Empress Unveiled

by Jenna Morland

  I browsed the newspapers at the pharmacy across the street, searching for anything out of place. I even looked in the classifieds, hoping I might see a “Sword Found On Passenger Bay Docks” ad. There was nothing. I walked up and down the cruise port boardwalk, pretending to enjoy the sights, smiling at all the new tourists. But really, I was looking for him.

  I looked in the reflections of windows and kept glancing over my shoulder, not only looking for him but also wondering if it was safe for me to be wandering around alone. If there were no news reports on bodies being found on the docks, then maybe those men in the strange military uniforms weren’t dead after all.

  That night, Penelope and Tyler came over for our annual Fire Before Snow. I hadn’t seen Tyler since the hospital. He had been avoiding me, and I wasn’t making much of an effort to see him either. When he showed up at the house, I acted surprised. “You came?” I said, accidentally phrasing it as a question.

  “Of course, it’s tradition, right?” The annoyance in his voice was apparent. He sat down, adjusted his hoodie over his jeans and turned his hat backwards, holding the hair out of his eyes.

  “Right.”

  “Where have you been all week?” he asked. His eyes glowed green in the warm firelight.

  “Around. The café mostly. I’ve been walking a lot. I’m feeling a little better thanks to the new meds,” I lied. I hadn’t taken any Formalthinaxin since the night of the eclipse. I didn’t want to tell him the real reason I had been walking so much.

  “It’s freezing out here,” Penelope complained, shivering by the fire. Though the fire was warm, she was bundled to the nines in her poofy jacket and winter boots and jeans, and on top of that, a fleece blanket.

  Penelope told me about her week at school, avoiding any gossip about me, of which I’m sure there was plenty after they all witnessed Tyler carrying me out of the party. Tyler chimed in with a few grunts and groans, leaving me wondering what he was thinking.

  Under the rim of his backwards hat just above his eyebrow was a red bump. “Did you get that same locker?” I questioned with a smirk.

  “Fourth year in a row.” He rolled his eyes and rubbed his sore forehead.

  Halfway through our freshman year in high school, Tyler’s locker started to malfunction. Every so often the locker hinge would get stuck, and he would pull on it in frustration, only for it to come loose and suddenly smack him in the head. No matter how many complaints he put into the office, he still got the same locker every year.

  Linda opened and closed the patio door with her hip, her hands full with pizza boxes, soda and marshmallows. We both wore our fire clothes: old sweats with sweaters, and warm wool socks.

  “As requested.” She put the pizza down on one of the tree stumps, and each of us grabbed a piece. This was my happy place: the crisp fall air, a campfire, and my three favorite people.

  If I could do this till I died, I would go happy.

  Tyler slow roasted a marshmallow away from the flame while I told them about my walk along the boardwalk that day, and how there was chaos after a little girl from one of the cruise ships couldn’t be found. I began searching for her as well, my mind irrationally thinking that maybe her disappearance was somehow connected to the boy on the dock. Eventually they found her eating a lollipop at the corner store a few blocks away.

  Tyler’s marshmallow engulfed in flames and he cussed, and the rest of us laughed. He put another marshmallow on the end of the stick; he hated nothing more than the taste of a burnt marshmallow.

  Penelope told us a similar story about her family accidentally leaving her behind at the Jersey Shore when she was just four years old. She was the youngest of all of her siblings, and after a long day on the amusement park rides, it took them sitting down to dinner at home for them to realize she wasn’t with them. They found her later sitting on the bumper of a donut truck, making polite conversation with the owner while eating a box of day-old donuts she had convinced him to give her.

  When Penelope first moved to Rowan and applied for a job at the café to escape the chaos of her large Italian New Jersey family, she had become more a part of our family than her own. When I once asked her why, she said, “My family is big enough; they don’t even miss me. You guys need me more than they do.”

  She was right. We did need her.

  Again, Tyler’s marshmallow lit on fire turning black instantly. “Seriously? I wasn’t even close to the flame that time.” He groaned, frustrated, throwing the burnt marshmallow along with the roasting stick into the fire.

