“They’re open at every hour.”
A cowbell clanged on the door as we let ourselves inside. Dozens of framed drawings hung on the walls of the store where no one was waiting. I wandered over to study some of the artwork. An assortment of faeries were depicted in a cluster. As I stood examining them, I saw that none of them looked like a typical fairy from a storybook. Black tears ran down their pointed noses and miniature faces. Violent holes tore through the delicate netting of their wings. A shiver raced through me.
“Wren?” Lena called, moving deeper into the store past black leather chairs that reclined like at the dentist’s office. “Wren, are you here?”
I leaned in to see a curved scythe clutched in the hand of one of the illustrated faeries. A thin trail of blood dribbled from the lethal point.
I heard footsteps and turned to see a short woman with breasts that spilled over the top of her shirt and sleeves of tattoos that ran from her knuckles up to her neck. A deep shade of plum painted her lips. Lena greeted her with a hug. The artwork adorning her body moved with her, giving it the appearance of animation.
“So you’re in the market for your first tat?” the woman who must be Wren asked.
“Does anyone have this one?” I tapped the glass covering the faerie with the sickle-shaped sword.
Wren came closer and peered over my shoulder. “Keres? No. Not yet.”
“Is she yours?”
Wren murmured an affirmation. “Do you want her? It’s an interesting choice.” She seemed to appraise me, looking for what damage I must have suffered to want the violent faerie marked on my body forever.
I stepped away from Keres but spared another appreciative glance for her. “Not yet. Maybe someday,” I said. I loved the faerie, but I’d save her for once I’d earned it.
“Okay, then. What can I do for you today?” She crossed the room, pulled a cart of equipment over, and sat down on a stool next to one of the reclining chairs.
I passed Lena and took a seat on the cracked leather. “Just a line for now. Here on my wrist.”
Wren raised her pierced eyebrow. “A line? That’s it.”
“It’s more than that. It’s a tally mark. One for now. More for later. That’s what I want. Can you do it?”
Wren grunted, but took out a silver tool that looked like a gun with a needle on the end. “I’ll try not to take it as an insult to my talent.”
Lena edged closer and put her hand on the headrest behind me. “You can hold my hand if it hurts.”
I didn’t tell her that I wanted it to.
Wren wiped my skin with a swab of alcohol and dipped the needle into a pot of black ink. She flipped a switch and the gun buzzed like a mosquito. The needle plunged into the bulge of veins at the base of my wrist. I gritted my teeth to keep from flinching. The sharp point bit into my flesh. I felt Lena’s sharp intake of breath beside me.
Wren expertly traced a line half an inch long on my wrist and then retraced it. Too quickly it was over. She swiped cotton over the spot and the excess ink smeared and then disappeared. “A line. Just like you asked for.” Her tone was flat. Unimpressed. “Thirty bucks.”
I pulled cash from my back pocket all the while staring at the razor-thin line branded on my skin. One down. Four more to go.
I paid Wren and thanked her. Outside the darkness was dissipating. The lamplight faded into hues of blue. An idea had been bothering me all night. For me, in the days, there was only darkness. It was an unreachable part of me, what happened during the daytime. I was nocturnal and, for the most part, I relished that fact. But it had its limitations.
“Lena, what if I said I needed your help?” I asked.
She froze on the spot. Crickets chirped along a nearby fence and above, the stars were beginning to blend away. “Anything. You name it,” she said.
I realized there may have been more to my seeking out Lena tonight than celebration. I had a task and, as someone who needed assistance for mundane matters that required regular business hours, it just might be worth having an assistant of sorts.
The one standing in front of me was canine loyal, wide-eyed and eager. Perhaps saving her would serve its purpose after all.
“I need you to track down a room on Corbin College’s campus for me.”
ELEVEN
Cassidy
What do you do when the facts of your life no longer add up?
I woke up with a line on my wrist that wouldn’t go away and no idea how it got there. The only thing I could be certain of was that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been certain of anything.
A coldness nestled into the pores of my bones, as though winter had come to live there.
