Hollow

by Rhonda Parrish

  And of course, Mom has to go and ruin it.

  “Morgan?” she calls, and I hear her approaching my bedroom. With an apologetic look in his direction, I scoot out from under Marcus’ arm and walk to the doorway. It’s not wide enough for Mom’s chair to fit through. We’d had to renovate the other doors in the house but they’d left mine and Amy’s alone.

  “What?”

  “I need you to take the garbage out, and Sevren should—oh, you’re not Sevren,” she says, sticking her head around the corner to peek into my room despite my best efforts to block her.

  “No, ma’am, I’m Marcus.” I’ve never heard someone my age call a grown-up “ma’am” without being sarcastic. At least not outside of a movie. It’s weird. It seems natural coming from Marcus, but weird all the same. I frown, and unfortunately, Mom sees it and quirks an eyebrow, giving her face the expression I hate so very much. She looks back to Marcus, meeting his gaze.

  “Nice to meet you, Marcus, but Morgan has some chores to do . . .”

  I hear Marcus moving behind me, sliding off my bed, and I want to yell at Mom, I want to scream, to stomp my foot. Of course, I don’t do any of those things, but still—he had his arm around me until my mother had to go and ruin things!

  That’s all she does anymore. Feel sorry for herself and ruin things. She’s not the one who gets up with Amy when she has a nightmare. She’s not the one who reheats the dinner Dad has prepared every night. She doesn’t do anything except sleep and sit in her room staring at the walls. The one time she finally decides to be a mom it’s to ruin something for me. Because of course it is!

  “Thank you,” Mom says, gives me one more meaningful look, and then backs up her wheelchair and heads back into the gloom of the living room and, most likely, her bedroom.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, turning to face Marcus. He’s standing at the end of my bed, shrugging into his jacket.

  “It’s okay. I probably should get home anyway. I have chores of my own to do. Plus, homework.”

  “Ugh, homework.” I make a face and feel a bit better about Mom’s interruption when Marcus laughs.

  “Right? Still, unless some university wants to give me a running scholarship . . .”

  “Do those even exist?”

  “Beats me,” Marcus laughs then his gaze lands on the camera on my dresser. “Oh, what’s that?”

  “Promise you won’t laugh,” I say, then pick it up with a flourish and present it dramatically. “Ta-da!” I say. “The best technology the 1980s had to offer!”

  In the background I hear Amy’s cartoons and the sound of Mom moving her chair around, but in here it’s as if Marcus and I are holding our breath. Finally he says, “Is that a Polaroid?”

  “Yeah. Kinda weird, eh?”

  “Kinda. Also, kinda cool.”

  I’m relieved he thinks so. I think it’s pretty neat too. Very . . . retro.

  “Let’s take a selfie—” Marcus peers around the room, looking for something. He doesn’t find it, whatever it is, but I can see the exact moment he comes up with his messed-up master plan. His eyes light up. Honestly, like something out of a Disney flick, growing big and bright. “—with your garbage!”

  “With my garbage?”

  “Sure, you were photographing trash in the hallway yesterday, weren’t you? And besides, you seen anyone else doing garbage selfies before?”

  I laugh. “No.”

  “See? We’ll start a trend.”

  “Okay, with the garbage,” I agree and shrug. “Our trend-setting prop will be waiting for us in the kitchen.”

  Amy is sitting in the murky living room watching cartoons on the television. The light and shadows it casts on her face are somewhat unsettling, but nothing I’ve never seen before. Marcus leans over the back of the couch and ruffles her hair. “See ya, kiddo,” he says.

  Amy ducks out from under his hand and sticks her tongue, stained blue from her slush, out at him. “Who you callin’ kiddo?”

  Marcus winks and strides out to the kitchen, where I’m waiting with the camera and the garbage. “You want to do this right here?”

  “No, I think—” Marcus looks over my shoulder and out the window. It’s still light out, though growing dimmer. “I think outside will work better. We can sit on your step with the garbage and put our arms around it like we love it.”

  “Like we love my garbage?” I laugh.

  “Yeah, don’t you love your garbage, Morgan?” Marcus wheedles, “C’mon, admit it, admit you love your garbage.”

