by J. K. Holt
Several girls hooted and began throwing their voices into the fray, while Tess took advantage of the diversion and left the room. So much for watching some television.
She retraced her earlier steps to the cafeteria to scrounge for food. Nothing was left out, and the pantry doors were locked. Resigned, she found a staff member and requested an envelope, paper, and pencil. They found a staff office where he gave her the supplies, instructing her to return the pencil once she was done with it. She tucked the materials into her pocket and walked back to her room. Leah was right where Tess had left her, sitting on the bed, though now she held a deck of cards in her hand, playing solitaire.
Tess went to her desk and began the letter to Cara. She was careful with her language, skipping over anything that felt negative towards the family and attempting to maintain an optimistic tone, which proved much more difficult than she’d imagined.
She sealed and addressed the envelope before going back to the staff office to return the pencil and leave the letter to be mailed. She was back in her room by nine.
∞ ∞ ∞
Leah broke the silence first. “Don’t touch my stuff.”
Tess lifted her head from the pillow, distracted from her current study of the ceiling. “I wasn’t.”
“I know you’re not right now. I’m saying don’t do it at all.”
Leah went back to her solitaire.
Tess groaned, rolling onto her side to face Leah. “Look, we don’t have to be best friends, but if we’re gonna be roommates then the least you could do it say a few words to me now and then that aren’t nasty.”
“Screw you.”
“Oh fine, have it your way.” She rolled back onto the bed and crossed her arms, resuming her count of the spider cracks that ran along the length of the white ceiling. Counting to keep her mind off the situation, counting to keep from crying, counting to feel less alone. Apparently it was too much to ask to try to make even one friend while she was here.
“Why are you here, anyways?” Leah said after another five minutes or so.
“In this room? I suspect brutal punishment.”
“Not the room, idiot.”
Tess glanced over to Leah again, who studied the cards in her hand. “It didn’t work out with my last placement.”
Leah snorted loudly, interrupting Tess’s reasoning. “Pulease. It had to be better than here, didn’t it?”
The girl had a point. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Tess took the opportunity to study Leah in more detail, realizing that her initial assessment of her age might be wrong. She was small, with skinny legs and arms and a head that seemed to be constantly in slight motion, ticking this way and that, like a life-sized bobble doll. But it was the way Leah talked that made her seem older, something about her tone that was hard to pinpoint.
“Why don’t you spend any time outside of the room?” Tess asked. “I mean, obviously you love being around people, so…”
Leah snorted, which seemed to surprise her, and then looked up again. “No one worth hanging out with.”
“Do you have seniority? If you did, you could at least watch some tv or something.”
Leah raised one eyebrow. “Seniority? Who told you that?”
“A bunch of girls in the rec room said-”
“Yeah, idiot. You got played. Don’t matter how long you’ve been here, you can watch t.v. during free time.” Leah rolled her eyes and leaned back onto her pillows.
“Oh.” Tess felt like a moron.
“But you can’t spend free time in here either, kay? I like my space. After tonight, go find another place, where they won’t bother you. We clear?”
“Crystal,” Tess sighed.
“Good. I’m going to sleep.”
She cut the overhead light before Tess could reply. Tess considered changing into her pajamas, but didn’t feel it was worth the effort. She curled up above the covers, squinting at the dark shapes in the room, listened as Leah jostled around in her bed.
Within a few minutes, Leah began snoring softly. Satisfied that she was sleeping, Tess rolled towards the wall, hugged herself, and cried as quietly as possible.
∞ ∞ ∞
The dream was such an unexpected gift, a clear and wonderful memory.
Tess was younger, maybe ten or eleven, spending a day at the park with Maggie. They’d driven out on the first nice spring day, and by noon it was warm enough to shed their sweatshirts and revel in the warmth of the sun. They’d hung from the monkey bars on the playground, made flower necklaces, played hide and seek, even waded in a nearby creek, overturning stones and squealing as the icy water splashed up onto their legs.
