by Rowan Maness
When I jumped down after Shane, he was already heading toward his house on the opposite side of the block. My shoes squished into soft mud, dirtying the hem of my pajama pants. I hurried along the street, not noticing the dreaming plants or the houses flattened into one dimension by the clear cool night, like the facade of an Old West town.
Dear Max,
Things are not good. It’s Rune. Did I tell you we dated? Before I knew you, obviously. He’s always been so obsessive about me. When we met, I didn’t want anything to do with him—the surfer guy thing is so not my type. But he kept asking, saying “You’re going to say yes eventually, so just say yes now.” I finally gave in. It was 2 months of negativity and possessiveness. But he’s so respected as a photographer, and I couldn’t pass up this job. Big mistake.
He tried to get in my room last night. I think he was high on something, whatever. I told my manager, but I signed a contract and he didn’t actually do anything. . . .
Sorry I’m such a baddie not writing more to you. I am thinking of you all the time. If only things were different.
Love, Anna
George: Finally, there u are
Emma: Hey baby
George: Guess what?
Emma: Just tell me. I have to be quick. Ron’s in the shower
George: He hurt you again?
Emma: I don’t want to talk about him
George: Aww, babe
George: Well, the thing is, I finally got leave.
George: I’m gonna be in Atlanta for 6 weeks
Emma: Oh, wow
George: You excited, girl? Your soldier’s coming home
Emma: When?
CHAPTER 9
Anna and Emma putting out feelers, flares arcing out of the Dream Palace, off the astral plane, into the worlds of Max and George. Max in the lab, never at home. George in the rec room in Afghanistan. I hadn’t noticed the similarities in their stories—abusive exes and husbands. Even Rosie had a disfigured avatar of Peter lurking in her past. I made up dangerous men to make other men feel useful, needed, necessary, protective.
Emma’s husband was pseudo-real. I’d taken the name Ron Marchand from a story on a blog about Atlanta high society. It listed him as a self-made multimillionaire who’d gotten rich buying barges on the Ohio River, and the idea of both barges and the Ohio River were so completely foreign to me I found it irresistible. The article mentioned his wife, Emma, a former beauty queen. Something about the way she gripped Ron’s arm in photographs from galas and charity benefits spoke to me, seemed to say, Take me; give me a different life. I kept their names the same, so if George searched he’d be able to find Ron, put a face to the monster Emma told him about.
When I got home from the utility box, my mom’s car was hot in the garage, its body cracking and settling. She was already in her room. I wondered if she’d checked on me, found the Modern Lovers record still spinning soundlessly, the bed empty.
Then, a little Max and George nightcap. They comforted me, lulled me to sleep, where I roamed the halls of the Dream Palace like a guard on patrol, looking into corners, daring the coyote to appear.
• • •
“What is he wearing?” Mary-Kate whispered as Mr. Lauren flicked on an ancient overhead projector. We were sitting at our usual table in the first row. Directly in front of us, the classroom wall was lit up with a white square covered in Mr. Lauren’s messy handwriting.
I watched as he licked a tissue and wiped at the scrawl, then squirted it with a bottle of cleaner he kept on the tray below. I liked how deliberately he erased, making a concentric square around the glass.
“It’s his favorite sweater,” I said, sending off the latest text in an exchange between George and Emma, focusing on Mary-Kate. “He wears it all the time.”
“It looks like amoebas.”
“Wait until he turns around. There’s a blob on the back that looks like a dinosaur.”
“A dinosaur?”
“The one with the crested head. . . .” I trailed off as Mr. Lauren began describing the differences between meiosis and mitosis. Some mental block prevented me from remembering the dinosaur’s name.
George: We have to get rid of him
George: Just say the word
George, newly stateside and in tantalizingly close proximity to Emma, was indulging in a fantasy with a murderous tinge. He would be the one to rescue Emma, to help her get away from Ron for good, “whatever it takes.”
