Freeze Tag

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Lannie chuckled.

  She rocked back and forth in her little pink sneakers, admiring her frozen children.

  Then she went home.

  The soft warmth of evening enveloped Dark Fern Lane. No child shrieked, no engine whined, no dog barked. The air was sweet with the smell of new-mown grass. All was peaceful.

  Mrs. Trevor came to the front door and called through the screen. “Game’s up! Come on, everybody. One cookie each and then it’s home for bed.” Mrs. Trevor was accustomed to obedience and did not stay to be sure the children did as they were told; of course they would do as they were told.

  But only the fireflies moved in the yard.

  Meghan’s eyes were frosty.

  Her thoughts moved as slowly as glaciers.

  As if through window panes tipping forward, Meghan saw Lannie leaving the yard. Lannie was happy. Meghan knew that she had never before seen Lannie Anveill in a state of happiness. Her smile shone on Meghan, as she lay crooked and stiff on the grass.

  Time to go in, thought Meghan. Her expression did not change, her muscles did not sag. Her mouth was still twisted in fear, her eyes still wide with desperation.

  Time to go in! thought Meghan.

  But she was frozen. Time was something she no longer possessed and going in was something she would no longer do.

  Lannie stepped down off the curb, contentedly glancing back at the statues of Brown and Tuesday. She headed for her house.

  Mrs. Trevor came back to the screened door. “I am getting annoyed,” she said, and she sounded it. “Everybody up and get going, please. I’m tired of all these grass-stained shirts. Now move it.”

  She returned to the interior of the house. The lights and music of the Trevors’ living room seemed as distant from the dark yard as Antarctica.

  Lannie stood invisibly in her own front yard.

  The dark swirled around her and Lannie, too, went dark, her usual ghostly paleness pierced by night as it had been pierced by sun.

  After a few minutes, she walked back across the street. Gently as a falling leaf, Lannie brushed the rigid shoulder of West Trevor.

  West went limp, hitting the ground mushily, like a dumped bag of birdseed. Then he scrabbled to his feet. He shook himself, doglike, as if his hair were wet.

  Meghan wanted to call out to him, but nothing in her moved. When he walked forward, she tried to see where he was going but her eyes would not follow him. Her neck would not turn.

  “Come on, Brown,” said West to his brother. “Come on, Tues.” His voice was trembling.

  Brown and Tuesday stayed statues.

  “You guys are freezing so well I can’t even see you breathe,” their brother said. A laugh stuck in his throat.

  “They’re not breathing,” explained Lannie.

  West sucked in his breath. He stood so still he seemed to have been tagged again. In a way, he was. Lannie had placed him in that tiny space after understanding, and just before panic.

  Through the frost over her eyes, Meghan saw Lannie’s smile, how slowly she reached forward, savoring her power, being sure that West understood. Then, making a gift to West, Lannie touched first Tuesday and next Brown.

  Tuesday whimpered.

  Brown moaned, “Mommy.”

  “I froze them,” said Lannie softly, as if she were writing West a love letter.

  Meghan could see her own hair, sticking away from her head without regard to gravity, carved from ice.

  “I can do it whenever I want,” said Lannie. She seemed to be waiting for West to give her a prize.

  West, Brown, and Tuesday drew together, staring at Lannie. In a queer tight voice, as if he had borrowed it from somebody, West said, “Undo Meghan.”

  Lannie smiled and shook her head. “I hate Meghan.”

  Tuesday began to cry.

  West knelt beside Meghan, putting his hand on her shoulder, Meghan did not feel it, but there must have been pressure, because she tipped over stiffly. Now her eyes stared at the stems and mulch circle of one of the beginner-bushes.

  I will be looking at this the rest of my life, thought Meghan Moore. This is what it’s like in a coffin. You stare for all eternity at the wrinkles in the satin lining.

  “Meghan?” whispered West.

  But Meghan did not speak.

  “Lannie,” whispered West, “is she dead?”

  “No. I froze her. I hate Meghan. She gets everything.” Lannie chuckled. “Look at her now. No blinking. No tears. Just eyeballs.”

