by Amy Reed
Maybe now is the right time to tell her it’s me paying for her dance classes. Maybe that would bring her back to me. Maybe that would convince her I’m worth keeping.
Whatever’s in the wall keeps moaning, and it won’t shut up. The wind won’t shut up. My mind won’t shut up. The tornado keeps spinning, and nothing can stop it.
I’m getting so tired of keeping secrets. When you think about it, is there really a difference between a secret and a lie?
But if I told her, it could backfire so incredibly bad. I didn’t really think that part through. The problem with trying to save people is, what if they don’t want to be saved? If she finds out, she might hate me forever. And that’s way worse than losing someone because they just get tired of you.
Maybe I never should have paid for those classes. Then Lydia would still be miserable and bored and mine.
I am a horrible person.
I have to focus on the positive. Why is it getting so hard to focus on the positive?
I’m so tired.
Where is Grandma? Where is Lynn A.?
I keep forgetting what I’ve learned from the therapy talk shows. The solution to my feelings right now is that I need to adjust my expectations. I must try not to be so attached. I knew my friendship with Lydia was too good to be true, but I got too comfortable, I got used to it, as if it would always be there. I’ve been so stupid. I, of all people, should know that no one sticks around forever.
I have to let Lydia go. That’s the only way I’m going to survive losing her.
I don’t know how my brain fits all these thoughts in it without exploding.
I want to sleep. I can’t sleep.
The room shakes and the glowing center of the painting flares and I feel my skin burning for a split second as I fight the pull of gravity that wants to slam me against the wall, and then I’m more freezing than I was to begin with.
I know Caleb’s still awake. Maybe talking to someone will help me stop thinking, even if it’s someone who doesn’t want me around. Maybe I should tell him about Grandma going missing. Maybe I should tell him about the detectives.
Or maybe I should tell him I love his new music. Maybe what Caleb needs is encouragement. Maybe I can help him.
Suddenly, I don’t feel so cold.
I creep up the stairs in my pajamas, preparing what I’m going to say. I’ve been listening to you playing music. No. I’ve heard the music you’ve been playing. No. I overheard you playing music, and I think it’s brilliant.
Then another little voice pipes up out of nowhere: please love me.
I shake my head, trying to dislodge the voice. But the echo is still bouncing around my skull, louder than all the other noises. I feel embarrassed already, and I haven’t even done anything yet.
I knock lightly on Caleb’s door and hear nothing. Maybe he’s asleep for a change. I open the door slowly, but it stops at some kind of obstruction. I have to put all my weight behind my push to get the door open enough to let me in.
The first thing I notice in the attic is the heavy pile of blankets in front of the door. The room is dark, lit only by the glow of the streetlight coming through the window. There are blankets everywhere, in haphazard lumps all over the floor, as if a storm came through and ripped Caleb’s nest apart. The guitar and creepy dolls are all safely huddled in one corner, but everything else—the broken lawn chairs, the cheap wooden bedside table, the lamp, Caleb’s growing library, even Caleb’s computer—are thrown around the room, like the attic became that stage where Caleb had his meltdown, where he lost his shit and became a tornado with the whole world watching.
“Caleb?” I say softly.
“Mmrrghmm,” says a voice from a dark corner. Caleb’s pale bare feet stick out of the shadows. He is lying belly-down on the floor, his eyes closed. I see an almost-empty bag of weed next to him, which I know was full just this morning because I had to go to Gordon’s house in the middle of fog so thick I got lost, even though it’s five blocks away in a neighborhood I’ve lived in my whole life, and when I got there Gordon was eating a frozen pizza that was still frozen, which he proudly called a “breakfast Popsicle.”
Can someone die of a marijuana overdose?
“Caleb,” I say, gently prodding his shoulder.
“Mmrrghmm,” Caleb says again, rolling onto his side.
“What happened?”
His eyes open into narrow slits. He coughs. “Let me sleep,” he says, his voice rough.
