by Allison Moon
LUNATIC FRINGE
By Allison Moon
Copyright 2011 by Allison Moon
Smashwords Edition
Cover by: Julianna Parr, juliannaparr.com
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ISBN 978-0-98383092-4
(Paperback version ISBN 978-0-9838309-1-7)
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For Reid, my champion
The cave stank of urine, sweat, and blood. Lexie pressed her back against the steel door, her knife’s sheathe digging into her hipbone. She wiped her hands on her jeans, watching the women’s faces.
Blythe kicked the man in the stomach and he fell to his knees. The hood over his face puckered as he coughed and sputtered, gasping at the word “Please.”
Blythe used the rope to wrench his arms back and ripped the hood from his head.
“You like attacking girls, Frank?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he pleaded, his ham-hands curling into purple fists behind his back.
“You’re a liar,” Blythe growled, “and a beast.”
He shook his head, drops of blood and sweat flying like water from a dog’s coat.
“Alright then,” Blythe said. She kicked him in the stomach, forcing more blood and spit from his mouth with a cough.
The women set in, taking turns beating the breath out of him.
From between her fingers, Lexie watched the man beg and struggle to rise between blows.
“I can’t--” Lexie flung the door open, running into the blessedly cool, clean air.
As the door slammed shut behind her, she thought she heard a whimper become a snarl. She didn’t stop to find out, running until her lungs and legs burned and the sky turned indigo with the impending sunrise.
Chapter 1
“Stop helping me, Dad. This is a dumb reason to re-injure your back.” Lexie Clarion walked to the rear of her pickup truck, wearing a groove into the gravel driveway, and slid another box along the bed to join the others. As she relieved her burden of packed books, bedding and clothes, her father, Ray, stood at the front door presenting another box for her collection.
“Sending my daughter off to college is a great reason.” He offered her a wistful smile with the box. “This is a light one,” he said. “The quilt Mom gave you, I think.”
Lexie sighed and walked towards her father, the gravel crunching beneath her tight-laced boots. She dried her palms on her flannel shirt tails and tossed back the twin braids that bounced alongside her face. She didn’t care that they made her look at least three years younger than her eighteen-year-old self. So little of her had changed in that time. The same chipmunk-auburn hair hung from her head. The same freckles that she had naively expected to fade with age stubbornly dotted her nose, and she had yet to grow into her front teeth. Now, on the far side of adolescence, Lexie had lost faith that any of these things would change. She learned to accept her face, just as she did her bony body. Still, she held out hope that she would eventually eke out a bit of curve to her hips or something more than an A cup, just a simple softness, however slight, somewhere along her angles. Until then, she would feel forever balanced on the cusp of childhood and something only barely more.
Taking the last box from her father, Lexie noticed the curve of his shoulders and the stress lines on his brow. Nine years on your back must take a lot out of you, she thought. She hugged her arms around the box’s stiff corners and took it to the truck while her father stood silent in the doorway. Lexie thought ahead to the coming afternoon, wondering what her father would do with himself in an empty house. The muffled voices of afternoon news anchors droned from the living room as if in reply. She slid the final box onto the truck with a sigh and looked to her father. He flinched and drummed his lower back with the tips of his fingers. He needed to lie down.
Instead, Ray shuffled to help her strap a blue tarp over her belongings. His eyes darted around the truck’s load.
“I still don’t know why you can’t stay here, Lex,” he muttered.
“It’s only fifty miles away, Dad.”
“You’ve got the truck. You could commute.”
“I’m going to be odd enough as it is. They’re all a bunch of rich kids from big cities. I don’t want to be the hick weirdo who can’t even afford the dorms.”
“Doesn’t matter where you came from, Lex,” he said, a deep divot forming between his eyebrows. “Only matters where you’re going. You should be proud of that scholarship.”
“They’d give it to any townie that wasn’t brain-dead.”
“You know that’s not true. They gave it to that Ward boy, and he’s one bright kid.”
“Duane’s an exception. He’s always an exception.”
“Most of those spoiled city kids never had to work for anything in their life. You busted your ass for this,” he said. “It’s gonna serve you good.”
Lexie tugged at her braids, eager to hit the road. She took a tentative step forward to embrace her father, but he stepped back into the shadowed interior of the house, returning a moment later with a white cardboard box sealed with two pieces of scotch tape. Affixed to the lid was a pink, store-bought ribbon.
“Dad, come on. This isn’t necessary.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” he replied, managing a grin.
Lexie pursed her lips and opened the box, her fingers searching beneath a layer of crumpled newspaper for the gift inside. Her fingertips grazed leather, and she pulled out a large hunting knife in a hand-stitched sheath.
“Whoa,” Lexie said. She unsnapped the sheath and slid a freshly honed, eight-inch blade free of the leather. The steel of the blade glimmered in the hazy afternoon sunlight. “Jeez, Dad. I’m going to college, not the Yukon.”
“Girl can always use a good hunting knife. And, you can always pull it on any of the boys if they get fresh with you.”
“Fresh. Ha.”
