by Temple West
I went back to my room, intent on giving them a little while longer to themselves. Still fighting the throat lump, I checked my e-mail and saw I had a new message from Trish. It was, predictably, short and sweet.
Mystic!
Merry Christmas. Don’t forget to tell Adrian what we told you to tell him.
—Trish
I shook my head but smiled. I didn’t know how someone could be infuriating and endearing all at once, but Trish managed it. After the Green Thing incident, I’d decided to save money and give her and the rest of the girls in our class these two-by-two-inch hand-embroidered pictures. My mom always made me one as a stocking stuffer, and just last year taught me how to pencil in the design straight onto the muslin and stitch over it. Flowers and butterflies were easier to do, but I was always easily bored with patterns, so I made stylized sketches of what everyone reminded me of. Trish’s was, of course, a bear. I stitched red mittens for Stephanie, a mountain range for Jenny, Red Riding Hood’s cape for Meghan, and a stack of books for Laura. They took forever, so I made them small, but everyone really seemed to like them, and it made me feel close to my mom, to carry on that tradition. But I couldn’t think about that now—I couldn’t think about her.
And I couldn’t think about Adrian—not after last night, not after that moment in the back room of the cabin where he’d whispered my name. Someday soon I wouldn’t be a target anymore, and then he and I would have to break off our fake relationship—which had never felt all that fake to begin with—and then my memory would get wiped and I wouldn’t remember that I’d ever felt anything about him at all.
A while later, Rachel called up that breakfast was ready. Shoving all the emotions back down into the pit of my stomach where they belonged, I headed downstairs. We ate a huge pile of waffles with the strawberries cooked right into them, and bacon. I went through several cups of coffee, and then we headed into the living room to open presents. Joe, Rachel, and Norah all seemed appreciative of my somewhat pathetic gifts, although Rachel overdid it, feigning so much enthusiasm that I had to pretend to go to the bathroom to avoid the bear hug she was trying to give me. Norah got me a cool old sketchbook she’d found at an antique store with a metal lock-clasp and faded purple velvet cover, and Rachel bought me a couple sweaters in different shades of funky greens. I really liked the gifts but it was hard to sit there with them, like this was normal, like there wasn’t someone missing.
I slipped up to my room after presents and wrapped myself up in the quilt. After staring at my closed laptop for a few minutes, I finally opened it, clicking through to find the pictures I’d buried so deeply in subfolders I wouldn’t ever be able to stumble across them by accident. It was hard to see her face and not be immediately overwhelmed by all the feelings I’d spent so long trying to not feel. That was the only way to do it, really. That was the only way to get through every day and not just break down crying. I couldn’t let myself remember her, I couldn’t think about her, or miss her.
But it was Christmas. It had been almost three months since she’d died, and I felt guilty—not for moving on, but for forgetting. It was easier to forget, and selfish, and cowardly, and it was time now, finally, to acknowledge that she was gone.
I started way back, back to the baby pictures, back to when my dad was still around. My mom was thin then, my dad looked healthy, I was all round blubber and wispy hair. The sad thing was, there weren’t all that many pictures to look at. My dad had always been the photographer in the family, and when he died, my mom just stopped taking them. All the ones I had of the two of us were from my grandma’s really awful point-and-shoot. But there were a few scattered moments from early childhood: Mom and me at Thanksgiving baking pies, Mom helping me into my coat last year before prom, just three days before she would go to the hospital and never come home; Mom and I eating Jell-O out of little plastic cups in her hospital room the day before she went into the surgery that would give her the infection that would kill her. And that was it—that was the last one. She’d said she was too ugly from the chemo, she didn’t want any more pictures taken of her until she was feeling better. But she never felt better, and she was never going to—and she knew that. We all knew that. And I didn’t realize she would fade so quickly from my memory, and these photos would be all I had of her, and they wouldn’t be enough. How was I supposed to hold on to an entire life with so few pictures? She was just an idea now—a lovely thought, faded at the edges, like my dad.
A long time later I shut the computer down, buried my face in my knees, and cried. I’d meant to go back downstairs to be with everyone else, but I couldn’t, and I think they understood because they didn’t come knock on my door. Eventually I fell asleep as the light faded and the snow stopped.
As usual, I woke up from a nightmare.
In it, I walked through Adrian’s silent mansion, but all the angles were slightly off; the floor was sloped, the door frames were crooked, and the walls were just the tiniest bit caved. I walked from one room to another, but the rooms never ended. Always, I would eventually end up in the main foyer.
I walked for hours until I felt tired and sore and the floors felt sticky. I looked down and saw that I was standing in a spatter of blood. The blood was dripping from twin puncture marks all over my arms. I looked up and realized that my footprints were scuffed through a trail of blood that led both behind and in front of me—I must have been walking in it the entire time.
As all these realizations descended, the spatter of blood became a trickle, although it didn’t seem to be coming from me anymore. Suddenly, the trickle became a flood, and the flood started rising to my ankles, my knees, my hips, my waist, my chin, and then I was floating in it, being carried up to the ceiling, and it was warm and thick and smelled like copper. I reached the ceiling and still the ocean of blood kept rising until there was no more air, just blood.
