I moved my bookmark, the black and white photo of the pregnant woman, and closed the book then stood and walked to the railing of the porch.
Squinting my eyes, I studied the house which was an eye sore no more. Just in the past weeks it had evolved into a charming two story white house.
I shuddered. It was probably a coincidence.
A lot of people could have a dog named Phoebe.
But I knew that in a small town like Petoskey there weren’t a lot of coincidences.
11
Near the end of September we had an encounter again. I tried my best to avoid Reign which meant carrying most of my books with me at all times. This year was sharing a lot of similarities with last year. But on a rainy Tuesday morning, I didn’t want to lug around my umbrella and wet coat, so I was forced to use my locker. I waited until the hallway was mostly cleared of students and dangerously close to the bell, but I figured the longer I waited the more likely it was Reign would be sitting in class. When I felt like I couldn’t spare another second, I ran down the hall and to my locker. As if he had been secretly waiting for me the entire time, I was almost immediately joined by him, unlocking his own locker. He didn’t say anything to me, but he didn’t have to just his presence annoyed me and his smell: wood smoke, which actually happened to be one of my favorite scents, but I didn’t like it on him.
“Do we have a quiz today in Ms. Stewart’s class?” he asked, with a small grin.
I didn’t look at him instead I fished out The Great Gatsby from my bag and dropped it into my locker. During lunch and free time during class, I found solace in reading since I had no one to talk with.
“I don’t have her for English. I have Mr. Arnold,” I replied.
He closed his locker. “I guess I’ll ask Kristy.”
I slammed my locker shut and turned to face him with a tense expression. “Her name is Kristen,” I said, turning on my heel to walk away briskly with my head held high as I flipped my wavy, red hair over my shoulder.
“Hey, wait,” he said.
I didn’t stop until he called to me again and said, “You dropped something.”
My first thought was that it was a tampon and I died a little inside. I turned slowly, my face as red as my hair, but I was relieved to see it was nothing personal. The black and white photo of the pregnant woman had slipped from in between the pages of my book and had fallen on to the muddy, wet floor. He kneeled down to pick up the photo, but froze with it in his hand when he flipped it over.
I walked up to him and snatched it from his long fingers. I tucked it into my back pocket and turned dramatically again, but this time I slid a little because the floors were wet and when I tried flipping my hair my fingers got caught in the strands. I checked to see if he was staring after me. He wasn’t. Instead, he still stood staring at his hand where the picture had been with a perplexed and astonished look on his face.
I stopped sitting in the cafeteria. It was too much for me to have to sit alone at a table in the back under the dim, flickering lights and put up with the snickering and glances of my peers. Though it had subsided some. I went from the center of gossip and rumors to regressing to the status I was the year before: invisible.
I started eating lunch in the library, but I was told by the librarian, Mr. Jones, a bald, wrinkly, liver spotted man who wore worn loafers and navy blue, flannel shirts that no food was allowed in his library, so I ended up outside on the stoop near the cafeteria doors with my back against the brick wall. I conveniently had a perfect view of Reign who, after I told him I wanted to eat alone, had continued sitting in the courtyard at the cement table by himself. I wasn’t the only loner in school after all. We spent most of the lunch hour stealing glances at one another. I was too proud to admit that I wanted to sit with him. I just wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t twelve or my mother.
On that rainy Tuesday, it continued to rain through lunch, but I still sat outside. I was dry on the stoop by the cafeteria doors, but surrounding the stoop were shallow muddy puddles. The rain wasn’t awful, but the chill was. I kept my icy, cold hands stuffed in the pockets of my wool pea coat. Every now and then I would quickly pick up my sandwich and take a bite, drop it back in my lap and warm my hands up in my pockets before trying to eat again.
About half way through lunch Reign came through the door holding tightly onto his brown paper bag. He came to a stop beside me on the edge of the stoop and looked, narrowing his eyes, at the wet scene before him. There was no way he could eat at his table with it raining.
He looked down at me and frowned and then sat slowly against the wall opposite me.
Unlike me, he had on big, brown work gloves and a gray cap that covered his ears. I was jealous instantly of his warmth.
“Don’t worry I won’t talk to you,” he said.
He sounded, for the first time ever, upset with me. I deserved it. I hadn’t been welcoming at all no matter how nice he tried being to me. It was immature of me to dump my bad mood on him, so I had a bit of a change of heart.
“That’s okay,” I said.
He was silent as he pulled his lunch out of the brown bag: an orange, a sandwich, and a hostess cupcake. He started with the cupcake and when he bit into a little whip cream was left on his top lip. I stifled a laugh. He looked really cute in his cap and rosy cheeks and his obliviousness to the whip cream on his lip.
“Did you have a quiz today?” I asked.
He looked up at me. “I haven’t had English yet. Seventh period.”
“Me too,” I said.
Then we were silent again and the only noise we could hear was the patter of rain drops falling from the dark clouds above.
“Where’d you get that picture?” he asked.
I blinked at him. That was an odd question. Why did he care? Besides, I didn’t really want to tell him. I didn’t even know why I still hung on to the photo.
“It’s a picture of my aunt,” I lied.
