The Enchantment of Emma Fletcher

by L. D. Crichton

  “I’m so sorry, Tristan,” I whisper.

  “I tried to stay awake, you know, tried to keep an eye on her. We failed her, her parents and I. I fell asleep when she needed me. When I woke up in the morning, she . . .” He stops and takes a sharp intake of breath. “She was gone. The police found her body a few days later, floating in the Charles River. A few witnesses reported seeing a woman matching her description walking along Harvard Bridge. They said she seemed disoriented, messed right up.”

  He looks away before bringing the palm of his hand to his eye. “I couldn’t save her,” he says. “I tried.”

  My heart completely shatters.

  “You couldn’t have done anything more,” I say.

  “I could have,” he argues. “I could have made her get help. I could have stayed awake.”

  “Tristan, that’s not your fault. You loved her and no matter what happens in life, that’s all anyone can ask for, isn’t it? To be loved. You shouldn’t carry that guilt with you. You loved her, and to be loved by you is probably something spectacular.” Whoa. I’m the hypocrite of all hypocrites. I know what it’s like to have the weight of guilt pressing down, gripping in an uncompromising vise.

  “You’re giving me too much credit.”

  “And you’re not giving yourself enough,” I say before repeating my words. “To be loved by you would be spectacular.” I hand him Genesis. “Maybe you need him more than I do.”

  Maybe we both needed a new beginning.

  FIFTEEN

  Tristan

  I feel like I’ve just ripped off a Band-Aid and exposed a raw flesh wound. Not a single living soul has heard me talk about Katie before except Mateo. Part of me feels freer now that it’s out in the open, and even though I have no idea what possessed me to share it with her, I’m glad I did.

  The moment is over and when we step off the Ferris wheel, Emma points to a fun house. “Can we go there, please?”

  I put my arm around her shoulder and pull her closer to me. “We can go wherever you want to.”

  “Too bad I don’t have a carnival map on my wall,” she says. “Then I could mark all of the places we go.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to offer you a map of the fairgrounds when you come into the door?”

  “They are, aren’t they?”

  I shrug. “Well, this is Stonefall. You gotta keep your expectations low. So why the fun house?”

  “I could use a laugh.”

  “All right. I could use a scare. Mind if we head to the haunted house next to it too?”

  She pauses for a moment. She’s hesitating. “I’ve never been in a haunted house before.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  “Not even at Halloween?”

  “Not even then.”

  “You’re in for a treat.”

  “Speaking of treats, we need funnel cake.”

  “Mini doughnuts,” I argue.

  “Funnel cake,” she says again.

  “Funnel cakes and mini doughnuts.”

  “Deal.”

  I love that I’ve just spilled my guts to her and she’s acting like everything is perfectly normal. I know if I told her I wanted to drop everything and talk, she’d follow my lead, but I don’t. I only want to enjoy this time with her.

  We go through the fun house and I hear Emma laugh more than I have in the entire time I’ve known her. It’s a beautiful sound and when we leave, she’s still giggling, her hand braced on my shoulder because we had to exit through a spinning cylinder that’s meant to test balance and she failed miserably.

  “Haunted house?”

  She’s got our teddy bear tucked under her arm and nods. We enter, and immediately I can smell a fog machine and a terrible assortment of horror music loops in the background.

  “If you get scared, Em, I’m right here,” I joke, sure that a place this high on the cheese wouldn’t scare a church mouse. We pass a mock graveyard with dry ice pouring out from underneath the headstones and a green, twisted hand poking up from the grass like someone breaking out from beyond the grave. To the right is a semi-realistic-looking zombie with its arms outstretched and fake blood dripping down its face, lumbering forward. As we pass, it makes a gurgling noise.

  Emma looks at me and crinkles her nose. “Eww.”

  I feel a vibration in her hand, the slightest tremble. “Are you scared?”

  She gives a slight nod. “It’s kind of creepy in here.”

  “If I knew it would actually scare you, I wouldn’t have suggested it,” I tell her. I have a sick sense of what’s awesome. Maybe haunted houses aren’t for everyone.

  “It’s okay,” she assures me.

  I squeeze her hand with mine and lean in so close that my mouth brushes her earlobe. “Don’t be scared,” I say. “That’s the thing about zombies; you can always outrun them. You like that, don’t you? You’re always runnin’ from something.”

  She turns her head to the side and shoots me a look that confirms I’m not exactly wrong, but she doesn’t say a word.

  “If I had to choose to be a creature of the night,” I say, trying to take her mind off being freaked out, “I’d want to be a werewolf.”

  “A werewolf?” She sounds surprised. “Why?”

  “Because, wolves are so badass.”

  She nods. “True. I’d be a vampire.”

  “A vampire, huh? They’re vulnerable to wolf bites.”

  “Even so,” she says, “that’s what I’d be.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re crazy beautiful, inconceivably strong—no one can hurt them—they’re like the top of the supernatural food chain, and depending on where you get your information from, some of them can turn into a bat and fly away.”

  I stop and turn so we’re face-to-face. “You are crazy beautiful already and you’re always trying to take off. Tell me what is so bad that you want to fly away, Emma Fletcher. C’mon,” I press. “I told you my secrets.”

