Teen Phantom

by Chandler Baker

  I drove the distance as though on autopilot the way I did when I had nowhere else to go and when I didn’t want to go home.

  After traveling a short fifteen minutes, the narrow avenue of Havelock dead-ended into an unassuming building, the lawn of which was fenced in by horizontal two-by-fours nailed to posts and painted a spritely red. It was an organized building. Straight lines, evenly spaced windows, and grass spreading out before it that never grew too long. It was a building that kept all its crazy on the inside.

  I parked in a clearly marked visitor spot. There were always plenty available.

  In the glass door, I saw my reflection as I approached. My whole person was at odds with the setting, from the frenzied assortment of rings on my fingers to my too-muddy boots on the white tile.

  Upon entry, the first thing I always noticed was that everything in this place—and everyone—was trapped behind glass. A receptionist sat safely behind a desk cased in by a cubicle of glass; orderlies bustled in and out of a locked door behind her, through to another wall of glass.

  I approached her. She had on a pair of lilac scrubs, her hair pulled into an efficient-looking braid. “Hi,” I said, causing her to look up from a crossword puzzle. “I’m here to see, Mar—I mean Cassidy—Hyde.”

  She pushed the puzzle in front of her aside and replaced the space with her keyboard. She tapped a few commands into it. The screen of her computer faced away.

  “Name?” she asked without bothering with any niceties.

  “Lena Leroux.” My fingers clenched the slender space of counter left to my side of the glass.

  Turning from the computer, I watched the woman on the other side of the counter write my name down at the top of a form pinned to a clipboard. She handed it to a passing orderly, who glanced down and then swiped a card across an electronic pad to exit the glass cubicle.

  “You can wait in the sitting room.” She gestured to the wiry chairs behind me. “We’ll be with you shortly.” Her eyes were already back to the crossword puzzle before I backed away and took my seat on one of the chairs with only the barest excuse for padding.

  Double-paned glass sandwiched a wire fence that partially obscured the view into the recreation room of Maven Brown Psychological Treatment Facility.

  Asylums, I’d learned, were tricky places. They were constantly trying to prove they weren’t prisons, but then equally as consistently giving away that they were.

  I stood when I saw her, drawn to the glass like a mosquito to the neon light of the zapper. I pressed my eyes to the cool surface and peered through the slits. I’d caught sight of her, and it forced the reaction in me that it always did. My adrenaline shot up. My heart went haywire in my chest. Her mere presence was a potent dose of attraction, affection, and danger.

  She sat at a table, her socked feet resting on the stirrups of a wheelchair. Her dark brown hair was longer, but also unkempt. Her tongue stuck out the side of her chapped lips as she cut jagged patterns into a piece of plain white paper with a pair of childproof scissors and let the scraps fall to the ground.

  The orderly who had taken the clipboard with my name on it approached her. He squatted down so that he was eye level with her. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she shook her head without glancing over at him. The points of her scissors kept working, changing angles and slicing through the page. He held out the clipboard and pointed. She shook her head again.

  One more time, he said something to her. This time her eyes focused on him, and she bared her teeth. He backed away, tipping onto his heels and stumbling to his feet.

  The orderly didn’t say another word to her. He pulled out his keycard and swiped it across the electronic pad to regain entrance to the cubicle.

  I felt an icy chill in the form of hairs raising on the back of my neck and arms. Marcy’s eyes had traced the length of the wall, following the path of the orderly as he left all the way across and back to me.

  Her gaze penetrated the obfuscated glass between us, and the pierce of her stare sent a spike from my heart through to my bowels.

  “Lena Leroux?” came the woman’s voice from the cubicle.

  My breath hitched in my chest. I ripped my eyes from Marcy, feeling the physical wrench of torn connection, and hurried back to the counter.

  “She’s not taking visitors,” said the woman.

  “You mean not today?” I asked. A swollen lump formed in my throat.

  The woman set her pen down. “I mean not ever.”

