Canary was all alone in the middle of the streamer-strewn dance floor, dead fish at her feet, hair and dress soaked with the reeking sea.
I didn’t go to her.
I walked away.
I don’t even remember doing it . . . I just melted into the crowd and the next thing I knew I was sitting in my car by myself, listening to Philip Glass and feeling nothing but relief.
That was all I cared about, right then.
The next day I got another note in my locker.
Nook. Now.
She was waiting for me, sitting on the old sofa, light green blouse, plaid wool skirt, gray socks pulled up to her lower thighs, frizzy hair sticking out six inches from her cheekbones.
“I want to show you something,” she said.
Nothing about the dance, nothing about what happened, nothing, just nothing. She knew it was Scout who threw the pail. It was all over school. They were whispering it in the halls. She must have heard.
And me. I didn’t defend her when it happened. I didn’t tell Scout to stop. I didn’t do anything.
But she’d forgiven me anyway.
Scout thought Canary was weak and pathetic, and she hated her for it. Scout didn’t forgive people. She was proud, and aggressive, and stubborn. And she liked being that way.
But Canary had strength too. It took strength to be quiet. It took strength to be kind. It took strength to let other people’s cruelty bounce right off of you.
I dropped down to my knees beside her. I kissed the skin of her right leg where it met the gray sock. I stroked her calf with my palm. I pulled off her shoe and ran my thumb underneath her toes.
She reached into her backpack and pulled out a little homemade book. Thirty pages, stapled together. It was filled with drawings—her drawings—all dark, thick lines, spooky and haunting.
“It’s the story of a sad girl and a sad boy who accidentally stumble through a magical door into a wonderful parallel world. They fall in love. But when one of them goes too far, and tries to take their love back into the real world . . . it dies.”
I looked through the illustrations.
Two figures, one tall with a dimple and wavy hair, one a gangly blond with glasses, both kissing in front of a crashing sea.
Two figures reading a book in a one-sail boat, a group of seagulls leaning in, listening to the story.
Two figures on the sand, sharing a night picnic under a starry sky.
Two figures swimming underwater, holding hands, schools of tiny fish surrounding them like stars around the moon.
× × ×
“I’ve got it.” Scout pointed at a sign by the side of the road. “We’ll put her in the churn.”
We all turned and looked.
DEVIL’S CHURN TRAIL
Carved into a rectangular sign, illuminated in the headlights.
Mr. Dunn’s truck was barely out of sight, just going around the next curve . . . going . . . gone.
“We have a witness.” Scout stared down the empty road. “We can’t just leave her here and we can’t put her in my car. I’ll say we hit a deer. It will explain the dent, but it won’t explain blood on my seats or a corpse in the trunk. Look, she’s already dead. What does it matter now? We have to put her in the churn.”
The screaming, wailing Scout on her knees in the road was gone. Just like that. The Straight-A Scout was back.
Devil’s Churn was a rock-lined inlet that used to be a sea cave, until the roof collapsed. And now it was a tourist attraction. The waves hit it so hard the spray touched the stars.
“Someone else could come along any minute . . .” Grace looked from the Devil’s Churn sign, to the empty highway, to Canary. Her face was wet. From rain, from tears.
“There’s no time, there’s no time.” Scout was the one pacing now. Back and forth between the sign and Canary. “She’ll be banged up beyond recognition. If they even find her body. People fall into the churn every year, they’re eaten up by the waves and never seen again. Asher, pick her up. We’ll carry her there. PICK HER UP.”
Asher shook his head, fast and hard. “No. I’m not doing it, Scout.”
Scout screamed. But it was different this time. Head back. No panic, no fear. Just frustration.
I saw them. Headlights gleaming down the curve behind us, only a half mile away, no time, no time . . .
I shoved Canary’s smashed glasses in my pocket, leaned down, slid my hands underneath her, lifted, lifted . . .
And then she was in my arms.
Head hanging back, frizzy yellow hair swinging. Her face looked naked without the nerd frames.