I kept pulling up my sleeve and staring at the tattoo, trying to imagine myself going into a tattoo parlor, sitting down, stretching out my arm, waiting for a needle to draw ink into the skin. It was nearly impossible and yet there it was. In black and white.
Of course the bigger problem—the much, much bigger problem—was the dead body buried just beyond the lot line of my house. Now that was something I wouldn’t mind being able to forget.
No such luck, of course.
My elbows were planted on a cold-surfaced desk in Mr. Yotsuda’s classroom where I was supposed to be listening to him teach AP calculus. Instead, I’d been staring at the clock above the whiteboard watching seconds tick-tick-tick by.
Yesterday I’d made a promise to myself to start figuring out what the hell was going on with me. Tomorrow, I’d promised. And now tomorrow was today and I’d done exactly nothing to honor that commitment. Because that promise implied me actually doing something. Active. And for the past few weeks I’d been completely rebelling against that notion. I’d decided to give up. Let myself sink into the pit of depression and drown there.
I flattened my cheek into my palm. Ugh, that certainly would be easier.
Uh-uh. No way.
I had to snap out of that train of thought. That sort of thinking was exactly what had gotten me into this mess. At least I thought it was. Honestly, I didn’t have a clue.
Besides, two days ago I quelled a coup on my cheerleading squad. Two days ago I’d been staging my big comeback. Two days ago I decided to grab life by the balls and take charge.
I sat up straighter, mustering my resolve. I had built Cassidy, Homecoming queen, out of two things: smarts and determination. I still had at least one of those. I chewed on my eraser. If I had a complicated math problem how did I approach it?
First, I figured out what variables were missing. Then, I followed the steps to solve for them. Bingo.
I glanced around and saw the students around me furiously scribbling notes from the whiteboard.
“Cassidy? Hello, Cassidy?” Coming out of a daze, I saw Mr. Yotsuda waving at me from the front of the room. I blinked, looked down, noticed that I’d already been shoving my belongings into my book bag. “Cassidy, are you paying attention?”
“Um…,” I faltered. I was out of my seat with my strap slung over one shoulder. I stared at the equation he’d scrawled across the board.
dy/dx = cos(x) / y2, where y(π/2) = 0
I read the line under my breath. The wheels in my brain turned over. “The answer is y = (3 sin(x) − 3)1/3.”
“Where are you going?” Mr. Yotsuda said as I turned my back to him. “Class isn’t over.”
“Sorry.” I stepped hastily over a backpack in the aisle. “It is for me.”
“But—but,” he stammered. “That’s correct.”
My mouth quirked into a half smile. Of course it was correct.
Once out of the classroom, I hurried down the hallway, past the school nurse’s office. I noticed it with a twinge of regret, wondering how things might have been different if I’d confided in a nurse or in anyone about Dearborn before there was a dead body to contend with, before the string holding me together was so perilously frayed that all I could do was cling to both ends and pray for dear life.
Nobody would have believed me. E
veryone would have thought I deserved it. It would have ruined my reputation at this school. These were the things I’d been telling myself for weeks. But were they true? And could I have been any worse off than I was now?
I kept walking briskly. Nerves crept in with every step. When I reached the library, I was downright jumpy, worried that every move I made was a sign of guilt.
Baby steps, I reminded myself. Figure out what variables were missing, then follow the path to solve for them.
I tugged open the door and landed on the ugly orange carpet of the school library. I spotted Mrs. Petrie behind the front desk. Her hair was a mop of cotton ball frizz atop her head. I approached her and cleared my throat.
When she saw it was me, she visibly brightened. For all she knew I was still Miss School Spirit and, as far as I was concerned, there was no need to correct her.
I’d almost forgotten one very useful tidbit: Teachers adored me. In fact, though I hated to admit it, sometimes I suspected that even adults and, let’s face it, especially adults like Mrs. Petrie, wanted to be me.
“Shouldn’t you be in class, Cassidy?” She curved her mouth into a frown, but her eyes expressed no real disappointment in me. A girl like me must have a good reason.
