Token of Darkness

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  “I don’t know, but it was cool, and I think you should experiment with doing it again,” Samantha answered as they both stepped into the back room.

  “No!” Cooper nearly shouted, shocked that she would even suggest such a thing.

  The back door opened and his father stepped inside from the employee parking lot where they kept the Dumpsters. He stopped, consulted his watch, and then gave Cooper a pointed look after confirming it was still during school hours.

  “I’m not feeling well,” Cooper mumbled, hoping the extent to which he was pale and trembling made the excuse believable.

  His father still looked skeptical, but just said, “If you’re sick, stay in the employee area and away from the food. If you start feeling better, you can come out front and give me a hand at the register.”

  Cooper was grateful that his father wasn’t the type to probe further—yet. He would expect answers later, but would give Cooper some time to calm down first.

  Cooper’s mother had tried to convince him to see a shrink about a month ago when it became obvious that he wasn’t sleeping, and had no interest in getting back in touch with his friends. They had ended up shouting, all of them. Cooper had never raised his voice to his parents before, and he couldn’t remember the last time they had yelled.

  They hadn’t discussed the subject again since, but he remembered his father’s view of the situation: Sometimes we need time to heal in our own way, without doctors telling us what we should be feeling.

  “Are you okay?” Samantha finally asked as Cooper collapsed against a wall in the employees’ lounge and slid down to sit on the floor.

  “Just fine.” Sarcasm wasn’t his natural tone, but sometimes Samantha brought it out of him. “What did I do back there? It was like—”

  It was if a part of him over which he had no control had shoved Brent away—except that Brent’s body had never moved, only collapsed in on itself. Afterward, Cooper felt like he was looking at a corpse.

  Cooper squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the memory of the first time that had happened, in the hospital. He had woken up in the hospital only a few minutes before, and there had been so many doctors and nurses and people asking questions and poking and prodding him. He had just wanted them all to go away—

  He bowed his head and drew a deep breath.

  “Look, Brent was okay,” Samantha said awkwardly. “I stayed until he stood up and walked out. He’s all right. It’s no big deal.”

  “No big deal,” Cooper repeated. “Samantha, I see ghosts—”

  “Just one.”

  “Fine, one ghost,” he said, continuing more firmly, “and now I have another freakish thing going on.”

  “Technically, you’ve had that as long as I’ve known you,” Samantha joked. “You’ve just kind of avoided people so you haven’t—I’m not helping, am I?”

  “Not so much,” he said, and yet her awkward attempt almost brought a smile to his face.

  “If you’re so worried, talk to him,” Samantha said. “You could look for him at the library again, or ask the librarian if she knows his last name so you can look up his phone number. Or just ask around at Q-tech on Monday.”

  Cooper shook his head. “I doubt he wants to talk to me. He probably doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “You’re such a coward, Cooper Blake,” Samantha snapped. “You wouldn’t talk to that girl earlier when it was perfectly obvious she was trying to leave you an opportunity, no questions asked. And now you meet someone who might be able to help you, might even want to help you, and you’re running away as fast as you can. What about your friends? You don’t call anyone, and barely talk to people in the hall, even when I hear them call your name. I know you don’t talk to your parents, even when you all sit around the table together. I’m your only friend at the moment and I swear the only reason I talk to you is because no one else can hear me.”

  Cooper blinked, startled by the tirade.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start with Delilah and the others,” he said.

  “It’s not like they don’t know … what happened,” she said, sounding as unwilling as he was to remember the details out loud. “They’re probably just giving you space. I’m sure they’re worried—”

  “They’re worried, sure,” Cooper interrupted. “They would be even more worried if they knew what was actually going on, and then instead of dealing with my issues, I would be dealing with their issues with my issues. I don’t want to have to take care of other people, not until I’m okay taking care of myself.”

  “Coward,” Samantha said again with a flounce of her currently neon orange, yellow and pink hair.

  “I’m not a coward!” Cooper protested, before realizing he was speaking loudly, and clamping his mouth shut.

  He stood up. The shaking had mostly subsided.

  “Come on, just talk to Brent,” Samantha said. “If not to help you, then for me. Unless you want to be stuck with me the rest of your natural life?”

  “You’re charming, but I could live without you.”

  “So go talk to him. He saw me for a moment, and he talked back to me. He’ll believe you. It doesn’t just have to be you and me trying to figure this out. Because, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not very good at the whole magic and mythology stuff.”

  “I’m a football player,” he grumbled.

  “No, you’re an ex-football player, the same way you’re probably an ex-friend to at least a few people.”

  “The doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to play, anyway,” Cooper said—before opening the door to face his father up front.

  “Yeah, they told you that you couldn’t play football. But not that you couldn’t have a life.” She shook her head and sighed. “You work, then. I’ll look for him. Do reconnaissance. I’ll try to get him to hear me.”

  Cooper could only stare as she walked off. Maybe she was right. Samantha’s support was all that had gotten him through the first weeks of physical therapy, when everything hurt all the time. It had been early August before he had been able to walk across a room on his own. Samantha had been the one who kept him going and convinced him to keep trying, back when he was sure he would be a painful wreck the rest of his life.

