by Brian James
I reach my hand up to the back of my head and mouth a silent sound of pain that is drowned out by Morgan snickering behind her closed smile.
I don’t move. Stay on the ground and play like a wounded animal as she steps over me. Prancing away like a cat having finished playing with a caught mouse even though it’s only half killed. The sound of her laughter echoing off the locker room walls and mixing with the rattling of metal doors as she drags her hand against the lockers when she walks.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I mumble. “Diana told me you were just full of talk,” exaggerating what Diana really said. Morgan’s eyes flash like dynamite and I worry that I accidentally brought Diana into the mess I’ve made.
“That stupid girl was wrong,” Morgan says, shaking her head. “You’ll see.”
She pauses in front of the equipment room door and lets her fingernails scratch its surface. A piercing screech like the sharpening of knives rings out as her hand slides down. Her fingers wrap around the padlock hanging from the door’s handle and plays with it for a second before turning around as if she forgot something. Drops the lock and lets it bang against the door with a wide smile. A stray ray of sun strikes her eyes and they flash like fireworks in the night sky.
“See you in school tomorrow,” she says before opening the exit door and vanishing into the last breath of daylight.
I let the evening air wrap around me, wearing the cold like a protective blanket that keeps me numb to all the broken promises that come off my father’s tongue and drop to the driveway like poison snow.
“It won’t be for long,” he says. “Maybe ten days. Two weeks tops.”
The straps slide through my fingers and my bag falls to the concrete as he loads a second overnight bag into the back of our car. When he starts telling me how much we need the opportunity, I pull the wool hat down over my ears. Hardly listening when he tells me the pay is good. Tells me that with this one job, we’ll have enough money to stay here for another few months, as if that’s what I want to hear.
“You’re leaving me here,” I say in disbelief.
He finishes arranging his travel bags in the backseat and closes the door. Walks over to me and puts his hands on my shoulders the way he’s done my entire life whenever he’s let me down. “Hannah, you know I wouldn’t if there was any other way,” he says.
I pull away.
The dull pain from where I hit my head, once against the ground then once against the lockers, starts to throb. The cold air starts to sting my skinned palms and my eyes grow heavy with the burden of my own rotten luck. In the movies, it never works this way. Whenever anything terrible happens, the characters are rewarded with something even better afterward. Like if they get robbed then they win the lottery the next day. Or if they get in a bad car accident on the way to the airport, it always turns out that it really saved their lives because the plane they were trying to catch crashed and everyone on board was killed. That kind of stuff never happens to me, though. If something really shitty happens, something just as bad is waiting for me around the next corner. That’s how this day is, my dad waiting for me with the news of his departure as soon as I make it home from the cheerleading tryouts.
“You promised,” I say quietly.
He promised no more trips out of town.
He promised no more leaving me alone.
No more courier jobs no matter what.
He swore to me that he’d never do it again after the last time. He knows I hate being left alone. Coming home to an empty house every night gives me the creeps. Sends me into panic attacks at the slightest noise in the middle of the night and I can never sleep until I run around bolting all the windows. It’s bad enough when he’s done it in places where I had a lot of friends, but here I’m truly going to be alone among the ghosts that lie tucked into the hollow houses of Maplecrest.
“Don’t be like this.” He’s saying it in a soft voice that drifts down the empty street. “It’s hard enough, without . . .”
“Without what?” I snap. “Without having to think about my feelings?”
I snatch my backpack up off the ground. Start to stomp up the driveway toward our dilapidated brown house with its promise of strange noises and shadows that move beneath the wallpaper to keep me company for two weeks.
“C’mon, Hannah,” he pleads. His eyes try their best to remind me that we’re a team. The same old silent speech about sacrifices I’ve heard since I was ten years old. “We need this,” he says, the car keys dangling from his fingers like a starting gun wanting to get on the road.
“Yeah, maybe I need you,” I say, not able to keep my voice from cracking as the syllables slip out through sobs.
His shoulders sag and his mouth makes an O shape without actually saying it. He’s finally remembering about me. Remembering that he hasn’t even asked yet about my day. After he’d encouraged me all through breakfast, convincing me that it was the best thing to do. That I might make some friends if I participated in the activities that the other kids did. Making me feel like I had a chance and now he’s not even going to stick around long enough to help pick me up.
“Didn’t go so well, huh?” he asks. Says he’s sorry for not thinking about it earlier.
But I won’t let him apologize.
Not now.
It’s too late for that and I turn my back and start to walk toward the door. He starts saying something. Wants me to come back, but I ignore his request for me to wait. “Forget it, just go,” I say.
But he’d never leave things that way and I know it. He catches up to me. Grabs me with both hands and wraps his arms around me. Hugging me even though I refuse to hug him back. Refuse to even look at him.
“Hey . . . I’m sorry,” and the worst part about it is that I know he’s telling the truth. And I know he’s right about us needing the job and the money. Doesn’t mean I’m not mad at him, though. Mad that he gets to run away from his troubles but I always have to stay and face mine.
“It’s okay, I’ll be fine,” I tell him, speaking into his coat.
