by Phoebe North
There was movement in the forest below. I crouched low, tracking it. The creature was huge, black as night, fur dotted silver like a million stars. A hare. And on her back, a boy, holding on tight with fisted hands. He cast his white face back, as though searching for something in the woods. I turned to look but didn’t see anything. Only the birches, pale as bones.
Still, I felt his fear. Practically tasted it, sharp as blood on the air. The King.
No. That wasn’t right at all. I peered through the branches, which had just begun to bud in the early spring. And saw something there. A flash of light against a golden crown.
The Queen.
When I looked back to the boy, he was gone.
I woke panting, my heart racing as though I’d been the one careening through the bright forest myself. Something was different, I realized. Something was wrong. I looked around my black room, my eyes finding the square digits of my clock: 3:57. I could hear Court’s even breath droning on in the extra-long twin beside me, but it was no comfort, not tonight. Edgy and shaking, I pulled myself from the bed and began to pace back and forth across my room.
Once I read a story in a magazine about a man who had a neurological event on a golf course. He looked up at the sun, and something snapped inside him like a rubber band. He was always different after that, a whole new personality. I shivered as I padded back and forth across the tiny room. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
In the early hours of the morning, I acted without thinking. I sat down at my desk chair, closed my eyes, and reached out through the darkness.
Are you okay?
These were old paths, tangled and overgrown. But that didn’t matter. My feet knew the way. As children, talking like this had been second nature. Some days, we’d tell jokes this way at the dinner table. Me in my high chair. Jamie in his booster seat. And we’d start giggling, both of us, out of nowhere—at the exact same time.
Still, it had been ages. No answer came back, not at first. I only had the sensation of wind rushing by, and his shock at my voice in his head, and his upset, and his worry. But in my mind’s eye, still, I saw him—in the dark at the side of the road, slowing down his motorcycle, then stopping. Groping with his cold, numb hands—he’d forgotten his gloves again—for the phone that was in his pocket.
I opened my eyes. Lurched for the phone just as it started ringing.
“Jamie,” I said, at the same time he said, “Annie.”
Then there was a gap. A crackle. A moment of confusion. Dismay. Surprise. Finally, I sighed. He wasn’t going to say it. I guess I had to.
“What happened to Mom?” I asked.
V
Twenty-Four
COMING HOME TO WILTWYCK WOULDN’T be so bad if it weren’t for running into people I used to know. My mom kept my room for me, even though she routinely threatens to turn it into an office. I can sleep on my old, comfortable bed and not a futon mattress whenever I want without worrying about my roommates having fuck buddies over in the middle of the day. I get to do my laundry for free, and Dad’s always good for a glass of whiskey together and maybe a game of chess. It’s kind of like a vacation from my ordinary life, so long as I don’t try too hard to remember who I used to be. Like last time I came home right around the New Year, and Harper wanted to get together with Geoff Ryman and Asher Kent and I convinced myself it would be okay. But then we just ended up getting stoned out of an apple at Harper’s grandparents’ house and I had to sit there watching Geoff try to finger Harper on the shag carpet, both of them too blasted to even care that I was watching, like I hadn’t known these people since kindergarten and it wasn’t weird at all.
But it was weird. This wasn’t who we were before, and I couldn’t see why it was who we were supposed to be now, either. Did they really think it was all that interesting, hooking up with people we’d known forever? I couldn’t understand how Harper could look at Geoff and see anything but the boy who had puked up strawberry Nesquik practically every day in third grade.
Since then, I’ve avoided leaving the house when I visit. I don’t tag along with my dad to the Target and I don’t go for long, rambling walks even when I can’t sleep and I definitely don’t go downtown, not to the witch store or anywhere else.
It’s not the memories that get to me. It’s the ghosts.
