Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

  Patchwork

  Karsten Knight

  Contents

  The Rose and the Amaranth

  Overboard

  Ethereal Soup

  Patchwork Unveiled

  Ravine

  The Fourth Shade of Darkness

  Patchwork Twisted

  Walter Lake’s Eulogy, Part I

  Admission

  Blood and Foolishness

  Patchwork Scorched

  Frostbite

  The Poison Within

  Patchwork Frozen

  Yuletide

  Walter Lake’s Eulogy, Part II

  Patchwork Haunted

  Ripping out the Threads

  Anachronism

  Patchwork Fractured

  Forbidden Fruit

  Orchard

  Patchwork Falls

  Walter Lake’s Eulogy, Part III

  Shoreline

  Thank You

  Free Preview of NIGHTINGALE, SING

  The Serengeti Sapphire

  About the Author

  Praise for the WILDEFIRE trilogy by Karsten Knight

  The Rose and the Amaranth

  An Amaranth planted in a garden near a rose tree thus addressed it:

  “What a lovely flower is the Rose,

  a favorite alike among Gods and men.

  I envy you your beauty and your perfume.”

  The Rose replied,

  “Dear Amaranth, I flourish

  but for a brief season!

  Even if no cruel hand

  plucks me from my stem,

  I must perish by an early doom.

  But you are immortal,

  and dost never fade,

  but bloomest forever

  in eternal youth.”

  -Fable of The Rose and The Amaranth, Aesop

  Overboard

  May

  We don’t hold him at sword-point, and we don’t make him walk the plank. Instead, we each take a limb—Slade and Ivy holding his arms, Troy and me on his legs. Every time I say “Heave!” we swing him backward, until on my third count of “Ho!” we pitch his body over the aft railing.

  His limbs flail in the wind as he tumbles twenty feet into Boston Harbor, silent the whole way down.

  Mannequins can’t scream.

  Momentum carries him under, but he soon bobs to the surface. The fishing line tethering him to the cruise ship’s railing draws taut. He couldn’t have landed at a more perfect angle: between the way his back arches beneath his tuxedo coat and how his arms list lifelessly in front of him, even I’m half-convinced that the dummy is a high school prom-goer gone overboard, and I’m the one who dressed him. I even gave him a violet tie to match my dress.

  I’ve watched enough teen movies to know that I should probably be dancing up on the top deck with the other students, losing myself in a slow song while Troy holds me close, eagerly waiting for the prom committee to announce court.

  Call me a freak, but to me pure bliss is leaning over the railing with my three best friends, admiring the fake corpse we tossed into the harbor.

  Good thing my friends are freaks, too. Ivy removes the fedora from her crimped hair and places it over her heart. “Should we have a moment of silence?” she asks.

  Slade pinches the sleeve of Ivy’s zoot suit. “For your femininity, maybe. How many speakeasies did you hold up before you found the right fit?”

  Ivy shrugs. “Actually, I raided your closet since we’re the same size. But I have to admit”—she squirms uncomfortably—“your clothes are a little tight in the shoulders.”

  Slade’s grin fades. Troy and I share a knowing smile. Slade has the kind of muscle-resistant metabolism that no amount of protein shakes and gym sessions can counteract. Jokes about his skinny frame enrage him.

  “Play nice, kids,” Troy says, always the peacemaker. “You guys can chat wardrobe later.” He snatches Ivy’s fedora from her hands and forces it down over my thick up-do.

  “Now …” I tap my finger on my lips. “Who on this boat can we convince to scream ‘Man overboard!’ or something else painfully cliché?” With the mannequin in tow, all that remains of our plan is for someone to discover “the body” in the water in an entertainingly dramatic fashion.

  Slade’s eyes light up and he snaps his fingers. “How about the Skipper? You know, the one-man yacht club?”

  I burst out laughing. The Skipper earned his nickname because he legitimately dresses like a cast member from Gilligan’s Island, and I shit you not, he has an anchor tattooed on his bicep. What a tool. “It would be a gross injustice of irony if we chose anyone else.”