  West tried to pick Meghan up. Her elbows did not bend and her ankles did not straighten. “Lannie! Undo Meghan.”

  “No. It’s Freeze Tag,” said Lannie. “So I froze her.” She turned a strangely anxious smile upon West. “Did you see me do it, West?”

  They were too little to understand boy-girl things, and yet they knew Lannie was showing off for West. He was a boy she wanted, and she was a girl flirting with him, the only way she knew how.

  And West, though he was only eleven, knew enough to agree. “Yes, I saw you. I was impressed, Lannie,” he said carefully.

  Lannie was pleased.

  West wet his lips. He said even more carefully, “It would really impress me if you undid her.”

  “I don’t feel like it,” said Lannie.

  Meghan stayed as inflexible as a chair, as cold as marble.

  West took a deep breath. “Please, Lannie?” he said.

  West, the strongest and oldest on the street, the big brother who could mow lawns, and baby-sit on Saturday nights, had to beg. Brown and Tuesday were both crying now.

  “Well …” said Lannie.

  “Promise her anything,” said Tuesday urgently.

  The only one who knew that West must not promise Lannie anything was the one who could not speak.

  Meghan, alone and cold and still, thought: No, no, no! Don’t promise, West. Better to be frozen than to be Lannie’s!

  The Trevors stood in a row, the three of them as close as blankets on a bed.

  “You must always like me best,” said Lannie.

  “I will always like you best,” repeated West.

  Lannie smiled her smile of ice and snow.

  She touched Meghan’s cheek, and Meghan crumpled onto the grass. A normal child, with normal skin, and normal breathing.

  “Don’t forget your promise, West,” said Lannie.

  They had been whispering. When the screen door opened so sharply it smacked against the porch railings, the children were badly startled and flew apart like birds at the sound of gunshot.

  “I am very angry,” said Mrs. Trevor. “You will come in now. West, why is the lawnmower not in the shed? Do you think Freeze Tag comes before responsibility?”

  Lannie melted away.

  Meghan got up slowly, sweeping the grass cuttings off her shorts and hair.

  “Don’t tell,” whispered Tuesday.

  Nobody did tell.

  Nobody would have known what to say.

  Nobody quite believed it had happened.

  They never did talk about it.

  Not once.

  Yard games went into history, like afterschool television reruns.

  When Meghan grew up, and remembered the yard games, her memory seemed to be in black and white, flecked with age. Did we really play outside every night after supper? she asked herself.

  Meghan could remember how it felt, as the hot summer night turned cool in the early dark.

  She could remember how it looked, when fireflies sparkled in the dusk, begging to be caught in jars.

  She could remember how it sounded, the giggles turning to screams and the screams turning to silence.

  But they never talked.

  Were their memories frozen? Or were their fears hot and still able to burn? Did they believe it had happened? Or did they think it was some neighborhood hysteria, some fabricated baby dream?

  Meghan never knew if Tuesday remembered that brief death.

  She never knew if West woke in the night, cold
with the memory of Lannie’s icy fingers.

  She never knew if Brown was slow giving up his thumb-sucking because he remembered.

  The only thing she knew for sure was that the neighborhood never played Freeze Tag again.

  But Lannie …

  Lannie played.

  Chapter 1

  FOR HIS SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY, West Trevor was given an old Chevy truck. It was badly rusted, but this made West happy. He was taking courses at the auto body shop and would rebuild the exterior himself. The engine ran rough, but West was happy about that, too; he had had two years of small engine repair and, although this was no small engine, he ached to use what knowledge he had, and bring that Chevy truck back to strength.

  Over the years, Dark Fern Lane had achieved its name. In the deep backyards near the shallow, slow-moving creek, bracken, ferns, and bittersweet had grown up in impenetrable tangles. Mrs. Trevor would not let West leave the truck in the driveway because it was so repulsive, and there was not room for it in the garage, so he drove it down the grassy hill and parked it at the bottom among the weeds and vines. From his bedroom window he could admire its blue hulk and dream of weekends when he would drive it to the vocational school shop and work on it for lovely grimy greasy hours on end.