George thought he was special. Nobody else was like him, not his fellow soldiers, not his small-town friends. Emma understood what he meant when he said he was uncomfortable being labeled an American hero. He’d only signed up for the army because he missed the enrollment deadline at the community college and didn’t want his overbearing mother to be angry. Emma was smart, older, sophisticated. The fact that she loved George was more evidence of his specialness.
I knew, though, that George was dumb. I would have cut him off long ago if it weren’t for the novelty of his soldierhood and his proclivity toward violence.
Emma: Let me think about it.
The classroom lights flicked on and I jolted, ready to hide my phone from Mr. Lauren. He wasn’t looking though, at me or anyone else. He pushed the projector into a corner, pausing to unstick one squeaky, rusted wheel. He checked himself out in the mirror above the emergency eyewash station before sitting back at his desk.
George: It’s the only way.
George: If you want to be with me I don’t want you with some other guy.
Emma: I’m married, George.
“Never mind,” Mary-Kate was saying.
I’d missed something.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
She stood up and walked to the back of the classroom, taking a seat next to Mae Castillo, looking at me with apparent disgust.
“Who’s your partner?” I looked up. Leah Leary, standing with an armful of worksheets.
I wished I could sic rabid George on Leah instead of the version of Ron Marchand I’d concocted.
“Everyone’s paired up, I think,” she said, sliding a worksheet toward me.
“Okay,” I said slowly.
“You can work with me and Zoey if you want,” Leah added.
“No,” I mumbled, shaking my head.
Leah shuffled off and I caught Mr. Lauren staring at me, sitting at his desk.
“Nobody wants to be my partner,” I said, lowering my voice so only he could hear me.
“Leah offered,” he noted, so evenly and without inflection that I was sure he had an opinion but was being careful to hide it.
“Nobody,” I repeated.
“It will be twice the work if you do it yourself, but—”
“There’s a splotch on the back of your sweater that looks like a dinosaur,” I blurted out, enjoying his flinch as he stopped himself from twisting around to look at it.
“And it’s bugging me that I can’t remember the name—the one with the crested head?”
He didn’t know either.
I went on. “I used to know the names of all the dinosaurs, plus all kinds of facts, like whether or not they were carnivores or herbivores and what time period they lived in and everything. I was obsessed with them when I was a kid. My parents used to make me recite facts for their friends, to show off. And now I don’t remember anything.”
Mr. Lauren leaned back in his chair, just letting me go on.
“In that way, I’m dumber than I was when I was four. That’s depressing.”
I could tell Mr. Lauren agreed that this was, in fact, depressing.
“Think about this three-dimensionally,” I said. “Pretty much all kids are into dinosaurs, right? But only, like, one of them actually becomes a paleontologist. Why do we lose interest? Dinosaurs are insane. That they ever existed is insane. They roamed the earth for hundreds of millions of years.”
Mr. Lauren was smiling, but I could feel eyes on the back of my head—Mary-Kate’s, or everyone’s.
• • •
what is the name of the dinosaur with a crested head
I didn’t have to remember—I could just ask the Internet to remember it for me.
Dilophosaurus
Parasaurolophus
More than one, of course, and neither rang a bell. I kept scrolling through the search results.
“ ‘Corythosaurus’!” I said, reading the Wikipedia entry. “ ‘Upper Cretaceous, also has a duckbill.’ ”
Mr. Lauren and I were standing in the doorway of the classroom. I’d stopped to show him the dinosaur and also to avoid looking too desperate to catch up with Mary-Kate, who’d ignored my “Hey—” as she left with Mae.
“Childhood amnesia,” he said. “That’s why you don’t remember.”
To my puzzled look, he added, “Google it.”
“No, tell me,” I whined.
“So, you don’t like my sweater?” he said, looking down, holding it out at the bottom, pretending to be sad.
I could hear him breathing. He smelled like shaving cream and he didn’t seem to notice how close we were standing.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Sorry, Mr. Lauren—” Leah Leary interrupted, breezing through the doorway, forcing us apart, her little muscular legs spinning beneath her like a running cartoon animal.
