PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “So,” I said. “What was so urgent you couldn’t wait to tell me later?”

  The silent wringing of his hands lacked the proactive response I expected. I was about to prod him again when he said, “It’s not that it’s urgent, really. I just . . . wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “And you couldn’t see that from stalking me outside my window?” I said. I crossed my arms against my chest and let my eyes meander lazily around the room, not pausing to focus on anything in particular. “So, here you are. Inside my room. For no reason.”

  “Do you really want to be alone that bad?” Josh said.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to be alone. It was that I didn’t want Josh to be in my room. It didn’t make sense. In one week we’d gone from loathing classmates to business partners to victim/hero to mortal enemies to awkward friends. And I was highly skeptical about the “friends” part.

  “No, I just . . .” I wasn’t sure how to say it in a way that wasn’t blunt. Too impatient to wait for the right words, I said, “Last night you thought I killed Ryan. You really seemed absolutely positive I was capable of murdering someone. Why are you here now? I mean, what changed?”

  “I, um . . . I found out when he died,” Josh said.

  “Yeah, and?”

  “It was sometime late in the afternoon.”

  I didn’t see how that proved anything. I was with my friends in the park in the afternoon, then went home and stayed in my room until I fell asleep. To a cop, that was a good four hours or so for me to track down Ryan and murder the crap out of him with . . . whatever I used.

  “So, what does that prove?” I said. “It’s not like you know how I spend my days.”

  He said nothing. Josh leaned over with his elbows on his thighs and kept his eyes on the carpet. His face made a few expression changes. Honestly, it sort of looked like he was silently arguing with himself and was oblivious of an audience. It was kind of creepy.

  “Josh? Hello?”

  “Well . . . not all your days,” he said to the floor. “I can see in your window from my house.”

  I looked at the window then back at Josh. “Bullshit. You’re too far away.”

  “I got a . . . got a telescope for my birthday.”

  “Oh my God, you stalker!” If I was at all a violent person, I would have hit him. I don’t know how I didn’t. I wanted to. “I’m seriously creeped-out right now, you have no idea. I think you should go. No, I know you should go. Get out.”

  I scooted back against my headboard and pointed a demanding finger at my window.

  Josh lifted his head and looked at me. “It’s not like that.”

  “Oh, how is it, then?” I said. “No, you know what? I probably don’t want to know.”

  “I don’t do it all the time, damn,” Josh said. He scooted away a little and turned sideways to put a bent knee atop my bed. “It’s just . . . I was checking on you is all. To make sure you were all right.”

  My eyes narrowed at him. I pulled Eeyore against my chest and tucked my knees up between me and Josh. “Why?”

  “Because we’re friends,” he said.

  His expression suggested his feelings were hurt, but I had no idea why. In fact, a little voice popped into my head that sounded a great deal like Inigo Montoya, and it said, how come you keep using that word? I do not think it means what you think it means.

  “You were “checking” on me all afternoon?” I said. If Eeyore was real, he would have bit my arm in protest of how tight my anxious squeeze was. “Josh, that’s creepy. And possibly illegal.”

  “I didn’t sit there and watch you, damn,” Josh said. “I just saw you were okay. I went back to what I was doing for a while, then checked again. You hadn’t moved. You were napping, I think. Either that or meditating for a very long time.”

  “Yeah, because meditation brings me serenity and balance,” I said with an eye-roll. “It works best when I’m laying on my side, snoring.”

  “I wasn’t being serious,” Josh said.

  “I know,” I said. “And if we were friends, you would have known I was kidding.”

  He exhaled with far more drama than a boy should and stood up. I thought he was going to leave, but he took a slow stroll around my room instead. Maybe he was looking for a souvenir. Stalkers liked souvenirs, so I’d heard.

  “So, if now you know I didn’t do it,” I said. “Why did you think I did in the first place? I mean, sure I was pretty pissed off at him, but not mad enough to murder anybody.”

  Josh didn’t answer right away. He crossed over to the window and was silent for so long, I got annoyed rather than intrigued.