  It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in a very long time but coming from Marcus it sounds natural and awesome. “Oh, of course,” I say in a ridiculously over-the-top Southern accent. “Of course, I love my garbage.”

  In what might be the worst cowboy drawl ever, Marcus says, “Well then, c’mon pilgrim, let’s take this shot.”

  He picks up the garbage, tosses it over his shoulder like Santa’s sack, stomps into his shoes, and opens the door. “Ladies first.”

  Camera in hand I step out into the yard. Even though it’s not even five o’clock, the sky is growing dark, the light insubstantial. “Winter’s coming,” Marcus says, looking up at the sky.

  “Yeah, I was just thinking that this is perfect light for a horror movie.”

  “Or a garbage selfie!” Marcus says with a laugh. It’s infectious, and I can’t help but laugh along with him.

  When our laughter has run its course, the silence between us is relaxed, comfortable. I don’t feel a need to fill it, which is weird because I usually only feel that way with Sevren. Still, eventually we need to get to the task at hand so I tear my gaze away from Marcus’ face and gesture. “Well,” I say, “where should we do this?”

  “How about here?” Marcus sets the garbage down on the step and crouches behind it.

  I kneel beside him, the garbage between and in front of us. The concrete step feels cold and hard against my knees and I shift to try and find a less painful position. I wobble a little, bumping into Marcus, and he puts an arm around me to steady me. Warmth floods through me, not a blushing kind of warmth either, but a happy kind. It begins in my belly and swells upward and outward, filling me and fuelling the smile I feel splitting my face.

  I hold the camera in front of us. It’s awkward. This kind of camera was not developed for taking self-portraits. By leaning against Marcus I eventually manage to get it balanced in my hands and find a way to reach the shutter release. “Ready?” I say, pressing against Marcus’ warm form. His scent, tangy and dark, mixes with the faint odour coming from the garbage, mellowing it.

  “Ready,” he says, and gives my shoulder a little squeeze.

  “One,” I say.

  “Two,” he says.

  “Thre—” I don’t get to finish the word because suddenly there’s a flurry of feathers between the camera and my face. I cry out in surprise and fumble with the camera. Marcus lets go of me and flails at the bird which is flapping about in our faces. My finger presses the shutter release, I feel it move and hear the sound of a photo being taken, the distinctive click and whir.

  Then the bird is gone. As suddenly as it appeared.

  “What the fu—”

  “I don’t know,” I interrupt. “I don’t—maybe it wanted the garbage?”

  “Enough to attack us for it?”

  “I don’t—I couldn’t even see what kind of bird it was.” I have my suspicions, though.

  “Something grey and white. Big. I dunno. A pigeon maybe?” Marcus sounds angry.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, scanning his face for any scratches or claw marks.

  “I’m fine,” he snaps, then stands and dusts his pants off. His face looks like it’s chiselled from granite. Hard. Cold. Completely unlike a few moments ago when we’d been laughing and smiling. It’s like a light switch has been turned off inside him. “Look, I’ve got to get home. See ya.”

  I stand there, on my doorstep with the fading warmth from his body and a bag of garbage at my fe
et, and watch him stomp away. “Yeah,” I say to his back. “See you at school tomorrow.”

  He mumbles something. I think it’s “Not if I see you first.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “I THINK IT was the magpie.” I lean against my locker, looking over at Sevren. I am being totally serious, he on the other hand—

  “Well,” he laughs. “They do like garbage.”

  “Shut up,” I say, but Sevren’s laughter is sincere enough that I can’t stay completely upset. “It’s not funny.”

  “What part isn’t funny? The part where you and Marcus decided to take a picture of yourselves with your garbage using a thirty-year-old camera, or the part where you got beat up by a bird?”

  “The—all of it!” I grin despite myself.

  “That so?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stranger than fiction.”

  “What?”

  “Truth,” Sevren says. “It’s stranger than fiction. If you read a story like that, about a pair of goofballs who were taking a picture of themselves with a garbage bag and got dive-bombed by a magpie, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “But it happened!”