“Just take it,” he said. “It’ll make me feel better about you being all alone out there. Those rare wolves aren’t getting any tamer.” He paused as Lexie inspected the knife’s steel hilt, which bore a crude etching in the shape of a circle and two crescent moons. “Maybe you should take the twelve gauge, too,” he added.
Lexie laughed. “Oh, I’m sure the R.A. would love that.”
“Rare wolves aren’t something to laugh about, Lex. They’re not like normal gray wolves. They don’t run in packs, they aren’t afraid of people, and they’re highly aggressive. No one’s taken one out since back in ‘ninety-nine. You heard about Hank’s friend in forestry, just got attacked between here and Milton last week. And that poor girl back in June? She was a student at Milton, you know. And then there was that rash of deaths a couple years back.”
“I know, Dad.” Lexie grumbled. “Every kid in Wolf Creek grew up with a ten o’clock curfew because of it.”
“Well, they don’t have curfews in college, and I don’t like the way Milton handles the wolf issue. It’d make me feel better knowing you can defend yourself,” he replied. “Let the other kids get ate. You’re all I’ve got.”
“I know, Dad,” Lexie said, more in apology than acknowle
dgement. “I just don’t know if I’m a hand-combat kinda girl.” She had hunted with her father countless times and bagged her first buck when she was thirteen, but she’d never had the nerve to end a life with a knife, and she didn’t think she ever would.
“We’ll get you there someday,” Ray said. “In the meantime, use it to clean fish or open cans of soda.”
“Not beer?” Lexie asked with a smirk.
“Not yet, smart ass.” He bopped his daughter on the back of her head.
She batted his hand away, but she was still focused on the blade. Lexie hefted the knife to test its weight and rocked it in her palm to find the balance. The handle was worn smooth, the varnish rubbed clean off in the finger grooves.
“Is this an antique?” she asked.
“You could say that. It belonged to your mom.”
“Mom hunted?”
“Not really,” Ray said. “Family heirloom, I reckon.”
Lexie examined the gift anew, its quality heightened by the added history. It gave her something to focus on besides the familiar, awkward silence.
“Best hurry then.” Her father’s monotone interrupted the tension. “Looks like rain.”
He opened his arms and pulled Lexie into an odd and awkward hug. He released her with a grunt and a nod, then she was off.
Lexie squinted against the setting sun as she drove westward. Today marked the beginning of the autumn sky. Weighty clouds peered over the land like jealous giants, rumbling indignantly, threatening to drown the valley. Beneath the cloud line, the sky burned yellow as the sun began its initial descent.
Her old Chevy Bonanza jerked forward, its gears struggling to shift as she merged onto I-5. Lexie knew this part of the drive well, having traversed this bit of highway countless times on her high school commute. She smiled, remembering her first taste of freedom behind the steering wheel of her beloved truck, free from cramped and smelly carpools, with their suspicious, judgmental parents and odious male classmates.
The first raindrops hit the windshield just after she crossed into Milton. Lexie pressed her foot on the gas, eager to get settled into her new home before the storm. Just inside the town limits, the dense forest broke into open fields, and Milton College appeared. It looked far too pristine to be a part of Lexie’s world, as if it was trying to pretend that this gray, forested place was New England rather than rural Oregon, and that the college was part of a long line of dignified and stodgy New England universities, instead of one of a handful of liberal arts colleges that had sprung up in the West over the last century.
Nevertheless, Milton had cultivated an admirable reputation among the moneyed and artistic families of the west coast. Parents sent their children to Milton to prove that encouraging artistic endeavors and emergent radical identities was no threat to their status quo. Most Milton families wore their open-mindedness like a merit badge, scoffing at schools like Brown or Vassar, claiming they stamped out one’s natural tendencies towards artistic authenticity. Yet despite such notions of liberality, there was still the issue of money, specifically that Lexie had none, while every other Milton student seemed to have it woven into the threads of their clothing. For this reason, Milton College was perennially at odds with the working-class townspeople. In an effort to improve its regional standing while maintaining its elite status, the school had established its Resident Scholarship Fund to bridge the gap between the coddled out-of-town students and the GED-wielding townies. Students were awarded the scholarship based on need and merit. Lexie was one of two students from her school to receive a full ride; she was the needy one. The other was Duane Ward; he was merited. While not particularly eager for his company, Lexie still hoped he would be on campus when she arrived, until she remembered that the Wards were still in Spain, celebrating the completion of the stellar high school career of their first Golden Child.
The college square stood empty, an effect of the rain. A red banner advertising the Campus Socialist Society dangled limply from one column of the Student Affairs building. A folding table supporting stacks of fliers sat unmanned on the sidewalk, its surface covered with a sheet of plastic. The hand-painted words on a nearby sign, Milton Animal Rights (MAR), lived up to their acronym as the rain washed the paint down the posterboard. The interruption of what must have been bustling activity added an air of the ominous to the campus, like a prominently placed alleyway in a film noir. Lexie wondered how long the eerie silence would last, hoping she could use it to steel herself for the arrival of her new classmates.
