Tornado Brain

by Cat Patrick

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  I KNOCKED ON Tess’s bedroom door and when she opened it, I remembered Mia was coming over . . . since Mia was curled up like a cat on Tess’s bed, her curly blond hair tied up in a topknot. She had mascara under her eyes like she’d been crying. My eyes got stuck on that for a few seconds; she wears too much makeup. How much time do you spend doing that every morning? Why would you put on makeup today, if you’re so upset that you’re just going to cry it off?

  “Hi?” Tess asked, pulling my attention back to her.

  “I need to talk to you,” I whispered.

  “Sorry, I’m kind of busy,” she said in a low tone, gesturing at Mia, who was always dramatic. I don’t get why Tess and Colette are friends with Mia. I mean, I guess she is student body president, and always coming up with ways to help students, like campaigning for gender-neutral bathrooms and better lunch options. And she volunteers to spend time with old people. But in my opinion, Mia does things to seem nice when really, she’s not.

  “Just come to my room for two minutes,” I said bossily. “It’s important.”

  Tess sighed and told Mia she’d be back in a second, which made Mia sigh. I’ve noticed that teen girls do a lot of sighing. Cats and dogs also sigh. Pirate is the queen of the dog sighers.

  “What’s going on?” Tess asked, following me next door to my room, which was unlocked because it always is, which my mom doesn’t know. The curtains were billowing in because of a building late-afternoon storm. I turned and faced Tess; she was frowning at the mess all over my floor.

  I thought of telling her about running into the Sea Witch, but for some reason, I didn’t. Instead . . .

  “Colette made the videos Thursday night and she was doing dare-or-scare for sure!” I blurted, the syllables bumping into one another as they fell out of my mouth.

  “What?” Tess asked like she hadn’t been listening. I repeated myself—faster and louder and bumpier. Afterward, she asked, “Why do you think that?”

  “I went to Marsh’s and Kai showed me where Colette stood when she went there Thursday night when she was taking selfies—except she wasn’t taking selfies! She was looking at Jake the Alligator Man and taking a video of herself doing it! It’s the dare where you had to look at something gross!”

  “Wait,” Tess said, confused, “you didn’t tell me that Colette was in Marsh’s.”

  “Yes, I did,” I said, confidently unsure. “Why do you think Kai was at the police station?”

  “I don’t know, but no, you didn’t tell me,” Tess said, confidently confident.

  “Yes, I did,” I insisted. Then quickly I added, so she couldn’t get the airspace to disagree again, “The point is that she made a video of herself staring at Jake!”

  Tess looked like she was thinking, then said, “That does seem like the dare we made . . .”

  “I know!” I said. “That’s what I’m telling you!”

  She tucked her dark hair behind her ear and started biting her pointer fingernail, her eyebrows pulled together. Her eyes are like a mood ring, and today, they matched the overcast sky. “That’s really weird.”

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” I asked, starting to get frustrated. Tess is so soft and delicate about everything that sometimes it seems like she’s not there. I wanted to shake her. “She made the videos we saw on Viewer on Thursday night! We might be able to solve the mystery of where she is if we just figure out—”

  “Solve the . . . mystery?” Tess interrupted defensively, putting her hands on her hips.

  I quickly corrected myself. “I mean we might be able to find her.”

  Tess let it go, but said instead, “Frankie, the videos say they were added to Viewer two years ago.”

  “I know, that’s what Officer Rollins said when I told him. But I think that—”

  “You talked to Officer Rollins?” Tess interrupted.

  “Will you stop interrupting me!” I shouted at her. She wrapped her long arms around her lanky body and pursed her lips. “I know the dates on the videos are wrong! I have a gut feeling that we need to pay attention to them!”

  Tess stared at me for a second, then said quietly, “Frankie, the police are looking for her. They know what they’re doing. And the dates on the videos aren’t wrong.”

  “Don’t you want to just try?” I asked. “Don’t you want to do something other than sitting around with Mia?”

  “Why’d you say Mia’s name like that?” Tess asked, raising her eyebrows. “She’s so nice! What’s she ever done to you?”

  “Are you serious?!” I shouted.

  “Frankie, be quiet,” Tess whispered. “One of the guests is going to call the front desk.”

  I was instantly furious, because Tess knew full well what Mia had done to me. “I don’t care!” I screamed right in her face, standing on tiptoe to do it. Then, like a faucet had been turned on, tears gushed from my eyes.

  “You are such a jerk,” Tess said, stomping out the door but not slamming it, leaving me alone to cry.

  I flopped, face-first, onto my bed and put a pillow over my head so I wouldn’t get in trouble. Here’s an embarrassing thing: the room I live in is double insulated for better soundproofing. My mom tried to have it done without me knowing, but I came home sick from school that day, so I know. Still, I buffered myself with my covers for an extra layer of sound protection because I really didn’t want my mom to bring up going back on medication.

  I don’t need it!

  I screamed over and over into the comforter, high-pitched, piercing my own eardrums. When I couldn’t scream anymore, I continued to cry. Sometimes when I’m sad, all that my brain will think about is other sad things. It’s like it wants to stay in a sad spiral. Today, feeling completely alone and misunderstood, I couldn’t help but think about the day in February when Colette and I stopped being friends.

