by Deb Caletti
“See ya,” Geoff says, because it’s very clear that Will’s attention is elsewhere as soon as Annabelle comes out those double doors. She runs to him, and he picks her up. Her feet are off the ground. It’s silly and sappy and teen-movie-ish, but who cares? She kisses him.
They kiss and kiss and he sets her back down on her feet. And when she’s on the ground again, when she opens her happy, happy eyes, she sees him: The Taker. He’s standing by the gym doors. He’s staring at them.
Annabelle feels a terrible rod of guilt jam through her heart, guilt and . . . what? Something else. Unease.
“Let’s get out of here,” Will says.
• • •
Annabelle is meeting Grandpa in the small town of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. The forested trail lets out onto a two-lane highway with a scary, narrow shoulder. Finally, she drops down into a valley where there are houses on large parcels of land. She spots a young woman, walking with her phone crooked between her shoulder and her ear. She is getting the mail in the box by the road.
The Taker isn’t letting go, is he? He is not letting her go now, just as he did not let her go then. This is Annabelle getting the mail. Wearing her shorts and a tank top and flip-flops. She gets the mail, and there’s an envelope. It’s from The Taker. She opens it right there, because it is strangely thick. It is so thick that she doesn’t know how he even fit whatever it is into that envelope.
When she pulls it out, she gets a horrible, sick feeling, because it’s a letter. An actual letter, written in tiny handwriting. Who writes letters anymore? She counts the pages. Thirteen. She has never written thirteen pages about anything in her life.
She reads the first few lines: I just needed to put down into words how it felt to see you with the guy I know is Will. The reason I even know it’s him is because Geoff told me. I had to ask, since you decided to keep it from me. I guess you were going for the maximum pain, letting me find out by seeing you like that.
She stops reading. Or, rather, she skims the pages and sees that the content is all about the same: How could you? You hurt me. I loved you. You knew that. There’s something about his birthday, him turning eighteen. How he was all alone and forgotten. How she ignored him on that day, after he’d made hers so special. She didn’t know it was his birthday. No one did.
She’s shocked. It’s one thing to suspect what’s in a person’s head, and another to see the truth in actual words poured out page after page. There is the word love, but it’s been stolen and used wrongly. Other words are used wrongly, too—beautiful, future, us. They sit beside a windstorm of rage. It’s unsettling. She doesn’t know what to do with this letter. She brings it inside, with the coupons for Papa Murphy’s and QFC and the Puget Sound Energy bill. She leaves the letter out there on the counter.
She forgets about it momentarily because something else happens: He calls. When she sees his number appear, she recoils, as if she’s just seen a poisonous creature. After that letter, she doesn’t want to even touch her phone. The ringing stops. And then starts again. Stops. Starts. The poisonous creature retreats and appears again. She has to deal with it. As much as she doesn’t want to get near it, it’s her job to get the creepy thing out of the house once and for all. When the phone rings again, Annabelle answers, cringing as if the despicable creature is wadded up in a paper towel in her own hand. Her phone is crooked between her shoulder and her ear, just like the young woman who is walking into her front door right now in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
“Belle,” he says.
No. He cries. He is crying.
He is losing it. He is freaking out. It’s like everything that was contained and hidden has been let loose. Abandonment has opened the door to the dark and ugly basement where the monsters have been waiting.
• • •
“What is this, Annabelle? What is this letter?”
“Mom!”
She is so glad to see her mom home from work. Gina is holding that letter. “This scares me, Annabelle. This is some scary shit.”
Malcolm sits on a counter stool. He is still. He has stopped midway in the peeling of an orange. He does not interrupt to say that Gina owes him money for the swearing jar. He knows that this is too serious for that.
“He called. It’s been a weird day. He saw me and Will yesterday.”
“I think we should call someone. I don’t know who. A counselor someone. The school counselor, maybe. I don’t know. But we can’t just let this—”
“He’s just upset.”
“Clearly. Thirteen pages of upset.”
“I talked to him. I think he calmed down.”
“Jesus, Annabelle. Thirteen pages.”