Her eyes were closed. I didn’t know if they would be.
There was no blood. Not on the car. Not on her. Not anywhere.
“For fuck’s sake let’s just get this done,” I said.
And they followed me, across the road, to the trail. It was narrow, paved, covered with overgrown ferns and wild azaleas and rhododendrons and completely hidden from the highway.
Down.
Down.
The ocean got louder.
Louder.
I heard a car go by on the road. Then another.
I wasn’t big and meaty like Asher, but Canary weighed nothing in my arms.
Her neck still felt warm on my skin. Her knees were tucked into the crook of my right elbow. They fit perfectly. Her skirt had ridden up, and I could see the pale skin of her thighs.
I heard it. The waves of the churn.
Crash.
Crash.
We went around a corner, hugged a rusty railing. And there it was.
The waves were white in the moonlight, and spitting mad.
Note in my locker this morning.
Meet me at Devil’s Churn after sunset. I’ll wait for you by the side of the road.
I’d planned to go. I’d wanted to go. And I wasn’t going to tell Scout this time, so she could laugh and laugh afterward, hanging on every detail. No. Just me and Canary. Out of the nook. Out in the real world. The two of us. No one else knowing.
And then Scout said we were going to Portland to party . . .
. . . and I forgot. I forgot about the churn. And Canary.
She’d waited for me for hours. For hours.
“Do it, Theo.” Scout looked at me. Her eyes were inky black. Sad. Unflinching. “Just do it,” she shouted, ribs stretching beneath her brown T-shirt, lungs straining against the howling of the sea. “Don’t think about it. Just put her in.”
“Don’t do it, Theo, don’t do it. Please don’t do it.” Grace was crying again. Asher put his arms around her and she huddled into him and kept crying. “Don’t do it, you’ll regret it, you’ll regret it . . .”
I went up the rim. Toes on the rock edge. I looked down, over Canary’s body. Thirty feet to the water. The waves were cruel. Brutal. The spray hit my face and it was sharper than the rain. Little wet knives.
Did I imagine it?
Did I imagine the flicker?
It could have been shadows, playing across her eyelids.
Did I imagine the feel of her fingers, gripping my shirt?
It could have been the wind.
Did I imagine the sudden beat beat in her neck, cradled in the bend of my arm? Did I imagine the sigh? The breath that fogged up into the cold sea air?
I threw her in.
I put Canary in the churn.
I put her in, and watched her fall, all the way down. I watched until she disappeared into the white fluff.
I reached into my pocket, got out the black, chunky glasses, and threw them in after her.
× × ×
Scout and I split up, after the churn. She never went to Harvard. She was driving back from Portland a few weeks later and her car spun out of control on the same stretch of road where we hit
Canary. She went over the edge, sensible blue Toyota Corolla, rocks, waves, gone.
Asher snapped a vertebra his first game at Austin. He’s in a wheelchair now.
Grace dropped her class ring down the garbage disposal while doing dishes. She reached in with her fingers to fetch it out, stretching . . . stretching . . . almost there . . .
Her hand was a useless, mangled mess. She’d never be a surgeon.
I didn’t go to Italy.
I moved to Portland, and took art classes at a community college. I didn’t make any friends. People avoided me. I had nightmares. I kept dreaming of Canary, kept lifting her up and throwing her in Devil’s Churn, over and over again. I screamed in my sleep and my roommate complained and moved out.
I quit college after the first year. I live in a rat-infested cottage on Widow Lane now. It’s small. You could almost call it a nook. I don’t make much money, doing janitorial work at the Wolf Cove Aquarium. I can’t afford any of the nicer apartments closer to town. And besides, I need to walk the beach. I need to watch the waves.
They never found her body.
Sometimes . . . sometimes I get this idea that she’s still going to wash ashore. She’ll look the same, exactly the same, just like the day I threw her in, the cold ocean preserving her like fish packed in ice. She’ll float right in, right here at the foot of Widow Lane, where she used to live.
