Crossing

by Stacey Wallace Benefiel

  “Have you given a statement to the police?” Dan asks.

  I nod. “Yeah, early this morning. The instigator’s name is Gary and I got a pretty good look at him and one of the other guys in the group. They are probably students. Otherwise there was no real reason for them to be walking across campus.”

  Liam’s mom sighs and reaches out, gingerly running her fingertips across his brow. “He was such a beautiful boy.”

  “He’s not dead, Mom,” Brynn says.

  “The nurse said he’ll be okay, but that he—”

  “We’ll wait to hear the doctor’s opinion.” She moves her hand from his forehead to the hand I slipped the note into.

  Shit.

  The realization hits me at the same instant she is pulling the folded paper from his fist. I watch, silent, while she unscrunches it and reads it.

  “Nothing a little lipstick can’t fix?” She looks at me, her eyes questioning. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s an inside joke. It’s nothing.”

  “What kind of perverted stuff do you have my son involved in?”

  “Kathleen!” Mr. Garrett chides, finally revealing the she-wolf’s name.

  “Listen,” I say, trying to move the wheelchair backward to no avail. “You’re probably tired and worried sick about Liam and having me here obviously isn’t helping.” Fuck this stupid chair! I push myself up to standing and start shuffling toward the door. “I’ll come back later.”

  “You’ll do no such thing! As soon as Liam can be transferred home where he belongs, we’ll be going. Dan will come by to collect his things.”

  I stumble and catch myself by putting my hand out on the door jamb of the bathroom. “I’d like to at least say goodbye to him…he loves me and I love him, y’know.”

  “Nonsense. He loves Ariana. Liam goes through phases, and that’s all that you are.”

  I manage to make it out into the hall before a sob rips my body open.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chase looks up at me from the asphalt and opens his mouth to tell me to run. I’m frozen, my legs wanting to move, but unable to. I look down to find bodyless hands clawing at my legs, pulling at me. A finger slips underneath the strap of my garter and rips it loose, my stocking sliding, rolling down my leg, turning into blood. It oozes over and between the fingers of the hands.

  My eyes shoot back to Chase, still lying there, bodyless feet jumping up and down on his back. “Run, run, run, run, run,” he chants. I finally get my mouth to work, feel my tongue moving, but it’s not really my tongue, it’s a tube of Perfect Red, writing Call Me in the air in front of me. The lipstick turns, loops back around and comes straight for my face, crashing into my nose.

  Liam appears before me, dressed as Lee, Chase’s disembodied face staring blankly at me from over Liam’s lavender sweater clad shoulder. “Hey, beautiful,” Liam says, his jaw cracking into puzzle pieces and breaking off from his face, blowing away in the wind.

  As far as recurring nightmares go, I’d say I got saddled with a doozy.

  I swipe the tears away from my cheeks with my fingertips, careful to avoid my nose even though the bruising is gone. I get up and grab my robe from the hook on the back of the door, lowering my face to inhale Liam’s fading scent from the collar. Or it might not even smell like him anymore and I just continue to imagine that it does.

  I shower, brush my teeth and comb my hair, never bothering to wipe the steam from the mirror. There’s no point in looking at my reflection because there’s no one I care to look good for, not even myself.

  In the kitchen, I take one of the mugs down, fill it up halfway with yesterday’s cold coffee and then dump the liquid caffeine down my throat. It’s Saturday and Elizabeth is gone for the weekend.

  Heading toward campus, I force myself to walk in the direction of the theatre building. I haven’t been here in two months and wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t felt obligated to show up for the playwriting seminar that David and Rebecca had both recommended me for. Without Liam around, I lost my thirst for the theatre and now at the start of spring term, I’m back on the high school English teacher track. My parents are happy about it. Again, probably because it is a better alternative than turning to meth.

  I walk slowly up the concrete steps of Villard and go through the double doors, anticipating all the questions that will be asked of me, and how I’m going to answer. There truly isn’t that much to say.