  “Oh,” Sevren laughs again. “I believe you. You’re not that good of a liar. I’m saying, truth is stranger than fiction.”

  “I guess . . . Marcus seemed really upset though, Sev.” I can’t bring myself to tell him what Marcus mumbled as he was leaving. It’s too humiliating. And maybe I heard him wrong. Maybe . . .

  “Yeah? Well, I don’t guess I’d be happy having a magpie cock-block me.”

  “Eww!”

  He laughs and I don’t know what to say. In truth I’d hoped for a kiss goodbye, but if I told Sevren he’d make a joke about making out on a pile of garbage or something.

  “But yeah,” I say after a long pause, turning the conversation back to a much less potentially tricky conversation topic. “I think it was the same magpie.”

  “The albino one?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so? Its eyes aren’t red. Aren’t albino animals supposed to have red eyes?”

  “Maybe not all of them? I don’t know. So, what? You think it’s stalking you?”

  “Yeah,” I say dryly, though I’m not sure how sarcastic I’m being. Not really. “I’m being stalked by a bird.”

  “Truth is—”

  “Stranger than fiction. Yeah, yeah. Whatever.”

  “Hey, you’re the one telling this story, I’m the audience, remember?”

  “Whatever. I’ve got the picture in here to prove it.” I open up my backpack, push the camera to the side, and dig out the photograph. “See?”

  Sevren takes the picture, flips his hair out of his face with a toss of his head, then bursts out laughing. “Oh man, no wonder Marcus was unhappy.”

  “Why?” I say, in a sudden panic that it’s somehow my fault, that I’ve done something wrong and it’s captured on that photograph obvious to everyone but me. “What is it?”

  “He’s never looked worse,” Sevren says and tosses his head again. “I’d be pretty pissed if you’d taken a picture of me that was this bad too.”

  I shove Sevren’s shoulder with one hand and pull the photograph out of his grasp with the other. It is a terrible shot. Marcus is visible, his eyes wide, expression a twisted amalgamation of shock and anger, but in my fumbling of the camera I managed to cut myself out of the shot entirely.

  “It is a bad picture,” he says, righting himself after stumbling back a step.

  “Not bad enough to explain how angry he got. He was mad, Sev. Super mad.”

  “Well, ask him about it.”

  I shrug, and Sevren is a good enough friend to take the hint and let the subject drop.

  “My grandmother used to have a camera like that,” he says. “Back when I was a kid. I didn’t know they made them anymore.”

  “I don’t know if they do,” I say.

  “How old do you think this one is?”

  “I don’t know?” I turn, take it from my locker, and turn it around in my hands. “Still, I wonder what a camera was doing sitting in the hospital anyway.”

  “Maybe Dr. Woods left it. Did you hear any squeaking shoes?”

  “Ha ha,” I say, rolling my eyes.

  “So take a picture. I want to watch it develop. That’s how these work, right? You, ahem, shake it like a Polaroid picture?” Sevren gives a little wiggle, looking a bit like Boris when he’s wagging his back end.

  “Oh, I can’t believe—that song is so old.”

  “And yet, you knew what I was talking about.”

  “Only because I’m a nerd too,” I laugh. “Okay, I’ll take a picture. But . . . what of?”

  “I don’t know, anything. Just take a shot down the hallway.”

  “Okay.” I hold the camera up to my eye, sighting down the hallway through the viewfinders. Little clusters of students are gathered, like bunches of grapes, all along the hallway. They clump together in front of lockers, sit on the floor with their heads together over iPads, and stride speedily up and down the narrow corridors between one another.

  To the left, I see Xia and Stacy doing some sort of dance, their arms around one another’s shoulders, kicking up high and giggling. To the right, a group of the more popular kids are watching them with sneers on their faces. Then, Keith and Simon come in the door right behind them. I watch as the boys’ laughter at something or another melts away and leaves a judgemental gleam in their eyes. Keith’s lip curls up into a snarl.

  I press the button, taking the picture.

  The camera click-whirs, and I immediately lower it, my heart slamming around in my rib cage like a person in a straightjacket. I don’t know what I was thinking, taking Keith’s photograph like that. What if he’d seen me? The last thing in the universe I need is to draw his attention. What I should be doing when I see him coming is ducking into my locker, not taking his picture.