“I forgot my water bottle,” she chirped, grabbing it off a desk, speeding back toward us.
I reached out and grabbed the water bottle as she passed.
“Are you sure this is yours?” I said, holding it back from her grasp.
“My name’s on it,” Leah Leary said, flustered.
It was, written in Wite-Out bubble letters.
“I don’t know, maybe there’s a different Leah Leary?” I said, shaking the bottle. A chunk of melty ice sloshed around inside.
“Joss, come on—”
Mr. Lauren grabbed the bottle and handed it to Leah. She left, hurrying away, anxious to beat the tardy bell. Mr. Lauren lingered, pretending to watch Leah go. He didn’t turn to look, but I felt his eyes on me, sideways and stealthy.
What if he was someone I was chatting with? One of the first people I ever talked to was a high school English teacher with a dominatrix fetish. What would Mr. Lauren confess, if he could? I imagined him reaching out, grabbing me, pulling me into the classroom. We’d slip into another dimension—
He shifted and opened his mouth like he was going to say something.
Dinosaurs roaming a jungle, outside time—
But he stopped himself, changed his mind. Bit his bottom lip and shrugged, returning to his desk without a word.
Halfway to world religions class I remembered it was meeting in the chapel, so I turned and crossed campus in the opposite direction, walking outside, through the courtyard, past the cafeteria, rounding the corner of the front office, where the newer school buildings met the crumbling walls of the old mission.
The tardy bell rang, and since I was already late, I slowed down more, lingering in the fresh-cut grass.
Two figures were standing in a thin line of shade outside the chapel, facing each other, talking closely. It took a moment before I recognized one as Mary-Kate, the other as Mae.
I held my phone up and took a photo—framing them in the bottom right corner, tiny shadowed forms against the gleaming structure. I posted the picture to Instagram.
idiotblush caught you tardy loiterers @mkmaho @maebsc
They hugged before they went inside—I couldn’t tell who initiated.
When I pushed through the wooden doors of the chapel, I staggered a bit as my eyes adjusted to the dark. The entryway vestibule was damp and lightless, lined with brown tile as soft and lumpy as mounds of dirt.
Muffled voices came from farther inside and reluctantly I went toward them, my eyes just able to discern the inner door, the rough stone walls sliced with bejeweled light from stained-glass windows.
I found Mary-Kate and Mae in a corner, sitting cross-legged among a pile of mismatched pillows in the designated pandenominational meditation space.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, sitting next to them.
“For?” Mary-Kate said.
“For whatever I did.”
Mary-Kate looked at Mae in a way that said Can you believe her?
The meditation area made me think of Kit, the nebulous real boy.
I texted him, one eye on the teacher, Mrs. Braddock, who was absorbed in a prayer circle and hadn’t noticed my late entrance.
Me: You’ll be glad to know I’m in a meditation space right now
“That’s why I’m mad,” Mary-Kate said, her voice almost maternally angry, with a tight-lipped Deb Mahoney razor’s edge vibe.
“Because I’m texting,” I said, not a question but an accusation flung right back at her. What a stupid reason to be mad, Mary-Kate.
“Because you’re always texting. I was telling you something important back there and you couldn’t tear yourself away to listen for one second. You’d rather be lying to some random guy—”
I should have asked what was so important, just insisted I cared until she gave in and told me, but I felt betrayed—she’d just alluded to my secret life in front of a girl who wasn’t part of our circle. I was sure she’d already confided in Mae, finding in her what she couldn’t find in me—a receptive ear.
“God, Mary-Kate!” I said, swimmy with anger. “I’m texting Kit—the guy from Guin’s band. I’m supposed to go on a date with him. My first real date. But you wouldn’t know because I haven’t been able to tell you because you’ve been busy with cheerleading and”–I paused to indicate Mae–“whatever else.”