  I hid my trembling hands below the countertop so that she couldn’t see and thanked her. As I left Maven Brown, I still had the feeling of Marcy’s eyes boring a hole through the barrier between us.

  I sat alone in my car with the keys in my lap. The slightly soupy feeling of being sick squelched in the pit of my belly.

  That look Marcy gave me. She knew I was there. And she judged me. For everything. I could feel it. The fresh burn of disdain, stinging like bleach on Misty’s scalp.

  For a short time, Marcy had been everything. She was most of all my savior. Back then I’d still been looking for love and finding it in the wrong places with boys that saw me as the butt of a joke, something to mock and something to hurt.

  They’d hurt her, too. But when Marcy saved me from them, I learned that she wasn’t the type to let things lie. I knew from the moment I met her that she was made for revenge. I knew and I wanted to be around her anyway.

  At least I thought I did. I thought I could. But when choosing her meant blood on my hands, I’d left. The truth of that abandonment was sitting inside the glass walls of Maven Brown. I hadn’t fought for her. Maybe if I had she’d still be out here instead of in there now. Or maybe she wouldn’t and those boys would still be maimed or dead because she was Marcy and she didn’t belong anywhere.

  I knew only one thing for sure. With Chris, I wouldn’t make the same mistake.

  I would be there. I would help him. I wouldn’t leave him. I would keep him as a friend, whatever it took.

  NINE

  Chris

  We walked a few blocks to the middle school where there was a mostly empty playground. I hadn’t been on a real playground since second grade, and this was nothing like the architectural playscapes that sprouted up from the city block I was used to. It was a colorful, plastic monstrosity with slides the shape of curly fries, monkey bars, a bridge that jiggled, and a miniature rock-climbing wall that had surely broken more than a couple of arms in its day.

  On the walk over, we’d been mostly silent. It was easier to be amicably silent in Manhattan I was finding, because there, the city was so noisy it tended to take up its own space in the conversation. The quiet here was much louder. I stood with my toes pressed to the plastic barrier of a sandbox feeling uncomfortable and as though it had been a mistake to let her wear me down into coming.

  Had she worn me down? I wasn’t sure now.

  “Come here often?” I asked, lamely, while keeping my hands stuffed deep in my pockets. “Crowd’s a little younger than your target demographic.”

  The distant sound of car doors slamming and moms screaming after their children reached us. I looked across the flat expanse of so much land and not enough to put on it and felt so very far away from home, like I’d been placed in a scuba helmet and plunged undersea.

  “It’s not like I come for the company,” she said. “I just like to hang upside down.”

  I shut one eye, squinting skeptically at her. “You what now?” She looked sane enough. I wondered if I should start worrying that none of the girls in Hollow Pines were what they seemed. Lena was certainly a little odder than one would expect.

  “I like to hang upside down.” She spoke more slowly and pointed at a set of monkey bars. “You know, the opposite of right side up.” She translated as if that were the part that was confusing and not the why of it.

  “Stop,” I spluttered. “That’s craz—” But she snapped a warning look at me, and I redirected. “I mean, that’s … unconventional.” And I m
anaged to turn it into almost a compliment.

  “Yeah.” Her thumbs were tucked into the back pockets of her jeans. “It helps to clear my mind. Every actor needs something, I think. You should try it sometime.”

  I doubted I’d need much mind clearing to get into character for Chorus Member Number Four. Or was it Six? Anyway. “It sounds ridiculous.”

  She frowned, kicking off her shoes so that she was barefoot in the mulch. “My parents won’t let me do any of the extreme stuff to get ready for a role like, you know, lose a bunch of weight or dye my hair or drink a pint of olive oil. I think you have to do something to empty yourself before you can be someone else, you know? So for now, I have this.” She gestured. “Honestly, it works. You’d be surprised. And besides, nothing can be that bad when the world is turned completely on its head. Trust me.” At this she marched over to the set of monkey bars, which were painted a slick purple. At the base of the two-step ladder, she climbed until her hands slipped around the rungs. I watched her forearms tense and her slender limbs arc as she swung across to the center and, adjusting her grip so that she would face me, crunched her abs and hooked her knees over her head and onto the side bar where she flexed her feet, turning them into stoppers against the metal. When she let go of her grip, her hair tumbled down before her, stretching toward the soft ground. She stared at me from her new vantage point, her eyes dancing with a certain giddiness. Or maybe that was just the lack of oxygen to her brain. “Well? Are you just going to stand there?”

