Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

  “Troy?” I say, before I can stop myself.

  But it’s only Wyatt, who bursts out laughing. “I’m a black guy wearing a white tux,” he says as he straightens me up. His top hat hangs at a cocky jaunt over his close-cropped hair. “You sure you don’t need to get your eyes checked?”

  I try to laugh, but the moment I do, I burst into tears.

  “Renata.” Wyatt holds me out in front of his goliath shoulders, which he gets from a combination of good genetics and varsity water polo. “Does this have something to do with Troy running across the dance floor, looking like he was about to cast himself into the harbor?”

  I wipe the tears away, leaving my hands coated in mascara, like I’ve been fingerprinted. I certainly feel like a perp. “I’ve got to find him, Wyatt.”

  Something flickers behind Wyatt’s eyes. “Please tell me that this isn’t because he found out about—”

  “Of course not,” I snap. Guilt bubbles to the surface, guilt that has taken months to anchor deep as it will go. “New Years Eve was five months ago. Unless you say something, Troy will never find out, so quit asking.”

  Wyatt bites the inside of his cheek and lets his hands fall from my shoulders. I half-expect him to turn and run like Troy did. Then I’ll have pushed away both my boyfriend and one of my best friends. Wyatt has been my sole confidante outside of the Amaranthine Society this past year. If I lose him and Troy within five minutes of each other … well, I might as well be adrift in the harbor with the mannequin.

  Wyatt opens his mouth to say something, but the shouts interrupt him.

  Soon it picks up into a series of screams, all along the aft railing. The music stops abruptly and in the silence that follows, I hear the Skipper scream, “Man overboard!” Immediately, the dense nucleus of the dance floor tramples over each other to get to the ship’s edge, in an attempt to see which drunken fool managed to fall into the water.

  “Showtime,” Ivy whispers in my ear. She grabs my wrist and drags me away from Wyatt. When I look over my shoulder to see if he’s following, he’s gone.

  We fight our way to the front, and there’s so much jostling to get to the railing that it’s a miracle the crowd hasn’t sent any actual Daedalus seniors overboard. The murmur of alarm on deck continues to grow as more students spot the shape in the water. With the mannequin’s head submerged and its back arching above the surface like a tortoise shell, it doesn’t look like a drowning student in need of saving.

  It looks like a long-dead corpse.

  One of the crew members radios the bridge and the propellors shut down with a whir. The chaperones are attempting to usher students away from the edge, but they couldn’t restrain the mob leering down at the dark water even if they had canisters of tear gas.

  I hear bare footsteps padding quickly across the deck, growing louder. A familiar voice shouts “Get out of the way!” with enough authority that the sea of students actually parts to let him through.

  It’s Wyatt. He’s stripped down to his boxer briefs, having left his top hat, shoes, and tuxedo in a pile on the dance floor, and he’s running with incredible speed for the edge of the ship. I panic and reach out to him to tell him not to play hero, that the form in the water is nothing but plastic and synthetic hair.

  It’s too late. He never slows down, and with perfect swimmer’s form, he brings his arms up over his head and dives into the harbor.

  I elbow my way past Marcie Graham, the Southern transfer who’s a shoo-in for prom queen, and grab onto the railing right as Wyatt’s streamlined body enters the water like a dart with barely a splash. I hold my breath while I wait for him to resurface. In all our meticulous planning, it never occurred to me that the mannequin prank might actually endanger someone, let alone one of my best friends.

  Wyatt breaches the surface and immediately starts swimming toward the mannequin. It takes him only a few powerful strokes to reach it. He slips his arm under its belly and rolls it onto its back.

  After a pause, Wyatt’s body begins to shake. To anyone else aboard the ship, it might look like he’s shivering in the cold of the harbor waters, but I know the truth.

  Wyatt is laughing.

  He gives the mannequin a sharp tug, snapping the fishing line. Then he rolls onto his back and begins his patient backpedal to the ship, with a protective arm looped around the mannequin’s torso.

