The Girl In Between (The Girl In Between Series Book 1)

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  I felt her in the doorway; long shadow spilling into the closet.

  “Roman,” I breathed.

  “What?”

  She sunk down next to me and I handed her the coin. It glinted in her palm, finger pressed to the plastic case.

  “My name is Roman,” I said.

  She looked at me, wide-eyed. “You remember?”

  “My name. I saw it and I knew.”

  She traced the case with her thumbnail. “Roman.” Her lips curled into a smile. ”I like it. It’s…”

  “Ancient?”

  She looked at me. “It’s strong.”

  Strong. Am I strong?

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No, not yet, and I’ve looked through everything in this house.”

  She slipped the coin back into the box and rose to her feet. “Then maybe we should start looking somewhere else.”

  The ocean was gone, the tide replaced by the soft whisper of copper reeds. We tramped through the wheat field, each of us hollowing out dark trails that tangled and crossed.

  “I saw a crop circle once.” She wrinkled her nose. “It was fake.”

  “Aren’t they all fake?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Hmm, that’s what they want you to think.”

  “You’re strange,” I said.

  “Knew that,” she said.

  There was a pop, something exploding overhead. I looked up and saw the sinking silhouettes of balloons, rubber skins bursting with glittering confetti. One by one they popped, littering the grass, clinging to our hair and clothes. Bryn started running, igniting more explosions.

  “Sixth grade birthday party,” she huffed. “Kid’s parents were loaded.”

  Sixth grade. I tried to picture it, me in overalls, mouth full of braces. Maybe I was still friends with some of the same kids I’d known in elementary school. Maybe there were pictures of us waiting for the bus on that first day—all wide smiles and God awful nineties haircuts. The nineties…

  “What year is it?” I asked.

  Bryn smiled. “2014.” She stopped. “Sometimes I think we’ve got to be close in age.” She inched closer, examining my face. “But other times you look…older.”

  “Maybe because I almost drowned.”

  “Or maybe because for a long time you were, you just didn’t know it.” She shook her head. “Sometimes you remind me of someone.” She turned and kept walking.

  I caught up with her. “Who?”

  “My mom.”

  We reached another field. The grass was darker and marked with large statues like the ones lining the bookshelf back at the farmhouse.

  They looked like skeletons, bones jutting up from the ground. There were robots and other mechanical beasts—cats with long sharp whiskers; children’s exoskeletons sprawled out on the grass, a giant chessboard.

  “So these are all your memories,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “But they’re random just like the Milky Way?”

  She stopped walking and suddenly the concrete receded.

  “Have you ever tried to control them?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said that sometimes they’re not random; that sometimes you’ll think of a photograph or something and then it’ll be here.”

  “Sometimes.”

  I took a step toward her, the grass spiking to our knees, to our waists.

  “What are you thinking of now?” I asked.

  She shook her head, hesitant. “I…don’t know.”

  “Do you want to try it?” I asked.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, a faint smile creeping across her face. I blinked and suddenly there were horses fashioned out of wood.

  “What were you thinking of?” I asked.

  Bryn’s eyes were still closed. She chewed on her lip and then she said, “I was thinking of the Brownstone exhibit.”

  “What about it?”

  She sighed. “The horses.”

  Then I said, “Look.”

  Their bellies were made of curling branches, bark still rough, and their heads were made of thick twigs, knobs and burrs positioned in a snout, eyes, bared teeth.

  “Did you make these?” I asked.

  Bryn seemed stunned for a moment and then she ran a hand along the snout of one of the horses. “No. These are…amazing. I don’t make things like this.” A slight tremor crept into her fingertips. “It’s driftwood. The artist molds the shape with a steel frame and fiberglass and then she sets each piece of wood with screws.”

  I stepped around her. “They look real.”

  “That’s sort of the point.”

  “So it worked?” I asked.

  She looked at me, then back at the horses. “Did it?” She stepped past the horse and approached a metal sculpture, running her hand along the bolts and knobs. “This one…I saw it when I was twelve. We went to an outdoor exhibit they were hosting in the park.”

  “They’re like your sculptures,” I said. “The ones on the bookshelf.”

  “You mean my attempts at a sculpture.”

  “I like them,” I said, trying not to sound defensive but for some reason I was.

  When Bryn wasn’t there I spent hours looking through her things, constructing some kind of identity out of the random objects she’d spent a lifetime collecting. And they were important, her things. For some reason I just knew that they were important.

  “Do you?” she said.

