by Phoebe North
Annie: Okay. That’s all. Good night.
I throw the phone back down on my desk like it’s a live wire that’s just zapped my arm. Then I cover my mouth with my hands. I cry and I cry into them, until I’m a soggy ball of tears on my bedroom floor.
I don’t know I’ve fallen asleep until I wake up, my alarm blaring, my body aching at every joint and the pattern of the carpet pressed into my cheek. I don’t know that I’ve slept until it’s morning and everything is awful all over again.
Twenty-Three
I’LL SEE YOU IN SCHOOL tomorrow, Annie said, and when I get off the bus in the morning, my head full of cotton balls and my mouth dry as driftwood, I can’t help but glance toward where I usually spot her, ambling off her bus.
But she isn’t there.
And she’s not in the hallway outside Mrs. Avery’s first-period earth science class, and she’s not tucked into her desk at the end of World History II. I duck my head down, pretending like I wasn’t looking for her, but I can feel everybody’s eyes on me as I slink off to class.
And I hear whispers, a low rustle, wherever I go. Even though she’s absent, she must have told someone. Miranda Morganson, probably, who must have told everyone else. Now they’re all talking about it, my name passing over a thousand pairs of lips, and not for anything good. I hurt her so bad she couldn’t even come to school today. I was selfish. And now the rest of them are talking about it, that dyke who broke the other dyke’s heart.
It’s moments like these that I think that Annie was right about our little town. It’s a shithole. I need to get out of here someday, escape to someplace where people are more open-minded and accepting and I can start fresh. Not as the girl who dated the dead boy, or the girl who dated the dead boy’s sister, but as me. Seeing how they look at me, how they whisper and murmur and elbow each other and then look away when I look back only solidifies my desire to get the fuck out of here. To escape.
I trudge through the lunch line, heap my tray with too much food that I know I’ll never eat, chips and a sandwich and cookies and a brown carton of milk, then go to sit down with Harper and the emo boys. I can feel something pulling me toward the table where Annie used to sit with Miranda, an invisible string. But even though I’m exhausted, I’m strong, for a second or two. I don’t look.
And yet when I sit down, everyone is watching me.
“What?” I ask.
Geoff, who has been in school with us since kindergarten and has loved me for at least half that long even though I pretend I don’t know it, kind of looks hungry.
“I heard . . . ,” he starts, and trails off.
“Yeah, well,” I say wearily. “Don’t get too excited.”
They all stare at me, even Harper, kind of like I have two heads.
“Vee,” Harper says, and she puts her hand on my wrist. “I figured Annie would have called you or something.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, pulling away, rubbing my own hand like her touch burns. “We texted last night but nothing’s changed. We’re still broken up. Or whatever we are.”
Even as I say it, they’re still staring at me like they have no idea what I’m talking about. Like we’re inhabiting entirely different worlds.
“You haven’t heard?” Geoff asks. “It was all over the news this morning.”
I blink. “What . . . ?”
Harper touches me again. This time I let her. “They found James. James [Redacted]. You know, Annie’s brother. They found him. He’s alive.”
My brain is full of marbles. I can feel them rolling around in there, dizzily. I laugh, because it feels like the only thing I can do. “You’re kidding, right?” I say.
But they all just stare at me.
That’s when I grab my backpack and pull the zipper open. Even though Mr. Macklin is bound to catch me, I take out my phone, unlock it, and pull up the news.
Geoff’s right. It’s the first three headlines.
Missing boy, 16, recovered in Pennsylvania
Hudson Valley boy held captive for two years
James M. [Redacted] returned to family
When I look up from my phone, they’re all watching me, waiting for my response.
