by Schow, Ryan
Chapter Three
Leighton McDaniel
Leighton felt students standing and leaving. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she thought she saw shadows in motion, a confirmation that it was time to go. She stood and moved toward the door. In the mad shuffle out of the room, she bumped one of the desks with her thigh, hooked her foot on the leg of a chair, and nearly fell, but not before a few other students slammed into her. Apparently, everyone was leaving as fast as they could, not that she blamed them.
In the hallway, the crowds intensified. She slipped into the bumping, stumbling, stampeding horde of departing students. Who knew leaving school could be a contact sport? A few girls knocked into her, which she could handle. But the guys were bigger, carried more physical weight, and weren’t as polite. One such brute bumped her, causing her to bump into the girl beside her, to which Leighton said, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry.”
Whether or not the girl replied, Leighton didn’t know because she wasn’t looking at her mouth to read her lips.
How did this happen? she couldn’t stop thinking.
When she got her hearing aids, she thought she could put the fears of being deaf behind her. But now? This?
She wondered what sort of storm had the power to knock out hearing aids. Or cell phones. And why weren’t people using the flashlight apps on their phones? Even if the cell towers were rendered powerless, the phone’s features should still work, shouldn’t they? Yet no one was using them.
When they burst through the building’s front doors and into the chilly afternoon air, she inhaled deeply, then glanced around. People were looking every bit as panicked as she felt. Many of them were also staring up into the ever-darkening sky.
She took out her phone, tried again to turn it on. It was dead. A moment later, someone touched her shoulder. Flinching, she spun around, hands up like she was being attacked, even though she wasn’t. It was Aaron. He was talking to her.
“Say again?” she said, looking only at his mouth to read his lips.
What happened? Are you okay?
“My phone died.” She looked down at his phone in his hand and said, “Let me see yours.”
He handed her a janky cell phone with a cracked screen. It was dead, too.
“What is going on?” she asked.
Your guess is as good as mine, but I think maybe it has something to do with the weather. I guess maybe that tornado is coming after all. Or maybe it’s already come.
“I have to get to my room,” she said, no longer wanting to talk to him.
To think that just a few hours ago her day started out like any other. And now a tornado was on its way and her hearing aids had failed her.
This was madness!
She started walking, but then a big hand grabbed her shoulder, stopping her. She spun around like her uncle taught her and slugged the body attached to that aggressive hand. Aaron folded over, not expecting her to react so violently. The rain started as she fished her pepper spray out of her bag.
What’s your problem?
“Stay away from me, Aaron!” she said, more scared than mad.
Is that pepper spray? Are you for real?
“I’m sorry, it’s just…”
Where are your hearing aids?
“They failed, which is why I’m freaked out,” she said, pepper spray still out, other students walking by the scene she was making but not stopping. Reluctantly, she put the pepper spray away, then turned and fled the altercation as quickly as possible.
What started as a light rain grew heavy, the droplets falling faster and heavier, the air nearly cold enough for hail. As the chill settled into her bones, the sky darkened to the color of coal, the clouds finally bursting open.
With her backpack over her head to shield her from what quickly became a torrential downpour, she jogged across campus to her dorm. Puddles formed all over the uneven grounds. Like so many other students scrambling for shelter, she sidestepped a few of the deeper pools and got caught off guard by a few more. By the time she arrived at her dorm, the driving rain had soaked through her clothes and dampened her skin. She glanced over her shoulder searching for Aaron. She didn’t see him anywhere. Then again, she couldn’t see much in the rain.
Standing outside, getting soaked even further, she stood behind the bottleneck of girls trying to push through the dorm’s main entrance all at once. The weather quickly took a turn for the worse. Gusts of wind became constant and ferocious, the sideways rain slashing at her head and the exposed side of her face. As she moved with the other girls like cattle through the dorm’s doors, her thoughts were on Aaron.
She shouldn’t have hit him, but what the heck was going on with her hearing aids, and her cell phone?
And why was his phone dead, too?
The temperatures were dropping fast and in stages. The pelting rain iced over and turned to hailstones. At first, the hail was the size of peas, but then they grew to gumball-sized chunks, the ice hammering them all in a relentless, inescapable onslaught.
“Move!” she helplessly roared, pushing the girls in front of her. She was so close to the front door!
Cold tremors shook her from the inside out. The girls behind her began pushing her the same way she was pushing the girl in front of her. The line of girls started to move. Within moments, they had all shoved their way inside the building, several of them falling in the process.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to the girl she had been shoving, still unable to hear herself speak.
Without waiting for a reply, or trying to read the girl’s lips to see if she even had a reply, Leighton hurried to her first-floor dorm room. She unlocked the door, stepped inside, took a deep breath. Was she alone? She felt her way through the dark room, her hands finally smashing into the blinds. She opened them up, let in what little daylight there was to be had.
Looking around, she realized she was alone. Chandra was out there, somewhere. Was she caught in the storm too, or was she sheltering inside one of the buildings, waiting it out like Leighton would have done if she was smart?