  He owed it to her to do whatever he could to help her, too.

  First, though, he waited for his father to finish the order he was working on and gesture to Cooper to follow him a few paces from the register.

  “Cooper …” He had a sinking feeling in his stomach as his father took a deep, thoughtful breath, and finally just asked, “What happened?”

  Cooper hated lying to his parents, but contrary to what Brent thought, he had gotten pretty good at it. The trick was to keep it as close to the truth as possible, and to include something the other person wanted to hear.

  “I was at the library, and ran into a friend,” he said, meaning Brent, a slight exaggeration but one that would make his father happy. “We got to talking about what happened this summer, and it brought a lot of stuff back. I couldn’t handle going back to school right away.”

  He knew his father assumed Cooper meant the accident, though he was actually referring to Samantha. But all in all, his words were pretty much honest.

  His father nodded. “Okay, then. Thanks for telling me.” He turned back to the coffee machine, as one of their regulars came in. By the time his father had prepared her order, he had come to a decision. “Cooper, get an apron on and watch the register for me. I’ll let the school know I forgot to call them before taking you out for a doctor’s appointment this afternoon.”

  Cooper breathed a sigh of relief as he did as instructed.

  Before leaving the front room, however, his father added, “I’m covering for you this once, by the way, because you’re seventeen, you’ve always been a responsible young man, and I believe you’re doing what you need to do. But if I start hearing from the school that you’re skipping classes or not getting your work done on a regular basis,
we’re going to have a longer talk. Understand?”

  Cooper nodded. “I understand.”

  If today was any indication of how the school year was going to go, then he suspected the next “talk” was going to come sooner rather than later—and it was going to be the least of his problems.

  Cooper could barely keep his eyes open after dinner. True to his word, his father hadn’t mentioned his brief sojourn from class to his mother, and their awkward chatter barely masked the conversations his parents obviously wanted to have with him, but couldn’t. The effort exhausted Cooper, and he crawled into bed without taking off anything more than his shoes, too tired to even experience the anxiety that usually accompanied the descent into sleep.

  The instant the rain began, he knew bad things were coming. It started with patchy clouds, barely wispy, but as he continued driving down the endless highway they darkened and spread. Soon a fine mist was falling, but if anything, it seemed like the weather had improved visibility, since before the cloud cover built, the afternoon sun’s glare had been blinding.

  But he knew better.

  He couldn’t remember the details of what happened next, but he remembered the emotions and the physical sensations. He struggled against them. He knew he was dreaming, and he pulled his car over to the side of the highway and got out—

  As soon as his feet touched the pavement, he was back in the car.

  This time he just took his foot off the gas, and let the car coast to a stop—

  Then it was back to seventy miles an hour, and the brakes didn’t work anymore, and the car wouldn’t slow down.

  Black tendrils began to rise from the pavement, waiting for him. The highway went on forever without a single exit, and tall concrete barriers rose into the darkening sky on each side.

  Cooper screamed with frustration, put one hand on the wheel, and spun it as fast as he could to the side.

  The car began to spin like a top, incredibly fast for impossibly long.

  Cooper shot upright, a scream trapped in the back of his throat. People had told him the gist of what had happened in his accident, and he was grateful he couldn’t recall the rest.

  Except in his nightmares.

  He shuddered and stood, eliciting a sharp pain in his hip. He should have stretched before falling asleep.

  He took a warm shower, hoping the pounding water would dull the ache that ran up his side from his knee almost to his shoulder. It was ten at night, and his parents were sleeping like the dead—

  Wrong simile.

  The sound of running water wouldn’t wake them, anyway.

  After his shower, he stopped in front of the full-length mirror attached to the inside of the bathroom door. With a towel around his waist, he examined his physique with a critical eye.

  He had never been big, compared to most football players, but he had certainly lost muscle mass since the accident.

  During the day, his long sleeves covered the scars that crisscrossed up and down his arms. Some of them were starting to fade to shiny pink-white, but many were still darker, revealing the depth of the initial wounds. Those same sleeves covered the ragged patch on his shoulder, now mottled pink and brown, where most of the skin had been ripped off by the hot pavement; his pants normally hid similar marks on his left hip and knee. The clothes also hid the surgery scars, and the faint—almost gone, or was the color entirely in his head, these days?—bruises that lingered on his ribs.

  Clothes, those simple defenses, hid all evidence of the accident from sight. They made him appear whole. Now if only his mind could agree. During the day he could barely remember anything, but during the night the floodgates opened. If he closed his eyes, he would see … hear … smell … taste …

  “So vain,” Samantha teased as she walked through the wall.

  “Ever hear of privacy?” he snapped as he checked that his towel was snugly in place. The words were sharp, but he was pretty well resigned to the fact that Samantha didn’t care about his privacy or anyone else’s.

  “Don’t remember,” she replied glibly. “Maybe I heard of it and just forgot.”

  “Well, would you leave so I can put on some clothes?”