By the time she pulled up outside Rice Hall, the raindrops were thick and heavy. Deep puddles had already formed and rivulets raced down the gutters. The dormitory was ugly, and the weather did it no favors; it was a drab box of brick and stucco from the seventies, when architects seemed to be the only people for whom psychedelics did not inform their creative output. The plain, two-story building seemed utterly out of place on the campus, where stone Tudors and a Gothic sensibility, however false, dictated the aesthetic.
Lexie sighed with equal parts relief and anxiety as she turned off the engine. She was alone for the moment, and she feared it would be her last moment like it for a while. The raindrops fell cold and heavy on her scalp as she raced to the dorm. She swiped her keycard and took the stairs two at a time to reach her room on the second floor.
The dorm was as empty as the streets below. She felt like the first one to arrive at a party, while the host ran out for more booze. Lexie took in her new surroundings, a simple room of cinder block and cheap wood paneling, reminiscent of a bomb shelter or a prison. A meager mattress lay on a simple wooden bed frame. There was a desk with an upholstered chair, a small nightstand, a dresser built into the wall, and a closet. It was carpeted, which seemed nice until Lexie noticed that its dark burgundy concealed numerous blotchy stains. She pulled aside a pair of drab beige curtains that framed the window and looked out onto a massive oak tree.
“Oh! Hello!” a voice hooted from behind her. “Are you Alexis Clarion?”
Lexie turned to see a squash-shaped girl standing in the doorframe.
“I’m Anna, your R.A., or ‘Resident Advisor’.” She added air quotes with her fingers. “I see you found your room. So listen, this is a single, right? You were supposed to be on the first floor in an open double, but I’m afraid your roomie had a bit of a . . .” Anna paused, pursing her lips and wiggling them from side to side. “Well, I guess I can tell you since you’re never going to meet her. She tried to kill herself. Terrible, right? But she didn’t do it here! Ha ha!” She waved her hands as though trying to strike down flying insects. “Don’t worry, no crazy roommates for you. You get a single! Congratulations! Everyone else in the dorm is going to hate you!”
Lexie stood dumbfounded as Anna sped through her monologue. To hear the solemn silence of the dorm so crudely interrupted made Lexie want to hide under the covers of her bed. Unfortunately, everything, including her mother’s quilt, was still in the truck, likely getting soaked as Anna prattled on.
“Anyway!” Anna said. “Neat! You’re here and you’re settled. I have to run off to a meeting, but make yourself at home. The upstairs bathrooms are girls only and the downstairs are co-ed. The dining halls start serving dinner tomorrow. And make sure you have your parking tag displayed on your dashboard or else you could get towed. Oh! And here’s your wolf-slash-rape whistle, you know, just in case.” She lurched forward and threw an orange, plastic whistle around Lexie’s neck, then pulled her into a thick and awkward hug. “Welcome home!” Anna’s head fell just above Lexie’s breast. Lexie held her breath until Anna released her.
With that, Anna hurried away, her footsteps echoing down the linoleum stairs. The only other sound was the buzz of the fluorescent lights casting their greenish hue over the hallways. The silence chilled Lexie as it draped itself throughout the space. The house she shared with her father had always hummed with the muffled voices of news anchors, soap stars and ad men, droning from the TV set in the living room. These vo
ices had been the soundtrack of her adolescence. Though their absence discomfited her, she would not miss them.
Years before, Lexie’s father had been injured on the job, leaving him stranded on his back in front of the television all day, every day. When he slept, which was as often as it was fitful, Lexie tiptoed around the house, haunting her own home as she skulked from room to room. Her father had once been a hunter, a hiker, a fisherman, and a climber. His skills as an outdoorsman were what established his career at the Department of Fish and Wildlife as a large game surveyor, and a shoddy tree stand was what ended it.
Lexie imagined that this same woodsy nature had also landed him his wife, the strange and beautiful Summer Pace. Though Lexie had only vague memories of her long-disappeared mother, she remembered her family’s shared love of hiking and canoeing. Those airy days were long dead, though, and now her father idled away his life flipping between the sordid stories of daytime television.
Lexie looked forward to exploring the unfamiliar quiet of her room, where she could unpack and collect her thoughts. In two days, the rest of the students would arrive and fill the halls with music, shouts, laughter, and all the other sounds endemic to college life. She hadn’t even thought about classes yet, focusing instead on the possibilities of skinny dipping, drinking, staying out all night. These things she had never done before, or at least not with the facility and comfort she pictured her new, collegiate self to have. The new Lexie, she decided, was going to be sexy, savvy, and strong. She would be invited to all sorts of things, and, standing in her room’s doorframe, she promised herself that she would always say “yes.”
It was during her third trip to the bed of her truck, the hazards tossing yellow light against the damp asphalt of the darkening driveway, that Lexie finally saw more people. The rain had dwindled to a light drizzle, and two pairs of footsteps echoed on the pavement around the corner, accompanied by the hushed conversation and giggles of young lovers. Lexie paused, box in hand, wondering what to do. It felt somewhat pervy to wait and see what these people were up to, but if they were two well-disguised murderers, well, it’d be better to meet them head-on. She reached to the back of her waistband, expecting to find her mother’s knife, until she remembered that she had stowed it in the duffle bag in the cab of the truck.