He hugs me tighter before finally letting me go. Telling me he’s left some money on the counter for food. Promises to call whenever he has the chance. I nod and watch as he climbs into the car. I sit down on the front steps as the engine roars to life. He waves as he backs up. I put my head down as the car drives off in a cloud of exhaust fumes, wishing I didn’t have to spend almost two weeks alone in this place.
I sit there long enough for the sky to change. The pink glow of sunset taken over by the purple clouds of evening twilight. Long enough for the shadows of the trees to stretch from our side of the street to the other side where they fall on abandoned lawns of dead houses.
I can feel the cold in the soft center of my bones like a lullaby. I bring my knees up to my chest and lie down with my backpack tucked under my head. The books beneath the thin fabric like a pillow made of brick. Uncomfortable but still it feels nice as my body starts to freeze. The aches and pains from this afternoon slowly fade. I’m almost able to forget about the series of embarrassing events and leave them for dreams when the footsteps of someone approaching from the sidewalk and trampling through the fallen leaves on our lawn interrupt and spoil my frostbitten sleep.
“Hey,” he says like it’s a question because he’s not sure I’m going to say anything back or just get up without a word, leaving him standing there with his hands in his pockets.
It seems like too much effort to stay angry and so I give in.
“Hi, Lukas,” I say, the way I’ve seen mothers forgiving their kids after they’ve done something wrong. I don’t bother to sit up, but I pull my feet closer to me as a way of inviting him to sit down.
He doesn’t sit, though. Shoves his hands deeper into his pockets and does his best to look everywhere but at me. “Look, I’m sorry . . . about what happened at lunch and everything,” he says.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I am, too.”
The wind picks up in the distance.
I can almost see it as it rolls over the hills and enters the valley. Blows against my skin and scatters our apology like it scatters the brown leaves over the ground, and we both put it behind us just like that.
Lukas puts his hands up to his mouth to warm them as he nestles into the little corner of the porch steps that I vacated for him. His skin looks paler in the shadows. Almost ghost white against the heavy black sweatshirt that he always wears like a second skin. A warmer one. One that hides him in a constant shade.
“How’d it go?” not daring to look at me as he asks. He stares at the empty driveway instead. The fresh oil spot making gasoline rainbows in the air where my dad’s car was only a few minutes ago and I’m glad Lukas came by. Glad I didn’t send him away because he’s actually the only one who cares. Cares enough to ask even though he hates the idea that I went through with it.
I roll over on my back and stare up at the underside of the awning that covers our front door. “About as well as you said it would,” I say, sounding disinterested as I study the flaking remains of a wasp nest left over from a summer some time ago. My cheerleading dreams in a similar state of deterioration.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“No, you’re not,” I say back to him.
I can see the start of a smile as he lets his head drop from his hands and looks down at his tattered shoelaces. Not the kind of little-boy smile he normally has, more like the smile of an old man smiling at the stupidity of someone younger. “You’re right, I’m not,” he says and can’t help himself from laughing.
I sit up and hit him halfheartedly. “You’re a jerk,” I say but I can’t keep from laughing, either. I guess it’s about the only way left to look at it. At least with him. Laughing about it is what will make us friends again. And it actually feels good to laugh. Feels good to have someone to laugh about it with. It makes the whole thing seem less serious. Besides, I have a whole ten days alone to feel miserable.
I move closer to him until our bodies are leaning together like we’re Siamese. Rest my head on his shoulder and let out a deep breath and he can tell I’m more upset than I let on. Puts his arm around my shoulder as the last rays of sun go down and the first stars poke through the sky like moth holes in an old blanket.
“Your hands are like ice,” he says, wrapping his fingers around mine.
I shiver in response and he helps me up.
“Let’s go inside,” he says as somewhere down the block a dog barks and a light switches on in one of the few homes beside mine that is lived in. I do the same, switching on the lamp and filling the room with electric daylight.
I head straight for the couch and wrap myself in its sunken cushions. Lukas circles around the room once. Examining the things lying around like visitors admiring artifacts in a cheap museum. “Where’s your dad?” he asks. “Is he going to be back soon?”
I pull my legs up onto the couch and sink even lower. Shaking my head at his total lack of intuition. Even for a boy, he’s pretty pathetic. “Shut up and come sit down next to me already,” I say.
A confused-puppy look shows in his brown eyes, but he comes anyway. Sinks in beside me and we listen to wind rushing against the roof and the creaking of the beams. Silent and alone together and I have the feeling we’re going to get used to times like this.
EIGHT
My dad bought me a dream catcher for my twelfth birthday to keep the nightmares away. I was always having them every time we came to a new house. He told me that he had it blessed by some Native American tribe at a casino. It doesn’t work at all, though. But it’s still the first thing I hang up in my room whenever we move in. It’s just a habit, I guess. Besides, I like the way it looks when the sun shines through it. The colors make even the dreariest room look sort of pretty. But the nightmares still find their way through the tightly woven fabric and visit me in my sleep.
Tonight, my nightmare took place in the school gym. I’m not sure if it was any specific gym. More like a combination of all the ones I’ve ever been in, sort of swirled together the way dreams do with places. But the army of bleach-blond girls in black skirts told me that wherever it was, I was supposed to recognize it as Maplecrest.
