Charm & Strange (18 page)

I try. I can’t wake it. It’s too late.

I scoot back from the edge. Sit on my bare ass. I have to accept the truth in front of my nose. This wasn’t my cycle.

My mind clicks ahead, shuttering into the future. Twenty-nine days until the next full moon. What else can I do but wait? This cycle wasn’t for naught. I know more. I think I was close. Now I understand the strength of the moon. The need to be near to it, to be naked, to find as much wildness within myself as I can, right down to my most elemental parts. That’s where change begins. Power, too. I know that now. I will do this again. I will try harder.

I hear voices. My body starts. I take a quick inventory of the approaching figures. It’s just Jordan and Lex. My surprise at their return is tempered only by my relief that they haven’t brought anyone else with them. I thought they would.

“Do us a favor,” Lex calls. He throws something at me. “Put these on, okay? Sunrise means it’s time to cover your junk.”

I look at the items on the ground. My boxers and pants. I acquiesce and pick them up. I can fool people, but maintaining distance is key. I think I clung to these two last night because of some inner conflict. Inner resistance. Weakness. It is a mistake I cannot afford to make again.

When I’m dressed, Jordan comes over.

“Sit down,” she says.

“Why?”

“I want to tell you something.”

Maybe she wants to tell me how worried she is about me. Or ask if I’m okay. I ready myself for her questions. I will say the right things. I will say the things that will make her leave. The things that will make her not care if I live or die. I’ve done it before.

I can attract, and I can also repel.

As I sit, I glance at Lex. He’s about twenty feet away, standing with his back against a small boulder. He’s looking at his phone.

Jordan and I face the north. We can see nothing but trees.

“What do you want to tell me?” I ask.

“Last night,” she begins, “I wasn’t totally honest with you.”

“Okay.”

“I was drunk.”

“Yeah.”

“But that’s not an excuse, you know? After you left, I was talking with Penn and his friends. They were being total guy jerks, asking me why I dress the way I do, why I haven’t figured out how to get guys to like me, and if I’m some kind of angry, man-hating feminazi.”

“Sounds like typical Penn.”

“So I told him to meet me in the woods. That I’d show him what I know about getting guys to like me.”

I stare at her. “You did that? Why?”

Her face is all pinched and her tired eyes burn hot. “Do you have to ask?”

“Yes!”

“Because I was pissed! Because I wanted to be more powerful than him.”

“But what were you going to do?”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t
know
?”

Jordan folds her arms and leans away from me. “You don’t get to judge me. My choices are mine, okay? I just wanted to say thank you. For what you did. You looked out for me. No one’s ever done that before.”

I blink, confused. I’ve made her mad and she’s
thanking
me?

“Win.”

I glance up. Lex stands before me.

“We need to talk.”

“Oh, okay.” I’m not really listening. I’m still thinking about what Jordan just said. I’m still sort of stunned.

“I mean it.” Lex sounds serious. He has one hand on his hip and his phone in the other.

I nod. “You get reception out here? I don’t.”

He crouches beside me. Slips the phone away. “Stop it, Win. You need to listen to me. Now.”

“Sure.”

“I’m worried about you. We both are.”

I rub my palms on the front of my pants. I feel hot and it’s hard to breathe. “D-did you, like, call somebody? About me?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper.

Jordan reaches out. She places a hand on my shoulder and pushes down with her warm fingers.

The pressure’s too much. I get up and start walking. I think I should go. I think I should get off this mountain.

Lex follows, trotting alongside me. “It’s that guy, that dead guy, right? You think you killed him?”

My stride falters. “M-maybe.”

“Win, you didn’t. Seriously.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I
do,
” he insists.

“
I
don’t.”

Lex grabs my arm, stopping me before I can reach the descending trail. He pulls me toward him.

“Look, I’ve been here, too,” he says roughly. “Okay?”

“Where?”

“Here! Hating myself. Wanting to end it all.”

“You have?”

He blushes. “I think you know that.”

“I guess.”

“I felt helpless then, Win. Hopeless, too. I don’t want you to feel that way.”

“I’m not going to kill myself.”

“But you’ve tried before. When you were just a
kid.
”

“I didn’t try,” I say.