  She chipped some rust off a fan. Light cut across the surface, burning my eyes. I followed her hands, tracing the timing chain that formed the spine; flywheel fashioned like a mouth.

  “These are vintage,” I said.

  “What?”

  I bent down, parting the tall blades of grass. “These ignition timers. They’re off a model T.”

  Bryn knelt over me, gripping a strand of her hair. “What did you say?”

  I froze, my hand still grazing the rusting timers. Suddenly they felt cold.

  “You knew that,” she said. “You remembered that?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Try again.”

  I examined the rest of the sculpture, my mind sifting through names and textures and serial numbers and auctions prices.

  “These aluminum valve covers are really rare. Exclusive to an Oldsmobile. These rockers look like they’re from the same model.” I pointed to an exhaust pipe. “This is old too. Looks like it came off a GTO. 1969. No. 1968.” I finally took a breath, looking at Bryn. Her eyes were wide and my hands were shaking. I gripped the grass.

  “You remember.” She laid a hand on my chest again and my pulse was writhing against her palm.

  I waited for more words, more pieces, but then I felt the air shift, giving way behind me, and the sculptures were gone. I got to my feet and there was a sudden slope, a large valley spreading out in front of us. Splashes of color lined the hillside, dimpled and fluttering in the wind.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Hot air balloons,” Bryn said.

  “Do they work?”

  “Not sure. They mostly just lie there. I’ve gotten lost under the balloon before. Never found the basket.”

  “I wonder how far they’d go.” I paused, chewing on my lip. “When I was in the water…I was swimming and then it was like I’d triggered some kind of reset button.”

  Bryn nodded. “I used to try to find a way back but I’ve walked all over this place and I’ve never reached the end. I’ve sort of just concluded that maybe there isn’t one.”

  “Does that scare you?” I asked.

  Her mouth twisted. “Sometimes.”

  She kept going, tramping across one of the hot air balloons, maneuvering the air trapped inside. The edges curled off the ground and I heard a faint squawking. Geese waddled out from beneath the balloon, long necks swaying with each step. They picked at their feathers, ruffling them, the down scattered along the grass.

  Bryn laughed, cal
ling back. “We used to feed the geese at this park by my house.” She knelt down, held out a hand. One of the rogue geese wobbled forward, snapping at her fingers, and she stumbled back onto her feet, laughing. “Sorry, I’m all out of Cheetos.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to feed them bread?”

  Bryn shrugged. “My grandmother would only let us take the stale chips.”

  I cut between the geese, scattering them and they shot up into the sky. The wind billowed off their wings and when they disappeared it was still slicing between us. The wind picked up, swirling Bryn’s hair around her face. She gripped it in her hand, staring at something behind me. I turned and there were shadows twisting out of the trees.

  Leaves spun into the clearing, red and gold, and settling in big lush piles.

  Bryn bit her lip, thinking.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember this many,” she said, voice fighting the wind. “What about you? Ever remember jumping into a pile of leaves?” She kicked at one of the piles, leaves exploding against my chest.

  “Maybe raking them,” I said. I was sure I’d probably done that before. Who hadn’t?

  She kicked again, leaves spilling down over my head. “Does this help?”

  I coughed, leaves stuck to my lips. “Don’t think so. But maybe…” I grabbed her shoulder and spun us both down into one of the piles. Leaves scattered, sticking to our clothes. I sneezed and then she was glaring up at me. “Vaguely familiar,” I said.

  “Are you kidding?” She narrowed her eyes, leaves tangled in her hair.

  I took off running. “Oh my God,” I choked. “You should see your hair right now.”

  She laughed, gasping. “You better run, asshole.”

  I kept running, the ground beneath me shifting, each evolution imperceptible and startling. The hot air balloons were gone and so were the leaves, the landscape replaced by a desert, white sands sprawling out in all directions. It was soft, clinging to our shoes, slowing me down until I was forced to stop. Bryn finally caught up with me, pausing, gripping her knees.

  “Yeah, so I think you’re wrong about that whole not playing sports thing.”

  I was still staring at the sand, the sun’s reflection burning my eyes. “Where is it taking us?”

  She shrugged. “You’ll see.”

  I climbed after Bryn, sand flying. Then she slumped down, letting it slide through her fingers and I knelt down next to her, running my palms along its cool surface.

  “What were you thinking of?” I asked.

  “New Mexico,” she said. “I think I was ten.”

  “You’ve been to a lot of places,” I said.

  She shrugged “Before I was sick.”

  The wind picked up, wrangling the sand into the air. Bryn was staring straight into it.

  “What are you thinking of now?” I asked.