But you can’t live like a total hermit. Not when you’re a woman of childbearing age, apparently. Because this afternoon while my parents are at Uncle Jovan’s visiting Naniji—without me, because I did my duty yesterday, taking them dinner and listening to Naniji’s stories until I thought I’d fall asleep at the table—I take a long cozy nap and then wake up with a knife in my gut. My period arrives and I guess my mom must have gone through the change without even telling me, because there isn’t a single tampon or pad in the house.
I stuff toilet paper in my underpants, throw on a hooded sweatshirt, hop in my Kia, and head to Kirky’s. They’ve changed it since high school, added a sandwich bar and a crappy cappuccino machine, but mostly it’s just like I remember, and the O.B.s are right where I remember them being, too. I fight the urge to stuff them in the pocket of my hoodie. Old shoplifting habits die hard, I guess, even when you haven’t done it since middle school. But twenty seems too old to be lifting tampons, so I shuffle off to the counter with them instead, trying to kind of hide them behind my hand so that nobody sees. I don’t know. It’s still just embarrassing, even though I’d like to pretend it’s not. Then I have to wait in line forever behind some trucker buying cigarettes. I consider buying gum, too. I try to pretend like I’m probably not bleeding all over my underwear. I’m looking at the ugly fluorescent lights and feeling obvious when I hear a voice behind me.
“Vidya?”
Inside, I’m cringing. I wonder who it’s going to be and how much of my life I’m going to have to fill them in on before I can put in a God damned tampon. Will I have to tell them I dropped out of Julliard, that whole long sob story? Or can I just slink off to the dirty bathroom in the corner of the deli in peace?
But then I turn toward the front door and see a girl standing there. Her skin is bone white and kind of waxy, like she hasn’t been sleeping lately. She’s got a better haircut than she did last time I saw her, layered and kind of edgy, and her face has slimmed out. She looks more like her mom than she used to.
But her eyes. Her eyes are just like I remember them.
“Holy crap,” I say, “Annie.”
She smiles, and when she speaks, I hear that familiar swagger in her voice, like she owns Kirky’s Deli and the town and maybe even the whole world.
“I guess it could be more awkward,” she says. “I guess you could be buying condoms.”
I duck back into the bathroom to manage my situation, as my mother might call it in polite company, then come out to find Annie waiting for me. She’s leaning against the glass window, crushing a “Help Wanted” sign beneath her back, her peacoat bundled tight against her. She looks hot. Of course she does. I stand beside her for a minute, not sure of what to say. The March afternoon is gray and the sun is a glinting golden coin and the moment will be over soon, and I don’t want that to happen.
“How have you been?” is what I end up asking, and I do my best not to cringe after I say it because it’s so obviously not the right thing to ask, not with Annie. I should be asking her what she thinks about the Illuminati or something. I don’t know. Something significant. Something fantastic. I always felt like I was a little too wispy compared to the weight of her. She laughs a little, and then blows her hot breath into her palms.
“I guess you haven’t heard” is what she says. She’s not looking at me. Those eyes are fixed out at the parking lot and the road ahead of us, headlights streaming by. Once I would have grabbed her hand and warmed it in my pocket. Once I would have held her jaw between my fingers and turned her eyes to meet mine, then kissed her, just to let her know I cared. Once I would have done a lot of things. but that was years ago. And I d
on’t even know if she’s single right now. I don’t even know if she still dates girls.
“Heard what?” I ask instead.
She scuffs at the ground with her Palladiums, which don’t seem warm enough for today, with the gray old dunes of snow piled up at the edge of the lot and the sunset cold and piercing out in front of us. Annie makes this expression that’s grim and mysterious and shows teeth. But she doesn’t answer. Instead she glances down into the plastic bag that’s been hooked around her wrist since I got outside. I glance in. It’s junk food. Hot Fries and Pringles and two bottles of Mountain Dew and a Butterfinger.
“You know,” she says, “I was going to just eat this crap on the way back to the hospital, but do you want to go to the diner instead? I could use a break.”
Hospital. Shit. It’s gotta be serious. But it doesn’t look like she wants to talk about it, not right now in the cold open air with the winter crows and truckers and entire planet listening. So I just stuff my hands down into my hoodie pockets, shrug, and say, “Sure.”
