The Frenzy (3 page)

How will we leave this place? How will we return home? When this is the only home.

My mother looked up from the kitchen sink where she was washing the pots and watching
American Idol
. My dad and Gramp were watching the news on the TV in the living room. There was a TV in almost every room of the house and my parents usually left them on when they went out of the room—I was always going around turning them off. All I could see of my father was his ex-quarterback shoulders and the top of his dark hair. My grandfather was a little white head peeking over the top of the overstuffed floral sofa. I could smell corn dogs and coleslaw.

“You missed dinner, hon,” my mom said. “Are you
hungry? I’ll make you something.”

My stomach growled in answer but I shook my head. “I’ll just get a sandwich.” I opened the refrigerator.

“Wash your hands!” she said.

I took out cheese, bread and mustard and laid them out on the table. I glanced at the cold cuts and shut the refrigerator door. I have to admit I crave meat but I am still a strict vegetarian.

My mother was watching me. “You have leaves in your hair.”

I reached up and felt the crunchy leaves, rubbed them until they disintegrated. The smell reminded me of Corey.

“Liv,” my mother said, “where do you go? I hope it’s not the woods. We worry.”

My dad turned off the sound and looked over at us. He was drinking his scotch. “Damn right,” he said.

“Hi, Liv,” said Gramp. “How’s my girl?”

I went over and kissed his cheek. “Good, Gramp.

How are you?” He smiled like a kid and then took the remote and put the TV sound back on.

“You didn’t answer the question,” my mom said.

“I was at Pace’s.”

She squirted more soap into the sink. She was wearing a flowered apron and high heels. She said it was good exercise for her calf muscles to wear them as much as possible.

“Maybe you want to invite Pace to Gramp’s birthday party,” my mom said.

I nodded and poured myself a glass of water. “Yeah, maybe.” As I lifted the glass to my lips I smelled my sleeve as surreptitiously as possible for a whiff of Corey’s scent still lingering there.

“Liv?” My mother spoke eagerly, like she wanted to connect with me, bring me out of my daze.

I tried not to sound annoyed with her. “Yeah?”

“I found you a cute dress in the Nordstrom catalog. I want you to look nice for the party.”

“Okay, thanks.” I was trying to be positive but I
knew I wouldn’t like the dress she picked. I also knew I’d probably end up wearing it for her anyway. I took my sandwich and headed for my room.

“Liv! What did I tell you about walking on your toes?”

“I always walk on my toes,” I mumbled. I’d given up trying not to sound annoyed.

“You’ll get shin splints. And put those jeans in the wash; they’re filthy.” I heard her sigh loudly as I closed my bedroom door behind me.

Pace

I
n order to hide my relationship with Corey from my parents I pretend to date Pace McIntyre. Pace looks just the way my parents would want my boyfriend to look. He is tall and fair and athletic, a football player, even. A lot of girls crush on him.

I’ve known Pace since we were ten. Our mothers play bridge together and our fathers coach Little League. The first time I saw him was at a party at our house. He was standing by himself looking uncomfortable and cringing whenever an adult came up to tell him how tall and handsome he was or to brush
his hair out of his eyes. We went to my room and he took a cassette tape out of his pocket and played me Tori Amos songs on my boom box.

“You even look like her,” he said.

Well, I loved him from then on and he told me he felt the same way about me, even though the only music I had to play him at that time was Britney Spears. But we were friends instantly; even before we knew the truth about each other we sensed that the other had a secret, although at least Pace actually knew what his secret was.

Sometimes Corey, Pace and I hung out, too, but I knew it made Pace feel like the third wheel and it made Corey a little jealous so we usually didn’t. They weren’t really close—maybe because of how close I was to both of them—but they liked each other. And when I was with them at the same time I felt the best I ever felt—safe like I had my pack.

