The Gryphon Project

by Carrie Mac

  “I understand that you’re angry—”

  “Oh, shut up!” Phee stood and faced her brother, fists on her hips. “Don’t talk to me like you’re Dad talking to one of his parishioners.”

  “I just wanted to explain before I … I just …” Gryph seemed to be arguing silently with himself. “Look, Phee, I just know how badly you want to know the truth about what happened.”

  “I want to know from my own memory!”

  “If I’d known that you’d lose your memory …” Gryph’s words trailed off. Just as quickly as her anger had swelled, it abated, and

  Phee could easily imagine her brother, just eight years old and full of curiosity. Just testing. Just wondering. Just experimenting, the way Fawn did so often. Both Fawn and Gryph were the types of people who needed to experience things in order to understand them. It didn’t matter how many times she’d told the toddler Fawn that the stove was hot, it was only after Fawn had burned herself that she’d understood. Phee could imagine Gryph’s anticipation, the wanting to know. She could imagine the push, and then how horrible he would’ve felt, watching her float away, face down, lifeless after just a few minutes of struggling.

  “Why didn’t you jump in after me?” Phee asked, her voice softer. “Why didn’t you try to pull me out?”

  “The river was so fast. I got scared. I couldn’t swim that well yet. I knew I had to go for help. If I’d jumped in, we both would’ve died.”

  “At least that way you might have had an idea of what it’s like to be me.”

  “True.”

  “Well”—Phee sighed—“I won’t tell Mom and Dad, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “It’s totally within your rights to tell them,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell Chrysalis.”

  “Of course they wouldn’t tell Chrysalis. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  A long silence passed between them, until Gryph finally broke it. “Are you sorry that I told you?”

  “No. Maybe.” Phee tossed aside the blanket. “I don’t know what I think.” With that, she left Gryph there and went back into the house and upstairs to bed without so much as a goodbye to her visiting relatives. She climbed under the covers, fully dressed, her mind churning so vigorously that she felt faint, even lying down. The room practically spun. She hated having all these secrets. She hated not knowing the real truth, her truth. And she hated Gryph for killing her when she was six. Or she told herself she should hate him.

  But she didn’t.

  She didn’t hate him. She wished she did, because it seemed appropriate, and maybe she’d feel better if she did. But she didn’t hate him. Why not, she couldn’t understand.

  She kept coming back to the same thing. He’d only been little. Just a kid himself.

  No matter how determined she was to hold it against him, she just couldn’t.

  She felt sorry for him, carrying that lonely version of events by himself for so many years. If his version of events was true. Just as she felt sorry for Saul and his burden of truth. She surrendered to her exhaustion before she could drive herself crazy with all the pondering, and fell soundly asleep.

  THE NEWS

  She might not have hated him, but for good measure Phee didn’t talk to Gryph for over a week. And he, thank goodness, didn’t try to make her. She had no idea what she could possibly say to him, what with her brain all in a bother and her heart tied up in knots. They skirted each other on the few occasions they were both home at the same time, and other than that she steered clear of him altogether. As for Saul, he was earnestly avoiding her too, so she had no idea what to tell Nadia when she phoned Thursday morning, before school.

  “Saul’s mom just called, looking for him.” Phee could hear the panic in Nadia’s voice. “She says he didn’t come home last night. After he left here.”

  “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.” Phee held her phone to her ear as she padded down the hall to ask Gryph if he knew where Saul was.

  “If he’s going off with the guys he always tells me.”

  “Is Neko home?”

  “Oh, my God, I didn’t think to check!”

  Phee could hear Nadia hurrying down the hall at her house as she knocked on Gryph’s door. There was no reply.

  “Neko’s door is locked.”

  “Knock harder.”

  Nadia pounded on the door. Finally, she could hear Neko greeting Nadia with a groggy yawn. “Hang on,” Nadia said as she put her phone on speaker. “Do you know where Saul is?”

  Nothing. Phee assumed the fourteen-year-old had shrugged.

  “Neko! Come on, this isn’t funny.”