  Sometimes West just stood on the back steps of the house and stared down into the yard. “You can’t even see your truck from here,” Brown would point out. But West didn’t care about that. He knew it was there.

  West liked almost everybody. He was not discriminating. He thought most people were pretty nice. He preferred the company of boys, and next to rebuilding his Chevy, the best part of his life was managing the football team. He wasn’t big enough to play, but he was crazy about the sport. Fall of his senior year in high school, therefore, was spent on playing fields or in locker rooms instead of working on his truck.

  Football season would be over after Thanksgiving weekend.

  West spent a lot of time thinking about what he would do next on his truck. He read and re-read his extensive collection of Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Car and Driver. He thought he was the happiest guy in town. He thought his life was perfect and it never occurred to West to change a molecule of his existence.

  But something happened.

  West Trevor fell in love.

  He fell so deeply, completely, and intensely in love that even the truck hardly mattered, and football seemed remote and pointless.

  What amazed West most of all was that he fell in love with a girl he had known — and hardly noticed — all his life.

  Meghan Moore.

  Meghan Moore, of course, had been planning this moment for years.

  Girls always think ahead, and Meghan thought ahead more than most. Meghan had worshipped West since she was eight. I’m fifteen now, thought Meghan. That means I’ve spent half my life adoring the boy next door.

  It seemed perfectly reasonable.

  West had grown broad, rather than tall. Meghan was crazy about his shoulders and had spent all last year imagining herself snuggling up against that broad chest.

  This year she was doing it.

  Sometimes, cuddled up against West, her long thick hair arrayed across him like a veil, Meghan would feel the joy rise up in her chest and throat, and envelop her heart and mind. She would actually weep for love of West Trevor.

  Furthermore, West was dizzy with love for her. West could not go down the school hall without detouring to her corner, and waving. (Making, said his brother Brown gloomily, a complete idiot of himself.) West could not have a meal unless he was sitting beside her. West could not be near a telephone without calling her. West could not sleep at night without slipping through the privet hedge that had grown tall and thick between the houses, running in the Moores’ back door, and kissing her good night.

  The only thing better than having a terrific boy in love with you was having the entire world witness it, and be envious, and soften at the sight.

  Meghan was the happiest girl on earth.

  Mr. and Mrs. Moore were not sure they liked this situation.

  Meghan’s interests had previously been confined to music. She was in the marching band, concert band, and jazz ensemble. She played flute and piccolo. Since she planned to be a band teacher when she grew up, she was now studying other instruments as well: trumpet, and the whole noisy range of percussion.

  The entire neighborhood had been forced to follow Meghan’s musical progress. There were those who hoped Meghan would attend a very distant college. Mr. and Mrs. Moore were tremendously proud of Meghan and were sure she had abilities far beyond teaching high school band. They expected her to be first flutist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and cut records, and be on television.

  They were not thrilled that West Trevor was cutting into Meghan’s practice time. With much difficulty (they had to look out the window or down at the table instead of at their daughter) they gave stern talks on sex, babies, AIDS, and life in general.

  Meghan nodded reassuringly, said the things she knew they wanted to hear, and went ahead with her own plans.

  Two houses away, the Trevors had other things to worry about than West’s love life. Tuesday and Brown, so delightful and compatible as small children, had become extremely difficult teenagers. Mr. and Mrs. Trevor were worrying pretty much full-time about Tuesday and Brown. They could not imagine where they had gone wrong. Tuesday and Brown’s being horrible was very gratifying to the rest of Dark Fern Lane, after having had the perfect Trevor family held up in front of them all those elementary school years.

  West, at seventeen, with his driver’s license and his good grades and his busy life, was their success story.

  Still, his mother was not sure she liked the intensity of this relationship with little Meghan Moore. “He’s only seventeen,” West’s mother would say nervously, as if she thought West and Meghan were going to get married when she wasn’t looking.