“You broke your computer.”
Caleb’s eyes open a little more. He stares at me. “Why’d you pick such an easy fucking password?”
“What?”
Caleb manages to prop himself up on his elbow. “Sarah? Really?”
After Caleb accidentally checked his e-mail a few weeks ago, he made me block a bunch of websites and search terms and change the system admin password to something he “could never guess.” He gave me the responsibility of protecting him from the world. And I failed.
“Fucking stupid,” Caleb spits as he lies back down, his eyes closed again.
Fucking stupid.
It’s Grandma’s voice. I am so sick of Grandma’s voice. I am sick of everybody telling me who I am and who I’m not. I’m sleep deprived and I’m pissed off and I’ve lost my patience with everyone.
And I’m not fucking stupid.
I stare at my uncle’s face in the dark, so stoned he can’t even open his eyes. The dolls watch us, Caleb’s loyal audience. I hear a familiar voice inside me, the one that wants to say I’m sorry over and over again until I can be sure Caleb stops hating me, at least temporarily, the part of me so eager to take all the blame, to give and give until it hurts, and then keep giving some more, because that’s all I know how to do. Even then, after I’ve given everything, it’s never enough. But the voice still says I’m sorry, as if doing and saying the same things the same way will somehow get different results. I’m sorry. As if apologizing for my existence is some twisted way to earn it.
But there’s a new, different voice beneath the I’m sorry, one I don’t remember ever hearing, one that knows I have absolutely nothing to be sorry about.
“I’m not responsible for your Internet searches,” I say. The dolls perk up. I can hear them shuffling behind me.
“You were supposed to do one thing, and you fucked it up,” Caleb says. “You can’t even choose a password right.”
“I can’t protect you from yourself,” I say. The dolls titter amongst themselves.
“You have to get me some dope,” Caleb says. “Gordon won’t have it, but he’ll know who does.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Then I just need some tinfoil.”
“No,” I say. “Get up.”
“Huh?”
“I said get up. You can’t lie there on the floor forever. It’s time for you to get your shit together.”
But I know Caleb isn’t getting up anytime soon. He can barely even open his eyes.
“So you know the plan, right?” Caleb says. “Ask Gordon where to get some dope.”
“Did you even hear me? I said no. I’m not going to help you kill yourself. If you want heroin, you can leave this attic and get it yourself. I’m done.”
Caleb says nothing. He just looks at me through the thin slits of his eyes, like he has no idea how this stranger found his hiding spot.
“I’m done with all of it,” I say, a fire rising, burning away a layer of sludge inside me I didn’t even know was there. “No more weed. No more emptying your bucket. None of it. You can come downstairs and do it yourself. I’m not your servant. I quit.”
Is this what the house has wanted all along? Was the point of all my sleep deprivation to make me so unstable that I’d finally lose my temper? Is this why it’s been torturing me, like how the military tortures prisoners until they tell the truth? Is this the truth?
“But I need you,” Caleb says weakly.
Something squeezes inside me. For a moment, I want to
take it all back. I look at Caleb’s bare feet. How is he not freezing? He needs a blanket. There are so many blankets.
But there is something solid inside me, and that place says, “I can’t save you.”
A gust of wind shakes the house, nearly knocking me over. Something creaks and groans from deep inside, then the sound of breaking, splitting open. The attic is no longer immune to the rest of the house’s madness. Something in the foundation has shattered.
And then Caleb starts crying. He pulls his thin body into a ball and lies in the shadows, wracked with silent sobs. I cannot see the details of his face, but I see the faint light from outside reflected in wet streaks down his cheeks. I see his teeth shining, and for some reason it makes me think of a documentary we watched together about an ancient city destroyed by a volcano, of mummified human remains caught in volcanic ash, everything scorched and preserved black, except the teeth still glistening white, like no one told them they were supposed to be dead too.
I lean down and put my hand on Caleb’s trembling shoulder. I can say no and still love him.