  Then Neko’s small voice. “I’m not laughing, am I?”

  “Well, don’t be cheeky, either.”

  Phee listened but was distracted by footsteps coming up the stairs behind her. She turned, and there was Gryph, dressed in exactly what she’d last seen him wearing the night before.

  “Gryph just got in,” she reported to Nadia.

  “No I haven’t.” He pushed past Phee and opened his bedroom door. “I just went to take a piss. I’ve been here all night. Everyone knows that. Right?” He gave her a sly grin before disappearing inside and closing the door behind him.

  “You haven’t! I can tell!” Phee lowered her voice as she heard her parents stirring in their own room. “Gryph! I’ve got Nadia, worried sick, on the phone, wanting to know where Saul is.”

  “Home in bed, I imagine.”

  “Open up, Gryphon.” Phee rapped on the door. “Or Mom and Dad will hear.”

  Gryph appeared again, shirtless, the bandage from the stabbing a neat rectangle on his abdomen, the bags under his eyes more evidence to support her suspicion. “What?”

  “Look, I know you go out without Mom and Dad knowing, and I don’t care. Well, I do, but that’s beside the point. Just tell me where Saul is and if he’s okay.”

  “He’s fine. He’ll be home soon.” Another smirk. “Does this mean you’re talking to me again?”

  “No.” Phee stalked off to her own room. She hated how indifferent Gryph could be when everyone else was in a flap. He took after Oscar that way. Nothing fazed either of them. Or at least, that was what it looked like.

  SURE ENOUGH, a couple of minutes after she got off the phone with Nadia, she texted Phee. “He’s home. Safe & sound. Commencing scolding-wench routine. Xoxo.”

  Phee wanted to march right back to Gryphon’s room and demand to know what the hell was going on. With the guys’ clandestine nighttime ramblings, what Gryph knew about Saul and his situation, the stunt Gryph pulled in the mall, and—if she had the guts to bring it up—why he was blowing his win record to smithereens and ruining his career with Chrysalis.

  The fact was, she didn’t have the guts to confront him on any of it.

  She was still stuck on exactly how she was supposed to react to the news that her brother had cost her a recon. It wasn’t something that happened. At least not to anyone Phee knew. She’d heard a horrible story of a man who’d backed out of his driveway and run over his toddler, but that was the only circumstance she knew of that even came close to resembling her bizarre situation. She might have to tell Nadia, if only not to be so alone with such a big part of her history.

  PHEE AND NADIA helped out at the church’s strawberry tea, working in the kitchen. By the time it was winding down, they both had stains on their clothes. Phee had picked a sundress to wear that morning, in the hope of seeing Tariq later, and now it had a streak of chocolate sauce down the front. Nadia had noticed the dress right away and had given her a hard time about it. Now she was far more concerned about her own soiled shirt.

  “It’s ruined.” Nadia pointed at the strawberry-juice splotch. “ This was not cheap, you know.”

  “I told you not to wear anything fancy.” “

  So then again I ask, why did you wear a dress?” “

  It’s just a sundress.” Phee looked away so Nadia wouldn’t see her face. No matter how hard she tried to c
onceal her feelings, Nadia could always read her like a book. “So again I tell you, I picked it up off the floor this morning.”

  “I know exactly where you got it from. Your closet, left-hand side, behind the frou-frou dress your grandma made you for Christmas. Floor, my ass.”

  “For your information, I did get it off the floor.” Phee got up. She reached for Nadia’s hand and helped her up too. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter. I promised my mom I’d take Fawn out this afternoon. I can change when we pick her up.”

  “We?”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “Only for an hour. Saul’s taking me to that sushi place for dinner.”

  “Then come on, so we can go swimming. And you can eat a hot dog or something before he picks you up, because I know for a fact you never eat when you go out with him.”

  “Uh-huh. Just like I know you didn’t get that dress off the floor.”

