Teen Phantom

by Chandler Baker

  When I arrived with Lena at her first-period class, I was feeling more clearheaded, and I didn’t think it was just my coffee-that-was-not-a-pumpkin-spice-latte kicking in. I was able to put myself at ease that surely Lena wasn’t spying on me and realize that just because I made one friend didn’t mean I needed to give up the other. Lena stopped before heading into her homeroom. “Chris,” she said, “I’d like to take you somewhere after school. Is that okay?”

  Surely that wasn’t as creepy as it came across … was it?

  TEN

  Lena

  After school, I peered out the windshield of my stumpy VW Bug and into the Hollows, the name of the forest that bordered Hollow Pines. It was a wall of furry trees and gnarled branches that roped this town off from the next. Chris beside me, I drove along a road that hadn’t been repaved in decades. The potholes always made the underbelly of my car scrape against the corroded cement—a sound that sent chills up the backs of our necks simultaneously.

  Even before we crossed the tree line, the air had grown considerably darker and as we drew closer, the sun dipped below the treetops and out of view. Trunks began to stretch into a ceiling of pine needles. The cracked bark looked like scales and dry skin when we rode past. And the space between us turned a wavering and untrustworthy brown-gray.

  I eased my foot onto the brake pedal, and the tires settled into a rut.

  I couldn’t make out Chris’s eyes behind the lenses of his glasses, which flashed with the shapes of trees, thin light, and shadows. He leaned forward, scrunching his nose to look up into the towering canopy that cocooned us inside the forest.

  “Where are we, Leroux?” His voice was hushed and reverent. The woods made me feel that way, too. Like I had stepped into a fairy tale, only the Brothers’ Grimm ones more so than Disney’s.

  “We have to walk the rest of the way,” I told him. “But don’t worry, it’s worth it. Even for a city boy.” I didn’t like to smile much, but I smiled for him and meant it because I had all the best hiding places and this was by far my best.

  I climbed out of the car. The smell of damp earth was overwhelming. The noise, too. The surrounding trees let out a cacophony of chirping crickets and rustling leaves that was disorienting in its everywhereness. “Are you sure you know where we’re going?” Chris asked as he pushed his door shut. Though it was still afternoon, the sky inside the forest was getting darker by shades.

  “I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. Trust me.” I glanced once over my shoulder to make sure he would follow. I high-stepped in my boots through the brush and bramble of the woods.

  Chris was as stealthy as a herd of buffalo behind me, so I always knew he was close without having to check. I listened to the sound of his heavy breathing.

  “You know it’s kind of cold out here,” he said, blowing into his hands. “We didn’t have nature like … like this back in New York City.” His shoes crunched the sticks beneath his feet. “I mean I once saw a cluster of people taking pictures of a raccoon eating trash in Central Park like it was an endangered species.”

  The path was only visible if you knew where to look. It wound through trees and low bushes. Soon, we’d traveled to the part of the forest where the bed of pine needles on the floor formed a cushion on the ground soft enough to silence our footsteps. Nobody could hear us coming, nor could we hear anyone else, either, if there was anyone else around to hear.

  “Go—ouch. Damn!” Chris caught his foot on the rotting remains of a stump. I stopped and looked back just in time to see him catch his balance before tripping partway into a blackberry bush. He brushed the leaves and smeared fruit from his sleeve. “I meant to do that.” Dimples formed on either side of his mouth. “Hey—cool—is that it?” He pointed over my shoulder where a cabin had, indeed, materialized from out of the woods.

  Never had I brought anyone here before. Not even Marcy.

  I put my hands on my hips, feeling a glow of confidence. He’d used the word cool. I’d heard it. “Worth it, right?” I said, admiring the cabin.

  “You’ve really outdone yourself. The rafters, now this.” He nodded. “You really know your way around this town.”

  A stone porch green with moss wrapped around the front. Stacked logs, imperfect and hewn straight from the trees, made up the walls that sloped into a stone chimney covered in vines. Thick tree trunks acted as posts around the front doorway.

