Equilibrium

by Lorrie Thomson

“I’m serious. No matter what. Close your eyes.”

  She rested her forehead against the receiver and imagined Nick beside her, warming the bed.

  “I’m the only friend you need, Darcy.”

  Words she meant to say danced around her mouth, and then slipped back down her throat. Her eyes fluttered shut. And she was falling into the dreaming kind of sleep.

  “All the other guys just want to use you. All the girls are jealous of you. It’s just us. You and me. All you need.”

  All I need.

  Oversized barbells shackled her ankles. The weight of water pressed against her lungs, and she knew she was at the bottom of Greenboro Lake. Clad in scuba gear, Nick swam toward her through the murky darkness. Her heart lifted. When he was close enough to touch, when she reached for him, he flashed one of his killer smiles, the smile that meant he really got her.

  A riot of bubbles, and Nick stepped on her chest, forcing out her last breath.

  Chapter 21

  For the third day in a row, Darcy had woken up gradually, not to her mother’s nagging, but to the hum of Nick’s breath through the open phone line. No more nighttime talk about having to see his father, making her wonder whether she’d dreamed Nick’s rant along with that whacked-out nightmare. Her Nick would never hurt her.

  She’d spent the whole morning at school searching between classes for Nick, scheming to run into him in the hallways before lunch. Now and again a less pleasant image had nudged Nick from her thoughts, so she stopped at her locker, scooped up Heather’s clothes-filled backpack, and went on a mission. Just go for it!

  Darcy had counted on the scuffle of students on the way to the cafeteria to work in her favor, making the return of Heather’s clothing a quick and painless exchange of goods. Now, rounding the corner and finding Heather by her locker in a tight-knit conversation with Cam, Darcy was sure she’d screwed up massively. Seeing Heather totally messed with Darcy’s ability to hate her. She should’ve waited until later, should’ve gone over to Heather’s house, should’ve made it right between them.

  “What do you want?” Heather asked, turning in a way that blocked Cam, making Darcy miss him, too.

  “I—uh.” Heather’s old backpack shifted on Darcy’s shoulder, and then bopped down the length of her arm, as if the bag had a mind of its own. They all glanced at the bouncing bag.

  “Thanks.” Heather grabbed her clothes without looking at Darcy.

  Darcy felt her head nodding, her legs walking away. So that was that.

  “Darcy, wait,” Heather said.

  Darcy turned around, certain the torture was nearing its end. Certain the worst fight she’d ever had with her best friend was coming to a close. In the space of a breath, Darcy saw them watching a movie Friday night and munching homemade kettle corn. Maybe Cam could sleep over, too. She could sleep in the middle.

  “Here.” Heather shoved another lumpy backpack at Darcy, similar in vintage and contents to the one she’d given Heather.

  Darcy just stood there waiting, for what she couldn’t say. For her life to change, she supposed. For something, anything, to improve, instead of growing increasingly worse.

  “Everything’s in there,” Heather said. “I checked twice.”

  “Check it again,” Darcy said as a stalling tactic until she could come up with the right thing to say.

  “What?” Heather said, although she’d heard every syllable.

  Darcy couldn’t think of a single piece of clothing she actually cared about, when all she really wanted back was her best friend. “The pink paisley scarf,” Darcy said, remembering the silk she liked to wear as a belt. “My mother gave it to me. She might want it back and—”

  “Fine!” Heather shot Cam a look of what a bitch, and Cam returned her eye rolling with a shrug.

  Heather fished in the backpack and took all of three seconds—Darcy was counting her breaths—to find the scarf. Heather dangled the scarf in Darcy’s face, close enough to blind her. Now who was the bitch? She snatched it out of Heather’s hands. Well, she’d tried, hadn’t she?

  “Cam.” Darcy waited until he’d peeled his attention off Heather. “Wanna watch a movie Friday night?”

  There she went. Now she had Heather’s attention, too. Good.

  “Yeah, I dunno, Darce.” He looked to Heather, as if he needed her permission and didn’t owe Darcy a thing.

  Darcy couldn’t read Cam’s thoughts, but she could always tell when his wheels were churning, grinding down the treads. She shifted from foot to foot. The buzz and rattle of student traffic framed Cam’s refusal to speak.

