Hollow

by Rhonda Parrish

  I stomp off to my room as soon as I can, successfully avoiding eye contact with both Mom and Amy, though I have no doubt they are making significant eye contact behind my back.

  Whatever.

  Back in my room I fwomp onto bed and angrily text Sevren the word “Family” followed by a poop emoji.

  He responds immediately with “IKR” and two poop emojis.

  And that, right there is just one reason he’s my best friend. He doesn’t ask why, he doesn’t argue, he just understands, agrees, and adds an extra poop emoji.

  I text the story to him as fast as my thumbs can manage, and as he responds appropriately with eyeroll gifs, more poop emojis and, at the end, a big hug gif, I begin to feel a little bit better. I feel a whole lot better when my eye falls on the camera I’d found in the hospital. It’s just sitting on my dresser, looking all grody and nasty, but still, seeing it makes me smile. It’s dirty and gross, and I don’t even know if it works, but it feels a bit like a secret treasure because of where I found it and how I had to outsmart the magpie to get it.

  Sevren says he has to go—the rules at his place are no phones after 10pm, poor guy—so I say goodnight, and then creep out into the kitchen for some cleaning supplies. Armed with a spray bottle of something that says it cuts through grease and a handful of old rags, I set up a little cleaning station for myself on the floor and get started.

  It’s a lot of work, and I have to be careful not to spray the cleaner stuff near any of the seams because I don’t know how air-tight the camera is, and I don’t want to wreck it if there’s a chance it will still work. The grime is stubborn, like it wants to hide the camera forever but eventually my fingernails and the cleaner prevail. The camera will never look new again—it’s pretty scratched up, but at least I’m not yucked out to touch it. And I can make out the word “Polaroid” on the front.

  I stroke it, the brand name and then the camera itself. All the edges and curves. It’s the first real camera I’ve ever owned, and even though I only just found it, it feels right in my hands. Familiar. Like we were made for each other.

  It sounds silly, but I feel a sort of affection for it. It’s odd, but real.

  I toss the rags in the laundry and glance at the clock. It’s almost midnight.

  I really want to test this camera but what if it will only take one picture and I waste that on something in my bedroom just because I’m being impatient?

  It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to be able to wait. I wouldn’t be able to sleep without knowing—it would be worse than Christmas Eve.

  I look around the room, desperate to find something worth photographing. Eventually my eye falls on my phone. It is rose gold and my bedspread is deep plum. The contrast is pretty. I grab one of my childhood stuffies off the top of my bookshelf and set it beside the phone.

  Looking through the camera’s viewfinder feels weird, but I frame the shot so that my phone is in the middle of it and part of the bear is sort of peeking in from the top right-hand side, and then I press the button.

  There’s a click and then a whirring noise, and a picture shoves its way out through the front of the camera. It’s all white, but I can already see shapes beginning to resolve on it, and then colours. It takes a few minutes, but eventually the photo shifts out of the white and into reality.

  Oh my gawd, yay!

  I dig around the mess on top of my dresser looking for a pen, but the closest I find is an eyeliner pencil. Good enough. I scrawl “Disconnected” on the white bit at the bottom of the photo in eyeliner. It smears a bit, but it’s not terrible. I stick the picture in amongst all the others crowding for space on the mirror and smile.

  It works!

  Chapter Eleven

  MORNING COMES TOO early, and I’m definitely feeling the effects of my late night, but I’m also super excited about the camera. It works!

  In other parts of the house I can hear the sounds of Amy getting ready for school and another noise that might be Mom stirring to help her? Surely not? But maybe? Outside my window, the birds are already up and chirping away. I push open the curtains, feeling a bit like a heroine in a romantic movie, to check them out. One little squirrel is twitching his way along the tree branch just outside my window, chittering loudly at something I can’t see. He is resplendent in the morning light, the yellow and orange leaves behind him making a beautiful autumn background.

  Without turning away from the window, I reach for where I left my phone on my nightstand. Instead, my hand touches the other camera. The Polaroid. Well, why not?

