“ . . . only it never opens,” Alex finished, grinning.
I nodded as if caught, pressed my palms into my eyes and stretched my chin up as high as I could, so the lump in my throat wouldn’t push through the skin.
“Good,” Melanie said, “nice,” and, when I could control my face again, I smiled, pointed to Rodge, his hair straw yellow, and lied, said that it was him patting me, somehow.
Rodge opened his mouth once, twice, shaking his head no, please, but, when he couldn’t get out whatever he had, Alex clapped three times, slowly, and then opened his hand to Melanie, said, “Ladies first.”
“Guess I’ll have to wait then,” she said back, flaring her eyes, but then shrugged, wrapped a coil of hair around her index finger like she was always doing, then walked her hand up the strands, each coil taking in one more finger until she didn’t have any more left.
It was one of the things Alex and Rodge and I never talked about then, but each loved about her—how she was so unconscious of the small things she could do. How she took so much for granted, and, because of that, because she didn’t draw attention to the magic acrobatics of her fingers, to the strength of her hair, she got to keep it.
We didn’t so much love her like a girl, desire her, though that was starting, for sure. It was more like we saw in her a completeness missing in ourselves. A completeness coupled with a kind of disregard that was almost flagrant. But maybe that’s what desire is, really. In the end, it didn’t matter; none of us would ever hold her hand at a pep rally, or tell her anything real. It wasn’t because of her story, either, but that’s more or less where it starts.
“Four kids,” she said, looking to each of us in turn, “sixth graders, just like us,” and Alex groaned as if about to vomit, held his stomach in mock-pain.
Rodge smiled, and I did too, on the inside.
A safe story. That was exactly what we needed.
“The girl’s name was . . . Melody,” Melanie said, arching her eyebrows for us to call her on it. When we didn’t, she went on, and almost immediately the comfort level dropped. Alex flashed a look to me and I shrugged my cheeks as best I could, didn’t know. What Melanie was telling us was the part before the story, the part we didn’t want and would have never asked for, because we all already knew: the thing between her and her step-dad. What they did. Only, to amp it up for us, maybe, make it worse, Melody added to the nightly visitations Melody’s mother, standing in the doorway, watching. Mad at this Melody for stealing her husband.
Desperate to not be hearing this, I latched onto that doorway as hard as I could, remembered it from my own story, and nodded to myself: all Melanie was doing was reordering the stuff I’d already laid out there. Using it again, because it was already charged—we already knew that bad things followed parents standing in doorways.
Or maybe it was a door I had opened, somehow, by telling a real story in the first place.
After the one rape that was supposed to stand in for the rest, Melanie nodded, said, “And then there was . . . Hodge . . . ” at which point Rodge started shaking his head no, no, please.
“We only have an hour,” Alex chimed, tapping the face of his watch.
Melanie turned her face to him and raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to back off. Finally, he did. As punishment, his character didn’t even get a name. Mine was Raphael, what Melanie considered to be a version of Gabriel, I guess. But Gabe, I was just Gabe back then.
I couldn’t interrupt her, though. Even when her story had the four of us walking away from school, to play our little “scare” game.
But this one was different.
In the Lakeview of Melanie’s story, Lakeridge, there wasn’t a book buried in a thirteen-by-nine Tupperware dish, but an overgrown cemetery. It was just past the football field.
Over the past week, she told us, her face straight, the dares had been of the order of lying face-up on a grave for ninety seconds, or tracing each carved letter of the oldest headstone, or putting your hand in the water of the birdbath and saying your own name backwards sixty-six times.
“They were running out of stuff, though,” she added.
“I get it,” Alex said, holding his mother’s book closer to his chest.
Melanie smiled, pulled a black line of hair across her mouth and spoke through it: “But then Raphael had an idea,” she said, looking to me.
“What?” I said, looking behind me for no real reason.