Outside, the trees were swaying against the thrashing winds. She had a terrible feeling deep in her gut. Part of her wanted to cry because she was so overwhelmed by the storm, her lack of hearing aids, Aaron, and her fear to shed even a single tear. But the other part of her held strong to her heritage. She was a McDaniel and the McDaniel women abhorred weakness.
“We don’t cry, and we don’t fold,” she said in perfect silence. Her mother, Faith, said these same words to her when Leighton first lost her hearing.
Faith McDaniel wasn’t a McDaniel by birth. She wasn’t even from the South. Leighton’s father, Colt, met Faith in Southern California, not far from where Chandra was raised on Mulholland Drive. The fact that her mother had been able to make a home in the South and gain acceptance in a community that tended to look down on folks from California—especially the really pretty ones, like her mother—was a testament to her strength and persistence. She wasn’t a McDaniel by blood, but over time, the ex-Californian beauty came to fully embrace the McDaniel spirit. If her mother bent but didn’t break against the upheaval of her past, then Leighton could deal with failed hearing aids, a dead cell phone, and a brush with inclement weather.
But the storm was sucking the light out of the day, hammering the grounds with hail, and lashing at everything with what felt like angry, whipping winds. The hail was now pelting her window, marble-sized chunks of ice running kamikaze missions against the frigid glass. She wasn’t sure how loud they were, but one hailstone was big enough and traveling fast enough to fisheye the glass in front of her. She backed up, cursed her broken hearing aids, this storm, and Mother Nature herself.
Deeper in the room, she dug out a candle and lit it, illuminating the tidy space. A moment later, movement caught her eye. Chandra had finally come home.
The girl’s jet-black hair was soaking wet and plastered to her face. Her eyeliner was not as waterproof as she thought. It ran in streaks fr
om her eyes. Combined with her long black dress, her black combat boots, and her ghostly-white skin, the girl looked like the angel of death coming to collect her.
What? Chandra asked, standing in the candlelight.
She tapped her ears and said, “My hearing aids broke.” She then glanced down at the girl’s lips in case she decided to reply.
Everything’s dead, she said. I was smoking in my car when it died.
Leighton got used to the occasional smell of pot on her roommate, but she didn’t like it. Weed was legal in California but frowned upon by the RAs at NKU. Chandra had other friends in the dorm who smoked, but Leighton’s roomie was a recreational pot smoker, which was maybe better than an addict if she was looking for some sort of a silver lining, which she was.
“What do you mean, your car died?” Leighton asked.
Just…died. Won’t start, lights are out. I think I killed the battery.
“Not if the car was running,” she said. “That would be the engine. The battery just gets the engine going. Plus it powers the lights and radio when the engine isn’t running.”
Chandra waved a dismissive hand then undid her dress, peeling the fabric off of her nearly colorless skin. She was wearing light-green G-string underwear—the only trace of color Leighton had ever seen on the girl—and no bra. The Californian was unaware of her attention. She didn’t consider herself shy, but Leighton wasn’t an openly sexual girl either.
Twice now, her boyfriend Niles suggested they have sex, and though she was close to saying yes, she wasn’t all the way there yet. Now she was looking at her roommate’s full-figured body and wishing she had those same curves.
Leighton glanced down at her own body in comparison.
She was built country thin with a nice butt but small breasts. Like her mother, she didn’t have to work hard to stay thin, but she didn’t have that hourglass figure like Chandra either. The girl had the kind of boobs she wished she had when she was finally getting hers. But it wasn’t Chandra’s body she admired most at that moment—it was her ability to hear. So many people took that for granted. She didn’t blame them. When you had all five senses, you never really looked at the world like you did if your number of senses had unexpectedly been reduced by one.
Turning back to the window, she watched the winds wreak havoc on the day. The hailstones had become rain once more, but the overhead sky had taken on a greenish hue. Seeing this, she stopped breathing altogether.
Chandra was by her side, face pressed to the glass, looking up. They looked at each other. She’d never seen her roomie this close before, or this scared.
Why does the sky look green?
“I think we’re about to see a tornado,” Leighton said uncomfortably close and staring at her lips. That’s what guys did when they wanted to kiss you. All she wanted right then was to not see a tornado tear through campus.
Low in the sky, the pillow-heavy clouds began to swirl, the sky darkening into bands of white, gray, and black. A whirling cone began to form, a funnel dropping down. The funnel wasn’t small. Rather it was a huge column, the kind you saw on the Weather Channel’s shows on extreme weather.
“Oh, no,” she felt herself say.
Chandra glanced at her, terrified. For a second, Leighton wondered if she could grab her things, sprint to her car, and put some distance between herself and the storm. But then Chandra took her hand and squeezed it tight. A storm like that could turn on you at any moment.
The closer the funnel got to the ground, the thinner it became. Outside, the last of the students were running for shelter. The weather had taken hold by then. One girl fought against the violent gusts, leaning this way and that, the winds changing direction, pushing at her sides, her back. The umbrella in her hand was turned inside out and ripped away, flung back toward the parking lot.
Chandra let go of her hand and was suddenly gone. Leighton turned around, saw her roomie answering the door. She recognized the RA outside, figured it was time to get under a desk or something.