And he knew. He tilted his head at me and smiled. “Really, how’d you get it?”
“I told you,” I said.
“You’re lying.”
His tone was cold, and the warmth in his eyes disappeared, but only for a flicker of a second. His dark eyes lit up a little again and he smiled.
“You have something,” I said, wiping my own upper lip so he’d catch on.
He laughed as he dragged his thumb across his mouth.
“I got it from a house,” I said. “An abandoned house.”
“Do you hang out in abandoned houses a lot?” he asked.
“No,” I snapped then sighed. “I live next door or across the pond from it. My friends—or a group of us went and explored a month ago and I found the picture.”
“You live in that log cabin?” he asked, perking up a little.
I nodded slowly and waited for him to explain how he knew where I lived.
“I’m moving into that house across from you.”
So it was his dog the other day and the man with the beard and orange hat, I realized, was his dad.
He was smiling more at me now that he figured out we were going to be neighbors. I looked away from him at the closed doors because it was always hard for me to not return his smile with my own. I didn’t want him to know that I liked him and that I was excited to know he’d be so close.
“It’s haunted,” I said.
He laughed. “It is?”
“Yeah, there was a skeleton in it.”
“Nah,” he said, still laughing. “It was just an animal.”
“I was attacked that night I checked out the house,” I said as I recalled the haunting memory. Maybe it didn’t really happen, and now I felt hot like he was going to catch me in a lie.
“Attacked?” he said. The smile slid from his face.
I nodded. “By an animal,” I said.
He pulled his cap down further as a burst of wind carried the rain in and we were splashed with cold water. “You live in the woods that could be any animal. It doesn
’t mean my house is haunted.”
Shrugging my shoulders, I took my hands out of my warm pockets and took another quick bite of my sandwich. He watched me and once he figured out what I was doing he bit down on the tip of his right glove and pulled it off then he did the other hand and he tossed the pair of gloves at me. They landed near me. I looked up at him he nodded for me to put them on. I was too cold to object so I slipped my icy hands into the gloves which were nearly two times too big for me.
He got up, finished with his lunch, and headed toward the doors.
“Hey,” I said.
He paused with his hand on the door and turned his head to look at me.
“How’d you know I was lying?” I asked.
“Because that picture is of my mom,” he said then opened the door and disappeared into the noisy cafeteria.
Despite the warm gloves now protecting my hands, I was left feeling even colder than I was moments before.
I spent the rest of the day in a sort of daze. I wanted to find him and give him the picture now knowing that it belonged to him, but the revelation also raised a lot of curiosity like why was a picture of his mother in the abandoned house to begin with? My new neighbor was suddenly very interesting and I planned to find out more about him. But it wasn’t just the golden haired, Southern, boy who churned through my thoughts more than before, but also the picture which I held, folded in my hand the rest of the day, While in class I’d unfold the black and white photo and study the woman with a warm smile, that looked more familiar, and freckled arms, and long fingers that caressed her protruding stomach, and I wondered if in the photo the woman, Reign’s mother, was pregnant with him.
Suddenly the photo changed in significance. Not only did it hold more meaning than before, but it also no longer belonged to me and I realized it never had. I don’t know why I liked it so much when I saw it alone in the broken frame on the cracked wall in the dirty basement, but I guess I felt it was too beautiful to leave alone for another odd amount of years in a sinking house. Once he returned to the house, did go straight to the basement to seek the forgotten photo? Did he even know it was in the house?
Reign. Reign. Reign. Golden hair, a sweet molasses voice, and a bright smile that offset his dark eyes. That’s all I thought about the rest of the day.
Then seventh period my thoughts turned into actuality when I was graced with presence, well actually I was graced with the presence of the entire English class taught by Ms. Stewart, who had to go home because her basement was flooding. They couldn’t find an emergency sub so our principle merged the English classes for the last class period of the day.
I sat by the window in the back row and with my head supported by my hand as I studied the water pour down from the grey sky because this was more interesting than listening to Mr. Arnold lecture about Jane Eyre.
When I heard Kristen’s high pitch laughter, I turned abruptly from the window and my thoughts, and saw twenty-three students file into the room with Kristen in the lead. Her hair was straightened and highlighted blonde. That was new. Her eyebrows were darker, her cheekbones highlighted, her eyelashes longer, her lips plumper. She scratched her upper arm with painted pink fingernails and whispered something in Sydney’s ear who stood close by to her. Their arms almost linked. They both wore their blue and white cheerleading uniforms. Sydney’s hair was done in pigtails decorated with a blue ribbon tied around the left pig tail and a white ribbon around the right. My heart dropped a little seeing them together. Mainly seeing Kristen so close, yet so far from me. I didn’t even know her anymore. She was “Kristy” now.
Mr. Arnold told everyone to find an empty seat or sit on the cold, tile floor which caused Kristen and Sydney to yell “ew” at the thought of having to sit on the wet, dirty floor. Two guys from my class offered up their seats for the two girls and Kristen beamed. She loved every minute of the attention.
The last one to enter the room was Reign. He walked in with his hands in his pocket and shuffling his big toed, brown boots slowly. He no longer had the grey cap warming his head. Once he started looking around the room for a place to sit, I lifted my hand and waved him over to sit in the corner next to me.
