by Nessa Morgan
If Ambrielle Knight, or News Today, wants to do a story on me, what happened to me must have been a big case with national exposure if they want to do a follow up on me. I should do a thorough web search.
“Joey,” Hilary begins as she slowly closes the door. “You don’t have to do this, honey.”
“I know I don’t,” I tell her absentmindedly, still thinking while my eyes train on the card in my hands. It’s small and white with neat type and the News Today logo by her name. “I still want ice cream, though.” I turn to head toward the stairs.
“I thought you wanted ice cream,” Hilary asks when I don’t head toward the door.
“I do,” I answer, my hand on the banister. “But I want to grab a pair of sweats first.” I start up the stairs, my flip-flops thwacking against my heels with every step. Standing in front of the open door made my legs freeze; they feel like popsicles.
I grab an oversized pair of sweats from my dresser, sliding them on over my shorts, then run down the stairs, passing my aunt as she sits on the couch, reading the back of my book. I never pegged her as a paranormal romance fan.
“Don’t forget the Golden Oreos,” she calls playfully as I slip out the door.
When I get home from the store, I camp out on the couch with my book. Zephyr’s out of town on an away game, Kennie’s with him, cheering for it, Harley’s visiting her father’s side of the family in Oregon, and I’m bored. There’s only so much reading I can do and I finish my book.
I could call Jamie, I mean, I haven’t hung out with her since she dragged me dress shopping before Homecoming, but she most likely has plans with Marcus.
What to do? What to do?
I trudge up the stairs, taking my ice cream with me, and toss the book on my bed. It hits my laptop before sliding to the wall, almost falling between the bed and the wall. I’m happy it doesn’t because I think a spider lives somewhere in there and I’d rather we not meet.
I could look up that night. I set my pint of Chunky Monkey on the bedside table, leaving the spoon in my mouth, and flip open my laptop, quickly going to Google. I type my name into the search bar—essentially following a trend some of my friends do, the Googling of one’s self. The only things that pop up are the usual Did you mean: Josephine Archambault followed by a few Ancestry UK posts.
So I’m not the only Josephine Archembault in the world, even if I spell it differently—who knew? What am I say, it’s a fairly common name, of course I’m not the only one.
But the envelope comes to mind. J. Lucas.
Am I really a Lucas?
It’s worth a shot, yeah?
I type in Josephine Lucas, thinking that nothing will pop up because I can’t really be a Lucas, but what I find shoots that thought dead.
Page after page of information pop up, but most of the recent ones are not about me. After a few clicks, reading news articles and blog posts, one catches my attention. It’s from eight years ago.
I open the link of an old newspaper search engine. The heading of the article catches my attention and chills me to the bone.
Father Sentenced to Life for Murder and Attempted Murder of His Wife and Three Children
San Antonio, Texas.
Last month, we all saw the tragic demise of the Lucas family of San Antonio. Husband and Father, Benjamin Lucas, murdered his wife and elder two children with stab wounds to the neck and stomach. The youngest daughter, whose name is being withheld, survived with major injuries to the stomach, back, and chest. As we recall, she was the one to call the police, alerting them to the tragedy within the home.
Only yesterday did we see justice for the younger Lucas daughter, who was just recently released into the custody of her paternal grandmother last Tuesday.
I skim the rest of the article barely taking in where it mentions his death sentence. I continue reading the article until I get to the comments listed at the bottom of the page.
Poor little Josephine Lucas someone writes. It’s the first comment in a long thread. The others only question how someone could do this to their family—How crazy must you be to take the life of your children, of your wife? The woman you swore to protect, how could you just destroy your family?—while also questioning my father’s mental stability (just as I do). But it’s that first comment that sticks in my mind.
Poor little Josephine Lucas…
That person, whoever Anonymous23 is, knew me; they knew my name, my old name—my birth name. That knowledge alone is enough to send a shiver down my spine. Someone out in the world knows me.
And who is this paternal grandmother and why am I no longer living with her? I can’t remember living with anyone but Hilary.
Damn, I need to open those letters, don’t I?
***
The weight presses me down, holding me under the surface until I can’t take it anymore. Then it holds me longer. This is the battle I fight, the fear I feel, and the sense of hopelessness as the water surrounds me.
No air. No air can be found anywhere, and I can’t hold my breath. But they’re taking me farther, deeper, gripping onto my legs, holding my arms, and pulling me under.
This moment, I just want to give up. Call off the fight and let go. Become so weightless that I just drift down. It’d be so easy to give up, it’d be so easy…
Fifteen
I still haven’t cracked open a single letter. I keep opening the door to the closet with the intention but I can never bring myself to open the tub and grab a letter. Part of me wants to know what they say, part of me wants to know what he has to say, the other part of me wants to burn them all without a second thought. I don’t want to give this man the satisfaction that, possibly, I may have read them. He’d think I believe him, he’d think I’d love him when I just want him dead.
But I’m having a second thought.
On a happier note, Hilary and Patrick have become an official couple. She seems extremely happy about it, like dance around the house all the time annoying the hell out of her niece happy, make her niece think she’s a lost a few screws happy. It’s nice she found someone and he seems like a sweetheart so while I’m annoyed with all of the dancing, I’m still extremely happy for her.