For once, Adrian wasn’t awake—when I sat up sharply, he did, too, though his eyes were mostly closed and he looked extremely confused.
“What’s what?” he asked, blinking as he scanned the room. “S’ome happening?”
I planted my face against his chest angrily. “Nightmare,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
Adrian sunk back into the pillows and rested his hand on my back. Still not really awake, he mumbled something I couldn’t understand before going still and quiet once more. I lay awake for an hour looking at him—not because I was afraid of another nightmare, but because I didn’t understand how I could be so happy and so sad and so angry all at the same time. Several times Adrian’s arm tightened around me, and I wondered what he was dreaming of.
* * *
“Two words, Mystic: slumber party.”
It was the day after Christmas and I was trying to brush my teeth and talk to Trish on the phone at the same time.
“Who, wha’, whe’, where?” I asked around my toothbrush.
“Are you brushing your teeth?”
I spit into the sink. “Yep.”
“Gross. Anyway, it’s at my house, junior gals, tonight. Be there or suffer my wrath.”
I headed downstairs and found Rachel sitting at the table. “Can I go to a slumber party at Trish’s tonight? If I don’t, I will suffer her wrath.”
She thought about it a moment. “Sure.”
I pulled the phone back up to my mouth and said, “Yes. What time?”
“Dinner’s at six, and we’re making Sloppy Joes. You need a ride?”
I chewed my lip, thinking. I hated asking Trish to come all the way out to get me, I didn’t want to bug Joe or Rachel, and I felt stupid asking Adrian to take me to someone else’s house. I had my license, but there was no way I was driving any sort of vehicle through snowy mountain roads on my own.
“Errr…,” I said, stalling.
“Do you need a ride to Trish’s?” Rachel asked.
“Errr…,” I said again.
“I can take you; it’s okay,” Rachel assured me. “Y’know, I’ve been so used to h
aving Adrian pick you up that I’ve forgotten you have places to go. What time?”
I looked at her, feeling torn. “Trish says dinner’s at six?”
Rachel nodded. “Okay. You’ll be there at six.”
I smiled at her. “Thanks, Rachel.”
She smiled and returned to her paperwork.
“You in?” Trish asked.
“I’m in.”
* * *
“Mystic! You made it.” Trish took my bag out of my hand and dragged me inside. I waved good-bye to Rachel as the door began to close.
“Just to warn you, my brothers are home for Christmas, so it’ll be kinda loud until they pass out.”
She dumped my stuff in her family room and led me into the kitchen/dining room, which was jam-packed with people. I noticed Meghan, Stephanie, Laura, Jenny, and Trish’s parents. But there were also three guys I didn’t recognize.
“Yo, Paul, Mark, Jimmy, say hi to Caitlin.”
As one they turned to face me, and though I instantly saw the family resemblance, my stomach clenched with dread that anyone of them might be Adrian’s dad. They seemed nice enough, and they didn’t have glowing eyes or anything. I told myself to chill.
“Jimmy’s on the left there, Paul’s in the middle, and Mark’s on the right,” Trish clarified.
Jimmy was easily the shortest of the three, maybe five ten or eleven. He had medium brown hair and broad shoulders and kind of just looked like he was happy all the time. Paul was at least six foot and stood with a lazy sort of grace. I wondered if he’d picked that up in law school.
Mark stood a little shorter than Paul, and had the same hair as Jimmy, except longer and gathered into a messy, hipster ponytail. If I remembered correctly, he was the art and music guy.
“Hot Sloppy Joes coming through!” Trish’s dad warned, setting a huge platter in the center of the table.
“Wait your turn, Jimmy!” Mrs. Fields exclaimed. “Ladies first.”
Jimmy withdrew his hand sheepishly. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Mark staring somewhere past my shoulder with a curious expression, but I couldn’t tell what he was looking at.
“Dig in,” Trish said, breaking my thoughts and taking a burger for herself. “Also, how was everybody’s Christmas?”
“Aka what loot did everybody score?” Meghan translated and then dug into her burger.
The conversation revolved around the table until the food was completely gone, and we dragged ourselves off to the family room, which had been designated as Girls Only for the night. We unrolled our sleeping bags and spread them across the floor, flopping down amid bowls of chips and candy that Trish had brought in earlier.
Meghan popped in a horror movie (which made me cringe—it would just add fuel to the fire for my nightmares) and we munched on the snacks until eventually I heard the rest of Trish’s family wander off to their respective rooms.
“Come on, Mystic; you gotta watch this!”
“No,” I said stubbornly.
It was the last twenty or so minutes of the movie, and I had my face covered resolutely with my pillow.
“Ronnie, watch out!” Meghan called to the main character’s best friend right before I heard what sounded like a metal baseball bat connect with his skull.
“Oooh!” Meghan and Trish groaned in unison.
I peeked to my left and saw Laura sitting with a horrified expression on her face as she systematically ate popcorn one buttery piece at a time. On the fringe of our little circle sat Jenny, who sat looking at the TV with her usual passive expression. I almost wondered if she was asleep, except she blinked. Stephanie was clutching her pillow to her chest, looking extremely concerned.
