by Eden Beck
I look at him as he holds out the pen and paper and waits for me to take it from his hand.
Then, without another moment’s hesitation, I jump.
At first, I hear the screams of everyone standing behind me at the top of that cliff. Even the worker at the faire lets out a surprised shout along with a few choice curse-words.
But then all I can hear is the sound of the wind in my ears as I’m falling. The longer I fall, the more the wind starts to howl; until it starts to sound like an actual howl. The noise no longer sounds like rushing air. Instead, it sounds like the painful cry of a wolf.
One of my wolves.
My heart races and my eyes flick open against the stinging air. I feel like I’m alive again. For the first time in weeks … that little flicker of something I felt at the top of the cliff, it lingers longer than a brief moment.
It sticks in my throat, races down my spine, rushes through my head.
I feel fear.
But at least I feel something.
I don’t even notice the smack of my body as it hits the water and I plunge beneath the surface. For a minute, I don’t know which way is up and which is down. It doesn’t matter though, because I can still hear it. I can hear the howl, even from beneath the water.
It echoes in my ears where for weeks, for over a month, there’s been nothing but silence.
When I resurface in the water, everyone is down at the edge of the embankment. I must have stayed under longer than I realized, even though my lungs don’t burn the way they should. The attendant from the faire takes a cautious look at the rocks around the edge of the river before he jumps in to come and pull me out as Tom just stands there dumbfounded. Behind him, Jess and Aimee look like they’ve been freaking out.
This isn’t the first time they’ve worried they lost me to the river.
The attendant insists on hooking one arm around my waist and dragging me back up onto the ground, even though the currents here aren’t actually strong enough to sweep me away—even with my own poor skills as a swimmer. He wraps me in his jacket and swears as the faire’s manager appears at the edge of the crowd to ask if he needs to file an incident report.
“I’m fine,” I say as I try to brush everyone off me. “I want to do it again.”
“Hell no,” the attendant who dragged me out says. He finally finds a blanket to replace his jacket, which he wraps around me as he starts explaining to his manager how I refused to sign the waiver and then just jumped off without the cord affixed like a crazy woman.
Jess starts crying and laying into the manager about the faire being dangerous and I can see the manager’s headache beginning to form. He pulls a wad of free ride and drink vouchers out of his pocket and hands them to Jess.
“Here,” he says. “Please use these to enjoy yourself at the faire for the rest of the evening.”
“We’re not even old enough to drink,” she says, still looking visibly upset like this wasn’t somehow my own, purposeful doing.
But then why would it be?
It had to have been an accident. It had to have been the attendant’s fault.
He must have explained something wrong. He had to have told me to jump … right?
Right?
Even the boys who were taunting Tom earlier look eager to get away. All that brazen bullying is gone, replaced with worried glances as they slip off into the dispersing crowd.
“No problem,” the manager says, handing Jess another wad of drink tickets and trying to back off himself. “Consider it all on me tonight, so long as you keep your friend away from the cliff.”
Then he looks at me. “Just stay away from here. We can’t have a girl go killing herself at my faire.”
“Cool,” Tom says. Unlike everyone else, he isn’t too fazed by any of what just happened. He’s more focused on the free beer he’s about to drink. “Let’s go check out that rickety roller coaster. Think those guys will still give me two hundred bucks if I convince them to let me ride it?”
Jess and Aimee nod in agreement but they don’t seem too thrilled about the roller coaster. I think they just want to get anywhere that’s not right here by the water’s edge. I get up to my feet and let the blanket drop. I’m drenched to the skin and I can’t get the sound of the howl out of my head.
Just the memory of it brings back the rush of falling.
I know I heard it.
I know it wasn’t just the wind.
“You guys go ahead,” I say. “I’m going to head home so that I can dry off.”
“That sounds like the first sensible thing you’ve said in weeks,” Aimee says, all her nonchalance from earlier swept away in the river water I’ve just been pulled from.
When I get home, my mother is curious about how in the world I got soaking wet in the middle of winter at the faire.
Even then, however, she doesn’t pry too much.
Not when she sees what I’m doing.
She just stands there and watches me as I stick all of the things that once belonged to the boys in a box and then shove the box into the small cabinet behind the stepladder. Kaleb’s hoodie is the last thing to go into the box.
The last thing I do is pull my calendar down off the wall and stare at it for one long moment. I had been crossing out the days until the eclipse, counting down until Kaleb’s big event.
It’s only two weeks away now.
I don’t see the point in keeping track of it anymore.
I shove it into the trash can with a satisfied huff. Mom wants to ask me what my sudden cleaning frenzy is about, I can tell by the look on her face, but she seems happy enough that I’m actually doing anything besides acting like a zombie, so she keeps her mouth shut about it and goes back to making soup on the stove.
“I’m going out,” I say to her as I grab my own hoodie. It isn’t as thick as Kaleb’s, but I have to shove that thought aside.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
I don’t know.
