by Diana Wagman
Copyright © 2016 by Diana Wagman.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.
Please direct inquiries to:
Ig Publishing
Box 2547
New York, NY 10163
www.igpub.com
ISBN: 978-1-63246-038-7 (ebook)
For Thea,
who is extraordinary
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
I was never anything but ordinary. Average in every way. Brown hair, brown eyes, not short, not tall, not fat, not thin, and your basic “B” student. I had no group I belonged to, no after school activities; I couldn’t play an instrument or draw a recognizable picture. Three months before my high school graduation and people I’d been in classes with since elementary school still didn’t know who I was. The only thing anyone ever remembered about me was my name. October. I was named for the month my parents met and my dad gave up drinking. People always laughed when they heard it. It didn’t seem to matter that there was that beautiful actress, January Jones, and there was a girl named June in school and two girls named May. My month, my name, October Fetterhoff, always made them laugh. I even tried going by Toby, but it didn’t stick.
But I should have known there were good things about being ordinary. I should have appreciated being unremarkable. I could travel under the radar, go completely unnoticed. I could think whatever I wanted, do whatever I wanted, and nobody paid any attention. Nobody was ever watching me.
And then all that changed. I was anything but ordinary and my extraordinariness was going to get me killed.
1. Four Days Until My Eighteenth Birthday
It all started with an itch. A bad itch. A terrible, bone deep, muscle shuddering itch. Out of control. I had to scratch. Had to. Immediately.
The itch started on the bottom of my right foot my shoe. I yelped loudly in class, couldn’t help it, and Mr. Fleming turned around from the board.
“There’s something in my shoe.” I couldn’t get it off fast enough. I was wearing my tall, lace-up boots—my favorites—and I was cursing how long it took to get my foot free.
“How could there be something in there?” Jacob the jock asked. “She never takes them off.”
The class snickered. Okay, so I wore those boots a lot. Every day in fact, and for a moment I was kind of flattered he’d noticed, but the itch had taken over. I knew something hadn’t actually bitten me. This was deeper than that. It came from way inside my foot, somewhere close to the bone. I peeled off my striped sock and attacked the bottom of my foot with both hands.
“Put it back on!” Jacob pretended to gasp from the smell.
“Pee-ew,” his sidekick, Lance, echoed and held his nose.
Juveniles. I was too absorbed in the itch to make a snappy comeback. If I could have thought of one. The problem was the scratching wasn’t helping. It made it worse, made the itch stronger. I was feeling it behind my knees, all the way up in my stomach, a jittery, weird sensation. I couldn’t help it; I started scratching all over. My arms, my legs, the part of my back I could reach. The class was laughing. I was practically crying. Scratching was useless. Finally, I sat on my hands and tried to will it to stop. I was starting to sweat and I could feel my hair frizzing from the heat.
Mr. Fleming frowned. “All right now, Miss October?”
The class laughed at me again and Mr. Fleming shrugged his apology. When people tack on the “Miss” in front of my name it makes me sound like a Playboy centerfold. Years of teachers doing it by accident and it still got a laugh. Ha ha ha.
“I think I need to go to the nurse,” I said to Fleming. What I really needed was to get outside, take off my clothes and roll on the ground so I could scratch all over.
“Go ahead,” Mr. Fleming nodded. “Be sure to get the homework from someone.”
I knew I looked ridiculous hobbling out of class in one shoe, clutching my books, boot, sock, and backpack. As I shut the door behind me I looked back, but my fellow students had already forgotten me and turned back to the board. I was even less interesting than the Dual Alliance of 1879. Typical.
Out in the hall, I stopped to scratch the bottom of my bare foot against the laces on my other boot. That felt pretty good, better than anything else so far, and I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall. Then my neck started itching and my scalp. I wondered if I had some dread disease, like leprosy or skin-eating bacteria. An itch ran up my spine and I rubbed my back against the rough cinderblock wall, back and forth and up and down.
“Like a little bear.” A guy’s voice startled me.
I stopped scratching and looked into the bluest eyes I had ever seen. Beautiful, startling, turquoise, no, a brilliant sky blue. And the eyes were surrounded by a face that was just as attractive. I blushed and the itching intensified. Even embarrassed as I was, my foot could not stop scratching itself.
“What are you doing out of class?”
Surprise, surprise, Principal Hernandez was there too, but I hadn’t noticed him beside Blue-Eyes.
“On my way to the nurse,” I said. “Something bit me.”
“Then go!”
“Need any help?”
The handsome young man was talking to me. Yes, I wanted to say, scratch. Put your hands on my body and scratch. Everywhere. But I just blushed again, shook my head and limped away. I knew he wasn’t a new student; school would be out in just three months and anyway, he looked too mature, too put together to be a high schooler. On the other hand, he didn’t look old enough to be a teacher. I sighed. Whoever he was, he thought I looked like a bear. Terrific. I lifted a hand to scratch my chin and dropped my boot. Bending over to get it, I dropped my books; then my backpack swung around and hit me in the face.
