by Jen Nadol
In the glasses, patterns were still swirling, moving in and out of each other. I watched the scene unfold, projected in front of or behind the changing colors.
The guy looked like he—I—hadn’t shaved for days. My hair was long enough to curl around my ears in a way it hadn’t since I was ten. I looked exhausted, rubbing my scruffy face like I’d just woken up from a two-month nap.
Then something moved and I realized the Riley in the picture wasn’t alone.
There was someone beside me in that bed.
I watched my other self turn toward the rustling sheets that were twisting slowly as a girl pushed up on one arm, a glint of metal by her throat. Her skin was soft and silky down to her shoulder, where her body disappeared, bare, beneath the covers.
Sarah.
I dropped the binoculars. A dull clang sounded as they hit a rock. A weird noise escaped my throat, every nerve in my body jangling.
“Hey!” Trip said, surprised.
I’d recognized her faster than I’d recognized myself, had known almost before I saw her face—the sense of it deep inside me. She was thinner, beautiful, but too pale. Her hair was heavy and dark and messy in a way I’d never seen it. Bed-head, my brain whispered. Because she was in bed. With you. My heart was jackhammering, and I felt like my face was on fire.
What the hell?
“Riley?” It was her voice drifting across the fire. “You okay?”
I nodded, trying to swallow, not daring to look up.
“Hey.” Trip gripped my shoulders. My chest was still pounding so hard, I wouldn’t have ruled out a heart attack. Could you have one at seventeen? “What’s wrong, man?” I had a flashback to third grade, when I’d blacked out after Paul Peterson punched me because he thought I’d stolen his Lugia EX Pokémon. Trip had sat beside me with that same watchful look, and my brain had felt like it did now, like nothing made sense.
“I’m okay,” I squeaked, coughing to find my voice. “Sorry.”
Trip looked at the woods, then scooped up the binoculars. “What’s out there?”
Oh no. No, no, no, I thought as he raised them to his eyes. He was going to completely freak—
Get a grip, Riley.
I breathed, slowing my heart so my brain could work. Trip isn’t going to see you in bed with his girlfriend. You didn’t just see that. Not in those binoculars. It’s in your mind. Imagination or fantasy or whatever. Beer, and fumes from the fire.
Yes, I thought, muscles unclenching. Of course.
After a minute, Trip laid the binoculars aside. “You scared the crap out of me,” he said. “I thought the cops were here.”
“You didn’t see anything?”
“It’s a kaleidoscope.” He shrugged. “I saw shapes and stuff.”
I nodded, relieved even though Trip was looking at me like I was nuts. Which I might have been.
“What’d you see?” he asked.
“Same thing,” I said weakly.
Trip frowned. “Did you drop acid on the way up here, Ri?”
“You know I don’t do that stuff.”
“Colors and shapes are only scary if you’re whacked-out.”
“Yeah. I just . . .” I shook my head. “It must have been, like, a panic attack or something.” I looked down at my hands, could feel them trembling. Thankfully Trip didn’t ask more. I’d had exactly three panic attacks in my life. All around the time my dad died. It was a sure out with Trip, though. Talking about stuff like that made him even more uncomfortable than it made me.
I ventured a quick glance at Sarah, who was still watching me.
She smells like spices and coffee and sleep.
The thought sent my heart racing again. Something was messed up. Was the beer spiked? I’d just been in the cave with her. She’d smelled like mints, maybe a flowery perfume, but I knew she smelled like that other stuff too. It had been so vivid in the binoculars, like it was real.
I could still feel the tangles of her hair, the coolness of the room we’d been in, the warmth and silkiness of her skin when I—
“Ohmygod,” Natalie gasped.
Hallucinations. The thought flashed in my brain just as the binoculars fell out of Natalie’s hand. Her face was pale, eyes wide and glistening with tears. My stomach fluttered with a hundred dread-filled butterflies.
“Jesus,” Trip said, looking from her to me. “What’s going on here?”