  BECAUSE IT WAS the first day of summer vacation, the beach at the Shores was dotted with teenagers spread out on towels, playing volleyball in the hot sun, or strolling along the sand, all of them aiming for an air of nonchalance but failing. The whole beach simmered with summer potential. Phee could practically hear the desperate hopes for the next two school-free months as she and Nadia, with Fawn swinging between them, searched for a spot to lay out their blanket. Right away, Fawn spotted a group of her friends building sandcastles under the watchful eye of a couple of mothers settled in for the day with their books and baskets of snacks.

  “Thank God.” Nadia unfurled her beach towel and arranged herself on it as if she were in a magazine ad for bronzer. “We are blissfully Fawn-free.” With her darker skin, she needed only five minutes in the sun to look even more exotic and sultry than she normally did.

  “Don’t pick on her.” Phee spread out her towel beside Nadia’s and started slathering on the sunblock.

  “I love Fawn. But sometimes she can be a pain in the ass.”

  “Then you two have a lot in common.”

  “Ha, ha.” Nadia sneered at her. “Guess what Saul and I did last night?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Get your mind out of the gutter, girl. We picked out baby names.”

  “What? You’re not—”

  “No!”

  “Thank God.” Phee let out a sigh of relief.

  “I don’t know,” Nadia said with a shrug. “It’d be kind of neat having a baby around, wouldn’t it?”

  “You just finished saying that Fawn was a pain in the ass and she’s not even a baby. And you hated looking after her when she was a baby.”

  “I was just saying.”

  “Well, you can just keep saying all you want, just keep being safe while you do.”

  “We decided that if we have a boy, his middle name will be Gryphon, and if we have a girl, her middle name will be Phoenix. We can’t decide on first names, though. We have a list that’s forty names long. But we both agreed on the middle names right away.”

  Phee grinned. “That’s sweet. But you mean if, like way in the future if, right? Because I think you should probably finish high school and get your degree before you get into babies.” Phee spread a glob of sunblock down her calf. “Just saying.” She winked at Nadia.

  “That stuff blocks the sun, Phee, honey.” Nadia pulled down her sunglasses and fixed Phoenix with a bored look. “If you want to tan, you have to let the sun do its thing unfettered. Just saying.”

  “Unfettered.” Phee grinned as she spread the white muck along her pasty legs. “That’s a pretty chunky word for such a little girl.”

  With a smirk, Nadia chucked a fistful of sand at her. It stuck to the sunblock like glitter to glue, so Phee headed down to the water to rinse it off while Nadia laughed at her.

  THE SUN ARCED OVERHEAD, Nadia napped, Phee swam, first alone, and then, when Fawn’s little friends left, with Fawn too. It was late afternoon when Phee dragged Fawn out of the water for the last time and headed back to the towels just as Nadia was waking up.

  “I just had an awful dream.” Nadia glowered at Phee. “And now I hate you.”

  Fawn peered up at Phoenix, surprised.

  “She doesn’t mean it, Fawn.” To Nadia, she said, “And what terrible, horrible, no-good rotten thing did I do to you in your dream?”

  Nadia’s lips thinned into a prissy straight line. “It had to do with Saul.”

  Phee laughed. “As if.”

  “You know …” Nadia ducked her chin so she could peer at Nadia over her shades. “I bet I’m way more intuitive than you give me credit for. I don’t think I was so way off. You guys have been acting weird lately—”

  “Weird how?”

  “Weird in general. I don’t know,” Nadia said with a shrug. “Like, one day I’ll see you two whispering and then you avoid each other for days. That ‘weird’ kind of ‘weird.’”

  “It’s always about you.”

  “When you avoid him? That’s about me too?” Nadia took her sunglasses off altogether now. Phee braced herself as her best friend carefully folded the frames and tucked them in the case. Whenever Nadia got all deliberate and calculating like this, it was always just before she was about to blow.

  “This is a stupid conversation.”

  “So now you’re calling me stupid?”

  Fawn tugged Phee’s arm. She glanced down at her sister, her thin arms covered in goose bumps. “Here.” She picked up a towel and folded her into it, rubbing her dry.

  “Are you?”

  “This is so ridiculous,” Phee said as she towelled Fawn’s hair. “You had a dream. It’s not real.”