  She looks away and I can already tell she’s not going to talk.

  I lead her to the next room. It’s a torture chamber. A female wax body is sprawled across a wooden table with a medieval cast-iron device removing her guts. Her head is turned, twisted to look at the fairgoers. Her eyes are wide and helpless, her mouth gaping, like she’s gasping for air. Compared to the zombie, I’m impressed with the realism of the scene before us, but Emma’s not.

  “I don’t like this,” she decides. She backs up until her body pushes against mine. How handy it would have been to know this when I was sixteen: take a girl to a haunted house and she’ll press herself against you.

  I rub circles on the top of her hand with my thumb. I may think most of this is lame, but she sounds legitimately scared. “We can leave.”

  I tug on her arm, pulling her around the corner, but no sooner than we round the bend than some prick dressed like Jason fucking Voorhees jumps out and grabs her shoulders. Her face looks a lot like the wax broad in the torture chamber, and the scream she lets out is very real and borderline hysterical. It’s followed by fierce, angry tears that begin to fall down her face.

  I don’t think he even works at the fair; he’s just a douchebag in a hockey mask. I elbow him as hard as I can in the face and hope I push that stupid mask straight into his nose before I manage to shoulder the emergency exit open and pull Emma through.

  The guy hollers behind me, “Fuck you!”

  She’s shaking like crazy, so I wrap my arms around her. “Hey,” I say in the softest voice I can manage. “It’s okay. It was just some prick in a mask.”

  If it were anyone else on the receiving end of that scare—like Mateo—I’d be laughing my ass off. But not now. I’ve never seen anyone look so genuinely terrified in all my life.

  She doesn’t respond but continues to cry freely. That’s wha
t freaks me out the most. Emma doesn’t strike me as a crier. She is not the kind of girl who wears her heart on her sleeve. I’m a dick for insisting that she go in the haunted house.

  I rub circles on her back. “Shh, Em, it’s okay. You’re okay.”

  With the dusk starting to creep in, I check for a full moon. Crazy shit is happening tonight.

  She won’t acknowledge me with words, but her arms snake around my waist and squeeze while she buries her face in my chest. I think the action will bring her comfort until her shoulders really start to rise and fall with that horrible rhythm of sobbing. Maybe it’s been a while since she cried.

  I continue my efforts to comfort her, rubbing circles on her back, kissing the top of her head. “Emma, you’re okay, I’m here.”

  When she finally looks at me her eyes are rimmed with red. There’s more than the prick in the mask. I can feel it in the very pit of my belly and it makes me want to puke.

  “I told him to stop, Tristan. I begged him to, but he just kept grabbing me and I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t, I couldn’t.”

  My heart falls to the floor, imagining the various things she may be talking about, but only one makes any sense. The scar. This is how it got there. I’m silent as I walk her directly out of the fairgrounds to my truck and brace myself for what she has to say, because I know I’ll want to kill someone when she’s finished.

  Emma

  It’s the start of the summer, with the kind of heat that sinks deep into your pores and lingers, scorching you from the inside out. It’s 90 degrees and I am freezing. My teeth are knocking hard against each other as Tristan steers me by my shoulders past the blur of people and to his truck.

  I don’t know what the hell happened back there. First, he confessed his darkest secret, and somehow I find myself about to confess my own. Could I tell him? I don’t want him to see me any differently. I want him to see the beautiful girl he’d talked about at the beginning of the night—not damaged, broken goods. I’m too late. I can’t hide from my past. I can’t outrun it. It always catches up with me.

  That guy grabbed me back there and I couldn’t help it. It was like a total recall of the night I lost just about everything: my life, my mind, my freedom. The scare rattled me and brought me back to a raw place inside myself that I try to avoid.

  Tristan is as white as a sheet of vellum paper and my stomach starts to revolt, twisting and turning like a washing-machine spin cycle. I wish I could take my freak-out back. I wish he didn’t know. Tonight was supposed to be fun. I should be eating funnel cakes and mini doughnuts, flirting with Tristan.

  He ushers me into the truck before rounding the front and getting in on his own side. He twists his body to face me. “Tell me what happened,” he says. “You told who to stop?” His jaw tenses at these words, like he’s fighting his own mouth to get them out.

  I don’t want to talk. My legs twitch, then start vibrating, up and down, up and down, begging me to open the door, to run. My fingers settle on the handle and I hear the automatic locks shut down.

  “You’re not running from this, Em. Talk to me.”

  Fuck. He reads minds.

  I open my mouth to speak but the words are trapped inside.

  “Silence gives your secrets power,” Tristan says. “Trust me, I know.”

  That makes sense. It makes sense and he just gave me an iota of his courage.

  I can’t look him in the eye when I tell him, so I turn away and stare out the window. The Ferris wheel is going around, people continuing like there’s nothing wrong. As if the world is not filled with bad people who do bad things.

  “It was August nineteenth, 2014, at twelve twenty-eight a.m.,” I say. “I know the exact time because my watch broke.”

  Tristan doesn’t say a word.

  He doesn’t take a breath.

