by Bryan Bliss
God, she didn’t know why she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Why it was affecting her so much. She didn’t care about this school. The new one would be the same as this—something to endure. Something to make her way through. And yet, standing here in front of Dr. Palmer, she couldn’t deny that it felt like she was losing something once again.
“I’m not coming back,” she said, as fast as she could manage the words.
Dr. Palmer closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them up, she had tears, too. She wiped them discreetly, as if Claire hadn’t seen them.
“Are you going back to North Carolina?”
“No,” Claire said. “A different school. Where they can, you know, help me.”
“That’s good, Claire. I’m sad to see you leave, but that’s really good.”
Claire could hear the whispering from inside Dr. Palmer’s room. And when Dr. Palmer snapped her fingers and pointed at a kid who was up and out of his seat, Claire took a deep breath and said, “I should probably let you get back in there.”
Dr. Palmer nodded, but as Claire went to walk away, she stopped her.
“So, let’s do this now. Frankenstein.”
Claire wasn’t sure how to break it to Dr. Palmer. “I’m not in your class anymore.”
“Have you filled out the paperwork? Are you officially unenrolled?”
Claire shook her head, fighting a smile.
“So, Frankenstein then. The Monster. You said that he was created—that he didn’t get a chance to decide how he would live in the world, right?”
Claire nodded.
“When’s the last time you read the book, Claire?”
Claire’s face went hot. What did it matter if she read the book now? She started to stammer out an excuse, but Dr. Palmer stopped her.
“I should’ve said it better—do you remember what happens to the Monster?”
Claire had vague recollections that he disappeared, maybe was dead, in some kind of great arctic. Lost in the blowing snow.
“He died. I think.”
“Before that.”
“He terrorized a bunch of people.”
“Did he?”
Like many of the things she’d read, Claire could pull out the highlights—a trick that made her popular with teachers. Animal Farm? Why, it’s about fascism and here are the connections to today. It didn’t help her with multiple choice tests—she was terrible at multiple choice tests—but there was never an essay she couldn’t dominate.
But right now, she had nothing, and she said as much.
“The Monster becomes emotionally sentient. He learns to care. He learns to feel things. And the true horror of the story isn’t some monster running around mindlessly—because who cares? That’s just a popcorn movie. Instead, it’s that we might forget that—no matter how scarred, how patched together, how monstrous seeming—that kind of change is possible. Do you understand?”
Claire thought about it for a second. “You’re trying to tell me that I’m the Monster.”
Dr. Palmer looked momentarily panicked. But then she shrugged and worked her mouth into a smirk. “I mean, kind of!”
Claire felt like she should walk away now, before Dr. Palmer compared her to . . . who? Jack from Lord of the Flies? Nurse Ratched?
“Wow, thanks, Dr. Palmer.”
“I guess I’m saying, we all get a chance to heal. Nothing stays broken forever. It may not look the same as it did before, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t strong—isn’t okay.”
Claire could feel herself getting ready to cry, so she nodded and took two quick steps toward Dr. Palmer, forgetting the rules—damning the rules—and grabbed her in a hug. It was quick and Dr. Palmer was obviously surprised, but when she let go, Claire felt better. She felt like something small had changed insider her, and that was enough.
Claire opened her locker and wasn’t surprised to find it empty, save a couple of notebooks and what looked like a wrapper for a candy bar she was sure she hadn’t eaten. She was about to bend down and pick up the notebooks when she heard an unmistakable voice in the hallway.
“She said yes,” Leg said. “It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, because she’s going to letter, too, and—”
When he saw Claire, he stopped talking. God nearly ran into him and was about to say something when he saw Claire, too. For a second they all stood there without talking. And then God hit Leg on the shoulder and nodded back in the direction they’d just come from.
“I’m not trying to get another detention; let’s just go back to PE.”
It was like Claire didn’t exist, which was fair—expected, even. But as they turned around, it felt like something was being ripped from her body. Nothing major. Not a fundamental organ that would cause her to drop to the ground in a heap. Instead, an appendix. Something unnecessary, but still painful.