  Because there were no steps up to the porch, I hiked up my skirt and lunged aboard it. Chris did the same, only without the skirt part.

  A layer of pollen streaked the windows, growing most concentrated at the corners where it obscured the view to the inside. I slid a key from the top of the doorframe and jiggled the rusty lock before the door creaked open.

  It was velvety dark on the inside and smelled of sawdust and stale smoke. The floorboards groaned underneath our feet. I crossed the room and after some knocking about, found the lantern. It cast a soft glow over a long, pine table.

  “This was my grandfather’s old cabin.” The light flickered over Chris’s face, shadowing his cheekbones. “He’s dead now. Got a brain tumor that made him super mean at first and then kept making one of his eyeballs bulge out of his skull. Nobody comes here anymore except me.”

  Chris walked slowly, admiring the handiwork of the uneven beams that were holding up the roof. “Did he build this place?” There was no polish to the floors and in places they even felt as if the wood beneath us was sloping at an angle.

  “With his own two hands,” I replied.

  “Crazy. That’s not really a thing in New York. The whole cultivating your own plot of land.” It was unbelievable to me sometimes, too. My grandfather’s hands had been calloused and cracked. He’d hammered every nail in this place. It was the sort of place that felt just a little bit alive, as though, if you stood perfectly still, you might see the walls breathing.

  Chris reached a spot on the wall on which two pegs held up an ax, blade down. “Decoration?” he asked, looking closer at it, reaching out to touch the sharp edge.

  “It’ll chop off your fingers clean through the bone if that’s what you mean.”

  He jerked the hand back that he’d been extending. “Right.” He gave it a reproachful look.

  “Cider?” I asked.

  “When in Rome, I suppose.”

  I pulled out a matchbox, scratched the head of a match on its side, and dropped the flame into the grates of a gas stove. Fire shot around in a ring, glowing blue and then orange and then red. I poured a can of cider into a pot and stirred it around with a wooden spoon retrieved from a drawer. After a couple of minutes, I divided the contents between two mugs, and after checking each for spiders, sprinkled cinnamon on top.

  “The damp can turn your skin clammy,” I explained, handing him one of the steaming mugs. “That’s what’s making you cold. This will help.”

  “Cheers, then,” he said, and we both took a careful sip.

  The liquid burned my tongue. I enjoyed the numb sensation left over by it. I liked my tea hot and my showers scalding. It was the only way I felt clean, the only way I felt warm even sometimes.

  “This makes me feel like a kid again.” Chris’s eyes traveled the ceiling. His hands clutched tightly around the mug. “Like we’re exploring.”

  “I don’t think you have to be a kid to do that.”

  I was so used to silences I wasn’t sure how long ours lasted, only that I enjoyed the sense of sharing it. The warmth of another body in the cabin was all at once thrilling and healing. It was a confession without words. It was like cutting open our palms and pressing the blood together.

  And then he said, “Lena,” in just the right way and I knew that he felt it, too. I expanded like a hot air balloon. “Have I ever told you the reason why I’m here?” he asked abruptly. Every particle in me metaphorically leaned in to hear his secrets.

  “No.” My teaspoon went click click click against the sides of the mug. “Hold on. I want to see your face.” I rummag
ed through the drawers for a couple of candles and lit the wicks. I handed one to Chris and, together, we moved to the two rocking chairs on the other side of the mantel.

  Chris rested the steaming cup on his knee, and I curled up opposite from him, rapt with attention.

  “First and foremost,” he began, “you should know that I’m an idiot.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said, reflexively.

  He pushed up on his toes, so that the chair tilted back, and raised an eyebrow in defiance. I relaxed because I could see that he was only partly serious. “But that’s just one reason,” he continued. “The other was Eden.”

  “Who’s Eden?” A breeze trickled through a space in the logs and flipped strands of hair across my nose. My mouth filled up with spit, that was how much I wanted to hear his secrets. Because so few people told me the things I wanted to hear so willingly.

  “She’s … the other reason. It’s mortifying, really.”

  I picked the stray strands of hair off the bridge of my nose. “You can tell me anything.” I took another sip of cider. Its too-sweet flavor curled my lip.