Melanie smiled, let the silence build—she had to have done this before, I thought, before she moved here, or seen it done—and told us that Raphael’s great idea was to take some of the pecans from the tree over in the corner, the tree that (her voice spooking up) “had its roots down with the dead people, in their eye sockets and rib cages.”
“Take them and what?” Rodge said, worried.
“Look at you,” Alex said to him.
“And what?” I asked, at a whisper.
“Take them to one of your basements,” she said. “Then put them in a bowl with water for six days, then turn the lights off and each eat one.”
The lump was back in my throat. I thought it might be a pecan.
“That it?” Alex said, overdoing his shrug.
“Six days . . . ” Melanie said, ignoring him, drawing air in through her teeth, “and the four of them collect back in the basement, turn all the lights off except one candle, and then, that too.”
“At midnight,” Alex added.
“At midnight,” Melanie agreed, as if she’d been going to say that anyway, and then drew out for us the cracking of the shells in the darkness, how they were soggy enough to feel like the skin of dead people. Then she placed the pecan meat first on the Alex stand-in’s tongue—he throws up—then on the Hodge-character, who swallows it, gets stomach cancer two days later, then it’s Raphael’s turn. All he can do though is chew and chew, the meat getting bigger in his mouth until he realizes that, in the darkness, he’s peeled his own finger, eaten that meat.
I laugh, like it.
And then it’s Melody’s turn to eat.
With her thin, beautiful fingers, Melanie acts it out for us in a way so we can all see Melody through the darkness of the basement, not so much cracking her pecan as peeling it, then setting the tender meat on the back of her tongue, only to gag when it moves.
In the darkness she’s created, we all hear the splat, then, unmistakably, something rising, trying to breathe. Not able to.
The lights come on immediately, and running down Melody’s chin is blood, only some it’s transparent, like yolk, like the pecan was an egg, and—
“C’mon,” Alex said. “You don’t try to outgore the gore of Gabe here eating his own finger, Mel.”
“I’d expect that from you,” Melanie said, smiling through her hair, “it was you who was born from that dead pecan,” at which point Alex hooked his head to one side, as if not believing she would say that, then he was pushing up out of the leaves, tackling her back into them, and we were smiling again, and I finally breathed.
When Rodge wouldn’t take his turn, saying he didn’t know anything scary, Alex went. Instead of telling a ghost story, though, he opened his mother’s book again.
“Cheater, ” I said. “They’re supposed to be real.”
“Wait,” he said back, “I was just looking at this one the other—” and then he was gone, hunched all the way over into the book.
I lifted my face to Melanie, said, “Where’d you hear that piece of crap?” and she pursed her lips into a smile, said, flaring her eyes around it, “You listened.”
“I heard it with a walnut, not a pecan,” Alex chimed in, turning pages, only half with us.
“A walnut?” Melanie said, crinkling her nose, “nobody plants a walnut tree in a graveyard.”
Looking back, now, I can hear it—how she’d used cemetery in the story, graveyard to Alex—but right then it didn’t matter. What I was really doing anyway was saying it had scared me.
“You heard it at D
unbar?” I said.
Dunbar was her old school.
She opened her mouth to answer but then stopped, seemed to be fascinated by something out on the lake.
I followed where she was looking.
“What?”
“I don’t know where I heard it,” she said, still not looking at me, but out over the lake. “Somewhere, I guess.”
“No, what are you looking at?” I said, pointing with my chin out across the water, and she came back to me.”
“Nothing.”
We were twelve years old, going to live forever.
When Alex finally got the book open to the right place, it was about witch trials all through history. Salem, the Spanish Inquisition, tribesman in Africa. A whole subsection of a chapter, with pictures of the devices used to torture confessions, pointy Halloween hats, all of it.
“I’m shaking,” I said to him, trying to chatter my teeth.
“Can it,” he said, following his finger to the next page.
It was one of the blue boxes framed with scrollwork. The stuff that was supposed to be footnotes, but was too important.
“How to test for a witch,” he read triumphantly.
“This is scary?” I said to him.