  “Well?”

  “Because of the note you wrote for me.” Josh didn’t turn away from the window.

  “Yeah, the cops said he had it,” I said. “They said you told them it got stolen, of all things.”

  “It did.” He looked at me then, and his eyes let me know Josh had something to tell me, something he didn’t quite know how to say. “It disappeared off my desk in my room a couple days ago.”

  “So? Ryan took it, obviously.” I didn’t see where the big mystery was there. He was found with it, after all.

  “No, he didn’t,” Josh said. “He hadn’t been to my house all week. We always go to his place, to practice in the garage or hang out in the basement.”

  “Well, you didn’t leave it where you thought you did then,” I said. “Because he found it.”

  “He didn’t find it.” Josh tucked his hands in his pockets. I was surprised they fit in the far-too-tight jeans he wore. “It was stuffed in his mouth.”

  “Stuffed in . . . you mean, when he was killed?” I didn’t need the clarification because I understood the words and what they implied. But I did. I really needed clarification because that was a more horrifying image in my mind than I wanted and I needed him to correct it, to tell me my vision was wrong.

  Josh nodded and found eye-contact impossible. I didn’t blame him. “I found him that way. In my tree house. On his b-back, and it was jammed into his mouth. Jammed so hard one of his front teeth broke off.”

  I remembered the tree house. There was a time in our lives we were just neighborhood kids without a worry about classmates and cliques. Once upon a time, Josh and I were—for all intents and purposes—friends. But those days had been gone for so long, I never thought about them anymore. Only once in a while, on the rare occasion I caught sight of the tree house in his backyard.

  “I want to take it down,” Josh said, his anger evident and unexpected when he had seemed on the verge of tears not a full minute before. “Tear it down, set it on fire, erase any hint it ever existed. But they won’t let me yet. Cops need it for evidence or something.”

  Words failed me. I sat in verbal impotence without a single thought I could share with Josh. It didn’t seem safe. He didn’t strike me as emotionally stable. I was afraid anything, even the most benign remark, would set him off.

  I tensed as he charged at me without warning, and before I’d drawn a full breath, his arms were around me. His breath hitched and was hot against my neck as his tears fell to wet my hair and exposed skin, much of which was still purple and a sickly sort of yellow-green.

  Part of me wanted to shove him away. Contrary to what he may have deluded himself into believing, we were not friends. Still, I wasn’t a heartless monster and he needed to be comforted, so I did the best I could. His angle against me as I sat on the bed would make a contortionist proud, but I managed to wrap my arms loosely around him to pat him on the back.

  That was a mistake, as he only pulled me tighter against him and knelt painfully against my leg. But I let him. He needed a friend, and since his friend was dead, I’d have to do.

  19: Three’s a Crowd

  It was a strange thing to be in my bed with Josh Colby until sunset. After he stopped clinging to me, he’d settled against the headboard at first, one leg on the bed and one hanging over the edge of the mattress. I did the same thing. I needed t
he space.

  We reminisced about those long ago days when we played together as children. Sometimes he would bring up events in the not-so-distant past, which were less amusing. As I grew uncomfortable discussing how our friendship dissolved over time, I turned the conversation towards other kids in our school.

  The persistent hum of the surreal echoed in the back of my mind. If even three days prior someone told me I’d be in bed with Josh avoiding the topic of Ryan’s murder, I’d have to ask them what they’d been smoking.

  As the afternoon stretched toward evening, Josh and I took more comfortable positions on my bed. I sat cross-legged with Eeyore in my lap. Josh stretched out almost the full length of my bed, his head propped up by the palm of his hand.

  “It’s getting late,” I said.

  Josh’s eyes flicked to the darkening sky outside my window then back to me. “Yeah, I should get home. My parents are kind of . . . freaked out by the whole thing.”

  That was a given. Just about anyone would be unsettled if a murder took place on their property, much less the murder of a child’s friend.

  “I imagine so,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Right.”