  She turned. “Just wait.”

  It swirled around us like ghosts, soft flecks whipping my skin until it was pink. It split, slipping to the ground in a gasp and then we were sitting on a moss covered cliff face. I skirted back from the edge but Bryn just sat there. I grabbed her wrist and she stood next me.

  “You afraid of heights?” she asked.

  She let the toe of her shoe slip over the edge, wind surging, her hair twisting around her face. I inched closer but then I stopped.

  “No, I mean…” I took a few steps back, arm stretched and still holding onto her. “Yes. I am definitely afraid of heights.”

  “Another clue,” she said, skipping back from the ledge. She nodded to the skyline. “North Carolina. The last trip before I got sick. I was almost thirteen.”

  “North Carolina…”

  “Look familiar?”

  “Not really.” I stared at the horizon, clouds curling and translucent. “Do you think we’re from the same place?”

  “Where?” she said. “Texas?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe. Austin’s a big city.”

  “Do you think that’s how I got here? Maybe we’ve met or something.”

  “No,” she said. “I would remember you.”

  I chewed on a smile. “What’s it like?”

  We wandered back into the trees, taking slow careful steps to nowhere in particular.

  “It’s…it’s like this weird kaleidoscope of summer all year round and there’s always something to see or do or hear. It’s crowded but it’s warm and the people know you. We also have the biggest bugs you’ve ever seen in your life and the best ice cream you’ve ever eaten.”

  “Do you think I would like it?” I said.

  She stopped, looking at me. “Yes.”

  “You’re pretty certain.”

  Her foot tangled on something slick. She tripped and I pulled her up by the arm, her gaze drifting towards the trees. I looked up and I saw tails, hundreds of them tangled in the leaves, fluttering in the wind.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She reached up, snatching the tail of one and ripping it down. It was blue and yellow with a crude drawing of a lamb in thick black marker. “Someone made this for my English class.”

  She let the kite sputter to the ground, our necks craned as we kept walking. The breeze shook a few free, thin wooden frames snapping as they hit the ground.

  “What’s that?” I said, hanging back.

  There were large black bodies sitting like boulders around a fountain, the sun highlighting hints of plum and red caught in their feathers. They fluttered in the wind, large wings outstretched or curled in at their sides. But they weren’t moving.

  Bryn stepped to one of the crows and I followed, both of us examining the steel beak and glass eyes. They were crude and creepy, red veins scaling each pupil, gunk clinging to its eyelids. They looked so real.

  “Statues?” I said.

  Bryn was quiet.

  “Where are these from?”

  She pressed her finger to one of the eyes, nose crinkled. “I don’t know.”

  “But you’ve been to a lot of exhibits, right?”

  She gave a slow nod.

  “It could have been at a museum or something,” I offered.

  “Yeah…” the word trailed off, breathless. Then Bryn stepped to the fountain.

  Thick roots tore up from the ground beneath our feet and climbed into the marble base, wide leaves slung over the edge. There were three tall tiers, birds warbling and splashing at the very top. Moss had grown along the cracks, splitting them wide, water trickling out.

  “I don’t remember this,” she said.

  “But you’ve seen it.”

  She followed the moss path, dark green designs carved into the soil. They looked like scroll.

  “I must have,” she said, a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “I’m not sure where.” She shook it off. “Probably across the street from my mom’s office. She works for a design company and they’re always changing the landscaping around their building.”

  I spotted a break in the trees and kept walking but Bryn was still looking at the fountain.

  “You’re quiet,” I finally said.

  “Thinking.”

  “About?”

  She stared past me and when I turned I saw a thick grey wall swelling overhead. Rain.

  “That’s moving fast,” I said, searching the trees and vines for some kind of shelter.

  Bryn grabbed my hand, tugging me back toward a seam in the cliff face. I felt the first drops, cold and stinging my skin, and then I couldn’t see. Bryn was a trembling shadow, cold, wet, her grip slipping. We tore through the rain, Bryn stumbling, me yanking her back onto her feet. We threw ourselves into a narrow slit in the rocks and sprawled out on our backs, catching our breath.

  I watched the rain peel down in thick grey sheets. I couldn’t even see the trees anymore, just their lucid outlines, drips of brown, green and black. I felt my clothes sticking to me. Great. Soaked again.

  Bryn was leaning against one of the stone walls
, gripping her knees. The collar of her shirt was twisted, exposing her shoulder. I watched the rain carve down her collarbone, disappearing against the fabric clinging to her skin.

