Reverie

by Ryan La Sala

  And the other person was Kane.

  The flesh of Kane’s inner cheek was ragged from his grinding teeth, the bite of blood hitting his tongue a second before he could rouse himself from the shock. He glanced at the old camera on the shelf, then looked at the back of the photo and saw a date: July, just two months ago.

  His eyes squeezed shut on their own, unable to see what Kane’s mind was already beginning to know. He could hear two things: his heartbeat, and Sophia reaching the height of a major scale.

  He dove back into the drawers, pulling them all out and tipping the box upside down until dozens more photos fluttered to the carpet. He spread them out, his dread replaced by a white-hot exhilaration.

  There was Ursula, blushing while a clown hugged her. In another, a cloud of electric blue cotton candy hid a person’s face. In yet another, Kane straddled a waxy unicorn on a carousel, mouth open wide. A fourth showed Ursula holding Kane in her arms while a mechanical dragon glowed red and exhaled steam.

  And finally: Ursula with her back to a ring-toss game; one hand was on her hip and the other proudly brandished a bag toward the camera. The bag was swollen with water, a black fish fluttering in its belly.

  Sophia’s scales shifted into a minor key, and with them Kane’s exhilaration ebbed into a bristling fear. He looked around his room, at the clutter of a life he did not recognize.

  Ursula Abernathy was not who he thought she was.

  But neither was he.

  • Five •

  ALWAYS FEED THE BIRDS

  Amity Regional High was an old beast, summoned from bricks and concrete in 1923 and then barnacled with new additions as the town’s population rose. Kane and his father sat in a rental car in the school driveway, watching the mist rise in the morning breeze. It looked suspiciously idyllic.

  His dad inched them closer to the doors, killing the engine and throwing Kane a look of grim resignation before asking, “You’re sure about this?”

  No.

  “Yes,” Kane said.

  “Your mother said just yesterday you were begging not to go back. She talked to the principal. You’re allowed to take another week at home.”

  “No, I want to go back.”

  No one knew about the photos he’d found; therefore, no one in Kane’s family understood his overnight enthusiasm for returning to school, least of all his dad. The two shared a love of avoidance that was practically hereditary in the Montgomery men. Kane hid in the lush worlds of fantasy; his father dwelled in the sparse dimension of architectural drawings. Kane used to imagine them hanging out in that dimension, perched atop translucent buildings made of frost-blue lines and panes of papery whiteness.

  “Earth to kiddo.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know him?”

  His dad pointed at a boy who had just materialized on the school steps. Kane hadn’t even seen him walk by.

  Why do parents think their kids know every other kid? Then he realized: if he knew this person, would he even remember? He took a closer look. The boy was staring at the car. Really staring. The clean light of morning lay over a face of brown skin and sharp angles, illuminating two gray-green eyes.

  Like sea foam, Kane thought.

  The boy must have been deep in thought; tension lined his jaw and neck. Distance yawned in those eyes.

  “Don’t know him,” Kane said. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  Kane hurried his dad into the office, where they had to fill out a bunch of paperwork ensuring that Kane was approved to return to school. Or something. He only half listened, unable to stop looking down the hallway, his heart jumping every time someone crossed his periphery.

  “Nurse’s office next,” his dad said, squinting at some forms.

  Kane brought him there, losing himself in murky dread as he thought of the photos. He had them in his backpack, ready for when he ran into Ursula and could confront her. He was rehearsing what he’d say. You know me. You knew me. He was replaying their conversation on the path over and over. You told me where to look. You knew.

  Amid a discussion with the nurses about medications, Kane found that he was absolutely furious. The joy of finding out that he had a friend was totally eclipsed by the realization that she had let him believe he was all alone, giving him only a riddle to work out for himself.

  Or maybe Kane was making it up. Maybe, like him, Ursula had no idea they were friends. Maybe, like him, her memory was messed up.

  Beneath his doubt, Kane knew this wasn’t true. Ursula had been on that path for a reason, and that reason was Kane. So why not just tell him?

  Back outside the school, his dad pulled him into a tight hug while Kane’s body continued to thrum with suppressed rage.

  “Kane, you’re shaking.”

  “Nerves.”

  “You’re going to do great, okay? And if you want to come home, just text us.”

  “Okay.”

  This was the moment for a heartfelt goodbye, but Kane had just noticed a familiar head of orange hair among the crowd of kids at the bike rack. He gave his dad a bright smile, said he’d be home later, and ran off.

  Fifty feet. Twenty feet. Kane pierced through the milling students in the parking lot, rehearsing under his breath as he closed in on Ursula. Ten feet. She was barely done locking up her bike when he stopped short, the rack between them.

  The instant she saw him, Kane knew he was right. Her face opened in shock, then closed in careful neutrality.

  “Hey, welcome back.”

  The words Kane had prepared vanished in this throat. All he could think to say was: “I have some questions.”

  Ursula shouldered her bag and walked away from Kane, who was failing at the confrontation he had imagined dozens of times. Luckily, she turned back.