But then he reaches his arm out and pushes me so hard I fall down.
Animals hide when they are wounded. They snarl at anyone who comes near.
I stand back up. I rub the sore spot on my butt, where I know I will have a bruise. My head is strangely clear as I walk downstairs, pull my wallet out of my backpack, and take out Caleb’s ATM card. Caleb is raging on the floor when I return, now wailing so loud I worry for a moment that Grandma might hear him. But then I remember she’s not here. And even if she were, I don’t care. Let Grandma hear him. Let all those people camped outside hear him. It is not my job to worry about Caleb anymore.
I throw Caleb’s card, and it lands next to him on the floor. He opens his eyes for a brief moment, looks at me with a split second of focus, confused, like he doesn’t know how he got here, like he doesn’t even know who I am.
“I don’t want your money anymore,” I tell him.
Then I lift a blanket off the floor and cover Caleb’s feet. I walk away. I go downstairs, to my room with the growing hole in the wall and the unseen creatures who live inside and never shut up and the painting with the black hole that I almost want to jump into. I lie on my bed and have never felt so heavy in my life, and my eyelids close, and I couldn’t open them even if I wanted to.
I wake up around five in the morning, after almost four hours of sleep, the longest stretch I’ve gotten in weeks, to the sound of the front door slamming shut and the whole house shaking. “Grandma?” I shout as I hop out of bed. I run into the living room just in time to see her plop down on the couch, a cloud of dust exploding around her.
“Where were you?” I say.
“I’m in no mood to talk right now,” she says with a raspy voice, hoisting her legs onto the couch, turning on the TV, and pulling a blanket up to her chin.
“Are you okay?”
“Do I look okay?” she snaps.
“Um, yes?” I say. “I mean, no? I don’t know.”
“Dammit, Billy,” she sighs. “I was in the slammer all night.”
Did she really just say “slammer”?
“You were in jail?”
“Damn police will think twice next time they try to come into my place of work,” she grumbles, clicking through the channels.
“What did you do?”
“Since when is asking someone to leave ‘assaulting an officer’?”
“Grandma, what did you do?”
“And since when is a broom a ‘deadly weapon’?”
“What?”
“Everything’s fine,” she says. “They let me go when they realized I knew nothing about Caleb. Everyone wants to be the one who catches him. Well, they’re barking up the wrong tree.”
“Don’t you want them to find him?”
She stops clicking through the channels. She looks at me, and I think I see a glimmer of something un-Grandma-like in her eyes, something maybe sad, something maybe a night without sleep in jail uncovered.
“Caleb’s gone, Billy,” she says, her voice cracking a little, maybe from a night spent yelling at cops, but maybe also from emotion, maybe because she misses her son and is ready to make amends like Lynn A. is always talking about.
“But what if he isn’t?” I say. “What if he’s here somewhere?”
This could all be over with just a few simple words. This is when I tell her that her son is sleeping two floors above her head. She’s finally ready and I’m finally ready and maybe she can help him too, and maybe I won’t have to hold this all by myself.
But in a split second, what opened in Grandma’s face closes down once again, and her eyes turn mean. “If he’s anywhere around here, you can bet your ass I’ll find a way to make a dollar off him.”
She turns the TV to the twenty-four-hour commercial channel and says, “Scram, Billy. I need to rest.” And then her eyes close, and she starts snoring, and just like that she’s fast asleep.
I stand there for a few moments just staring at her. How can she just decide not to care? How can she sleep so easily? How do Grandma and I even share the same blood? How can we live in this same house but I’m the only one it’s hurting?
I go to my room and get dressed for school. Everything’s completely upside down, but I can’t think of anything else to do but go through the motions of my normal life. I’ll get to school way too early, but the good news is I won’t miss free breakfast.
LYDIA
IT’S SO COLD THIS MORNING that I’m forced to get over my embarrassment about Larry’s van and drive to school because I’m pretty sure I’d freeze to death during the couple of minutes it’d take to wait for the bus. If I’m lucky, the van will get covered in ice so nobody can see what’s painted on the side.