  I centre the squirrel in the frame and then take the shot between his twitches—I don’t want it to be blurry.

  The camera makes the click-whirr sound the same as last night. The squirrel must hear it, because he stops dead in his tracks. No longer chittering. No longer twitching. He barely looks like he’s moving.

  I lower the camera and pull the photo out of it, keeping my eye on the squirrel. I seem to have really freaked him out.

  Then, as suddenly as he became transfixed, he becomes animated again. Even more than before if that is possible. He’s chattering like crazy and twisting back and forth on the branch as though he’s looking for something.

  Then he faces my window and freezes in place for a moment, before abruptly tensing all his muscles and launching himself straight at me. He sticks to the corner of my window, just like his paws are covered in Velcro, staring through the glass at me and shouting for all he’s worth.

  I take a step back. I know he can’t reach me through the glass, and even if he could, I mean, he is just a squirrel, but still . . . Having him fly at me like that and then look at me through the window and chitter and squawk . . . it’s disconcerting to say the least.

  And he’s still hanging there. I can see his tail twitch with each squeak he makes, and he’s sort of jumping around the window, while simultaneously staying flat against the wall.

  I pull the curtains closed again.

  I can still hear him, but at least I don’t have to see him being creepy and weird.

  I look down at the photograph in my hand. It’s a great shot with lovely light and colours and the squirrel is in sharp focus, but knowing what came right after makes my stomach twist and I just can’t find it in myself to like it. I toss it, without a title, onto the surface of my dresser and get ready for school.

  “CAN SQUIRRELS GET rabies?” I ask Sevren over lunch. We’re sitting at a picnic table at the side of the school, alone. As usual.

  He lifts one eyebrow at me, but doesn’t actually respond, so I go on.

  “I mean, that squirrel this morning—the one that was acting so strange—do you think maybe it has rabies?”

  “No.” Sevren pulls the crust off his sandwich and tosses it toward a tree for some lucky bird to find later. “I think the flash from your camera pissed it off and it was letting you know about it.”

  “I didn’t use a flash.”

  “The sound then.”

  “Maybe,” I say. I’m dubious, though. I mean, it makes sense, but the way that squirrel was acting . . . it just wasn’t right.

  “Netflix this afternoon?” Sevren asks.

  “Marcus is coming over.”

  “Ah, that’s right.”

  “You can come too?”

  Sevren’s brow furrows. “And watch you two make eyes at each other? Uh, yeah . . . no thanks.”

  “Do you really think he’s going to make eyes at me?” I ask, hopeful.

  Sevren rolls his eyes. Hard. It’s true. I’m kind of pathetic.

  “Just, be careful,” he says. Again.

  “Why do you keep saying that?” I ask. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “No,” Sevren shakes his head, crumpling up his empty lunch bag and making a perfect three-point throw into the garbage can several meters away. “It’s just that the last guy you dated turned out to be an asshole who started a bunch of rumours about you after you broke up.”

  My throat feels like it’s cl
osing up, and suddenly I have to focus really hard to swallow the bit of apple I’d been chewing. Finally, I get it down without any choking or sputtering—yay me!—but I’m still not quite sure what to say. I mean, Sevren doesn’t even know the whole story.

  “Yeah,” I eventually mutter, noncommittally, and then, finally, I get a bit of good luck because the bell rings, summoning us back to class and saving me from having to pursue this conversation any further.

  School drags, as only school can, and when last bell finally rings, releasing us all from purgatory, I have to consciously slow my pace to keep from running to my locker. I haven’t spotted Marcus all day but he said he’d—I see Stacy. She’s fidgeting with her lock, and I’m tempted to stop and talk with her, finish our conversation from the other day. I slow my pace and Stacy looks up, sees me.

  What are you going to say? I ask myself. What? You can’t ask her if Keith did anything to her without telling her—and what if that wasn’t what she was going to say at all? What then? Do you want to take that chance?