Natalie was rocking gently back and forth, hands covering her mouth like she was stifling a scream. I went over, squatted in front of her. “What, Nat?” I said, hearing a quaver in my own voice. “What was it?”
Her eyes found mine, and I saw she was scared. “God, Riley . . .” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I saw my dad,” she said shakily. “In our house. There was blood everywhere.” Natalie breathed quickly, like she could barely suck in the air. “I think he was dead.”
My body felt cold, every hair on end. Go, my brain whispered. Walk away. Pretend this never happened. But I was frozen.
And in that moment, Tannis leaned forward and picked up the binoculars. I’m not sure if I thought she wouldn’t look or if I hoped she wouldn’t see anything. Maybe I was just too stunned to act. It wouldn’t have mattered; Tannis would have looked anyway. That was how she was. Or at least I tell myself that now.
The dark lenses reflected the fire, with Tannis’s thick blond hair spilling loose around them. When we were kids, she wore it in ponytails, dirty and messy by the end of the day from climbing trees and riding BMX bikes with the boys. Tannis was tough. I knew no matter what, she wasn’t going to freak out or cry. I wasn’t even sure she knew how to do those things.
I held my breath, staticky nonsense in my brain, until finally she lowered them.
“Well, that was really fucking weird,” she said softly. She looked at Nat, who was rubbing her temples. “It was me, on the mountain,” Tannis said. “I was walking Wraparound in summer. You know, like, hiking?” I nodded. “There were a couple kids with me. The way I felt about them . . . I think”—she hesitated—“they might have been mine.” She laughed nervously, looked at me. Waited.
She wanted me to tell what I’d seen.
Not a chance.
Natalie stood suddenly and lurched away from the circle.
Trip jumped up. “Nat?” He followed her to the edge of the woods. She stumbled, and he grabbed her arm. Then she threw up.
“We should go,” I said, the voice—Get out!—now screaming in my head. I started to gather our things, robotically stuffing my backpack with beer cans, matches, sweatshirt. This wasn’t okay. Something was wrong here. Very wrong.
Tannis nodded, dumping her beer onto the fire, scraping up handfuls of dirt to put out the flames. She gestured toward the woods. “I’m going to help Trip. You guys pick up the rest?”
“’Kay,” said Sarah, already folding the blankets.
I collected the last of the trash and scanned the circle. The fire was out. There was nothing left.
Except the binoculars.
Sarah saw them too. “You want these?”
I shook my head. It seemed stupid not to take them, but no, I didn’t want them. No way.
“You think we should just leave them?” she asked doubtfully. “Here?” Sarah looked around the clearing. “They might get wrecked.”
“We could put them back in the cave.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “I’ll take them.”
“Are you sure?” I forced myself to say, “I can do it.”
“I won’t go far.” She was already reaching for the box, flipping it open.
“Riley?” Tannis called.
“Yeah?” I could barely make out her silhouette against the trees.
“We’re going to start down. You guys okay to follow?”
I checked the flashlight. “Uh-huh,” I told her.
“We’ll meet you at the car.”
I heard the crunch and snap of their receding footsteps as I zipped up my bag. I looked over, expecting Sarah to have tossed the binoculars into the cave and be heading back my way, but she’d stopped just inside the dim opening.
She was frozen, and for a second I thought she’d seen an animal or something. Then I noticed a glint of metal in her hands, near her face.
She was looking into the binoculars.
CHAPTER 3
TRIP PICKED ME UP FOR school just before eight on Monday like he did most mornings. I slid into his passenger seat and wrinkled my nose. “Dude. It reeks in here.”
“Says the guy who spent yesterday cleaning toilets,” Trip answered.
“Actually, it was rotting mice.” It had been my week to clean and reset the traps at Oknepa Hotel and Restaurant, the only place to stay in town, and my employer for the last three years. “And toilets,” I added.
“How’d you score such a sweet job?”
“Must be my good looks.” I swiveled around, looking for rancid food. Trip’s gym bag was on the floor, surrounded by McDonald’s wrappers. Bingo. I hadn’t seen him since he’d dropped me off Saturday night after the cave. I’d spent half of Sunday at work and an even longer half at the hospital ER with my mom. I guess I knew how Trip had spent his. “You ever clean this thing?”