Already, one of the blue boxes from two weeks ago had given us a list on how to become werewolves: roll in the sand by water under a full moon; drink from the same water wolves have been drinking from; get bitten by a werewolf without dying. Our assignments that night had been to try to become werewolves. Or get grounded trying, yeah.
“Weigh her against a Bible?” Melanie read, incredulous.
“Her,” Alex said, quieter, an intensity in his voice I knew, and knew better than to argue with.
By this time, Rodge was rocking back and forth, looking up to the road each time a car passed. When the noise got steady enough, that would mean it was five o’clock, and this would be over. On a day the sun was shining, the sound of cars would slowly be replaced by the sound of boat motors, but that day, if there even was a boat, then Melanie had been the only one to see it. If she’d seen anything.
“Her,” Melanie repeated, not letting it pass.
Alex smiled one side of his face, looked up to her. “How do we know?” he said.
“I’m a witch,” Melanie said, “yeah.”
Alex shrugged.
Melanie shook her head without letting her eyes leave him. “What do you want to do, then?”
Alex looked down to the blue box and read aloud: “Devil’s mark . . . kiss of—do you, if I cut you, or stick you with a needle, will you, y’know, bleed like a real person?”
Melanie just stared at him.
“C’mon,” I said, standing, pulling her up behind me. She didn’t let go of my hand after she had her feet under her, either. Alex saw, looked from me to her, and, even though I was just twelve, still I understood in my dim way what he was doing here: he wanted to be the one holding her hand. And, if not him, then, at least for this afternoon, nobody.
“Do you?” he said, again. “If I stick you with a pin, will you bleed?”
“Do you have a pin?” she said back.
Alex scanned the ground as if looking for one, or trying to remember a jack knife or hypodermic one of us had in a pocket.
He shook his head no.
Melanie blew air out and then held the sleeve of her right arm up, cocked her elbow out to him. It was the wide scab she’d got three days ago, when, to scare ourselves after reading about the jogger who disappeared mid-stride, we’d each had to run one hundred yards down the road, blindfolded.
Alex curled his lip up.
“What?” he said.
“You asked,” she said. “It’s blood. Want me to peel it?”
“But that’s not—scary,” he said.
Melanie lowered her elbow, let her sleeve fall back down.
Ten seconds later, Alex raised his face from the book. He was smiling.
“How about this?” he said, and I stepped around, read behind his finger.
“We can’t,” I said. “It’s too cold.”
Alex shrugged, let his voice get spooky. “Maybe we have to, for her own sake.”
“What?” Melanie said, her arms crossed now.
“Tie your hands and feet,” Rodge said from below, where he was still sitting. “Tie your hands and feet and throw you in the water.”
“Bingo,” Alex said, shooting him with his fingergun then blowing the smoke off, the thing the football players had all been doing during class lately, because it made no real noise.
“Excuse me?” Melanie said, to Rodge.
“He’s been reading it after we leave,” I said. “Right, Rodge?”
Rodge nodded. I’d caught him doing it early on. It wasn’t because he wanted to know, to be more scared, but because, if he’d already read it once, then hearing it again wouldn’t scare him so much. He’d made me promise not to tell. In return, I’d walked to what had been my spot in the leaves that day, dug my inhaler out, held it up to him like Scout’s Honor.
“Well?” Alex said.
“It’s cold,” Melanie said.
“More like you just know you’ll float,” Alex said back, daring her with his eyebrows.
Melanie shook her head, blew a clump of hair from her mouth.
“Just tie my feet then,” she said, and already, even then, I had a vision of her like she would have been in 1640 or whenever: bound at the wrists and ankles, sinking into the grey water. Not a witch but dying anyway.
Because we didn’t have any rope like the blue box said we should, Alex sacrificed one of his shoe-laces. Melanie tied it around her ankles herself.
“It’s only a couple of feet deep out there,” Rodge said.
He was standing now, facing the water. A defeat in his voice I would come to know over the next three years.