  “Seconded,” Ivy and Troy agree in unison.

  Ivy plucks her fedora off my head and gives me a playful slap on the ass. “You’re the silver-tongued manipulator, Renata. We’ll leave the details to you.” Then she wanders off with Slade.

  Troy lingers back, gazing out over the dark harbor. His chin-length hair, which will soon grow lighter under the summer sun, shrouds his face, but his tense body language betrays him. Whenever our secret guild, the Amaranthine Society, executes a new score, Troy always maintains a calm façade. Sometimes, in a rare candid moment, he’ll let a flash of excitement burst through like a solar flare.

  Tonight, something’s off. The confident, collected Troy that I’ve come to know has been replaced with someone else. He looks like his body might crumple beneath his tuxedo jacket if he didn’t have a white-knuckled grip on the railing to support himself.

  I come up beside him and slip my arm around his back. “What’s gotten into you, Charlie Chaplin? You’ve hardly put two sentences together since we boarded.”

  A plane flies low over the water toward Logan Airport, close enough that we can hear the banshee scream of its jet engines. Troy’s eyes follow it a little too closely as it descends toward the runway. I wonder if he’s thinking about the plane that will carry him away to Spain in three months.

  Away from Massachusetts.

  Away from me.

  The moment passes and Troy’s thousand-yard stare returns to the present. He tugs at the fishing line that’s towing the mannequin in the wake of the ship. “It’s going to be tough for the Amaranthines to outdo this one on graduation day,” he says.

  I laugh. “Short of a fireworks display or painting the entire school neon pink … Yeah, I’d say we have our work cut out for us.” I can hear the muffled chatter of the prom-goers dancing up on the main deck, most of them seniors, although a few of them are lucky juniors like me. Apparently everyone upstairs is too absorbed in the magic of their big night to notice the humanoid floating behind the boat. The frenzied guitar solo of the AC/DC song that’s playing would have easily drowned out the splash.

  My secret is that I sometimes wish I was more like the other three hundred students at Daedalus Academy. That I could enjoy the pomp and circumstance of ordinary high school milestones like homecoming, prom, or graduation without executing some ridiculous hoax to spice things up. That I could eat a big bowlful of high school vanilla without smothering it in Amaranthine caramel.

  But that sort of normalcy was never in the cards for me. I’m sure the Daedalus administration thinks that we’re a bunch of “ne’er-do-wells” and would happily suspend us all in a heartbeat if they knew who we were. I don’t think of us as hooligans though. I prefer to think we specialize in transforming mundane high school rituals into something more memorable. Ten years from now, what will these people remember about their prom: the crappy keepsake photo albums that student council left on the tables? Or the moment they discovered a “body” floating in the waves?

  “You think you’ll find another reckless secret society to join at school in Barcelona?” I ask. “Maybe a fraternity of wannabe warlocks, who sit around polishing their wands an
d broomsticks and—”

  Troy cups his hand gently over my mouth to shut me up and laughs for the first time since we smuggled the mannequin out of the ship’s galley. “Okay, first of all, ‘men sitting around polishing their wands and broomsticks?’ Probably not the mental image you were going for. And secondly,” he lowers his voice to a whisper, “I don’t need any witchcraft to cast a spell over you.”

  Before I can tell him exactly how cheesy that sounded, he spins me around with his muscular rower’s arms and presses his body against mine, sandwiching me between him and the railing. His hands settle on my hips, with his fingers just barely extending around my stomach, but it’s enough to draw from me a longing ache. Troy Bridges is a master of the “just barely” seduction. Fingers that trace magic behind my ears before they pull my neck toward him, kisses that whisper over my lips like a ghost before they fill me. He’s nothing like my oafish first boyfriend, who treated my body like a coal seam waiting to be mined. Troy exercises the kind of restraint that has continually made me want to lose my own and pin him up against a wall.