  “I had been hanging out with this guy, Gabe Willis, for the summer. He’s the reason I didn’t come home last summer anyway. I was enamored by him. He was in town visiting his mom and we kind of hit it off right away. He was funny, he was older, and he was charming. He made me feel special. He made me feel wanted and beautiful.” My stomach lurches and I wrap my arms around it in a hug, thinking that maybe if I am nice enough to it, it won’t vomit at the memory of Gabe’s face. The way it changed. The way it went from kind and engaging and the Gabe I thought I knew to someone else completely—to a monster.

  My eyes pool with moisture that burns as hot as the air outside. “He broke my watch.”

  I can’t see him, but his voice cracks. “How’d he break your watch?”

  “I told him to stop,” I manage to choke out. “I begged him to stop, Tristan.” My fingers are suddenly possessed and I’m clawing at the switch to open the windows, because the heat seeps into my pores and the air in here is as heavy as the burden that I carry.

  Tristan rolls the window down, careful not to unlock the door. A wise move on his part because I still want to flee.

  I gulp at the stagnant air, realizing my mistake. The air inside was cooler. I roll the window back up and reach for the air-conditioning dial, but Tristan grabs my hands. “Emma. Talk to me. Please.”

  “We went to a party,” I say. “It was a pit party, out in the field an hour or so outside of the city. I drank too much. I probably drank too much.”

  “That’s okay,” he says softly. “It’s all right.”

  I shake my head back and forth because it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t all right. “I led him on,” I say. “I let him think something was going to happen because at first I wanted it to.”

  Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

  “I kissed him,” I continue. “I kissed him and I let him touch me, but then he got really rough and I didn’t like it. I asked him to stop.”

  I look at Tristan, hoping he doesn’t want more from me. That he is willing to leave the horrific details buried where they belong. It’s a good thing I trust him because if I didn’t, the look on his face would be scaring the shit out of me.

  “He wouldn’t. He didn’t stop. He held me down. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything while . . .” I can’t finish. I cannot say it out loud. It’s like reliving the entire thing over again. I’m going to puke.

  “He wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop,” I say. I flick the light to the inside of the cab on and pull up my shirt enough for Tristan to see the ugly, jagged scar that ruined me for the second time. “He said he didn’t want me to forget him. He said I needed a reminder, so he gave me one.” I think tears are streaming down my face but the stagnant air, the burning in my brain, and the searing memories make it hard to tell.

  I should feel better. I spoke the dirtiest, most vile, most disgusting thing I know and I should feel better, but I don’t.

  I reach for the door handle and start pulling at it frantically. “I have to go.”

  Tristan looks at my face, desperate and pleading, and he awards me my freedom, tapping the button to unlock the door.

  By the time my feet hit the asphalt and I’m about to bolt, he’s in front of me.

  “I have to go.”

  “You need to stay,” he counters. “With me.”

  “I have to go.”

  His arms wrap around me. “Stay.”

  “Let me go,” I plead.

  “I’ll let you go if you want, Em. Of course I’ll let you go, but I want you to stay. Please, stay.”

  He’s holding me now and because the universe is cruel and my great date turned into more drama than I could handle in a lifetime, I start crying again.

  I’m so sick of crying.

  SIXTEEN

  Tristan

  I twist the fabric of Emma’s shirt in my hands. My nails dig so deep into the fibers, I’m sure it’s going to rip. My teeth are fused together, my jaw sore with the pressure I’m applying. I want to deliver Emma to Mateo, find the douchebag t
hat hurt her, and make him wish he was never put on this earth to begin with. I want to punch the living shit out of something, but I can’t because I won’t leave her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says into my shirt. “I’m so sorry.”

  I grab her face and frame it in my hands. Her eyeliner and mascara are a mess, making her eyes look small and afraid. “Don’t you dare do that,” I say. “Don’t apologize. This wasn’t your fault.”

  “I shouldn’t have—”

  “Emma,” I say more forcefully, “this wasn’t your fault. No means no, plain and simple.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you,” she says. “You’re mad.”

  Fucking right I’m mad, but not at her.

  I use the pads of my thumbs to wipe at the tears that linger on her face. “I’m not mad.”

  She clamps her arms around my waist again, so I simply hold her because I think it’s what she wants most right now.

  “Does Marley know?”

  Emma’s head moves back and forth before she mumbles, “No one knows. Except my parents.”

  “And the police?” I send a silent prayer into the world that the bastard is rotting somewhere in a prison cell and being subjected to a daily reminder that he’s no longer in control. God, he’d better hope so, because if I ever meet him, I’m going to make him my bitch.

  She shakes her head no again, so I push her away from me for a moment so she can see the look of horror that must be on my face right now. “You didn’t call the police?”

  “Of course we called the police,” she says, now looking at me like I’m insane. “I almost bled to death.”

  “So he’s in jail?” I ask hopefully.

  “No,” she responds. “The police don’t care.”

  “What?”

  “They don’t care, Tristan. The chief of police is his stepfather.”

  I’m trying to think of a million different ways I can compute this. I can’t even wrap my head around it. “His stepfather?”

  “Yeah,” she says, looking down. “He made the entire thing just go away.”