III
and i open up the fridge and what stares back at me is a six-pack of cheerwine, plastic bottles, shining and sweating all red red the color of sticky Sweet Blood and before i know it i run off to the bathroom and i’m sick and i’m sick again because the last time i drank that stuff was two years ago and i’ll never forget the taste, too Sickly Sweet and Somehow Salty, how i still licked my lips, happy i was finally going to get my stupid fucking drums, or what happened to me when i woke up later, how He was on top of me and the mess in the bathroom After, this bathroom, how i tried to clean it while He talked in a Sad Quiet Voice about how i better not stain the linoleum with my blood
and lo! We have wandered all these years, mine hare & I. Across the vast salt sea and over the ice floes of the North so we could scale the mountain that should have been our home, the sanctuary of the Winter Watchers. But when we arrived, mine hare & I, we found the slopes empty and cut slick by a hollow wind and only bones and the skins of our friends. And so we gathered provisions, weapons, maps, furs, ground tubers, drink skeins, and began our journey for the obsidian tower and when we arrived nineteen moons later, we listened to the sound of lonely ghost howls as we scaled the steps, mine hare & I. But found no princess there, only in the topmost chamber a single bottle, a single chalice, a wine the color of blood
and now i’m vomiting vomiting vomiting and in my mind’s eye it’s red as cheerwine even though it’s just normal puke, last night’s hot pockets and the bad coffee like He always makes in the morning before He goes to work and i remind myself that He hardly even touches me lately and haven’t things been better, almost normal because He says he’s been dating a woman from work and He tells her that He’s got a son and she has a daughter, younger than me, and when He first told me that i thought of Annie and how He used to yell your sister can’t help you, she hasn’t even looked for you when i used to cry out for her and i was nearly sick when He told me about His girlfriend but i wasn’t but if He’s going out to buy fucking cheerwine i know what’s coming because i already got it and
and so we drink, first mine hare, her tongue gently darting out like the mouth of the bottle is a salt lick. And then me, tasting her rabbity breath around the bottle’s lip and then the red sweet burn of the wine as it courses through my body—down my veins and to the tips of each toe, alighting a truth within me as it makes its journey: I am not a Winter Watcher at all, nor the prince of this land as once I believed myself to be. Instead, I am an interloper, a cunning thief of this world’s magic and it is time, at last, that I find my knife—lost in the sea many moons ago—split open the sky with her blade and, finally, return home. I have set out on this journey before. I have always failed. Now, with the dark wine coursing through me, I am resolute. It is only later, when I wake from my stupor, that I see that the body of mine hare has gone cold beside me, dead
i flush and slump down in the bathroom, my hands pressed over my eyes until i see a Thousand Stars and i could almost cry but i don’t, i’m only shaking and pressing my hands over my eye sockets until i see Waves and then Lightning Bolts and then Scattered Sand because i can’t bring myself to look at myself in the mirror if after everything i’ve done and everything He’s put me through He’s going to do it again fuck fuck
and so I weep and rend my clothes and press my soggy face into her scruff until I see a thousand stars. And I could almost vomit but I don’t
sick again and then over, i’m brushing my teeth too hard until my gums bleed, then rinsing them out with listerine, the yellow kind, and it hurts and then i look in the fucking mirror
because what is there to do but pull myself together, sigh, and heft her useless body down the stairs?
You’re so handsome is what He used to say back when i first met him in Neal’s basement those fir
st few times and even though He was so much older it made me feel good to hear it but He hasn’t been saying it lately and He hasn’t been touching me and let’s face it, i can’t blame Him, my face is all pocked and then picked at and then peeling and picked at again and my hair is greasy curls way down my shoulders and He’s always telling me to shower more but fuck it what’s the point and i’m wearing His clothes, still too big on me, will probably always be too big on me, fuck
You’re the half of me that’s human is what she used to say and it made me feel so good to hear it but lately hollow, as if I knew there was some greater kingdom out there, waiting for me
i exhale hard and go and grab one of His cigarettes from the kitchen table and sit outside on the concrete steps of the apartment complex and there’s a lady there carrying her laundry to the laundry room and i stub the cigarette out and pretend to look embarrassed and she laughs and kind of lowers her eyes
and now I exhale hard and dig, piling snow and soil atop her flesh.
Don’t worry, she says, thinking she’s a good citizen, I won’t tell your dad.