Twenty-Five
WE DRIVE THERE SEPARATELY, WHICH is probably for the best because if we sat in the same car together I think my head would explode. Harper used to say that the [Redacted]s were my catnip, and I think there was some truth to it. Something about the cloudy, faraway look in Annie’s eyes and the deep pain beneath them that makes me just want to tear off her clothes, or mine, whatever would be the fastest route to healing her. It’s not healthy. I’m not going to pretend that it is. So I’m glad to have like ten minutes to myself in my car, the radio off and my hands steady at two and ten instead of shaky and inappropriate when she’s clearly going through some kind of personal tragedy.
Still, I think as we get out of our cars outside the diner, she looks damned good in that peacoat. She’s filled out a little, looks less gangly than before. And she seems to walk a little differently up the concrete diner steps, her hand lightly gracing the rail as she goes. She was always confident, but now she’s self-possessed.
I bet she’s dating someone, I think. I bet she’s in love.
We get a booth for two beneath a giant taxidermized moose head. I’ve always loved this diner, with its dark wood and Tiffany lamps and weird dusty statues of bears in the corners. Annie slides her backpack in beside her and then promptly buries her nose in a menu.
“Do you think I can get away with ordering a kid’s meal?” I ask. “The Popeye, or maybe the Big Bird?”
Annie smiles faintly, like she’s thinking of something else. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess: the Big Bird is chicken fingers.”
“Nailed it,” I say.
She laughs a little. But then she stops herself, like she isn’t supposed to laugh right now. I wait until we put our drink orders in to ask.
“So . . . ?”
She looks at me, and it’s like her eyes are boring into my soul. “My mom had a stroke,” she says.
I wasn’t expecting that. Not sure what I expected. Something with Jamie, maybe. But not that. I bring my hand up to my mouth.
“Oh God. Are you okay?”
She looks back down at the menu. The frown is deep between her eyebrows. “I’m fine” is what she says, but she isn’t, I can tell. “They say she’ll recover. After another surgery and PT.”
“I’m so sorry. That must be terrifying,” I tell her, and even though my voice is sympathetic, she slides her eyes away from me.
“Yeah.”
I watch as a few tears dot the surface of her menu. I want to hold her hand and reassure her somehow that I’m here for her, that she’s not alone. But before I can, the server appears, a middle-aged woman with pens stuck in her bun and a white nubbin of chewing gum visible between her teeth as she talks.
“What can I get for you girls?”
I’m about to tell her that we need another minute to decide when Annie answers. “Grilled cheese with bacon and tomato, please. And what are your soups?”
I look at her closely as the waitress rattles off the options: chicken matzo ball, beef barley, and tomato bisque, which is what Annie wants. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I would have never known that Annie had just been crying.
When it’s my turn to order, I try to train the question from my voice. I act like everything is normal, because that’s what Annie wants. “Egg white omelet with broccoli and onion, please. Hold the toast.”
Annie’s looking at me as the waitress takes our menus away.
“What?”
“Egg white?”
“I’m on this health food kick. No gluten, no meat, no dairy, no egg yolks . . .” It feels wrong to be telling Annie about this, like I know she’ll judge, and sure enough, her eyebrows are arched.
“What?” I say again. She shrugs. I think she’s glad to be teasing me about my diet instead of talking about what’s happening with her mom.
“It just sounds kind of disgusting. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I tell her. It isn’t, though, and silence settles between us like a throbbing heart spiked with nails, and I wonder why I’m here, and I wonder why I thought this would ever be anything but awkward and weird.
Then Annie sighs. “How’s school?” she asks, in a tone that makes it clear she’s only asking because she knows it’s what she’s supposed to say. To my surprise she actually perks up when I tell her the truth:
“I dunno. I dropped out.”
Eyes wide, she leans forward. “Really?”
“Yeah, I started an internship at this recording studio my freshman year and it kind of took over my life. I’m a studio musician now.”
