by Bryce Gibson
I peeked through the curtain on the door, but didn’t see anything, mail carrier or otherwise. The day was bright and clear. Wolf’s barking, however, was unrelenting. My eyes scanned the yard for a stray cat, squirrel, or anything that could have gotten the dogs so excited. Just as I was about to give up, I saw it... across the road, a dark figure moved among the trees.
It was a person wearing a long, black rain jacket with the hood pulled up. Now, he was staring straight ahead. Toward the house. At me?
With my hand, I felt the deadbolt to make sure that it was locked. I stepped away from the door and eased the curtain down, hoping that I had not been spotted.
Trying to be as quiet as possible, I moved into the living room and stepped closer to the bay window that faced the woods. From there I could get a better look. I pushed the edge of the curtain aside. The man was gone. My eyes darted to and fro in a frantic search. I would feel safer if I knew where he was. Then, from the left, he was on the porch.
I jerked my hand away from the curtain and stepped backward. My feet stumbled over the large rug that was spread across the floor. The corner of the coffee table caught my fall, but there was a loud clatter as everything on the table came down as my ass finally hit the hardwood. Now, it was impossible for him not to know I was in the house. From the floor, I watched as the dark shadow continued to move across the wraparound porch and stopped at the next window.
Wolf scampered across the room, barking at the figure that was on the other side of the glass. Zee was right behind her.
I got to my feet and ran. I didn’t care anymore if I made noise. I bolted up the stairs, nearly tripping over my own feet before I reached the top. Once inside my room, I slammed the door and locked it. I ran to the desk, picked up my phone, and called the police.
BY THE TIME THAT THE deputy got there, the man in the rain jacket was gone.
I was sitting at the kitchen table. The deputy was standing with his back against the counter. “So it was a man wearing a rain jacket?” Deputy Roper had a small notebook and pen. He was taking notes.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve already told you. Just like what I saw the other night in town at the gazebo.”
Mr. Roper huffed, obviously annoyed. “Look, Blake. Unless you’ve been put in any physical danger, I can’t do anything about somebody walking down a public road.”
“He was on the porch,” I explained. “He was wearing a rain jacket. It’s not even raining.”
“Blake, look. It’s Spirit Week. I called the school. Today is Inclement Weather Day.”
Of course. How could I have been so stupid? The fact of the matter was that there were probably countless people walking around the area wearing rain jackets and all kinds of other ridiculous things. The point of the day, after all, was to dress for extreme weather conditions.
The deputy continued. “Heck, I even saw a girl wearing a homemade costume that was supposed to look like one of those ice scrapers that you use on your windshield in the wintertime. She made it out of cardboard. Craziest damn thing I’ve ever seen. Have you ticked somebody off? Or upset somebody at school? I heard that you were suspended for fighting Cade Williston.”
I nodded my head. I saw where he was headed with everything he was saying—it was Cade messing around with me, and by the time that Dad got there, the case had been settled, or at least as far as Deputy Roper was concerned.
“I’m going to head over to the Williston’s,” he told Dad. “I’ll get a statement from Cade about where he has been all day.” The deputy left.
“Blake, whatever is going on with you and Cade has got to stop,” Dad talked in a low, hushed tone. “I can’t keep doing this. It has been going on long enough. First, the night at the brewery, then the fight, and now this?”
I wasn’t ready to tell Lisa about the fact that I would be moving soon, but I wanted to talk to somebody. Under the circumstances, the easiest person to talk to would be Charley17. There was no attachment between us. What was going on in my world had no bearings on his. And after all, the whole reason for him being in my life was to help me. When I logged on, he was already online. He messaged me right away.
HOW’S IT GOING?
NOT GOOD. I JUST FOUND OUT I’M MOVING TO COLUMBIA.
COLUMBIA. WOW. WE’LL BE SO CLOSE!
I wasn’t expecting that. Before I could think of how to respond, I got a new message. This one was a photo. Until then, I hadn’t even known that you could send photos on the site. It took a few seconds for the photo to load. Finally, the whole thing was revealed. It was an old, brick building. Palmetto Apartments, the sign said. The photo was accompanied by another message from Charley17...
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS? WE CAN BE ROOMMATES. IT WOULD BE A BIG STEP UP FROM THE CRAZY HOUSE DON’T YOU THINK?
I flung myself back in the chair so forcefully that the wheels rolled across the floor. The chair didn’t stop until I was a good three feet from the desk. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My hunches had been right—the guy was a creep. Why did he think I would want to live with him? I didn’t even know him. And how did he find out about my time at the mental hospital? All of that was supposed to be confidential.
During those two months I’d insisted that it was my fault that Davey was dead. I told the nurses that I would never let people get close to me again out of fear that they would get hurt. I had hoped that nobody would ever find out about all of that, but he did.
Trying to make sense of all of this, I had another thought—Charley17 was obsessed with me. I was sure of it. Internet stalkers were not that uncommon. Maybe he had been orchestrating things all along, trying to push the two of us closer together. The idea was scary. I knew I had to stop communicating with him before things got even weirder.
