No. It…she…what if she was wrong? What if there were others? I’d seen the landscape change, daylight snuffed out like a match; the snow, the sand—it was different every time I blinked. Nothing was absolute. Not the landscape. Not time. Not me. What if the solitude wasn’t either?
I headed for the forest again, trying to spot a break in the leaves and I could just make out something jutting up through the treetops. White. Massive. I headed straight for it, zigzagging over puddles and swollen roots, sunlight careening off the structure and cutting a path across the forest floor. I stumbled, foot caught on a fallen branch, and then I heard a faint hiss tangled in the leaves. I wiped the dirt from my jeans, rose to my feet, and the hiss grew louder.
“Who’s there?” I stumbled backwards, scanning the trees. “Hello?”
I looked up and dotting the branches were hundreds of eyes—wide on my face, flashing gold like the farmer’s moon that had been hanging in the sky the night before.
The owls let out a soft unified purr, wobbling from side to side on pronged feet. But even higher there were others—darker, slimmer, hanging like rotting fruit. Bats. A few extended their wings, blue veins cutting through translucent skin and I fell against another tree, watching them. Then they all fell at once, the bats swooping down over my head, a black sheet flung out over everything and then...gone. Shred by the breeze like smoke.
I tried not to breathe it in, a sinister weight floating down from the ashes. But then that was gone too, nothing but those strange shapes and sharp angles edging out from the leaves. I crept closer, still shivering as I waited for something else to disappear, and the white mass revealed itself in pieces. I spotted rails and tracks and boxcars. Concrete edged out of the grass beneath my feet and I craned my neck at a rusting Ferris wheel.
Rain started sprinkling down in patches and I watched the sun carve through it as it fell from a cloudless sky. It disappeared through the trees and then the sky was red, a spontaneous sunset that just hung there.
I stepped around the Ferris wheel, spotting a carousel sunken in the grass, poles cracked, horses strangled under thick vines. A few of the lights flickered, a short in the circuits. They shuddered, so bright, until they were all I could see.
I was on my knees again, the same light I’d seen earlier stinging me from the inside.
Pain.
Heat.
I groaned, kneading my eyes with the heels of my palms. It was stronger this time, too strong. But this time I smelled something harsh. Something chemical. Gasoline. It clung to the back of my throat, a different kind of burning. I scrambled, trying to get to my feet again and then I heard the soft tinkle of bells.
The music started, low at first, warped like it was playing under water, and the hairs rose on the back of my neck. The light finally disappeared and I blinked once, twice, letting my eyes adjust.
I finally caught my balance, took a few steps back, watching the trees for movement, and then I saw the signs—corroded and rotting. FUNNEL CAKES. TICKET BOOTH. REAL MERMAIDS. THE SMALLEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. The carnival signs were scattered among the trees, hanging from low branches by rusting nail heads and scattered in pieces across the grass.
Suddenly it felt like fall, humid air replaced by a chill, and I shivered. I stared at the shadows between the lights, tracing the trees as they receded into darkness. But the longer I stared into it, the more the shadows seemed to swell. Something stood upright, peering at me from between the trees. It shifted, lithe like someone moving.
“Is someone there?”
It grew still and so did I.
“Hello?” I didn’t mean to whisper.
I narrowed my eyes, staring into the trees until I couldn’t see their outline anymore. And then I heard it, the sound like I was trapped in a vacuum, all of the air rushing towards me at once.
I ran along the concrete of the playground as it narrowed into a sidewalk; the lights shuddering off behind me and the music growing faint as I followed it up a gravel driveway to a small yellow trailer house. A row of pinwheels had been buried in the rocks by the door and there was a pink bike wedged between the cinderblocks under the house.
I knew it. We aren’t alone.
The trees bowed behind me, the darkness moving closer. I raced up to the door but I didn’t bother knocking.
“Hello?” I leaned inside. “Is anyone here?”
No one answered and without looking back at what was chasing me I hurled myself inside. I pressed my back to the door, waiting for something to slam into it, to find me there. I crawled to the window, peering outside but the trees were still and everything was quiet.
I faced the room and saw a couch, a TV, and a small card table in the corner of the kitchen. I opened the fridge. Empty. I followed the tile floor to where it disappeared under orange shag carpet. There was a bare mattress and an ironing board next to the window. A small nightstand sat next to the bed topped with a few picture frames and I picked one up, clearing off the dust with my shirt. It was of a little girl, wide-eyed and smiling. Dark curly hair was pulled into a ponytail on top of her head. And they were green—her eyes—sea foam.
I walked to the other end of the house and found the little girl’s bedroom. There were a few stuffed animals tucked behind an empty clothes hamper but the bed was stripped just like the other one.
I clicked the light on in a small closet and another bird shot past me, dizzying out on the floor before flying into the hallway. I was pressed against the back of the closet, trying to catch my breath when I spotted something along the baseboard. There was a crack in the floor, something gold flickering in the darkness. I pulled it out—a copy of Through The Looking-Glass—and the cover splayed open in my palm. My Dearest Bryn…
Bryn. Is that her name? The book slipped from my fingers, pages still limp and opened to the inscription.