So far it had not been a very good day.
The skinny nurse, Ms. Raynor, looked frazzled when I came in. I could hear a kid puking in the little bathroom, creating a new definition for the word ‘retch.’ A girl from my English class, Luisa, was lying on the only cot holding her stomach and groaning. Luisa was definitely faking—she stopped suffering long enough to wink at me—but Ms. Raynor listened to the kid vomiting, looked at me, then looked at Luisa and said, “I’ll call your parents.”
“No, my sister,” Luisa said. “She’s the only one around. My folks are at work.”
I didn’t think Luisa had a sister.
“Fine.” Ms. Raynor picked up the phone.
“I can use my cell,” Luisa smiled, weakly. “You’re so busy.”
“Thank you.”
Luisa immediately started texting. Grinning instead of groaning. As Raynor turned to me, Luisa gave me a secret thumbs up.
The nurse frowned at my one bare foot. “What’s wrong with you?”
I noticed the hem coming out of her uniform and her hair falling out of her bun. Her eyes were red and dripping. As if everything about her was unraveling.
“Something bit me,” I said. “Or maybe a be
e sting?”
“You’re not supposed to be barefoot in school.”
“I wasn’t. I mean it crawled inside my boot I guess. I itch all over.”
Raynor took my foot into her lap and peered at the bottom. I was glad I’d cut my toenails.
“I don’t see anything,” she said. “You say you itch?”
“Like crazy. Everywhere.”
Her breath on the bottom of my foot was agony. My leg was twitching in her lap and I was scratching my arms so hard I was leaving red welts.
“Could be body lice,” she said.
Body lice? I’d had head lice in first grade. Now there was body lice?
“Or mange.”
Wasn’t that what stray dogs got? “Wait a minute,” I said.
She inspected my arms, then lifted my T-shirt and peeked at my stomach. “No rash,” she concluded. “Could be viral. Or an iron deficiency. Still, I think you should go home.”
“Really,” I said. “None of those sound very good.”
She leaned toward me and whispered, “Are you pregnant?”
“No!” I practically shouted. Unless you could get pregnant from a fantasy life.
The puker came out of the bathroom wiping his mouth. Poor little guy, probably a 7th Grader. He tried to smile at me and his teeth were bright white in his truly green face. I smiled back. I felt bad for him but the throw-up smell was overpowering.
“I’ll go wait out front,” I said.
Raynor sighed. “I’ll call your parents. Fetterhoff, right?”
“Right.” I was surprised she remembered.
“I know your dad,” she said. “Say hi to him from me.”
Outside, Luisa was sitting on the front steps waiting for her ‘sister’ and spinning a Frisbee on one finger. She was beautiful and ultra fem, and for some reason she always had a Frisbee. She was also kind of a friend of mine. She seemed to turn up wherever I was and more than once had steered me out of trouble. Last winter I’d been coming home late and I got off the bus in the dark and I was sure someone was following me. Someone big. Someone creepy, although I never saw him (or her). Out of nowhere Luisa had driven by and picked me up. And over spring break I’d gone to the “party of the century” at someone’s house and these older kids had crashed. I don’t drink—thanks to my dad being an alcoholic—and this guy kept trying to get me to have a beer. Just a sip. Come on. Just one. It got harder and harder to say no and then Luisa arrived, put her arm around me and told the guy to crawl back under his rock. That’s exactly what she said, “Crawl back under the rock where you came from, troll.” And he did go away. She and Jed, her boyfriend forever, gave me a ride home that night too.
I sat down beside her on the steps. She smiled at me, tossed her shiny dark hair over one shoulder and crossed her long smooth legs. I heard the rumble of dual headers and Jed’s cherry red, souped-up classic Charger turned up the driveway.
“Your sister sure has changed,” I said.
Luisa laughed. “I know, right?” She tossed Jed the Frisbee through the open window and scampered into the car. They zoomed away.
A cool wind blew. People say you can’t tell which season it is in Los Angeles, but I knew it was definitely spring. There was a freshness in the air, the promise of warmer days to come. Daffodils in the grocery store and even a few in people’s yards. I liked sunshine. I liked being able to be outside and go barefoot year round. I took my other boot off. I turned my face up to the sun. I wasn’t wearing a sweater and the breeze soothed my scratched, red skin. And then I realized I didn’t itch anymore. Not at all. Not my foot, my back, or my arms. It had stopped as suddenly as it began.
I was contemplating going back to class when my dad drove up. His car was not cherry red nor was it classic, it was just old and needed a wash. Which it would never get unless my mom or I did the washing. Plus I couldn’t help but notice it was crooked, definitely tilting lower on the driver’s side. I guess I’d never really looked at it coming toward me before. It made me sad to see the car like that. It hit me again everything that was wrong with my dad. He was fat. Truthfully, he was obese. Way over 300 pounds. He met my mom and he gave up drinking and then they had me, and in the early pics he looks pretty good. But he was just substituting sugar for alcohol and now, eighteen years later, it had caught up with him. He couldn’t walk more than ten feet—worse than that he could hardly breathe. He couldn’t fit in a seat on an airplane or in a movie theater. He had to stop working and our family finances had seriously suffered. My mom wanted him to get the lap band, but he promised he’d do it himself. He told us over and over he got sober by himself, he could go on a diet. He could do it. He could give up sweets. And then what, I wondered, take up heroin?