  “You know the old court?”

  The old courtyard. Not really a courtyard. Just a slab of concrete penned in by three windowless walls that opened to the wooded area behind the school. An optimal meeting spot for cutting class, smoking, and hooking up. Or so Kane assumed. He’d never done any of that. But he knew what it was.

  “Meet me there after homeroom,” she said before he could even nod, and then she walked away.

  Homeroom was clearly expecting Kane. He burst in, mind buzzing, and only realized there was nervous applause when it ended and a big silence settled.

  Everyone watched him, waiting for him to say something.

  “Thank you for the card,” he mumbled.

  Viv Adams raised her hand. Ms. Cohen, who had frozen while writing WELCOME BACK KANE!!!! on the whiteboard, seemed hesitant to call on her but did anyways.

  “I like your haircut,” said Viv.

  “Thanks.”

  “Looks like it hurts.”

  Someone snickered. The room went electric with cruel energy as the other students bit back laughter. Viv was always calling herself brutally honest, but she was more concerned with being brutal than with being honest. Kane was in no mood.

  “No, Vivian, getting a haircut doesn’t usually hurt unless, like yourself, your head is neck-deep up your own ass.”

  “Mr. Montgomery!”

  And with that, Kane’s triumphant return to high school ended in its own fiery crash.

  Before he knew it, he was outside the school, in the back court. Alone. Finally.

  The first thing he did was shake himself out. Anxiety swirled in his chest as a breeze pulled loose garbage and leaves into a small whirlpool. Dizzy, he dropped onto a flaking picnic table, and soon his journal was in his hands. He recorded the strange events of the day before and the morning, messy and meandering and full of embellishment.

  There is something unreal about everything, and I have proof, he wrote, so why do I feel like I’m making it all up? Why do I have to feel like the crazy one, when it’s the world that’s wrong?


  Kane tapped his boots on the bench, wondering if it was a mistake to look for answers to who he was by coming to school. He was the least of himself here, and on purpose. Kane’s exclusion was one he’d cultivated over years, withdrawing from a world he’d always felt wrong in.

  It wasn’t due to being gay, or who he was, but instead how he came to be. Kane had been outed pretty young by his eccentricities. Maybe a more astute child would have tried harder to rein themselves in, but Kane was the last to know he was gay and therefore powerless to deny it once he was finally told. He only found out as the other boys began to evade him in elementary school. Sleepover and birthday party invitations dried up. Teachers became overkind, which secured his shame. He became marked. A curiosity placed in the limbo between the worlds of boys and girls.

  The limbo yawned wider every year, and no one yet had dared to join him. Alone, Kane felt himself warping into someone who didn’t trust anyone. Sometimes he would get messages through the limbo—people reaching out to him through unsigned notes or anonymous emails saying they wished they were out, too—but it was hard to tell which were real. Most of the time, they were pranks from the same sleepovers he wasn’t invited to anymore. More than once the conversations got shared throughout the school. Eventually Kane stopped responding.

  Statistically, Kane knew he wasn’t the only gay person at Amity Regional, but he had been marked in a way that made it risky for others to associate with him. That’s what curiosities do: they draw the eye. No one else wanted to be the focus of the eyes that scrutinized Kane. No one wanted to share his limbo with only him as company. They watched from afar, and Kane made himself at home within his habit of hiding.

  People left him alone, which he liked. Not anymore, though. Vivian’s comments would be the first of many as Kane’s classmates remembered him—and how little they liked him.

  In the back court, Kane once again sensed he was being watched. This time it was worse than homeroom because it was not the eyes of a crowd, but the stare of a predator.

  Kane looked up.

  Twenty yards toward the forest, slashed into the brightening day, stood the shadowy figure of the boy he’d seen that morning. He did not approach. He just stared, the gaze from his eyes radiating such intensity that Kane’s bones hummed with the urge to run.

  Upon reflex Kane ventured a small wave, which the boy did not return. Instead, he pointed at the journal. Where nothing had been before, a photo jutted from the seams where the pages met. Plucking it out, it showed four pairs of shoes from above. Four people standing in a tight circle, their toes almost touching.

  In the photo he recognized his own boots and what he remembered were Ursula’s running shoes, but the two other were anonymous: a pair of white ankles in straight-boy sneakers and a pair of gray sandals on brown feet.

  Something flashed in Kane’s memory, like a far-off lighthouse whisking its beam across black waters, there and gone before he could tread toward it.

  When Kane looked back up the boy was gone. Now—inches from where Kane sat—stood Ursula.

  “Jesus!” Kane snapped the journal closed over the photo.

  “You came,” she grinned. She had a hat over her curls, and she wore a neon green windbreaker. Her frostiness from the morning had thawed, but timidity still rounded her posture as she rocked on her feet. Kane looked around. The boy was for sure gone. Scared off when he saw her coming, maybe? How was everyone so able to sneak up on him? Was he that oblivious?

  “You wanted to talk?” Ursula asked.

  “Yeah.” Kane was prepared this time. “Where did I get my fish?”