“Bryn.”
I let the name swell in the small space, the echo bouncing against the closet’s exposed ribs. But the moment it dissipated an ache climbed into my throat. Because even though I knew her name I still didn’t have one of my own.
Who are you? Fucking remember.
Who. Are. You.
10
Bryn
“They sure do like to hide, don’t they?”
Mrs. Michelle was one of the worst nurses I’d ever had. What she lacked in precision she made up for in southern charm but it still wasn’t enough to coax one of my arteries to the surface.
“Maybe because they know what’s coming,” I said.
“Oh, found one.”
She stuck me and I pretended not to feel it. She filled a vial full of my blood, stuck me again, filled another vial. Then she dabbed me with a cotton ball and pulled the gauze so tight I could feel my pulse in my throat.
“Okay, all done.” She smiled, proud of herself. “You can head back into the waiting room until Dr. Sabine calls you back.”
She pointed down the hall even though I’d already been to the office three times that month. If anyone knew the drill, it was me.
My mom was frantically flipping through a magazine when I sat down next to her.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“I had Michelle.”
She grimaced. “Poor thing couldn’t pin the tail on a donkey even without the blindfold.”
I reached for a magazine, searching for a page that wasn’t an ad. There was some retro song pouring from the speakers above us but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the snoring to my right. I glanced over. Michael Erickson.
He was your stereotypical narcoleptic. Fell asleep in the middle of the pool at his twelfth birthday party. I was standing in line for cake when someone started screaming. Thirty minutes later the ambulance was toting him off to the ER while everyone stood there in shock, well, except for me and Monica Row, another one of Dr. Sabine’s narcolepsy patients. I never got my cake.
Monica’s case was less severe. I heard that she was actually a cheerleader these days or something else terr
ibly normal. One summer she and I spent every Sunday morning before our appointments naming the fish in the aquarium above the magazine rack. I spent a lot of time making the rounds with Dr. Sabine’s other patients but those friendships were as sporadic and unreliable as my disease.
I was the only KLS patient Dr. Sabine had ever had—I knew I was the only one in the entire city of Austin; probably the entire state—so those forced friendships shriveled up fast. It was a little hard to plan play dates around narcolepsy and even harder to plan them around a coma. And the dream-state. No one had ever heard of anything like it and I didn’t exactly feel comfortable discussing it after Michael started claiming I was some kind of alien.
Maybe I was. Better than dying, I guess.
I saw nurse Michelle back at the front desk. She was whispering to one of the other nurses and eyeing me through a plastic fern. I tried to read her face and see if she was still holding my file. What if they’d found something in my blood? What if they knew?
They’d taken a lot of blood, more than usual, and even though I couldn’t tell if the nausea was from that or something else, I reached for one of the vanilla wafers she’d given me.
I let it dissolve on my tongue but I still felt on edge. The cold hit me and I scratched at my forearms, nausea settling like a pulse between my eyes. I felt like I was about to pass out. No. Not now. It’s nothing. He’s nothing.
Dr. Sabine stepped into the waiting room, ushering me back, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I should tell her or if I should wait. Part of me was sick of hearing them refer to the place in my head as a coping mechanism because part of me was afraid that’s all it was. I was tired of being patronized, of them trying to convince me of some explanation for every strange unexplainable thing that happened to me. And I was tired of waiting for a cure. If I told them about the boy, what if I couldn’t participate in the trial anymore?
“How are you feeling today, Bryn?” Dr. Sabine asked.
“Fine.”
“Our favorite word,” she laughed. “Well, glad to hear it.”
I tried to concentrate while Dr. Sabine walked us through the rest of the procedure. It was simple. Basically they’d just stick a few needles in me and see how my body reacted to the medicine, test for allergies and abnormalities. If it seemed safe, because nothing is ever certain, then they’d distill it in capsule form and I would take a few pills a day, waiting to see if it kept the episodes at bay.
She kept talking but soon her voice faded out. I’d heard it all before. The drug is experimental. Results are subjective. Sign here, here, and here. I let my mom thumb through the paperwork, even though she probably had that memorized by now too.
Dr. Sabine faced me. “Now, this particular medication might induce an episode.”
I picked at the gauze, trying to loosen it.
“Bryn?”
I looked up. “Sorry. You said it might induce an episode.”
“Right, but that’s a good thing. We want the medicine to be in control because it might also be a means of waking you.”
I nodded, not absorbing a single word. I didn’t need to after hearing the word might. It might work was always code for probably not.
On the way home we stopped by Felix’s dad’s garage. I’d been working on my sculpture sporadically. But all of the parts my uncle had brought me just weren’t the right texture. They were too corroded, flecks peeling off in my hands as I tried to heat them with a flame.
I let myself in through a side door, my mom waiting out front and taking the opportunity to ask Felix’s dad about some strange knocking sound under the hood that was probably just another imaginary product of her anxiety.
I spotted Felix standing under a black GTO, one I hadn’t seen in the shop before. He spun when he heard my footsteps echoing off the garage.
“Shit. Don’t sneak up on me,” he said.