  He started to get up, then reached out and placed a hand atop mine. He smiled at me. I didn’t like it, but I smiled back to be polite. There was no reason to end the evening with an argument.

  That was an error on my part. Josh must have mistaken politeness for something else entirely. He leaned in closer to me, and I was horrified to belatedly realize he intended to kiss me. My instinct rescued me, and my head leaned away.

  I searched for the words to relay my revulsion without being too insulting, but was startled when my door opened abruptly after a short, impatient knock. Unwarranted guilt slapped me in the face when Aka walked in. Josh rolled off the bed.

  “I . . . uh,” Aka said, his usual eloquence abandoned in favor of shocked inarticulateness. His expression was a lost Kodak moment.

  “Hey, Aka,” Josh said with a small wave. “I was just heading out.” He tossed a nervous glance my way, then exited through the window, not closing it behind himself.

  Awkward silence followed. It was my least favorite social interaction time so it didn’t take me long to blurt out, “We weren’t doing anything. He was just getting up to leave. I think you spooked him. He might’ve thought you were Dad.”

  “You aren’t answering your phone,” Aka said. He didn’t look at me. He walked over to the window and closed it. The drapes remained open while Aka stared out into the darkness.

  “I didn’t want to be harassed by people,” I said.

  “Does that make Josh not ‘people’?” Aka said. “Or does that mean I’m lumped in with ‘people’?”

  “I didn’t invite him over,” I said. I was defensive, but Aka seemed angry so it was my natural reaction to the negativity directed my way. “He kept banging on the glass ‘til I let him in.”

  “But you did,” Aka said.

  A frown creased my forehead. It sounded like an accusation of some kind. “So?”

  Aka said nothing.

  “What do you care?”

  I regretted my question instantly. The best friend I had in the entire cosmos turned and walked out. Great. I was getting more idiotic by the hour. I shouldn’t have been defensive. I shouldn’t have been a jerk. I should have just told him the truth: Josh tried to kiss me, but I hadn’t let him.

  But I feared saying that to Aka. He wouldn’t care if some guy put the moves on me, and he’d wonder why I thought he might. It would just add a whole level of awkwardness I didn’t want in our friendship. It was twisted logic, but the thought persisted. Besides, Aka’s annoyance with me seemed to be about my recently acquired phone allergy. Josh’s presence had surprised him was all.

  I considered chasing after him to apologize. I didn’t want Aka mad at me, and the reason he’d shown up in the first place was because he was worried about me. At least, that’s what I assumed. I didn’t think he came all the way over to my house just to tell me to turn my phone on.

  The front door slammed shut. I was torn between following him and causing a scene Dad would see or calling him on his phone and asking him to come back. I chose the more proactive of the two and ran barefoot down the stairs and outside, the door again slamming in my wake. I was out of breath by the time I caught up to Aka over a block away. He must have sprinted. Then again, I was barefoot and out of shape so my “run” was more of a “jiggle-hobble.”

  “Aka, wait,” I said as I grasped for his arm. “I’m sorry, okay? I was just . . . being a defensive bitch.”

  He didn’t turn around, but he stopped. “What were you defending?”

  My hands curled into fists against my hips as I tried to stop panting. He stopped where a streetlight went out, so it was dark except for the headlights of the occasional motorist. There was a chilled breeze I had not accounted for, so my hands soon went to my upper arms to provide some warmth.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Myself? You looked mad at me. Are you?” Clarification, yes. The key to any productive conversation.

  Aka remained silent for too long and would not turn around to face me, so I stepped around him into his path. He didn’t meet my eyes. He looked over my shoulder, down at the grass, over at a house, up at the tree, but he wouldn’t let his gaze fall on me.

  “Well?” I said, unable to take the silent treatment any longer. I thought his avoidance was pretty childish, but I knew better than to say so or he’d just walk off again.

  “The night hosts such potential for bitter word balloons which rise from hot breath,” he said in a slow cadence, as if reciting from a play. “I ought not tempt such malicious winds.”

  “Okay, first of all; what the hell are you talking about?” I paused then added, “I don’t really have a second thing.”

