Freeze Tag (11 page)

“I said when you’re eighty years old and you’re stuck in a nursing home five hundred miles away, you want to hear from your oldest grandson. I’ve written a lot of letters.”

Meghan giggled. West’s face split into the old familiar grin. Oh, she loved him so much! Okay, they were going to whip this thing. Together they were going to knock Lannie out of commission.

“You should have been here at breakfast this morning,” Tuesday told Meghan. “It was so funny. Mom says to West, ‘You can have the car, dear.’ And West says, ‘No thanks Mom,’ because the last thing he wants is to be alone with Lannie yet again. And Mom goes — ‘There’s no such thing as a seventeen-year-old boy who doesn’t want the car. Are you sick? Are you taking drugs?’ So after we make our way through the no-I’m-not-on-drugs conversation, Mom wants to know the truth about why West doesn’t want the car. And the best my stupid old brother can come up with is — it’s tough finding a parking space.”

“Oh, yeah, Mom believed that,” said Brown. Tuesday and Brown burst into gales of laughter. West flushed. Meghan rested her hand on his. It was their only touch. The only touch in so long! He lowered his gaze and seemed to draw comfort from her hand. No doubt it was very different from the one that had been touching him these last weeks.

Tuesday became very businesslike. She did not want this evening to deteriorate into some sort of icky romantic thing. “I think,” said Tuesday, “that you’ve given it enough of a shot, West. Now in the morning, you march up to Lannie and you tell Lannie it’s been fun, but it’s time for you to move on.”

West looked at his sister incredulously. “After what she did to Meghan?”

“It’s worth a try,” said Tuesday.

West shook his head. “She’ll hurt somebody.”

“We’ll keep our distance.”

“She’ll run after you.”

“Don’t be a wimp,” said Tuesday sharply. “You have to let Lannie know the score. Otherwise, this could go on forever.”

Tuesday made it sound so simple. Meghan tried to believe her. That West could just say,
Hey
,
Lan
,
been fun
,
see ya around
,
back to normal now
,
don’t hurt anybody
,
’kay?

“Okay,” said West, nodding, trying to give himself courage. “You’re right. It can’t go on forever.”

Meghan ate a huge breakfast, having skipped dinner the night before. Her mother was delighted. Mothers always loved seeing you eat breakfast. Even though Meghan had fixed it herself, her mother seemed to feel she could take credit for it.

But she was not so eager to go outside.

For this was the morning. West was to tell Lannie to skip off and leave him alone. Leave them all alone.

To whom was Lannie the most dangerous?

Would she turn on West, for breaking his promise? Would she turn on Meghan, for being the one West still wanted? Would she turn on Tuesday, for being the sister who started things?

This won’t work! thought Meghan. He mustn’t do it! Lannie isn’t going to say, oh, well, it was worth a try, have a nice life without me, West! Lannie’s going to attack!

Meghan rushed to the telephone and stabbed at the familiar buttons, to call West, tell him no, no, no, no, no!

She didn’t get past the second number.

West, Tuesday, and Brown were already outside. West had his mother’s car keys in his hand; was unlocking the doors. Tuesday was getting in front — Lannie’s place. Brown was playing Indian and hollering and whooping and generally attracting attention.

Meghan set the phone down gently. She got into her coat. She pulled on her mittens. She tightened her scarf. Perhaps Lannie’s touch could not go through clothing. Perhaps wool or goosedown could save Meghan.

Right, she thought. There is no getting away from Lannie.

Meghan came out her front door.

Lannie came out hers.

The Trevor children looked up Dark Fern Lane, and saw them both.

West, Tuesday, Brown, Lannie, and Meghan all knew. This was a test. The game had reached another level. They looked at each other and, even from her front door, Meghan could feel the heat and the cold, the hatred and the love, the fear and the need.

No one else did.

Two houses up, the rest of the Dark Fern Lane children waited for the buses. There were two kindergartners at that stop, two first-graders, no second-graders, one third-grader. Then there was quite an age skip up to Brown. Lannie intended for Brown to be on that bus, not riding in the car with West and herself.