  I looked around to ensure that no one over the age of thirteen was watching. Reluctantly, I emptied my pockets and, grumbling, followed after her. Foregoing the ladder, I hopped from the ground to the bar beside her—these were made for elementary school students, after all. The muscles in my arms and even my fingers immediately began to burn with effort as I tried to generate enough momentum to get my feet on top of the bar the same way she had done. I grunted way too much. It was kind of embarrassing if I were worried about impressing a girl like Honor, which I wasn’t. I absolutely wasn’t. “Jesus Christ, are you some kind of witch or something? How did you do that?”

  She laughed. Her cheeks had turned a vibrant shade of red. “Don’t leave me hanging, Chris.”

  “Oh no.” I swung the force of my body. “You didn’t just use a monkey-bars pun. Tell me … you did not … just use … a monkey-bars pun.” At last, I managed to get my knees over the bar and my toes arched so that I wouldn’t fall flat on my face. Trickles of sweat ran down the back of my neck. I took a deep breath and forced myself not to think as I released the tension in my hands and allowed my torso to swing down. That part was at least a thousand times scarier than it had been back in second grade.

  “Fun, right?”

  “Um, all the blood is rushing to my ears, and I’ll probably pass out in, like, five minutes,” I said, feeling my eyeballs bulge. “So yeah, it’s a blast.”

  She let her arms droop down over her head. Her whole body stretched. “But I bet you feel good. A little bit better, right? Like nothing is as serious as it was before.”

  I considered this. “I guess I’m not thinking about moving back to New York,” I said. “Or at least I wasn’t before I said that.”

  “See? That’s something.” She turned her head to look me in the eyes. I felt like we were in outer space. “You’re only here because you felt bad for me, aren’t you.”

  I reached up to tuck my shirt into my jeans. I didn’t particularly like when my belly button showed. “Not really. Maybe. I don’t know. Am I supposed to feel bad for you? Because people seem to like you well enough.” I hadn’t overheard any comments to the effect that Honor didn’t deserve the lead role. And people had, at least in passing, offered their congratulations to her. “I think you may have a bit of a dramatic streak come to think of it.”

  “People tolerate me. Or, they don’t know what to make of me. Maybe you already know this, but my sister’s in an insane asylum. Okay, so it’s supposed to be called a psychiatric treatment center or whatever, but it’s the same thing. Everyone gives me a wide berth.”

  That explained why she was so sensitive about the “crazy” label. “I don’t think that’s contagious, is it?” I joked.

  “I hope not.” She reached up and caught her hands around the bars and then eased her legs down so that she was upright and on firm ground again. “I was kind of hoping that you wouldn’t have had time to have any preconceived notions of me, I guess.” She looked sad. “But no such luck. I’ll get out of here eventually, and then it won’t matter what anyone thinks of me.”

  My blood was beating hard in my temple. I felt the veins in my neck bulging from hanging upside down. “I didn’t have any preconceived notions of you,” I said. “I had them of myself. That’s different. A little help. Please.”

  I was reaching up for the bar, but it was a struggle of epic proportions. Honor laughed lightly. Then, her small hands were on my back. She was curling me up around myself. She was shockingly strong. Every tendon in my body stretched and stretched until my fingertips found the bar and I, as if by a miracle, managed to right myself again.

  “Do you feel cleansed?” she asked, walking over to where her bag rested at the perimeter of the playground.

  “No.” I pressed my hand to my forehead. “I feel dizzy.”

  “Perfect.” She shoved a script into my other hand. “You can be Mark Antony.”