I haven’t learned much about Patrick, though. I know that he’s a successful neurosurgeon and graduated from Johns Hopkins University, I know that he’s in his late thirties; I know that he went to college on a football scholarship, but that’s about it. I’m tempted to sit down and interview him until he starts spilling and I learn things about him I can’t find with a Google search.
Though, after asking Patrick all the questions I have pinging around in my brain, I still need to ask Hilary about my paternal grandmother. However, that’s not a high priority—so it can wait.
As scheduled, I have my monthly session with Dr. Jett and talk about nothing, nothing at all. She asks me all of the usual things about school—I have nothing new to tell her—and she tells me that I’m making good progress.
Yay me!
The only problem is that she won’t tell me anything about my own past either. It’s as if all the adults in my life have gathered together with the sole purpose of keeping me in the dark about my own mind. Though, I do get to ask her questions about what I found on the internet.
“How much did you know about me before our first session?” I ask during the start of our November session. It’s raining and I watch droplets of water slide down the window, collecting others and running a maze to a puddle on the sill.
“What exactly do you mean?” Dr. Jett replies in question. I can see I’ve confused her but I don’t understand, the question makes sense.
“Just what the question implies, Doc,” I answer. “How much did you know about me before our first session?” I assume that she was briefed, or whatever the word is. She couldn’t have only relied on my filed for the past eight years.
“Only what was stated in your file,” the doctor replies with a shrug.
“Is there a lot in my file?” I wond
er aloud.
“I wouldn’t say a lot but enough,” Dr. Jett, tapping her pen against the pad in her lap, mentions to me with a casual shrug. “Why do you want to know about that?”
“Just curious,” I tell her, turning my gaze back to the window. She’s lucky enough to have a window in her office; it attracts my attention more than our conversation. That isn’t a good thing to say but she loses me most of the time when she speaks.
But that aside, I now know that there’s a thick file folder with my name on it somewhere in this building.
That is very good to know.
When I get home, the first thing I do is call Harley and beg her to come over to my house. I do the same with Zephyr but Harley arrives first.
“Hey, why the urgent call,” she asks as she glides through the front door, shrugging off her jacket—or Avery’s coat, I think—and tosses it on my bed.
“I’ll tell you when Zephyr gets here,” I explain to her. Lucky for us, he doesn’t take his time.
“What’s up?” Zephyr asks before I close the door to my room for privacy. My aunt already left for work but I don’t want to risk the chance of her hearing what I have to say if she just so happens to forget something and runs home. It’s happened before… not again, please.
I’m a bit paranoid at times—sometimes I think it’s justified.
“She just called me,” Harley offers from my bed as she lounges against the pillows, her converse kicked to the floor by my matching pair.
“Joey, what’s going on?” Zephyr asks, taking a seat on the recliner in the corner of my room. He’s wet, his jacket covered in droplets of water, his hair dripping. I wasn’t aware of the rain outside. It was dry when I got home.
I am too excited, too nervous, to sit down so I pace back and forth in the center of my room, the plan still forming in my mind.
“I don’t know things and it’s bothering me,” I begin, catching a raised eyebrow from both Harley and Zephyr. Not even five minutes and I confuse them by speaking like a crazy girl.
“What are you talking about?” Zephyr blurts.
“I have this plan, this really stupid plan,” I continue. “We’re going to break into my therapist’s office,” I tell them, matter-of-factly, expecting agreements and brainstorming, I mean, these two are my closest friends and I trust them with my life.
That’s not what I got.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Zephyr almost shouts. I can see him turning an awkward shade of red.
“What does it sound like, Zephyr?” I start, excitedly. “I need answers, and I’m not going to get them by just sitting on my ass hoping that I have another dream, I’m taking some action,” I tell them. “Are you either of you in?” I ask, looking back and forth between my boyfriend and my best friend but all I see is blank faces.
But Harley perks up, appearing ready for anything. “I’ll help you in any way that I can,” she chimes from my bed.
That’s a best friend, right there. One that’ll help you commit a crime.
Now what about Zephyr?
“This is crazy,” Zephyr mutters before standing up and approaching me. Maybe I might only be doing this with Harley. Possibly Kennie if I can convince her. “You’re talking about breaking and entering. You can go to jail for that, Joey. Doesn’t that place have surveillance cameras?”
“I’ve been going there for eight years,” I tell them. “Trust me, there are no cameras. Zephyr, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.” I turn to look at Harley. “We can do this on our own.”
“Forget that, I’m going,” Zephyr agrees, sounding as if he was going all along. “I swear, we’re going to get arrested, but you both need someone there to keep a level head,” he grumbles, reclaiming the recliner in the corner.
That night we start the planning process. Even if it’s the last thing I ever do, I will know what happened to me, so help me, baby Jesus.