They came in a pack and surrounded me as if I were a prop in one of their routines, only in my dream Morgan was the leader ordering the others. She ordered them to tie me to a wooden pillar that sprang up through the center of the basketball court like the trunk of an ancient tree that wasn’t there only a moment before.
The rope felt like thick wool. Scratchy and rough as it dug into my skin, deeper each time the girls danced around the beam to latch me tighter to it. I heard the clapping of hands from an unseen audience off in the distance. Clapping to the rhythm of their feet as the cheerleaders skipped like little Candy Land kids around a maypole, like in movies about children in foreign countries that are always filled with songs and fake scenery. My nightmare had a song, too. A singsong chant of “Death” as my arms and legs were bound strong enough to keep me from even squirming.
I notice for the first time that I’m wearing one of the black uniforms.
Streaks of blood trickle down my body where the rope cuts my skin. Cuts my bare stomach and my legs just below the hem of the short skirt. I can see Miranda next to me, smiling the way I remember them all smiling when I was helpless and injured in the grass that afternoon. Smiling like hungry dogs over a crippled rabbit.
Morgan comes closer and I try to turn my head but the rope around my neck makes it hard to breathe if I turn it too far. Her eyes are bulging from her sunken face, the white part swallowing all but a tiny prick of blue, the color of stars exploding. The skin around her mouth is chapped and split and stained pink like her teeth with the taste of blood.
“Now you’re one of us,” she says, without moving her mouth.
The walls get darker and the gym is not like the gym in my school anymore because the gym is now outside and the fields are filled with fire as Morgan puts her hand on my chest and pushes me. Holds my chest flat so that it’s hard to breathe and I struggle for air. Impossible for me to scream and the air is filled with so many sounds like the screeching of heavy machines but it is only the grinding of zombie teeth.
It burns when her teeth penetrate my stomach and tear into my flesh. Teeth working deeper like bloody chainsaws, ripping veins and getting thirstier with each new layer. Painfully peeling back my skin like tearing open Christmas paper. Feels like I’m being licked with the fire tongue of a demon as my body is torn open with bones poking out at all angles when the other girls join in. Their teeth too long and too sharp, made for shredding organs and pulling apart abdomens.
I feel them swallow my hands and swallow my feet and I try my best to scream but I cannot hear anything except the gnashing of teeth and the warm breathing against my face.
The air is like black smoke when I wake up. Black like ink flooding over me as I scream. The impression of electric blue eyes still there every time I blink. Imaginary eyes staring through the window as the dream catcher dangles helplessly against the frosty glass.
I shove my hands under the sheet and feverishly run them over my stomach to make sure I’m still whole. Kick the blanket from the bed and turn on the light in a panic before getting out of bed and rushing to the window. A rustling of branches in the bushes outside trails off into the woods as the nightmare travels on to the next person.
I look at the clock and realize there’s no use going back to sleep. I might as well make some coffee and turn the television on. Use the sound of cartoons to wash out the leftover parts of my dream. Wait for the hour to change and then take a shower and get ready for school. Aware that the only good thing about the nightmare is that real life can’t ever be as scary.
One thing I’ve learned from my dad is that avoiding confrontation is the best way to hang on to false hope. Like the way moving from town to town to avoid debt collectors allows us to pretend everything’s okay once we reach the next home. Problem erased as if it never happened.
I take the same approach through the school day.
I avoid passing Mrs. Donner’s classroom all day. I even go out of my way to circle around the outside of the building to get from third period to fourth and happily accept the late warning from my teacher Mr. Boyle. I even smile when he threatens me with detention the next time it happens, because at least I don’t have to see Mrs. Donner and hear the sweet-old-lady tone of her voice as she rejects me for the squad.
I make sure to avoid Meredith in homeroom, too. I wait until I’m sure she is already done at her locker before going to mine. Then I wait for the halls to clear out before going into class and sit in the farthest desk from hers so that she can’t break the news, either.
I already know I didn’t make it.
I’m not kidding myself. The tryout was terrible.
It wasn’t just the one fall, but also the way I stumbled through the marching routine, the slight trip I made going into a handstand, and the ever-present attitude of the rest of the girls at even having me there to begin with. But as long as I don’t hear it from Mrs. Donner, I can still pretend it didn’t go so bad. Keep up the appearance that I still have a chance, which keeps the whispers to a minimum as I walk through the halls. Until it’s official, no one wants to say anything too negative about me just in case.
There’s one group I can’t fool, though. The perfect girls. They know exactly what kind of a fool I made of myself and during lunch they make sure that I know it, too.
Miranda, Maggie’s queen henchman of lunchroom character assassinations, cuts in front of me on my way back from buying a diet soda to the table I share with Lukas in the quietest corner of the lunchroom. Waiting until it’s too late for me to stop, she shoves her chair back in the aisle. I stumble into her as she stands up. Knock her back into her chair and brace myself to keep from tumbling onto the floor like the can of soda that slips from my hand and rolls under the next table.