  Ursula stopped rocking. “Your what?”

  “My fish. Where did I get him?”

  There it was, the flash of deceit in Ursula’s eyes as she looked away.

  “I have no idea what fish you’re talking about.”

  Kane tore open his bag, dug out the photos, and slapped them down on the table. The one of Ursula holding the fish in the pouch of water was right on top.

  “You’re lying.”

  Ursula’s face went from pink to red to gray. She attempted to smooth out her expression, but there was no saving this. She’d been caught and she knew it. Her stiff posture relaxed, and a hint of a smile brushed her lips. Was she relieved?

  “Okay. Fine,” she said, acting defeated. “I won him at the Amity Agricultural Fair this summer in one of those ring-toss games, and I named him Peter, but my brothers kept on trying to play with him so you offered to take custody. And you renamed him Rasputin after the mystical adviser to the Tsar of Russia, which I thought was kind of gruesome because of where his body was found—the mystical adviser, not the fish—but you told me that this sort of overbearing behavior was going to cost me visitation rights, and—”

  “We were friends?”

  Ursula was silent for so long that her breathing blended into the simmering cicada song. Then: “We’re still friends, I hope.”

  Simple, earnest words. They plunked into Kane one by one, like bits of sea glass. They sank into his depths and glimmered at him from his shadows, hinting and unknowable. The truth was deep within him and well beyond his reach.

  He needed to know more. Everything.

  “For how long?”

  “Umm. I guess since third grade when I asked to borrow your comb on picture day and you told everyone I had fleas from the pound or something, which turned into this whole thing about me and dogs, and then your dad made you come over to my house and apologize. Been friends ever since. Except I guess part of seventh grade because you went through this pretty intense goth phase and started doing tarot card readings, which my dad thought was Satan worship, and we got into this big fight and you cursed me.”

  Painfully, Kane remembered that phase. He did not remember Ursula during it, before or after. She had been cut from his memory entirely. How was that possible?

  “I cursed you? Like, with magic?”

  “Yeah, I guess. That was the goal, but it wasn’t the real stuff or anything.”

  “The real stuff?”

  Ursula let out a tight laugh. “Did you find my note?”

  “Your note?”

  “It was with the box I dropped off at the hospital? They said no visitors except family, so I left it at the desk.”

  There had been many gifts and flowers. Sophia had diligently brought them all home from the hospital, and Kane had diligently shoved them all into the trash.

  “I missed it. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It was dumb.” She sounded relieved, but after a beat of silence her tone turned hesitant. “Look, Kane, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when I saw you on the path. I’ve replayed that night like a million times in my head, and I mess it up every time. When you didn’t recognize me I just…I don’t know. I panicked. I heard the rumors that your memories got messed up, but I thought maybe when you saw me…”

  Her voice failed her. She swallowed.

  “I shouldn’t have left you like that. I just didn’t want to confuse you even more.”

  “I’m not confused.”

  The air between them tensed.

  “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  Kane sighed. In his head he watched Ursula running into the night. He replayed it again and again. The steeliness, the concealed anguish. It had seemed so odd then, but he understood it now. Like thick mist, pity threatened to blot out Kane’s determination. The familiar urge to retreat pulled at him. To sink into the limbo, where no one could find him. But he darted away from the urge like a fish sliding up from the darkness, toward sunlit waters; he needed to see this through.

  “Listen,” he said. “It’s not just you, okay? Other stuff is foggy. I’m not sure how much I’ll get back. Or when.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I might never remember our friendship fully.”

  “Okay.�
��

  “Or at all.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you say something other than ‘okay’?”

  Ursula smiled. “This is sort of stupid, but I brought something for you.” She pulled a plastic container from her bag. “Close your eyes.”

  Kane did. Ursula placed something cool and smooth into his hands.

  “Okay, you can look.”

  At first he mistook them for flat dolls of some sort. One had a tuft of brown hair, the other had red hair. They smiled wanly at Kane while he tried to figure out what strange, occult talisman he’d just been handed.

  “I couldn’t get your boots as detailed as I would have liked,” said Ursula, pointing to the brown-haired one, “But I got some tips from this baking blog, and I think I could do the laces with a finer piping tool.”

  “Oh!” Kane was holding cookies. Two incredibly detailed, frosted sugar cookies, made to look like him and Ursula.

  “You made these?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’ve just been carrying them around?”

  “Ha. No. You and I are good friends with the lunch ladies. They let me keep them in the cafeteria freezer. I just grabbed them.”

  “But…why do this?”

  Ursula’s smile turned bashful. “I needed to do something, I guess. And I…I missed…” A sad pain rose in Ursula’s voice. “We used to have this joke with my dad about how we wished we could live as cookie people in the cookie kingdom and… Actually it’s hard to explain.”

  She didn’t bother. She shook herself and said, “And I wanted to try out this new recipe. They might suck, just warning you.”

  “They look too good to eat.”

  “Oh, please. I have like, hundreds more. Here.” She took one cookie, snapped off the leg, and handed it over. They both took a bite.