  “Your dad says God can speak to us through dreams.”

  “My dad says God can speak to us through pretty much anything.”

  “Well, maybe God was telling me to watch my back.” Nadia gathered her book and lotion and water bottle and hat all in a jumble in her arms and sprang up. “Maybe God was telling me to mind who my friends really are.”

  “Oh, please.” Phee rolled her eyes. “Give it up, drama queen.”

  “Don’t fight!” Fawn yelped from under the towel.

  Nadia leaned in and whispered harshly. “And don’t try to tell me you’re planning my birthday because that’s months away. And you know that I hate surprises. Hate them.” She shoved her things into her bag and stalked off across the sand, her flip-flops clutched in one hand, the bag in the other. Phee was just about to run after her, but then she spotted Tariq running across the road, coming from the train station. He was alone. Nadia slowed, confused. Phee dropped the towel, sensing at once that something was wrong.

  “There’s Tariq!” Fawn took off in his direction, but he ran right past her. Phee thought he was coming to see her. Later she would remember feeling a tremendous sense of relief that she’d switched the soiled sundress for a clean one. Later she would look back on that easy sense of relief as being the last easy thing for a very long time.

  Tariq stopped when he reached Nadia. He grabbed her shoulders as though he was about to shake her. In those few seconds, Phee knew it was bad. She thought of Saul, of course. No recon. His precarious web of lies. Maybe the guys found him out? Maybe he’d been seized? Relocated to where he was supposed to belong. Tariq said only a few words before Nadia crumpled to the sand. It was Saul! Something terrible had happened! Phee broke into a run, but no matter how she willed her legs to go faster, she felt as if the distance between her and Nadia stretched out forever, as if she’d never get to her friend’s side when so clearly she needed her the most.

  “What’s wrong?” Fawn fell into step beside her.

  “I think it’s Saul.” Phee kept running, the sand slowing her down. At last she was at Nadia’s side. She fell to her knees beside her and folded Nadia into a tight embrace. “What is it?” She looked up at Tariq. His mirrored sunglasses prevented her from reading his eyes. She saw that his hands were clenched into fists, that he was holding himself apart from whatever had happened. “What happened?” Phee coul
d hear the panic in her voice. “It’s Saul, isn’t it? He’s hurt? What happened?”

  “Oh, honey …” Nadia shifted to face Phee. Now it was Nadia hugging her. “Everything will be okay. He’ll be as good as new. Better, even.”

  “What?” Phee’s heart crumpled, taking her breath with her. “What are you talking about?”

  Tariq opened his mouth, but the words didn’t come at first. “Phoenix … I came … there’s been …” With a deep breath, he tried again. “It’s your brother. Gryph is dead.”

  ACCIDENT, MAYBE

  Phoenix had no recollection of how she got home. One moment she was gasping for breath, feeling as if Tariq had punched her hard in the gut, and then the next thing she knew she was stumbling up the back steps, desperate to be with her parents.

  “Mom?” She flung open the door. No answer. “Dad?”

  “You have to slow your breathing down, Phee. You’re going to pass out.” Nadia gripped her hand. “Maybe they’re down at Chrysalis already.”

  Tariq came in last, carrying Fawn, who clung to him, bawling. She looked even smaller in her polka-dotted bathing suit, her head resting on his shoulder, as if she were just a toddler. Phoenix lifted her from him and held her. She sat on a kitchen chair with her little sister in her lap, not sure what to do. Fawn whimpered, snot running down her face. Nadia found a napkin and wiped her cheeks dry.

  “They wouldn’t leave without me.”

  “Check your phone. And the lync.” When Phee was clearly not able to move from where she sat, Nadia nodded at Tariq. “You do it.”

  Tariq crossed the kitchen to the little desk where Eva kept the household organized. Under the glass surface of the desk the lync screen swam with the dim clouds of its standby mode. Tariq ran a finger across it to wake it up. “They’re at your grandparents’,” he said after reading the message Eva had left. “They’ll be back—”

  The front door slammed open. “Phoenix? Fawn!”