Mary-Kate and I had been fighting and making up for years, but I couldn’t tell whether or not she knew or cared that she almost always lost.
“Oh,” she said softly. “Sorry.”
“You’re apologizing to her?” Mae said under her breath.
“So you like him?” Mary-Kate asked, ignoring Mae, shifting away from her to face me. Ha!
“I guess so. What is liking someone, anyway?”
Mrs. Braddock walked up and handed Mary-Kate a slip of paper.
“Your group community service assignment.”
I grabbed the paper and read it—
Arrowhead Nursing Home
“Noooo,” I groaned.
Mrs. Braddock frowned and walked away.
“Can’t we just pick up litter or something?” I whined.
“You hate helping people so much,” Mary-Kate said.
“No I don’t,” I said. “I went to that homeless shelter last year. That was fine. But old people are scary. Nursing homes are pits of despair.”
“My nana’s in one,” Mae said. “It’s not that bad. She has a boyfriend and does Pilates.”
“If it depresses you, imagine how they must feel,” Mary-Kate said. I was comforted by the familiar rhythm of her gentle attempt at helping me empathize with other humans.
“That’s the problem,” I said. “I feel their depression too much. Then I can’t stop thinking about toddlers with terminal cancer or whole cities getting sarin gassed in Syria. Health and youth are shameful things I should hide—”
“Force yourself to help and maybe you’ll get out of your shame spiral,” Mary-Kate said, back to normal now, helpful and smart, like she should be.
“What could I possibly say to anyone to help them in any way?” I asked, standing, compelled toward the flickering orange glow coming from an alcove beneath a Station of the Cross painting—station number six, Veronica wiping the face of Jesus as he marched toward Golgotha.
The alcove was filled with tea light candles, some with clear pools of hot wax at their bases, some empty and burned out, the marks of sooty ghosts on the wall behind them. A longer, unlit candle rested on the lip of a metal donation box.
I picked it up,
touching it to a flame. I wanted to light one for nostalgia and old people and Peter and my dad, and for not knowing what to do with all the life I had in front of me, even though I’d seen how a second can return it.
As the flame caught on a fresh wick, I wished for an incantation I could believe in.
• • •
“What’s it like at your parents’ house?” Emma asks George, leading him into her room at the Dream Palace. It’s made up differently now, updated for his homecoming, altered by his allusions to confronting Ron, the Bad Husband.
Candles line the room’s edges, burning down to flat white disks, cluttering the stone ledge beneath a stained-glass window.
George, out of his army uniform for the first time in Emma’s imaginings. In jeans his mother bought for his return, too big in the waist, not stylish. A forest-green sweater seems too plain, like it had a logo that was removed in Photoshop.
“I don’t know. It’s just normal,” George says, and the waves of Emma’s attraction recede from him. She prefers him in Afghanistan, imagining the base under a roiling cloud of boredom and agitation. At home, he’s just a twenty-one-year-old kid with a chip on his shoulder and a thing for older women.
“Ron’s home,” Emma says, and the room storms. The window hasn’t settled on a design—the jeweled glass shards are in a state of constant rearrangement. At the mention of Ron the pieces shift, depicting a man’s face, surrounded by jewel-tone daggers.
I leave them there.
Down the hall. In another room, a man is reciting a poem.
Not a poem, a love letter.
James.
“Soft Robe, new thing,” he is saying. He never bores. He is never dull. “Come here, witchy girl. Sit by me. This is where you belong.”
CHAPTER 10
I started to change my mind. Changing my mind would make more sense. That’s the kind of thing I would do. Just make up an excuse, bow out at the last minute. Or I could tell him it was too much. That would be being honest. He couldn’t hold that against me.
I moisturized. Put on three different outfits. Took a thousand photos of myself in Photo Booth, trying to get my face to settle into a casual, chill expression. I was having flashbacks to going to the movies with Zack Matthews in seventh grade because he threatened to cut himself with his Swiss Army knife key chain if I said no.
