Something like Voodoo

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “Only sometimes?” I asked, grinning at him. I didn’t tell him I would add demanding and rude to the list.

  “You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into,” he whispered before pressing his lips to the top of my head. “I promise, I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  He’d proven that once already, but I worried about what he would risk to keep his promise. Or why he would even make that promise in the first place.

  “Why do you care? What does it matter to you what happens to me?”

  He sighed deeply, his warm breath tickling my scalp. “Because it would be wrong,” he said, “to put someone else in danger to save myself.”

  Oh. Was that all? It wasn’t because he was into me? I tried to let the disappointment roll by me and changed the subject back to him.

  “The doctors said you could’ve died.” I relaxed my body into his. “They never would have found out the cause.”

  When he didn’t respond, I craned my neck back to look up at him.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. “It’s not something science can explain. She won’t kill me, though. Trust me, there’ve been times I wished she would. But I’m worth nothing to her dead.”

  Me, on the other hand… I indicated the slushy dirt mounds against the embankment. “Ready to tell me about those?”

  Noah rubbed his free hand over the side of his face and stared down the path leading to this spot. “Sometimes she has a hold on me, sometimes she doesn’t. I can’t tell you how or why – not yet, perhaps not ever – but when the hold is strong, she can make me do anything, even if she doesn’t know where I am.”

  “But sometimes she does know where you are?”

  He nodded solemnly. “With the exception of a few protected places, like this one. She can’t sense me when I’m here, even if she can alter my behavior.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. Remind me why I’m helping you again?”

  “Because I’m so irresistibly handsome?” he asked with a crooked grin.

  That was probably part of it, but I wasn’t about to tell him so. I pushed his shoulder playfully. “Don’t try your luck.”

  He pulled my back into his side again and rested his chin atop my head. “I don’t want to,” he whispered, so quietly I barely made out the words. “I really don’t want to.”

  Over the next two weeks, Noah and I avoided each other during school hours so as not to piss off Sarah. After school though, we spent our afternoons tucked away in his hidden little world. Considering how much I despised the cold, it was a sacrifice spending so much time out in it. But it was worth it to spend so much unguarded time with him, so I took to wearing extra layers of winter clothes and a heavier jacket.

  Sometimes we sat cuddled together on his tailgate, talking, but other times we hung out in the cab of his Chevy, heat blasting. Aside from Sarah, the only thing standing between us was his inability to share his secrets and my unwillingness to share mine. I figured none of that mattered until we got the It Girls’ queen bee out of the picture.

  Where Sarah was concerned, we were definitely dealing with magic, but it wasn’t any kind I knew about. I would have to get more creative in my research – look up different types of magic and see if anything stood out. If I didn’t find the answers, Noah and I would remain at this impasse forever.

  For that first week and a half, I wasn’t completely sure if he was into me. Or maybe he couldn’t tell I was into him, even though I had painted my nails the same blue as his Chevy and hadn’t switched the color since. But the snow changed all that.

  We’d stayed so late in his secret place after school one afternoon that the next thing we knew, night had fallen. Still we didn’t make an effort to leave. We just lay on our backs in the bed of his truck, staring up at the sky.

  I’d taken my coat off to escape the heat radiating from Noah’s body. Though we were close enough only our arms grazed, whatever curse caused his perpetual fever – paired with my attraction to him – overheated me anytime our skin touched.

  The music playing inside of his truck carried out of the open window and over to where we lay, and when my favorite Nirvana song came on, I sighed. My lips moved in sync with the words, and my thoughts drifted to what Kurt Cobain’s final hours must have been like. Eyes suddenly stinging, I pressed my lids shut. Hell, I couldn’t pretend to understand, but for some reason, it always struck a chord with me.

  “You okay, Em?” Noah asked.

  I swallowed around the lump in my throat and nodded. I feared speaking would make my voice crack, so I rested my head against his shoulder instead and counted the stars until the emotions rolled away. Every so often, his foot would knock into mine, and he would mumble an apology. But I didn’t mind.

  After some time, Noah whispered, “It’s one of the things I like about you.”

  He must’ve been talking about the music, about the way I connected with certain songs. He was perhaps the only person on this planet who understood me – understood what music meant to me and which songs touched me the most – and I hadn’t needed to explain a word of it to him.

  A light snow drifted from the inky eggplant and ochre sky above, a single patch of bright blue surrounding the moon. Almost as blue as Noah’s eyes, I thought, right as another snowflake fell on my nose.

  “What’s that feel like?” I asked.

  His face swiveled toward me, his eyebrows pulled together.

  “The snow,” I clarified, getting lost in his eyes. “Does it help the burning?”

  “A little,” he said.

  “Does anything help more than a little?” I asked.

  His hand found mine, and he stared back up at the sky.

  Every day, I wished Noah could talk to me at school. Wished we didn’t have to walk the halls alone, pretending each other had the plague. Then one Friday, right before the last weekend of January, my wish came true.

  I was in the lower level C hall on the way to trig when Noah walked straight up to me, wrapped his arm around my waist, and ushered me through the doors leading to the stairs.