“I talked to him. I think everything is okay.”
She didn’t think that, though. She didn’t want Gina to worry. She told Will about it. He invited her over. They sat on his couch in the bonus room, same as always, and he wrapped his arms around her, and—this is awful, this is an awful thing to remember—she felt like it was some large drama that he was protecting her from. It was ugly but nice, the way his arms were around her.
The self-hatred floods back.
Yes, The Taker says. Yes, yes, that’s right. That’s as it should be.
She runs along the road, house to house. Two boys toss a baseball to each other. They are thin-legged and are wearing uniforms—striped pants and tall baseball socks, blue and red jerseys. It is cruel, this road.
Now she sees this: Malcolm—reader, scientist—is attempting his first sport, baseball, at the long-distance urging of That Bastard Father Anthony, former athlete. Former athlete fathers cause a lot of misery. Malcolm is gamely hanging in there, though he clearly hates to stand at home plate as the ball whizzes toward him. The tragedy that’s coming will finish the season for him, the only good thing to come out of what’s about to happen.
Annabelle and Will sit on a blanket on a grassy hill at Challenger Elementary, watching the game. Malcolm’s uniform is blue and white. He is in the out-outfield. Gina is in the stands, but Annabelle and Will sit closer to Malcolm’s outfield location, because Will is helping him. “That’s the way, buddy! Mitt to the ground. Eyes on the ball.” When it’s Malcolm’s turn to hit, they move the blanket. Malcolm loves Will. Annabelle does, too, and this is just one of the reasons.
Her phone buzzes. It’s sitting on the blanket between them. She looks at it. The Taker. She ignores it, and it buzzes again. Again. Again. The poisonous creature returns, no matter how many times she thinks it’s finally gone.
“Who is that?” Will asks.
“It’s him.”
“If he doesn’t knock this off, I’m going to handle him myself.”
Annabelle looks around. She doesn’t want to say it, because it sounds too dramatic, and she’s not sure anyway. But she thinks she sees The Taker’s car pulling out of the parking lot by the school.
31
Stop! she tries.
No good.
Stop, stop, stop!
There is no stopping. No stopping The Taker, no stopping her thoughts, no stopping her pumping legs, because she goes and goes and the thoughts come and come, and he’s here. She is calling him. She is in her bedroom, and she calls him because she can’t stand a minute more of this. She needs to smack that creature dead, because enough is enough! He picks up on the first ring.
“Belle,” he says. “You’re killing me, here.”
“You’ve got to stop this. You’re a great guy, but we were just friends. I care about you so much, but you’ve got to let this go.”
She’s lying. She doesn’t care about him so much, not right now, not anymore, because he’s scaring her. She just wants him to go away.
“I know we’re supposed to be together. I know it. If I don’t have that anymore, the hope of it . . .”
“Do we need to call someone? Are you—”
“What, going to hurt myself? Like you’d care?”
“Of course I’d care. I love you, like a friend, but I do. We
all do. We care about you.”
“I can tell,” he says.
He knows she’s not telling the truth. She doesn’t love him. He’s acting too frightening to love, and her lies are another rejection, but she’s in an impossible bind she can’t fake her way out of. She is tired. He’s wearing her out. Enough is enough? Enough is never enough.
It gets worse, because he keeps this up. For days. He texts late at night. She spots him parked outside Sunnyside Eldercare. She switches tactics. She manages him. She tries to manage him, by being nice but not too nice, present but not too present. She thinks that if she just helps him through to the other side, kind of like Kat, kind of like how Kat helped Annabelle to the other side of her hurt after Will, then The Taker will be fine. She’s responsible. She caused these feelings. She encouraged him, she was unclear, and now she’s finally being clear. She hurt him, and dealing with that hurt is her job now. It is a big, uncontrollable, scary job. An exhausting one. She can’t even run. She hasn’t laced up her shoes in days. They sit empty by her bed.
After a week of this, he calls at two a.m.
“You need to stop calling me,” she says. She hangs up. She shuts off her phone. There are no tactics left except this one: no contact. None.