  * * *

  MONDAY MORNING, I sought out Lena first thing. Her head was bowed over something in concentration. I leaned into the locker beside her. “Boo.”

  She startled—scared-bunny startled. Her hip-hoppity-jump-scare sent the object in her hand catapulting up. I watched her eyes go wide, and she fumbled around unathletically to catch it. The contraption bounced in her hands, glanced off her fingers and through them. Reacting on reflex, I squatted low and caught it easily in my hands before the black square of equipment hit the ground and shattered to bits.

  Thank goodness I did, too, because when I turned it over I saw that it was a handheld video camera with a PROPERTY OF HPH sticker fixed to the side. “Close one,” I said, breathing a bit heavily.

  The viewfinder was open and on it a still frame caught my eye. The picture there should have been instantly familiar, but you know how sometimes it’s hard to recognize a person out of context? Like if you run into your second cousin at the dentist or something and don’t know that it’s him. There was a split moment in which I didn’t really see what I was looking at. Then my brow folded. I peered closer at the side profile of a face. My face. And not me from today. Not from now, but from last week. I recognized the red and black check of my shirt as the same one now wadded at the top of my laundry hamper.

  I froze, staring at the still frame, not knowing how exactly to react.

  “Chris?” Lena’s voice was soft.

  “Yeah?” I cleared my throat, flipped the screen shut, and quickly shoved it back into her hands. “Um, sorry,” I said. “I mean about Friday,” I corrected, wiping my hands on the back of my jeans. They were slick with sweat. “I need to get a day planner or something, I guess.”

  I looked around her more than at her. My discomfort must have been obvious if not by the lack of eye contact than by the fact that I could feel my cheeks redden like hot plates. I also picked up a hum of no particular melody, which I didn’t quite know how to stop if she didn’t say something. And soon.

  Christ, were we going to address what I’d seen on the camera or leave it be? Which was worse?

  “That’s okay,” she said. She placed her books into her locker, setting the video camera gently on top of the stack. “You’re here now.”

  “Yeah…” I let my gaze slide over to meet Lena’s. She looked unbothered, not a hint of embarrassment on her serene face. Maybe it was all the eyeliner that hid it, because I knew she knew that I had seen what was on that camera. “I mean, yeah, of course I am,” I said, forcing some of the tension out of my shoulders.

  I was b
eing unfair. Underneath all that makeup was probably a girl who was mortified. She could have been testing her camera out to make sure she had enough storage. There could be any number of explanations.

  “Come on, I’ll walk you to class.” I took a couple of her books and tucked them under my arm.

  Lena didn’t smile, not exactly. It was more like the surface of her face erupted in pleasure and here I was, an asshole, for wishing that it wouldn’t.

  We walked side by side down the hall, the din of hallway noise making it comfortable enough between us.

  Lena stayed a little too close to me. Our arms kept brushing against each other even though there was plenty of room to account for personal space in the broad corridor. I resisted the urge to edge away.

  I liked Lena, I reminded myself. She was the first person who was nice to me at this school, which should count for something. If I should feel uncomfortable around anyone, apparently it should be Honor, whose sister was off her rocker to the extent that the whole school treated her as a pseudo-pariah. But I didn’t feel uncomfortable around Honor. At all.

  And that meant that what I was doing was classic Chris Autry. I’d met a girl that I like-liked—Honor—and now every other female within a twenty-mile radius was paling in comparison. Walking too closely and, okay, at times staring at me a little too long were not valid criticisms of a person.

  I needed to get my head straight. After meeting Honor to run lines after school on Friday, we’d run lines again, this time, over the phone on Sunday.

  She’d peppered me with questions: Which Broadway shows had I been to? Where did I live in New York? For her part, she wanted to get an agent and move straight to Manhattan after high school. That made two of us for the moving-to-New-York bit. It felt good to talk to someone about my home, someone who wanted to listen, who shared the same goal as I did. Get out of here as quickly as we could and never look back. Return to the center of the world.

  To our credit, we ran lines, too.