We Won't Feel a Thing

WE WON’T FEEL A THING

by

J. C. Lillis

Published by J. C. Lillis
Find J.C. Lillis online:
Twitter:
@jclillis
Website:
www.jclillis.com
Copyright © J. C. Lillis, 2014
First edition: March 2014
Cover design by Mindy Dunn
Ebook Formatting by
Guido Henkel
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, places, and events is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

For Jarrett

Chapter One

Once there was a boy and a girl with a kingdom in their room.

The kingdom was located on the second floor of a white house with black vinyl shutters, the quietest house on a quiet Nebraska street. It was relatively small for a kingdom—a 16 x 24 room, one side painted blue and the other red—but for the eight years they had lived together, it had suited all their needs. They had glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, eight constellations they’d invented themselves and named things like Gertrude Major and The Petulant Fork. They had a genuine claw-footed tub in their bathroom and prosperous gardens on their windowsills, terracotta pots filled with basil and tea roses and multicolored peppers that looked like Christmas bulbs. They had a whiteboard of creative insults, stacks of books about murderous queens and bittersweet goodbyes, and a sliding mirrored door that was supposed to split the room in two but never, ever closed.

Best of all, they had each other.

Because every kingdom must be protected, the room had a special guardian. It was a six-inch-tall clock: a ceramic mermaid queen and king crowned with seaweed and starfish, their hands in a knot with a whisper-thin crack in the middle. His tail was pale silver, hers a ruddy gold. Press the false pearl in their sculpted sand, and a secret popped up between them—a quarter-sized clock with a tick like an egg timer. The mermaid clock watched over the boy and girl from a sandcastle dollhouse they had built from scratch six years before. They had cut all the doorways extra wide to protect the dignity of the king and queen, who couldn’t help being stuck together and should not have to shuffle sideways to get someplace new.

On this Wednesday in July, at four twenty-four in the afternoon, everything seemed normal in the kingdom. The boy in the blue half was making pictures from bits of broken things. The girl in the red half was making nouns and verbs and adjectives bow to the beautiful rules she knew by heart. But the tick of their clock seemed sharp and stern today. They were seventeen now, almost grown. They’d kept secrets from each other, heavy things they couldn’t hold much longer. The windows were open and the outside world sent in breezes of unfamiliar smells and the low distant hoot of a passenger train. The boy and girl forced happy pictures in their heads, dreamed of faraway places that called their names.

They didn’t hear the old floorboards creak in new places, like the spine of a well-loved storybook about to crack in half.

***

On the blue side of the room, Riley Woodlawn crouched on white butcher paper, trying to tame a tidal wave.

The mosaic was a wreck, at least the left half of it. The wave on the right had been easy—the nips of sea glass and shells had fallen dutifully in line on the three-foot arc of plywood he’d cut with his father’s saw. But the other wave still deviled him. He couldn’t get the gradient right; the hues jerked from cobalt to azure to white instead of climbing from dark to light with the watercolor grace he had drafted in his head.

Riley sighed and swiped his hands on his FUTURE SURFER t-shirt. He’d been working for three hours, and all he had to show for it were coral crumbs caught in his nest of dark curls, a scatter of tiny cuts stinging his fingers, and a POSSIBLY UNTALENTED ARTIST sign blinking on his forehead. He never sketched or measured beforehand; he always trusted that with work and time and patience, the thousands of pieces would mirror the picture in his head. His instincts were off today. The mosaic tongs trembled in his hands; glass shards slipped from his grip and skittered into dark places under his desk.

He knew exactly why.

The envelope locked in his toolbox.

Riley had an extremely unnerving gift to give his best friend today, and the fact that she was twelve feet away on her fake-velvet quilt made his art toolbox practically rattle on the desk. He had decorated the envelope with a drawing he knew she’d love—a sea witch with eight tentacles, one for each year he had known her—but the thought of handing it over still made his stomach boil. He told himself the fear was just one more entry in his Index of Senseless Worries, right after #378 (flash mobs), #379 (brown recluse spiders), and #380 (the dreaded DERT seminar they’d be marched to that afternoon).

She would love the gift. Of course she would. She’d remember their pact, and she’d say yes.

But what if she doesn’t?
ticked the mermaid queen.
What if she thinks you’re a dumbass?

What’s your Plan B?
ticked the king.
Gotta have a Plan B, kid.

Riley narrowed his eyes at the clock, which typically said more supportive things in his imagination. He stole a look at Rachel. She was stretched on her stomach with her pen and ruler, the sun painting gold in her red-brown hair. He could usually read her mood by the way she gripped the pen, by the color and height of her socks (stripy knee socks = good, slouchy gray anklets = bad). Today she was deep-sea mysterious. She pointed away from him, right arm curled around her paper, and her long narrow feet drew languid circles in socks he’d never seen before: red with golden scepters and crowns.

He tossed a glance at his Great Artists in History calendar.

She’s changing,
said the mermaid queen.
Do it now. Before it’s too late.

Everything’s the same,
Riley shot back.
Socks are just socks.

The king and queen tick-tocked in the dollhouse. Midday shadows sketched doubt on their faces.

If you say so.

***

On the red side of the room, Rachel Seton lay on a quilt of gold velvet, diagramming a sixty-word sentence.

She had lifted the sprawling thing from page 473 of
A Blessing of Sand,
one of those humorless brick-thick novels Riley’s mother kept on alphabetized shelves and tried to duplicate at night in her stuffy writing room. It had rattled on for five hundred pages about Sublimated Desire and Thwarted Ambition and didn’t even have the decency to summon a proper ending, just an endless dumb nothing of a scene with the protagonist untying her shoes and tossing one into the sea.