  Maybe, I think. Maybe. It might be worth it to get it out, share the burden. Stacy and I used to be close once, almost as close as Sevren and I—

  But no. This isn’t the sort of thing like when Sevren and I would talk about the accident and he’d tell me it wasn’t my fault and I could believe it for a little while. Somehow this is darker, more shameful than that.

  Stacy half-smiles and looks away, back to her lock, and I let her, let the moment, the chance, pass.

  I have no time to dwell on it because there, standing by my locker, is Marcus. He looks at me through the tumult of the hallway, smiles, and my belly flips like when my Minecraft character drops a long way.

  “Hey,” I say, oh-so-articulately.

  “Hey,” he says, his accent warm and sexy. I drop my books in my locker and feel his hand on the small of my back all the way through the school to where we see Amy waiting on the sidewalk. We take a detour to get her and Marcus slushes again then head back to our house.

  Amy and Marcus keep up a running commentary the whole way home, laughing and joking with one another. I don’t mind, in fact, I like seeing Amy so happy, and it doesn’t hurt that Marcus isn’t leaving me out of his attentions either. Every so often he touches my forearm to make a point, his hand cool from holding his slush, and once he puts his arm around my waist to get me to switch sides on the sidewalk with him. Each time he touches me I feel butterflies flapping about wildly in my belly and my knees turn to mush. It’s actually handy that Amy is keeping up the conversation, it means I don’t have to while my mouth is dry and my thoughts scattered like leaves in a hurricane.

  The house languishes in the perpetual twilight that’s cloaked it for the past year. It is as quiet and still as a portrait when we first enter, but Amy’s chatter doesn’t stop at the front door, and some of the gloom is lifted by her enthusiasm.

  As we pass into the living room, I avoid looking at Aric’s shrine. I do it without thought these days, purely out of habit. I pause when I notice Marcus isn’t at my side and, looking behind me, see him stopped in the doorway, his gaze on the little shrine.

  It’s a sad display. A handful of LEGO things he’d built, a plastic dinosaur, and a selection of photographs I’d taken of him over the years are scattered around the shelf. At the centre, the main focal point is a photograph of Aric taken weeks before he’d died. He is sitting on Santa’s knee, his pudgy cheeks pulled up into a Joker-sized grin, his blue eyes sparkling, and blonde curls erupting like a rooster’s comb atop his head. He’s wearing his favourite Batman shirt—the same one we’d buried him in, and he looks happy. It’s not a professional “Santa” photo, though we have that somewhere too, it’s one I took of him. The last one I took of him.

  The picture is bookended by a pair of taper candles and a trio of votives squat in front of it. Laying horizontally between them and the photograph is a single dried-up rose, one from the bouquet my parents had purchased for his funeral. We, each member of the family, had tossed one of the flowers into his grave before they buried him and kept another. So we’d always have something with a physical connection to him even though he was gone.

  My flower is wrapped in tissue paper, packed into a velvet box, and stuffed into the dark recesses of my underwear drawer. This, the flower on the shrine, is Dad’s. I don’t know what Mom or Amy have done with theirs.

  “Your brother?” Marcus asks.

  “Yeah,” I say in my best, I-really-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it voice.

  Marcus nods and looks away from the shrine and back to me. “I’m sorry. I heard you’d been in an accident last winter.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” I gesture to the other side of the room. “My room is over there.”

  On the way past Mom’s room, I rap on the door. “Mom, we’re home. I have a guest. We’ll be in my room.”

  “Keep the door open.”

  I roll my eyes over at Marcus, who smiles. “Of course.”

  “Oooh,” Marcus says, wiggling his fingers at me once we’re in my room. “I’m scary. You must keep the door open! You don’t know what I might do!”

  I know he’s making a joke but I can’t bring myself to laugh. His words cut far too close to the bone. I don’t respond. Instead I hurriedly rush around the room kicking my dirty clothes under the bed and scanning to make sure there isn’t anything embarrassing I don’t want Marcus to see. Nothing too bad, I decide, I’m safe that way.