  By the time Wyatt makes it back to the hull, the captain has emerged from his cabin and cleared out a space along the railing. With the help of his deckhand, they lower a ladder and a harness into the water.

  Wyatt slaps away the harness. To the sharp gasps of the students around me, he begins to climb the wooden rungs singlehandedly, with his free hand easily holding the mannequin by its leg.

  When he reaches the top, Wyatt grunts and swings the body over the railing in an arc. It lands face up, with its limbs splayed out like a rag doll.

  After a stunned silence, the students immediately around the mannequin explode in laughter. The laughter ripples out through the audience, partially out of relief that it’s a life-size doll instead of a drowned student—

  But also because they can see the laminated mug shot grinning up at them from beneath the soggy wig.

  It’s a photograph of Mr. Slattery’s spray-tanned face. Ivy had gone through a half decade of yearbooks to find the perfect picture of our history teacher.

  Far more devastating is the sash we sewed around his waist. It reads “Property of the Freshman Class,” complete with an arrow pointing down to the bulge in his tuxedo pants.

  Even I’m laughing now, grateful for the distraction. Wyatt is shivering with a towel wrapped around him, but he has a grin on his face, too, and I’m thankful he’s safely back on board. I don’t see Troy, but he must be somewhere nearby watching and hopefully enjoying the fruits of our devious labor. Maybe if I laugh hard enough, I can undo the drama of the last fifteen minutes.

  Maybe.

  The real Mr. Slattery pushes past me with such force that he stumbles out into the small clearing and almost falls on top of his doppelgänger. The laughter dies and the ring of students backs away from the history teacher. There’s a long disquieting stretch where he gazes down at the doll, looking sickened to the point that I’m afraid he might vomit all over the mannequin’s thrift store tuxedo. We were so euphoric about the brilliance of this prank that, until now, I never stopped to consider why Ivy was so insistent that Mr. Slattery be the punchline. He’s skeevy to be sure, but enough to warrant the kind of humiliation we just subjected him to?

  “Who did this?” he asks quietly, then with savage intensity, “Who did this?”

  The ring around him only responds by stepping further away. Some of the students next to me scatter.

  Mr. Slattery storms up to the captain of the Harbor Ghost. “Turn this boat around now! This prom is officially over.”

  If my eyes don’t deceive me, even the captain is suppressing a smile. “Unless there’s a real body in the water,” he says evenly, “I’m not going to double-time my ship back to the dock. Maybe not even then.” He doffs his Red Sox cap to Mr. Slattery and returns to the bridge.

  With that, the DJ turns the music back on. He pumps the volume up a few clicks until it drowns out Slattery’s ranting and raving. Everyone filters back onto the dance floor.

  Only now do I realize that Wyatt is studying me closely. He has the towel draped over his shoulder, his chest unabashedly bare. I guess when your body has been chiseled by years of swimming, self-consciousness becomes a moot point. He keeps glancing at the mannequin. Did my reaction give me away? Slade, Ivy, Troy and I have all taken our Amaranthine vow of secrecy beyond seriously. Our silence is so sacrosanct that not even significant others are allowed to know about our involvement, unless, as in the case of Troy and me, we both happen to be members.

  Wyatt, however, has always been able to read me like the alphabet, the same way I can read him. And now I realize from the look in his eyes that he wants to continue the co
nversation I avoided earlier—to finish the story we started on New Years’ Eve. Sorry, Wyatt, I think. I have to make sure my story with Troy isn’t over before I tackle the chapter with you in it.

  Mr. Slattery, who’s been milling restlessly about the crime scene, picks up the mannequin and heaves it over the railing, back into the harbor. Slattery’s crazy outburst distracts Wyatt long enough for me to fade backward into the dance floor chaos. Wyatt has a thick skin, and the way I treated him earlier is hopefully a flesh wound I can smooth over later.

  The things I said to Troy might be a killing blow.

  I give the crowd a quick scan. If I know my boyfriend, he’s not dancing away his grief, and he’s definitely not on the other side of the observation deck with the couples who are sucking face under the stars. No, he’s probably found an isolated patch of railing somewhere to blow off steam alone.