  It wasn’t marriage that worried West’s father. He chose not to say what he had been doing with girls when he was seventeen. He thought it was just as well that the Chevy truck was not in good enough condition to drive farther than the vocational school repair bays. He tried not to laugh when he looked at his son. He had never seen a boy so thoroughly smitten.

  Young love, thought West’s father, smiling. There’s nothing like it.

  Meghan herself had everything: two parents who lived together and loved her, neighbors who included her, a boy who worshipped her, and a school in which she was popular and successful.

  Meghan did not analyze these things. She did not ask why she was so lucky, nor worry about the people who were not. She was fifteen, which is not a particularly kind age. It’s much better than thirteen, of course, and greatly superior to fourteen, but age sixteen is where compassion begins and the heart is moved by the plight of strangers.

  Meghan was fifteen and her world was West and West was world enough.

  Nobody knew what Lannie Anveill thought.

  And nobody cared.

  Meghan danced down the hall to West’s locker. In the shelter of the ten-inch wide metal door, they kissed. Then they laughed, the self-conscious but wildly happy laugh they shared. Then they held hands and admired each other’s beauty.

  “I’ve got Mom’s car for the day,” said West.

  They were airborne with the thought of a front seat together.

  Meghan slid the strap of her bookbag over her shoulder. West slid his over his opposite shoulder. They wrapped their arms around each other’s waists, and slowly made their way out of the school.

  Every girl daydreams of a boy so in love he can’t bear spending time away from her. There were a thousand boys in that high school and maybe ten had ever behaved like this. The girls watched West watching Meghan. They ached to be Meghan, to have West, to be adored like that. They saw how his hands and his eyes were all over her. How he was thick in the clouds of his love.

  West did not see a single girl except Meghan.

 
Meghan, of course, saw all the girls, and knew exactly how envious they were, and got an extra jolt of pleasure from it.

  Lannie Anveill fell in step with them.

  Meghan could not believe it. There were certain rules of etiquette, and one was that you did not join a couple who were linked body and soul. Meghan glared at Lannie to make her go away, and Lannie glared right back. Meghan flinched. She had forgotten the power of Lannie’s eyes. They went too deep.

  West remembered his manners — he had fine manners; sometimes he stood behind his manners like a safety rail — and said cheerfully, “Hi, Lannie. What’s up?”

  Lannie stood still. She was still thin and wispy, looking little older than she had when they had played yard games. It was a little spooky, really, the way Lannie did not age. As if she would bypass all that tiresome human stuff of stages and ages. Her bleached-out eyes passed straight through Meghan and came out the other side.

  Meghan, lovely in casual plaid wool pants and clinging dark sweater, felt stripped. As if Lannie did not see clothes. Only interior weaknesses.

  Lannie discarded Meghan from her sight. She focused on West. Sternness left her. Hostility left her. With unusual softness, Lannie said to him, “It’s time.”

  Meghan felt a strange tremor.

  West smiled politely. “Time for what, babe?” He called girls who did not interest him “babe.” He did not know how much this annoyed them.

  “You remember,” said Lannie.

  West considered this. One of his nicest traits was being serious when being serious counted. Not every seventeen-year-old boy had figured out how to do this. “Remember what?” he asked her at last.

  “Your promise,” said Lannie.

  Something cold shivered in Meghan’s memory.

  West was blank. He said, “Am I taking everybody to a movie or something? Sorry, Lannie, I’m a little off-center today.” He pulled Meghan close, to demonstrate what put him off-center. “Remind me, babe.”

  Lannie tightened like a bow and arrow. “You must remember!” she whispered so hotly she could have lit a match with her breath.

  West frowned. “Ummm. Lannie, I’m sorry, I’m not sure what we’re talking about.”

  “Give us a hint,” said Meghan. From the lofty position of Us — she had a partner, she had a boyfriend, she was a pair — she could look down on Lannie, who was alone and unloved and unpaired. It was more comfortable to be scornful than to be scared. So Meghan looked down on Lannie, and it showed.