“Then I won’t sink far, I guess,” Melanie said, to Alex.
“Then we can tie your hands too,” he said back.
Melanie took the challenge, offered Alex her wrists.
“Not too tight,” I told him.
He told me not to worry.
“This gets me out of homework for two weeks,” she said, having to sling her head hard now to get the hair out of her face, then lean back the other way to keep from falling over.
“Three,” I said back.
“A month,” Rodge said.
Alex didn’t say anything. Just, to Melanie, “You ready?”
She was. Alex should have asked me though, or Rodge.
All the same, he couldn’t lift her all by himself.
“C’mon,” he said, stepping in up to the tops of his lace-less shoes. The water sucked one of them off, kept it.
“Cold?” Melanie said.
“Bathwater,” he said back, grimacing, then, because her feet were tied together, gave her his hand.
“Thanks,” she said.
“It’s in the book,” he said, smiling.
He was on one side of her, me on the other, both of us trying to pull her along, not dunk her yet. Rodge still on the bank.
“Not too deep,” I said, but Melanie jumped ahead of us, splashing me more than I wanted. “It has to be a little deep,” she said. “I don’t want to hit bottom either, right?”
Right. I just thought it, didn’t say, because I knew she’d hear it in my voice: that this didn’t feel like a game anymore. It wasn’t like rolling in the sand under a full moon or running blindfolded down a part of the road that had one of us standing at each end, to watch for cars.
Something could really happen, here.
It was too late to stop it, though, too. Or that’s what I tell myself.
We followed her out until the water was at our thighs, and then Alex nodded, and she turned sideways between us, so one of us could take her feet, the other her shoulders. She leaned back into me and I held her as much as I could, but she was already wet, her hair in the water so heavy.
“If she’s—” I started, taking her wei
ght, trying not to hurt her, and when Alex looked up to me I started over: “She walked out here, I mean. Like us. Didn’t float. Is that enough?”
Alex refocused his eyes on the water and silt we’d just disturbed.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, “it wasn’t a test, then. It was her doing it herself, not getting thrown. ‘Cast,’ I mean. Getting cast into the water, to see.”
“But you know she’s not—”
“On three . . . ” he interrupted, starting the motion, setting his teeth with the effort, and I shook my head no but had to follow too, like swinging a jump rope. One as thick and heavy as a young girl’s body.
If I could go back, now, I would count to three in my head and never look away from Melanie, I think. But I didn’t know. Instead of watching her the whole time, I kept looking up for boats, for somebody to catch us, stop this. Meaning all I have left of swinging her is a mental snapshot of her face, all of it for once, her hair pulled back, wet, inky, her skin so pale in contrast it was almost translucent. And then we let her go, arced her up maybe two feet if we were lucky, and four feet out. Not even high enough or far enough for her hair to pull all the way out of the water.
It was enough.
Without thinking not to, I raised my right arm, to shield my face from the splash, but then—then.
Then the world we had known, it was over. Forever.
Instead of splashing into the water, Melanie rested for an instant on the surface in the fetal, cannonball position, eyes shut, all her weight on the small of her back, her hair the only thing under, and then she felt it too—that she wasn’t sinking—and opened her eyes too wide, arched her back away from it, her mouth in the shape of a scream, and flipped over as fast as a cat. Once, twice, three times, until she was out over the deep water, where the gradual bank dropped off into the cold water. She was still just on the surface, writhing, screaming, whatever part of her that had been twelve years old dying. Finally, still twisting away, she lowered her mouth to the laces at her wrists, then her hands to the laces at her ankles, and then she tried to stand but fell forward, catching herself on the heels of her hands, her hair a black shroud around her.
She looked across the water at us, her eyes the only thing human on her anymore, pleading with me it seemed, and then whipped around, started running over the surface on all fours, across the mile and a half the lake was wide there, leaving us standing knee-deep in the rest of our lives.
The Ones That Got Away Page 17