The little children played in the snow.

They pushed each other down and then got up and admired the dents their bottoms had put in the snow. They swung their lunches and bookbags in circles and let go, so the bright colored containers spun out like trajectiles and hit the others lightly. They laughed six-year-old laughs and made six-year-old jokes.

The third-grader showed off, doing a cartwheel.

The littler ones had no idea how to accomplish such a marvelous move, but they tried. They flung their legs up an inch or two and giggled proudly.

Lannie Anveill walked through them. Stringing her fingers along as if she were hanging laundry on a line.

Perhaps she was.

They froze.

The two kindergartners, the two first-graders, the one third-grader. They hung in their positions like statues.

“No,” whispered Tuesday, who had started this. “No, please.”

Lannie stopped midway between her statues and the Trevors. Directly in front of Meghan’s. Meghan might as well have been frozen. She could not move. Could not think.

“Hi, West,” said Lannie across the frozen yards.

He did not speak. Perhaps he was as terrified as Meghan.

“Your heart is not in this, West,” said Lannie.

He did not move either. Had she frozen him without even touching?

“I want your heart, West,” said Lannie.

There was a thick dense silence.

Lannie’s smile was tiny and yet tall: her mouth opened up and down, instead of sideways, in a terrifying leer.

The five little children remained frozen in the snow. Perhaps their mothers were not looking out the window. Perhaps their mothers thought it was part of a game.

It was.

But not a game anybody should ever play.

Freeze Tag.

No, please, thought Meghan. Not the little children. Not just because I want to be the one at Pizza Hut with West. Set them free. Let them go.

“Lannie,” said West. His head sank down, so that he was looking at his own chest, the front of his own winter jacket. He seemed to lose some of the vertebrae in his backbone, and grow shorter and less strong. His voice scratched. He walked toward Lannie like an old man weighted with stones.

“You have my heart,” said West.

“Y
OU KNOW,” SAID MEGHAN’S
father, “I haven’t seen Jason lately.”

Meghan and her mother were going through the movie listings. Once a month the Moore family had Movie Saturday. Driving to the huge, twelve movie theater that had opened a few years ago, they saw one movie at four o’clock, came out dizzy and pleased, went to have hamburgers, french fries, and shakes, and came back for a movie at seven. During the first movie they had candy and during the second movie they had popcorn.

Meghan loved Movie Day. When she watched a movie, she fell into it. It was completely real and completely absorbing. Even a bad movie was good when you saw it on a big screen. Whereas bad movies when you rented them to watch at home were just plain bad movies.

This month was a toughie: They wanted to see everything. “It’s better than the months when we don’t want to see anything,” her mother pointed out.

“I mean, I usually at least see Jason coming and going,” said Meghan’s father.

Meghan had not been thinking about Lannie for several weeks now. Ever since West had had to go on his knees to beg her to unfreeze the little children at the bus stop, she had decided just not to think about it again. There was nothing she could do. Nothing anybody could do. And as long as Lannie had West, the world was safe.

You have my heart, Lannie, West had said.

Meghan didn’t think about that either. It had sounded so true. You could almost see his heart, that day, red and bleeding and beating. As if he carried it over to her and set it down so she could have it.

Lannie had danced back among the children, as light as an elf on top of the snow. Flying past the little ones, she seemed hardly even to touch them. She skimmed along like a swallow in the sky.

But the children fell over in the snow, real again. There was a moment when they were all close to tears. All close to calling,
Mommy! Mommy come and get me! Mommy
,
something’s wrong!

But the yellow schoolbus had turned the corner, and the children lined up to get on, bickering over who deserved to get on first. Shouting about who would sit with whom. And if they crowded closer to each other for warmth, and if a short, cold memory lay like ice on the backs of their necks, they did not say so out loud.

Nobody had ever said so out loud.

If I’m not thinking about Lannie, thought Meghan, I’m certainly not thinking about Jason.

Meghan tapped on the newspaper column with her bright blue soft-tipped pen. Meghan liked to write in many colors. She liked to underline in vivid yellow. She liked to make lists in black. She liked to address envelopes in red. She liked to take notes in blue. She had written very few letters in her life, but when she considered writing one, she considered writing it in blue, too.

