Instinct

by Mattie Dunman

  “I came here to talk, to start getting to know you better, and then I just wanted to kiss you, be near you. It’s…unexpected.” His eyes narrow for an instant and a thread of suspicion enters his voice. “You didn’t forget to mention any other abilities did you?”

  I crinkle my brow in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you maybe have some compulsion talent added in with the whole honesty thing?” he asks casually.

  I am speechless with my distress, and all the blood drains from my head, centering somewhere in my chest like a hot metal knot. The damn tears prick my eyes again, and I just start shaking my head, incapable of any other response. Cole’s expression remains sharp for a moment and then he shakes himself and reaches for me.

  “Sorry, Derry, I didn’t mean that…” he begins, but I swallow my hurt and move away.

  “Stay away from me. You and your psycho brother. I am done with this shit,” I growl, turning to run back to the house, barely holding back the tears.

  “Derry, wait. I’m sorry,” Cole calls after me, grabbing at my arm.

  I snatch it away and round on him. “You know, I have been pushed around my whole life by my mother. Don’t you think that if I had the ability to make her do what I wanted I would’ve used it by now? Maybe I would have made Jake leave me alone?” I shake my head crossly and start toward the house, tossing one last comment over my shoulder. “You know what the first thing you said to me tonight was? You said you were drawn to me. I can’t force that.”

  He calls after me and attempts to follow, but I hurry inside and rush up the stairs, ignoring my mother’s startled exclamation. I slam my door shut and stomp around the room for a bit, trying to convert my humiliation and disappointment into righteous anger. It doesn’t work.

  I collapse on the bed and draw my quilt up around me, burying my face in my pillow. But the tears won’t come now. After fighting them so long, I give a dry sob and feel my eyes burn, but there is no release. I don’t even know what I am most upset about at this point, whether it’s Jake or Cole or just life in general, but the inside of my skin throbs with the need to escape, to forget.

  At the back of my mind, I am listening for the creak of the stairs, the sound of my mother coming to check on me. But the minutes pass by and there is no hesitant knock at the door, no whisper of fabric as she sits next to me. When I finally do hear her steps down the hall, she doesn’t even pause at my door before she closes her own.

  Then the tears come.

  Chapter 8

  I grin as Nicole comes skipping through the shop door, her hair blown in wild tangles and dotted with snowflakes. Her cheeks are red, her eyes bright, and there is no trace of the sullen, downtrodden girl I met my first day of school three weeks ago. After her first big confession about her fears over Miranda’s death, she clammed up a bit, keeping herself distant for a few days, as though waiting for the other shoe to drop. But when I didn’t call her crazy or start mocking her she made tentative gestures of friendship.

  The day I told Tasha her boyfriend was cheating with her cousin, Nicole and I became best friends. Tasha had been posting nasty, unfounded comments about Nicole sleeping with old guys at the train station for crack money. Nicole was miserable, and I could see her drawing into herself like she did when we first met. Tasha was hanging all over her football player boyfriend, looking so smug, and then he opened his mouth. I don’t know what he really said, but I heard about his little affair and for once I took vindictive pleasure in dishing out some unwelcome truth.

  Tasha called me a freak, but she didn’t target Nicole again. Every day after that Nicole’s smile got wider, more natural. Every day she came further out of her shell. And for the first time in my life, I had someone that made me laugh, someone to talk to about my boy troubles.

  It was heaven.

  “I’ve got a secret you’re not going to like,” Nicole says, bouncing over to the counter where I sit unhappily with the cash register. I finish ringing up my customer, who purchases a beaded bag from the ‘20s. I give her my shopkeeper’s smile and then sigh with satisfaction when the bell above the door announces her exit.

  “Oh my god, do you ever stop working?” Nicole demands, climbing up onto the retro barstool next to the counter.