  Colette, Tess, Mia, and some other girl in their math class were studying for a test. I came back from collecting shells at the beach and walked into my room, intending to go see if the others were done studying and wanted to hang out. The connecting door between my room and Tess’s was open a little, so I could hear their conversation.

  “Where’s your sister?” Mia asked. I froze in the middle of my room, ears perking up.

  “Uh . . . at the beach,” Tess answered, her voice preoccupied. I couldn’t see her but could picture her in her glasses reading her practice test intently.

  “Doesn’t she need to study, too?” Mia asked.

  No, I thought to myself. I know how to do geometry.

  “She doesn’t really study unless our mom makes her,” Tess said. I wanted to creep closer but was afraid the floorboards would creak and announce that I was listening. The door opened and someone else came into Tess’s room and I thought: Great! More people to talk about me!

  “Maybe her tests are just easier,” Colette said.

  “What do you mean?” some girl I didn’t know asked.

  “She gets to take them in a special room with just a couple other kids and wear headphones if she wants.” Colette was spilling my secrets as if they were nothing, which felt like a slap in the face. And she wasn’t even completely telling the truth. I didn’t always take tests in different rooms, just sometimes . . . big tests. And I never used the headphones because gross, who knew how many other kids had smashed their earwax against them?

  “Maybe her class is just easier,” the other girl said.

  I made a face that said: What the heck? No, it is not!

  I could feel the hotness in my cheeks and waited for Tess to stand up for me, to say that no, my math class was not easier than theirs. That my work was exactly the same. That even if I took a test in a smaller group sometimes, it was still the same test that they got.

  I realized I was clenching my fists so tightly that I was diggin
g my nails into my palms. And the conversation didn’t stop there.

  “Can you imagine Frankie taking this test?” Colette went on. “The question would ask her to calculate the volume of a rectangle and she’d write something about her favorite music. Get it, volume? The way she thinks about things is so random.”

  “Don’t forget about her obsession with tornadoes,” Mia said. “She’s a total tornado brain.”

  All the voices that mattered in the world burst into laughter while my heart shattered into pieces. Tears pushed their way out of my eyes and down my hot cheeks; I wiped them away fiercely, so angry and hurt that Colette, my supposed best friend, would say those things. That Tess, my own twin sister, wouldn’t defend me. Blood was pounding in my ears, making me tune out whatever came next. I needed to leave; I couldn’t listen anymore. Silent as a spy on a mission, I left my room and crept away.

  The next day was when I stopped taking my medication—without telling my mom at first. And the next week was when I started skipping my appointments with Gabe and hiding from the specialist at school. I wanted to show them all that I was normal just like them.

  “I’m normal,” I sobbed into my pillow. “I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal . . . I’m normal.”

  Repeating it didn’t help me believe it: it just made the words loop together and sound funny and distract me from my sadness.

  And just like that, the tears stopped.

  chapter 12

  Myth: Green clouds always tell you that a tornado is forming.

  AROUND THREE IN the afternoon, I decided to go out to the beach even though a storm was coming. It wasn’t raining yet and the wind would feel nice on my puffy face. I put a windbreaker over my hoodie and left my room, looking sadly at Tess’s door from the hallway as I went by.

  I crunched across the parking lot, then sank deep into the squishy mountains of sand that made walking feel more like trudging. I didn’t mind, though. With the crash of the ocean in my ears, I was immediately calmer and clearer than I’d been when I was cooped up indoors. At the edge of the water, it was windier without the protection of the dunes and my hair covered my face completely until I turned into the wind. There were dark gray clouds looming in the distance, so gray they almost looked green. Or maybe that was my imagination.

  Inhaling the sea air, I got out my phone and looked through the four videos on our Viewer account again. It was weird that there were only four. We’d done so many dares—and we’d made videos of everything. With those plus the times Colette or Tess had scared each other (I stuck to dares), we should have had way more videos.

  I rewatched the staring-at-Jake video, then the flowers-on-the-porch video. I watched one I hadn’t seen before since it was on the second page of the account. It was a video of Colette singing. Her surroundings looked familiar, but I didn’t know where she was at first. I wished she’d recorded with sound so I could hear the lyrics.

  I made a fresh path of footprints as I watched the videos over and over. When I got to the running-in-beach-grass video the third time, I saw something I hadn’t before: whale bones.

  From where I was standing, I only had to turn my head to the right to see the whale bones display. Up on a bluff, the wood carvings of mother and baby gray whales were supported at their bellies by metal rods buried in the ground so the whales looked like they were swimming above the sand. The wood versions had replaced an actual whale skeleton when I was a little kid, but everyone still called the new wooden display whale bones. I guess the real skeleton was from a whale that’d washed up on the beach one time. Poor whale.

  In the video Colette had made of her running feet, I could see the profile of the mother whale, and the water beyond.