Pace called me the night Corey and I saw the wolf. I could tell something was up with him. His voice
sounded excited and a little out of breath. We talked about the usual—summer jobs and music and things. I was working at the ice cream parlor and Pace was a waiter at a quaint little café, with tiny flowers on the wallpaper and paintings of boats in carved wooden frames, where he served cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches with tea to little old ladies. We both tried to play our own music whenever we could get away with it but usually the managers didn’t let us. Both Pace and Corey were always turning me on to new songs and quoting lyrics and trying to decipher what they meant. Which was how I felt talking with Pace that night; he was being so cryptic. “You’re like a song by the National,” I told him. “All mysterious and shit.”

“Okay,” he said finally. “I met someone.”

I smiled into the receiver. Pace had been looking for a boyfriend for years. The reason he posed as my boyfriend was as much to hide being gay from his parents and the rest of our less-than-tolerant town as it was to
keep my parents from finding out about Corey. He calls me Skirt and I call him Beard, although technically he isn’t really my beard but, as Corey says, my white beard.

“Dude!” I said. “Scoop, please.”

“Well, he’s not straight.” Pace always crushed on straight guys and it never worked out.

“That’s a good start!”

“Hottie,” he said.

I laughed. “Naturally. What’s his name?”

“Michael. It’s so weird. I was walking home and I passed that old house on Green?”

“The Fairborn house?” It was a big, old Gothic place with gargoyles cowering under the eaves and years’ worth of old Christmas trees planted in the yard. No one had lived there in forever and it was a wreck, coated in dirt and cobwebs. There was a rumor that the teenage son of the man who built it had hung himself in the dining room. Once I snuck out of my house and met Corey and Pace for a midnight picnic under the fir trees. We took photographs to see if we
could find ghosts captured in the shots but nothing turned up except the shadow of the pine needles.

“Yeah. And there was a light inside. So I thought I’d check it out. It was unlocked and there’s this guy sitting at a table with a jar full of lightning bugs.”

“Crazy!” I said. “Why was he there?”

“He said he just really liked it.”

That was like us—like Corey and Pace and me. We loved to explore places that we thought were haunted, like the old steel mill, a campus dorm called Ravenwood Hall and the cracked stone ruins—some partial pillars, steps and foundation—of the orphanage that had once stood at the edge of the forest. The owner was said to have gone crazy and burned it down with a hundred screaming children inside. We never found anything unusual there except that when we left there were tiny handprints on Pace’s Jeep.

“Does he go to St. Paul?” I asked Pace.

“No, he said he’s homeschooled. He just moved here.”

I heard a click and my mom’s voice. “Oh, sorry. You’re on the phone? Did you get your homework done?”

“I’m talking to Pace, Mom.”

“Hi, McIntyre.” I hated when she called him by his last name; it sounded too coy and flirtatious when she did, even though a lot of people called him that and I knew she was just trying to be nice.

“Hello, Mrs. Thorne.”

“I don’t want to disturb your conversation but it’s getting late.”

“We’ll be right off,” I said.

She hesitated, then hung up.

“Shit,” Pace said. “Why does she always do that?”

I flopped onto my back on my bed and let my hair hang down over the side so that it swept the floor. “I told her I was with you today.”

“What else is new?”

“I know. I just forgot to tell you.”

“I’ve always got your back.”

“Same here. Tell me more about this guy you met.”

“He’s just really cool. Not like anyone else. He asked me a lot of questions but he didn’t talk about himself at all. There was something really sad about him, though.”

“You and I like those melancholy types, huh?”

I knew him well enough to be able to hear the smile on the other end of the line. “How’s the boy?”

I lifted my legs in the air and examined my feet. My toes have very slight webbing between them that had seemed to have become more noticeable in the last few years and I never wore open-toed shoes anymore. There were a few hairs sprouting from my big toes. I reached for tweezers.

“Pace,” I said. “It was so cool! We saw a wolf today!”

“A wolf?” I imagined Pace in his big room in his big house—an overdecorated Colonial like ours—wearing sweats and a T-shirt, his golden hair falling across his forehead. He let me comb his hair and sometimes

I put mascara on his eyelashes. He’s as gorgeous as a model but it just seems to freak him out.

“Yeah. In the woods. A gray wolf. A female, I think. She just stared at us and then ran away.”

