Barth laughed. “What the hell? What you think that piece of wood will do? You going to hide like a bug under a rock?”
The door was heavy, almost unmovable, but all she needed was enough space to fit in between.
The door’s edge lifted a few inches.
All the adults in her life had made her promise never to open a door because she was too young to understand the dangers, even as they turned the knob and invited themselves into danger’s living room. Maella waited for something to happen. A wave of water, an explosion of fire, a pile of snakes, her father and older brother waiting on the other side, laughing at the joke they’d played on her all these years.
Darkness and silence greeted her.
Maella slithered halfway under the gap in the door and held up its edge with her back, straining her calves. A cool, humid breeze brushed her face. She still couldn’t see anything. She tugged on Claritsa’s muddied skirt. Claritsa let go of the door and scrambled onto all fours next to Maella.
Half their bodies were still in sunlight, half in the dirt under the door, and Maella feared that’s all it was—dirt and darkness and bugs.
Maybe there was something wrong with her.
Maybe the power the rest of her family had wouldn’t work for her.
The door lifted off their backs.
“Maella,” Claritsa whispered, frantic.
Barth stood above them, holding up the door, framed by a sun so bright it hurt Maella’s eyes.
He laughed.
She felt around with her hand, desperate for anything other than dirt and dampness and slimy worms.
There.
She felt a lip, an edge of dirt.
She pushed her hand out past the lip and felt only emptiness.
Maella grabbed Claritsa’s hand. “Don’t let go of me.”
Claritsa squeezed back.
Maella rolled off the edge, breaking the promise she had made her father.
Before she could feel afraid, before the darkness consumed them, Maella saw the look of shock on Barth’s face.
They thought she was too young, but now they would know better.
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—ABOUT THE AUTHOR—
Jamie Thornton lives in Northern California with her husband, two dogs, a garden, lots of chickens, a viola, and a bicycle. Her anthropology degree shapes her fiction. Her YA post-apocalyptic series FEAST OF WEEDS consistently ranks in the Top 25 Amazon Kindle Bestseller lists for Horror, Action Adventure, Young Adult and Survival Stories. She writes stories that take place halfway around the world, in an apocalyptic future, in a parallel universe—her books don’t always stick to one genre, but they always take the reader on a dark adventure.
THE C IN SUMMER
Jaime Munn
We always come to Summer Cove for the long holidays. Nobody I know has ever heard of the place. It’s small and doesn’t even feature on the map unless you zoom in really, really tight on Google Maps. Mum and Dad have been coming since forever. I don’t think either of them know why, except that it’s cheap and not too far away from home. You might think we’re paupers, but we’re not. Mum and Dad are just ‘savers’ and not ‘spenders’. All I know is that Summer Cove was always, always, always boring.
You would think that for a couple of bohemians with a penchant for naming their kids Crowther and Emmeline, the former being me and the latter my little sister, that we’d be summering in the South of France on a colourful barge boat bearing a striking and unusual name. Not Summer Cove, middle of nowhere. Trust me, even the postcards are dull. We send three of them every year. One to Mum’s folks and two to Dad’s, who don’t live together anymore. These postcards don’t end up on their fridges ever.
There is only one reason that I’ve started to look forward to Summer Cove. Abel Porter. Only this year I hadn’t gone looking for him yet. Mum had cottoned on to the fact that I was gay and it had gone down far too well with everyone in the family. I was waiting for something to break. I mean in every book or every movie or every television show that little fact was like an old fashioned bomb with the wick lit and burning down to some tragic horrible event. It didn’t help to keep telling myself that it just wasn’t real life because real life was full of horror stories too.
“Crow!” Emmeline was frowning at me as I sucked the dredges of my chocolate milkshake from the glass. She had sensitive ears, as she liked to keep reminding us.
“Sorry, Emm.”
For a little sister, Emmeline wasn’t too bad. A little too worldly-wise for her eleven years, I thought, but nothing that quirked the brows of social services. I was sixteen going on seventeen, sing it in your head if you must. Sometimes it seemed like there must have been a mistake on our birth certificates. Emmeline, for example, was drinking the closest thing Summer Cove offered to her standard soy milk caffè latte.
