The Frenzy (6 page)

Pace shuddered. “It was weird. Can’t we leave yet? You need to go after your boyfriend and I want to see if I can find Michael.”

His eyes twinkled when he said the name and I remembered how excited he’d been about the guy he’d met but I hadn’t heard much about it since. “Michael, huh? What’s up with that?” I socked his arm.

“What?” Pace batted his eyelashes in an uncharacteristically girly way. “He’s cute, that’s all.” I knew Pace; I could tell there was more to it than that but I let it go.

“You’re
cute.” I kissed his cheek. He smelled like soap.

“So are you. Let’s get out of here. It makes us less cute.”

“I can’t,” I told him. “I promised I’d stay to the end of this thing.” Then I added, “Corey looked pissed.”

“No,” Pace said. “He’s just sad. He misses you.”

“Maybe you and I should cool it a little when he’s around. He’s gotten more sensitive about it.”

“Sure. I’m going to go see if Michael is there. Is that okay? Will you be all right without me, Skirt?”

“Yeah, you go, Beard,” I told him, breaking off a piece of bark in my hands and holding it up against my cheek. The rough texture of tree skin comforted me.

I could hear my grandfather’s voice in my mind.
Bad, bad business
.

Haunted

P
ace left and the party wound down by evening so I helped my mother clean up and then I texted Corey but he didn’t answer so I went to find him.

I went toward the campus, where the streets were quiet, everyone inside hiding from the heat or gone for the summer. The large wood-frame houses with their slightly dilapidated porches and hand-lettered Greek signs all looked deserted. It was true that some of the townies and almost all of the college kids from the frat and sorority houses took off for cooler places
in the summer but this much quiet was uncanny. The sun was still as bright as day although it was past six o’clock. I rode my bike down the middle of the street, daring a car to come around the corner, but none did. Then I cut through the campus, along paths that ran among brick buildings and leafy trees, to the other side.

Corey lived in one of the bigger old farmhouses at the edge of town. There were bicycles in the yard and a small, neat vegetable garden with rows of carrots and corn and pea vines clambering up a low metal fence. Corey’s brothers, Mitch and Jordy, were playing basketball against the tool shed. They glanced up at me blankly. I smiled at them like usual but they didn’t smile back. I always wondered if it was a racial thing or if they just thought I was weird like most people did.

“Corey around?” I asked.

They both shrugged. They were much bigger and lighter-skinned than Corey. He had told me that they didn’t dislike me the way I thought; they just didn’t care.

I parked my bike and went up to the door. Corey’s mother answered, wearing her nurse’s uniform. She looked at me suspiciously. “It’s not a skin color thing,” Corey had reassured me, but you never know; my parents wouldn’t have put it that way either.

“He’s out,” she said. Her face was cold. I wanted her to like me so much. Corey had her hazel eyes.

“Would you tell him I stopped by?”

She hummed a yes as I hurried away.

“Oh, and Olivia?” I stopped and looked at her. “You two be careful running around like you do.”

I nodded, glad she had spoken to me but not sure what her tone meant. Was she being protective, or warning me to keep my distance from her son? I couldn’t tell.

I went to the woods, to our special place, but Corey wasn’t there either. I wished I’d run outside to him right away when I saw him in the garden. I looked around at the dark, towering trees and started to feel a panicky sensation in my chest. Then I had to talk
myself down. We’d always been safe in the woods before, right?

I didn’t want to let myself think about murders that had occurred annually in those woods over the last four years. One of them was Sadie Nelson’s dad, Loudon. After it happened she and her mother moved away and no one heard from them again. There was one more besides Loudon Nelson; Carl Olaf’s dad, Reed; and Dale Tamblin’s dad, Dan—Bob Lee, the father of Sherry, the girl who had tied my hair to the chair in seventh grade. The bodies of the hunters were so torn up it looked like a wild animal had done it but the precision of the killings—always in the woods, always local hunters of about the same age—made my dad and his men think it was human. They hadn’t solved the crimes, though. Maybe that’s what Corey’s mom was referring to but she’d never said anything like it before. Maybe she was finally seeing how serious things were between me and her son.