“My car or my bod?”
“Either.”
“Rarely,” Trip admitted.
“I bet that impresses the ladies.”
“Seems to be working out okay,” he said pointedly.
I let that go. I didn’t want to talk about Sarah, or worse—him and Sarah.
“Don’t you think it defeats the purpose of a workout to have fast food afterward?” I asked instead.
“You’re in a shitty mood,” Trip observed, glancing over.
I took a deep breath, then exhaled hard. “Sorry.”
He studied me for an extra second, then zeroed in on it. “Your mom all right?” Trip had a way of reading people like that, especially me.
I shrugged, my chest tight, thinking of her in the hospital wheelchair last night. I wanted to blow it off, tell him it was nothing, she was fine, but I was having a hard time unclenching my throat.
Trip noticed and pulled over, turned on the bench seat to face me. “What happened?”
And just like that, it felt like the end of eighth grade, Trip and me standing by our lockers—side by side that year—after the first time she’d been sick. I’d tried to hold it together back then, telling him the stuff the doctor had said.
Normally you wouldn’t take your fourteen-year-old son to your medical appointment, but I’d found my mom in bed that morning, barely able to sit up. I’d been so worried, I’d insisted, and I guess she hadn’t had the energy to fight it. But when we’d sat together in the doctor’s office after she’d come out of the exam, I wished I hadn’t gone with her. The things he’d said scared the crap out of me.
“. . . cardiomyopathy, inflammation, muscular dystrophy—”
“Or it could be just strained muscles,” my mom had added, seeing my reaction. “I probably overworked them yesterday.”
I’d wanted that to be it. My mom’s job was physical, moving things, lifting people who couldn’t walk, helping them into and out of bed. It wasn’t the first time she’d come home sore, but Dr. Williams had given her a look. “There are the other symptoms to take into account,” he’d said.
I’d thought back to every incriminating thing, my heart sinking as I realized there were plenty: headaches, dizziness, days when she’d dropped dishes and blamed tiredness, days when she’d had trouble driving because her eyes were bothering her. Stretching back months, at least.
“We’ve done some tests,” he’d said. “The results should tell us what we’re dealing with.”
Only, the tests had been inconclusive, and we were taking the “wait and see” approach. It was years later, and none of us liked what we were seeing.
“She went to the hospital last night,” I told Trip now as we sat in his car. “They did more tests. She’s home today. I don’t want to talk about it.” Which was the God’s honest truth, because just thinking about it was like suffocating under a thick wet blanket of worry.
I pinched the underside of my forearm, focusing on the pain instead of all the other crap. Finally Trip nodded and faced forward. “Sorry, man.” He pulled back onto the road. “Let me know if I can help.”
***
We split in the parking lot, Trip stopping to talk to his football teammates while I jogged toward homeroom. I had a sudden weird certainty that Natalie wouldn’t be there. She’d called off work Sunday at the ski shop, Trip had told me on the drive to school, and hadn’t answered his texts or calls either.
“Because of Saturday night?” I’d asked. I’d managed to put aside most of my anxiety about those binoculars. We must have been hallucinating, I’d decided. It had been weird, but I was okay.
Trip had shrugged. “I guess so.”
With anyone else, you’d swing by their house or maybe call their parents to check in. But, of course, we couldn’t do that with Nat.
I held my breath crossing the threshold to homeroom, expecting an empty chair, but there she was: second seat by the window, as usual. I tried to catch her eye, but she stared outside through announcements, not talking to friends or looking my way.
I waited by the door when the bell rang.
“How’re you feeling, Nat?” I asked, trailing her toward the music room.
“Fine.” Natalie kept her head down, but I didn’t need to see her face to know something was wrong. She walked in long, stiff strides like she couldn’t wait to get away from me. I didn’t take it personally, but it cranked my nerves up a notch.