There is no Starbucks in Summer Cove. Despite that, Emmeline seemed to enjoy our holidays here. It should have annoyed me and in the past it had. Not since Abel Porter though.
In one of those rare moments when it seemed my younger sister and me understood one another perfectly, Emmeline did what I’d been hoping for all morning.
“Mum, I want to go see the old village.”
The old village was a series of excavations that had been going on for years. Local wannabe archaeologists were painstakingly revealing the foundations, flagstones and broken bits of pottery from the original settlement that had first founded Summer Cove way back in the pre-written history of the area. It was exceedingly dull, but Emm was always keen to revisit them.
“They’ve uncovered a boneyard,” she added, unabashedly delighted at the prospect of seeing it. Occasionally Emmeline shows a little Goth under her future Prime Minister clothing. “Hundreds of bones.”
“There are 206 bones in an adult body,” Dad pointed out.
“Thousands of bones,” Emmeline amended.
“I’m done,” Mum said, pushing aside her iced tea. “I don’t suppose you want to join us, Crowther?”
I shook my head, timing it so that it didn’t look too quick off the cuff, too eager. Mum never calls me Crow. Not ever. Which I think is pretty weird. She says fridge instead of refrigerator and cell instead of cellular phone but never takes the easy route with my name. It’s always Crowther and Emmeline with her. She doesn’t do the same with everyone. Her friend Amanda is Mandy. I prefer to be called Crow.
“Well, we’ll meet at the cottage for tea. Don’t be late,” she said.
It was the signal to leave the little café. Everybody stood up. I dawdled because I didn’t need to go that far and I didn’t want Mum and Dad seeing which direction I took.
I waited for them to turn the corner before I hurried towards the centre of town.
In the middle of Summer Cove is a fountain. It is bog standard. It’s like someone took a Chinese plastic knockoff fountain, supersized it and put it in the middle of a square of green. The Summer Cove fountain isn’t plastic, but it looks it. Sometime in the past the town council decided to paint it glossy brown. The following generations have stuck to tradition. When she was younger Emm called it the chocolate fountain. Secretly, I still call it that.
Abel Porter is always by the chocolate fountain. He is slender, much thinner than any man who is supposed to be handsome. Despite this, he doesn’t seem fragile. His eyes are sharp; green and unflinching. They never look through you, even though he seems to know everything about you in a single moment. His hair is dark; darker than it seems it should be. But it is always the same every year and I don’t think it comes from a bottle. It is so dark that it glows in the sunlight.
The best thing about Abel Porter is his smile. He is always smiling, but every time I always think he is smiling just for me.
You’d think, given all the above, that we’d been talking ever since I spotted him in Summer Cove four years ago. You’d think we’d have shared all our s
ecrets already. You’d think I might have tried to kiss him. You’d be thinking wrong.
Abel Porter and I have never met.
Surprise. I’m a stalker.
* * *
Today, heart pounding in my chest, I find Abel Porter on the first M bench. There are ten benches around the chocolate fountain. Each is labelled with a different letter from the name of the town. Summer Cove. There are two M benches and two E benches. There’s no distinction between them, but in a clockwise direction the benches spell out the words. The first M bench is at two o’clock.
Lucky me, I’m approaching from one o’clock. A perfect view.
He’s wearing jeans and a black t-shirt that has Jim Morrison on it. It’s always a t-shirt with Jim Morrison and THE DOORS emblazoned somewhere on it. Part of me hopes it means he’s deeply in lust with Jim Morrison, because – well you know why. Part of me figures he just really likes the music. It’s not exactly contemporary music, so it also makes Abel Porter seem a little bit more exotic. At least it’s not ABBA; Mum and Dad love ABBA. This quirky fact about him has meant that I’ve become a little obsessed with THE DOORS too. The more I see Abel Porter, the more I like to listen to their music. This changes the meaning of some of the lyrics too.
Anyway, back to the stalking.