  “Whoa!” I said, giggling. “What’s going on?”

  He pulled me under the stairwell and put a finger to his lips. “Shh…I had to see you.”

  “But Sar –”

  I couldn’t even get the witch’s name out before Noah’s lips were bumping into mine, his body pressing against me, pushing my back against the wall.

  At first, I was too stunned to react. No one had ever kissed me before. But despite his passion, he was gentle, and every time I thought he was about to stop, I leaned in a little, never wanting the kiss to end, inhaling his coconut smell now that I knew it wasn’t simply some fancy air freshener in his truck but actually the aroma of Noah himself – or whatever body wash he’d taken to using.

  I was helpless to his touch, half of my brain mortifying me with stupid thoughts about love and sex while the more logical half chastised me with the reminder that attraction and love were not the same thing. I didn’t love Noah. I couldn’t.

  Why was I thinking about this right now?

  He cradled my face in his hands, his fingertips slipping into my hair and then smoothing down my neck. If his body wasn’t pressing mine against the wall, my legs might have crumpled beneath me. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, but he seemed to know what to do with his.

  All of a sudden, those “tempting hormones” my mom had warned me about when she was still alive made perfect sense. I could totally see how easy it would be to get carried away. Especially with Noah.

  When he pulled away, a noise escaped me that sounded embarrassingly like a whimper. God, I hoped he hadn’t noticed. It was just a kiss. My first kiss, but still. It was turning me into everything I hated.

  “Sorry,” he whispered, his eyes full of agony.

  “What? Why? Was I – was I bad at it or something?
”

  Then the magic of the moment fell away. My tunnel vision cleared and my peripheral revealed the most horrifying of truths. Sarah was watching us, toying with a strand of her silky blonde hair. She smirked and clapped her hands twice.

  “You didn’t think he wanted to kiss you, did you?” she asked, strolling closer to me.

  She put her hand on his cheek and kissed him. His mouth complied with hers, and the way they looked together made my kiss with him seem amateur and prude. When she came up for air, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her coral lipstick evidence on his frowning mouth.

  “Don’t you get it?” she spat. “He isn’t into you unless I say he is.”

  I blinked back tears but stared her down defiantly. “I don’t believe he’s into you unless you say he is, either.”

  She tossed her head back and laughed. “Either way, you can’t have him, so it doesn’t matter.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and turned the screen toward me, displaying a video of Noah and me kissing. “Now the whole school will know how easy you are! Only skanks kiss in the halls, or didn’t you get the memo?”

  On another day, I might have pointed out her “memo” implied she herself was a skank, but I was too hurt to speak. I reached out to snatch the phone, but she yanked it away.

  “I don’t think so, Squirrel.” She tilted her head to look at Noah. “What did you think? Is she a good kisser?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. The moment fluttered in the air between us.

  “Well?” she pressed.

  “Terrible,” he mumbled.

  “Don’t you think she’s the hoe-iest hoe ever?” Sarah asked, her voice lilting giddily.

  Noah nodded, then said “Yes,” as if the word had been forcibly removed from his gut. Apparently one affirmation was not enough to appease the queen.

  Tears stinging my eyes, I started to brush past them, but Sarah pushed me back, hard. I fell to the floor and my head knocked into the wall. Nausea coiled through my stomach. I tried to get up, but she crouched over me and poked her finger into my forehead. “Stay away from him. For his sake and yours.”

  They walked away, hand in hand. When they were gone, I fled the school and drove straight home. I sat in my room trance drawing for hours, trying to escape reliving the memory of all that had happened. I “came to” when my dad called me to dinner, the smell of burnt lasagna wafting through the house.

  “Be right down,” I hollered, my voice choking on the words.

  I shuffled together all the drawings. The majority of them were of Noah. One of him with horns and the strange symbols that marked his body the day of his seizure, another with a hole in his chest bleeding out.

  But the most disturbing one was the one of me, my gaze empty, my heart literally pinned to my sleeve.

  If I didn’t get rid of my feelings for Noah soon, it was going to get me killed.

  8

  FOUNDED 1848

  The apology didn’t come until the next morning by way of text, but by then, all the awful feelings had festered into something like suspicion. Maybe Noah had been in on this since I arrived in Hackensack. Maybe this was all some sick joke.

  What if drawing his pictures wasn’t a warning of anything more than a developing crush? What if Sarah knew all about me from the medical records she so obviously had gotten her hands on? Knowing her, she’d simply asked the principal for my school transcripts and he’d handed them over.

  Either Noah was in on this, or Sarah’s control over him went deeper than I ever imagined.

  Only one way to find out for sure.

  I was going to that asylum.

  Night darkened the sky before dinner, and my dad stared at me with mouth agape as I finished his over-boiled pasta in record time. The city of Trenton was over an hour away, which wouldn’t give me much time to drive there, explore, and return by curfew.

  “Slow down, Squirrel,” Dad said. “You’ll choke.”

  I shoved the last bite in my mouth. “I’m fine, Dad. Gotta go.”