Mrs. Moore said, “This movie is supposed to be a really truly weepy huggy romance. I am in the mood. I want love and loss. I want finders keepers. I want rings and music.”

Meghan’s vow to herself never to think about it again evaporated, as it did, in fact, nearly every day. Sometimes hundreds of times a day.

I want West, thought Meghan. He is all of those. I am going to a movie with my mother and father to watch an actress pretend to be in love with an actor. A month ago, I was the lover. I was loved.

And now …

What was happening now?

“It kind of bothers me,” said Meghan’s father. He circled the kitchen, wanting his women to listen. Say something. Finish up his thoughts and his sentences for him.

Not me, thought Meghan.

At last Meghan’s mother responded to him. “You could go over and check,” she pointed out.

But Mr. Moore and Lannie’s stepfather were not actually friends. They waved over the pavement. They occasionally met in the driveway when each was polishing his car. Once or twice they had each had a beer in hand on a hot summer day and had stood talking.

Jason never seemed to have a part in the life of Dark Fern Lane.

He drove out or he drove in, but he did not drive among.

In fact, now that Meghan thought about it, what did Jason do?

Mr. Moore left the kitchen, and the long white counter over which his wife and daughter had spread the newspaper. He crossed into the living room, spread back the curtains that lay gauzily over the picture window, tucked the fern fronds out of the way, and looked diagonally across the street at Jason’s house.

“There’s Lannie,” said Mr. Moore. “Meggie-Megs, go find out from Lannie.”

Leave the safety of her house?

Walk right up to Lannie Anveill? Who froze children like used clothes for a garage sale?

Get close to Lannie? Who when she was done freezing or unfreezing would set her hand back down? As if it were not attached, but was a purse or a book she was carrying around.

Say to her:
Lannie … we haven’t seen Jason lately
.

“What do you think could have happened to him?” said her mother lightly.

Meghan could think of one thing, anyway. But her mother was not talking to Meghan. Meghan’s fingers tightened. The blue dot beneath her pen spread an amoeba of ink over the movie listings.

“He’s probably just out of town,” said Mr. Moore.

But Jason’s job had never seemed to involve overnight travel. Besides there was Lannie. Would he leave a fourteen-year-old?

Of course, it was Lannie.

It was not as if they were talking about a normal fourteen-year-old.

And yet …

“Go ask Lannie, Meghan,” said her mother.

Meghan did not move.

“I know you’re still upset about West going out with her,” said her father, as if this were pretty small of Meghan; an event so minor her father could hardly believe his daughter even
noticed
when her boyfriend dropped her. “But I want you to ask.”

Meghan was against part of growing up.

There suddenly were times when she was supposed to do the hard parts, when up till now they had always fallen into her parents’ laps. “You ask her,” she said.

Her father sighed a little, shrugged slightly, went to his office, and shut the door.

“It certainly isn’t very much for your father to ask of you,” said her mother sharply. “I think it’s rather unpleasant of you to refuse him such a simple request. He’s worried about his neighbor and you can’t even be bothered to set his mind at rest.”

At rest? Since when did Lannie’s answers set anybody’s mind at rest?

Meghan trudged heavily down the half stairs that divided their raised ranch house in the middle. Most of the families on Dark Fern Lane had replaced the thick hairy carpet that originally covered their stairs. When she was little, Meghan had loved that old orangey-brown carpet, with its loops as thick as an old-fashioned mop. Every house had either orangey-brown or else avocado green. It made even the houses of strangers seem familiar, because you remembered the carpeting so well. The year Meghan was in sixth grade, suddenly no grown-up on Dark Fern Lane could stand the sight of shag. Carpet vans were parked on Dark Fern Lane all the time. Now everybody had sophisticated nubbly champagne wool.

The orange shag had been cozier. Shabby, but comforting.

There was something cold and businesslike about the knots of pale wool.

Plus you had to remember to wipe your feet on the doormat before you came inside, a step everybody had omitted back when they had shag carpeting.