Sometimes I walk through the waves, knee deep, and I can’t tell if it’s the seaweed tickling my calves or her blond, blond hair.
Her grandfather died soon after she went missing. She was all he had.
I paint. Sea things. Waves and caps and crests and breakers and tides.
And I paint the beach. Over and over. Stormy sky, long stretch of sand, empty except for a naked girl with black, glassy eyes and yellow hair, long as seaweed, down to her toes.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I think she’s lying next to me, her hair spread out on my chest, her soft breaths going in and out like waves hitting rocks, shush, shush. I talk to her and she talks back, but her voice is different now, not breathy like it used to be, but deep, and distant, like the sea is pressing on it.
I’ve stopped eating fish. I see them at the seafood market in Wolf Cove. The salmon and the bass and the tuna. I look into their slippery, beady eyes . . . and I wonder if they saw her, swimming, down there in the dark. I wonder if she ran her small fingers down their scales as they swam by.
I wonder if she’s going to come back. I wonder if she’s going to come get me and drag me into the water with her.
Sometimes . . . sometimes I think I want her to.
Did I imagine it?
The flicker?
The fingers?
The beat?
The sigh?
Did I?
FAT GIRL WITH A KNIFE*
JONATHAN MABERRY
-1-
She had a pretty name but she knew she wasn’t pretty.
Kind of a thing with the girls in her family. None of the Allgood girls were making magazine covers.
Her oldest sister, Rose, was one of those college teacher types. Tall, thin, meatless, kind of gray-looking, with too much nose, no chin at all, and eyes that looked perpetually disappointed. She taught art history, so there was that. No one she taught would ever get a job in that field. There probably weren’t jobs in that field. When was there ever a want-ad for art historian?
The sister between Rose and her was named Violet. She was the family rebel. Skinny because that’s what drugs do; but not skinny in any way that made her look good. Best thing you could say about how she looked was that she looked dangerous. Skinny like a knife blade. Cold as one too. And her moods and actions tended to leave blood on the walls. Her track record with “choices” left her parents bleeding year after year. Violet was in Detroit now. Out of rehab again. No one expected it to stick.
Then there was the little one, Jasmine. She kept trying to get people to call her Jazz, but no one did. Jasmine was a red-haired bowling ball with crazy teeth. It would be cute except that Jasmine wasn’t nice. She wasn’t charming. She was a little monster and she liked being a little monster. People didn’t let her be around their pets.
That left Dahlia.
Her.
Pretty name. She liked her name. She liked being herself. She liked who she was. She had a good mind. She had good thoughts. She understood the books she read and had insight into the music she downloaded. She didn’t have many friends, but the ones she had knew they could trust her. And she wasn’t mean-spirited, though there were people who could make a compelling counterargument. A lot of her problems, Dahlia knew, were the end results of the universe being a total bitch.
Dahlia always thought that she deserved the whole package. A great name. A nice face. At least a decent body. A name like Dahlia should be carried around on good legs or have some good boobs as conversation pieces. That would be fair. That would be nice.
Failing that, good skin would be cool.
Or great hair. You can get a lot of mileage out of great hair.
Anything would have been acceptable. Dahlia figured she didn’t actually need much. The weight was bad enough; the complexion was insult to injury. But an eating disorder? Seriously? Why go there? Why make it that much harder to get through life? Just a little freaking courtesy from the powers that be. Let the gods of social interaction cut her some kind of break.
But . . . no.
Dahlia Allgood was, as so many kids had gone to great lengths to point out to her over the years, all bad. At least from the outside.
No amount of time in the gym—at school or the one her parents set up in the garage—seemed able to shake the extra weight from her body. She was fat. She wasn’t big-boned. She wasn’t a “solidly built girl,” as her aunt Flora often said. It wasn’t baby fat, and she knew she probably wouldn’t grow out of it. She’d have to be fifteen feet tall to smooth it all out. She wasn’t. Though at five-eight, she was a good height for punching loud-mouth jerks of both sexes. She’d always been fat and kids have always been kids. Faces had been punched. Faces would be punched. That’s how it was.