Abel Porter is just sitting down like he’s only arrived a moment before me. It’s an inviting image to toy with. Like a prearranged rendezvous. I feel my pulse race at the thought of it. My fingers toy with the zipper of my hoodie. It’s bold, but underneath it, I’m wearing a t-shirt exactly like the one I saw him in the last time we were in Summer Cove. A red THE DOORS t-shirt that hugs my slim frame as tight as a second layer of skin. I’d specifically wanted it that tight, despite Mum’s objections.
Wearing the same shirt as Abel Porter, I’d figured, was bound to get his attention. I wanted to look as appealing to him as I could. According to everyone, tight was hot. Even if your body wasn’t quite chiselled you could still earn bonus points. Some people at school, sadly all girls, thought my body was a bit of okay. Tight seemed worth the discomfort and the almost naked feeling it gave me. I’d made the decision that, if I could get up the courage, this year I was going to actually meet Abel Porter.
This is easier said than done. I’ve almost done it twice before.
Watching him – okay stalking – has been my one reason to look forward to Summer Cove. It’s almost impossible to imagine what would happen if things went badly. Given that every source, reliable and unreliable, predicted doom, I was understandably in two minds about it. Both minds, however, agreed that I was almost certainly damned either way. It was time to risk it all.
For the record, my stalking isn’t in a bad way. As far as I know Abel Porter never felt stalked. His smile certainly never wavered once. Not any time he was facing in my direction at any rate. I noticed those times when his smile did dim a little. Sometimes, when people came over to him and said something that seemed, to me at least, to upset him, his curved lips straightened a little. Enough that only if you were paying attention could you spot it. I’ve never figured out what makes him smile a little less. I’ve never been close enough in those moments to overhear what was said.
In all the years that I’ve shadowed Abel Porter, sometimes daring to sit so close as to hear when people come up to him and say his name, I’ve never figured out why he’s haunting the chocolate fountain in Summer Cove. He seems to know a lot of people. Or a lot of people seem to know him. I admit that makes me jealous. Silly, right?
You can do this, I told myself, as I got close enough for him to see me from the corner of his eye. Taking a deep breath, I unzipped my hoodie and fumbled it off. My arms got stuck a little, my hair mussed. Very uncool. I really hoped Abel Porter wasn’t watching.
I didn’t dare look up until I had the hoodie off and had brushed my hair, with my fingers quickly, hopefully back in place. Then I looked up into a stranger’s eyes.
“Abel Porter?” he asked.
Panic bubbled up through me. Confusion must have shown on my face. The stranger, a twenty-something blond Thor with very blue eyes and a pronounced jaw, frowned.
“Pardon?”
“Are you the Porter?” he asked, voice rising a little more sharply than his big jawline would have suggested.
“I’m Abel Porter,” the real Abel Porter arrived at my side.
It felt a little like a rescue. Probably, it wasn’t. Probably both of them were very annoyed with me. I blushed.
I’m not quite a ginger, but so close that many call me that. I’ve got freckles that are light enough to almost vanish in dim light, but there enough to show up in the mirror every morning. I blush like a beetroot. It’s not very attractive.
“Oh,” the Thor-a-like said. He glanced at my t-shirt and then at the one the real Abel Porter was wearing. “Sorry mate.”
This last was directed at me. Then Abel Porter nodded his head in the opposite direction. The two of them headed towards the gaudy souvenir shop.
The Summer Cove Emporium had spread from one store into another until it seemed to hold one side of the square hostage. The store fronts all still looked different, but peering through the windows you could tell it was all just one big jumble of cheap beach towels, buckets, spades, and bottles of shells. The kind of stuff that you find in every town by the sea.
Remember when I said a lot of people know Abel Porter? This was one of the curious facts about him that always made me wonder about who he was and what he got up to when I wasn’t watching – stalking – him. At first, I’d thought maybe he was famous, but Abel Porter didn’t bring up my Abel Porter in a Google search. So no, not famous. At least not in a conventional way. Not being as naïve as the other sixteen going on seventeen teen, you know the one I’m talking about, I’d also wondered if Abel Porter wasn’t selling something he shouldn’t be. It wasn’t sex though.