I trailed my fingers into the cool water of the stream
and listened to the forest sounds. The branches were crackling and I held my breath. Maybe it was Corey? A feeling of anticipation crawled along my spine like when Corey and I had seen the gray wolf. I turned my head.

There was a woman standing in the shadows of the quaking aspen.

She had gray hair that fell over her shoulders but her face looked young. She wore a gray cotton T-shirt and blue jeans and her eyes were pale blue.

We stayed poised, unmoving, looking at each other until I shifted my weight slightly and then she backed away and disappeared.

I had no idea who the woman was but I knew that seeing her meant something. There was a dreamlike quality about it, like where you know the image you are seeing is a symbol for something very important, a secret that your unconscious wants to reveal to you but can’t. I shivered in the heat, the forest suddenly growing cold and full of whispers.

I ran back through the trees into the fading light at the edge of the wood, got my bike and headed home. On the way, I rode past the haunted house. I never lingered there long when I was alone; it gave me the creeps and I only liked to get the creeps when I was with my friends. Was Pace there? I needed to talk to him. Behind the old Christmas trees the gray house loomed up with its high-pitched, cantilevered roof shading the stone gargoyles from the sun. The posts and balconies were carved so elaborately that they looked like lace. Some of the windows were carved into large rosettes. I dropped my bike on the sidewalk and made my way among the fir trees and pieces of broken statuary—I recognized one of the gargoyles, smashed to bits, his leering face more angry than ever in its ruined state—to the porch. The sky was finally getting dark and I could hear the cicadas starting up. Through the pointed arch of the front window I saw a very faint light.

I wondered if Pace was there. I would have just
walked in, but maybe he was with Michael? So I knocked.

“Pace?” I said. “It’s me.”

I heard sounds inside and then after a couple of minutes the peephole opened, then the huge, heavy door. Pace stood there. His eyes looked very big. They darted around and he wasn’t smiling.

“Oh, man,” I said. “Do not disturb, huh?”

He glanced back behind him into the darkened house. His voice sounded distracted. “No, it’s okay. Come in.”

He beckoned for me to follow him into the dusty foyer with the parquet floor and through a door to an old-fashioned parlor with shabby lace curtains and furniture covered with sheets and tarps. A few rays of light came in through cracks in the walls.

“I’m sorry to bug you,” I said. “I can’t find Corey.”

Pace was looking around, not really listening.

“Pace?”

“Oh. Sorry. Where’s Corey?”

“I don’t know. I tried to reach him. I went to his house. He wasn’t there. And then I saw this woman….”

Pace was still looking around, confused.

“Is the guy … Michael? I want to meet him.”

“Michael?” Pace said softly. His eyes had a soft, cloudy look in the faint light. “He was just here.”

“I hope I didn’t …”

Pace shook his head. “It’s okay,” he said again. “I don’t know where he is. Maybe he went to the bathroom.”

“I’m going to go,” I told him. “I’ll leave you guys alone. I’m going to try Corey again.”

I walked back to the front door. The air in the house felt frosty in spite of the heat outside. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I could have seen my breath. The quiet made my head hurt.

“Cool place,” I said. “I mean, literally, too. It’s a little freaky, right?”

“Yeah.” Pace looked around with that same vague expression.

“You okay?”

He nodded.

“Call me later.” I opened the door and ran down the front steps.

I rode my bike around as fast as I could until my legs were shaking. I wanted to make sure all the upset of the day was wrung out of me before I came home. Maybe it was good that I hadn’t been able to find Corey….

Late that night I was lying in bed when I heard a clicking sound against the window. I’d texted Corey about ten times before I’d finally given up and curled into a ball under a sheet.

I looked outside and saw him standing there looking up at me, holding a handful of pebbles. I pulled on jeans and shoes and ran out to him.