  No, I haven’t talked to Liam.

  Yes, every e-mail, letter, text, phone call, and carrier pigeon I’ve sent has been ignored.

  I don’t know how he is and every day since he left has been hell. I’m just trying to get through today and make it to tomorrow. What I’m most angry about is that I’ll survive this, just like I survived Chase.

  Walking down the hall to the Little Theatre, there is a slim hope on the tip of my brain that Liam will come crashing through the door and slam into me, nearly breaking my nose again. It would hurt, but it would be worth it to see him, to feel something. No one opens the door for me and I go in by myself. Rebecca waves me over and I sit in the seat she’s saved for me.

  “Hey, lady.” She chucks me on the arm and then pulls me into a gruff hug. “It’s so good to see your beautiful face,” she says into my hair.

  “It’s good to see you, too,” I lie, the words catching in my throat.

  She smiles. “You look scared shitless. I’m proud of you for showing up today. Take back your power, sister. Fuck those drunk bigots and their community service.”

  “So, you know then,” I say, looking down at my hands.

  Liam’s family chose not to press charges and Gary turned out to be the son of a wealthy alumnus, so my word was basically shit. Gary got one hundred hours of community service and the guys that held me back, Grant and Justin, got twenty each. They weren’t to come within fifty feet of me, which wasn’t difficult because I never left my house except to go to class and they were all business majors with classes in another part of campus. Still, I avoided going anywhere by myself at night, sure they could get out of whatever they did to me if they retaliated.

  “Yeah, I know.” Rebecca puts one of her small hands over mine. “Everyone in the department knows and they’re sick about it. You and Liam are family, Dani. And Theatre people don’t like it when our family gets the shit beaten out of them. We all understand being different and that’s why we stick together.”

  “Unless your biological family sucks and makes you move back to Boise,” I snort.

  She sighs. “Shit. Did you at least get to say goodbye?”

  I bite the inside of my lip, hard. “No, I got to get all of his things together while his dad stood there looking at me nervously like I was the whore of Babylon. I didn’t know what to do with half of Liam’s clothes, ’cause you know, so I just shoved everything into black garbage bags and prayed his parents either wouldn’t go through them or would burn everything Lee that was in them.”

  The seminar attendees quiet down as Professor Damian Straub takes the stage. He’s nothing like you think a playwrighting prof would look like, no white silk scarves and black berets. This guy is wearing New Balance kicks, dark jeans, and a burgundy fleece. He’s got a full head of wavy gray hair and a tan.

  “Welcome.” He smiles warmly. “I’d like to start off by thanking David Fox for inviting me here this weekend. I lose perspective with all of that L.A. sunshine and find the Oregon gloom always gives me a proper dose of melancholy and angst.”

  There is polite laughing and several people mouth “awwwengst” to each other, making fun.

  He clasps his hands together. “This weekend we’re going to work on monologue and voice, using our own personal experiences to create characters that are us, but not us. Another self.”

  “Write what you know,” a student chimes in.

  Professor Straub nods. “Or as I like to say, ‘write what you think you know and then embellish the hell out of it.’”

/>   That gets him some genuine laughs.

  X

  “…I never realized how much I liked the way I looked, until a drunk guy’s knee rearranged my face. I never realized how much love I’d held in my heart, until the sight of watching Liam fade away drained it dry.”

  No one says anything, the theatre is silent and I curse myself for getting into this again. For my drive, for believing I have anything important to say at twenty that any of these people hasn’t heard before. I should’ve gone earlier in the day, but my stomach was roiling from the vegan breakfast burrito Rebecca forced on me and I’d thought I would finally die if I threw up in front of everyone.

  I start to walk off stage, when the sound of forty plastic seats flipping up and the low hum of a collective “Ohhhh” stops me.

  Professor Straub comes forward, takes me by the shoulders, and turns me toward the audience.

  “Well done, Danielle. Your monologue is the most powerful we’ve heard today. It appears we’ve saved the best for last.”

