by L. D. Davis
I wasn’t going to take a nap. I almost always did what my parents told me to do, but I was so angry. I wanted to be defiant. I wanted to be bad.
Very quietly, I pulled open my bedroom door. I became instantly annoyed when I saw that my mother had placed my shoes in front of the door with my ribbon and hair tie stuffed inside one shoe, but then I felt satisfied knowing that my hair was wild and free and totally uncontained.
As an afterthought, I went into my sock drawer and pulled a small wad of cash out of a ball of socks and stuffed it into my pocket. Not having any time for leisure had one advantage: I didn’t spend any of the cash gifts I received for holidays and birthdays. I had way more money than an eleven-year-old should have.
I went back to the door and listened for several moments until I heard the faint sound of water running in the kitchen. My mom was probably in there preparing a ridiculously healthy lunch for me. That was another thing I was tired of, healthy food. I wanted chocolate and cookies and cake and candies. I wanted to stuff my mouth with potato chips and cheeseburgers and French fries and suck down a thick chocolate shake, but my mom only allowed me a small candy bar once a month and no more. My dad worked away from home most of the time, but sometimes when he came back, he’d bring me treats that I was allowed to eat. It wasn’t often enough, though.
I slipped out of my room and carefully closed the door. I silently moved down the front stairs, pausing every few steps to listen for my mom. She was still in the kitchen, and as long as she stayed in there, I would be able to get out of the front door unseen. I wasn’t sure about being unheard, though. Sometimes, the door squeaked when it was opened, but as luck would have it, the telephone rang.
“Grayne residence,” Mom answered formally.
I took my opportunity quickly and hurried down the last few steps and quickly out the door. Fortunately, it didn’t squeak.
I really had no idea where I was going. I didn’t really have friends outside of dance class and the pageants, and those girls were more like enemies than friends. My cousins Emmy and Tabitha were older than me, but they were the closest things to friends that I had. They didn’t exactly live within walking distance. They both lived in towns that were miles away from me.
Walking aimlessly through my neighborhood, I found myself at the local school. I had never gone to a regular school. I had always been homeschooled by a private tutor. I never had a backpack or a lunchbox. I never got the opportunity to eat cafeteria food or to feel chalk between my fingers. I never got to sit at a classroom desk or go on a field trip. Worst of all, I never experienced recess.
My fingers hooked onto the tall chain-link fence as I watched kids running across a blacktop. Some kids swung on swings and others played ball. There were a couple clusters of girls standing close together, chatting and giggling. A group of boys approached the girls and seconds later there were shrieks and shouts as the girls suddenly started chasing the boys.
I watched all the activity with deep envy and loneliness. Although I did play with my cousins at some family events, those times were few. My mother kept a close watch on me, always ready to jump in and stop me from doing something silly, like running or skipping. I otherwise had no playtime and no one to play with, even if I wanted to. Besides, I was almost twelve, and I would soon be too old to play like that.
A whistle was blown and the kids raced to line up to go inside. I didn’t know if more kids would come out or not, but I didn’t want to see anymore. It made me feel sad.
I walked on for a while longer until my growling stomach began to object to any further activity. I surely wasn’t going to go back home to eat rabbit food. I walked to a convenience store that was about a quarter mile from my house. There was a girl I recognized from my neighborhood standing on the side of the building smoking a cigarette. She was way older than me, at least fourteen or fifteen. I knew she should have been in school, but she was probably thinking the same thing as she watched me walk by.
When I came back out ten minutes later with a bag full of junk food, the girl was still there. She was dark skinned, the color of dark chocolate, thin, and several inches taller than me, as most people were since I was on the short side.
She smiled at me and I felt myself smiling back even as I took a huge bite of a chocolate bar.
“You have chocolate on your face,” she said, not bothering to hide her smile. “Come here, I think I have napkins in my satchel.”
I was a little wary and a little awed. I was wary because even though I knew her face, I didn’t know her. I was awed because she was a teenager, and not a new teenager, either. She had been a teen for at least a year, and she was talking to me.
The girl dug around in the brown bag slung across her body. It was covered in pins—some for bands, some looked like cartoon characters, and a few of them were just phrases.
“Ah-ha,” she said as she pulled a couple slightly crumpled napkins from her bag. “Don’t worry, they’re not used.”
I took the napkins from her and followed her directions so I knew where to wipe.
“Thank you,” I said to her and leaned back against the wall.
“Anytime, kid. Why aren’t you in school?”
“I’m homeschooled.”
Her dark eyes widened. “Really? People still do that?”
“Apparently.”
“Well, damn,” she said, shaking her head as she dug into her bag again. She pulled a cigarette out of a crumpled pack and held it between two fingers as she continued to look for something to light it with. “Don’t you want to go to regular school?”
“Yeah, but my mom won’t let me. She said it’s a distraction.”
I cracked open a can of soda and took several large sips. I was so excited to taste the sugary liquid, it almost dribbled out of my mouth in my haste.