“Where were you?” I almost started crying as I
fell against his warm chest. He had the woodsy-clean smell. When he tried to move away I put his arms back around me and clung to him.

“You didn’t write me back. Were you mad?” I asked. But he didn’t seem mad now.

I felt him sigh almost imperceptibly, not really a sound, just a slight movement of his chest.

“I’m sorry, Liv. I needed some time.”

“It’s okay.” I closed my eyes and hugged him even tighter.

“I know I shouldn’t have come by the party but when I saw you with McIntyre, pretending … it just makes me sick sometimes. Why we all have to pretend like this.”

“I know.” I tried to kiss his neck but he moved away.

“Serious, Liv. It’s messed up. We should be able to be who we are.”

“But I’m not sure I know who I am,” I said. “What if who we are isn’t okay?”

I wanted to tell him so badly then about what had happened to me when I was thirteen. But I couldn’t do it. I was afraid he would leave me if he knew about the rage inside of me and what it had made me want to do. And I was afraid that if we made love, if we got that close, whatever lurked inside me might come out and hurt him somehow, or scare him away. That was the truth. That was why I was waiting. Maybe he sensed it, too, because he didn’t push me.

“Who you are is more than okay. I love who you are. What are you so scared of?”

“Everything,” I said. “Even you. Especially you. Because you might leave.” I buried my face in his neck. “I was so scared today when I couldn’t reach you.” I didn’t tell Corey how scared I was of myself.

“I’m not leaving, baby. I told you I’m never leaving you. I just needed time to cool down. When you looked at me through the window, there was something weird about it….”

I thought of how Corey looked like a deer in my
mother’s garden. Gramp had scared me, I was angry and afraid, and then I had wanted to run outside and … and what? Grab Corey by the throat, drag him inside?

I was mad, I told myself. Not at Corey. At Gramp for scaring me. At Mom for what she had done to that wolf and whatever it meant now. But in the moment it had all gotten confusing and I hardly knew what I felt.

I didn’t tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn’t understand and could never run away from.

It was myself.

Abstinence

I
was sitting at dinner with my parents and Gramp, thinking about the woman I’d seen in the woods. I hadn’t had the chance to talk to Corey or Pace about her yet—there had been too many other things going on. But I wanted to find out who she was and there was only one person I could ask. I’d go see Joe Ranger the next day, I told myself.

My dad and Gramp were watching ESPN while they chewed their chicken and Scoot begged for scraps.

My mom was singing softly to herself and flipping
through a gossip magazine. I stacked peas on my fork.

“That Jennifer Aniston really better just face the fact that kids might not be in the picture,” my mom said. “She looks good, but still …”

I ignored her.

“I mean seriously cuckolded. Angelina Jolie. Can you imagine?”

I stared out the window into the garden looking for deer. Once my mom tripped in her high heels when she was running to get her gun to shoot one. She twisted her ankle and had to stay off it for a few weeks.

“Damn deer,” she’d said. “Eating all my flowers and now they’re trying to break my leg, too.”

“Here’re pictures of Angie when she was younger,” she said now. “Do you know she had her lips done? And her nose? But the thing is, her lips were actually bigger! It’s just ridiculously unfair.”

My dad turned up the sound on the TV.

“Jeff,” my mom said. “I can’t hear myself think.”

He shrugged and lowered the sound again.

“May I be excused?” I asked.

“You didn’t eat your chicken,” said my mom.

“I’m a vegetarian, Mom, remember? I have been for four years.”

“But you can eat chicken, right?” She winked at me.

We had this conversation at least once a month. I knew she wasn’t stupid; she was just hoping I’d change my mind.

“No. Chicken is animal flesh. I don’t eat animal flesh.”

“You don’t want to become anemic. The Micheners’ girl Kim, the oldest one? She’s anemic. She only eats pasta. Now she has to take iron pills and you know what they can do to your bathroom habits.”

My stomach churned the pasta and peas. I got up.

“Gross, Mom. I have to go.”

She watched me walk away. “I’m just trying to get the point across,” she said.