  “Whatever!” she said, clean out of patience after counting five breaths. She so didn’t have time for this.

  Typical of her life, Darcy’s worst fear was coming true. Heather and Cam were growing closer, two best friends working together to focus their hatred on the outcast third. The thing that riled Darcy wasn’t so much that it was happening, but that she’d imagined, even briefly, that it would not.

  From her seat at the front of advanced placement English, resting her chin in her hands and leaning slightly forward, Darcy could hear other students reading aloud their short stories, but could discern no meaning, as though listening to a foreign language she’d never studied.

  Darcy straightened up when the bell rang and snatched the wide strap of her backpack.

  “I’d like to speak with you about your story.” Mr. Sullivan was heading her way.

  Wasn’t that what they were doing in class? She glanced at his eyes, then focused on the flecks of silver in his close-cropped beard, the way they twinkled like tinsel. “Study hall,” she said.

  “I’ve already let Mrs. Levesque know you’ll be late.”

  “Okay.” She dropped the backpack in the vacant seat beside her. What had she done wrong? She folded her hands in her lap and squeezed them together, pretending her tension ball lay between the palms.

  They waited until the last student left the room and the volume in the hallway trailed to nothing.

  “So,” he said, moving her backpack over one seat so he could sit right beside her. He scrubbed his hand across his beard, chuckled as though nervous, and then fixed his gaze on hers. “Your story was really, really good. I mean, wow. It just blew me away!”

  She released a pent-up breath, smiled. Now she could go!

  “The reason I asked you to stay—”

  They weren’t done?

  “Darcy.” More fixed gaze coming from Sullivan. “Some of the themes you illuminated very much concerned me. And I thought you might like to discuss them.”

  No, she did not like.

  “Sure.” For the first time, Sullivan’s unflappable calm rubbed her the wrong way and she sensed a dangerous undercurrent.

  While she wondered how to get out of this one, Sullivan got her assignment from his accordion folder on his desk, set the papers between them, and removed the clip from her untitled story about a court of fairies and their ephemeral—God, she loved that word—life on the planet Earth. The happy fairies spent their days sipping nectar from long-necked daylilies and flitting between flowers, zigzagging the fairy garden with their butterfly cousins. But unlike their decor winged relatives, a higher being had bestowed upon the fairies a two-sided gift: the knowledge of their mortality.

  “I thought, maybe, we could discuss the king of the fairies?”

  Darcy shrugged. “What do you mean? Like his robe that reflects twenty-seven different colors or his territory-marking citrus-musk scent?” She’d found the territory-marking idea by googling an article on predators.

  Sullivan grinned, but his eyes said something else. “Your details are unbelievably creative. I especially enjoyed how every spoken word makes a unique color and smell. Your writing really rocks.”

  Eww! She hated when teachers tried to sound like kids. She slid her story away from Sullivan and flipped through the pages just for something to do with her hands.

  “Darcy.”

  She looked up.
/>   “I’m going to read from your story. All right?” he asked, as if she had a choice.

  She lifted her hands off the papers, and Sullivan scanned the pages with his finger until he found what he was looking for. He cleared his throat. “ ‘Thoughts of his impending death niggle at the king, for he can never hope to know the details of his last breath. Taking control of the deplorable situation, he usurps the role of the higher being and plans his end in great secrecy.’ ” Sullivan scanned farther down the page without glancing up. “ ‘After setting the scene with all that had comforted him through his days, silks and jewels, colors that no human could see, he drinks deeply from the forbidden black rose, and sinks into the welcoming arms of the great sleep.’ ”

  Sullivan sighed like an old lady, the type with bad teeth. “Shall I continue?”

  “It’s your class.”

  He shuffled the pages, then took a breath. “ ‘When the fairy princess returns from her travels, nothing remains of the king, except the lightest sprinkling of fairy dust and his citrus musk cloying each and every blade of grass in the silent garden. Her father, the king, only forgot one precious detail when gathering his comforts for the eternal journey. He left the princess behind.

