The Punished

by Peter Meredith

  The mouse, he could barely stand to even look upon. Her lips moved ceaselessly, even as she ate, and small bits of oatmeal flew out toward whomever she was currently rolling her eyes at. She was simply disgusting and the sight of her turned his stomach.

  It bothered him to look at Paul as well.

  The twitching of his right eye had started to now effect his left and Curt wondered how the boy would ever be able to see if this kept up. But despite the twitching, Curt could see that the spark of the boy's defiance was fading in his eyes and as it did, it revealed again the weird premonition of Paul's approaching death. In addition, Curt saw how it would happen, not the exact moment, but the reason. Without his defiance, Paul would simply give up.

  This was so saddening that Curt looked away from him as well and his eyes sought out the girl whom he fancied. Amber appeared ill. Her pale features were practically paper white, and the lethargy that she had displayed at times was now more pronounced, so that she ate her breakfast almost as a sleepwalker would. Slow and deliberate, but without noticing at all what it was she put into her mouth.

  Seeing them this way, made him wonder what he looked like and after breakfast, he hurried upstairs to get to the shower first. He didn't like what he saw in the mirror. Curt would be thirteen years old in a few weeks, however he had the dark circles and the bags beneath his eyes of a thirty-year old career alcoholic. At first, he rubbed at them and splashed water on his face, but soon he had to give up, and he turned away from the mirror, hoping to forget what he saw. It nagged at him though and he felt a weight growing in him.

  With the depression of seeing his own haggard face in the mirror, Curt didn't much feel like reading the note that Paul had left for him. However, he read it on the off chance that it could hold something that would cheer him up.

  Hi Curt,

  I only lasted part of the first day. i didn't mention it cause i was embearassed. Miss F told me about the punishment and a hour later i went crazy and tried to escape, first by trying to run out the front door and then by trying to bash in the family room window. To get throogh this, you have to find something to hold on to or things won't go well.

  Curt shook his head tiredly at the note. It had only made him more depressed. Things didn't seem to be going well for any of them, he thought to himself and before he got into the shower, he wrote a quick response.

  Paul,

  Everyone seems more depresed then normal today. Is there something going on?

  A large part of him didn't want to know.

  He stayed in the shower for a very long time. The water wasn't exactly soothing, but it was warm and there was the slightest fuzzy sound that accompanied it. That small noise caressed his ears gently and after a while, he thought he could hear odd sounds in it. Rhythms or mechanical echoes and sometimes he fancied he could hear tiny voices as well. He strained to catch these, but they were the auditory equivalent of a willow-o-wisp and were always just out of his reach.

  3

  Matt met him at the door, when he had finished with the bathroom. And after he had finished getting dressed, Matt met him outside his bedroom. And when Curt went downstairs to be around the others, Matt followed him there as well.

  He seemed determined to hound Curt into breaking and with his unrelenting stare, he gave off waves of negative energy that nearly made it happen. Everywhere Curt went that morning he was shadowed by the angry boy and he couldn't seem to sit still for very long, because of it. Hiding in his bedroom was his only point of refuge, but soon it felt more like a jail cell. Just as the day before, he found himself pacing while sucking on his fingers, however now there was no waiting on a note, rather he waited on a boy who had learned patience through years of being a prisoner in that wicked house. Matt sat outside his door, waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

  Curt felt the edges of his world begin to slip. It was a long morning that turned into an eternal day. The silence slowly became too much for him to handle. After hours trapped in his room, he took another turn about the house and as before, Matt was there but now he began to push Curt or jostled him. The little thief fled back to his room.

  There he heard the silence. It radiated in his head until finally, he gave in to the pressure building inside him, and just like the day before, he pulled his blanket and pillow from his bed, and headed for his closet.

  The closet held a small but very clear path.

  The path, he knew would start as a trifling thing, however, it would ultimately become a wide boulevard that led if one kept to it, eventually and invariably to insanity. He knew this and feared it as well, still his need to speak and be heard, if only by him alone was too great. Therefore, he headed for his closet so he could hear the sound of his own voice and he knew logically it wouldn't stop with a simple humming or a few whispered words. He had seen too many whacked out bums not to know that they carried on long dialogues with themselves and he guessed that they too began in some simple way, such as this.

  But just as he went to close his closet door for the first of what he guessed would be thousands of conversations with himself, a flash of light lit up his room and it froze him in place. His breath caught in his throat at this, but when the great bang of thunder followed it, his body jerked in fear. The vibrations of the sound ran through the panel of the closet door and he marveled at it. A second flash of light that was even brighter than the first came moments later and this time he felt mild alarm, since the thunder arrived instantaneously with the light and the house seemed to shake around him.

  Could the house have been hit by lightning? Forgetting about Matt momentarily, he went to his door and looked out, but the house appeared unharmed. As he stood there, Matt glared at him as he had all day, but when a new sound came, the glare slipped and became instead disappointment.

  The new sound was a very heavy rain. It drummed with a wonderful intensity upon the roof of the house and Curt felt sudden giddiness at it. He even went to smile at Matt, who seemed oddly unnerved by the sound and within moments of the beginning of the deluge, the older boy wandered away, heading for his room.