  She reached a hand up, pulling her wet hair from her face and that’s when I saw the strange markings on the cave wall above her head. They were pale, fading—some kind of face or maybe the sun?

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Bryn glanced up. “Maybe I saw it on that trip to North Carolina?”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  Her voice was low. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just getting harder to remember some of these things.”

  “Good, I’m not the only one.”

  “Everyone forgets things,” she said. “In fact people forget most things. That’s life.”

  “Little things, maybe. Not the ones actually worth remembering.”

  She shook her head, wringing the hem of her shirt. “People only remember the things they want to remember. Not the bad things, the true things. Do you ever think about that?”

  “About what?”

  “That when you get your memory back you won’t just get the good things but the bad things too. Do you ever wonder if it’s better to not remember at all?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t really thought of that. Is that how you feel?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “I mean I’m glad I’m here during an episode instead of being conscious in the real world. I’d hate to see myself that way.”

  “Have you?”

  “Not really,” Bryn said. “I know there’s a tape of me somewhere. Dr. Sabine had my mom record me during an episode so they could monitor the severity of my symptoms. I’ve never seen it though.”

  “Would you want to?”

  “No, I don’t think I could.”

  “But what if it’s not as bad as you think?”

  “No.” Bryn stared out into the rain. “I’ve seen my mom’s face when I wake up. That’s enough.”

  The way Bryn talked about her disease made it seem like some kind of possession rather than just a long nap and it made me wonder if she thought the worst because she was here, not there, not really living it.

  Sometimes the things we imagine are worse than the real thing, right? Like whatever bad memories might have been lurking in the deep recesses of my brain. They could have been bad—my parents getting divorced, my grandmother’s funeral, getting into a fight at school. Or they could have been really bad. The worst.

  I tried not to think about all of the things that might be waiting for me. Bad things I might have given anything to forget. Things that had left a mark so deep it took drowning to finally scrape myself clean.

  But then I reminded myself that that wasn’t all it had taken. It took my memories, all of them, the good and the bad. My entire identity. Because don’t you need both? People don’t exist in just the light or the dark. They exist in the contrast. In the shadows where the two overlap. So even though I was afraid of what I’d find, I knew I’d never be myself again without all of it, the entire truth of me.

  The rain suddenly sputtered out all at once, sunlight tearing through the clouds.

  “Keep going?” Bryn asked, never dazed by the way things were constantly disappearing here.

  I nodded and she led us back through the trees now growing in dense clusters, branches tangled and sinking low to the ground. There were no trunks, only leaves, tall bushes hollowed out and rustling with the sounds of birds.

  Bryn spread the leaves, stepping into the tree’s wide crown and I followed, branches snapping shut behind me. Sunlight sifted in and glinted off the shuddering leaves, their emerald shadows dancing along Bryn’s skin. A band of wind cut through the canopy, igniting a soft clanking overhead. When I looked up there were glass bottles strung over us, their red, and russet, and dark blue silhouettes bleeding across the dirt beneath our feet.

  “It’s supposed to be a pirate ship.” Bryn shrugged. “Eight-year-olds.”

  “You did this?”

  “With my cousin Dani and our friend Felix.” Bryn knelt down, reaching for a bright red Cardinal feather before tucking it behind her ear. “We used to spend all summer in here.”

  She rapped her knuckles against the trunk of the tree. It was hollow. She slipped her hand inside a small hole and pulled out some dingy swaths of fabric, two caped action figures, a Looney tunes Pez dispenser, and some of those sparkly rocks that are supposed to be fake gold.

  “Pirates who don’t bury their treasure,” I said.

  “Of course not. That would be way too cliché.”

  I reached for the Pez dispenser in her hand. Tweety Bird.

  “Six Flags,” she said. “It’s a theme park. Have you been there?”

  I waited for the words to sprout in my brain the way they had when I was looking at those vintage car parts. I waited for some spark of recognition, a memory, a smell, a vision of me in tall socks and a cheap sun visor. Earlier it had felt like a small nudge, one slight tug deep in my gut and then I’d tasted the truth. But I waited and there was nothing.

  I shook my head. “Have you been?”

  “With my dad. Once.”

  She grew quiet, picking at a tuft of leaves. Her smile slid into something dark, teeth grating on her bottom lip as she looked up at the bottles twisting above our heads. She blinked, eyes trailing to the ground.

  “I saw him,” she finally said.

  “You did?”

  She nodded.

  “How was that?” I asked, wondering if I was prodding too deep, over-stepping my bounds.

  But then she said, “The same.”