  “Shit, okay. I’m trusting you, Leroux.” Nobody in the world ever called me that except for Chris Autry, and each time he said it I felt a needle and thread sewing him into my heart. “There was this girl, Eden. She was a year older than me with this long, shiny black hair that reached down to her hips. And it wasn’t just the hair—she was always wearing things that looked cool on her but would look completely ridiculous on anyone else. Feather boas, head scarfs, purple lipstick, that kind of thing. Eden loved guys who wore polished Ferragamo shoes and didn’t completely clam up every time they tried to talk to her, go figure.”

  “But—but I love the way you dress.” I wanted to jump up like a lawyer in a courtroom. Objection! Chris wore black jeans and sneakers whose brands I’d never heard of. He was the most fashionable person I’d seen in real life.

  His smile tweaked into a half grin before quickly disappearing. “Thanks. But obviously, she never gave me the time of day. I was a certified nobody compared to her, or at least as far as she knew.” He held up a hand. “I know, by normal standards, my dad has a pretty cool job, but at my private school, unless your mom is president of a major network or your dad is involved in a political sex scandal, nobody really cares. It’s a weird world.” I tried to imagine a place like that. Here, if your dad owned a car dealership, you might as well be royalty. My dad did nothing at all, and it translated perfectly. “Anyway, looking back on it now, it all sounds so stupid. I hardly even knew her. But for whatever reason, I was crazy about Eden. I gave her a whole personality in my head. I made her into a thing that I wanted. I kept thinking if only she’d notice me, if only I weren’t invisible to her, then she’d realize we were meant to be together. Together-together.”

  I watched him over the rim of my mug; I watched as he was unlocking doors into his soul only for me. I would remember every word he said. I would care. He was asking me to care. And I would. I would do it so well. He had my undivided attention.

  “So,” Chris continued, “as soon as I got my driver’s license, I got a job working at a valet stand for a fancy restaurant. My dad was against it, but my mom thought it wasn’t a bad idea. Something to keep me grounded. It was an okay job. I spent most of my time running, which got me in decent shape, and the tips were good. Well, this one particular night, I knew Eden was going to a club opening nearby. And as luck would have it, a customer dropped their Ferrari keys right in my hands. I was barely sixteen. What was he thinking? Honestly, I don’t take full responsibility, because if you’ve never had Ferrari keys in your hands, you should know that it’s a little intoxicating.” Chris closed his eyes, remembering. “The car was so red it looked as if the paint on it hadn’t even dried yet. And when I sat down on the world’s softest leather with the thrum of an Italian super car underneath me, I couldn’t help it. I went all carpe diem.” He peeled one eye open to look at me. “For the record, carpe diem is really crap advice to give to a teenager. How about, ‘Sleep on it, have a think, and it will all be clearer in the morning.’ Why not that advice? I guess it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.”

  “You wrecked it.” I gasped, my stomach twisting like crushed car metal at the thought of Chris in an accident. So much could have gone wrong.

  He shook his head. “I wish. In the middle of my great, big seize-the-day madness, I drove straight over to the club, pulled up to the curb, and when I spotted Eden, I told her to get in like the stud I thought I was. To my credit, she did get in.”

  “Then what?” I ran a finger over the edge of the mug, back and forth, back and forth.

  “Then … we drove a couple of blocks, my hands always at ten and two, might I add, because I was scared out of my mind that I was going to crash the thing and for the record I wasn’t having any fun at all. It took about seven minutes before I got pulled over by a cop. It turned out I didn’t know how to turn on the headlights.” He groaned at the memory. “I got nailed with a ticket and caught joyriding. The guy that owned the car didn’t press charges, but he threatened to. I cried in front of Eden, and you know what she did?”

  “What?”

  “She rolled her eyes.”

  The steam had stopped rolling off the top of my cider. “That’s awful,” I said, and I meant it. I could pick out the villain in any story, and I knew Eden was it.

  “It’s stupid. The big act of rebellion of my teenage years that got me sent clear across the country was headlights. Headlights!”

