7 Souls

by Barnabas Miller; Jordan Orlando

  Incredibly, miraculously, she had made it to the street. Her vision was fading in and out as she slipped against the cold, rain-slicked metal sign and staggered forward, splashing her sneakers in a wide puddle as she reeled from the pain. She turned away from the howling wind, looking up at the dark shadows of the surrounding buildings.

  Taxi, she thought desperately. I’ve got to get a taxi.

  Mary clutched her bleeding abdomen and stared down the deserted avenue, her vision doubling. She could see the red embers of the traffic lights change to green and she could hear the rumble of approaching, southbound traffic, but she couldn’t make out the details—she extended her arm, hoping that one of the oncoming cars was a cab and would see her.

  “Taxi!” Mary wailed. “Taxi!”

  A rumbling, sliding yellow phantom had appeared beside her, its cold steel surfaces still beaded with rain. Mary grappled with the door handle, watching Dylan’s fingers smear blood across the door before she managed to wrench it open and tumble inside. Fresh pain lashed out at her from her abdomen, as if someone had just kicked her there, and she clenched her teeth against the agony and leaned over, mustering the herculean strength necessary to heave the cab door shut.

  (heaved the cab door shut)

  “The Peninsula Hotel,” Mary shouted. She could only see a blur; she hoped the cabdriver had heard her. He must have heard something, because the cab started moving. She stared at the roof of the car, hoping she wouldn’t throw up, hoping that Dylan’s body wouldn’t die before she got where she was going … and recalling the memory—Dylan’s memory—that had just sprung to mind.

  (heaved the cab door shut)

  SHE’LL COME HOME WITH you tonight.

  She’ll come home with you if you ask.

  The thought hit Dylan suddenly as he heaved the cab door shut. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he knew something about Ellen was different tonight. He could feel it in the way she’d stepped into the cab as he held the door for her. Usually, she ducked past him and shuffled herself along the black vinyl seat until she was pressed up against the opposite window, but tonight she grabbed onto the lapels of his gray overcoat, looked him right in the eyes and backed herself in. She planted herself dead center, leaving only a third of the seat for him as he climbed in after her, and she let her entire leg press against his without the slightest hesitation. She even pushed her fragile shoulder against his, as if a third person had piled into the backseat with them, crushing them against the window like lovers.

  Like lovers. Finally like lovers, Dylan thought, even if only for the few seconds it took her to realize she was sitting too close.

  “We’ll be making two stops,” Dylan told the driver, as he always did after their Saturday-night Chinese dinners at Empire Szechuan Palace. “We’re going to drop her home at Ninety-second and Amsterdam, and then I’m going up to One Twenty-fourth and Morningside Drive.”

  But he secretly prayed for Ellen to correct him. He imagined her telling the driver to forget that first stop and just take her straight to Dylan’s apartment. He imagined her falling into his lap and staring up at him for as long as he could resist leaning down to kiss her.

  A first kiss. Right here, right now. It didn’t have to be in some gondola in Venice, or trapped at the top of some cutesy malfunctioning Ferris wheel on Mott Street; it could just happen in the back of a cramped New York taxicab, surrounded by half-ripped Urban Underground stickers, and the babbling ABC news anchors on Taxi TV, and the overpowering odor of the coconut air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. They could race up the empty highway, buried so deep in their first kiss that they’d barely notice the Hudson River rolling by, or the George Washington Bridge lit up like a giant prehistoric bird in the black sky. They’d sprint up the dusty stairs of Dylan’s third-floor walk-up and crash against the door to his apartment—kissing so passionately after a year of pent-up anticipation that the loose change would be raining from his pockets as he dug blindly for his keys. They’d burst through the door, and he’d scoop her wispy frame up off the floor as she wrapped her legs tightly around his waist, and glide her down the hall to his bedroom, where they’d fall onto his creaky twin mattress with their arms and lips entangled, never even bothering to turn on the lights….

  “Dylan?”

  “Huh?”

  Ellen’s voice snapped Dylan back to the quiet reality of the taxicab.