  Rolling my eyes toward the back of the store where my mom is busy foisting her wares on an unsuspecting elderly couple, I heave a sigh. Mom has had me doing inventory all week, which means my newfound social life has taken a serious dip. If I thought it was really necessary, I wouldn’t complain, but mom has revealed on several occasions that she doesn’t want me to have friends or a social life. She just wants me to stay with her, working at the store, waiting to use my ability for her benefit.

  “Oh, come on, you owe me dinner. And I’m hungry,” Nicole pouts, extracting a reluctant chuckle from me.

  With a grin to cover my trepidation over Nicole’s unwitting admission, I call back to Mom, “Nicole’s here. I’m leaving!” I jump down from my perch behind the counter and grab Nicole, dashing out the door before Mom has a chance to argue. We pause outside the store, trying to decide where to eat. Snow drifts down in soft clouds, dusting the cobblestone street, covering the old, muddied snow from last week like a balm over a bad memory.

  “Ugh. No more pizza. I can’t take it anymore,” Nicole begs and I roll my eyes at her dramatics.

  “Well, there aren’t that many options. You’ve shot down all our usual choices.”

  She glances around impatiently and then her gaze settles on the café across the street, The Stone Bistro. Following her gaze, I shake my head violently. “Hell, no. No way. That’s where Cole works,” I remind her.

  “Oh, come on. How long are you going to keep avoiding him?” Nicole sighs, repeating her oft-heard refrain. Since I couldn’t really give her the whole story about my fight with Cole, I just told her he had kissed me and then regretted it. While she sympathized with me, she didn’t understand the depth of my resentment.

  Sometimes I didn’t either.

  Cole had come to the store the day after the big first kiss fiasco, full of contrition, but no explanation for what had happened between us. I told him I accepted his apology, and on some level I did, but the humiliation ran too deep to just let go. He stopped by almost every day and bugged me until I gave him my phone number, after which he called every night to talk, mostly about our abilities and what he thought we should do with them. Sometimes I answered, sometimes I didn’t. He didn’t bring up the kiss and neither did I.

  But it hurt every time I saw him, and I’d been dodging him lately, too confused by my feelings and what our relationship really was.

  “Forever,” I finally answer.

  “Fine, fine. Pizza it is,” Nicole capitulates, shrugging and looking wistfully toward the café. I ignore her and lead the way down the hill to the pizza parlor, not looking back.

  “So, I have something to tell you,” Nicole says, her voice hesitant. I stuff the last of my crust in my mouth and look at her inquiringly.

  When she doesn’t continue, I lean forward, lowering my voice. “What is it? Are you okay?”

  She nods and then looks out the window, watching the snow deepen, erasing the sidewalk in a streak of white. Finally she takes a deep breath and nods, as though making a decision.

  “I think I know what Miranda found out about Phillip,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.

  I freeze, startled by the sudden revelation. Nicole hasn’t said anything else about her suspicions since the first day she told me, and I had let it go as well. The only time I see Phillip is in first period, and we’ve remained friendly, but I turned down his few attempts to ask me out. No matter what the truth is, I can’t get over the unsettled feeling he gives me or the constant, uncomfortable buzz under my skin.

  “What do you mean? I thought…you haven’t said anything about this in a while,” I ask, unsure of how to react.

  “No, I just didn’t want to say anything until I w
as sure. Hear me out, okay?” Nicole’s voice is fragile and I know she is worried about how I’ll react, but I can sense the truth from her and know that whatever she has to tell me she believes to be true.

  “Of course,” I say, maintaining eye contact until she relaxes and leans back in her seat.

  “Okay. Let’s pay and then go somewhere quiet.”

  Since it’s my turn, I pay the bill and we head outside, shivering as the cold creeps through the openings on our jackets. “Where do you want to go?” I ask her.

  “Let’s walk down to the river,” she answers, starting down the street before I can argue. I’m not nuts about discussing her dead friend by the river she died in, but it’s hard to change Nicole’s mind when she’s set it on something. I hurry to catch her, digging my hands into my pockets, trying to bury my unease.

  “So what’s with all the secrecy?”