Just as they were about to turn the corner, Claire said, “Dark is staying at the Lair—he has a key.”
God stopped, more of a slight pause in his step, but he didn’t turn around. And just as quickly as they appeared, they were gone.
Claire closed her locker and walked down to the office, where Derrick was waiting with a single sheet of paper. He held it up with faux triumph.
“You’re officially a high school dropout,” he said weakly.
Chapter Fifteen
THEY SPENT THE NEXT FEW DAYS RESEARCHING THE different schools, which really meant they looked up the teachers and then looked up their various social media profiles to critique their suburban hairstyles and determine which ones were, in fact, Republicans. And when they grew tired of that—it didn’t take long—they sat in the house, the way they had in the days and weeks after, and played make-believe.
Derrick pretended that this would fix everything.
And Claire pretended that she wasn’t battling an entirely new emotion, something that hadn’t been able to squeeze into her body with all the anxiety and pain—sadness.
It wasn’t a crying sadness. Instead, her entire body ached, draining her energy. It was the day after a long run. Two days after a particularly nasty stomach bug. And no number of streaming movies or social-media voyeurism seemed to do the trick. She woke up and felt like she hadn’t slept a single minute.
They had started therapy at a small office just off the light rail line, which meant she could take herself when she felt ready—if she ever felt ready. For now, Derrick would come and sit in the waiting room as Margaret, the therapist, led her upstairs to a room that was obviously used for children of all ages. In one corner, there was a beat-up bean bag chair. In the other, a table with chairs too small for her or Margaret, but that’s where they sat—moving the pieces of a board game around and talking.
Talking.
Even after the first session, she felt as if something had been taken out of her hands. It was the same feeling of having hugged Dr. Palmer. And when she told Margaret that it felt like she wasn’t carrying as much, Margaret nodded and didn’t say anything, which of course made Claire talk even more.
When she told Derrick, it looked like the entire world had come crashing down around him. He wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t acknowledge the forgiveness that Claire had extended a hundred times since that ride home from the Lair.
“I’m sorry,” Derrick had said. “I should’ve known.”
But it wasn’t entirely his fault. It had been the cost, past preconceptions about the benefits of therapy, and an irrational confidence in their ability to fix anything. They’d both been lost, stranded in some foreign and frozen place that was built in a circle, a trail that took them around and around until they were both dizzy and unsure of where they had even started walking.
This gave them a map. Or so it seemed. And that was enough for Claire. She hoped at some point it would be enough for Derrick, too. Now he was sitting on the couch, watching skating videos on his phone—which felt normal. It felt like a place they could both use as a foundation and slowly build up.
&
nbsp; The knock on the door jolted them both, and for a moment they shared some brother-sister mental telepathy.
Should we just pretend we’re not home?
They can probably see the lights.
Well, in that case, you can get the door.
Claire wrapped her blanket around herself tightly and Derrick sighed, dropping his phone onto the couch and walking to the door. Claire smiled, going back to her laptop and turning the volume up so she wouldn’t have to hear the conversation about newspaper sales or upgrading their Internet or . . .
Derrick was staring at her, like he wasn’t sure if he should say something. She pulled her earbuds out and said, “What?”
It sounded more panicked than she’d wished. She had just stood up when Dark appeared in the doorway. And then God and Leg were behind him, the three of them looking some mixture of embarrassed and nervous.
“Hey,” Dark said.
“Hey . . .” She said. God and Leg were both blank, suddenly devoid of any readable emotion. “What are you guys doing here?”
Dark glanced back at God, who bit his bottom lip and stared at the ground, working up the nerve to say something.
“We’re going to the park,” he said. “Over by my house.”
When Leg spoke, his innate excitability was too much to suppress. He pulled out his phone and held it toward Claire. “The Storm Mob is assembling! What-what!”