He ignored me at first, but when Mr. Arnold told everyone to hurry up and sit so that he could return to the madwoman in the attic. Reign hung his golden head, hunched his shoulders, and walked to the back of the room where he sat on the floor resting his arms on his knees and his back against the wall under the window.
Reaching into my bag, I pulled out his gloves that he let me borrow at lunch and I tossed them at him. They slapped against his face as his attention was on the front. He blinked a little in surprise and picked them up off the floor beside him where they fell then waved his hand at me in a thank you mannerism. This wasn’t enough for me. There were so many kids packed in the room that Mr. Arnold couldn’t pay attention to all of us so I figured talking to him would go unnoticed.
I handed him the black and white photo that I was still holding in my hand. It was creased funny from the amount of times I had folded and unfolded it. I felt bad about returning the stolen photo in a less than perfect state.
“I think this belongs to you,” I said.
He didn’t object. He took the photo from in between my fingers. His hand touched mine and sent a shot of electricity tingling through my body. I caught my breath in my throat and my heart raced as I waited for him to speak.
“Thanks,” he mumbled. He examined the photo in his hand.
I smiled when his lips parted into a grin. “What was it doing in that house?” I asked, my curiosity got the best of me and made me impatient I wanted to know as soon as he had told me the photo was his mother. I couldn’t contain myself any longer even if we were stuck in the back of a stuffy room during seventh period listening to Mr. Arnold drag on in his boring nasally voice.
“Mickey?”
Mr. Arnold stood at the front of the room in a long sleeve white collared shirt underneath a checkered sweater vest. He rubbed his hands together as he waited for my response. His eyebrows were so high they almost disappeared into his hair line. He raised his chin as he watched me, waiting. The entire class turned their heads to look at me as an uncomfortable silence settled under the fluorescent lights.
“Sorry?” I said, burning red.
“What are your thoughts on the woman in the attic?” he picked up his old copy of Jane Eyre from the desk at the front of the room and shook the book for me to see.
Thankfully, I was saved by Sydney, surprisingly, who raised her hand and without waiting to be called on said, “I think she’s crazy.”
“Mickey would know about that,” Kristen said, coughing, but everyone heard including me all the way in the back of the room. I became so upset not at what was said, but because of who said it, so while the class roared with laughter I raised my hand and excused myself to the bathroom not bothering to receive permission. I just picked up my books, my bag, and left the room.
I stayed in the dark bathroom stall until the bell rang. As soon as I heard the bathroom door swing open and girls, loudly filter inside and stop in front of the smudged mirrors to fix their makeup or gossip, I left the security of the stall and the bathroom. I walked, slowly, with my arms crossed and my bag thumping against the back of my legs to my locker.
Reign was soon beside me.
He glanced back and forth at me and the lock in his hand as his fingers danced around the black dial of his combination lock. I stared solemnly into my locker. I had sometime before Mom would pick me up in front of the school. She had a meeting this afternoon with a client. How insufferable, to have to spend another second within this building, when all I desperately wanted to do was return home and hide under my covers, maybe eat a pin of Ben & Jerry’s.
“My mom and dad lived in that house,” Reign said.
I looked over at him, suspiciously.
“After my mom died, my dad and I moved and now we’re back,” he continued.
“Oh,
” I said.
He closed his locker and waited for me as I closed mine and slipped on my wool pea coat. We started walking together down the hall, but I came to a stop once I got a text message from Mom. She was going to be even later.
“Shoot,” I mumbled. I looked out the front glass doors of the school it was still raining and the only place to wait on a late ride was the courtyard.
“What?” he asked.
“My ride got delayed,” I said, shaking my phone back and forth.
“I’ll give you a ride,” he said. “I’m headed that way anyway.”
I hesitated and he noticed. He smiled and said, “Come on. Aren’t we friends now?”
Nodding, a smile crept onto my face. It was nice to have a friend again.
Once we walked through the doors of the school, I popped open my umbrella to walk under while Reign shoved his grey cap over his messy hair and pink ears. His cheeks turned a rosy tint as we were hit with a chilly breeze. He jogged a little ahead of me to the parking lot until he came to a stop in front of a red Ford pickup truck. It was old, a little rusty, dented, it only had front seats and it smelled like him, like wood smoke.
On the back window was a state flag that I didn’t recognize. He turned the heat on high and waited a minute for us to warm up before reversing out of the crowded school parking lot. As soon as the truck had turned on so did the voice of Johnny Cash. I didn’t want to spend the whole twenty minute ride listening to his music though, so I turned the volume down and pointed behind me to the sticker of the flag.
“Where’s that flag from,” I asked.
“Arkansas,” he said with a smile.
“That’s why you talk funny.”
He laughed. “I don’t talk funny. You Yankees talk funny.”
“Yankees? I don’t like baseball.”
He laughed.
“So you moved to Arkansas from here?” I asked.
“We moved around a lot for my dad’s job, but we lived in Arkansas for the last seven years and now that my dad is retired he said I got to choose where we move to and I wanted to move up here.”
Memoirs of a Girl Wolf Page 8