“Sorry, slow day?”
He looked up and I saw that the car was completely gutted.
“Special delivery,” he said.
“For who? The mob?”
“Hey, hey.” He raised a hand. “Lower your voice.” He nodded to a table covered in shiny chrome parts. “Check it out. We’re putting in a new street engine. Seven-hundred horsepower. This things gonna fuckin’ fly.”
I brushed the finish. I’d never seen one in person, though I’d watched my uncle drool over plenty all of those Saturday afternoons we used to spend watching car shows on TV.
I ran my hand along the valves “And the camshaft?”
“Hydraulic roller, of course.”
“Any of these up for auction?” I asked, patting a valve spring that would have looked awesome on my sculpture.
“Yeah, right. I’ll take you to the scraps.”
I followed Felix to the back where they kept the recently dismembered—tables covered in glinting metal, garbage cans filled to the brim with scraps.
“Anything good?” I said, picking through a pile of license plates. “You guys sure do get a lot of these.”
“We’re the only shop that can do an exterior paint job in one night.” He winked. “In the dark.”
“Didn’t need to know that.”
“Don’t worry, it’s totally illegal.”
I tucked a few cracked spotlights into my bag along with a few of those license plates—one from Kansas, one from New Mexico.
“Sorry you missed the deadline,” he said. “That blows.”
“I’ve still got another shot. Have you applied anywhere yet?”
“Who? Me? Um, no, I’ll be here.”
I nodded. “Take over the family business. That’s cool.”
Felix had never been big on school. He was always that one kid who turned his pencil into a drumstick and every assignment into a paper football. He always had to be doing something with his hands, a tick that was perfect for being a mechanic.
But I knew that wasn’t the only reason Felix wasn’t going away to school. He had four younger siblings and after his grandmother had a stroke last year and went to live with them, they suddenly became his responsibility. I remembered us sitting on his back porch one afternoon, me teaching him how to French braid his little sister’s hair so he could do it for her before school in the mornings. Half an hour and a few expletives later, he was a total pro, two more sisters perched at his knees, waiting for their turn.
“Yeah.” Felix jumped up on one of the tables, swinging his legs. “I like it. It’s not so bad.” He cleared his throat. “So uh, is Dani going with you? Away to school, I mean.”
“I don’t know. School’s not really her thing. Why?” I said, eyeing him.
“Just asking.”
“Sure.” I grabbed some silver and copper coils, oil slipping under my fingernails. I raked them on my jeans. “You know Matt’s got two more weeks. Tops.”
Felix laughed. “Wow, that’s pretty serious.”
“Yeah, I think it’ll be a new record.”
I stuffed one last scrap of metal in my bag, the shiny partial exterior of a bumper, and then tried to wrestle it closed. It finally snapped shut and I looked up at Felix.
“You know she’s scared, right?”
That’s all it was. Because even though Dani was afraid to be alone she was also afraid to get hurt again. Because the moment you find out you’re not exempt from heartache, it feels like that’s all you’re good for. Getting your heart broken. Breaking someone else’s. I knew Dani had feelings for Felix and so did she. But she also knew how it would end, thought she did anyway, and it was that anticipation that kept her at bay. Even if it meant she’d be crying over losers like Matt the rest of her life.
Felix stared at the ground. “I know.”
“She’ll come around,” I said, even though I wasn’t so sure.
He flicked a drill bit across the table and it spun.
“She knows you’d be good for her,” I said.
“Yeah, well no one ever wants what’s good for them, do they?”
I bent down, angling my face in his line of sight. “Don’t give up.” I patted my bag. “Thanks for the goods. There won’t be black sedans full of FBI agents waiting for me outside will there?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We paid them off. You’re good to go.”
11
Bryn
I stood over my workbench, pieces lined in neat rows, running my fingers over each of them. I waited for that electric pull, that itch to pick one up and turn it over in my palm. I tried to look at my sculpture, the one I’d been slaving over for months, and not just see a mess. But that’s hard to do when you feel like one yourself.
My emotions on the day before a new trial always existed on this manic spectrum between reserved hope and total indifference. There was a part of me that believed it would work as if that belief was its own serum and if I just let it fill every inch of me, maybe it would tell my body to relent. To let the cure work. To be a miracle for once. But there was another part of me that knew my body would never be a miracle, that I would never get better, and sometimes that ache filled me too, snuffing out everything else.
That’s where I was sinking to as I gripped the sketches I’d done, pages ripping as I wadded them in my fist. I thought about how it was my self-righteous defiance that had always sustained me in the past. I’m sick but I’ll get better. They said I can’t do it but I’ll prove them wrong. Mantras that suddenly felt like lies. The kind that settle at the base of your stomach and make life feel even heavier.
Because the truth was I was tired. I was tired of fighting, but more importantly I was tired of losing, of being disappointed. And as I stared at my sculpture, hand hovering over a broken spotlight like a finger poised over a trigger, I was trying to figure out how to keep it from turning into another disappointment.
I heard my uncle’s truck pull into the driveway, heavy footsteps in the grass, him clearing his throat as he lifted the door to the garage.
The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4 Page 7