All I know, is that I can’t stay here right now. The memory of them still lingers.
The old them. The old me.
“To see what kind of trouble I can get into,” I say. Mom laughs at my joke, and for what feels like the first time in ages, I smile.
I wonder if she would still be laughing if she knew it wasn’t a joke.
18
Sabrina
The cordless bungee jump is just the beginning.
I spend the next few days being anything other than myself. I seem to have a new affinity for being reckless. I find the tallest tree that I can climb and stand on the highest branch, letting the snow fall against my face as I closed my eyes. I even take both my hands off and balance for as long as I can before I finally sit back down. Lucky no one saw that stunt; they would have me committed.
That or any one of the other half-dozen things I find to make myself feel.
I climb rocks without a harness.
I wander further into the forest than ever before, following paths marked by the footprints of feral beasts.
Unfortunately, in a town as small as North Port, distractions of this nature are surprisingly hard to find. At least, for someone my age and without a car.
I soon grow bored with climbing trees and jumping into rivers.
I start to skip school again in search of distraction, except for a day that I show up to one or two classes but don’t really participate in anything anyway. One of the teachers tells me that if I don’t do some sort of extra credit work that I’ll be in danger of not passing, so I begrudgingly sign up for an extra credit assignment at the school science assembly.
Lucky me.
As soon as I get to the auditorium—meaning the cafeteria with the tables pushed up against the wall and folding chairs placed in rows in their place—I feel the itch to leave. This would have been the perfect time to slip away, to go find something better to do. Something that would ease the aching numbness that’s once again spread throughout my entire body.
Th
e task is to be the “guinea pig” for a low-voltage electric experiment in which I am going to get shocked by one of the nerds in the science club. The boy responsible for it, Roland, is actually a really nice guy and much less socially awkward than I had expected him to be once I talk to him.
“It’ll just feel like a shock of static electricity,” he says as we get ready for his portion of the presentation. “Nothing harmful. In fact, it might even tickle a little bit.”
I’m barely paying attention, my eyes searching the sliver of crowd that I can see for any sign I might still be able to slip out afterwards. But then he takes out the machine, pulling it from some locked janitor’s closet behind the stage, and my interest piques.
“Can you adjust the voltage on this thing?” I ask as I play around with his makeshift controls. The machine, although very rough and not exactly aesthetically pleasing, is quite impressive. It’s all wires and dials and very primitive looking metal plates attached to coils. Even though it isn’t on yet, I can already imagine electricity arcing above it … into me.
“I could,” Roland, says, “but obviously I won’t.”
“Why not?”
He looks at me like he’s looking at me for the first time. Really looking at me.
“Because … because then it might actually hurt you.”
His name gets called to come on stage and I follow behind him as he carries out his machine in his hands, glancing back at me one more time with a look of uncertainty on his face.
As Roland’s facing the audience and explaining his experiment, I turn the voltage up on his equipment and then stand in front of it, positioning myself so that he can’t see what I’ve done.
“You can stand back a little,” he says after he turns back to me to start the experiment.
“I’d like to stand up here a bit closer to the audience,” I say, feeling the rush of eyes as they fall on me. “I am, after all, part of this show too.”
He rolls his eyes at me and gives me the classic “why do popular kids have to be so much work” sigh. Too bad I’m not popular enough to make it a valid gesture. Certainly not now that the boys are gone. Now that they’ve abandoned me.
“Whatever,” he says. “I just need the remote anyway.
With one final sentence to the audience, he directs all of their attention to me and to the effects that they should see on the screen that he’s hooked his laptop up to.
“Ready?” he asks me.
“Fire away,” I say. I’ve never been zapped with electricity before.
Before today.
I don’t have too long to think about it before I feel a rush of voltage go through my body. The sensation is wild, almost like the burning that happens when you swallow hard liquor too fast down the wrong pipe. Except with this, it feels like the sensation is going through every vein in my body.
There are a few gasps in the audience as the people react to seeing my body quiver with the bolt of electricity and the data on the screen jump up.
Roland’s brow furrows, something about the reading on my screen and the reaction. He leans over to me and whispers something about how I don’t need to be such an overly dramatic actor.
“This isn’t about you,” he whispers, “you’re not actually going to get hurt.”
I don’t care enough to correct him.
All I can think about is wanting to feel it again.
“Do it again,” I say, and then when he hesitates, add, “Scientists never just do things once, right?”
That, and the stares of the expectant audience, seems to resonate with him because he goes ahead and gives me another zap. This time I writhe against the chair, my hands clutching at the arm rests until my knuckles go white. I think even he is impressed by how much the experiment is working.
He glances over at the electrical readings again, muttering something into the microphone about how he’s going to have to make some adjustments. That the electricity levels aren’t really that high.
The laugh that ensues is a little nervous. Unsettled.
Like me.
“Again,” I say, louder this time. “Go again.”