  I jumped up, scrubbed my plate, and stuck it in the drying rack beside one of Mom’s ceramic hens that Dad had held onto, even though he had hated it while she was alive.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yep,” I said, giving him a quick peck on the cheek. “Don’t want to miss any bowling!”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Going with Heather again?”

  “Yep,” I lied.

  “She called the house earlier.”

  Inwardly, I groaned. I’d been avoiding her texts, calls, emails, and messenger notifications. She wanted to talk about The Kiss Witnessed Around the World – as did the rest of the student body, though for different reasons – and I did not.

  “I caught up with her right before dinner,” I said. “I better go.”

  “Hmm,” Dad said again. He must have known I was lying, but he didn’t press further. “Stay safe.”

  “Always.”

  I bounded upstairs to grab the bag I packed earlier: gloves, flashlight, camera phone, black hoodie, first aid kit. I glanced around the room, feeling as though I was missing something. It dawned on me what: a lecture from Dad.

  It was unlike him to let me leave the house knowing I wasn’t telling him where I was actually going. Was this some kind of parental test?

  I pushed away the panicky feeling in my stomach. I had to go. Besides, what would Dad do if he found out? Ground me? It wasn’t as if I wanted to go out anywhere anymore – not after what happened at school yesterday.

  Just in case, I shot off a text to Heather: IF YOU TALK TO MY DAD, I’M WITH YOU.

  She pinged me back: WHERE ARE YOU?

  I debated telling her something – not the truth, of course – but decided against it. She would cover for me, and I would cover for myself when I told her why tomorrow.

  I shoved my phone back into my bag and hurried to my car, pulled out of the driveway, and sped away before Dad asked any more questions about my plans for the night.

  At the local convenience store, I stopped to put the address into my phone’s GPS app, grabbed a Dark Roast to go, then headed for the highway. I needed something to cheer me up, so I set my playlist to Of Monsters and Men. Little Talks blasted through my speakers.

  But about halfway through my drive, my playlist switched over to Black Sabbath’s Solitude, resulting in tear-blurred vision. Damn you, Ozzy. I shut down my playlist and drove the rest of the way in silence.

  When I turned onto the road where the hospital was located, I spotted a sign that read TRENTON PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, FOUNDED 1848. The asylum was gated – of course – and parking in their lot wouldn’t have been my best bet. So I continued driving a little ways until I reached an abandoned lot. Then I pulled on my black hoodie, slung my bag over my shoulder, and hopped out of my car.

  I stole a careful glance around before locking up and creeping back toward the hospital entrance.

  This was a bad idea.

  My phone vibrated with a new text message from Heather.

  I’M WORRIED ABOUT YOU.

  Ugh.

  I shoved the phone into my hoodie pocket and continued the rest of the way, peeking in through holes in the underbrush as I tried to discern where to go from here.

  It looked like…well, not like anything, really. I accessed a map display on my mobile browser. Street view, satellite view – didn’t matter. I got nothing. I leaned against the fence, squatted down to remain unseen, and ran a search on the facility.

  The website provided more helpful directions: go under the overpass, proceed to the top of the hill. I paused, searching for what the site described. Finding it, I returned to my phone browser. Gate two would be on my right, then once in the parking lot I could follow signs to my specific destination.

  Well, that was awesome. I suppose I couldn’t expect them to te
ll me the best way to sneak in undetected.

  It took me forty-five minutes to find a way in that wouldn’t catch the attention of night security and another twenty minutes to find the building that had been abandoned – Forst. By this point, I verged on having a heart attack for fear of getting caught. Not because I would get in trouble, but because I’d gotten this close, and walking away without answers would kill me. Perhaps even literally.

  Forst was intimidating in both its stature and dilapidated condition. I wasn’t exactly excited to go in. Shouldn’t I worry about asbestos or lead or whatever? The website hadn’t mentioned why this building got shut down, and I kicked myself for not having checked into it. Well, no time for such concerns now. I was here, and I was going to find answers.

  Once inside, I was equal parts horrified and fascinated – the forgotten halls were both beautiful in their history and eerie in their abandoned ruin. Worse, a person might actually die breathing in this place. The blackened…everything…had me sure of that now.

  Cringing, I pulled my hands into the sleeves of my hoodie and held my flashlight through the thick jersey cotton knit. I didn’t turn it on right away, though. Lights too close to the entrance or windows would probably draw attention. So I trespassed a little farther before snapping it on.

  Soon I found myself in a corridor with huge flakes of peeling paint – the beam of my flashlight indicated a coat of robin’s egg blue covered the once-beige walls. Swivel chairs and boarded up windows lined either side of the hall. No dents or scratches on the shiny plastic, though, so the chairs were new. They must’ve been using this hall as storage. Maybe it wasn’t too dangerous to be in here after all, but I still kept thinking I felt bugs crawling on my skin. My stomach churned. This place was royally gross.

  I continued until I reached the end of the passage, at which point I realized I was sandwiched between two old wards. I walked down another hall – this one lined with doors – and checked every room for signs of Sarah. I didn’t know what I hoped to find, but I would know once I saw it.