Only when the light was fading did Tess allow Maggie to drag her back to the car and drive home. Tess sat in the front seat, cuddling Bear as the wind rushed in from the open windows. They’d talked about school, Tess’s grades, the new boy who had chased her on the playground (his name was Tommy, and he had red hair and wore checkered shirts). They’d talked about summer plans, a trip to the beach, the fair that would be in town over the fourth of July- Maggie’d promised to take Tess to see the fireworks this year, since she was old enough now to stay up late for special occasions.
They’d talked about home, about painting Tess’s bedroom green (“but not a lime green, Maggie! Just a nice happy green, like the trees”), about making oatmeal cookies. They’d pulled faces at each other, played twenty questions and I spy, and mooed at the cows in the nearby pasture as the car rolled past.
Maggie’s blond hair swirled around her face as she laughed, squeezing Tess’s knee, reminding Tess of her love with every touch, every gesture. They’d stopped for dinner at Maggie’s favorite diner; Tess had two scoops of ice cream for dessert- rocky road.
A perfect day, until a loud siren began blaring and Tess blinked, darkness flooding her eyes where before there had been light, had been Maggie.
She grasped in the dark and fell out of the bed, calling for Maggie.
“Shut it, newbie. It’s just the alarm,” came a voice through the disorientation. “Some idiot trying to run away. Go back to sleep.”
It all rushed back to Tess, though she tried to shut it out. Where she was, when she was, living in a world where Maggie no longer existed. Tess caught a sob in her throat and crawled back onto the bed, blindly searching for Bear, realizing too late that Bear was tucked, abandoned, in her backpack, in the possession of Mr. Verdin, who had not allowed her to get to him before dumping her here.
“Oh, no, Bear,” Tess whimpered. “Oh no, oh no.”
“Hey, be quiet already. I told you it’s fine.”
Tess tried to stop herself, but found she was unable to. The walls began to close in on her. “Oh no, oh God, oh no, I can’t-”
“I told you, can it,” Leah threatened from the shadows.
“I’m trying,” Tess cried.
“You have ten seconds before I punch you in the face.”
And Tess was trying, but she couldn’t catch her breath. Her pulse raced, and shivers racked her body. She couldn’t get control.
She couldn’t control anything.
“Oh, Maggie, help me,” she pleaded with the darkness.
A growl from her roommate was the only response.
The absolute unfairness of it all, the pain that sat always in Tess’s stomach and threatened to capsize her at a moment’s notice, took over. Tess could not, in this moment, be strong. She was broken.
She was broken.
The promise she’d made to Maggie wavered. She didn’t know how to continue in this world alone. She didn’t want to. She’d been trying, and failing. She would always fail. She was weak.
She needed something else, somewhere else, but could think of no place in which the pain would not follow her.
Regardless, she needed such a place to exist.
She willed it to exist.
She curled into herself, an ever-shrinking ball of pain, and her soul screamed into the universe.
It scr
eamed for a long time.
Then it began, with a tiny tug, a hint of a promise.
Just enough for her to notice.
Tess squeezed her eyes shut, clenched her stomach, and focused entirely on the thread she felt tugging at the edge of her consciousness. It was calling to her.
Maggie, is that you? Tess threw into the void. And though Maggie did not answer, Tess clung more persistently to the shred of elsewhere. She held herself tightly as she willed her mind to follow the thread. She felt a pull not altogether unfamiliar, and her conscious mind responded, pulling, pulling, clinging.
Please, please, please, help me.
The feeling of the bed dissolved beneath Tess, and still she clung.
I need you, Maggie. I need you. I need you.
The sound of her roommate’s threats slowly faded, and Tess held fast.
Oh, please.
Away from here.
Away from the pain.
For a moment, Tess was alone in the ether with only the sound of her own ragged breaths. Still she kept her eyes closed, pushing down the urge to scream, and willed herself further, further still.
Anywhere but here, she kept repeating to herself. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but here. A mantra.
