Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

  “Their skin,” I remember the curator saying, “is coated with a poison so potent that it can kill a man simply by touching him.”

  “Sounds like a few girls I’ve dated,” Wyatt had said.

  It’s much less funny now that the water around me is crawling with them. The frogs dart around my boat in one thick, squirming migration, which leaves the question: where are they all going in such a hurry?

  Boom.

  Something thunders back toward the ride’s entrance. The frogs break formation and scatter in all directions.

  Boom.

  This one sounds even closer. The water around me ripples.

  More booms, growing closer and more frequent, with a deliberate patience. The next hit rocks the boat. I have to latch onto the metal safety bar to keep from toppling out. I can only guess what’s coming after me now, but one thing is very clear:

  It’s much, much bigger than whatever creatures were in those shipping crates.

  As curious as I am to see exactly what’s after me, I’d rather not earn that knowledge at the expense of being its next meal. But my options for escape are limited. The boat remains dead in its tracks, and a few thousand frogs with poison-slick skin just turned the chlorinated water into their own personal hot tub. If I jump overboard, I’ll be dead before I even hear the splash.

  Plan B: I launch myself toward the slope with the dolls, which are leering at me like murderous, neglected ventriloquist dummies. I catch the edge with my elbows and dangle, my cleats brushing the deadly waters before I slither up onto the fake snow.

  As I scramble forward, I hear something else beneath the echo of lumbering footsteps: the twisting and snapping of metal. The creepy dolls are struggling to unbolt themselves from their stations. I’ve now made myself an easy target, since I’ve reached a dead end—there’s no emergency exit at the top of the slope, only a plastic ice pond, guarded by a line of animatronic penguins savagely pecking away at their wires.

  Somehow, amidst the chaos, I find a small moment of serenity. Another dormant instinct awakens in me, coaching me along.

  Find the right memory, it whispers, and this world is yours to mold.

  It comes in the gentle but authoritative voice of a man. I can’t match a face to the voice, or where or when we would have met, but the familiarity of his words floods me with a quiet confidence.

  Standing on the fake ice, I am overwhelmed by déjà vu as the dolls surrounding me trigger a memory from my childhood. One moment I’m standing in the ride, and the next—

  I am six years old. After my grandmother passes away, my father brings home her collection of antique dolls and stores them in our unfinished attic. My parents have always made me promise never to play up there since there’s no real floor, only fiberglass insulation between the wooden joists. “One wrong step, and you’ll fall right through,” my mother would say.

  This time, I don’t listen. I wait until Mom and Dad are asleep, then unfold the ladder, which creaks as I climb into the forbidden attic. The musty air up here is cold and smells of animal feces, but I’m too amped up to care. My flashlight beam plays over the walls until I find the glass cabinet, and within it, twenty pairs of unblinking eyes gazing out at me.

  I step from joist to joist, but in my excitement my foot snags on an extension cord. I trip and fall hard between the beams, onto the cotton-candy-like insulation.

  I plunge right through the ceiling below. I drop twelve feet in a rain of plaster and land at the base of my parents’ bed. The bone in my left wrist snaps beneath me as I futilely attempt to break my fall, my screams instantly waking my—

  Back in Patchwork, the plastic ice beneath my feet has been getting spongier the longer I relive that night in the attic. As the memory reaches a crescendo, the pond crumbles away completely, imploding just as the attic floor had ten years ago. My stomach rises in my throat as my body is vacuumed through the opening.

  I tumble from the dimly lit ride out into brilliant daylight. Mercifully, I land on the side of a grassy hill this time instead of the unforgiving hardwood of my parents’ bedroom. Gravity sends me cartwheeling downward for forty feet, until the steep knoll levels out.

  I gingerly rise and brush the dirt off my sweats. If the trick with the attic memory was any indication, then at least I carry some power over this world.

  So Patchwork is 2 percent cooperative and 98 percent homicidal. Not remotely reassuring.

  “Next time,” I mutter as I crack my battered spine, “I’ll use a memory involving an elevator.”

  I gaze up at the ride at the top of the hill. I need to get out of this place before that big red thing, whatever the hell it was, squeezes through that aperture. Even as I stand here, enraged roars echo down the hillside, followed by chunks of plastic and metal as it tries to claw its way out.

  There’s another sound, however, this one more encouraging—the familiar whoosh of cars rushing down a highway.

  As it turns out, I’ve landed next to a pedestrian overpass. As I limp across the narrow footbridge, I recognize the Merritt Parkway beneath me, with its tree-lined center island and its canopy of spring foliage. Cars speed down the two lanes in both directions. Even as fast as they’re going, I can see that there’s nobody behind the wheel in any of them.

  I lean over the overpass railing. At the very beginning of March, my four closest friends and I used one of our college visit days to tour Windshire University. We stayed the night before at Troy’s parents’ house in Connecticut, then road-tripped to Pennsylvania for an overnight on campus. This highway was the first leg of that trip.

  If Osiris is expecting to find me on a day when I’m on my normal grind, back at Daedalus, this would be the perfect memory for me to hide in. If I can engage with this day now, on this road, then I’ll already have a hundred-mile head start to escape his clutches.