  “Nothing can replace these last nine months.” He places a kiss where my braid has pulled my hair thin. “I love you, Renata Lake.”

  Those simple words nearly send me over the railing and into the harbor, the words that neither of us has used in the entire time we’ve been dating. My breath catches, sounding unflatteringly like a hiccup. It’s not that I’m surprised that Troy loves me—I’ve known it for months. I love him, too. But we’ve never had the type of relationship where we vocalize that type of thing. The fact that he’s saying it now makes me think that something big is coming.

  I want to turn and face him, to look into his eyes and hear him say it again, but my feet are magnetized to the metal deck. Even though I know he’s waiting for me to say it back, I stare silently out at the colorful shipping crates stacked along the shore of South Boston, and the dark banks of Castle Island just beyond.

  “I’m always going to love you,” he goes on when I say nothing. “I don’t need to go overseas or travel the world to know that for certain.”

  “But you are going overseas.” My voice quivers. “You are traveling the world.” And there it is: After all this time being the ever-supportive girlfriend, two months soothing Troy when he had second thoughts about studying so far from home, quelling his fear that a few thousand miles might butcher our relationship, even I’m astonished to discover that I resent him. Resent him for moving away. Resent that he waited to express his feelings until right after we’d dropped a tuxedo-dressed mannequin into the water.

  “I know,” he replies quietly. He releases me and steps away. The warmth of his chest against my bare back is replaced by the chill May air, its cold fingers tracing down my spine. I shiver despite myself.

  When I finally work up the nerve to turn and face him, Troy is down on one knee.

  And if I had any questions as to why he was kneeling, the black box in his hand would have dispelled those.

  I take an unbalanced step back in my heels and it takes the railing to steady me. All I can think to do is point at his tuxedo pants and say, “The floor doesn’t look like it’s been swabbed in a while.”

  Troy laughs uncomfortably, but his expression quickly sobers. “Listen, Nata. I know how out of my mind I probably look right now. We’re young. We’re at our prom. But this …” He swallows and nods toward the harbor and the mannequin. “This is what we do. This is who we are. So I can wait until I’m thirty-five to get married like my parents did, because their résumés matched up and it was the logical thing to do. Or I can do the stupid, crazy, impetuous thing and blindside my girlfriend with a proposal on our prom night. Which leaves just one question: will you marry me?”

  Then he cracks open the box, and the ring that’s glinting in the sallow moonlight isn’t some hand-me-down heirloom that’s spanned generations in the Bridges family, but a platinum band that looks like he plucked it right out of the jeweler’s case.

  In a lot of ways, that makes it worse.

  Because it doesn’t change the “I can’t” that I’d say if my tongue—and my heart—weren’t rebelling against my brain.

  I do love Troy, but this is all wrong. Over the course of our relationship, he has given me plenty of pyrotechnic, soul-stirring moments where our spark feels like something deeper than your average high school sweethearts. But we’re too young for this, and asking someone to marry you is supposed to be a happy event. Everything about Troy’s proposal smacks of fear, uncertainty, desperation. Like he’s already assumed that I don’t have the fortitude to make a long-distance relationship work. Like I’m some sort of butterfly that will fly away, and this is the jar he intends to catch me in, for his own peace of mind while my wings flutter impotently against the glass.

  I can’t even look at Troy for fear that he can read my thoughts, and I can only guess how crestfallen he must look when he realizes I’m refusing to make eye contact. So I stare at the white wake lines fanning out behind the mannequin, that stupid mannequin, and I can’t think clearly knowing that I’m supposed to be up on the deck, right now, coaxing some oblivious upperclassman to discover the fictitious body that’s surfing the waves.

  “It’s not going to swim away,” Troy says. When I turn around, he fidgets uncomfortably like he’s deciding whether to stand up. Still, he holds his ground, and a mask of firm resolve sweeps away the doubt that had been brewing on his face since he dropped to one knee. It’s that dauntlessness that drew me to Troy in the first place. “I’m asking you to marry me. Not right now. Maybe not even for a long time. But I need you to know that I’m always going to be there for you.”