And then, the next afternoon, right after school, she calls the QFC, where The Taker works. She asks to speak to Lucy. She asks to speak to Adrian. There is no Lucy. There is no Adrian.
She can’t believe it, and yet she suspected this all along. She is utterly and completely done now. A big X goes up in her mind over every single piece of the unnerving, unsettling idea of him.
That’s it. Over. Finished. Discard.
• • •
Annabelle runs and runs down this awful Pennsylvania road, because now there is a car in a driveway, and its stereo is on, and music is pumping. Stop! Stop!
She puts her hands to her ears and presses. She can’t. She can’t go there or do this.
She has gone thirteen miles. Three short of her destination. After all of those lost days in Hayward, Minnesota, she has to stay on track now or she won’t get to DC before she has to appear in Seth Greggory’s office.
She wants to call Grandpa Ed to pick her up. She has been running a half marathon every day for nearly a month since Chicago, and her body is suffering. Suffering? It’s been doing that for weeks and weeks. No, it’s breaking down. It is saying no more. Way back in Cherry Valley, she started feeling the pain of runner’s knee, and she’s been trying to shorten her stride and avoid hard downhill runs, icing and wrapping it afterward, wearing a compression sleeve during the run itself. And every morning lately, she’s also been dealing with a dull ache along the arch of her foot and a constant jab in her heel, which surely means plantar fasciitis, tears and inflammation of the tendons from her heel to her toes. Right now, her head starts to throb in the way that she knows means dehydration. She is breaking down and depleted and her mind is too full and she just can’t go on.
She just can’t.
• • •
“I’m taking you to a clinic.”
“No.”
“Don’t argue. You’re dehydrated. You’re . . .”
Brittle, breaking, destroyed, because The Taker is sitting right next to her. She feels his warm breath on her cheek, hears him whispering in her ear. It’s happening because the Carnegie Mellon students are waiting. Seth Greggory is waiting. The Taker himself is waiting. He is waiting, because he’ll always be waiting.
She feels his fingers, pressing into her arm as he grabs it outside of class. After she hung up on him at two a.m., after she’s gone 100 percent No Contact, he was absent for three days, and she’s almost surprised to see him. In those three days, Gina called Mr. Curley, guidance counselor, and Mr. Curley pulled Annabelle out of class to tell him what was going on as she sat in his office surrounded by posters of Whitworth. Geoff’s dad called Principal Garvey, too, after The Taker posted a photo of a gun on social media and then told Geoff that he was feeling fucking dangerous. It shook Geoff up. He thought it meant suicidal. People were talking, whispering. Making guesses as to why he was out of school. Rumors swirled, but then they heard that The Taker was getting help. It was all under control. Annabelle felt terrible, but after that call to QFC, she was glad he was gone, too. It’s not your fault, everyone kept saying. She felt like she was walking on glass, and the three days of his absence felt pretty great. He was getting help, and she could breathe.
But now, here he is. Standing outside her last class. He grabs her wrist.
“We need to talk,” he says.
“I have nothing more to say to you. Nothing,” Annabelle says.
Geoff spots them. “Hey, man. Let her go,” he says.
Let her go? Never.
• • •
Grandpa Ed has all three fans going in the RV and all of the windows are open, but it’s still so hot in there.
“Porca miseria! I am not a doctor!” Porca miseria: Damn it! Literal translation: pig misery.
“Please. I just need to lie down.”
“It’s been over eighty all week. What if this is heatstroke? I don’t know nothing about heatstroke.”
“I’m fine. I promise you. Let me just lie down. Please. Please, no doctor.”
They park at a rest area next to the Ohio River. Olivia calls. Grandpa Ed answers Annabelle’s phone.
Annabelle listens to the low conversation. Grandpa Ed tells Olivia that he’s not sure how much farther Annabelle can go. The summer heat is more than they anticipated. It is brutal. She’s killing herself, he says. He tells Olivia all of the things Annabelle hasn’t—how her knee pain has grown so that even prolonged spans of sitting hurt. How the compression sleeve doesn’t seem to be helping anymore. How she’s been popping anti-inflammatories and rolling her foot on a bottle of water to ease the agony in her arch. How her eyes are vacant and her body is so thin, because her muscles are actually shrinking and breaking down now. Her shorts barely stay up.
