air flickered. The sound of the song changed, not the blurred sounds coming through a phone speaker, but something louder and stronger and—
It wasn’t Charlotte in my arms anymore, but Heather. A very passed out Heather, the weight of her warm body heavy as I held her up.
I slammed her into the wall, and I did it hard, because that rage I was talking about before, it was flowing through me, raging like the churning, stormy ocean.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What the hell?” came a voice, a fema
le voice, but it wasn’t Heather, because Heather was still passed out. “That really hurt.”
“Let go of her, man, come on.” Wade’s voice. “Deacon!” And now, he had Heather, and he was trying to rip her out of my arms, but I wasn’t going to let him. I held tight to her, not even sure why. I had to finish this. I had started it, and now it needed to end.
The window loomed, tall and bright and glowing. It was shimmering, and it was calling to me. Now, I could hear the calling, the beckoning. It wasn’t a woman’s sigh. It was a release of rage.
Teach that bitch a lesson.
Yes.
I lurched forward, dragging Heather with me.
But Wade had Heather—Charlotte—he had Charlotte. Charlotte and Heather were separating. I had Heather, but he had Charlotte, who was fighting me, pushing me away, and Wade and Charlotte were stumbling across the room.
But not me and Heather. We were going for that window. We had to go for that window. It was destiny. It was fate. It was meant to be, and when she went out of it, everything was going to be so, so right.
I stumbled and Heather slipped from my grasp.
I let go.
But she tried to grab me. She cried out, scrabbling at my wrist, her nails digging into my skin.
I watched, detached.
She couldn’t stop herself. She fell. She screamed.
I stepped over to the window myself, looking down at her there on the ground.
Her body was mangled, her limbs all bent at strange and unnatural angles. Red ooze was coming out of the back of her head. Her eyes were still open. They peered up at me in accusation.
The barnacle was at my back, pushing me. “Just jump,” it rasped. “Just jump, you little shit.”
No. Not her. Not with that voice.
“Deacon,” it said. “You worthless piece of trash. I’d be so much better off if you never existed. Jump.” It shoved me.
I stumbled forward, pitching out the window.
I grabbed for the window sill, for something. Anything.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Wade’s hand at my back, snatching a handful of my shirt, catching me.
The collar of my shirt dug into my neck. I choked.
Wade’s other hand on my shoulder, pulling me back.
I could breathe. I gasped.
“Deacon, you okay?”
I sucked in gulps of air. The barnacle danced in front of my vision, laughing at me. “It didn’t work,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m getting that,” said Wade.
I shut my eyes.
When I opened them, the walls of the room seemed to be expanding and contracting, like they were breathing. They were breathing in the same time as my own breath.
I pushed to my feet. “We need to get out of here.”
“Yes,” said Charlotte, looking around. “I don’t like it here at all.”
Together, we all hurried down the stairs and hurled ourselves out of the house. As we ran, the barnacle muttered in my ear. “Can’t handle it? What’s wrong, little shit? I should have known you’d never be able to hack it.”
“Shut up,” I said. We were standing outside the house, all looking up at it. No one had said anything.
“What?” said Wade.
“Not you,” I said.
Charlotte wrinkled up her nose. “Well, guys, this his been great. Really. Next time I get the chance to try to expel ghosts with two men I’ve screwed, sign me up. Excellent freaking time. But, um, I’m leaving now.”
“Wait, Charlotte,” said Wade.
“No,” she said. She was heading toward the sidewalk. “We don’t have anything to talk about, Wade.”
“Just a minute,” he said.
She was still walking. “And whatever was going on with us is officially done, got it?”
He came to a stop, watching her go. “Yeah, okay, fine. Just… stay safe, huh?” He came back over to me. “What the hell happened up there?”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check the time. I’d grabbed it on the way out of the room. “Is the bar open yet?”
Wade nodded. “Good call, man. Good call.”
* * *
Wade and I clinked our shot glasses and swallowed down the bourbon at the same time. Then we both set down our glasses.
I reached for my beer chaser, feeling the warmth of the liquor work its way down my esophagus. “I’m sorry I slept with Charlotte.”
“You saved her life,” said Wade, taking a drink of his own beer. “I mean, I could have done it if I’d been there. But who knows, she might have killed herself before you found me, so you did what you had to do. And by the way, I’m sorry about Olivia.”
“I know you are.”