  “No, Troy.” The words that spill out of my mouth next are ones that I know I’ll regret, but they leak out into the space between us before I can stay my tongue. “You’re only doing this because you’re afraid I’m not always going to be there for you.”

  I can’t believe I said that. It’s the truth, but a truth that will cut deep. At first, Troy kneels there rigidly, except for where the harbor breeze blows through his hair. “Troy, I didn’t mean that,” I say and reach for him.

  He’s too quick. He stands and staggers back toward the stairwell, his kneeling leg stiff from the metal floor. The ring box snaps shut like a judge’s gavel coming down, and it’s the most heartbreaking sound I’ve ever heard. Then his footsteps clatter up the stairwell and he’s gone.

  I am left alone on the lower deck. The dummy dragging behind the ship suddenly seems like a broken kite trawling through the water. Any hostility I felt toward my boyfriend dissipates, replaced by a gnawing fear that I’ve done something irreparable to the best friend I’ve got.

  Then the chest pain comes.

  Reason tells me that it’s just another panic attack. I’ve been experiencing them with increasing severity since freshman year. They’d begun as a sudden jolt in the middle of the night, a feeling that something, somewhere, wasn’t quite right. Over time, the attacks evolved into a thick cocktail of fear and anxiety that my mind could never fully swallow.

  Now it’s my turn to drop to one knee. I clutch my chest and grimace. The world around me pulsates and twists. My pupils must be dilating because the jaundiced light bulbs overhead burn brighter. Even the music coming from the dance floor sounds muffled, like the speakers are at the top of a deep well and I’m falling down, down, down …

  The attacks are getting worse. For the past few months, the panic has somehow leached into my body, bringing with it a tearing feeling that sears through my chest as though I’m having a heart attack. I’ve started to wonder lately whether something really is wrong with my heart, but all it would take was one bad report from the doctor to end my softball career, and with it, hopes of an athletic scholarship.

  My trembling hand finds the tarnished silver locket around my neck and I flip it open, revealing the tiny clock inside. With my eyes closed, I count each tick of the second hand, as I have so many times before. Like always, it grou
nds me in the moment, gives my heart a familiar rhythm to latch onto like a life preserver before I drown in a sea of dark thoughts.

  “It’s only stress,” I say, cooing the words. My fingers tighten around the locket, my palm flush against the glass clock face. “You rejected your boyfriend’s out-of-the-blue proposal and that’s why it feels like you’re about to die.”

  Gradually, the pain subsides. I’m able to straighten up, now that my heart no longer feels like it’s being strangled with a copper wire. I brush off my dusty knees, tuck the locket back into the breast of my dress, then work my way up to the dance floor.

  The top deck is a scene of chaos. Somehow in the twenty minutes I’ve spent below, the hundred students have worked themselves into a wild frenzy. Half the senior class is clumped in the middle of the laminate dance floor, spiritedly hopping up and down to the song “Jump Around.” It’s the less enthusiastic dancers loitering around the fringes that are making it difficult to find Troy. A few chaperones linger by the food. Mr. Slattery, the slightly pervy history teacher, is chatting with one of the prom’s junior class ushers. The girl laughs nervously and stares ahead.

  Ivy is nearly hidden in the shadows behind the buffet table, flirting with the 25-year-old caterer (gross) that she agreed to make out with (way gross) in exchange for his help smuggling the mannequin on board. She spots me and raises a Did you forget about our plan? eyebrow. I hold up a Give me two freakin’ seconds finger at her.

  I push my way blindly through the crowd. My eyes pathetically gravitate to every tall tuxedoed blond guy hoping that it’s Troy. The dance floor is now degenerating into a mosh pit, and a soccer player slams into me with a war cry. I go tumbling, and a pair of strong arms catches me right as I’m about to pull a digger onto the linoleum.