  “Where were you just now?”

  “I was right here,” he said.

  “Hmmm.” She smiled dubiously out of the corner of her mouth, and then she leaned her head on his shoulder, clasping her hands tightly around his arm. She had never done this before. Maybe they locked arms when they came out of a movie, but this was different; this was more.

  He could smell the faint traces of rose water in her short, tousled hair and a hint of Ivory soap on her face. Her black hooded sweatshirt was buried under her black parka, but the hood had gotten caught on his shoulder, stretching her collar out to expose the long, graceful neck that she always tried to hide. The collar was actually stretched far enough to expose a patch of her vanilla skin, running from the base of her neck to the beginning of a beautifully naked clavicle bone. He wanted so badly to follow the entire line of that clavicle, but it disappeared back under her sweatshirt—back under her thick black armor.

  That, he supposed, was why he was so in love with Ellen. Because he could never see all of her, no matter how hard he tried. There was always more to uncover, more to figure out, more to learn, just like all those ancient languages that obsessed him. He hated obvious girls with obvious beauty—girls like Ellen’s sister, Mary. Mary was just another one of those porcelain-doll girls who bounced around the Meatpacking District on Friday nights, screaming for love and attention with every skintight outfit, every overbearing splash of designer perfume, every studied feminine pose. Everyone seemed to think that Mary was the Pretty One, but they had no idea what they were talking about. Dylan had the Pretty One right here in the cab with him, resting comfortably on his shoulder, holding his arm just as tightly as she held that beat-up Paddington Bear in all her childhood pictures. He wanted them to stay this close for the rest of the night, and on through the next day, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. How many more times could he ask? Her answer was always the same and her reason was always the same.

  Instead, he asked one of those half-assed leading questions. “Are you tired …?”

  “No,” she said. “Not at all.”

  Ellen looked genuinely surprised by her own answer. She began to smile, as if she’d just discovered something truly remarkable. She leaned her head back against the seat, breathed in deeply and let out the longest, most luxuriant sigh. “I am not tired at all,” she marveled. “I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t tired. I feel … awake. I think I feel good.”

  “Something’s different with you tonight,” Dylan said. “What’s going on?”

  Ellen turned to him, still reveling in her unexpectedly euphoric moment. “It’s Mary,” she said simply. “She’s taking care of Mom tonight.”

  “No.” Dylan shook his head refusing to believe it. “No, there’s absolutely no way.”

  “I know.” Ellen’s eyes widened with amazement. “I couldn’t believe it either. I ask her every time we go to dinner, Dylan. I ask her to watch Mom for a few hours after eight—just give her the meds and watch a little Forensic Files or something. They wouldn’t even have to talk. I don’t know why I keep asking—she always says no. But tonight, I asked her again … and she said yes.” Ellen grinned wider than before—wider than Dylan had probably ever seen her smile. “She said yes, Dylan. That means we’ve got, like, three extra hours to hang out. Maybe even four …”

  She leaned abruptly onto Dylan’s lap and gripped his thighs with her long fingers. His pulse doubled as her face grew closer to his—so close that she became a blur. But he realized she was only leaning over to open the window as far as it would go.

  The i
cy wind rushed into the cab with a deafening rumble, slamming against their faces and blowing back their hair. Keeping her hands anchored on his lap, Ellen stuck her head out the window and breathed in the night air like a German shepherd in the front seat of a pickup.

  “God!” she shouted into the wind. “This must be what it feels like when you get out of prison! I’m out! I’m out!”

  She ducked back into the cab, her jet-black hair blown in all directions and her cheeks flushed a bright and lively pink. Dylan had never seen her look so beautiful. Usually, she looked so much older than her age. He had always assumed that was because of her intelligence, but now he could see … it was just the burden. It was the burden of being a mother to her own mother night in and night out. Mary had agreed to babysit their mother for this one Saturday night, and so, for this one Saturday night, Ellen could be what she actually was: a young and adorable sixteen-year-old girl. The strange thing was, with her gorgeous face so flushed and alive and free, she actually looked more like Mary than herself. Dylan hated himself for even thinking it.