“We thought you might want to go,” Dark said. “Well, it was my idea. But whatever. You should come.”
God and Leg were noncommittal. Claire wanted to go, but it was obvious the other two weren’t interested in having her tag along. At least, not God, who hadn’t looked at her since entering the carriage house.
“I don’t know. I’m sure Derrick wants me to stick around the house. But thanks.”
Derrick shrugged, which was enough for her to call the exchange settled. She was about to put her earbuds back in and force herself to forget about all of them—to be okay with being alone once again—when Derrick said, “I mean, what else are you doing?”
Leg slapped his hands together. “What-what!”
Dark smiled, but God only stopped staring at the floor to focus on the snow falling outside instead. Claire shook her head one last time and said, “Yeah, I’m good.”
Dark paused before finally nodding and, with a smile, ducked out the door, followed by Leg and God. Claire put her earbuds in and tried to tell herself that this was better—that she’d been nearly content not ten minutes before—when Derrick popped back up and opened the door. Before Claire had her earbuds out, God was walking in and, finally, acknowledging her.
“Come with us,” he said. “It’s stupid for you to stay here, so you might as well go watch Dr. Palmer and her idiot husband get arrested this time.”
Claire gave him a polite smile. “You guys go. I’m fine here.”
God sighed. “Listen, it’s not that I don’t want you around. And yeah, I was really pissed at you. Maybe I still am. But. Shit.” He glanced at Derrick, a default reaction anytime there was an adult in the room, Claire guessed. When there was no reaction, he took another deep breath and said, “You fucked up. Me and Leg fucked up. Dark fucked up. So, the way I see it, we’re likely to do less damage if we all look out for each other.”
“Or you’re one short to round out the four horsemen of the apocalypse,” Derrick said, once again watching a video on his phone.
Claire couldn’t stop herself from smiling, from showing every single emotion she was feeling—joy, excitement, and relief. She hurried back to her room to pull on a fleece and a warmer pair of jeans. It took less than a minute for her to be back in the living room, shouldering the heavy winter parka they’d bought after realizing their North Carolina “winter clothes” were JV in a land of varsity weather.
Once they were outside—the cold air burning Claire’s lungs and stinging her cheeks—they were met with a rowdy cheer from Leg. Even Dark gave a few perfunctory claps, unable to contain his smile. And then Leg raised his hand in the air, pointing them forward with a loud “What-what!” that seemed to carry through the air as if it had wings.
They walked silently, the cold wind swallowing all of their words, before coming to a park Claire had never seen before, even though it was only fifteen minutes from the carriage house.
“Are you sure this is the place?” Dark asked.
Leg pointed to the trebuchet, which was in the corner of a large baseball field. “Unless St. Paul Parks and Recreation is planning to invade Minneapolis, I’d say we’re in the right spot.”
They trudged across the field, their steps the first in the blanket of white. The snow was deep now, almost halfway up Claire’s shins. When they finally got to Dr. Palmer, she looked surprised to see them.
“Claire! Boys! I didn’t think we’d have anybody show up with all this.” She motioned dramatically at the snow. “But either way, the show must go on.”
“The Storm Mob will not be denied—what-what!” Leg said.
“Uh, well, yes. We’re not going to film this one. So, a special event.”
Claire looked at the trebuchet, still as impressive and menacing as it had been the first time she’d seen it. A quick sweep around the park confirmed there were no interstates in throwing distance, but there were still plenty of houses, cars, and other things that could be severely damaged by a flying melon.
“Um, I thought you weren’t supposed to use the trebuchet. . . .”
Dr. Palmer’s eyes lit up and she raised a finger. “Actually, they said we weren’t allowed to throw watermelons.”
Just then, Greg appeared. “Almost ready, Wendy. Let’s get rolling. Literally, ha ha!”
Claire raised an eyebrow and Dr. Palmer reached down, packed a snowball, and handed it to Claire. At first Claire thought she was supposed to throw it at Greg for making some kind of joke she still didn’t get.