But, yeah, she was fat and she knew it.
She hated it. She cried oceans about it. She yelled at God about it.
But she accepted it.
Dahlia also knew that there was precedent in her family for this being a lifelong thing. She had three aunts who collectively looked like the defensive line of the Green Bay Packers. Aunt Ivy was the biggest. Six feet tall, three hundred pounds. Dahlia suspected Ivy had thrown some punches of her own in her day. Ivy wasn’t one to take anything from anyone.
Mom was no Sally Stick Figure either. She was always on one of those celebrity diets. Last year it was the Celery and Carrot Diet, and all she did was fart and turn orange. Before that it was a Cottage Cheese Diet that packed on twenty extra pounds. Apparently the “eat all you want” part of the pitch wasn’t exactly true. This year it was the Salmon Diet. Dahlia figured that it was only a matter of time before Mom grew gills and began swimming upstream to spawn.
Well, maybe that would have happened if the world hadn’t ended.
-2-
It did. The world ended.
On a Friday.
Somehow it didn’t surprise Dahlia Allgood that the world would end on a Friday. What better way to screw up the weekend?
-3-
Like most important things in the world, Dahlia wasn’t paying that much attention to it. To the world. To current events.
She was planning revenge.
Again.
It wasn’t an obsession with her, but she had some frequent flier miles. If people didn’t push her, she wouldn’t even think about pushing back.
She was fat and unattractive. That wasn’t up for debate, and she couldn’t change a few thousand years of developing standards
for beauty. On the other hand, neither of those facts made it okay for anyone to mess with her.
That’s what people didn’t seem to get.
Maybe someone sent a mass text that it was okay to say things about her weight. Or stick pictures of pork products on her locker. Or make oink-oink noises when she was puffing her way around the track in gym. If so, she didn’t get that text and she did not approve of the message.
Screw that.
It’s not that she was one of the mean girls. Dahlia suspected the mean girls were the ones who hated themselves the most. And Dahlia didn’t even hate herself. She liked herself. She liked her mind. She liked her taste in music and books and boys and things that mattered. She didn’t laugh when people tripped. She didn’t take it as a personal win when someone else—someone thinner or prettier—hit an emotional wall. Dahlia knew she had her faults, but being a heartless or vindictive jerk wasn’t part of that.
Revenge was a different thing. That wasn’t being vindictive. It was—as she once read in an old novel—a thirst for justice. Dahlia wanted to be either a lawyer or a cop, so that whole justice thing was cool with her.
Justice—or, let’s call it by the right name, revenge—had to be managed, though. You had to understand your own limits, and be real with your own level of cool. Dahlia spent enough time in her head to know who she was. And wasn’t. So, when someone did something to her, she didn’t try to swap cool insults, or posture with attitude, or any of that. Instead she got even.
When Marcy Van Der Meer—and, side note, Dahlia didn’t think anyone in an urban high school should have a last name with three separate words—sent her those pictures last month? Yeah, she took action. The pictures had apparently been taken in the hall that time Dahlia dropped her books. The worst of them was taken from directly behind her as she bent over to pick them up. Can we say butt crack?
The picture went out to a whole lot of kids. To pretty much everyone who thought they mattered. Or everyone Marcy though mattered. Everyone who would laugh.
Dahlia had spent half an hour crying in the bathroom. Big, noisy, blubbering sobs. Nose-runny sobs, the kind that blow snot bubbles. The kind that hurt your chest. The kind that she knew, with absolute clarity, were going to leave a mark on her forever. Even if she never saw Marcy again after school, even if Dahlia somehow became thin and gorgeous, she was never going to lose the memory of how it felt to cry like that. Knowing that while she cried made it all a lot worse.
Slasher Girls & Monster Boys Page 19