  Ellen stretched herself to the opposite window and slid it wide open too. Now it was cold enough to see her short, excited breaths puffing from her mouth. Her eyes lit up with inspiration as she grabbed hold of his arm.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” she said.

  “Anywhere you want. We could go for coffee or—”

  “Morocco. Let’s go to Morocco. No, Egypt. Let’s go to Egypt. My dad was totally obsessed with Egypt, and I’ve never been there. You could teach me the language, Dylan—you could teach me everything you know. You should have seen your eyes light up at dinner when you talked about all the uncovered Sanskrit in the Middle East. We could go to Egypt and study Sanskrit! Let’s go, Dyl. Let’s go tonight.”

  “I’m not sure we could pull that off in three hours—”

  “Well, let’s pretend we can.” She squeezed the life out of his arm, and when he looked into her eyes, he realized that she meant it. She honestly wanted to pretend they were crossing an ocean tonight. A pretend escape was better than no escape at all. “Please. Can’t we just drive to the airport?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “We probably can’t get a flight out tonight, but we could head out to JFK really early in the morning … and you could stay over tonight.”

  Her misty breaths seemed to cease altogether. It was as if the ice-cold wind in the cab had actually frozen her solid. Dylan was holding his breath too, waiting on her next word. But she didn’t seem to have one. He instantly regretted asking. He was such a hopelessly impulsive idiot. “I mean, if you wanted to,” he added, making it worse. “You could take the whole night off. You could tell your Mom you were sleeping over at a friend’s house, and …” He wondered how much deeper he could dig this hole.

  “Actually, you’re kind of my only friend,” Ellen said. “I mean, not really, but … you know what I mean. I think Mom would figure out where I was staying pretty quick.”

  “Right,” he murmured, feeling his chest deflate under his thick coat. “Good point.”

  “But … I think she’d probably be half-asleep when I told her….”

  Dylan studied Ellen’s barely blinking eyes, trying to see if she was saying what he thought she was saying. She looked painfully nervous all of a sudden—frightened, even. But she wasn’t backing away. She let her face linger next to his, and he could feel her warm breath on his neck, cutting straight through the cold. He let himself lean the slightest bit closer, watching her breaths quicken and become shallow. But she still didn’t back away. Finally, in that last fraction of space left between their lips, he felt something give. Something changed in the air between them. If she had wanted to push him back, she would have done it by now. So he leaned forward the rest of the way. She let his lips touch hers so lightly that it was hardly a kiss.

  And then her cell phone rang. It screamed out from the pocket of her black parka. The piercing ring cut through the moment with such laser precision that it carved out a foot of space between them.

  “It might be Mom,” Ellen mumbled, totally disoriented by the almost-kiss. “No, it’s Mary,” she said, glimpsing the caller ID. She flipped open her phone and plugged her other ear with her index finger. “Hey, is everything okay? Did you give Mom her—”

  She was immediately interrupted by her sister. Dylan could just make out the unbearably singsong sound of Mary’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “No, wait,” Ellen said. “No, you can’t just … Mary, you can’t just leave.” Ellen was trying to get a word in, but Mary wasn’t giving her a chance. “No, that doesn’t matter, Mare, you still have to stay there, or she could … I know that, but … Oh, come on, doesn’t Jamie own the club? He’ll have, like, ten more openings before the real opening…. Well, he can get them to play another show there—they’re like his best friends, they’ll do whatever he—Yes, I’m done with dinner, but I was going to sleep over at a fr—No, I know … I know …”

  Dylan watched Ellen transform with every additional word out of Mary’s mouth. He watched her shoulders slump and her neck sink further into her black sweatshirt. He watched a deep, fleeting sadness pass over her eyes, replaced with a heartbreaking sort of dead-eyed numbness. “No, you’re right,” she said in a near monotone. “You should go. You should definitely go. I’ll come back home. Yeah, I’m coming back now. No, it’s fine. Really, I promise. It’s fine. Right … a goddess, I know.”