  Just then, Paul and Amber came out of their bedrooms and both wore a mixed look of relief and awe. Upon seeing Curt, Paul began heading his way, but Amber came rushing up with a determined look on her face and grabbed Curt's hand.

  "Get away, he's mine," she said out loud. Curt's heart leapt into his throat at the sound of the words and he stepped back from her in complete shock.

  4

  Even for a girl, her voice was surprisingly high, but her commanding manner and the possessive way she spoke about Curt were more surprising still. There was a dangerous look on her face and Paul backed away, leaving the two of them alone in the hall. She wasted little time and yanked him into his room. Shutting the door behind her, she crossed to his window, dragging him along.

  "It's best right here," she said in a high breathy whisper and pulled him down to a sitting position on the floor, the dangerous look now completely gone from her face. Curt's mind was a jumbled confusion of questions, starting with, what's best right here, but these would have to wait as she went on speaking, quickly.

  "I'm Amber Vandermark, I'm fourteen...I think. Do you know what day it is? I'm pretty sure that I'm fourteen, it's so hard to tell, but my birthday is February tenth and I think there have been like, three Christmases that I spent here. Oh, but don't get your hopes up, you could barely tell that it was Christmas, though we do get a bit of chocolate, which was nice. You didn't happen to like, go to Greenfield elementary did you?"

  Now she paused waiting for an answer but the moment was a little too much for Curt and he must have looked as stunned as he felt.

  "It's ok," she assured him, nodding her head vigorously. "You can talk low...or quietly I mean, when it rains, it's allowed cause nobody can hear it."

  Still he hesitated.

  The mindset needed to keep from speaking under these dangerous conditions wasn't something that he could turn off and on so simply. Little things h
ad slipped from his lips under great pressure or when he wasn't thinking about it, or when he felt his mind was coming unglued, but now it seemed he could speak as a normal person would, if only he could overcome the inertia of the last four days. It was difficult to find his tongue with so much mental friction, but there was a feeling to the moment, as if he were on holiday, as if his cares could be pushed aside for just a little while.

  "It's uh..." Curt counted days quickly in his head. "It's February 22...1997." He added this last part just in case she was confused as to the year as well. "And I have..."

  She interrupted, "The twenty-second of February? Is that all? That's weird. Don't you think that's weird? Shouldn't it be like, almost July fourth? You know you can so totally hear the fire works on the fourth of July. But I don't like the fourth or New Years. Those days suck, but it is good to know what day it is, you know?"

  Curt actually loved Independence Day. As a thief, the distraction of the pretty lights, the beer drinking and the press of bodies made for easy pick pocketing, and last year he had come away from the night with well over three hundred dollars.

  He smiled at the memory, "Actually I..."

  "Time is so like weird here, you know?" She looked dreamy for a moment, "I'm supposed to be a freshmen at Carrick high. I was so looking forward to high school. My mom, before you know, told me I would make the cheerleading sqawk...sq...I mean, team easily, but I never really believed her. Now, I don't know if I want to be a cheerleader, I think I do, but I'm not sure, you know?"

  Even though there was a temporary halt to her speaking, Curt only nodded vaguely, knowing already that she wasn't actually asking him a question and sure enough she began talking again after barely a second.

  "You never told me if you went to Greenfield or not. I did. I miss that school. It was so much fun. Did you know I was Glenda in the Wizard of Oz? I was. My mom died then and with my dad, like disappeared; I kept my magic wand from the play. I used to think it was like a real wand and I kept it until I came here. Were you ever in a play? You could of been like...the scarecrow. I was going to say Toto the dog, but I bet you would've thought that would be...uh angry? Or rude, I think I mean. But it really wouldn't have been rude of me, since we had a boy play that part too."

  Curt blinked wondering if he was suppose to answer this time and as she didn't start talking again, he said, "I didn't go to Greenfield, but I visited there a few times. Did your mom... die during your play?"

  "No, she died at work. Bam, just like that. It was a...uh brain asperinism or aspearnism or something like that. I forget the word. It's weird, I forget lots of words lately, you know when you're talking to your sel..." Suddenly she stopped speaking and snapped her mouth up closed with a little clicking sound. Her eyes went wide and there was fear or embarrassment in them.

  He guessed that she secretly talked to herself, just as he had planned to do, only minutes before. So not wanting to humiliate her, he started speaking as if he didn't notice her sudden silence.

  "I know what you mean, it happens all the time to me. But speaking of the Wizard of Oz...are you a good witch or a bad witch?" he asked her with a smile.

  For a moment, she looked blankly at him before light came back into her eyes and remembering the lines answered, "Who, me? Why, I'm not a witch at all. I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas." She giggled then and grabbed his arm. "So were you in the story...uh, I mean the play too? What part were you?"

  There was a warm needy grip to her hands and he didn't mind it at all, in fact, he rather liked it and he liked as well the smile that she had for him. It made his heart begin to race.

