Falling Under (25 page)
Mike didn’t include me; everyone in class knew my trig grade was falling because I’d stopped turning in the assignments. I needed to get it together. While a part of me was enjoying not living up to everyone’s preconceived notions of me, I really didn’t want to be the girl whose life fell apart because of a boy. It was so … cliché.
It was also really, really easy to let happen.
“Sure,” Ame replied. Her smile lit up her entire face, and I felt a guilty stab of envy.
Then Mike looked at my burger. “Are you going to eat that?” he asked.
I shook my head and handed him the whole tray, making excuses to everyone about needing to go do something. I didn’t stick around to explain—I just got up and walked away from my friends, something I was getting very good at doing.
I should have seen it coming.
“Where are we going?” I asked as Donny drove past the turn to my house.
“We’re nabbing you,” answered Amelia.
I rolled my eyes. I’d barely made it through the entire school day. I didn’t want to be nabbed; I wanted nothing more than to crawl under my covers and sleep. Just like I had every day lately. It seemed safer to sleep during daylight hours.
She’d
said
she would give me a ride home.
said
she would give me a ride home.
Not for the first time did I curse my father for not letting me get my license. Too dangerous, of course. And what did I need one for? Serendipity High was within walking distance of our house and the fresh air was “good for my constitution.” Donny’s parents actually bought her a car—an older Honda Accord—but she also had to taxi her little brother to and from practice every day and take over the grocery shopping. It seemed fair to me. Everything about her parents seemed rational and fair. Their rules, though she often broke them, made sense. And her privileges, when she earned them, were more than just.
If I wanted money for something, I had to ask and explain why. What did I need it for? Muriel packed my lunch in the evenings, Father’s shopper purchased all my clothes, and his decorator made small variances to my room two or three times a year to keep me from being bored with the design.
He didn’t understand that I might like to have a bit of spending money that I didn’t need to account to him for. I’d have gladly done chores or even gotten a job—if he had let me.
Ame also had her license, but no car. Which gave Donny a lot of power in our relationship. Which she certainly took advantage of, but didn’t usually abuse.
“Look, you’ve been all Emo Barbie and we’re tired of it. We’re taking you to the beach.” Donny met my gaze in her rearview mirror. “And before you whine and say, ‘I don’t want to go to the beach,’ you should know I’m past caring.”
“That’s very nice, Donnatella.” I sneered and folded my arms. “I’m glad you’ve found a way to make this all about you.”
“You can be a bitch if you want to, but we’re still going to the fucking beach.”
Amelia turned around to look at me from the passenger seat. “Please don’t fight, you guys. We’re just worried about you, Thei. You won’t talk to us anymore. Not since the day Haden stopped coming to school. We miss you.”
I hugged myself and stared out the window. “Well, he’s gone. Talking about it won’t make him come back.”
The trip to the coast took only ten minutes, but it seemed longer. Amelia peppered Donny with inane conversation to keep her off my back. I should have been more grateful. Instead, I just wished longingly for my bed.
I don’t know why I pushed them away so hard, or why I actively sought out an argument with Donny. My heart ached, and it colored everything around me black. I wanted nothing because I couldn’t have the only thing I really wanted. And I guess part of me wanted nobody else to get what they wanted if I couldn’t.
Some friend, right?
“Get out of the car,” Donny told me.
“I’m fine here. You guys go,” I answered.
“Get. Out. Of. The. Car.”
I drew my mouth into a grim line that hurt my jaw with its frozen force. I pushed out of her car and stomped ahead of them in the sand, not even closing the door behind me. The bitter spring wind whipped around me as I trudged to the line where the ocean met the land, and there I stood, wishing the water would just claim me and get this over with. What did drowning feel like? It couldn’t hurt more than my decimated heart did, could it? Would it hurt more than burning to ash like Haden did that first night?
Donny and Amelia joined me at the water’s edge, bookending me between them. The tumultuous waves crashed over themselves; the tumbling repetition should have been ineffective, and yet that was how the coast was formed, how it was transformed. It was how I felt standing there—like I’d been battered endlessly by waves and it was changing me in nearly imperceptible ways. Though judging by the way I’d been treating my best friends, the imperceptibleness was questionable.
Winter hadn’t completely let go yet, despite the earlier sunshine. The beach was still cold and unforgiving. I inhaled the briny air deeply, suddenly very glad to be there. The ocean always unlocked something in me, a fact Donny knew well. “I’m sorry. Both of you. I haven’t been myself and I’m ashamed of the way I’ve treated our friendship lately.”
“We’re just so worried about you. You’ve been so un-Theiable lately.”
I nodded. “Haden is gone for good. I know that I’ll never see him again, but I really love him and it hurts … it hurts to breathe.”
They were on me in a second. There-thereing and it’snot-so-badding, holding me up and keeping me strong. Better yet, being strong for me.
Ame pulled a lock of windblown hair from her mouth. “Theia, we didn’t get to know him very well, but he must love you too, right? I mean, he didn’t take anyone, did he?”
I shook my head. I explained to them that he could still be in danger for angering his mother. That he seemed truly adamant that she would not be understanding. “I don’t know if he’s okay. I mean, if I knew he was happy or okay, I could get through this.”
“Oh, God, I think you guys are starting to make me believe in all this crap,” Donny said. And we laughed.
Huddled together, the three of us, it did feel significant. Our little circle against the world.
I told them about my father. How we’d finally spoken about my mother, how it had hurt but felt good at the same time. I told them that the last time I went Under, I had to take my father’s sleeping pills.