She’s grinning like a maniac, drumming her hands on the table. “That’s terrific.”
“It is?” I ask, uncertain, because usually people apologize to me when they find out I’ve dropped out of Juilliard. But Annie was never one for the usual responses to things, I guess.
“Yeah. You always wanted to be a band. Now you can be in, like, all of them.”
I feel myself flush just a little bit at her enthusiasm. I’d forgotten this about Annie—how she’d often say the wrong thing, but, sometimes, exactly the right thing.
She’s still drumming her hands now, excited for me. “What do you play?”
“Piano, mostly. Guitar or bass or ukulele, if they need it.”
“Awesome. Totally awesome. You’re so talented. You always were.”
I grin. The waitress brings by our drinks, a root beer for Annie, a black coffee for me. Annie squashes her straw down onto the table and then drops beads of soda on the wrapper, and we watch together as it unfurls like a worm. I don’t remember her being this kinetic as a teenager. She always seemed pretty placid. Now she seems restless, ready to take off at a moment’s notice.
Her eyes dart up at me. “I always think of you when I hear the Beach Boys, you know. I’ll be in the supermarket or at a party and I hear that fucker Brian Wilson and suddenly I’m fifteen again.”
I cringe, taking a long slurp of my coffee.
“What, no longer a fan?”
“I mean, sure, they’re talented. But their stuff always reminds me of high school. I was just so obsessed with them back then. I thought that because Brian Wilson was fucked up, then he must have had all the answers.”
“And now?” Annie asks, chewing on her ice cubes.
“God only knows,” I say. She grins at me. I grin back, then shrug. “Life’s different now. Things are different. You know who I’m into lately? David Bowie. He and Iman were married for like thirty years. Stability. That’s my jam.”
“Weirdo,” Annie says.
“Nah,” I tell her. “Normie. And that’s okay. That’s the whole point.”
Annie’s looking at me oddly, her eyebrows knitted so closely together that they almost meet. “What if you were born Brian Wilson, though? What if your life is just kind of fucked up?”
“Can you transform yourself into David Bowie, you mean?” I ask, and Annie nods. For a second, there’s an opportunity there. A vulnerable gap inside
her, one I can fit inside, easily. I’ve always liked comforting her. And she always liked being comforted by me.
“I think it’s just a matter of acting like you’re David Bowie anyway. Doing what needs to be done, no matter what. Not getting lost in—”
“In all those Pet Sounds?” Annie asks, and flashes me a smile. Before I can answer, our food arrives. I watch as she breaks off half her melty grilled cheese sandwich and leaves it on a napkin between us.
“No pressure,” she says, waving her fork toward my plate and the grayish-green lump of food on top of it. “But, you know, just in case.”
As we eat, our conversation falls into a rhythm as comfortable as an old pair of jeans. She tells me about Hampden, where they have no classes or grades but plenty of drugs. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, the way she talks about pot like she invented it, but it does. I remember the things Harper said about Annie being a goody-goody—years and years ago now—and her blind, animal panic right before the only time we smoked. But time passes, and people change. Even people like Annie.
“How about you?” she asks. “Glamorous life in New York? Are you seeing anyone?”
Leave it to Annie to cut straight to the point. I’m picking the bacon out of the sandwich half she gave me, trying to look blasé about the whole thing.
“No. I’m testing singledom. I was dating a girl for a while. Priyanka . . .” I try to think of what I can say to Annie about Pri but come up blank. The truth is, no one really measured up after the [Redacted]s made mincemeat out of my heart. Pri was exciting, creative, dynamic—but she was no Annie.
“A nice Indian girl!” is what Annie says, her eyes lighting up. “Your grandparents must have been thrilled.”
I study her face, trying to decide if she’s making fun of me. But that’s not the kind of person Annie is. She means it.
“Well, my grandfather passed away last year,” I tell her. Her mouth twists sympathetically. “But yeah, my grandmother loved her.”