  I maneuver my way past the line of girls at the bathroom who are all trying to squeeze in one last pee before the prom court announcement. Marcie Graham stands on her tiptoes, peering into the grimy bathroom, and asks Dana Holland whether it’s possible to catch herpes from a toilet seat. “I wouldn’t go in there without a SCUBA suit and an oxygen tank,” I interrupt on my way past. Marcie thanks me with her practiced smile, which looks perpetually lodged somewhere between “fake” and “confused.”

  I find Troy on the starboard side of the ship. He leans against the railing, with his tuxedo coat missing and his hands looped through the suspenders I’d laughingly insisted he wear. I linger back in the hallway, in part because it’s a rare opportunity to see Troy the way he looks when he thinks he’s alone, truly alone, with no one watching him. He has this wistful depth to his eyes as he stares out at the Atlantic, where the Harbor Islands sit like coal silhouettes against the horizon.

  I’m scouring my brain for what to say to him—anything that will keep me from losing him—when he takes out the ring box and turns it over and over again in his hands. His body tenses. If I’m not crazy, it looks like he’s preparing to throw it away. I have to stop him before he takes a diamond that probably costs more than Daedalus tuition and casts it into the harbor.

  But he doesn’t throw it. He just lets it drop from his hand and it falls like a shooting star toward the bay. Before I even hear the almost imperceptible splash in the water below, Troy turns away and storms off in the opposite direction. Maybe it’s the engagement ring that he’s walking away from … but it sure feels like he’s abandoning our relationship, too.

  I’m at the railing as soon as Troy disappears around the corner. I can scarcely make out the ring box floating below. For now, it’s buoyed to the surface. The water must already be seeping through the seams, though, and it’s swiftly coasting toward the bow of the ship.

  I look around in vain for something I can use to scoop it out. With each passing second, we leave the ring a little bit farther behind.

  So when I spot the life preserver with Harbor Ghost printed white against the red plastic, I make a split-second decision that may turn out to be the stupidest—or last—thing I’ll ever do: I rip it off its metal mount and sprint toward the end of the boat, intending to dive over the railing and hopefully intercept the ring before it floats away into the night.

  I completely misjudge the jump. My legs slam painfully into the railing, flipping me—

  Over the edge.

  End over end.

  Arms swinging wild.

  Into the water.

  By the time I hit the harbor and plunge into its depths, I’ve lost all sense of direction. The water’s even colder than should be legally possible for a late Boston spring. I flounder, unsure which way is up, until I open my eyes and let the bleary moonlight guide me to the surface.

  As soon as I’ve clawed my way back to the life preserver I lost during the fall, I spit out a half pint of harbor water, which tastes like an oil slick, and draw in a few greedy breaths. I should be fearing for my life, but my first irrational prayer is that my splash wasn’t enough to submerge the ring box. As ungraceful as my dive was, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have landed far from it.

  And there it is, faintly visible on the nearest swell. It takes a series of spastic one-armed strokes to reach it, but I capture the little felt box. I feel like Harry-fucking-Potter and I’ve just caught the snitch to win the game.

  That brief wave of victory dies as soon as I turn back. In the short time I’ve spent in the water, the ship has made incredible gains. I abandon the life preserver. With the ring box clutched in my fist, I try to channel my inner Olympian and swim toward the boat. No matter how hard I push, though, I can’t keep pace with the Harbor Ghost as it sails away.

  In the end, out of breath, I retreat back to the life preserver and hug it tight.

  This can’t be happening to me. There had been this moment of clarity before I jumped overboard, this quiet but reassuring voice in my brain telling me that saving the ring mattered. Mattered for what, I no longer know. To show Troy that I cared? To save him from acting on a stupid impulse that was in some ways my own fault? To do something recklessly romantic to make up for how cold I acted toward him after he proposed?