  “Ty is officially off marshmallow duty tonight.” Linda widened her eyes with a smirk.

  “I guess you aren’t good at everything, are you?” Penelope jokingly mocked.

  “Now, now, you two. I have a good story,” Linda interrupted Tyler’s glare at Penelope. “Penelope, did you ever hear about Swayzi and Ty’s reenactment of Peter Pan?” She sat forward on her lawn chair, tapping her foot with excitement.

  “Ah, Linda!” both Tyler and I groaned in unison.

  “Tell me, tell me.” Penelope was eager after seeing our embarrassed reaction.

  “When they were seven years old, we watched Peter Pan for the first time. Full on movie night style popcorn and so much candy our bellies hurt. They were both in complete awe of Neverland, a place where you would never grow old.

  “They spent the entire next day rehearsing a reenactment and built a theatre out of pillows and blankets in our living room. They even made theatre tickets and gave one to each of Tyler’s parents and one to me.”

  “Awww,” Penelope cooed while Tyler and I exchanged embarrassed looks. In truth, I loved that day and remembered it vividly.

  “They made us sit on pillows and gave us popcorn,” Linda continued.

  “I insisted I be the one to play Peter Pan,” I said with a smirk.

  “Yes! I’ll never forget the moment Tyler came running down the stairs in one of my floor length night gowns as Wendy.”

  “You didn’t?” Penelope looked at Tyler.

  “Swayzi can be so damn stubborn,” he said, looking at me as if I had asked the question.

  “Our boat made out of cardboard collapsed so we had to improvise,” I added, breaking free from his gaze.

  “They were sword fighting on the kitchen counter as Peter Pan and Captain Hook using toilet brushes.” Retelling the story clearly made her happy, and when she was happy—I was happy. “Swayzi took it so seriously,” she continued. “She pretended to be Tinker Bell for over a week, refusing to speak, insisting that she was reborn a fairy.”

  Penelope shot me an odd glance before looking into the fire and giving a small polite laugh.

  “I had to sit through a few more Swayzi theatre productions after that,” Linda said as she tapped my knee.

  “Not all of them willingly,” I teased her.

  “Who? Me?”

  “One time I had to rehearse my Romeo and Juliet monologue for eighth grade English class, and I had to bribe her with ten dollars just so she would listen.” I narrowed my eyes at Linda and she put her hands up in surrender.

  “In my defense, it was really dry,” she added through fits of laughter, “but you made it sound beautiful, Baby.”

  “You were paid to say that,” I scoffed before we chuckled together.

  We all began roasting marshmallows—except Tyler, who seemed to be listening to the crackling of the fire and the smell of the burning pine.

  “Ten years from now, where do you think you’ll be?” I asked them. They all stirred uncomfortably, not sure how to answer. They knew I most likely wouldn’t be around and didn’t want to hurt me. “It’s okay, really, I want to know.”

  “I know where Tyler will be,” Penelope said smiling.

  “Oh? Where?” His chin jutted up in suspicion.

  “He will have just won the bronze for swimming at the Olympics. His face will be everywhere, on cereal boxes, talk shows, and face wash commercials. He will still be driving that black tank of a tr
uck, even though it would cost way too much keep it running. He’ll join the military, insist on finding purpose in his larger than life, life. He will be on his second wife already because none of them will measure up to his expectations.”

  Tyler glanced at me for a brief moment before he tossed a small twig into the fire.

  “Eventually,” Penelope continued, “he’ll find himself back here in Rowan, a war veteran coaching the next generation of great swimmers—a forever bachelor. Not by circumstance but by choice because ‘bitches be crazy’.”

  “Ha ha,” Tyler fake laughed. “Just bronze?” He glared at her in good fun. “Okay, my turn,” he said.