  “ ‘From that day forward, the abandoned princess wears the forbidden black rose over her heart, pinned directly to her skin, securing the secret gateway to her father.’ ”

  Sullivan paused. “Would you like to talk about what I just read?”

  The color of the sky kept changing; she could tell even through the grimy school window. Amazing, really, just when she’d get a handle on a particular shade, the baby-boy blue shifted to indigo, the color of Daddy’s eyes.

  She knew more than one gateway to her father and none of them required sipping from a black rose. Why, right in her house, hiding innocently behind a year-old bottle of Valerian drops—the herbal sleep aid Maggie had given Mom—sat a nearly full bottle of prescription sleeping pills her mother hadn’t touched in a year. Darcy had sneaked both when she couldn’t take another minute of lying awake staring at the ceiling, and the prescription meds had given her a wicked headache.

  Sullivan touched his fingertips to her arm. “Darcy? I said, would you—?”

  She looked him in the eye. That’s what he wanted, wasn’t it? “It’s a fairy tale.”

  “Yes.” Sullivan’s voice actually cracked. “But even fairy tales tell the truth.”

  Which apparently was against the law in Greenboro, New Hampshire. Would a great dramatic confession please Sullivan, a teacher she’d liked up until a few minutes ago? Perhaps he was looking for a play by play of the precise moment when she’d returned home from school to find the town’s entire police department swarming her house, and the sure understanding her father was gone forever.

  Perhaps she could map out how her heart had exploded in her chest.

  “I need to know,” Sullivan said, “if you’re thinking about hurting yourself.”

  The heel of her sandal jangled against the chair’s metal rung. The blue sky had already washed white, barely hinting at indigo.

  Sure, she’d thought about it. How could she not, when she had such a legacy to follow, such a fine and shiny example? Car accident, popping pills, blasting your brains out. Daddy had made it look so easy. And she hated him for it.

  Sullivan’s chair scraped the floor, and before she realized he’d left, he returned with a box of tissues.

  Dry-eyed, she pushed the tissues away using both hands. Once again, he’d read her all wrong. The black rose in her story was a metaphor, a snapshot of feelings past. Not the motion picture of her emotions. Her private emotions, not Sullivan’s. Damn him for dissecting her story. Damn him for believing he understood her.

  Damn him for even trying.

  “No,” she said. Then, just so there could be no mistaking the meaning behind her words, she said, “I’m not thinking about hurting myself. Can I leave now?” Despite what Sullivan or anyone else might have thought, she was not her father.

  Sullivan scribbled on a scrap of paper. “Here’s my cell phone number. Feel free to call at any hour. My door’s always open. And Mrs. Gould is here for you, too, Darcy.”

  Oh, sure, Mrs. Gould, the school shrink, who’d insisted on an appointment last spring and forced Darcy to sit through an hour-long lecture on why her father’s death wasn’t her fault. That had gone so well.

  She slid the phone number in her back pocket, nodded in Sullivan’s general direction, and made sure to take her story with her before the idiot submitted it as police evidence.

  She slipped into the ladies’ room, carried the wire trash basket into a stall, and took out her emergency pack of matches. Copies of her story were safe in her computer at home and the thumb drive in her backpack, as well as her memory. But the paper copy begged destruction. Sullivan had ruined it for her. Not only had he totally misunderstood what she’d written, he’d managed to hold it against her, as if what she’d really meant were secondary to his screwed-up interpretation.

  She dropped Sullivan’s phone number on top of her story, struck a match, and lit the word-decorated kindling on fire. Then she watched the sharp red and orange tongues lick her A plus, curling and blackening the papers’ edges. Remembering the smoke alarms, she dragged the flaming basket back to the sink and squeezed her hands around the faucet, aiming the stream of tepid water like a garden hose.

  She stared at what was left of her story, as pleased with the destruction as with the creation. For the life of her, she could not believe Sullivan had read the last paragraph.

  The realization starts out slowly, gaining momentum in not merely the princess’s mind, but also in her heart. The king, whom she admired, who spent his brief days casting great magical spells over the kingdom of fairies, wielded his talents as a smoke screen for the larger truth.

  The king, her father, was a coward.