Pace is the person who knows me best. I want to tell Corey about the strange thing that happened to me when I turned thirteen but I’m afraid. It’s not because I don’t trust him; I trust him more than anyone. But if he got scared by what I told him and decided to leave me I think I would literally die.

I went to Pace at dawn after the night of my thirteenth birthday and threw pebbles at his window. I stood naked and shivering behind a tree, not sure what had happened or why I was there at all. He came down carrying a blanket, wrapped me up in it, and we sat in his garden and talked while the sun rose bloody above the distant woods.

I told him about my mother and the wolf, how angry I’d felt and how I’d run to the woods but that I couldn’t remember much after that. Pace listened and
stroked my head and told me I was going to be okay but he didn’t try to force me to remember anything that was too scary for me. That was also the night he told me he was gay.

I said it didn’t change anything between us. I had kind of known already, anyway. The only thing that worried me about it was that I knew most people in our town wouldn’t understand. They rejected me for being weird and hairy, which I understood, but they would also reject handsome, social, athletic, “normal”-seeming Pace for this if they found out. It would be harder for him than for me, I thought. Under his strong exterior Pace was more sensitive than I was. And the cruelest kids might do something worse than just reject him.

But that night Pace seemed relieved to have told me. He gave me a shirt and jeans to wear and walked me home. I snuck into the house and crawled into bed and slept for a day. We never spoke about what had happened to me after that night but we talked about Pace’s situation a lot.

“I think that’s a good sign,” Pace was saying—four years later—about the wolf sighting. “Maybe things are changing for us, Skirt.”

In a way I hoped he was right. But there was something about this guy, Michael, about our wolf and even about that word—
change
—that worried me.

Joe

I
n the morning I rode my bike downtown to the ice cream parlor where I work. My mom and dad know the owner, of course—they know everybody; people jokingly call my mom the mayor—and I figured a summer job there was something to do to keep my parents off my back until I started school at the local college in the fall. It was also a distraction from the fact that Corey and I wouldn’t be together then; he was going to school in New York.

It was ninety-three degrees by ten o’clock, with high humidity. Kids were playing in the gray stone
fountain already, the way I used to do when I was little. I was jealous of the freedom they had. My mom used to let me run half naked through the water. I remember how she looked at me, then, with the softness in her eyes that hasn’t been there for years.

In keeping with the weird Gothic architecture of the town, small severed heads decorated each of the points surrounding the top of the fountain and the water spurted from the mouths of angry-looking water gods. Baskets of purple flowers hung from the old-fashioned streetlamps. The streets around the square were cobbled. It looked quaint and charming unless you knew what was really going on, like most places, I guess. I suppose the fountain gargoyles kind of gave away what was underneath.

I passed some boys from school sitting on a wrought-iron bench.

“Hey, it’s hairy teets,” one of them said. It was Carl Olaf.

I’d been hoping that after I’d graduated he would
leave me alone. But I knew that Carl could have associated me with the news of his father’s death and with the fact that my father, the police chief, had never found the killer so I’d become more and more withdrawn and on edge around Carl and his friends, always expecting something like this.

“What did you drink to put that hair on your chest, girl?” said another boy. Nick McCain.

“You could use some of it, whatever it is.” Carl Olaf shoved him affectionately.

I flipped them off with my long middle finger and rode faster up to the door of the ice cream parlor. It was a relief to be inside, away from them. I served milkshakes and ice cream cones all day in the strawberry pink room with the black-and-white checkerboard floor, the shiny chrome counter. Since the owner wasn’t around, I played the Metric song Corey had made for me. “Help, I’m alive.”

Corey kept texting me all day from the veterinarian’s office where he worked.

when can i c u? i miss u.

that wolf still in my mind. liv i love

I got kind of distracted, I guess. At one point a guy came over to me and showed me his dish of melted ice cream. He didn’t say anything, just tapped his spoon on the side of his dish.

“May I help you?” I asked.

“This was supposed to be a banana split. Operative word: banana. Do you see a banana?”