I went to the profile on my account and clicked a few links until I found the SETTINGS tab. I hovered the cursor over DELETE ACCOUNT for several seconds before finally clicking the button and sealing my fate. A message appeared on the screen.
THANK YOU FOR READING! YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY DELETED YOUR PROFILE. IF AT ANYTIME IN THE FUTURE YOU WANT TO SIGN UP AGAIN, JUST REACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT BY CLICKING HERE. GOOD BYE.
THAT NIGHT, I DREAMED that I was a werewolf.
With clawed hands, I ripped at my clothes until they were in tatters. My rapidly growing muscles and changing bone structure pushed the pieces of fabric off my sturdy frame. Thick, brown fur covered every inch of my body.
I ran through the night and jumped from one bale of hay to the next. The feel of the cool air on my exposed anatomy was liberating. Eventually, I found myself standing outside of Lisa’s bedroom window. The blinds were open, and I could see her lying in bed, asleep.
It was there, in the glass, that I saw my reflection for the first time. I had large, turned back ears and a long snout that was full of canine-like teeth. My back was slightly hunched, but the size of my pectoral muscles and biceps made up for the bad posture.
I tapped on the window, and Lisa woke. She shoved the blanket aside and stood from the bed. She was wearing a cotton tank top and sleep shorts. She opened the window, and I lifted her up. With Lisa in my arms, I ran.
I didn’t put her down until I stopped at a small pond. Lisa sat on an overturned fishing boat, and I was on all fours lapping at the water. Lisa placed her fingertips on the flat of my stomach. The caress caused my body to flinch, and I stood up straight. Drops of pond water fell from my muzzle onto the top of her head. Finally, she slid her hand lower so that it was just below the slight paunch of my belly.
chapter fourteen
DAD WAS OFF ON FRIDAY, and he planned on spending the afternoon boxing up more things at the brewery.
I had an appointment with Mrs. Reynolds, so I rode with him into town. Dad parked in front of the brewery, and I walked over to the therapist’s office.
At the beginning of the session, I told Mrs. Reynolds that Dad and I would soon be moving to Columbia for his job and that I didn’t want to leave Lisa. I told her ab
out the dream I had the night before of being a werewolf and how I carried Lisa in my arms. I felt myself turning red at the memory of the dream leading up to a happy ending.
“I think, subconsciously, you know that you are ready to change. Your true self, your essence, is wanting to break free. Accepting the past will allow you to move forward. Eventually you will have to face your fear head on.”
I knew that she was right. All of this time I thought that if I let somebody get close I would risk reopening that wound. The only way that I could have a future with Lisa was to overcome the events of the night that Davey died.
Mrs. Reynolds stood from her desk and reached up to one of the highest shelves of the bookcase. When she turned around, she was holding an old, leather-bound book.
She returned to her seat and placed the book on the desk between us. “This is something that a colleague of mine wrote.” She opened the cover and scanned through the Table of Contents. “Here we go.” She flipped to the page that she was searching for. “Look at this.” She spun the book around so that it was facing me.
What I saw on the page was a black and white sketch of a howling wolf. Below the image was an inscription—THE WOLF IS BELIEVED TO LEAD ONE TO JUSTICE.
“Trust your instincts, Blake. You’re a smart young man. I think it would be a good idea to start trying psychodynamic therapy...,” she began.
But I cut her off. “Pshychody-what?”
Mrs. Reynolds laughed. “Psychodynamic therapy. It’s when you revisit a traumatic event and rearrange the effects that those things have on you. It teaches you how to deal with things in a different light. You can’t change what happened, but you can take control of your future.”
What she was saying caused me to remember something. One day, last fall, Davey and I had been hanging out in my room. Morris was home, but by that point he did very little with his days off. He never went out. He hadn’t had a girlfriend that I knew of since Mom died in the car crash. I was no longer helping out at the pool store. Instead, I worked with Davey at Burger Heaven.
“It’s bullshit, you know?” Davey spoke up.
“What is?” I was sitting on the floor, deep in the middle of a book. I looked up.
Davey was standing in front of me. He was holding the Groundhog Day box that Morris had helped me make ten years earlier. “This suggests that we don’t control the things around us. I bet after you made it you just threw it outside and accepted the results as they were.”
He was right. Back then, the entire second grade class had lined up the boxes along the sidewalk in front of the school. At exactly twelve o’clock we went to look. That day, the sun had been bright. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky. Every groundhog saw its shadow—predicting six more weeks of winter.
Davey removed the lid from the box and tossed it to the floor. He dropped the box onto the nightstand and lifted the table lamp. The lamp’s cord pulled across the nightstand’s surface and knocked loose change and a half empty cup of water to the floor. The cord remained plugged in, and it was pulled taught from the wall socket to Davey’s hand.
“We’re the groundhog,” he said. “And this lamp is all the shit that goes on around us.” He held the lamp over the box and moved it to the left and right, up and down. With his other hand, he shifted the box back and forth. “Watch the groundhog’s shadow,” he said.
I did. The shadow changed with each of Davey’s movements.
“If we play things right, everything is in our control,” he said.
Now, in Mrs. Reynolds office, my brain was being bombarded with so many different thoughts and suggestions. Some of them seemed to be at odds with one another, but really, all of it was true.