  I took a step closer. “I’m sorry.” I wafted there, afraid of saying the wrong thing.

  She narrowed her eyes, still staring into the sun. “You know he’s right?”

  “About what?”

  “About leaving.”

  I thought about her diary and the episodic way her dad came in and out of her life, disappearing when he knew she wouldn’t be awake to see him go.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “He’s running.”

  “That’s more than I can say for my mom. At least he’s moving.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  Her eyes snapped to my face. “How do you know what I mean? You don’t even know me.” But it wasn’t anger thrashing behind her gaze. It was defeat. Disappointment. Stale and heavy. She drew in a breath. “I’m sorry.”

  I felt the words on my lips and I let them go. “I could.”

  “What?” She looked at me.

  “I could know you.”

  She sunk against the trunk of the tree, spurring a nest of butterflies. One tangled in a strand of her hair, wings flapping and wild. I reached for her, slipping it free.

  “I think I might like that,” she said, her breath trailing down my arm.

  “You know not everyone leaves,” I said.

  She looked away, putting her eight-year-old treasure back in the tree. I reached behind her ear and she watched me free the feather before tucking it in with Tweety Bird and the fake gold.

  “Who?” she said. “You mean like lonely single moms and lost boys who wash up on beaches that don’t even exist.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t count. You’re stuck here.”

  “I thought you said this isn’t purgatory.”

  “You’re still just waiting,” she said. “And so is my mom. Who’d want a lifetime of waiting?”

  I stared at the soft lines of her lips. “Someone who knows what it is they’re waiting for.”

  I thought about flipping through the rest of Bryn’s diary, reconciling the words with the long-winded peculiar voice I’d come to recognize.

  Within the pages there were doodles matching the rough outline of some of the strange sculptures lining the bookshelf. There were lists of her favorite things—teal fingernail polish, salted cantaloupe, the smell of things burning. There were pages ripped out, dark holes where her pen had carved som
ething in a fury. And there were grey smudges, ink from her pen spilling into something long dry. Stories about her dad and about Drew marked with the translucent shadow of her tears.

  And for some reason I knew how she felt. Left behind. Always. I didn’t know how I knew. I was in a constant state of waiting when she wasn’t there but that was different. It didn’t feel deliberate or personal.

  She wrote about her dad showing up a few days after her birthday and then disappearing again. I could see her watching him go and I could feel that same ache in my throat. And Drew. Whoever the fuck he was. He liked playing with those tattered strings of Bryn’s existence, yanking on them, pulling her close, and then unraveling them again.

  I hadn’t been able to make out the seams before. I’d been too busy feeling impermanent. But now that I saw them—in the way she had to get the words out before losing them, in the way she’d hung her blanket over a stranger—I could see that it wasn’t just a cure she was looking for but a promise. And for some reason that made me feel real. Like it wasn’t coincidence that had carried me in with the tide at all.

  Bryn leaned forward, heat pouring from her mouth. I let it dance on my tongue, hovering there. But when I leaned forward, trying to close the space between us, there was a flash, light cutting across my vision. I smelled something burning; that same echo of gasoline. Then another sharp pain, this one rattling between my teeth, a scream between my ears.

  Bryn pulled away, startled. “I’m sorry.”

  “No. I…” I doubled over, barely able to hear my own voice.

  I blinked, my eyes flitting across the leaves, waiting for the light to recede. It was so bright. Just like it had been when I was staring at that carousel. When I touched that sculpture, the heat almost tactile.

  “I think I…” I tried to catch my breath, the light dimming. “I think I saw something.”

  Bryn laid a hand on my back and when I looked up she was watching my face, her own wary.

  “What was it?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. Just light. It was so bright.”

  Bryn looked at me expectantly, fear in her eyes.

  “It’s happened before.” I shook my head. “I don’t know why but every once in a while I’ll just see this flash of light. Then I’ll smell something or hear something.”

  “Your memory,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Maybe it’s working,” she said. “Your memory. Maybe it’s coming back.”

  The light still swirled at the edge of my vision and I tried to wrangle it into something I’d lost. But then it blinked out and I was just staring into the sun. Maybe it was working. Maybe I was starting to remember. Or maybe the light wasn’t some glimpse of the past. Maybe the light was me, a flash just on the verge of disappearing for good.

  It was so quiet and that’s when I realized that Bryn wasn’t breathing. Her eyes were wide and I saw the darkness in them, its reflection pouring through the leaves.

  I turned and saw the shadow. Breathing. Reaching.

  “Bryn. Run.”

  Chapter 21

  Bryn