“Distraction from what?”
Holding the cigarette between her lips, she lit it and inhaled deeply. When she blew the smoke out, she turned her head to the side so that it wouldn’t go directly in my face. She watched me with curiosity, waiting for my response.
“I dance,” I said, shrugging a shoulder. “I play the piano, and I compete in pageants.”
She looked mildly confused. “So? Lots of kids do shit and go to school.”
Reciting my mother’s words almost verbatim, I said, “If my feet fail me at dance, I will have my fingers for piano. If my fingers fail me, I will still have beauty and brains.”
The girl stared at me as if I were a species she had never seen before. She sucked in a few puffs of her cigarette but forgot to turn her head when she exhaled. I coughed and waved away the smoke, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“So, what? Your mom wants you to be a professional dancer, and if that doesn’t work she wants you to be a…what’s it called…a concert pianist? And if that doesn’t work she wants you to be, like, Miss America or some shit?”
Opening a bag of chips, I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Do you like doing all that shit?”
I shrugged. “Not really. Not anymore. I don’t get to do fun stuff, but my mom won’t let me quit. So, I got mad and walked out of the house when she wasn’t paying attention.”
She smiled mischievously. “So you’re playing hooky today.”
“Yeah, totally.” I smiled back, even though I didn’t exactly know what playing hooky was.
“Do you think your mom is going to come looking for you, though?” she asked, looking around as if she expected my mom to appear at any moment.
“Probably,” I said, my shoulders sagging a bit.
We were quiet for a minute as she smoked with a thoughtful look on her face. I ate more chips and sucked down the rest of my soda.
“You can always hang out with me for a little while if you’re not ready to go home,” she offered. “We can cut through the woods to avoid the street in case your mom is driving around.”
My eyes widened. “You want to hang out with me?”
“Yeah, sure.” She
grinned. “Why not? I always wanted a little sister. What’s your name, kid?”
“Mayson.”
“Mayson what?” she asked as she began to lead me away from the store.
“Mayson Grayne.”
“Hello, Mayson.” She smiled down at me. “I’m Sharice.”
I followed the strange girl into the woods.
I sipped my coffee as my eyes refocused on the present and as Kyle slid back into the seat across from me. After asking our waitress for a fresh cup of coffee, he gave me his full attention.
“Now, tell me about Sharice.”
So, I did. I told him everything that had happened on the day that lead me to the older girl.
He listened intently, without interruption.
“I only hung out with her for a couple hours before she made me go home,” I said, stirring cream into a topped-off cup of coffee. “She thought my mom would call the police if I stayed away much longer. We sat in her room listening to music and eating the junk food I bought at the store. She talked about school and her favorite bands and television shows, and I told her all about dance and playing the piano, and the competitions. I finally, finally had a friend. A real friend that wasn’t my friend by default because she was related to me.”
I absently took another sip of coffee. My eyes started to glaze over again as I refocused on the past.
“My mom was remarkably calm when I walked through the door that day,” I quietly recollected. “I thought she would have gone crazy trying to figure out where I was, but she hadn’t. She was in the kitchen, cooking dinner like it was any other night. When she saw me, she just looked at me with this blank expression on her face and told me to go wash up for dinner. She was so…normal throughout dinner and afterward when we were cleaning up, that I didn’t think I was going to be punished for running off.”
I managed to scowl and smile humorlessly simultaneously.
“My mother made me dance that night.” I met Kyle’s eyes. “She made me dance until my toes bled. That was her passive-aggressive way of punishing me.” I raised a shoulder. “It worked, for a little while anyway. I was just more careful about sneaking out to see Sharice after that. It was easier to do when my dad was home because my mom wasn’t as strict with my schedule. Anyway,” I continued with a sigh. “Hanging out with Sharice, I picked up all kinds of bad habits, and, of course, it was with her that I got high the first time.”
“How old were you? What did she give you?” he asked with interest.
“I was still eleven. It happened about three or four months after we first met. I was getting more and more rebellious. Maybe it was the burgeoning preteen hormones that aided in my descent into degradation.”
“Maybe it was your burgeoning natural asshole personality traits,” Kyle suggested innocently.
I gave him a flat look. “Do you want to know the details or not, douche puddle?”
He gestured for me to carry on, hiding the hint of a smile behind a fist.
“Anyway, to answer your question, it was pot. It was only pot for a long time. Then it was a line of coke here and there. That was Emmy’s drug of choice, you know, for the short period that she was into drugs. I was fourteen the first time Sharice and I tried heroin.” I smiled dreamily. Feeling wistful, I said, “That first time, God, there’s nothing in the world like that first time.”
“I’m amazed that you remember meeting Sharice so clearly,” Kyle said, deviating from my comment about getting high the first time. He knew better than to allow me to linger on that.
“I remember almost everything before the age of fourteen. There are a few things that are a little cloudy, but I remember most of it. It’s after that things begin to get muddy.”