  The temperature must’ve dropped twenty degrees since this morning, and Darcy shivered when Nick pulled his heap into the private drive leading to the lakeside cottage.

  Good, still vacant.

  They got out of the car, flipped down their seats, and hunched into the backseat. They didn’t have much time. Mom had only given Darcy permission to stay out till nine thirty, half an hour later than her usual school-night curfew. Yahoo’s Pizza Shop stayed open till nine, so why not let her and Nick hang out in the safe public place till closing? Still, Darcy could stretch it further, explain her way out of getting home fifteen or twenty minutes later than expected. Traffic jam, stopping for gas, or Nick dropping off other kids. Her mother didn’t trust her, so why tell the truth?

  Nick started toward her, and she closed her eyes. His body pressured her chest.

  “What’s wrong?” Nick took his weight off her and sat up suddenly. “Why the tears?”

  Finding the wetness on her cheeks made her even shakier, like when she was little and noticed blood after skinning her knee. She thought back through the events of the afternoon, trying to figure out what precisely had stuck in her gut and was now churning out tears. Incredibly, the tears had nothing to do with her.

  “Troy’s seeing a doctor Thursday,” she said. “The shrink I told you about.”

  “Uh-huh. So that’s a good thing, right?”

  “Yeah, awesome.”

  “Sounds like this shrink guy knows his stuff. If your brother has your dad’s problem, then he can help. And if Troy doesn’t, even better.”

  “I suppose.” If Super Shrink diagnosed Troy with bipolar, little brother could look forward to a lifetime of pills and doctors, with a messy suicide as his final Daddy-like act. Some patients even offed themselves while in the disorder’s early stages as a preventative measure.

  Nick refused to look away, even though she knew she looked ugly when she cried. A box of tissues came her way for the second time today, and this time she accepted the offering. She blew her nose and pocketed the wet wad.

  “Better?” Nick asked.

  She
nodded. “A little.”

  “Your family’s like mine. Really small. It’s just me and my mom and grandmother, so we stick together. Hang tough through all the crap. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them.”

  Nick returned to his original position above her and lowered his weight as she slid beneath him. His unfaltering gaze blurred her vision. He felt so good. Smelled so good. Tasted so good. She couldn’t tell whose heartbeat was pounding through her chest wall—his or hers.

  There was nothing she wouldn’t do for Nick.

  He unbuttoned her jeans, and she helped him push her pants and underwear down together. He moved his hand over her stomach, past her stomach. A small hitched gasp rumbled through her mouth and into Nick’s, so they could both feel the gravelly texture. “Shh, it’s okay. I just wanna make you feel good. I won’t do anything else. Trust me,” he said, and she held her hand to his.

  Chapter 22

  Monday night found Laura kicking herself, annoyed to distraction by her willingness to please her daughter. Darcy was already half an hour late for her half-an-hour-later-than-usual curfew, making Laura sorry she’d agreed to the exception. She’d called Nick’s house ten minutes ago and spoken to his mother. Hope had no more idea what was delaying the kids than Laura did. Well, that wasn’t true. Laura had plenty of ideas, and none of them softened her edges.

  Laura threw in a load of wash and booted up the computer. For the first time in years, this morning, the writing muse had whispered in Laura’s ear.

  She’d been resisting the muse’s voice all day.

  For years, Laura had pictured the muse as a young woman with long, flowing hair, pastel-pink fairy wings, a to the floor lavender gown, and a voice like cool whipped cream frosting. Now the muse spoke to Laura in a voice decidedly male, entirely warm, and completely Aidan’s. He’d called her the genius behind Jack’s writing. He’d deemed her writing fresh. He’d found her work sensual.

  He’d found her sensual.

  When Laura thought back to Aidan’s encouragement, and the ensuing kiss, she didn’t know whether she should apply for a grant to the MacDowell Colony for artists in Peterborough or show up at Aidan’s doorstep wearing nothing but a white calla lily behind her ear and a big grin across her face. So far, she’d neither committed to writing nor decided what to do about her spring-fever crush on Aidan. The fact the man was seven years her junior and renting the apartment in her home made him doubly inappropriate for her.