  Nicole gives me scathing look. “You’re joking right? He probably killed Miranda because of what she found out and you want me to blurt it out in the middle of a restaurant?”

  I put up my hands defensively. “Okay, okay. Yeesh.”

  She snorts and picks up the pace, reaching the bottom of the incline and turning to the right toward the overlook and the path to the old railroad bridge. “So has Jake given you any problems today?” she asks, changing the subject.

  With a sigh I shrug. “Friendly as ever,” I answer, uncomfortable with the turn in the conversation. Everything having to do with Jake makes me uncomfortable. While I have managed to avoid actually speaking to him about anything not related to the newspaper, it seems as though he is always there; waiting in the hall outside my classes, around the corner when I’m eating lunch, standing just behind me when I turn around, his slate eyes watching my every move with unnerving intensity.

  “Not gonna say anything else about it, are you?” she asks, humor creeping in her voice. She can laugh. He doesn’t threaten to either kiss her or kill her on a daily basis.

  “Nope,” I mutter, refusing to think about it. If I let thoughts of Jake intrude for too long, I’ll drop out of school and move to a different town.

  When we finally reach an acceptable spot alone in a corner on the overlook, Nicole drops her joking manner and turns serious eyes on me.

  “So what is it? What did you find out about Phillip?” I ask, unable to contain my curiosity any longer.

  Nicole sighs and gives me a wary look. “You’re not going to laugh at me, are you?”

  I roll my eyes so hard my head hurts. “No, Nicole. I think we’ve established by now that I won’t laugh at your theories. If I wasn’t willing to ride your crazy train, I would’ve gotten off weeks ago.”

  She punches me lightly in the shoulder and then drops all signs of humor. “Ok. Look, I don’t have any solid proof yet, but I’m pretty sure that Phillip’s a drug dealer.”

  I blink, thinking that compared to some of her other theories, dealing drugs seems kind of tame. “What makes you think that?” I ask, trying to be supportive.

  “Miranda’s mom called me yesterday and told me she was packing up some of Miranda’s stuff to put in the attic. She wanted to give me the chance to pick out some of her things to keep.” Nicole’s eyes blur with memory for a moment and I feel a twinge of sympathetic pain on her behalf.

  “That was nice,” I comment, trying to encourage her to keep going, to not get caught up in the miasma of guilt and sadness that swarms her every time she mentions Miranda’s death.

  “Yeah. I haven’t talked to her in a while, so I was surprised when she called. But Miranda and I were friends for a long time, so I guess she remembered me after a while.” Nicole shakes her head and the focus reenters her eyes. “Anyway, so I went, and I was looking through her stuff and I found her journal. It was hidden in the false floor in her window seat, where we used to hide our candy stashes and dirty books.” Nicole laughs suddenly, warm sentiment written across her face.

  “Dirty books, huh?” I tease, glad to see some of her grief has eased at the memory.

  “Shut up. Anyway, I guess no one else thought to look there, because it obviously hadn’t been disturbed. So I took it with the other stuff.”

  I frown at this news, wondering if what she has done is wise. “Was that a good idea? Maybe you should have given it to her mom, or the cops or something. For the investigation.”

  She just gives a dismissive toss of her head and pulls a dark brown leather journal from her purse. “There is no investigation, Derry. No one cares anymore but me. Even her mom is trying to forget her, packing up her stuff to tuck away like she was some visiting relative who forgot her suitcase. No one else wants this shit stirred up again, but I was right. Read this,” she commands, flipping open to a page and shoving the notebook in my unwilling hands.

  With serious trepidation I look down at the slanted script on the pages, the dark ink burning its message into my brain.

  I can’t breathe, I can’t think, I can’t sleep. Food tastes like his spit and I can’t get it out of my mouth. No one cares, I can’t tell anyone. Phillip knows and told me I’m just a dirty slut who asked for it and if I tell anyone else he’ll break up with me and make sure everyone at school knows what happened. Sometimes I don’t care, I want everyone to find out so that he’s punished, so that he can’t do it to anyone else. But the shame…my mother would never understand and Jake…he’d hate me. I waited for so long, and I always thought it would happen with Jake, that we’d have our first time together and it would be perfect. But then Shockey took me and I can’t get his scent out of my skin. Phillip says he can smell him on me. He wrinkles his nose every time he sees me like I’m rank, and I feel like I am, I feel like I’ll never get clean.