“Hey Pumpkin.” He hollered out the window.
I hated his nickname for me—another October reference. I waved and gathered my stuff, trudged down the steps and into the car. “Hi,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
He backed down the school’s long driveway because it was too uncomfortable for him to crank the wheel enough to turn around. Through the windshield I saw the mystery guy with the blue eyes come out the front door with Principal Hernandez. They shook hands and seemed to be agreeing about something. My dad screeched to a stop to avoid a car behind us, and Blue-Eyes looked up. I cringed, hoping he didn’t see me, but it looked like he did because he turned away from Hernandez and watched me until we went around the corner. Great. Just great.
“So Birthday Girl, what’s wrong?”
My eighteenth birthday was four days away, but my dad had been calling me Birthday Girl for two weeks. It was a way bigger deal to him than it was to me. He kept reminding me that soon I’d be able to vote, buy cigarettes, and join the armed services. So what. At that particular moment in my life, I have to admit I wasn’t very excited about it. Another milestone I’d be celebrating with just my parents.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I think something bit me.”
“An itch, huh?” It seemed to interest him. “Bad?” I nodded. “Really bad?” I nodded again. “Where did it start?”
“My foot. Then everywhere.”
“Your back?”
“Everywhere, Dad. I mean everywhere.”
He nodded, even smiled. “Fascinating.”
“To you, maybe.”
“Have you had lunch?” he asked.
“It’s 10:00 in the morning.”
“If your stomach’s not upset, we can stop by Village Bakery. Maybe that will make you feel better.”
A big old cheese Danish sounded like just what the doctor ordered, but I had agreed with Mom we would not be enablers. “No, thanks,” I said. “I just want to go home.”
Actually home was the last place I wanted to go. Mom would be at work. Dad would be tinkering in his workshop, building another flipping birdhouse. He’d want me to come hold a stick or something. Still I could look up Body Lice and Mange online, although if I had those things why would the itch just go away the minute I got outside? Maybe I was allergic to school.
2.
Our neighborhood was a “planned community” on the very eastern edge of Los Angeles. Every house was one of three designs in one of three color combinations. Every driveway led to the same two-car garage. The wide sidewalks, the appropriate landscaping, even the mailboxes were unexciting and humdrum on purpose, so that no one and nothing would stand out. Only we were different. Our house was Model Number Three, just the same as every other third house, but our yard was unusual. Unfortunately it wasn’t because of the flowers or a vegetable garden. It was the 24 birdhouses, all different shapes and sizes and colors, strategically placed on poles. Our front lawn was like a forest, except the trees had no bark, no branches and no leaves, and they were painted colors to match the birdhouses on top. It was my job to mow the lawn through that obstacle course, and I have to admit I had sort of given up. We weren’t supposed to water the grass because of the drought so it was mostly dead anyway. Dad didn’t care. He loved birds. Interes
tingly, so did I. I don’t know why I found the little feathered things so amazing, maybe it was our name Fetterhoff which is German for Feather-House, but my Dad and I used to trek deep into the woods with our binoculars and spend hours looking up. Of course, that was before he got too fat to trek. Now he built birdhouses and stared out the window and his cheeks were so plump, his blue eyes were barely visible.
Maybe that was why I didn’t like the birdhouses—aside from the fact they looked ridiculous all over our lawn—they just reminded me of the guy my dad used to be.
“Sure you feel okay?” Dad asked as we pulled into the garage. “Betty, uh, the nurse, said maybe you have a virus.”
It didn’t even register that he was on a first name basis with the nurse. “I’m fine,” I said as I got out of the car. “It seems to have passed.” I was half hoping he’d take me back to school, otherwise the day stretched ahead of me long and empty. Nothing to look forward to until the good TV started that night. Of course I had plenty of homework. Tons in fact. Second semester seniors should not have to write long papers about World War I or do pages of Trigonometry problems. School was so over for me.
I watched him struggle with the one step up from the garage into the house.
“Damn knees,” he panted.
“Dad,” I began.
“Don’t.” He held up a hand. His fingers were so fat he couldn’t wear his wedding ring anymore. “I talked to your mom this morning. I’m going to see someone.”
“A doctor? A nutritionist?”
“Hypnotist,” he said. “The best in the country. Helena Gold. People swear by her.”
I couldn’t help but sigh. Sounded like baloney to me.
“Not Overeaters Anonymous?” I asked for the umpteenth time. “A.A. worked for the drinking.”
“I don’t need more meetings, just a jumpstart.”
He needed to eat less and get up off his ass and move around, but he was waiting for a magic wand. I knew he’d never find it, I knew there was no such thing as magic. Hypnotism? Whatever. At least he was trying something new.