I pushed my cup of coffee away. If I kept drinking it, I’d never get to sleep and I would have a late start in the morning and have another screwy day.
“So you and Grant,” Kyle said, nodding and tapping his fingers on the table. “How serious was that?”
“About as serious as you can get between a heroin addict and a guy that loathed drug abuse.”
He cringed. “How the hell did that happen?”
Watching a large family as they noisily entered the diner, I gave a small shrug, indicating that I didn’t know. I did know, but those words that Grant had whispered to me a lifetime ago seemed too private to say aloud. Kyle and I were very blunt with each other, and he knew a lot about my life as an addict, but he didn’t know very much about me as Just Mayson. Just Mayson was another person altogether, and there was only one person in the world that knew her. Grant Alexander was the only person in the world who ever knew that girl…
Understanding that I didn’t want to divulge anything further on that account, Kyle moved on.
“You said that Grant saved the wrong girl. What does that mean?”
I flattened my napkin on the table and began to smooth away the wrinkles.
“I remember laughter as Shari and I set up,” I whispered as I started to fold the napkin very carefully. “Laughing like we were getting ready to sit down and play a game or something. Then I remember feeling weightless, like I was floating away, and that’s because I was. I was dying.” I met his eyes again and continued to speak in that soft whisper. “I said there is nothing like that first high, and there isn’t, but there is nothing like that other high, either. There is nothing like that high right before death claims you.”
I waved the waitress away when she held the coffee pot over my cup, but Kyle accepted more. I waited for her to bring back more cream for him before continuing. He watched me with a straight face, but I could see the tension in his jaw after he sipped his coffee.
“I remember darkness and shouting, but the shouting sounded really far away at first. I remember a lot of voices and hands touching me, and people saying my name. It’s all…rather vague. I felt paralyzed. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I was barely breathing. I was able to open my eyelids just a crack and that’s when I saw him. I saw Grant holding Shari’s dead body and crying.” I sighed heavily. “I don’t know all the details. I just know that Grant saved me and he didn’t save his sister. I don’t want to remember that.”
“Well, you can’t make the memory go away,” Kyle said after a few moments of silence. “So, how are you going to handle it?”
“Can I get high?” I asked hopefully with a small sardonic smile.
I was only half kidding.
Kyle didn’t smile.
“Are you going to be okay tonight? Do you want to come home with me?”
“I know that you really think I’m hot and that you want me bad, but I must decline.”
He slapped a few bills onto the table. “You do have a very nice ass, but unfortunately for you, I will not be taking you to my bed. My wife doesn’t like to share.”
“She needn’t worry,” I said, getting up. “I wouldn’t want you if you were the last man on Earth.”
“Thinking about putting my cock inside you does make my skin crawl,” he said conversationally as we walked toward the exit.
Just before we stepped out, I stopped and turned around and narrowed my eyes at Kyle.
“Do you really think I have a nice ass?” I asked.
He nodded solemnly. “Nice tits, too. Still wouldn’t touch them or your ass with a ten-foot pole, though.”
I smiled widely. “Cool.”
With my dog, Dusky’s, head in my lap, and the television tuned to the History Channel, I made my seventh origami masterpiece of the night. The other six flowers sat on the end table beside my phone.
I was tired and my fingers were beginning to ache, but I kept folding and folding. One corner of paper, and then another. I could make flowers and stars without looking. Some of my more complicated pieces took more care, but it was the flowers I made the most of when I was strung too tightly. Making anything more complicated would get me frustrated. Then I would give up and my hands would be idle. Can’t have idle hands on a too-tightly-strung night.
Fold. Crease. Tuck.
I finished the flower and placed it with the others on the table. Then I did what I did the other six times. I picked up my phone. I held it. Stared at it. Traced the same ten numbers again and again.
I put the phone down.
I picked the phone up.
I put the phone down.
I picked the phone up.
Chapter Four
Grant fucking Alexander had the power to screw up not just one day, but two consecutive days in one shot.
I barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Sharice’s dead face and Grant’s grief.
Lying awake wasn’t much better. Vapory, jagged fragments of memories of that night poked at the edges of my mind. I would try to grasp them, but then they just slipped through my fingers, returning to the thick, churning gray fog that clouded parts of my past.
Then there was Grant himself. There were memories of him that had nothing to do with Sharice. His body wrapping protectively around mine. His lips. The taste of his mouth. His words…especially the last ones he had said to me before exiting my life.
I picked up my phone often during the night, poised to make the call that could make the unease in my heart cease, at least for a while. I always put it back down without dialing.
I didn’t fall asleep until near dawn, and that short sleep had been restless. I dreamed of jeering laughter, rough hands on my body, and the smell of the breaths on my face from people I could not see. The voices were recognizable, only because they had been with me for so many years.
When I left for work in the morning, I wasn’t in danger of being late, but my schedule was thrown off. I would definitely run into The Mommies again and I didn’t think that I’d be able to just smile and coo about their alien life form children.