“That is so not cool,” Donny said as she pinched me. “We don’t let boy problems turn us into druggies—got it?” Her tone was light, but her message was stern beneath it.
“I don’t think I can get back that way again. He’s done something so that I can’t go there anymore. Maybe …” I looked at Ame. She might know a way. She’d been studying so many metaphysical things.
I was about to ask her opinion when a strange wind picked up. It wasn’t just bitter cold, it was malevolent and searching. We gasped and instinctively began to break away from our circle in the confusion, but Amelia’s face took on a stubborn expression and she squeezed us tighter, so Donny and I held on. The wind carried voices, whispers and hisses of words swirling around us, getting faster and faster. Donny grew pale looking towards the horizon. Amelia and I followed her gaze over the water and watched as the darkest clouds I’d ever seen gathered, turning the sky bruise-purple.
A gale-force wind blew and the mottled clouds raced across the sky and straight towards us. It wasn’t just the color or the speed that scared us—there was a smell, a tinge of sulfur that accompanied their tumbling roll. Amelia yelled at us to hang on, and so we did, without thought of consequence.
The wicked wind blew through us, trying to tear us apart, but also at work was another force. The pendant—my talisman—seemed to glow heat against my skin, and as it spread, the warmth buffeted the impact of the gathering storm. Rain fell like bullets from the sky but didn’t touch us. I looked up and noticed the black clouds were directly over us then, with a break in the center like a hole in a doughnut.
The wind still stung at us, and lightning bolts landed sporadically around us, but somehow we knew we had to hold on. So we faced the freak storm, and it dissipated as quickly as it had come on. No theatrics. Just gone.
“Well, that was weird,” Donny said dryly.
“Thei,” Ame began, “I don’t think this is over yet. Whatever that was, I think it wanted you.”
I shivered. Amelia was shaken, but she looked … in control, empowered.
Donny watched Amelia very carefully too. “Ame, what the hell is going on?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure exactly, but I think it’s time I started really paying attention to my Hello Kitty tarot cards.”
After returning from the beach, I had to wade through a painful supper in which Father and I both tried to make believe things were looser between us now. They may have been better, but it was hard to tell given the current climate of “let’s pretend.” Let’s pretend you didn’t want to abort me. Let’s pretend it doesn’t bother you that I’m wearing blue jeans and my hair wild. Let’s pretend we have a different relationship now that we understand each other.
Once we’d run out of idle chatter, rehashing the inane details of our day that neither of us cared about, we returned to an uncomfortable silence. I couldn’t stop thinking about that storm, about Amelia’s warning. What had it meant?
“Are you taking a chill?” Father asked. I must have looked confused, because he clarified his question with, “You just shivered.”
“Oh,” I answered. “I’m sure I’m fine. Must have been a draft.”
We went back to silence. What would supper have been like if my mother had lived? I’d bet we’d eat in the kitchen more often.
“Father?” A punch of panic wouldn’t let me go any further. I’d simply meant to fill the silence with something, anything. But as my mouth formed his name, I realized I wanted to talk about something real.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been wearing one of my mother’s pendants for a while. I got it from the attic,” I confessed.
The fork stopped in midair. He set it atop his plate carefully. “I see.”
“Are you angry?”
“No,” he assured me. “I should have thought to bring her jewelry down to you a while ago. She would want you to have it.” He cleared his throat. “I want you to have it.”
I smiled at him. A real one. I felt … closer to him at that moment than I ever had.
After our meal, I tried to play my violin. Father had dismissed my tutor without questioning why I didn’t want to play anymore after … well, after the night with the pills. But suddenly I wished I wanted to play again. I picked it up, the weight of it foreign and familiar at the same time. I re-haired my neglected bow carefully and then eased into a song. I didn’t feel it stir my soul. It was just notes and mechanics. Perfunctory practice. Boring.
I put it down.
I took a bath, long and hot. I tried not to think about anything, but my mind kept circling back to the beach. When Varnie had told me that something dark had attached to me, I assumed it was Haden.
Whatever had been on the beach—it hadn’t felt like Haden. It had felt evil.
The bathwater turned icy. How long had I been in it? It had felt so warm only a moment before, it seemed.
I got ready for bed, still shivering from my bath and ignoring that I had a metric ton of schoolwork to catch up on. Then from across my bedroom, I saw it.
A long-stemmed black rose lay on my pillow.
Haden?
I approached the bed slowly, as if the flower were going to flee like a scared animal. My heart picked up an uneven, frenzied rhythm and sent the blood rushing to my head. I snatched the stem and a razor-sharp thorn pricked my finger. Haden had never left me a rose with thorns before. As the bloom fell from my hand, I brought my finger to my mouth, the coppery taste of blood on my tongue while I witnessed my own shadow shifting apart from me on the canvas of the wall.
I jerked from the unnatural sensation of seeing myself disengaged. My shadow turned to look behind her and then ran frantically. I watched her, fascinated as she ran a circle around the room, trapped on the wall yet oddly not attached to me any longer.
I stumbled backwards, searching the room for whatever malevolent force had scared my shadow so much that she was able to flee my person. I felt trapped. An acre of carpet separated me from the safety of my bedroom door and possible escape. All at once, she stopped racing and spun around and upside down like a pinwheel, getting smaller and smaller. Then the other shadows in the room began funneling towards her disappearing shape, and they too whirled like water around a drain. In horror, I watched them all swirl into a pinpoint and disappear.
A room without shadows is an abomination of the laws of our universe, though I’d never much thought of it until I was left in one. It made me itch. The door still seemed so very far away, but I had to try. Girding my nerve, I padded in that direction, only to stop short in front of my mirror.
I wasn’t in it.
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