  "I wasn't in any play, but I saw The Wizard of Oz a lot. It's one of my favorites." This was true on both accounts. Going to see plays and stealing from the people attending them was one of his favorite past times. Frequently there was free food, or rather, food that was free for him and everyone seemed to be in such a good mood. The kids ran around with abandon and the parents took picture after picture of their little darlings.

  People always enjoyed the illusion of warmth and security that being in an elementary school gave them. However, in Curt's opinion, that was when a person was in the most danger. When they thought they were safe.

  While at these plays, he'd linger in the back of the auditorium, finding his marks, waiting for the lights to go low, or for the moment when the Wicked Witch of the West would be doused with water.

  "I'm melting! I'm melting," little Suzie would say to great applause and then Curt would casually fish through a purse, or rifle through the coat that invariably hung from the back of a chair, easily finding the wallet where it always lay, in the inside left pocket. He'd then slip away, perhaps hiding the now empty wallet in someone else's coat or just tossing it depending on his mood and then he would enjoy the rest of the play, or if the week had been a spare one, he'd go for seconds on another mark.

  His least favorite plays were the ones celebrating diversity, or the environment or worst of all, celebrating the greatness of the state of Pennsylvania. The kids and parents never seemed to enjoy these as much and it was harder to steal from someone who wasn't relaxed and watching the show with their full attention. There was one time however, when a kid dressed as the Liberty Bell fell off the stage and in all the ruckus, Curt cleared two hundred dollars that night.

  Amber broke in on his thinking, "Can you guess what my favorite line in the play was?" She only paused long enough for him to open his mouth. "I'll give you hint, the chair, I mean the care...the person I played, Glenda said it."

  "Would you be mad if I told you that the good witch's name was actually 'Glinda'?" He asked. He noticed that she did indeed have trouble with words, especially the larger ones.

  "It was?" Her pale face screwed up prettily and he saw that she could very well be a cheerleader, if only she could ever be allowed to see the sun again. "You are probably right, but you didn't guess!"

  "Uh...how bout when Glinda tells Dorothy all she has to do is tap her feet and say, There's no place like home?"

  "Nope. It's like just after Dorothy gets too Oz, when the other witch shows up and Glen...Glinda says to her, 'Oh, rubbish! You have no power here. Be gone, before somebody drops a house on you, too.' I just love it how powerful she is, like she was just waving away a fly. I wish I could drop a house on somebody." She seemed to cloud up for a moment and turned her head at an angle to see through the shutters into the gloomy afternoon sky.

  His spirits had been rising with the conversation and the warm touch of her hand on his arm, which had never left. But now Curt felt a trace of gloominess settle back on him and it reminded him of where he was.

  "Tell me, do you know why this is all happening? Why Miss Feanor keeps us locked away? Do you..." he stopped in mid-sentence; she had turned from the window and looked back to him with a hard cast to her very white face. He leaned away from her at this, thinking she was seconds from exploding in wrath, but instead she slumped.

  "I've always loved the sound of the rain. Even before...this. I liked to fall asleep to it," she said in her high voice. It was like a little girls voice, not a teenager's. "When it rained like this, I would go cuddle with my mom. She liked it as well. Until she died that is. Now she probably hates it. Her hole probably fills up with muddy water and I'm sure the worms just have a field day. You know what I used to like a lot? Gummy worms..."

  She chattered on like this for quite a while. No aspect of her former life went unspoken about, right down to the number of shoes she owned on her last day before foster-care. Curt marveled at her and not only that, he reveled in her. His overwhelming need to speak, which mere minutes before had been all consuming, now disappeared altogether. He had spoken little but it had been enough and he realized that what he needed more than speaking was simple contact with another human.

  The notes from Paul had been barely keeping him from drowning, but this long talk and the innocent touch on his arm that came with it, buoyed him, lifting his spirits and he sat back smiling and
nodding as Amber spoke. Every once in a while he would comment or make a joke and only a single time did he bring up their present circumstances.

  In a lull, he asked a question that had been with him since they first started talking. He didn't have a burning need to ask it, since he didn't expect much from her answer, but he had to at least try.

  "Have you ever tried to escape?"

  He hadn't read her well at all, because her reaction was a complete surprise. Her perky demeanor dried up in a heartbeat, replaced by coldness that seemed very adult.

  "You want to know about escape? Why don't you go to the front door and give it just a touch, just a little wiggle and see what happens. They will know. Even with the rain, they will know. Go on, I'll wait right here. Go get it over with. You know you can't last forever." Her eyes were pale blue circles of deadly ice and looking into them, he saw that she truly did want him to go and just like Matt, she wanted him punished.

  His mind swam in circles over this and he tried to pull his arm back from her grip, but she held tighter, her fingernails digging into his skin, even through the long sleeves of his shirt. Thankfully, the change that came over her lasted for but a moment and she smiled suddenly.

  "I like, so didn't mean that," she lied to him through her smile. "Really. Why don't you tell me something about you?"

  He began to talk about himself in only the most general way and the odd moment passed as Amber quickly took over the conversation, steering it toward boy-bands that she once had crushes on. Curt let himself relax and once again, he enjoyed her very closeness and the sound of her high little girl's voice and the way she used the word 'like' every fourth or fifth word.