Bone Deep

by O'Brien, Kim;

  I walk until I come to a corn field. The plants aren’t quite as tall as me, but they’re lush, packed together tightly, and utterly motionless. My mind flashes back to another time, another field. I hear Emily’s childhood voice in my head. There’s this special place I know…

  All at once goose bumps break out on my arms, and the back of my neck prickles. I stare at the field, picturing Emily, not as a teenager, but as a ten-year-old in a frayed pair of denim shorts and an oversized pink T-shirt knotted at her waist. She smiles, the gap between her front teeth giving her a slightly mischievous, slightly sinister look. She beckons me forward.

  Somewhere deep inside the corn field, a cricket begins to buzz. The single rattle quickly swells into a loud and insistent chorus as if thousands of crickets are buzzing. It’s almost like the insects are calling me, daring me to walk into the tangle of corn leaves.

  “There’s a secret place I know,” Emily said, “where the grass grows taller than anywhere else. Want to see it?”

  It wasn’t grass, though, where she brought me. It was a corn field with tightly packed plants and stalks as thick as my legs.

  “Come on,” Emily pulled me by the hand.

  “Emily, I…”

  “It’ll be fun,” she said.

  And it was fun, at first. The corn smelled warm and sweet. We walked deeper into the field until all we could see were the stalks. Emily giggled and then raced ahead, zigzagging through the plants.

  It was hard to keep up. Leaves slapped my face, and a couple of times I almost tripped on the tangles of old, broken stalks. Suddenly Emily turned, and I couldn’t see her at all.

  I stopped. Panting, I looked around. “Emily?” It was very quiet. I called a little louder. “Emily?”

  Spinning slowly, I looked for her. A jungle of giant plants surrounded me, blocking my view with their long, green leaves. Had Emily fallen? Was she hurt? My father’s stories spun in my head—snakes and scorpions and iguanas big enough to carry off a child.

  Something behind me brushed my arm. I whirled, but it was only a leaf. As soon as I pushed it away, another touched me, this time on the back of my neck.

  “Emily!” I shouted.

  The plants swayed, reaching for me. I tried to shrink, but they surrounded me. They seemed suddenly alive, capable of movement, of lashing their leathery leaves around me like ropes.

  I sank to the ground, sobbing. And then suddenly Emily burst from between plants, laughing.

  “Got you!” she sang out. “Now I’ll find you!”

  I looked up. “You scared me!”

  She studied my face and then wrinkled her nose. “Why are you crying?”

  “I’m not.”

  “It was just a game.”

  I stood up. She was taller, but I was really angry. “I don’t want to play with you anymore.”

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “We’ll make the corn prince now.”

  “I want to go back.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but please don’t be mad at me. My dad says if you don’t face the things that scare you, you’ll never grow up. You’ll be a little girl forever.”

  “We need to go. The corn’s alive,” I told Emily. “It moves when you’re not looking. It wants to catch you and turn you into a scarecrow.”

  Emily’s eyes got bigger with excitement. “We’ll fight it together. We’ll steal the leaf from the tallest plant and destroy it.” She reached for my hand. “I won’t let the corn hurt you. I promise you that. We’re best friends now.”

  I turn away from the field and its memories. And then I see him, standing less than a dozen yards from me. He’s so still he seems to blend into the scenery. His presence is dreamlike, as if he would vanish if I blinked. Only moments ago, I dared the universe to have whatever happened to Emily happen to me, and now here he is.

  I square my shoulders and ignore the way my heart suddenly slams in my chest.

  “Jalen,” I snap because I don’t want him to see that he’s scared me. “What are you doing here?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Paige

  Sweat rims the neck and under the arms of Jalen’s black T-shirt. He walks toward me slowly, and despite my mood and my doubts, I cannot take my eyes off him. He moves like a lion, all muscle and bone and grace. But the question remains—why is he here?

  “Jacob saw you run from the information center. I came after you. What’s wrong?”

  “You were following me the whole way? Why didn’t you let me know you were there?”

  He closes the distance between us, and suddenly I’m standing in the shade of his body and have to tilt my head to see his face. If he wants to kill me, there’s no way I can match him physically. And yet even as I’m thinking this, I’m not scared.

  He simply shrugs as if there is no need to explain.

  I fold my arms. “It’s creepy,” I tell him. “I turn around and you’re there. That time in Chamber One with Jeremy…you just showed up. When I was going to Jeremy’s house, you just happened to be there with the truck. Why is it that every time I’m upset, you know to be there?”

  “Just lucky,” he says, stone-faced.

  His joking voice is the same as his serious voice, but I get it. I shake my head. “Seriously, Jalen, how do you always know?”

  His eyes meet mine, and I see, even if he won’t say it, even if he doesn’t want it to be true, there’s something between us.

  “Here.” He lifts the strap of his canteen over his head and hands the battered metal container to me. “Drink.”

  “Thanks.” I take the canteen from his hands and drink so greedily that I choke a little and small drops trickle down my chin.

  I push the canteen back at him, and when he takes it, our fingers touch. It’s just a brush, but just like before, it’s electric, magnetic. But I have to pretend that I don’t feel anything because I know that’s what Jalen wants. I just don’t know why.