He buys food in town. Grandpa Ed and Annabelle eat burgers outside by the river. She is too tired for food. Too tired for nature. Too tired for whatever is living and flowing around her.
She sits in a camp chair and stares out until it is cool enough in the RV to sleep. She climbs into her bunk. Grandpa Ed begins to snore. The Saint Christopher medal shines in the moonlight, but even a saint seems small and powerless against what’s coming.
She closes her eyes, and when she does, Annabelle hears the thump, thump, thump of the bass from the car she saw in that driveway today. She puts her pillow over her head, but she still hears it. Bump-tha-thump-bump.
“I have nothing more to say to you. Nothing,” she says again to The Taker.
“Hey, man. Let her go,” Geoff says again and again.
Because she knows then, doesn’t she? The way The Taker’s fingers drop suddenly from her wrist—Annabelle knows it’s bad. She knows, because she’s suddenly scared. Really scared. Something is coming. She knows and she doesn’t want to know, so she tells herself she doesn’t.
She tells herself he’ll go away. She tells herself that everything is fine. She tells herself that it’s no big deal. She tells herself that people older than her have things under control.
She tells herself that violence is something that happens to other people.
Annabelle gets dressed for the party at Geoff Graham’s house. She wants to get excited for it, but she isn’t. She feels sick about The Taker grabbing her at school, sick about shaking him off like that. She saw his face as she walked away. He wasn’t just tearful and hurt. He was pissed.
Well, she’s pissed, too. She’s sick of him. She is so entirely, completely finished with him.
Annabelle tilts her chin up toward the bathroom mirror at home, puts her mascara on. It’s a barbecue, a backyard party. It will get chilly later, so she wears her jeans and an orange T-shirt. Geoff Graham’s parents have a hot tub, so she wraps her bathing suit up in a towel. She calls Will. He’s meeting her t
here. He’s working late, and he’s driving over from the Eastside.
“I’m bringing my suit,” she says. “In case we get a chance to get in the hot tub.”
“Oh, nice,” he says. “I’ll bring mine, too. See you soon.”
“See you soon.”
She hunts for the keys to Gina’s car. She spots them in a heap by Gina’s purse.
“Don’t be too late,” Gina calls. “You know I worry. You know I wait up.”
Of course Annabelle knows.
Annabelle stops at Greenwood Market. She buys a package of chips. She buys some mints. She plans on kissing Will a lot, and dancing, and having fun. All of her friends will be there—Kat and Zach and Olivia and Zander, lots of Geoff’s friends from band. But The Taker won’t be there. Geoff told him it might be best if he didn’t come, and The Taker said it didn’t matter anyway—he was going away for the weekend with his parents. What a relief. It’s going to be nice to shake off some of the weirdness of what’s been going on. School is almost out, and this’ll be pre-summer fun.
There are lots of cars already. Annabelle parks behind the last one in the line on the street. Music is bumping. She can hear it from where she parks. Bump, tha-thump, bump.
She feels good. She feels mostly good. She’s relieved to be there. Relieved that The Taker is gone and that Will is coming. She sees Kat’s car, meaning Kat has already arrived.
She rings the bell. Geoff Graham answers. “Hey, chips. Thanks.” He squeezes the bag twice in appreciation. “No one else brought anything. Losers.”
“Hey, thank you. I mean, I smell barbecue.”
“My brother’s in charge of the hot dogs, because I cremate them. Beer’s over there.”
She shouldn’t, her mother will smell it, but she does. She gets a beer, pops the cap, and takes a swig. It’s cold and great. She rarely drinks, so the alcohol hits her immediately. She starts to relax. She can’t wait until Will gets here.
“Belle Bottom! Get your sweet little ass over here!” Kat is in high spirits. She’s talking with Sierra and Destiny. Zach and Olivia are dancing, and more people are pouring in. Annabelle hears loud laughter out in the backyard. People are getting into the hot tub already.