“The thing I said before, about her wanting you and not me—”
“Let’s not bring that up again.”
“But I’m confused. Why did that make you hit me?”
I sighed.
“Or was it just everything, and it was building up, and you hit me then, but it wasn’t related—”
“If she liked me so much,” I said, “then why was it you she said yes to go to prom with? Why was it you she slept with?”
“Because you never tried,” he said.
“Because I was honoring the pact,” I said.
“I know.”
We were quiet.
“Look, if you never want to talk to me again, I get it,” Wade finally said. “But I can’t leave you alone until we get that barnacle off you. It’s my fault you have it, anyway.”
“It’s no one’s fault,” I said.
“We should never have gone into the dorm in the first place,” he said.
I shrugged. “Yeah, and it’s the fault of serial killer victims for looking like the killer’s type, I guess?”
He considered. “I guess you have a point.”
“Bad things happen all the time, whether you deserve it or not,” I said. “And I don’t want…” I drank more beer. “You’re my best friend, and that’s not going to change. The whole reason we made the pact was so that a girl couldn’t come between us. I don’t think Olivia would want to think that she ruined our friendship. Especially not now that she’s gone.”
“So, what are you saying? We’re cool?”
I shook my head. “No. We’re not cool. It’s not like this is the kind of thing that just goes away, you know. But I’m not cutting you out of my life either.”
He nodded.
We were quiet.
We drank our beer.
“I don’t know why it didn’t work,” I suddenly said.
“What didn’t?”
“In the room up there in Ridinger Hall,” I said. “It was working. Charlotte was Heather. I was Paul. But… I don’t know. When we tried to change the loop, to make something different happen, we all disconnected. I don’t know why. Maybe we weren’t strongly enough connected in the first place or…” I shook my head. “Who the hell knows?” That was what made me so crazy about all this. Not knowing anything.
“Why did you go out the window?”
“The barnacle,” I said. “It was talking at me like… like my mother.”
“Oh,” said Wade in a different voice. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“It pushed me,” I said.
“How can it do that?” said Wade. “How can it be your mother? She’s not dead.” A beat. “Is she?”
“As far as I know, she’s not. She sent me money a few weeks back.”
“Sounds like my old man.”
“You see him?”
“Nah, never,” he said. “He sends me these long emails every couple months. He apologizes a lot and says that he doesn’t deserve my forgiveness, but that he’s proud of the man I’ve become and everything else. And sometimes he asks about my classes. I think he’s starting to get annoyed with me for spending so much of his money on putting me through school.”
“Well, fuck him,” I said. “He can pay through the nose.”
“Oh, I agree,” s
aid Wade. “But I might be getting a little old for college girls.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That’s a possibility?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, don’t revoke my manly credibility, but the thing with Charlotte, the lack of strings? That’s all getting old. Maybe something sort of serious would be… I don’t know… nice. But, uh, no one’s going to settle down with a guy who can’t get his shit together enough to graduate college.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself,” I said. “You can graduate. You were just sticking it to your father.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I am going to graduate. Maybe even this year. I think I can get the credits in the spring.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Hey, what about your mom? You see her?”
“No,” I said.
“But… like she stopped, right? That’s what you said. She never laid a hand on you for years before you ran away.”
“Yeah, and she also refused to acknowledge that any of it ever even happened,” I said. “Screw her. I don’t want to talk about her.”
“Noted,” said Wade.
I downed the rest of my beer and twirled around on my barstool, so that I had my back to the bar. I looked out over the place. It was mostly empty. It was early, even for a college town. “I want out of here.”
“Yeah,” said Wade, turning his stool too.
“What if Rylan just has sex with someone?” I said. “After it’s done, she tells him to pass it on to someone else, and he does the same? Wouldn’t that solve everything?”
“Well… Ridinger Hall is kind of weirder than it was,” said Wade. “When we went in there, it seemed, I don’t know, awake.”
“Maybe that’s just because I’m around,” I said. “If I leave, it’ll go back to sleep.”
“Will it?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything.
* * *
“I’m not having sex with a man,” Rylan said. She was standing outside the coffee shop, having just finished her shift.
“Just to get rid of the barnacle,” I said. “That’s all.”
“You smell like liquor,” she said. “How much have you two been drinking?”
Wade and I exchanged a glance.
“Not that much,” I said.
“If there was ever a time to drink, it’s now,” said Wade.