  “In ten years, Penelope will still be travelling Europe. She will be completely broke but will run into a guy that isn’t particularly good looking but just happens to be royalty of some kind. He will fall madly in love with her and against his family’s wishes, he will propose. She will turn him down—of course.”

  Penelope puckered her lips.

  “She will use her new-found fame from being the scandalous ex of a royal and live some place warm, getting paid to promote clubs and diet supplements on social media.”

  Penelope playfully stuck her tongue out at him.

  “Linda will still have the café, but by then, it will be a chain,” I began. “It will be in ten different states, and she will travel to all of them to make sure they keep the granola bohemian style authentic to the original COFFEE. While she is travelling for business, she will meet a hot musician from New York, and since someone else will be running the café by then, she will travel the world on tour with him. It won’t take her long to realize she misses home. She will come back and live in this same house, running the original COFFEE, and meet a humble fisherman who lets her be crazy enough for the both of them. They will settle down and have one child.”

  Linda was beginning to tear up as I spoke, embers of the fire reflecting in her eyes. I reached out and put my hand on her arm.

  “She will love that child with all her heart, but every night she’ll go to bed counting and recounting, cursing herself when she realizes that child won’t graduate high school until she’s sixty-four.”

  We all laughed, and for a moment, nobody seemed to notice that we hadn’t talked about me. But I knew where I would be—watching over all of them.

  I spent the entire next week stuck indoors. A cyclone hit the Pacific coast harder than expected, and the remnants of the tropical storm inundated our small town with torrential downpours and high-speed wind gusts. All the businesses on Sawyer Avenue boarded up their windows, preparing for the worst.

  The Mayor of Rowan made a statement to not leave the house unless absolutely necessary until the storm passed, but Linda wanted to remain open just in case someone needed shelter or food. The take-out orders started to pick up on the third day of the storm when people began to run out of food at home, and it wasn’t until the third day that I realized I hadn’t seen Tyler at all.

  It wasn’t just the storm. I was still distracted by what had happened at the docks that fateful night. Why did those men have swords? How did they appear out of nowhere? And why could I see them, but Tyler couldn’t? My mind was so wrapped in this mystery boy that I completely spaced on Tyler. I felt guilty, so much so that on the fifth day of the storm, I decided to drop off a freshly made grilled cheese sandwich and fries at his house.

  With my gum boots and rain poncho, I ran as fast as I could from my house to his, slushing through the muddy trail with rain beating wildly against my hood. Before I knocked on the door, I took a deep breath, realizing that I had just run from my house to his without being completely winded. I couldn’t help smiling as I knocked loudly three times. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. That’s strange. The only time they ever locked their house was if they went out of town. I looked at Tyler’s truck parked in the driveway and knocked again.

  I heard Tyler scurrying around inside, and when he finally opened the door, he held it barely drawn. His bare shoulder peeked out along with his flushed face. He looked surprised that it was me.

  “Sway, what are you doing here?” He opened the door a little more but remained in the threshold, his shirt off with only a pair of jeans sitting loosely on his hips.

  “A simple hello would do,” I said loudly over the rain hitting the roof above us. “I haven’t seen you all week, thought you might need some sustenance.” I held up the paper bag from the café.

  “Oh, thanks.” He reached out for the bag, still holding the door. “I would invite you in, but the house is a mess.” He looked over his shoulder nervously.

  “Since when do you care if I see your house a mess?” I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously.

  “I don’t… I mean, I’ve been training all week, and I’m spent. I’ll eat this, though. Tell Linda thanks for me.”

  “When are your parents getting back?” I asked trying to stall him from practically pushing me off his porch.

  “As soon as the storm lets up. A couple days I think.” His words were sharp. I could tell he didn’t want this conversation to continue.

  “Okay, well, I’ll let you eat. We should do dinner when Tom and Silvia are home. Tell them for me?”

  “Yes, of course. Stay safe out there, Sway.” He nodded towards my house through the trees where the rain was pouring down enough to make it barely visible. He closed the door before I could say anything else.

  I felt an extra chill as I walked down his porch steps, glancing once more over my shoulder at his darkened house.