Slowly, softly, sounds began to fill the space- birds calling from above, footsteps on wooden planks echoing nearby. Cold, wet stones slowly materialized beneath Tess, and she became aware of water sloshing on her face.
A salty breeze swirled, pushed against her. A bell clanged from a distance.
A meager grey light gently penetrated Tess’s eyelids, entreating her to open them.
After a beat, Tess obeyed.
She opened her eyes to the else.
Chapter Two
It was not yet dawn. Soft, lapping waves glinted and sparkled, reflecting the moonlight as they swirled and eddied around sturdy pillars that disappeared into the darkness above. The pungent smells of salt and seaweed filled her nose as Tessa took a tentative breath, then another.
A dock. She was under a massive dock.
Tessa struggled to sit up, slipping on the mucky rocks as she slid backwards, pulling herself hand over hand onto a spot of dry land. She grimaced as the bandage was ripped from her hand on a particularly sharp rock, and she maneuvered until she was sitting on a smoother spot of land slightly above the water line. The water was cold, and with no sunlight she quickly began to shiver. Tessa peeled off her drenched sweatshirt, hugged her legs to her body and stared uncomprehendingly out across the vastness in front of her. The dark waves, calm and steady, gathered a bit in height before breaking softly in the shallows.
Well, it’s happened. I’ve officially lost my mind.
A laugh rose in her throat and escaped, wild and uncontrolled. She stifled it a moment later, surprised by the sound as it reverberated off of the wooden planks above.
“Okay, Tess, get a grip.” She slapped her cheek, wincing at the sting but grateful for the centering it provided her.
She wiped winding wet tendrils of hair from her face and sighed. “Now, first things first- what in the hell did you do?”
She glanced around in the muddy light, frustrated by the lack of definition provided for anything more than twenty feet away. As best she could tell, the dock was a good ten feet above her, and she sat on a mixture of rocks and course sand. When she shifted, an object crunched beneath her feet- she pulled it out, running her finger over the fragment of a large shell. The feel of it provided an anchor for her thoughts, and she focused on it as her mind raced over recent events, searching for logical explanations and systematically eliminating them.
Perhaps she’d been brought here by someone and had no memory of the event? Not likely. Or maybe she’d gone totally and completely bonkers; potentially more likely, though she’d never heard of a type of insanity that just up and plonked your butt in a completely different place.
Maybe someone had slipped her something- a drug, like LSD? But Tess thought people on those things believed they could fly or wouldn’t be hurt by bullets or felt the incredibly urge to kill and eat people. Okay, she wasn’t actually sure of the last part, but still- the “on drugs” answer felt a bit lacking in explaining her current predicament.
The most likely option was that she was dreaming, though that hand slap earlier had stung and no dream had ever felt this… well, real. And while she couldn’t eliminate the option, it just didn’t feel right. Then there was the fact that she remembered the actual dream, with Maggie. She remembered waking up, frantic. She remembered sobbing, that girl Leah yelling. Heck, she remembered coming here, the void in between, the queer calmness it gave her as she was pulled from that room and into the inky abyss.
Oh, boy.
What was that Sherlock quote Maggie loved? Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
The only trouble was, she couldn’t eliminate anything yet.
She needed a plan, and a damned good one at that.
The light grew stronger as Tessa pondered, the hint of dawn chasing away the pitch colored sky. When there was enough to see by, she would climb out above the dock and have a look around. If she was dreaming, she would wake soon enough. If she was on drugs, she would eventually come down from the trip. Both would just take time. If neither of those were the case, she could figure out where she was, come up with more options for how she came to be here, and then decide what to do about it.
Oddly, the option that scared Tessa least was that she had completely lost her grip on sanity. So far, she felt like she had her wits about her (though insane people likely thought the same thing), but more importantly, she couldn’t escape one truth: so far, here, wherever it was, felt much better than where she had been. The panic she’d felt subsided, the aching hole in her heart queerly tamed. She felt better in this strange place than she had in a long while, though she had no answer for why.