  I gasp, tears burning my eyes, and put my hand to my mouth. The despair, the hopelessness that emanates from this page in a dead girl’s journal is suffocating, her untold guilt and shame thick like smoke in my lungs.

  “Right? That has to be what she found out!” Nicole exclaims triumphantly.

  I glance up at her in shock before I remember whatever I just read is not what she saw. An overwhelming sadness settles on my shoulders as I realize that this poor girl’s sense of degradation was so intense she lied even in her journal, something she never believed anyone else would see. With a heavy heart, I take another look at the passage, filing away the terrible knowledge that has just been forced on me.

  Today I found a mysterious brown paper bag in Phillip’s glove box. When I asked him what was in it, he slammed the lid on my fingers and told me to shut up. I don’t know what he’s into, but it has to be illegal. He gets this expression on his face, this glee when he looks at it, the same expression he has when we walk around the halls together with everyone looking. He just likes to have things. I don’t know why I don’t just open the bag, why I don’t tell him to go to hell. I just don’t seem to have the energy anymore.

  “I don’t know, Nicole. Why does this make you think he’s a drug dealer?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady. All I want to do is go home and lock myself away to weep for Miranda, for her deeply hidden anguish.

  “Well what else would he keep hidden in a brown paper bag in his glove box and be so touchy about? That sick bastard, hurting her like that. I knew he was doing something to her. I just can’t understand why she didn’t leave him. She left Jake,” Nicole muses, creasing her brow so deeply the lines are etched on her face.

  “Is that the only part that makes you think that?” I ask, wondering if Nicole has any idea what really happened to her best friend.

  “Yeah, and it’s near the end. I got this journal for Miranda on her birthday at the end of September, so she only had it a few weeks before she died. Everything else is about how much she loves Phillip, how mad she is at Jake. There’s one brief entry that seems weird, she mentions not being able to get clean, but it’s really short. Here,” she says, flipping back a chunk of pages and pointing to a half page entry. At first glance the handwriting is chaotic, frenzied, as t
hough scrawled out painfully, against the writer’s own will. With a sinking stomach I read what is truly written.

  Shockey raped me. He took me in his car, he promised to take me home, but he locked the doors and drove to the river and he was so strong, so much stronger than I would have thought. He pushed me into the seat so hard it scraped against my skull. I can still feel it there, driving further and further through the bone, and my head hurts so badly. He covered my mouth so I couldn’t scream and I couldn’t breathe and he just poured himself into me, and I can’t get him out, I can’t get him out, I can’t get him out…

  Tears are streaming down my face and I can feel a scream rise in my throat. I clench my hand into the fabric of my coat, digging in as hard as I can to keep myself from flinging the journal into the river, to get those words away from me.

  “What is it? What do you think she was talking about?” Nicole asks, her expression concerned as she takes in my reaction. I am at a loss. How can I tell her what I know, what Miranda endured, without giving away my own secret? How can I burden her with this knowledge when she already carries so much guilt?

  “I don’t know,” I finally whisper, so nauseous I can barely see straight. Nicole takes the journal back from me, staring down at the page as though it will reveal something new to her.

  If she only knew.

  “I wish she would have told me this. I would never have let Phillip do this to her if I had known. She thought she was all alone.”

  I just nod absently, still too raw to talk normally. Knowing the truth is too horrible sometimes.

  Nicole closes the journal and I give a shudder of relief. I can’t take any more revelations from that book today. She glances at her watch and jumps to her feet.

  “I gotta go. I’m going to check some things out. I’ll call you later,” she promises, grabbing her things. I just nod again and then snap out of it when I register what she’s said.