“Yes, you did. You told me. You were going to jump off that bridge. You had a plan.”

A plan.

(Get up, Drew. We’re leaving. I’ll tell you why when we get there.)

“I didn’t try,” I say again, but I feel myself slipping. Why doesn’t he get it? Why doesn’t he get that that’s the whole point? The whole problem? “I changed my mind.”

Lex continues to stare. The look on his face is not easy for me to recognize. It’s too serious. Too tense. Behind him, Jordan gets up from where we sat looking out at the trees. She comes toward us, wiping dirt from her hands as she walks. My heart jackhammers. I don’t know what they’re trying to do. I don’t know what they’re trying to prove, but I’m uncomfortable. I’m more than uncomfortable.

This is painful.

“You need help,” Lex says, and I shake my head. I mean, who could help me? It’s not like people haven’t tried before.

But what is there to say when what’s inside of me is unspeakable?

“You can’t do anything,” I tell Lex, and it’s true. My own mom gave up on me. She’s the one who sent me away to boarding school. She’s the one who said I needed to be somewhere where people didn’t know who I was or what I’d done. I don’t think she was wrong about that.

“Yes, we can. We’re taking you to a hospital. A psychiatric one. Right now. I know where to go. Okay, Win? Everything will be okay.”

Will it?

I find that very hard to believe.

chapter

thirty-five

to the stars

We leave Eden.

We stumble out of the woods.

The bridge appears in the distance.

My past catches up with me.

Ssssnap!

The three of us trudge along the edge of the river. My legs hurt and I lag behind the others. I watch as her small fingers dart out to grab at the blooming vines of jasmine that cluster along the roadside. She plucks the white flowers, one-two-three, then crumples them, scattering the ruined petals like bread crumbs.

Their conversation floats back.

“Why do we have to walk?” she asks, craning her neck to look up at him. “This is taking forever.”

“Because he can’t ride the bus.”

“
He
can’t do anything.”

“Shut up,” I call out.

She ignores me. “How much farther is it?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“That’s my job,” she replies brightly. “I ask questions. You answer them. Every question has an answer, you know.” She circles back to me, worming her fingers into mine, tugging at my hand. I shake her off. She laughs, then grabs for me again, this time snaking her thin arm around my waist. I shiver.

“Stop it,” I tell her.

“I love you,” she says sweetly. Too sweetly.

“Leave me alone.”

She pouts. “You’re being mean.”

I’m not mean,
I think, but then she skips ahead and takes his hand, and my heart flares with something black, like jealousy or ire, and so maybe I am. Mean.

A bridge appears in the distance. A rusted span stretched high above the glassy water.

“Tell me where we’re going,” she says.

“We’re almost there.”

“But what’ll it be like?”

“It’ll be good,” he says. “Better than good. Where we’re going, we’ll never have to grow up and turn into anything we don’t want to be.”

She thinks about this. “Really?”

“Really. Remember the story of Peter Pan? It’ll be just like that.”

“You mean, like magic?”

“Just like magic.”

She nods solemnly. “I like that.”

“Me too.”

“What is there to do there?”

“Well, what’s your favorite thing in the whole world?”

“Favorite what?”

“Anything?”

“Horses,” she says. “Arabian ones. Like the Black Stallion.”

“Then that’s what’ll be waiting for you. Your very own horse.”

“Huh?”

“What’s your least favorite thing?”

She begins to spin in a circle, slow then fast, long hair streaming out with comet-tail force. Her eyes close, very tight, and her pale face fills with lines, like a tiger’s mask.

“Monsters,” she whispers.

He glances at the bridge, then back at me. “Then that’s what won’t be there. No monsters. Ever.”

The spinning ceases. “You promise?”

“Yes,” he says. “I promise.”

chapter

thirty-six

siobhan

I blink.

My eyes sting.

The dawn is too bright.

I sit up and look around. I’m riding in a borrowed car with Lex and Jordan—Teddy’s BMW. We’re winding down the mountain away from the school. Lex fiddles with the stereo while he drives, and the music that comes on is sort of folksy. Sort of sad. It reminds me that he’s from Seattle. Jordan sits beside him in the front. She picks at the buckle of her leather boot. My knees press against the back of her seat. I’m too tall for a coupe.