  Ellen clapped her phone shut and slid away from Dylan, pressing herself against the opposite door. She rolled the window up and leaned her head against it like a rag doll. She came back to life for just a split second, and pounded her fist so hard against the cab’s partition that she actually frightened Dylan.

  “Hey!” the driver hollered. “What the hell are you doing to my cab? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m sorry,” she called back in a weak voice. “I’m sorry about that, it was an accident.” Her face returned to its expressionless state, and she let her head fall back against the window again. “I’m sorry,” she said more quietly to Dylan.

  “It’s all right,” Dylan assured her. “It’s okay.” The streetlights were flashing across her face, but he was sure he caught a glimpse of a tear rolling down her cheek and landing on her waterproof parka.

  “Mary’s got to go to a club opening tonight.” There was no emotion left in Ellen’s voice. “She’s going to do Mom tomorrow.” Dylan wondered how many times he’d heard that before. “I can’t come over,” Ellen continued. “Not tonight. Mom’s going to need her meds and someone’s got to keep her company when she … It was a bad idea anyway. I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t … I mean …”

  “It’s okay,” Dylan said. “Don’t worry about it. Another time.”

  But he knew there wouldn’t be another time. That one half of a kiss was as close as they’d ever come. She wouldn’t be coming home with him tonight or any other night. Because Mary made sure of that.

  The Pretty One. What a joke. He couldn’t imagine anything uglier than Mary Shayne. He pictured her throwing on another one of her obvious party dresses, puckering in the mirror and racing out the door without a care in the world. A cheap imitation of a supermodel in a bad perfume ad. She wouldn’t have a second thought about leaving Ellen alone to rock their mother to sleep again; she’d be too busy clinking glasses of free Cristal in the VIP lounge with some spoiled asshole named Jamie whose daddy had bought him a nightclub. She’d sure as hell never think about how she was slowly but surely ruining Dylan’s life. He wasn’t even sure she knew his name.

  Now he wanted to punch something too. Not something—someone. He wanted to punch Mary really, really hard. Maybe that was something she’d actually notice.

  IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT they did to me, Mary thought dazedly. Dylan’s memory—the strength of his feelings for Ellen and the callous way Mary had kept ruining their romantic ambitions—was no less sickening than any of the other mem
ories, the other grievances she’d experienced since she died. It doesn’t matter how they ganged up on me, because I deserved it.

  I deserved all of their rage; I brought it all on myself.

  Did it mean that she deserved to die? Should she stop what she was doing and just expire, right here, in the back of this taxicab, in Dylan Summer’s body?

  I can’t. Mary was pretty sure that there was no way. It’s not over yet.

  “Peninsula Hotel,” the driver called out. His voice was so distant, it was like he was in a different city. “Nine fifty-eight.”

  “Just a second …” Mary was struggling to pull Dylan’s wallet from his pants pocket. It was an exercise in pain and blood. She managed to pay the driver and drag herself out of the cab, but she could barely stand. It was like she was falling, even when she was standing still—she was teetering on the edge and she knew it.

  (on the edge)

  She felt like she could almost count the breaths she had left, before she fell.

  (on the edge)

  “THERE’S ONE MORE THING,” Ellen said, pointing at Dylan. “Stick around—I’ve got to talk to you. Everyone else, it’s showtime—let’s get moving.”

  Dylan stood on the rooftop of the Chadwick School, hands in pockets, the wind ruffling his hair around his face as he watched the Chadwickites—Patrick and Joon and Amy—move single file through the battered metal door that led back downstairs, into the school. They were following orders, he noted with some satisfaction … just like he was. Ellen had told them to go, and had told him to stay, and there was something about obeying her that was profoundly satisfying. It was odd, but it was true.

  Dylan had felt strange since awakening that morning—but it wasn’t anything he could complain about. It wasn’t like waking up with a hangover; if anything, it was the opposite of a hangover. He felt alert, and refreshed, and exuberant, and alive. More than anything else, he felt like he had a purpose, something crucial to do that day.