  “That’s so cliché,” I joke, letting myself smile.

  He pushes me gently. “Take a bow so I can get on with my seminar, Gloryhog.”

  I bow quickly, feeling like a tool, and then rush up the stairs to my seat next to Rebecca.

  She practically jumps in my lap, she’s so amped. “One. Woman. Show. You’re ditching those pretentious Lit fucks and putting on a piece of art. You’ll write, I’ll direct. Done deal.”

  I open my mouth to say no, but find that I don’t want to. I haven’t felt this awake in months. My heart is beating again. I am happy for a moment even though I was reenacting something horrible.

  “Cathartic, isn’t it?” Rebecca says, nodding. “Writing helped me get through my divorce from Sage’s dad.”

  “He didn’t call you a biiiiiiiiitch by any chance?” I ask, the words stinging my lips.

  She laughs. “He did, and you can bet your ass I did more than karate-waltz with him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I’m walking home from rehearsal, sunshine on my back, furiously texting myself all the notes that pop into my head the instant I’m not sitting somewhere convenient to write them down, when I walk past my own front door.

  “Dani?”A female voice calls to me.

  I look up, realize I’m halfway in front of the neighbor’s house, and turn back toward the voice.

  It’s Liam’s sister, Brynn, sitting on our front steps.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I manage to say, even though I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. “Is everything okay with Liam?”

  She stands and walks toward me. “He’s fine,” she says quickly. “Physically. Emotionally, he’s a hot mess.”

  I shrug in slo-mo. I don’t have a clue what to say…and I also have seven billion questions. I freeze.

  “I’m here for a swim meet,” she offers.

  I notice for the first time that her hair is damp and she’s wearing flip flops and a gigantic sweatshirt emblazoned with a Jefferson High School Ravens logo.

  “You want to go inside? Your toes must be chilly.”

  She nods and follows me into the ’plex. I dump my stuff off on the chair and point at Liam’s couch, the couch his dad had muttered at me to keep. “You want something to drink? We have coffee and, uh, probably iced coffee.”

  Brynn kicks off her shoes, just like her brother does. “Coffee, hot, would be great.”

  She sits down and I flip the coffee maker back on, going through the motions of making a fresh pot.

  I lean against the door jamb, apprehensive about what her being here means. “How is your meet going?” I say for something to say. “Are you, um, winning or whatever?”

  She snorts and shakes her head. “Nah, I didn’t place. I’m not very good.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.” I wave the comment away.

  “It is.” She shrugs. “If I was good, my mom would’ve come to the meet, but instead she stayed home. Her excuse is that Liam needs her, when in fact, I’m pretty sure I saw him Googling ‘ways to kill your overprotective mother without getting caught.’”

  I laugh. “That bad, huh?”

  “That bad for him. She could give two shits about me and that’s the way I want things to stay.”

  I take a couple of mugs down from underneath the cupboard. “We have some fake creamer stuff if you want and Splenda—”

  “Black is fine.” Liam has taught her well.

  I pour our coffees and head into the living room. I set our mugs on the coffee table and sit down on the opposite end of the couch. It’s time for me to Woman up. “Brynn, I gotta level with you. You seem pretty cool and I get the feeling that you care about your brother, but your being here is scaring me. What do your parents know? What happened when you all took him home?”

  She takes a deep breath. “You know about what happened last fall?”

  “Liam never told me the full story.” I immediately feel like a fool for not asking, but I guess I assumed we’d have all the time in the world for him to tell me.

  “I called Liam to give him a heads up because Ariana blabbed her big mouth to her baby cousin Nico, who is such a dumbass gossip, and everyone at school was asking me if he was, y’know, and I was sure it was going to get back to Mom and Dad.” She takes a sip of her coffee, blows on it and then takes another tentative sip. “I found his stash of girl clothes a long time ago, when I was still in middle school. I was snooping for weed and instead came up with a pair of patterned tights, a fuzzy purple sweater, and a skirt that was too big to fit me, Mom, or Ari.”