  He frowned down at me, but I was grateful to at last have eye-contact. It was brief, and his eyes returned to the grass.

  “Please use plain English,” I said with great drama, grabbing the front of his jacket with both hands. I hung from him with my fingers curled into the material. “I have seriously had way too surreal a week to . . . attempt interpretation of your rhetoric or to detect any nuance of phrase in what you have attempted to relay.”

  Aka smiled at my theatrics, but did not look at me. “You used ‘rhetoric’ incorrectly.”

  “You like it when I do,” I said with a waggle of my brows. I didn’t think I had, but I was willing to let it go if insulting me would make him feel better.

  “Look, I’m going to claim irrational anger, and you’re going to go back inside,” Aka said. His eyes were cast over my shoulder, which annoyed me to no end, but I let it go since he was my best friend and I understood him. He wanted the situation ended, so he offered a truce in his own weird way: bossing me around and vaguely insulting himself in the process. Dramatic petulance was a specialty of his, and I’d indulge him for the sake of peace.

  “I’ll go back inside if you call me when you get home,” I said.

  “Deal.”

  I gave him a light hug, but he did not hug me back. The boy was all sharp angles and points while I was much shorter and rounder. Against the designs of geometry, his square pegness fit in the round hole of my embrace.

  “Okay, see you,” I said when I pulled away, at last allowing myself to feel a little embarrassed for standing on the sidewalk barefoot and barely dressed in what passed for my pajamas. Luckily, no one was about.

  He did not reply, but gave me a small smile and walked away. Everything about his body language screamed his discomfort, from the bowed head to the tightness of his shoulders and brisk walk. It was a side of Aka I didn’t like to see, and I wished he’d just tell me what was wrong. I’ve always sucked at guessing since I immediately assume the most horrible scenario.

  With Mom missing, Ryan dead, Aka angry, and Josh being . . . well, I wasn’t sure yet, it was without a doubt the single, most unusual and
worst day I ever had in my entire life. And that included the eggplant bath.

  I took my insecurities back to my room to smother them with a pillow.

  ***

  The darkness thrummed softly in my ears, radiating a pressure in my sinus cavity that grew exponentially until I realized it was just the blood pounding in my brain, furiously pumped there by my heart because I had let my thoughts stray to Aka. Stupid thoughts. I wanted to be more like a Zen master who could control thought and emotion, or simply take down the person who haunted my mind with a swift roundhouse kick to the head.

  Or maybe that’s Chuck Norris. Close enough.

  Headlights danced across my ceiling as a car sped by. I pulled my pillow closer and buried my face in it, pretending that it smelled like him. His head had never rested there, but I’ve got a pretty good imagination. He smelled like willow trees, the ocean at dawn, and those little cinnamon bits that cover the top of a canned Pillsbury roll. Sometimes he smelled like fingernail polish remover, but that was probably my hand beneath the pillow. Aka doesn’t paint his nails.

  A horn blew in the distance, the deep cry of the freight train which told people to get the hell out of the way because they were too big to stop for just anyone. Hancock, obviously, or Superman, but that’s about it. It’s said the sound of a train’s horn is the saddest sound in the world, but what’s sad about telling people to get out of the way? Not to mention the train has been in common usage only since the 1800s, so what was the most mournful sound before that? Who came up with the Mournful Scale, anyway? Whale song is pretty mournful. Howling wolves and steady rain on a dreary day are downright depressing.

  So was the sound my phone made when Aka didn’t call.

  20: Conversations with Dad

  I rarely remembered my dreams. Many times I wondered why and lamented the loss. Surely my dreams were worth remembering, weren’t they? I could never recall more than vague impressions or hazy faces of strangers, while other people got to remember all sorts of cool stuff like flying or going to exotic places. I read somewhere that some Native Americans kept track of their dreams with fierce accuracy, believing it to be their other life and imperative to remember. I often wished I had their discipline for remembrance. If what they believed were true, it would probably do me a world of good to remember some concurrent life I was living. It had to be better than the one I had.