  Night fell quickly with the black clouds swallowing the sky. The fireplace easily consumed the last few pieces of wood Tyler had stacked for us. With Linda still at the café, the house was quiet with only the sounds of wood crackling and rain falling outside. I held my coffee in my hand and watched the downpour drown our grass.

  Lightning flashed across the sky, revealing something in the back yard. I stood up and approached the patio door just before another strike brilliantly lit up the sky. Someone was there, standing next to the Empress tree—it was him—the boy from the dock. A crack of thunder made me jump, and my coffee cup dropped to the ground with a crash. Another flash and I saw him more clearly. He was completely soaked, and his hair fell over his face, but eyes were sharp looking directly at me.

  I hesitated for a moment before I pulled on the heavy patio door and ran bare foot out into the pouring rain. I was jolted by another loud boom of thunder, but I continued to run. When I got to the tree, he was gone.

  I groaned in frustration, turning in circles, looking for him in the darkening storm. My hair felt heavy on my shoulders, drenched from the rain, while my fingers and bare toes puckered from the cold. I hugged myself, giving up and walked back to the house. A few times, I looked over my shoulder, my eyes finally adjusted to the dark, but he was still nowhere to be seen.

  A few days later, the storm finally let up. I opened my blinds in the morning to see the sun peeking out from behind the clouds and smiled, excited that I could finally go looking for my mystery boy. I kept wondering if I was crazy for seeing him the night of the electric storm, but I knew he had to be real. I had barely been taking any meds. If these were hallucinations, they weren’t caused by the meds.

  I decided to take the Wagoneer for a drive to the old fisherman docks. I hadn’t been there since the day Tyler and I played Truth or Dare, and I was curious if I would find anything—a clue maybe to who this boy was.

  I parked the Wagoneer down at the old boat launch. The beach was completely deserted, and the tide was higher than it had been during my last visit. Trees were broken, their branches littered the beach and driftwood floated in the bay. Waves gently lapped at the docks now thrashed from the storm. The ramp that once served as a bridge from the sand to the docks floated in the distance, destroyed by the storm. I groaned, frustrated that I would have to get wet.

  More snow covered the mountains surrounding the bay than the night of Mellie’s party. It was midday, an
d the sun was clear of clouds. I tilted my head up and closed my eyes, welcoming the warm sun on my face.

  I left my nonmatching socks and rubber boots in the Wagoneer and rolled up my leggings to my knees. My feet sunk into the damp sand as I trudged closer to the docks. I looked over at the balcony where Tyler and I had sat during the eclipse. It seemed further away than I remembered.

  I walked slowly looking for anything out of the ordinary. Where the water met the sand, I stood there for a moment, listening to the squawking seagulls above me. The cold sand tickled my toes, and I burrowed them deeper. My long hair blew carelessly in the autumn wind until I pulled it up into a high bun. I shaded my eyes from the beaming sun, searching for something—anything.

  The waves were like a heartbeat, steady and predictable. The force of the each one against my legs shook my frail frame. I sucked in a breath as I pushed through the cold water to the docks. I pulled myself onto the first dock, causing it to sway beneath me. With my hands out to balance myself, I carefully tiptoed, avoiding any rusty nails.

  A few of the pillars once used to secure the docks were now beached on the sand, separating the docks more than usual. There was an especially large gap between the first and second dock with both corners submerged under water. I took a deep breath, willing my untrustworthy legs to leap across to the next dock. I landed with one knee on the slimy wood and my other leg in the ocean, my fingers wedged between two boards. My hands, which were covered in flecks of wood, barely held me in place.

  The muscles in my arms tensed as I pulled myself up, and I welcomed the unexpected strength. On still wobbly legs, I slowly made my way to the middle of the docks to the spot where they all stood that night. Wood shavings clung to my wet body, and my wool sweater was stretched, drenched and heavy. I had only a small gash on my elbow, a few slivers, and a couple soon to be bruises on my knees.