Things at school are tenser than ever. The King announced early this morning that the forests around Fog Harbor would once again be off-limits to logging after all his equipment was destroyed because, in his own words, “If I can’t have it, no one can.” Three fights break out by lunchtime. One kid has to go to the hospital for a broken nose after getting punched by a kid he accused of being an environmental terrorist for having a peace sign bumper sticker on his car. Apparently, everyone becomes a suspect for causing your misery when there’s exactly jack shit you can do about it.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Billy in Miscellaneous Science. It seems like that’s been the bulk of our conversations lately. He’s lying on his desk with his face turned away from me, watching the freezing rain fall outside the window and coat the ground with ice. “You barely talked at lunch,” I say.
“I’m just tired,” he says.
“At some point you don’t get to use that excuse anymore, you know.”
“Anything you’d like to share with the class?” Mr. Mosley says from the front of the room, interrupting his lecture about ionic bonds.
“Sorry,” Billy says.
He told me a little about what happened last night, about how his grandma spent the evening in jail, how Caleb asked for heroin, how he cried like a baby when Billy said no. When I said, “I’m proud of you for standing up to him,” I meant it as a compliment, but Billy did not seem to take it that way.
“If it was such a good idea,” Billy said, “why does it feel like such crap?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because sometimes doing the right thing is hard.”
“Now who sounds like a therapy talk show?” he replied, with a new bitter edge to his voice.
“You seem angry,” I said.
“I don’t get angry.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Don’t tell me what to feel.”
The rest of lunch was pretty much silent after that. If we had fancy phones to stare at, that’s probably what we would have been doing. My little girl companion sat with us at the lunch table, but she was kicking my leg the whole time. I just sat there, getting angrier and angrier, at her for kicking me, and at the fact that I couldn’t do a thing
about it. When she slammed her foot straight into my ankle, it sent a lightning bolt of pain up my leg, and I erupted before I could stop myself. “Fucking stop it!” I yelled, and Billy looked at me like I broke his heart. “My leg again,” I said. “Cramps.” And he just sighed and looked down at his lunch tray, and Kayla or Kaitlyn or Katelyn muttered, “Crazy bitch,” as she walked by and bumped me in the back with her hip, and it took all my strength not to turn around and tackle her. If I don’t get a handle on this soon, it’s goodbye, dance career, hello, mental institution.
As Mr. Mosley drones on about electrons, I look at the back of Billy’s head and feel guilty. He’s the friend who needs me most, so it’s him I should be thinking about, but my thoughts keep drifting to Natalie. Does her car have four-wheel drive? Will she be safe driving the steep hills to her house with all the ice on the road?
How do people manage having more than one friend?
The intercom crackles. Everyone looks toward the ancient speaker in the ceiling. Even Mr. Mosley seems relieved to get a break from his boring lecture. But then three alarms ring in quick succession. I know this means something important, but I can’t remember what. Whatever it is, it’s bad. Billy sits up. We lock eyes.
“Please remain calm, students,” the principal says over the intercom. “We need to vacate the school immediately. Teachers, please lead your students to the off-campus safety meeting location in an orderly fashion.”
This is not a drill. Nervous echoes of “What’s happening?” fill the room. Even Mr. Mosley looks spooked. “Come on, everyone. You heard Principal Bensen. Leave your things and form a line immediately.”
Only Billy and I think to put our coats on. The other students leave their belongings—coats, hats, books, backpacks—everything except their phones. Nobody leaves those. They’re already texting their friends, already posting on their social media accounts, swapping theories about what the emergency is. Some people are even talking to each other in person with their actual voices.
Consensus seems to be there was a bomb threat. Even the teachers are pretty certain. It was inevitable, really. This is how wars escalate. First some angry words and tripping people in the halls. Then fistfights and broken noses and throwing people into tornado pits. Then mass annihilation.