Don’t worry, I tell her, hanging my head low, your life won’t be in vain.
and i smile and shrug and go inside even though my brain is screaming He’s not my dad He’s not my fucking dad He’s not old enough to be my dad are you people even paying fucking attention but let’s face it, they’re not, because if they were someone would have noticed something two years ago when He came home with a brand-new fourteen-year-old son that He’d magicked out of thin air, though okay, i think He told the landlady that His ex-wife had given Him custody if by “ex-wife” He meant “my parents” and by “had given Him custody” He meant “hadn’t bothered to look for me much at all from what I could tell”
(there was that one time i left a comment on their website thinking it would be a clue for them but the phone call i wanted and the knock on the door never came and the facebook group and the hashtag campaign and the prayer requests from gram and poppy’s church were all still there last time i checked but it’s been more than a year because He changed the password on the desktop again because He says it will rot my brain but we both know the reason He really did it was because He was afraid i would say something, which i did, so there, asshole)
(Once I would have sworn that my hare kept me safe, that with her keen eyes I could see whole colors that the others could not see. I would have told you that I swore a vow, written in mine heart’s blood on the day that I found her or she found me on the deck of a ship on the Brackish Sea, but now, trudging across the permafrost, doubts grow. Perhaps she was only a sweet distraction, meant to keep me from returning from the quaint, provincial land where I was born. . . .)
so i go inside and go to our bedroom, and go to my side of the bed and wedge my arm all the way down the wall past the cold clean target sheets and then feel all along the seam of the mattress until my finger hits It and i take out my Knife and stare at it for a long time thinking about the thing i’ve always been thinking about since i bought the Damned Thing on amazon, how i would do it, slicing His throat to ribbons or burying It in His belly, the softness of His belly and the hardness of the Knife, i’m staring at the Knife and shaking and thinking about it and remembering all the shit He’s said to me about how i liked it and who He would tell and the fact that He’s still so much bigger no matter how much i eat
I am lost and aimless again. This whole world is hollow, dead, and cold. At night I build a fire but the wood is too wet to make anything but smoke. My belly aches and I think, I should have taken the hare’s meat to keep me fed, though the thought makes me sick a little. But I think she would have wanted it, her life for mine. Starving, cold, fingers numb, I wish I had my knife. Then I could whittle down a piece of damp wood into nothing, just to keep the blood warm in my hands. In the morning I wake on a bed of soil, not knowing I had slept and find my armor gone. I search everywhere, overturning every mossy stone, and I realize, I am being stripped of everything, I am unbecoming myself.
(i always thought by now i’d be taller, but i’m not, maybe it’s because i’m always half-starving these days? He buys me everything i could ever ask for but fuck some days i think my stomach is a hole burnt straight through my body burning burning burning and i can’t fill it and i can’t put it out all i can do is eat and eat and when he comes home He’s in one of His Black Moods because He can’t afford this and He cries and i don’t know if i’m supposed to comfort Him or what)
anyway, i don’t have the stomach for violence like He said once: You’re a pacifist, I can tell, when he was in one of His Thinking Moods After, the lights low and the windows open on a Summer Night and my legs bare and life feeling almost okay for a minute if i didn’t think about the entire fucked-up context of it, the drugs in the bathroom and in my belly and the rope in the nightstand drawer but i can’t help myself, i can never help myself because it’s under everything: i asked for this and fuck it i want to go home
I walk into the afternoon, until the sun is a faint coin overhead and the ice begins to take on a glossy edge on every branch, not melting but shining, as though dipped in sugar. And the thought of food reminds me that I’ve had none again. I bend down, take a fistful of snow, let it melt on the heat of my palm and drink it down, my parched throat aching at each swallow, and then I look up and squint into the sun and realize I might die here, all alone in the empty world I made, as much a prison as a sanctuary,
i put the Knife back where It was like i always do
when suddenly ahead, I see a rising column of smoke.