“Oh, shit. I get it,” God said, finally smiling. “Claire, hand it here.”
She gave God the snowball and he put it on the ground, gingerly. And then he knelt down and just as carefully began rolling it in the snow. Claire hadn’t grown up in snow—had barely built a snowman—but she understood now.
“Get down here,” God said. “Leg, you and Dark start on another one.”
And they started rolling, in large circles around the trebuchet. Each time they completed a lap, they moved a few feet closer to the center, taking advantage of the fresh snow. Her jeans were soaked, her knees frozen. And the gloves she’d worn had never been regulation, not for Minnesota, so the wool was already wet and beginning to freeze to her fingers.
“Here,” God said, taking off the shells of his snowboarding gloves. “You’re going to lose a finger.”
And then they rolled some more, almost ten minutes before either of them spoke again. This time, Claire.
“This takes way longer than you’d expect,” she said, starting to breathe heavily.
“Rookie,” God said, looking over at Dark and Leg, who had given up right away and were pretending to play soccer with their roughly cantaloupe-sized snowball. “But the bar is low.”
“So, was Dark pissed? For telling you where he was?” Claire asked, not wanting to see God’s reaction.
“No,” he said. “I think, in some ways, he knew you’d tell us.”
“He was pretty adamant that I not tell anyone,” she said. “But maybe it’s because I bought him tacos.”
“I mean, the dude was living on whatever he could steal from Mark-O’s snack bar. So that might be true.” God sat down in the snow and started packing a snowball. He tossed it a few feet away from them and watched it land on the ground. “And even if he was, it all worked out. Plus, I’ve got a roommate now. So, bonus.”
“Can I say I’m sorry?” Claire asked. “To you?”
This time it was God not looking at Claire. He nodded, wiped his nose, and started packing another snowball. This one, he threw at Claire. It hit her shirt and exploded.
> “Apology accepted,” he said, laughing. Claire started packing her own snowball, but it fell apart in her hands and the second one did the same thing. “Oh wow. Go back to North Carolina with that weak shit.”
Behind them, Leg and Dark had started lobbing snowballs. They fell around her and God like meteors, disappearing into the deep snow with barely a sound. Claire tried one last time to pack a snowball and in a moment of pure luck or grace or something else otherworldly, threw it at God in one perfect motion. When it hit him right in the face she gasped, and then she laughed.
“Oh! I’m sorry!”
God wiped the snow from his face, laughing. “Like I said, this isn’t my first rodeo.”
“Excuse me.” Dr. Palmer was staring at them, her arms out to her side like she’d just realized they were teenagers and couldn’t be trusted with the important task of building snow ammo. “Are we having a snowball fight? Or are we launching a snowball?”
God stood up and started pushing the snowball toward Dr. Palmer. It was bigger than Claire realized, almost to her waist now. And by the time they got it back to Dr. Palmer, it looked impossibly large—something they wouldn’t be able to load onto the trebuchet, let alone launch in the air.
“We should pour some water on it and make it freeze,” Leg said.
Dr. Palmer’s eyes lit up, but she must’ve had a flashback to the watermelon—new visions of a four-foot-tall ice ball hurtling through the bay window of some nice grandmother’s house—so she shook her head.
“No, no. This is going to be great.”
As she was talking, Greg carefully loaded the snowball onto the trebuchet, offering up random facts—he called them Storm Nuggets—as he worked.
“What made the trebuchet preferable was its ability to handle heavier projectiles,” he told Leg and Dark, who humored him with enthusiastic grunts. “Your typical catapult could handle, maybe a hundred twenty pounds. But a trebuchet?” He laughed knowingly. “You’re talking three hundred fifty pounds. A disaster for a castle under siege.”
Claire was shaking from the cold. Her wet jeans, wet hands, and increasingly freezing neck and face and, well, everything, was catching up with her. Dark came over and stood next to her. Even the small amount of body heat helped, and Claire took another step toward him.