  “And?”

  She shrugs. “And whatever. I figured he was gay and I knew Mom would be a bitch about it, because she is obsessed with appearances, so I kept my mouth shut. Anyway, I think I’ve run interference and our parents haven’t heard the rumors after all, but then right before Thanksgiving I’m walking by Liam’s old room and Mom is ripping the drawers out of the dresser and all of the shit that was in his closet is flung all over the bed. She’s mumbling to herself, ‘Not again, not again.’”

  “Not again? So, if she’d already known about him, why the ransacking? Everything incriminating was here.” I take a drink of my coffee and then get up and grab the four half-eaten boxes of Girl Scout cookies Rebecca’s daughter scammed me into buying. Twisted my arm, totally.

  I drop the cookies on the table and Brynn goes for the Samoas while I unsheathe the Do-si-dos.

  “Thanks, I freaking love these sonsofbitches.” She swallows and then tucks her feet underneath her. “So, I ask Mom the same thing. I say, ‘From the looks of it, you know about Liam.’ She breaks down crying and starts babbling about how she thought she’d nipped this in the bud, about how she’d gotten Ariana’s mom, who’s her frenemy, to talk Liam up to Ariana so that she’d want to date him.”

  “Basically, they pimped their kids out?”

  Brynn rolls her eyes. “Totally. Like it was a modern-day arranged marriage or what have you. So, when Liam comes home for Thanksgiving, I tell him this and he’s of course way pissed. He and Mom get in a huge fight and he tells her that her plan backfired, that Ariana is out of the picture, that he’s met this awesome woman who he loves more than he ever loved Ari.”

  Pain radiates through my chest, hearing that. He loved me even then? I suppose I loved him already, too. I finish off my coffee and set the cup back on the table. “Where’s your dad in all of this?”

  “My dad,” she says, sighing, “is nowhere. He’s checked out, been checked out forever. He’s never been able to live up to my mom’s expectations. But Liam and I…Liam made me promise that I would live my life the way I wanted. I asked him if he would make the same promise to me and he said that by the new year he hoped that he could.”

  I nod. “He did. He was living the life he wanted. We both were.” Brynn and I munch on Girl Scout cookies in silence for a moment until I can’t stand it anymore. “Has he said anything about me?”

  She scrunches up her mout
h in thought. “He hasn’t been able to talk for that long, so he hasn’t said anything, but he did slip me a note asking if you’d tried to get in touch with him.”

  My hands fly to my chest. “I did! I tried everything, but he never—”

  She holds her hand up. “I told him I thought you had, and that I assumed Mom was keeping everything from him.”

  “And he went ballistic and scribbled furiously on his pad of paper that he demanded to speak to me?” I ask, half joking, half wishing it were true.

  Her eyes go sad. “He wrote, ‘Good, I’ve messed up Dani’s life enough. She should forget about me.’”

  “Like that’s ever gonna happen,” I snort.

  “So, you still love him?” she asks.

  I look her directly in the eye. “Yes, of course I do. I will always—”

  She juts her chin out at me. “Then how come you haven’t driven to Boise and kidnapped him?”

  I sit back. How come I haven’t done that? “Because I was afraid that it had all been a cruel cosmic joke – someone like him with someone like me? Besides the getting the crap beat out of us part, being with your brother was a dream. I guess I thought if I went to him and found out that what I had felt wasn’t real then I wouldn’t even have the good times to remember.”

  Brynn scrubs her face with her hands. “God, you two are such a couple of pussies, seriously. He loves you. You love him.”

  I retrieve my backpack from the chair and pull out my two comp tickets to the One Night Only performance of Crossing and hand one to her. “Here. Tell him he didn’t ruin my life. Tell him I’m doing what I do best, thinking deep thoughts, writing them down, and then performing them in front of a hundred people.” She takes the ticket from me and crams it in the front pocket of her sweatshirt. “I need him to come to me, Brynn. Any version, I’ll accept them all, but I need him to come to me.”