“Caitlin, Caitlin, he’s about to find the”—but she was cut off by a loud crashing noise, a splash, and Shia LaBeouf screaming in revulsion—“dead bodies,” she finished a moment later.
I shuddered. I was not a horror-movie person, especially not the last couple weeks.
“Tell me when it’s over,” I called from underneath my pillow.
“Is that Disturbia?” someone asked from across the room. I peeked out and saw Trish’s brother Mark. He was leaning against the door frame with his arms crossed across his chest.
“What part of ‘girls only’ do you not understand?” Trish asked, eyes glued to the screen.
“I’m not technically in the room.”
Trish rolled her eyes, but didn’t say anything else. Fifteen minutes later, the movie ended. Finally.
I took my head out from underneath my pillow and saw that Mark was still standing in the doorway, but sometime while I’d been hiding under my pillow, he’d changed into sweatpants and a white V-neck with a loose flannel shirt over it.
“Good night, Mark,” Trish called to her brother, her tone a warning to leave.
He turned to look at the rest of us, and for a moment, his eyes flickered to the corner of the room. “Good night, ladies. I’m right upstairs if anyone has bad dreams.”
He flashed a smile and disappeared.
Meghan turned to Trish. “Since when did Mark get hot?”
She looked back blankly.
“Oh, come on! I always remembered him as this quiet, out-of-the-way guy, and now he’s got this really sexy starving-artist thing going on and I like it.”
Trish stared at Meghan like she was an alien. “Are you serious?”
“He’s quite attractive,” Stephanie supplied with a shy smile.
“Paul’s more my type,” Laura said, “but I could see how people might find Mark appealing.”
“Guys,” Trish warned, “he’s my brother. Ew, okay?”
Meghan leaned forward eagerly. “Is he dating anyone?”
“Not that I know of. But he’s old!”
She rolled her eyes. “He’s only a junior. We’re juniors! It’s practically the same thing.”
Laura shook her head vigorously. “That’s not the same at all.”
“Besides,” Meghan said, leaning back on her elbows with a satisfied smile, “I like older men.”
“Meg, you are sick.” Trish didn’t really look angry, more morbidly puzzled.
“And he’s yummy,” Meghan added with a grin.
“I really don’t think he’s your type.”
“He’s totally my type!”
Trish looked at her skeptically. “I thought you wanted to be a hair stylist.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” she replied with a shrug, “I just think Mark wants to do different things. He’s doing a semester abroad in France next year, to study at an art academy.”
Meghan looked like she was about to drool. “I like cultured men.”
Trish shook her head, disgusted. “Culture for you is eating a microwaved croissant.”
“I’ll learn French. We’ll live there and make French love and have cute little French babies.”
Trish looked horrified. “Dude, just—no.”
“When are they leaving?” Jenny asked suddenly. As always, it surprised me when she spoke.
“Abou’ a wee’ af’er New Year’s,” Trish said around a mouthful of popcorn. She swallowed thickly. “We’re having a little shindig here and you’re all invited, by the way.”
“I claim dibs on Mark for the New Year’s kiss!” Meghan exclaimed. I happened to be glancing at Jenny and was startled to find an irritated expression cross her face as she stared at Meghan.
“I’m not sure you can really claim dibs on a human being,” Laura replied dryly. “That’s, like, slavery. Or prostitution.”
“You guys are so melodramatic.” Meghan sighed, leaning back against her pillows.
I decided to try and break the tension. “Hey, Trish, do you mind if I bring Adrian?”
She grinned at me. “Hell no, I don’t mind! I’m bringing Ben.” She looked at the other girls. “That’s an open invitation; if y’all have dates, bring them along. Everybody should get a little midnight action.”
The conversation
spun off from there, and we stayed up until two in the morning talking. I conked out the moment we decided to call it a night.
Two hours later, I was awake again after a ferocious nightmare involving a thousand binoculars like the ones from the movie staring at me as I posed naked for an art class that was meeting in the Eiffel Tower.
It was mostly just creepy, but I woke up feeling like I was being watched. When I looked around, everyone was deeply asleep.
Except that Jenny’s sleeping bag was empty.
Through the crack under the door, I saw a faint light. Trying not to step on anyone, I made my way over and peered through the sliver where the door wasn’t quite closed.
There, sitting at the kitchen table, was Jenny.
And … Mark?
I could see two mugs sitting in front of them, like they’d been there so long they’d needed refreshments. Jenny had her chin cupped in her hand, white-blond hair draped around her, and was actually looking Mark in the eye, something I’d never seen her do with anyone else. Mark was murmuring something quietly to her and I strained to hear.
“… talking and saying nothing. People don’t understand the power of words. I love talking to people, but I can’t stand it when they have absolutely nothing to say.” He chuckled in a self-deprecating sort of way. “Which is ironic, because I’m doing all the talking.”
Jenny smiled. I’m not sure I’d ever seen her smile before. “I like listening.”
“Then you’re pretty damn different from every other girl I’ve ever met.”
They regarded each other for a few moments in silence.
“When are you going back?” Jenny asked finally.
“Two weeks.”
She looked down at the table.