In less than five minutes Abel Porter emerged from the souvenir shop alone. It was almost always less than five minutes. Hence, not sex.
I had spent a summer holiday timing each and every one of his short visits to the Summer Cove Emporium. Sad, perhaps, but it did make me feel a little closer to him. I’ve never had the courage to follow him into the store and see exactly what he did with all these people. Given that the store had quite a few exits, it wasn’t too suspicious that I never saw any of them leave the Emporium. Regardless I’d noted it down under all things Abel Porter anyway. Like the fact that he liked apple juice but never ate apples. Or that he didn’t have a cell phone, but had a wristwatch.
Instead of heading back to the M bench, Abel Porter made a beeline for me. He was smiling, his green eyes seeming to take in every part of me. I straightened, chasing away any folds that might make me look like I was still holding onto puppy fat.
“Nice shirt,” he said when he was standing right in front of me. It was closer than I’d ever gotten to him. Abel Porter has a strong, firm voice. It sounds confident but also warm like he’s enjoying talking with you. It’s exactly as I imagined it would feel directed at me. “I have one just like it.”
Maybe, I thought, it was going to go just like I’d planned. One little hitch didn’t change the script much. I told myself to say something, anything, but I didn’t. Abel Porter seemed happy to fill in the blank.
“It looks better on you,” he said.
Nothing short of a miracle could have stopped me from blushing. As the day was out of miracles I didn’t stand a chance.
He gestured to the M bench without commenting on my skin malfunction. He raised an eyebrow, so very black that it looked like iridescent stone framing his bright eyes. It kind of took my breath away, but I managed to nod at the implied question.
As we approached the bench, me nervously glancing at Abel Porter from the corner of my eye, I tried to wish away the lingering blush that felt warm still on my cheeks and down my throat. Fortunately, I had my red t-shirt to conceal just how far the blush reached.
“I’ve seen
you around,” Abel Porter said when we had both sat down.
He was watching the chocolate fountain, so I found it hard to read his expression.
My tongue still felt tied up in a knot. It made me feel stupid and I struggled to shrug off the mix of panic and excitement that raced through my body like a thunderstorm. Abel Porter had noticed me. I could only nod.
He must have caught the movement of my head.
“You know my name,” he said, “tell me yours.”
It was a challenge. Somehow it loosened my tongue.
“Crow.” My voice sounded a little choked. I couldn’t finish with my surname. I swallowed hard. “Sorry,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as nervous as I felt. “I’m Crow Silber. You’re Abel Porter.”
He turned and smiled widely. “Yes.”
“The Porter,” I added, frowning a little, as I recalled the curious turn of phrase from Thor-a-like.
“Are you asking?” His smile dimmed a little. I caught it and panic fluttered up into my throat.
“No,” I stammered, though I didn’t understand the question. “No, I just…” I took a deep breath and hurried out a sentence that I hoped would make some sense. “The other guy he said – he asked if I was the Porter.”
Abel nodded. He seemed to understand even if I didn’t.
“You’ll be asking,” he said, but then he shrugged and asked, “So, Crow, do you like THE DOORS?”
That was how I finally met Abel Porter. Officially the moment I stopped stalking him.
Well, almost.
* * *
We talk about music. I mention that Jim Morrison was kind of hot. Abel Porter doesn’t take the bait. He shrugs in an offhand way like he’s acknowledging the statement but neither agreeing nor disagreeing. It’s frustrating. I feel the constant urge to blurt out that I’m gay, but I can’t quite bring myself to say it.
We talk family. His parents live abroad with his sister. He has a guardian. It sounds a little messed up, but I don’t want to pry. He’s very vague about the details. I tell him about my sister and her obsession with the old village. Abel Porter looks at me curiously but doesn’t say anything. We watch a flock of seagulls circle above, crowding out the patches of blue and making the summer sky grey. It doesn’t feel uncomfortable. The silence. At least not for me. But then, I’ve been quiet around Abel Porter for years.
That Moment When: An Anthology of Young Adult Fiction Page 67