“We were worried about you,” I told her. “After Saturday. Trip said you missed work yesterday.”
She still didn’t look at me, her long hair swinging as she walked. Nat usually wore a braid so her hair wouldn’t tangle—lots of the skiers did—but today it was loose, hiding her face.
“I’m okay, Riley,” she said. “Thanks.”
“It was really weird, wasn’t it?” I asked quietly when we’d gotten to the stairs without another word. “What happened up there?”
She gave me a quick, hard look. “I saw my dad dead. It was beyond weird.”
I felt a lump in my throat, but not because of what she’d said. “Nat.” I reached out, held her arm gently, the hallucinations forgotten.
Natalie stopped, staring at her shoes, but her whole posture sagged.
I looked around quickly, letting a few nearby kids pass before I lifted Nat’s chin, forcing her to look at me.
“Jeez, Nat,” I said softly. There was a Band-Aid under her left eye. A soft yellow bruise spreading out from it. “What happened?”
“I tripped,” she said, forcing a smile.
“You tripped? How?”
“There was a box on the floor in the living room, and I had my arms full. Just didn’t see it. And whap! Smacked my face pretty good, huh?” She chuckled, the sound brittle. I could picture her standing in front of a bathroom mirror, rehearsing. My stomach clenched as I thought of all the ways it might have actually gone down.
“Listen, I’ve gotta run,” she said, pulling her arm away. “I’ll see you later.” Nat spun on her heel and trotted down the steps toward the music room, leaving me to consider the things I knew about how she lived.
We picked her up almost every weekend, but never went inside her house. Natalie would slip out like she’d been waiting, the door cracked just enough for her to squeeze through.
I knew what was in there, though. Moose, from work, had taken me up to her place one night when he’d offered me a ride. It would have been a long, cold walk home, so I’d gladly accepted.
�
�Just gotta run a quick errand on the way,” he’d said as I’d followed him to his car. Moose had waved me to the rear door, and I’d noticed an arm hanging out the passenger window. I recognized the ripped-up surplus jacket. Wynn Bishe. Another Buford High deadbeat who’d graduated—or at least left—a couple years before.
“What the fuck’s he doing here?” Wynn asked, tossing a butt on the gravel lot as I slid into the backseat. He shot me a dirty look, the dark wisps on his upper lip twitching—the world’s most pathetic mustache.
“He needs a ride home,” Moose said.
Wynn snorted. “What’re you, his babysitter?”
“Jeez, Wynn—” Moose said.
“I can walk,” I said, reaching for the handle. But Moose had already started the car and now threw it into reverse.
“Forget it.” He glared at Wynn.
Wynn just shook his head. “Not smart, Moose.”
I sat stiffly in back, ignoring the cold air whistling in from the open windows. I felt like somebody’s kid brother no one wants around, even though Moose was in my grade. Not that I’d said a word to him since elementary school before he’d started at the restaurant. Moose went to vo-tech most days, and when I did see him, he was usually smoking with the other ’heads two steps off the Buford High curb—not school property. But despite his crappy choice of friends, habits, and death metal T-shirts, Moose was mostly okay.
We sped down back roads, then up a winding, unlit lane, Wynn smoking and Moose nodding randomly to Zeppelin, tapping his lucky skull-and-crossbones lighter against the wheel. Finally we pulled off the road and parked by a run-down trailer.
I’d never seen the place—wasn’t friends with Natalie then, and certainly didn’t know she lived there. Wynn got out without a backward glance, but Moose gave me a quick “Wait here; be right back” before jogging across the weedy yard.
It wasn’t until the last bit of daylight had gone and I’d had way too much time to examine every dented strip of aluminum hanging from the mobile home that I started to worry. The place was pretty remote. I’d seen maybe one other house on the way up, and it didn’t look like somewhere that’d welcome visitors. It was pretty obvious what kind of errand Moose was running, and I kicked myself for being lured along. I was late, my phone was out of juice, and my mom was waiting for me, probably calling work, expecting that I’d have been home for dinner thirty minutes before.