“Totally.” I leaned in close like I was telling her a bit of juicy gossip. “Confession,” I said, and felt her drawing in even closer. Her strong, floral perfume stung my nose. “I procrastinated on this project for Ms. Langley and I need to knock out some of the research quick.”
“I can help,” she said too eagerly, picking up a pen.
I let out an exaggerated exhale. “Thank god. I knew you could. Okay, so I’m doing a project on the human brain and memory. Like…” I stared up at the ceiling, trying to think through the missing variables and the steps to solve them. “Like why we remember some things and not others and whether we can make ourselves remember things we’ve forgotten.”
She deflated. “That sounds … like a complicated project. Are you sure that’s for Ms. Langley?”
“God, I know, right? We, um, had to choose our own research topics. Stupid me chose the most complicated of the human organs—the brain.” I thunked myself on the head like I was one of the Three Stooges or something.
Mrs. Petrie’s mouth went pin straight. She turned to her old school desktop computer and began typing. “Brain could be housed in the science and anatomy section. But…” She punched another pattern of keystrokes. “I think what you’re looking for is psychology, which is in … Ah-ha! Row F, halfway down. Would you like me to help you look?”
“No, no.” I tapped the desk in front of me. “You’re very busy. Thanks, Mrs. Petrie!”
I couldn’t get away fast enough. The last thing I needed was ancient Mrs. Petrie Dish tagging along. But it felt good to act like myself again. Even if it was just that—an act.
I brushed past the rows labeled with the first few letters of the alphabet, slowing down as I approached F. I turned down the narrow rows until the words that were written on the spines began to catch my attention. Brain & Behavior: An Introduction to Biological Psychology. Understanding Psychology. Thought Manipulation. Psychopaths. I studied them all, trying to decide which one to choose.
As I scanned the shelves, I homed in on the fattest one. A leather-bound psychology reference book. I slid it from the top shelf. A puff of dust rained down on top of me, making me sneeze.
The library was fairly quiet. I lowered the tome to the ground and sat in front of it cross-legged, where I cracked open the spine and flipped to the index pages at the back.
I was dragging my pointer finger down column after column of tiny print words when I heard a small gasp, as if in alarm, and looked up to see the girl who’d introduced herself as Lena staring at me from the end of the aisle.
Her hair was pulled into two tight buns that perched on top of her head like mouse ears. She had her thumbs hiked under the straps of her backpack. It was like I was Medusa and the sight of me had turned her to stone and frozen her in that spot. It was like I was a ghost who’d jumped out and scared her when she least expected it.
We held each other’s gaze for longer than social niceties would permit. My mouth had gone dry. Was Lena another missing variable? Was she a piece that I needed to solve for? The thought of Dearborn kept flashing in my mind.
I broke our staring contest first, returning to the page, to the plan. And away from the weird girl who’d called me Marcy of all things.
As I scanned through another page of columns, I felt rather than saw her slink away. My finger traced the font and I found the entry I was looking for. Memory.
The tattoo on my wrist poked through from under the sleeve of my shirt, causing the metronome of my heartbeat to pick up its pace.
I was about to turn to the page of the first entry for Memory, page 187, when a word, spelled out as one of the subcategories, stood out in my line of vision.
I stopped thumbing through the pages and stared at the index. I hadn’t known it was a real area of study in psychology. But reading it now felt like a sort of suggestion. There it was. A step.
Hypnotism.
* * *
WHEN I LEFT Hollow Pines High, I’d had exactly two hours to get back and that was if I planned to only miss gym and Spanish, the two courses I thought I could most get away with skipping. Slipping off campus wasn’t hard. The faculty was already beginning to mentally check out in advance of the three-day weekend.
I pulled into the parking lot of the redbrick strip mall and checked the clock. I was down to an hour and forty-five minutes. A wooden sign that was attached to the side of the building had white letters that read: Dr. Crispin, Harmony Hypnotherapy & Transformation. I parked nearest to the tinted entrance underneath the sign and got out.