  “Cool!” Sevren says, snapping my attention back to him. “Lemme see.”

  I pluck the photograph from where it is hanging from the front of the camera. It’s pale, but I can see the image beginning to develop on it. I wave it gently back and forth.

  “Is it wet?”

  “I dunno,” I say. “I’m just doin’ like the song says.”

  Sevren snatches it from my hand, holding it by the wide white strip on the base, and looks at it intently, watching the picture show up.

  “It’s like watching ghosts come at you out of fog.”

  “You’re such a poet,” I say sarcastically, but mostly because he would have expected it from me. It is a lot like watching ghosts come at you out of a fog. The image slowly coalesces, details gradually drawing into focus, colours as well, seeping out of the white. When it is done, it’s a picture of the scene in the hallway. A bit blurry, but clear enough to get the idea.

  Xia has only one shoulder in the shot, and her hand around Stacy’s shoulder, but Stacy is there, on the left-hand edge. Her leg is frozen in mid-kick, her head thrown back, face-splitting grin unmistakable. Beside her a cluster of kids are obviously looking at her, and though I can’t see most of their faces, Blaire’s is visible, her expression disdainful, eyes rolled back. Finally, at the far side opposite Xia are Keith and Simon. The snarl on Keith’s face reminds me of the documentary I’d watched last week about hyenas.

  “It’s a great shot, actually,” Sevren says, looking from the photograph and up around the hallway. “You could call it ‘High School Jungle’.”

  “Survival of the Fittest,” I suggest.

  “Either or,” Sevren says.

  Then the warning buzzer sounds to signal the start of the school day. Four minutes until first class begins. I stow the camera and photograph into my backpack, snatch up my binder, and slam my locker closed.

  “Bio then gym,” I say to Sevren’s back while he digs through the mass of stuff in the bottom of his locker, excavating his books for his own first class.

  “Math, then Bio,” he mumb
les into the pile of refuse he calls his locker. “I’ll catch you at lunch.”

  “Deal,” I say and bolt off to class.

  Bio class passes in a blur of notes and readings as Mr. Hutton tries to wedge all he knows about marine biology into my and my classmates’ brains. It’s all pretty clear to me, but judging by the looks on many of my classmate’s faces, I am in the minority.

  The buzzer rings, and I slam my textbook closed, tuck it into my binder, and scoop the whole mess up on my way to the door. Phys. Ed is my favourite class and I’m in such a hurry to get to it that I don’t watch where I’m going. I bump into someone, and when I look up and focus on the face in front of me, I’m relieved to see it’s only Stacy. I offer an apologetic little smile as I slide out of the way. “Sorry.”

  “You should be,” Stacy says, her voice frostier than Marcus’ slushie the day before. “Slut.”

  She adds the word like an afterthought, but even so it’s filled with vitriol and strikes me like a physical blow. I step backward, bumping into the lab bench, my mouth opens, then closes, then opens again. Stacy looks down her nose at me, tosses her perfect hair over one shoulder, rolls her eyes, and then strolls out the door as if nothing had happened. From the hallway I hear girls laughing. Stacy’s laugh among them.

  I can’t move.

  My cheeks burn. My belly squirms like an earthworm, tears burn the back of my eyes, my fingers shake, knees feel weak, and there’s a golf ball-sized lump in my throat. What had happened between the other day and today? Stacy had been so nice—I’d thought we’d connected. Then this.

  This.

  I swallow hard, once and then again, blinking fiercely to keep the tears at bay. Stacy has hurt me, she’s shamed me, but I can’t let her see. I can’t let any of them see how they affect me. Maybe if I leave them all alone, ignore them for long enough, they’ll return the favour. Maybe Keith will get tired of spreading lies and everyone will stop believing them and talking about me and I can go back to a quiet life. The life I’d had before the accident, and especially before that day at the park.

  Kids from the grade above me start trickling into the classroom by the time I feel I’ve enough control over myself to venture and am satisfied Stacy has had enough time to be far from the classroom door. The last thing in the world I want right now is to run into her again.