Sixteen
We push all of the planning aside for the Big Heist—we need a better title for our crime—because I kind of have to do that stupid Idol competition at school that Friday night. Every time it popped into my mind, came back to me that I had to do something terrifying in front of a group of people, I glared at Zephyr—just started staring at him in anger one day. He eventually caught on. Now, as I stand in the hallway wearing a black-and-white striped dress, I continuously curse Zephyr for signing me up for this stupid thing. A few people were in the various practice rooms warming up their voices, others were talking in the hallway with friends, I was just clutching the locket hanging around my neck and counting down the minutes until this ended. One hundred, forty-three minutes, and twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven seconds to go.
Oh yeah, I’m definitely going to punch Zephyr in the throat.
I really hope the time flies… but I doubt I’ll be having any fun.
“Thank you all for coming,” one of the judges from the audition, who I later discovered her name to be Brittany, calls as she walks down the hall. She’s the size of a pixie with short blonde hair cut in a bob. Her heels, which do absolutely nothing to help her height, click-clack along the tiled floor as she walks past us, ushering us into the green room near the end of the hall. She closes the door behind us before she starts saying, “I really love the turnout for this, thank you.” She’s in disbelief over this, which is odd. “This is my Senior Project and it’s never been done before. If it goes well, then the school was discussing keeping it up as an annual thing.”
Yippee! I want to grumble, but that might be rude. I’m sure my disinterested stance isn’t helping my case.
A stagehand walks into the room, dressed in black, not much taller than Brittany, but she’s not wearing heels. I think her name is Joanna. “Faith Simmons is first,” she reads from the list stuck on her clipboard.
A slightly pudgy girl in a too small of a bright orange dress and too much makeup stands up; her frizzy brown hair is unsuccessfully pulled away from her face, poofing around her head mimicking a lion’s mane. “That’s me,” she says in a voice that, I swear, could rival Minnie Mouse. She doesn’t go to my school, thank goodness, because that voice would make me want to punch her daily.
As she crosses through the door furthest away from us, those that have friends start talking to each other, others with instruments they can easily carry start quietly playing music. I guess that they’re practicing their song. I’m playing the piano but I can’t have that in this room nor can I randomly just start playing the one pressed against the far wall. I think the audience would be able to hear it and that wouldn’t be good.
We hear a voice coming from the tiny television set mounted high on the wall and collectively, our heads turn, spotting Brittany speaking in the corner of the stage, welcoming Faith Simmons onto the stage. She starts singing Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas, and two girls sitting next to each other start laughing hysterically. I don’t know about anyone else in the room, but I’m guessing I missed the joke.
Slowly, we take our turns singing on stage, and the process is long and slow. I don’t speak to anyone in the room, well, no one really wants to talk to me. I can live with that. Finally, it comes to be my turn and I’m so ready to get this over with I almost sprint through the door.
“Joey Archembault,” Joanna whisper-reads from the list as she stands at the door.
I stand up, more like spring up from my seat, and smooth down my dress, feeling the nerves flare from my stomach, the tingles spreading throughout my body like a disease. My palms start to sweat as I follow Joanna, who’s shorter than I thought, to back stage, waiting for a girl named Mashka Viktor to finish singing another Disney song I didn’t hear the title to and don’t recognize.
When the music fades and the girl passes me on her way to the green room, Brittany walks up to the microphone with the boy I remember from the judges table at my audition. I think his name is Louis.
After some playful banter I don’t pay attention to, Brittany says, “Up nex
t, we have a talented junior,” loudly into the microphone.
“This is Joey Archembault with Adele’s Set Fire to the Rain,” Louis finishes for her.
The applause for me is louder than I could have imagined. My eyes widen when I try to think of who could be sitting in the audience. Other than the usual suspects, I draw a blank on why the noise is so loud.
I walk onto the stage, feeling the heat of the lights burning into me. Luckily, they blind me so I can’t see anyone staring or sneering back at me. The piano has been rolled onto the stage for me and I take a seat at the bench, smoothing down the fabric of my dress to prevent showing the audience any more than my vocal ability.
I start taking deep breaths, in and out, in and out, before I dare to rest my hands above the black and white keys.
Here goes nothing.
My fingers press against the keys; letting the music overtake me and banish the nerves. There isn’t any sheet music. I don’t need it. I’ve entered my own world where nothing else matter, nothing but the music and me. The words flow from my lips in a melody I’ve sung so many times before. By the end of the first verse, my nerves have disappeared and I’m actually enjoying myself on stage. I know, who knew, right? I finish the song and sit back, letting the moment sink in, letting my world return and reality awaken, listening to the applause boom louder than before around me.
I laugh as I turn, because I’m worried that if I stand, I’ll face plant onto the wooden floor beneath my feet, to face the judges for this part of the competition. The choir teacher, his student teacher from the nearby university, and a special guest I think.
“That was nice,” the choir teacher, Mr. Wright, tells me, speaking directly into the microphone to be sure that he’s heard in the room. I’m not sure what nice means, but it must be a good thing because I hear a few whoop, whoops in the crowd.
Is that all he’s got for me?
“I could tell that you were nervous when you sat down at the piano,” the student teacher, Miss Crane, says loudly. “But once you started singing, it was like you were in your own little world and no one could penetrate the bubble you built around yourself.” She smiles at me, a genuine, sweet smile. “I admire that because, once you started singing, you started to shine from that piano and we all got to glimpse the beauty of performance.”