Rachel took revenge now with red pen and ruler, tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose and her choppy hair clipped in a gold barrette shaped like a feather. This was her favorite thing: caging an untamed sentence, pinning down subject and verb, making all the other words fall in line around them. In her poison-red t-shirt and novelty socks, she was merciless and regal. She shot lightning bolts of prepositional phrases from her scepter. She was the spit and image (
not
“spitting image”) of the Grammar Queen mosaic on her wall, created by Riley last year for her Not-So-Sweet Sixteen.

She blinked at the diagram.

She’d connected the principal clause and the dependent clause with a straight line. Not a dotted one.

Rachel sat up and capped her pen—a fancy ivory one engraved with ARTHUR V. SETON, the only thing she still had from her grandfather’s house. Mistakes like these happened to other people, people who used
impact
as a verb and thought
irregardless
was an actual word. Something was very wrong. Earlier in the day she’d been browsing new posts on Grammarfail, and she’d had to stare at a tattoo that said NOTHING LAST’S FOREVER for a full fifteen seconds before she realized what was wrong with it.

She knew exactly why.

The envelope hidden in her nightstand.

Rachel had an extremely significant gift to give her best friend, a gift she’d been hiding for months in search of just the right moment. She had tried to make it look cheerful, decorating the envelope with eight skyscrapers drawn with a fine-tipped Sharpie and a ruler. But the gift still whispered doom from her nightstand drawer, like a modifier she’d left dangling.

She told herself things had changed. The pact was so long ago. Maybe Riley had forgotten it.

Pshh, he never forgets anything,
ticked the mer-king.
He could tell you what you were wearing three Thursdays ago.

You’re giving him a problem, not a present,
ticked the queen.
It’s totally possible you’re going to make him cry.

Rachel glared at the mermaid clock—Bob and Athena, she and Riley called the king and queen. They were unusually nosy and unhelpful today. She ripped her failed diagram in fours and peered across the room at Riley. He was sitting by that tidal-wave mosaic he’d been working on for weeks, the one Trick and Laurie Semper had commissioned for their vow-renewal ceremony. It wasn’t going well. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving slightly, as if he were rehearsing threats.

Rachel’s red crown socks, bought on a rare solo shopping trip while Riley helped Mr. Woodlawn deliver a preserved grizzly cub to the Puckatoe Wildlife Center, began to itch.

Do it now. You’ve put it off long enough.

She removed her glasses, folded them, and stuck the pen behind her ear.

“Hey, weirdo,” said Rachel.

“Yes, weirdo,” said Riley.

“Whatcha doing?”

“Dunno. Auditioning.”

“For what?”

He knocked his head on the wall behind him. “The Failure Olympics.”

“
Really
.” She flopped back on her stomach. “I might enter, too. Where are they this year?”

“Hmm…Pennsylvania? I think.”

“YES. In that creepy ghost town that’s been—”

“—burning underground since 1962.” He grinned. “It’s the most dangerous Failure Olympics ever.”

“Toxic fog.”

“Sinkholes everywhere.”

“Ghosts of angry miners.”

“Did you know there’s like, six people still living there?” said Riley. “For real.”

“That’s insane.”

“That’s their home.” He shrugged. “I think it’s kind of nice. It’s probably so quiet. Your own secret town, all to yourself.”

“So for the record, you’d be totally fine with living
atop a flaming coal mine?”

“If I lived with someone I liked.”

Rachel nodded. She cracked open the nightstand drawer.

“Riley.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s exchange gifts now.”

“I thought you said after DERT.”

“I know. But—”

“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, sure. Let’s do it.”

He pulled a dropcloth over the mosaic and went to unlock his art toolbox, a mahogany case veined with real gold and inlaid with stained glass and mother-of-pearl. Rachel scrutinized him. He usually took longer to make decisions—even simple ones, like when to open a gift—and his left ear was pinkening with worrisome speed. He took out an envelope the size of the funny coupon books he made her every Us Day, the anniversary of Rachel’s arrival in the Woodlawn house.
Coupons
. Why would those make him nervous? She instructed herself to not to speculate. Everything made Riley nervous; the day after Mrs. Woodlawn gave them a lesson on naval battles of the Revolutionary War, he had tugged her awake at three a.m., convinced he was dying of scurvy.

Rachel met Riley in the middle of the room. They sat crosslegged in their nest of throw pillows. Rachel’s heart rattled like her ten-speed on a downhill slope. She tensed and set her chin, like she did before braving a steep new hill, and then she dropped the envelope in front of him.

He cleared his throat. Dropped his in front of her.

“Happy Us Day,” said Rachel.

“Happy Us Day,” said Riley.

“Are you okay?”

“I am. Yes.”

“This isn’t one of your prank gifts, is it?”

“Nope.” Riley’s bare toes curled and uncurled. “Learned my lesson from the ‘YOUR SWEET’ teddy bear.”

Rachel smiled at the scowling sea witch on the envelope. Then she slit it open, unfolded three sheets of parchment, and started to read.

It was a printout of an email from Riley’s Aunt Jerrie—set, to Rachel’s irritation, in a quirky handwriting font. Aunt Jerrie ran a mildly run-down inn on the California coast and made hair accessories in her spare time; the gold feather barrette in Rachel’s hair had been a birthday gift sent in a beaded drawstring bag that smelled of green tea and mysterious spices.

The letter went on for several pages. Rachel skimmed the parts about the artisan soaps Jerrie had bought for the inn and her new vegan chef who
turned quinoa into edible poetry.