  He screws the cap on with more force than necessary. I feel his sudden tension, even if I don’t understand it.

  He pulls the canteen and strap over his head, and they nestle against his side, drawing a perfect line of where I would like to be. It makes me angry that I can’t control thoughts like these, that when I look at him, I start thinking about how I want him to touch me, kiss me, want me. He makes it easy to forget that Emily is missing and that finding her is all that’s important.

  I dig the toe of my hiking boot into the hard, pebble-crusted earth and try to crush the thoughts I don’t want to have. “Dr. Shum is reinstating Jeremy Brown.”

  He doesn’t speak, but his frown deepens.

  “Effective immediately,” I continue. “Dr. Shum is satisfied with the police report. Jeremy’s not a suspect, and there’s enough ambiguity with what happened with me to reinstate him into the research program.”

  I hold Jalen’s gaze even as the heat of memories burns my face. I don’t want to think about Jeremy’s thin fingers clawing at me, and even worse is the thought of Jalen picturing me like that, too.

  “That’s a mistake. He’s an asshole.”

  “Totally.”

  “He’s not coming near you,” Jalen states.

  I shrug, although inside I’m thrilled at the totally serious tone of his voice. He wants to protect me. He cares. “Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe I can make him slip up.”

  “I don’t want you around him.”

  “I don’t want to be around him, either, but I really don’t have a choice. How else will I find out anything?”

  Jalen’s mouth tightens. “What if I told you I think you’re going in the wrong direction?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shifts, as if to ease the pressure of the words he doesn’t want to say. “Jeremy told us he saw Emily at the park after hours. That she might have been meeting someone.”

  “He also said Emily was a slut. He’s a liar.” I have to force myself not to get angry all over again.

  “He’s a liar,” Jalen agre
es, “but even liars know the best stories mix truth with fiction. What if he actually saw her? What if she was secretly meeting someone?”

  “That’s crazy. I’d know.” But my thoughts immediately jump to my father and the possibility that he and Emily were having an affair. Oh God, does Jalen think this, too?

  Where, I wonder, does the line between loyalty to my family and loyalty to Emily lie? And on what side do I want to stand?

  Behind me, the crickets begin a loud, shrieking chorus that rattles through the heat like demented laughter. I want to cover my ears from their terrible noise, my terrible thoughts.

  “Maybe you know more than you think.”

  It’s the worst thing he could say to me other than come right out and accuse my father. “If she were seeing someone, she would have told me.” I say it a little defiantly. “We should go.”

  He doesn’t argue, only follows me as we pick our way through a line of dirt that only barely resembles a path. Over us, the sun beats down so hot on my head it feels like my hair will burst into flames.

  We follow the irrigation ditches leading from the well. Although these have been searched, I can’t help looking into the murky water and picturing Emily’s long blonde hair tangled in the reeds growing out of the banks.

  I think about all those summers when Emily and I were kids. We were close in a way that I’ve never been with any of my other friends. Or probably ever will be again. I can’t stop trying to find out what happened to her, even if it means that I might not like the answers.

  I sigh. As much as I want to dismiss Jalen’s observations, I can’t. “So you think Jeremy was telling the truth about seeing her after hours at the park?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she didn’t tell me anything.”

  Jalen lets a moment of silence pass. “Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe she promised someone she wouldn’t.”

  We pass a towering saguaro, and I try to see a face in its prickly green barrel, a game Emily and I used to play. We never did, but it was good because, if we saw a face, it meant a person would die. “Then how are we going to find out who it was?”

  Jalen stops walking and looks into my eyes. Suddenly he seems very old. “You knew her,” he says, “who she was and who she liked. To find her, we need to start thinking like her.”

  “Until this summer, we hadn’t spoken in years.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he insists. “People don’t change. What was she like growing up?”

  Bold. Adventurous. Beautiful. I shake my head. The adjectives don’t do her justice. “It was a long time ago. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “I think you know exactly where to start.”

  We pass another cactus, but I’m too afraid to look for a face. I’m afraid I’ll see Emily’s. I take a deep breath, and then without looking at him, I start at the beginning.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Paige

  “We played games.” As we walk, my hiking boots make soft crunching noises as if the ground has been starched. “They were all about fear—feeling it and then using it to give us magical powers.” I pause, hoping he won’t laugh. He doesn’t. “At first it was just running across a corn field by ourselves, but then it escalated. Before long, we were sneaking out at night, holding secret ceremonies, trying to talk to the dead.”

  Jalen doesn’t talk or try to interrupt me as I try to summarize the next several summers—the risks we took, how our secret adventures bonded us so closely that neither of us could have other friends, nor did we want to. We shared everything about ourselves—our deepest, most private thoughts—and these became elements that I wove into our games. I feared snakes, so of course we sought them out, even touched them. Emily feared being alone, and so I would lead her blindfolded into the desert at night, leaving her in the scariest places I could find, to find her way back to camp.