  Whatever the reason, I am in deep shit right now. I’m Renata Lake, of average popularity and GPA, pitcher for the softball team and all-around likable scholarship student at Daedalus. Girls like me aren’t supposed to drown on prom night. Girls like me aren’t supposed to end up as a tragic photographic still on the local news channel. The Coast Guard’s three-day search for a missing Daedalus student came to a heartbreaking conclusion today when her body was discovered tangled in a fisherman’s net off the coast of Gloucester …

  The ship has half a football field on me when the engines cut out. Hope blossoms in me like a warm spring. If a tipsy Daedalus senior can spot a mannequin floating in the water, maybe they can spot a real student as well.

  That hope melts away when I’m overcome with this sensation, this aura of dread, that something is terribly wrong. I squint at the dance floor deck. From this distance, the faces of the students milling about by the railing are all indiscernible, painted neon green and purple by the DJ’s laser lights.

  The music cuts out.

  All the lights on the boat fall dark as the power fails.

  And that’s when an explosion rocks the ship.

  The eruption tears right through the starboard side of the Harbor Ghost. A plume of fire rises up from the deck and into the Boston sky.

  I want to cry out, but my vocal chords release only a strangled whimper. The explosion is so powerful that even fifty yards away, I’m hit with a blast of hot air that instantly dries out my eyes. Screams rise up from the boat, sounding muffled from across the harbor. An even more chilling noise follows, drowning them out:

  Gunshots. Gunshots aboard the Harbor Ghost.

  Through the veil of smoke that has engulfed the top deck, I see muzzle flares flash again and again as someone moves through the chaos, systematically shooting at the students. Even as the black fumes grow too thick to see through, the gunfire never rests.

  Shock. I can’t breathe, I don’t blink, I lose my grip on the life preserver. My body is sinking into the harbor while my imagination puts me right back aboard that ship, forced to watch as bullets from a masked gunman seek out the passengers … passengers like Slade, and Ivy, and Wyatt, and Troy.

  They clutch their chests.

  They fall to the deck.

  They die in a nest of blood, wood, and fire.

  Only when my head slips beneath the harbor waters do I snap back to reality. I splutter to the surface and abandon the life preserver with a helpless sob. I don’t think logically about what I can possibly do to save my friends aboard the boat, to extinguish the inferno that I can see spreading over the hull like a wildfire, to stop the pop-pop-pop of deadly fireworks that are playing over the bay. I start swimming, hoping that I can get there and find signs of life, hoping that I can find the people I love before it’s too late.

&n
bsp; I’ve hardly made any progress when the ship tanks horrifically to one side. It’s sinking. I can see several splashes where students topple overboard. The hull looms over the bodies of both the living and the dead, ready to drag them down to a watery grave.

  What’s worse: I can feel a familiar pain spreading in my chest as my arms grow tired. The panic.

  The glowing coals of pain ignite. Somewhere beneath my dress, the invisible fist tightens around my heart. My body sinks and my face slips underwater before I can take a deep breath.

  I am going to die. With that realization, I don’t see my life flash before my eyes like they always said would happen, at least not the good parts. I only see snapshots of all the mistakes I’ve made over the past year.

  I intentionally hurt my boyfriend tonight, to punish him for wanting to leave me behind, while also wanting to cling to me.

  I cheated on him with one of my closest friends last New Year’s Eve.

  I pushed that same friend away so I wouldn’t have to face the guilt of what I’d done.

  I walked out of my own father’s funeral right when I was supposed to deliver his eulogy.

  I left my mother alone in our now empty house after his death, to deal with her grief by herself because I couldn’t deal with my own.

  And now, unknowingly, I abandoned all my friends to die aboard a cruise at the hands of a faceless killer.

  These are the knots I’ll never get to undo, the dirty wounds I’ll never get to cleanse.

  I reach out for the Harbor Ghost through the murk, and my last tangible thought before the black seas consume me is to wonder what morbid twist of fate allowed a prom, a proposal, an act of terrorism, and the deaths of myself and everyone I know to converge on the same night.

  Darkness.

  Ethereal Soup

  Osiris’s Book of Riddles, 2017 A.D.

  Her name is Renata Lake

  and I can taste her soul