She waited for at least an hour longer, watching the pale light grow across the sky and squinting further out across the water. Moored boats became visible, tied to the dock, while on the horizon the open water ran as far as her eye could see. If this was a lake, it was a large one. More likely it was the ocean. She watched until the light on the water became orange and fierce, and then looked for the sun. It was rising almost directly to her left, which meant the open water was south.
Tessa snatched her sweatshirt and scrambled up the embankment, grabbing onto a few meager patches of wild grasses before emerging from underneath the dock, hoisting herself up while she scanned the area. She’d heard some nondescript voices from far off while waiting, but not a soul was nearby at the moment.
She appeared to be on the westernmost point of an expansive boardwalk that crawled along the coastline, sending out numerous appendages that sprawled over the water and provided mooring for boats. Further out, into deeper water, ships were anchored in the harbor. The ships themselves, though…well, they were weird. She could see at least six or seven from where she stood, of various size, but they all looked a time-apart. Large masts towered above the decks while sails, folded, listed lazily in the early morning breeze. They were all wooden, none with motors that she could see, and she half expected to see a skull and crossbones flag poking out among the crows-nests. The lack of them was almost a disappointment.
More and more peculiar, mused Tessa.
She stuck her hands in the pockets of her damp pants and ambled north-east on the boardwalk, towards what she could only assume was the surrounding town. The outline of stunted buildings, standing at perhaps three stories or less, crowded each other for purchase on the low horizon. No high-rises jutted towards the sky, no neon-lights broadcast her destination.
Drawing closer, Tessa could make out the silhouettes of people moving about the dusky buildings and milling in small groups near the docks. Garbled pieces of conversation found their way to her above the gentle sloshing of the water below.
“..lads’re too lazy for their own good.
Be here before the tide, I told ‘em…”
“…Blues are runnin’ west of here, ‘round Hazy Lookout or nearabouts…”
“-Oi! There’s my netter now. Hurry, boy!”
A few more shadows emerged and joined the group before several of them broke off and began to saunter in her direction, laughing in response to something one of them had said. Tessa froze; they had not yet noticed her but she likely had mere moments before they would. She darted to the left, off the planks and onto soft sand before finding herself behind a small overturned rowboat, crouching as she waited for the men to pass.
Had any been looking in her direction as they meandered by, she would have been discovered. Luck was on her side, though, and they made no notice of her as they walked by and soon turned left to follow the pier out toward open water and a ship buoyed there. The dawn light hit upon their skin in a way that made them appear to glow, and Tessa shielded her eyes momentarily. They were soon far enough away that the glare subsided.
She studied their dress with interest; most were wearing baggy breeches and loose tunics, while low brimmed caps covered various lengths of hair. Several of the men were barefoot. Their accents seemed strange, hard to fit. A bit English, though not quite. Tessa was glad she’d chosen to hide. She glanced down at her wet sneakers, jeans and old summer camp t-shirt, balled up sweatshirt still in one hand. This would not do.
The light was reaching bright fingers in all direction now, and she wouldn’t have the cover of shadows much longer. She left the relative safety of the boat and trotted inland, towards a nearby cluster of two-storied row-houses. The sand mingled with dirt beneath her feet and grasses clung stubbornly to the low-lying dunes, sharp reeds catching on her pants as she trudged through them towards the residences clinging to the outskirts.
She found a clothesline a few houses in, garments pinned neatly to the greying rope as it strained ponderously under the weight. She liberated a blue linen shirt and brown breeches with a drawstring tie and changed quickly, hopping as she pulled her wet shoes from her feet with a loud sucking sound. Peeling off her wet jeans was an entirely separate ordeal, and she shivered as the cool morning breeze hit her bare legs. The clothes were ill-fitting, but she tucked the shirt in and attempted to tighten the pants enough that they would stay up. Uncertain of what to do with her own clothes, she decided a trade was the fairest option and hung them over the line as reparation for the stolen clothes. Leaving your clothes out in the open is a stupid idea, pointed out her rational internal voice. She conveniently ignored it.