  I weighed how to feel about this because without this great act of rebellion, however small or large, Chris never would have wound up in Hollow Pines with me. I tried to search for a path in the story where I could want the best for him, but be content with the way things had played out. “At least they were a Ferrari’s headlights,” I said.

  He shrugged, conceding this. “My dad sent me packing straight to my aunt and uncle’s here in Hollow Pines. It was a dick move if you ask me. I was a decent kid before. He thought I was getting into a bad crowd because I dressed differently than he did when he grew up, but I swear I wasn’t. Anyway, he said if I screwed this up the next stop would be military school, and trust me, my dad is not a man that bluffs.”

  “Don’t then!” I sat up straight.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Get sent to military school.” I eased back into my chair though I was still agitated. I knew military school was the threat, but the thought of Chris being taken from me, it couldn’t—I wouldn’t let it—happen.

  “Oh. Yeah. That. Don’t worry. I’m on top of it.” He took another sip of the cider, and I tried to feel assuaged by his confidence. “See, given the well-documented nature of my idiocy, I’ve boiled it down to three rules for success: One”—he held up a finger—“no girls. Two, no fast cars, and three, absolutely no trouble.” He lowered the three fingers back into a fist. “Simple, right?”

  I whispered the rules under my breath, memorizing them. One, no girls; two, no fast cars; and three, absolutely no trouble. One, two, three.

  The cabin flickered in the light of the lantern and the candles beside us.

  “Simple enough,” I said, my tone earnest. Chris had told me these for a reason. Since he’d arrived, I had noticed the Tetris blocks of my life clicking into place—snick, snick, snick. Fate and purpose rolled into one.

  He fidgeted in the wooden chair. “Yeah, but, there’s something different about the girls in Hollow Pines,” he finished. My eyes darted up to meet his, searching for the meaning. “Have you noticed that?”

  I swallowed, an image of Marcy, her eyes cutting through me between the slats of glass at an insane asylum.

  Hollow Pines would never have fancy people or stand at the cutting edge of anything, but it was a tiny universe that stood on its own, miles on all sides, its walls seeming to shrink in at the worst times to bend us and break us and leave behind jagged shards of aftermath. Broken girls would always look a bit different,
I guessed, at least when they began putting themselves back together.

  * * *

  MISTY WAS WAITING for me when I emerged from the bathroom the next morning. She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe while the hot water from the still-steaming shower rolled fingers of fog out past her. I clutched my bag of toiletries tight to my chest to hold my towel up.

  After the hair incident, Misty had picked up a habit of scratching viciously at her scalp, then picking bits of dandruff from underneath her nails.

  “You think I don’t know what you done to my hair?” she said.

  To keep from itching, she had curled her phony nails crisscross over her forearms and she gave a little shrug like it wasn’t a big deal. It had taken her nearly a week to suspect me, seven days longer than expected for me to incur her wrath. But she had the mean, dogged look of a pit bull and I was in a towel and I didn’t feel as ready for consequences as I should have.

  “I didn’t do anything.” The lie shined through so that I knew if somebody X-rayed me they could have seen the words of it right there beating beside my heart. My eyes flitted to the burnt ends of Misty’s hair, made worse by the fact that she kept trying to straighten the leftover blond stubs of it with a flat iron.

  Misty had taken this household hostage like a cancer spreading out into its vital organs. Despite whatever rent money my dad claimed she was bringing in, it seemed like Misty was always home and he was always out drinking, except in the morning when I could hear the snoring floating through from his room.

  She nodded, slowly, and it dropped the temperature in the room by degrees. She may have been a version of that particular brand of Hollow Pines girl all grown up, but the growing-up part counted for something. Meanwhile, I was trying not to cower while dripping cold water from the ends of my hair onto the carpet.

  “Just remember I know where you sleep, darlin’,” she said. “So I’ll give you one more chance, Lena, love.” She patted me on the head. I stood stock-still. “You can either be on my side or you can be against me and I done promise you don’t want to be against me.” She turned and flipped her hair, reminding me so much of a Hollow Pines cheerleader that it gave me double vision.