  Marcus looks around as he takes a seat on the corner of the bed. It sinks beneath his weight and he tucks his leg beneath him. He’s sitting in Sevren’s usual spot so I can’t help comparing how different the two boys are in their appearances and at their very core.

  Actually, the more I think about it, the more they have in common. They are both fantastic with Amy, make me smile, and seem to have good hearts.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  I hadn’t realised I’d been staring, but of course I had. “Like what?”

  “Like I’ve sprouted a second head or something.”

  “I was thinking about you and Sevren.”

  “Me and Sevren?” His accent makes Sevren’s name sound awesome and exotic.

  “Yeah, he’s the only other boy who has ever been in my bedroom.”

  Marcus wiggles his eyebrows. “Oh, really?”

  I laugh and sit down next to him on the bed, tucking my feet under me and sitting cross-legged like my class had been forced to do in kindergarten. “Yes really. But it’s not like that.”

  “I know. Sevren seems like a good guy. Everyone seems to think he’s a little . . . odd. Is that because of how he dresses?”

  “Sevren is not odd,” I snap. “And why shouldn’t he wear whatever he wants? Just because we go to school with a bunch of snobs who can’t see beyond—”

  Marcus tucks his slush between his legs and holds his hands palms out in surrender. “Whoa—I wasn’t saying I agreed with them. There’s a lot of history here I wasn’t a part of. I’m trying to get the highlights.”

  He hadn’t actually said anything bad about Sevren, I realise, but that doesn’t melt through my anger on his behalf. Dad had once joked he didn’t know which pit bull was more protective of Sevren, me or Boris. I took it as a compliment.

  I’m consciously working on stamping out the sparks of my irritation before they flare up into something bigger, and Marcus grins and angles his slush toward me. “Peace offering?”

  He looks so cute and inoffensive I can’t help but smile. I push the slush gently back toward him, “It’s far too cold to be drinking ice.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” Marcus jokes. “If you get cold I promise I’ll warm you up.” He wiggles his eyebrows again, and I toss a pillow at him, which he catches before it smashes his drink into his face. “Hey now, that’s not nice!”

  “Not nice! I’ll have you know that was plenty nice!”

  “Nope.” Marcus’ grin belies his words. “I’m hurt. Hurt right down to the bone.”<
br />
  “Oh, are you?”

  “Yes. Yes I am. I think.” He pauses and looks over with big wide eyes and a pouched-out lower lip. I laugh at his attempt to look pitiful, and his face abruptly transforms into a bright smile, and then almost as abruptly becomes serious again. When he talks, his voice seems deeper, his accent thicker. “Can I kiss you?”

  A volcano erupts in my belly spreading heat all the way through my body. “I—” I clasp my hands together to hide the shaking of my fingers. I’d wanted this for weeks now, to kiss Marcus, to be his girl. Only . . . I’m not his girl, am I? He hasn’t actually asked me out yet. He asked for a kiss. What if Keith had talked to him first? What if he’s told Marcus that I’m easy, that I’ll give it up for a few nice words and a slush? It doesn’t seem likely, but it’s possible, and the flutters in my belly shrivel and sit like soured milk in my stomach.

  “Morgan?” He sounds worried and I feel the irritatingly familiar tickle in my eye that means I’m about to cry. No, no, no! I think, blinking frantically to push the tears away before looking back over at Marcus. He looks confused. His brow is furrowed, his eyes concerned, lips slightly pursed. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No.” My voice sounds odd so I clear my throat and start again. “No, you didn’t say anything wrong. I was thinking about . . .” I force a small fake laugh. “You’d almost think I’d taken a drink of that slush after all. I’m feeling kinda cold right now.”

  “I could warm you up?” Marcus says, his tone much less confident than it had been two minutes before.

  I don’t know how to reply. The words stick in my brain, so instead I move over to sit closer to him, close enough our thighs touch. He wraps an arm around my shoulder and pulls me against him. It’s an awkward way to sit and makes my neck bend at an uncomfortable angle, but I don’t care. He is warming me up. Inside and out.