  I went over to the highest point of the bluff, then walked around in wide circles, looking at different angles. Behind me to the right, two police officers waded through the brush under the boardwalk, shining flashlights into the space beneath where a person could be hiding . . . or . . . I didn’t want to think about that, so I focused on the whale bones.

  “This is where the camera was,” I murmured to myself, pointing to the ground.

  There was a rock the size of a cantaloupe to the left side of the path. I wondered if Colette had put that rock there. I pictured her propping up the camera, hitting record, then running by, filming her feet and everything else the wide-angle caught.

  I watched the waves crash, growing feistier with the brewing storm. Every time the sea pulled back, the pipers ran out to try to find food before the tide rolled back in. The seagulls squawked, cars bumped along the sandy roadway, and a family posed for a picture with the irritable ocean as the backdrop.

  I tried to imagine Colette here, running past a camera propped on a rock. I tried not to imagine where Colette was right now, where she’d been all night when everyone else had been sleeping in their warm beds.

  You were out alone without friends or parents—just like the Sea Witch warned me about. A chill raced up my spine.

  “What are you doing?”

  I jumped.

  “Don’t sneak up on me!” I snapped, folding my arms over my chest. Tess had on a red windbreaker identical to mine. Sometimes our mom got things on sale and bought two of them. I kind of liked when we ended up in the same clothes, but I don’t think Tess did.

  “Sorry,” she said easily. That word was harder for me to say than it seemed to be for her. “What are you doing out here?”

  “This is where Colette did the running dare,” I said. “Thursday night,” I added for emphasis; it was still stinging that Tess didn’t believe me. I faced the water and focused on staying calm with the ocean’s help. A piece of my hair tickled my nose; I tucked it away. “I can’t figure out which dare she was doing—since she was alone, it only showed her feet and the background. Maybe it was the one where you had to jump off the dune.”

  “I never liked that dare,” Tess said. “I always worried I was going to get hurt. Or that you guys would.”

  You worry about everything, I thought but didn’t say.

  “Hey, Frankie, I’m not here to fight,” Tess said. “I wanted to say sorry for calling you a jerk.” She reached out like she was going to touch my shoulder but then didn’t. I touched my other shoulder to balance myself out anyway.

  “Okay.”

  “I shouldn’t have said it, especially today, when you got your first—”

  “Okay!” I cut her off. “I don’t want to talk about that. Ever!”

  She nodded, then continued. “I’m sorry for another thing, too. When Mia was in my room, we noticed that my clock was set to the wrong time.” I stared at the ocean; she went on. “Remember that we just had daylight saving time a few weeks ago?”

  “Huh?” I asked. I had no clue what she was talking about. I yanked out a piece of beach grass and started twirling it around my finger. It makes me feel better if my body is doing something, not just standing still.

  “My clock,” she explained. “I guess I forgot to set it forward when daylight saving time happened because I always just use the alarm on my phone. That’s why I said that Colette came to my room at the same time you said she was in yours.”

  “So I was right,” I said quietly.

  “Yes, you were right,” Tess admitted. “And I’m sorry. For both of those things.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. My finger was turning purple from the beach grass wound tightly around it. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me when I make mistakes. I mean, I told the police the wrong time. I could have completely messed them up.”

  “I don’t think it was that big of a deal,” I said, because now that I wasn’t mad at her anymore, I could see that it wasn’t. Sure, I wasn’
t the one who’d made the mistake, but forgetting to change your clock isn’t the end of the world. I wanted to say that to Tess, but I didn’t because I didn’t think she would listen to me.

  She was wandering through the grass, looking at the path.

  “I did get hurt when I did that dare,” Tess said quietly. “I twisted my ankle.” Her mood-ring eyes were more green than gray or gold right then.

  I nodded, remembering. We’d gone to the arcade earlier that day and played air hockey, then squished into the photo booth like sardines. I still had the picture strip somewhere. I’d made silly faces in all four pictures; Tess had smiled the same way in all of them; and Colette had posed like a model, blowing kisses or baring her shoulder.

  “Maybe Colette was doing the dares as a surprise to you or something,” I said. “Like as a funny present.”

  “Frankie, don’t get mad at me for saying this, but the videos are old. They’re from two years ago. I’m sure she was just messing around back then and we happened to see them now.”

  “But she made the one in Marsh’s Thursday night,” I said, breathing deeply to try to keep myself in check. “Kai told me.”

  “Kai told you that she made a video that night, not necessarily that video that’s on Viewer,” Tess said.

  “He said her hair was the same,” I said.

  “She’s worn her hair in knots like that since we were little, Frankie,” Tess said. “The videos are old.”

  If your brain twists and turns like mine, it’s easy to get confused when people tell you you’re definitively wrong. Watching the seagulls struggle to fly in the building wind, I began to question what I was saying. I got out my phone and scrolled through the videos again.

  I noticed something about one of them.

  “Tess!” I said, turning to face her. “Colette’s singing in the gym at school in this one. I didn’t recognize where it was at first, but that’s where it is, see?” I shoved my phone at her, and she stepped in to look.

  “You didn’t show me this one,” she said, taking my phone and watching. “I wish we could hear what she’s singing. I wonder if it’s that song—” Tess gasped, making me jump.