  There were fantasy creatures in our games. Coyumans—dangerous beasts who were half-coyote and half-human, but could be kept away if you could imitate their howl perfectly. And spirits—smoky dark creatures who moved through the night like shadows and possessed your body if they touched you.

  The greater the fear, the greater the power it gave us. We believed fear let us tap into the power of the universe—even into the multiple worlds my father described in the myths he told us. We both claimed, one night, after inching along a crumbling canyon wall a hundred feet off the ground and no wider than our feet, to have seen the faces of old people watching us from the craggy face of the rocks.

  By the time we were ten, we were very, very good at playing the game. It was our secret, and if we came home with bruises or cuts, our clothes torn, we were always able to explain it. It went on for years, I tell Jalen, until that final summer.

  We found the cave by accident, one morning when we were exploring the rock formations rising in Macizo Canyon in New Mexico. It was well-hidden, the opening so disguised it looked like a shadow between two rocks. I stuck my face into the darkness. I couldn’t see much, but I knew it was a perfect place to play our game.

  Emily grinned. “The best-told stories are the stories told just before dark.”

  I hesitated. The last time I had played the game, I’d almost fallen off a very tall rock. For a long time now, I had wished we could stop playing these games. I actually thought what our fathers were doing was a lot more interesting, but I’d always done what Emily wanted me to do. The bottom line—I didn’t want to lose her friendship.

  I promised myself this would be the last time. “Okay, but I’ll have to get inside before I’ll know the story.”

  To prove I wasn’t afraid, although I was, I went first. What little light there was vanished almost immediately, but I moved slowly, waving my arms around like a blind person, making noise, and taking tiny baby steps. The air grew cooler, smelled musty.

  “We’re in a si’papu,” I said, pausing as Emily shuffled up behind me. “And we’re going backward in time, to the world that existed before ours.”

  Emily’s hand dropped on my bare shoulder, connecting us, but startling the hell out of me. “Shit,” I said, and she giggled. The noise echoed in a terrible way.

  With Emily’s hand on my shoulder, I led us deeper into the cave. It was very dark, but we were used to it. The deeper we went, the more the walls became increasingly narrow. Each bend became harder to squeeze through.

  The sounds became magnified, or maybe we were just breathing harder and harder. My heart thumped loud and fast, and my sides scraped against the rock that was pressing now on me from both sides even though I was mainly turned sideways. I told Emily that the cave had a heart and lungs, and if we listened closely enough we could hear them. I stopped. We listened.

  “Oh, shit,” Emily whispered. “I hear it. I’m totally freaking out.”

  “Let’s go back.” I thought about lying, saying that the cave ended. It was too tight for her to pass me. She’d never know. But I didn’t. Instead, I led us deeper, embellishing the story, releasing my fear in the story I told as we inched our way through the darkness.

  The bat came out of nowhere. I didn’t even hear it until it was flapping by my head. I ducked to the side, and then it happened. One minute there were walls and floor, and the next they were gone. I had long enough to realize I was in serious trouble, and then the ground flew up at me. I heard something crack, and then Emily’s weight smashed into me.

  My leg exploded into a thousand knife-points of pain. It blazed up my body, took my breath, and lit my brain on fire. I had to clamp my teeth together to keep from screaming.

  “Emily… Emily…” I croaked out. “Are you okay?”

  “I think so,” she said. In the darkness, it seemed like her voice was everywhere—around me, on me, even inside me. She shifted off me. “Are you okay?”

  The pain was terrible. I couldn’t keep myself from making a horrible groaning noise. “I…I think my leg is broken. And I’m bleeding.”

  Emily sucked in her breath. “Oh, shit,” she
said, and for once there was no excitement in her voice, only fear.

  “How did you get out?” Jalen asks.

  We’ve stopped walking. His irises are as dark as that cave was, but the darkness isn’t absolute. There’s a light in them, a way out of this story and all its terrible memories, and I hold onto this. “After a while, Emily climbed out of the hole we’d fallen into and went for help.”

  Jalen’s lips tighten. “After a while?”

  I cross my arms. “She didn’t want to leave me. I was cold, and she lay next to me, trying to warm me up. I finally managed to talk her into leaving.”

  There isn’t much more to the story, but every time I try to summarize something, Jalen stops me, asks for clarification. He wants details, to know how I felt. I find myself admitting to him things I’ve never told anyone else. How scared I was, how angry that I had not listened to myself and stayed out of the cave. How part of me had wondered if Emily would ever come back or if she’d just leave me there as the ultimate end to our games.

  But she came back. And they Life Flighted me to Phoenix. My heart stopped three times on the way. I’d lost so much blood. They immediately operated after we landed—the first of three surgeries on my leg… and the end of my friendship with Emily. She came to see me in the hospital, and I pretended that everything was okay. But it wasn’t. I blamed her. Her parents blamed me. A couple of months later, my father took the job at Rutgers, and we moved. I got busy, and it was easier not to be best friends anymore.

  “Your leg…it’s okay?”

  We both glance down at my calf, at the scars marbling the length of it. He touches it tentatively, and I feel a rush of warmth shoot through me. “Yes.”

  He takes his hand away, but keeps staring at my leg. “I’m glad.”