i could play video games or i could go for a walk, it’s cold today but not too cold, but I don’t want to do any of that, i don’t want to do anything, that fucking cheerwine in the fridge and my stomach pulsing like a Second Heart and when i go to sleep it’s with my pillow wadded up over my head but it doesn’t kill the screaming that rings in my ears, nothing ever fucking does
I find new life inside myself, new heat, new heart, new blood. I run, my feet sinking into the snow, the smile frantic over my mouth, because smoke means people, smoke means life, smoke means all is not lost.
sometime in the afternoon i wake up and go to the fridge and look at those bottles again, i pick one up and the cap’s loose, of course it is, so i put it back on the shelf and stare and then pick them up one by one, tighten the caps hard, shake as hard as i can
In a forest of white pines, I find a hovel, built from rotting timber and vined in this endless winter by dry tendrils that look now like bones. The door is half off its hinges and open, just a gap, and I press my hand to splintered wood and push it in
it’s the only thing i can think of doing, i’m not going to fucking stab Him, am i? in six plastic bottles shining with Blood Red Sap a thousand bubbles coalesce and break and my mouth is watering but i’m not going to be sick again i’m not i’m fucking not there are six plastic bottles, the closest thing i have to a Weapon because i’m too fucking weak All Soft in the Middle but maybe this will change something, if not for me, then for someone else
and see a hunched, narrow figure sitting like a silhouette before the meager flames.
and i put them back in the fridge and i go and put the TV on and put my headphones on and play Left 4 Dead and the only thing in the world is the sound of zombies screaming as i bury a thousand bullets in their desiccated corpses
I creep closer, wishing, again, that I had my knife. But then I see the drawn, lined face underneath the steely hair. Annit, the Emperata, now grown old and tired, and her eyes are closed and she sleeps sitting up, and if it weren’t for the rise and fall of her bone-thin breast, I’d wonder if she lived at all.
I sit beside her before the fire. I, too, sleep.
it’s almost dark when the door clicks open and He comes home. i nod at Him without looking hey but then i catch His grinning bearded boy’s face out of the corner of my eye, so fucking happy that my stomach sinks
I wake to the sound of pots jangling. The Empera
ta scurries about and in her movement she looks like a much younger woman—those familiar eyes lively and just a little bit dangerous, and as she notices that I’m awake she shoves a still-warm cookpot into my waiting hands.
My stomach snarls.
beautiful night! He says with a whistle, putting his keys on the table, and then i see why He’s in this Bright Bright Mood—because there’s this kid, this little kid, shaggy ten-dollar haircut and wearing a black patterned t-shirt with a flannel shirt over it and skinny jeans and black converses, this little kid ten or eleven, younger than me when i came here, and he follows Him into our apartment and he looks at me with his little kid face, a nervous smile lighting his lips and the little kid says
A feast! she tells me. I eat without thinking of the dangers of it—the abundant poisons of this place. I know that these are mistakes I have made before and will make again. I eat her gray gruel and drippy eggs and I could vomit, but I don’t, and when my stomach seizes I only keep eating until it’s quiet and I’m human again, the boy I once was and the man I’m becoming. I look at her, old now, and faded, as she sits down to polish her dented armor. Sister, I think, but she does not remember me, looking at me with eyes worn hard from a million battles. I want to ask her how I’ll get home now. I want to ask her if she knows what happened to my knife. But she does not know me, not like she once did. Everything that has come and gone has changed us both, and we will never be the same.
hey
Hail and well met, traveler,
i take my headphones off
she says to me at last in a voice I hardly recognize.
bathroom’s that way, He says, jerking his thumb to the door, and the kid bobs his head as a sort of thank-you and for a minute i see our apartment brightly drawn through his eyes: the posters peeling along the edges on the wall and the amazon boxes all crushed down in the recycling box in the corner and the xbox all the cords tucked away and the statues from anime movies on the shelves that i’ve put together on days He was at work, it all looks so proper but kind of wrong like this is the house of some kids pretending to be grown-ups which in a way i guess, it is