Dr. Crispin’s office was wedged between a row of sterile business fronts, next to an accountant and a mediator. There was no bell to announce my arrival and I found the squat reception desk completely devoid of human life. The legs of an anemically brown leather couch wrinkled the edges of a puke-colored oriental rug lying underneath it.
I thought about taking a seat there with the stack of magazines, but decided I didn’t have time to waste pretending to be patient when what I needed was to be a patient. Like now. So instead, I walked over to the vacated desk and strummed the strange wind chime that was hanging like an upside-down xylophone.
I kept on strumming the instrument until at last I heard a cough from a back room and a short man with a concave chest and round tortoiseshell glasses emerged dabbing his mouth with a crumpled napkin.
“Do you have an appointment?” he asked, unnecessarily pushing the glasses against the bridge of his nose. His voice had a nasal quality as if he were suffering from terrible allergies.
“Not exactly,” I said. “No.”
He made a high-pitched noise that I couldn’t recognize with any assurance as either a sign of annoyance or a hiccup. I leaned over the counter to watch him flip through an appointment book that appeared to have more blank slots than filled.
“Can you fit me in?” I asked.
He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Today?”
“Right now,” I answered.
Dr. Crispin—I presumed—furiously flipped through the appointment book. “But the website specifically says no walk-ins.”
I sighed. “I took a gamble that the hypnotherapy business wasn’t exactly booming in Hollow Pines. And what do you know?” I made a show of looking around the empty waiting room. “I was right.” I placed my hands on my hips. “So assuming you don’t happen to be booked for the next hour and it looks like you’re not,” I said, staring down my nose at the blank spaces in today’s date, “I’ll take right now. It’s urgent.”
Dr. Crispin blinked rapidly behind his lenses. “Fine, then, okay, if it’s urgent, as you say. I suppose I can fit you in.” He spread his palms over the page and picked up a ballpoint pen. “Name?”
“Um … Jessica … Faire,” I lie
d quickly, remembering a character in a romance novel I’d once stolen from my mom’s nightstand in middle school. This seemed a time to be better safe than sorry.
He printed the name in slow, methodical letters and snapped the book shut. “Well, then, Jessica, I suppose you can follow me,” the little man said.
I trailed him through a narrow hallway painted an ungodly hue of mustard yellow and together we entered a box-shaped room. My palms were sweating now and I wiped them on my jeans. Inside, a silk plant scraped against the wall next to an armchair. Water burbled over a bed of rocks down a fake waterfall and into a bucket-sized pond of lily pads. He gestured to a long black sofa with a decorative pillow propped in the corner. Wordless music with a Far Eastern flair trickled through a set of speakers balanced on a dresser. I took a seat and stared at my shoes, feeling more uncertain about the reasons I’d come.
I didn’t believe in hocus-pocus. I was a facts-and-figures girl. A former mathlete, for goodness’ sake. Was I sure hypnotherapy was the way to go? The place looked as if it’d been decorated from the dregs of a Chinese restaurant’s garage sale.
Of course I wasn’t sure at all. But it was a step. A way forward. And it had seemed like a good idea back in the library. Back before I saw how cheesy it was.
“You’ll need to be lying down.” Dr. Crispin waved his hand through the smoke of a newly lit stick of incense. Oh, brother, I thought. I was confident my problems were beyond what aromatherapy could fix. I considered my options. I could still turn back. I could tell him there’d been some kind of mistake. Or that I’d call back for an appointment after all.
Except then where would I be? I’d come to a point where the facts in my life no longer added up, where I couldn’t trust any of my usual instincts. So, instead of following the one I had right now, which was to run as far away as possible from this hokey hypnotherapy shop, I swung my feet up onto the couch and leaned back onto the pillow.
“Very good.” Dr. Crispin’s voice took on the tone of a massage therapist. I tried to relax. “Now, what can we do for you today?” We? I winced at the affected manner.
Teen Hyde Page 9