Driven by my own wild eyes and the faces turned towards us, he does as I ask.
Every zap sends that scorching feeling through my veins and I can even feel it in the muscles in my face and behind my eardrums. I think that it’s causing a weird, high-pitched vibrating sound in my ears, but then I recognize that sound again.
It’s a howl.
A faint, unnaturally high-pitched howl that sounds like a wolf in pain.
“Do it again,” I say even louder this time. “Do it for longer this time.”
Roland looks at me as if I am being slightly masochistic, but once again he’s caught up in the expectant stares all around us, and he goes ahead and does it again. This time he holds the switch down longer until the howling in my ears is deafening.
“That’s enough,” he says as he sees the results on the screen start to look a bit questionable. “I don’t know why it seems to be hitting you so hard, but I think it’s time to stop.”
I hear what he’s saying.
I’ve proven that my experiment works, and you’ve done your part to get your extra credit.
But I’m not done yet.
I grab the remote from his hand and hit the switch again. When I do, the surge of electricity makes me drop the remote to the ground, jamming the switch in its engaged position.
He reaches for it and tries to pull it back up, but it’s stuck.
Then he looks up to see the voltage knob that he can now see from behind me as the electricity starts to make me lean a little bit out of position. Roland’s eyes open wide, but he remains frozen to the spot.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the science teacher who’s overseeing the assembly catches sight of his look and immediately dismisses the audience to go back to their classes.
“Show’s over,” the teacher says, hurriedly rushing up onto the stage. “Hurry up and go before you’re all late to class.”
The two of them grab all of the wires and cords and unplug then until the entire machine shuts down. As soon as it does, the howling in my ears abates.
The tingling pain rushes in as it leaves, making me double over in my chair as the curtains are quickly drawn in front of my face.
“What the hell was that?” the teacher asks my electrocutioner as he storms back up onto the stage after switching off the electricity just to be safe. He takes a closer look at the machine and balks. “You could kill a person at those levels!”
“I didn’t set the voltage to that level,” Roland explains to the teacher. “I swear sir, I had it set to the lowest voltage possible!”
“Then how did it get there?” the teacher asks as he points to the voltage selection.
Roland turns to me.
“She must have changed it,” he says, accusatorially.
He’s right, of course. I did.
But the teacher just glares at me in disbelief and lets us both off with a warning so long as we get off his stage … now.
Roland whirls on me as soon as we’re out of earshot and demands I never speak to him again.
I couldn’t care less. I just wanted more of that feeling. I wanted to hear the sound of wolf calls in my ears or in my head, or anywhere.
Still, it’s somehow not enough.
On my walk home from school, I stop in the convenience store.
I realize as soon as I go to check my loose change that I accidentally left my wallet at home, but once again, a thought that would usually make me balk makes a thrill race through me instead.
The owner of the store has always been really nice to me, so I kind of feel bad about what I’m about to do.
But this growing feeling inside me outweighs my guilt.
I say hello to the owner as I walk inside the store and then wait for him to busy himself with some restocking before I attempt to shove a soda bottle into the pocket of my hoodie. I do it quickly, then walk
around the shop a bit more and pretend like I’m looking for something that isn’t there.
I feel more sick than thrilled.
There are a couple other people in the store too, so it’s not as if he can keep eyes on what everyone’s doing at once. The longer I linger, the more guilty I feel … but it’d be too obvious to slip the soda out now.
Still, despite that guilt I’m supposed to be feeling, I do get a small feeling of exhilaration as I shoplift the two-dollar soda and start walking toward the door. It’s not as big of a thrill as the other things I’ve done lately, but it’s still something.
“Don’t have what you’re looking for?” he asks as he sees me getting ready to leave.
“Nah, not this time,” I answer as casually as I can manage.
He wishes me a good night as I slip out of the door, my prize still neatly tucked away.
I’ve done it. I’ve gotten away with it.
Or so I think until I look up into Tom’s face gawking at me just outside the door.
“You know, I would have bought you the soda,” Tom says after glancing at the door now swinging shut behind me. “But with the way you’ve been acting out lately, I figure it’s not the lack of money that’s making you do this shit.”
Speaking of shit …
Shit.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say as I keep walking on the path toward home.
“Yes, you do.”
Tom follows right along with me as I walk and keeps pace beside me.
“I know what that’s like,” he says as I try to walk faster and ignore him. “That need to feel. The need to feel just about anything as long as it’s something.”
I stop and turn to look at him in surprise.
I must have a fearsome look on my face, because he takes a half step backwards and holds up his hands in surrender.
“I have a better idea than shoplifting,” he says. “Meet me at the outskirts of the woods tomorrow night at midnight.”
“And why would I do that?” I ask, narrowing my eyes at him.
“Because me and a few of my friends are having a bonfire and I promise you that if you come, there will be something there that will make you feel more alive than stealing two-dollar sodas.”