  “Don’t be a prude. They say you used to be a football star. You must have changed in plenty of locker rooms.”

  “Yeah. With guys,” he answered. “You’re not a guy.”

  “I’m hardly a girl, either,” she argued. “I’m dead.”

  “Fine. Dead. Whatever. So why do you want to stay?”

  “Because you’re sexy-cute,” she replied promptly.

  “Out!”

  She sighed, and wandered back through the wall, mumbling, “Sometimes I wish I was the invisible kind of ghost.”

  Cooper shook his head. Why couldn’t he have gotten a guy kind of ghost? The kind of ghost who would certainly never show up while he was in the shower or encourage him to track down and be friendly with guys from Q-tech.

  As soon as he had pulled on his pajama pants, Samantha appeared again. Cooper had a sneaking suspicion she had been watching, but didn’t want that confirmed and wouldn’t trust her if she denied it, so he didn’t bring it up.

  She sat on the bed beside him, one leg tucked beneath her, and one dangling through the piece of furniture. He wondered what kind of effort or thought it took to keep her from falling through floors or furniture more than she chose to.

  “I found Brent,” she said, “but no luck there. He was passed out with a pillow over his head.”

  “We’ll find his number and call him as soon as school is out tomorrow,” Cooper promised. He didn’t want to do it, but he owed it to her.

  Samantha smiled, but her expression seemed halfhearted. “I hate nighttime,” she confided. “Everyone going about, sleeping, dreaming or snuggling with other people or partying or something. And then there’s just me.”

  “Trade?” Cooper proposed. He would have been happy to stay up alone, if it meant he didn’t have those dreams Samantha envied.

  Samantha lay back. Cooper was about to yell at her about the whole “girl” thing again, but she wasn’t flirting this time. Instead, she took a funeral pose, with her arms crossed neatly across her chest. She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “To sleep, perchance to dream and stuff,” she misquoted softly. “I’m really bored, Cooper. I’m getting kind of desperate.”

  Without thinking about it, he reached out to awkwardly pat her shoulder. He realized what he was doing and pulled back before actually touching her, but her eyes had cracked open, and she half smiled.

  “I’m going to go wander,” she said. “Look in windows. Or something.”

  She sank through the bed and out of sight.

  Cooper was almost certain Samantha had actually left this time, but still, he found himself staring at the spot where she had just been—his bed, which he had come to see as a kind of enemy, one he seemed to battle nightly.

  Sometimes sleep didn’t come at all. He would spend hours lying there, fighting to keep his eyes closed and his body relaxed, but every time he started to slip into sleep, it was like he could feel the nightmares reaching for him. If he cracked his eyes open in that state, he saw shadows that didn’t match any light source. They lingered around him and even more thickly around Samantha, and upon seeing them he would jerk back awake with a start.

  Instead of going back to bed now, he took some time to try to read the assignment for English, but couldn’t absorb most of the words. Lately his memory was simply shot. He did a couple of math problems and read three or four paragraphs of his history textbook, and then chucked the book across the room—only to cringe as it narrowly missed the window. He didn’t want to explain shattered glass to his parents.

  He booted up the computer, and lost himself in Wikipedia for a while, then spent a good half hour looking at cat macros before he broke down and logged into his MMORPG pirates game. He couldn’t quite resist opening the one e-mail in his account, which was from Delilah, but all it said was, If yo
u’re in trouble, Cooper, you can talk to me. I might be more understanding than you would expect.

  By then, however, it was one in the morning and his eyelids were so heavy they seemed to be dragging his head down. His eyes kept unfocusing so he had to roll away from the computer, and the dizziness of exhaustion made him lie down. Ignoring the blankets, he collapsed onto the bed.

  The first time he jerked back from sleep, his heart was pounding and there was a sour taste in his mouth. 1:45. He pulled a pillow over his head. He only had a couple of hours left until his alarm was due to go off. He couldn’t possibly dream on only a couple of hours’ sleep.

  Cooper Blake was in trouble. Delilah hadn’t decided yet what she planned to do about that, if anything, but it had taken only a moment for her to know that Cooper was in way over his head and sinking fast. It was now the middle of the night … no, well past the middle of the night … and her mind was still on the problem.

  Unlike most members and supporters of the Lenmark Ocelots’ football team, Delilah had not gone to visit Cooper in the hospital. She knew about the accident, of course, but though she had many interesting skills, she was no doctor; there would have been no point in her loitering by his side while he was comatose.

  She knew Cooper had been unconscious for three days. She couldn’t help hearing about it from the other girls on the squad, the guys on the team, her friends on the school paper, and everyone else she ran in to, all of whom it seemed wanted to offer emotional support, or ask for it.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like Cooper; he was hard to dislike. He was the kind of person who, when presented with the opportunity to do a good deed, didn’t have the sense to contemplate being selfish instead. A total sweetheart, which meant he wasn’t interesting enough to be her type for dating, but he was fun to keep around as a friend. Indeed, she would’ve been sad if he had died … but he was still alive and kicking, so she didn’t know why everyone had made such a big deal about it.