That’s when Leighton’s eyes went to the still-sealed mystery box she recently received from her uncle. She had been curious about what was inside, yet she couldn’t bring herself to open it. Not with how things ended with him and her father. Now she might die having never solved that mystery.
She grabbed her pillow and ripped a blanket off of her bed, and then she scrunched herself under her desk, burrowing in for the long haul. She could be there awhile.
Chandra closed the door, grabbed a blanket, and—like Leighton—crawled under her own desk. Before tucking in, she moved the candle to the space between them.
“Tell me if it gets really bad,” Leighton said. Chandra looked out and nodded. “If it looks like I’m staring at you, it’s because I have to read your lips.”
I know.
“Wave if you want to get my attention.”
I didn’t get this far in my education by not having common sense or cognitive reasoning.
Leighton nodded, slightly impressed with the girl. This was more conversation than the two of them had had since they were first assigned to the same room at the start of the semester. Fresh opinions aside, any minute now, the twister could drop down and demolish the entire town, maybe even reduce the school to sticks and powdered drywall.
Later that night, after not being whisked into the sky and tossed into oblivion, Chandra summoned Leighton’s attention. She flicked her Bic lighter, casting light upon her face. Leighton looked at her mouth, waiting for her to speak. She said, It’s raining outside, but the winds died down. It’s pretty calm. Chandra looked relieved when she said this. Leighton felt relieved as well.
A moment later, another flame pushed even more of the darkness back. Chandra lit several candles. Leighton crawled out from under the desk, stretched, then went to the window and tried to see outside. Several saplings had been unearthed, the root-balls exposed and devoid of soil.
A nearby flash of lightning set the sky aglow, revealing the slight, steady rain that Chandra had mentioned. It was almost over.
At least she hoped it was almost over.
Chandra tapped on her shoulder. Leighton turned around to her roomie’s illuminated face.
I heard this was just the beginning.
“What do you mean, the beginning?” Leighton asked.
Between classes, before my phone went dead, I was reading about the pressure system headed our way. This was the front of the storm, but meteorologists are saying the storm could last several days.
That sick feeling in her gut resumed its churn. All she wanted was to get into bed, sleep the whole night through, and wake up in the morning knowing all of this was just a bad dream. But she was too old to think like that.
“Thank you,” she said.
For what?
“For being here and not freaking me out anymore than I’ve already freaked myself out.”
I’m sorry your hearing aids broke.
“Me, too.”
A moment later, when they were both in bed, Chandra blew out the candles and called it a night. They’d survived for now. Just before closing her eyes, and only for a brief moment, a shadow of movement in the window caught her eye.
Is someone out there?
She was too tired to get up and check. Or perhaps she’d dreamed it. She wasn’t sure, so she stared at the window for as long as she could before finally succumbing to sleep.
Chapter Four
Hudson Croft
How in the world had his life become a country song? That’s the first thing Hudson thought when he woke up alone. Last night, Emily told him she was leaving him. A heated evening had turned to a lonely morning, which was to be expected. He’d somehow convinced her to wait out the storm and go when it broke. He told her he was concerned about her. It wasn’t a lie.
“I tell you I’m leaving you, and you’re worried about my well-being?” she’d asked as she had made up the couch.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he had offered. “Why do
n’t you take the bed.”
“I don’t want to be in the bed we used to share. It reminds me that once upon a time good things happened there.”
“Suit yourself,” he grumbled.
Now, he dragged himself out of bed, emotionally spent. In the living room, he found her asleep on the couch, her bags packed and sitting near the coffee table. She opened her eyes and said, “I was having the worst nightmare.”
“You’re still in it,” he said, even though he knew he shouldn’t let his spite bleed through.
“Yeah,” she said, shoving off the blankets and rubbing her tired eyes. “It would seem so.”
“Coffee?”
“Make it ‘to go,’” she said.
If the sad song of his life was put to music, the lyrics would chronicle the life of a country boy with a dream, a stupid kid who gained everything he ever wanted only to lose that which mattered most—his lust for life, his innermost passion. If the song continued, if anyone wanted to keep listening, they would know that after his dreams died, he dutifully fell in love. But the boy was not a boy anymore, and his dreams were every bit as forgotten as his ambition, or his willingness to feel anything but indifference, and occasionally, animosity.
Am I a country song or a Greek tragedy?
No one could say for sure.
Not yet.
Hudson turned his attention to his Golden Gloves trophy on the fireplace mantle. He took that trophy home from Chicago three years ago. What a day that had been! He’d been so proud, but then everything changed. He had passed out in the locker room while getting the tape cut off his hands. Too many blows to the head, the doctor had said. After he was rushed into surgery to reduce the swelling on his brain, after learning that he almost died, the surgeon told him he could never fight again. Fighting was his only true passion.
Emily was a suitable substitute, though he never spoke such words to her. She was a treasure in his life, but he was no treasure to her. The fight was where he felt most alive, so naturally, he was going to fight again despite the surgeon’s cautions. Injuries were part of the game, something every professional fighter knowingly signed up for.