Some things we can control.
Others we can’t.
The important thing is how we process and act on the things that happen to us.
After the session with Mrs. Reynolds was up, I went outside. The heat of the day was a welcomed change from the frigid temperature of her office. After I met up with Dad, I asked him if he had time for me to get a haircut. He said that he did, and we went across the street to Destiny’s salon. While Dad waited in one of the barber chairs, Destiny cut my hair. It was the first time that my hair had been cut since the spring, and it felt good to have the shaggy mop off the top of my head.
Later, when Dad and I were walking to the car, I told him, “I just want you to know that I’m okay with Destiny going to Columbia with us.”
“I’m glad I have your permission, but I wasn’t going to let her get away. Even old men like me need some action every now and then.”
“Ugh, Dad!”
He laughed and put me in a headlock. “I’m just messing with you,” he said.
I elbowed him in the side.
I knew that the relationships I had with Dad, Destiny, and Lisa were headed in good directions, and I wanted to keep them that way. When I got home, I put the fifth sticker on my progress chart. This one was for maintenance.
chapter fifteen
LISA PICKED ME UP ON Sunday and drove me to her house.
“The ‘rents are going to want to meet you before you’re allowed in my room,” she said. “Daddy’s on the tractor, but Momma’s out in the barn. Let’s go.”
The Tanners lived in a ranch-style house that had been constructed with red brick in the mid-seventies. The property was enclosed with a chain link fence.
Several buildings stood behind the home. One of them was a long shed that was open on both ends. It was where Lisa’s dad kept his tractor.
“By the way, I like your new ‘do.” With her right hand, Lisa ran her fingers through my shorter hair.
We walked beyond the shed and past two smaller buildings that were made of plywood. The neatly mowed yard dipped and curved under our feet until we came to a building that was tucked so far back on the land that it had been out of sight until now.
“Here we are,” Lisa said.
Personally, I would not have called this a barn. A barn was what was at the Williston’s, but this...
The exterior of the building looked like something you could live in. It had tall, metal walls and carefully landscaped shrubs and flowers around the perimeter.
Once inside, I immediately realized that the building’s primary purpose was to store the camper that was parked against the right wall. A large set of double doors hung at the opposite end of the building. It was where the camper could be driven in and out.
“Hey there,” Lisa’s mother spoke from across the width of the large space. She was on her knees with her hands deep in a five gallon bucket. When she stood up straight, I noticed she was wearing a pair of yellow rubber gloves that were covered in something dark and wet. She looked nothing like Lisa. She was tall and rail-thin. Her hair had been cut into a bob.
“Momma, this is Blake.”
The older woman approached and held out her gloved hands toward me. I must have made a face because just a second later she pulled her arms back. “Oh, right, I would give you a hug, but, this...” She waved her right hand in the air and rolled her eyes.
“She’s hulling black walnuts,” Lisa explained. “They’ll stain anything like crazy. Thus, the gloves.”
“Oh,” I answered.
“Lisa’s told me so many great things about you,” her mother said.
The idea that Lisa had been talking about me made me happy.
There was the sound of an approaching tractor. The throttle shifted down, and the tractor stopped. A minute later Lisa’s father was walking through the door. Just like the last time I had seen him, he was wearing a flannel shirt and cap.
He held out his hand to me. “Jacob Tanner,” he said. “It’s good to finally meet you, Blake. I’ve been seeing you around. Lisa told me you’re still trying to decide on where you want to go to school.”
“Yes sir, I’ve been looking at a few.”
“What do you think you might want to do for a living?”
Other than helping out at the pool s
tore, the only job I’d had was the one at Burger Heaven in Ridge Spring. “I’m not really sure,” I told him. “I’ll probably just go in undeclared and decide from there.”
After a few more minutes of small talk, her parents went back to what they were doing, and Lisa and I went in the house.
Lisa’s room was clean and girly. The bed was covered with a white comforter that had gray flowers printed all over it. A zigzagging line of lightning bugs was painted around the wall.
“They glow in the dark,” Lisa said and flipped the light switch.
The room went dark, and each bug glowed a bright, fluorescent green. “It’s glow-in-the-dark stars,” she explained. “I stuck one on the butt of each and every bug.”
Without turning on the light, Lisa moved to the desk that was pushed against the window on the opposite side of the room.
“Let me show you what I’ve come up with.” She powered on her laptop. “Have a seat.” She kneeled on the floor in front of the computer and patted the office chair next to her.
I sat down. I was expecting to see, at the very most, an edited and captioned photo of Cade that was ready to be posted on social media, but when Lisa opened the file, I was shocked at what was on the screen.
There was a photo of a road with a blank billboard, bright orange construction barrels, and a sign—Williston Plaza. Another picture was a close-up of the billboard. Next to all of this was a seemingly endless series of letters and numbers that I recognized as being HTML code that was often used for creating internet content.
“I figured out how to hack into the billboard at the Williston shopping center.” Lisa tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and a new file opened up. It was the photo of Cade and Tristan from the hunting camera. Lisa clicked on the image and dragged it to the billboard where it fit perfectly within the frame.