I’m dazed. I run my hand through my hair. I know where we’re going, but I don’t understand how any of this came about. I don’t understand why they’re doing this for me. They are not my friends. I have gone out of my way to make sure of that.

Getting to Burlington takes over an hour on the interstate, and in Vermont, interstate means a two-lane road. I stare out the window. Lake Champlain sparkles on our left. Great glittering sunrise diamonds dance across its surface as the cool shadows of New York keep watch in the distance.

My head begins to hurt as the road winds and we get stuck behind a truck blowing thick clouds of diesel exhaust everywhere. Jordan realizes what’s going on with me, which I’m grateful for because I can’t talk, but she reaches back for my hand and holds on to it, which I don’t like. She gets Lex to pull over on the side of the road. I kneel in the grass and try really hard not to get sick, but of course I do. Only for the first time no one acts disgusted or scornful.

Jordan and Lex get out of the car with me. I keep my back to them, but I listen to their chatting, their voices full of light and ease. Lex is smoking, and it sounds like Jordan’s found his book of matches. He makes a habit of drawing little faces on each individual match with a fine-point pen and relishes watching the tiny red heads go up in flames when he needs his nicotine fix. Jordan calls him a sadist, which he doesn’t deny, but she’s not bothered by it. I can tell.

I don’t rejoin them right away. I let them talk. Maybe it’s the cadence and timbre of their speech or the meaning of their words. Maybe it’s the way the morning sun cuts the swirling valley mist or the way dew beads across the laces of my shoes, but my heart burns like flames lick ice. I am bound between two worlds. I don’t want to die and I don’t think I can live. How can the same God that created all this beauty have created me?

A stake of wood and a hanging sign tell me the property I’m crouched on is for sale: two hundred acres of countryside. The house sits far back from the road, and the windows have been boarded up. A weathered barn sways with the breeze, rocking gently on its exposed foundation. Beyond that sit woods. I spy a brown wolf with hungry eyes not ten feet away, wriggling beneath the post-and-rail fence. It struggles, haunches churning, forelegs scrabbling at the earth, and then it’s free. The animal drops its head, shakes, then pads into the field without caution. Approaching the tree line, it breaks into a lope, great bounding strides. Its coat shimmers like dripping honey. Then it is gone.

Swallowed up.

Jordan and Lex have their arms around mine. They’re pulling me off the fence because I’ve got one leg over already. They’re talking to me, telling me things, but my ears are filled with a desperate keening, a feral moan. They both pull harder. My shirt rips. I flail back and land hard on the ground.

“Shit!” says Jordan, wringing her hands. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t do this, Win,” Lex says sharply. “Get up.”

I think of Siobhan’s hair fluttering in the wind as she drops, so fast.

I moan again.

There is no turning back.

Jordan crouches beside me. “Can you get in the car? We’re almost there.”

I shake my head very quickly. My eyes sting again, making everything blurry. One of them shoves a water bottle into my hand.

“This is bullshit,” says Lex, despite a shushing from Jordan. “If I have to call the cops to haul your ass to the hospital, then that means I’ll have to dump my stash right here, let the wildlife get high. And I really don’t want to do that, Win. Don’t make me do that. Let’s just go.”

“I saw her,” I say as I struggle to my feet. I want to look back, past the fence, the meadow. Into the woods. I want to, but I can’t. I take a step toward the car.

“Saw who?” Jordan asks.

“My sister.”

chapter

thirty-seven

admission

The emergency room is staffed by air traffic controllers. I get the impression everything is communicated through semaphore. Or telepathy. Because besides the occasional page over the intercom, the place is quieter than it should be. A local television show highlighting fall color and apple picking plays out on one screen. On the other is a movie with Denzel Washington.
The Manchurian Candidate,
I think, which is pretty appropriate considering how the people waiting look hypnotized. Jordan is told to stay with me so I don’t bolt, but really, what’s she going to do if I try? Kick me in the face again? Lex writes my name on an admittance sheet, then comes back with a clipboard and some paperwork. He begins to fill it out on his own.