  It looks like I’ve found my ticket back. But how am I going to engage with this memory?

  I spot the familiar black convertible with the mismatched red hood coming my way fast, top down, speeding along the inside lane. I take a deep breath. I grab the railing. And I jump off the overpass, praying the whole way down that I don’t splatter and die on the windshield of Wyatt’s car.

  Walter Lake’s Eulogy, Part I

  by Renata Lake

  My father taught me how to turn lead into gold.

  Not literally. He was an animal biology professor, not an alchemist. But there was one day six years ago when I realized my father wasn’t just some boring scientist. He was a magician.

  Middle school was transforming me into an angsty little monster, and the ancient wallpaper in my bedroom started to seem like a nightmare. I had mailed out invitations to my tenth birthday sleepover, and I was terrified the new friends I’d made would laugh at the faded flowers on the wall, or think the musty old smell of the house was coming from me. We didn’t have enough money or time at that point to redesign my room, but logical excuses like that fall on deaf ears when you try to explain them to an insecure fourth grader.

  Dad came home exhausted one night from teaching his evening class and found me sobbing about the wallpaper. I’d eaten almost an entire box of frozen waffles. He could have easily scolded me for being unreasonable, or cancelled my birthday because I was being a selfish brat, all of which I would have deserved. Instead, he put his hands on his hips and watched me for a moment, then disappeared into the bathroom. When he came back, he had three tubes of petroleum jelly.

  Before I could ask what they were for, Dad unscrewed the top of one, smeared the jelly all over his fingertips, and began to write on the wall. I was curious enough that I finally stopped crying. Dad handed me a tube and told me to go to work. He said I could paint any designs I wanted on the wallpaper, even scrawl out messages to my friends. At first I resisted and asked him what good it would do to write with invisible ink—it wouldn’t hide the ugly wallpaper. Dad just smiled and kept on drawing.

  Eventually I caved and began to paint with him. It
took us over an hour to go through all those tubes. When we finished, our hands were slick with goop, and it was impossible to see what exactly we’d accomplished, aside from leaving a faint, greasy trail on the wall.

  Dad disappeared again. This time, when he returned from the garage, he replaced the bulb in my old lamp with a black light. And when he turned it on, our illustrations came to life. In the near darkness, the jelly drawings glowed an eerie blue like alien cave paintings. The stars we’d dotted on the ceiling over my bed. The garden we’d drawn between my bureau and the old roll-top desk. The names of all my friends who were sleeping over, inside a big, lopsided heart made out of handprints.

  The black light illustrations were a hit at the sleepover. Dad even picked up extra tubes so my friends could make their own creations. They were all too impressed that I was allowed to write on my bedroom wall to say anything about the ugly wallpaper or the musty smell.

  For days afterward, I would turn the black light on before I fell asleep, so that I could dream within the electric blue fantasy world I’d created for myself. Only one night, a week later, I noticed my dad had added something extra to the stars over my bed. Three words. We love you.

  I never needed a black light to see that, Dad. When a father is as patient and tender as you were, a message like that is never invisible.

  Admission

  March

  I sit bolt upright and let out a short shriek. I furiously pat my head and chest to make sure that I’m not splattered into a thousand tiny chunks on the hood of the old two-toned Chrysler Sebring.

  But I’m sitting inside of it, riding in the backseat between Troy and Ivy, who are gawking at me. Slade has turned completely around in the passenger seat, and even Wyatt, at the wheel, takes his eyes off the highway long enough to stare in the rearview mirror.

  Everyone bursts out laughing in unison. “Want to give us some warning next time?” Slade says. “Maybe mumble something ominous or creepy in your sleep before screaming at the top of your lungs?”

  Troy moves a strand of hair out of my face. “Are you nervous about our campus visit or something? I’ve never seen you have a bad dream before.”

  “Troy would know, too,” Ivy purrs. “Our resident Renata sleep specialist.”

  Slade snickers. Troy’s hand bashfully retreats to his lap.

  Wyatt says nothing, but his eyes look a little less spirited in the rearview mirror.

  “Please don’t scream like that during your overnight.” Troy elbows me playfully. “You don’t want to scare the shit out of your admissions host.”

  “Anything to make a name for myself on campus,” I mumble.

  Ivy’s cell phone rings and everyone laughs again—her ringtone is the theme to Jaws. Ivy doesn’t look too tickled, though. She glances at the number, then immediately clicks Ignore. When I think back to the original March 4, I vaguely remember Ivy getting this call, as insignificant as it must have seemed at the time.

  I do notice one detail now I didn’t notice then: the number that flashed on the screen clearly didn’t have a name programmed with it, yet the look that washed over Ivy’s face was disgust. Impatience.

  Recognition.

  “Who was that?” I ask her.

  She flips the phone to silent and stuffs it into her purse. “Let’s just say some people don’t take rejection lightly.”

  “Please tell me it’s one of my teammates,” Wyatt says.

  “Hasn’t she run out of those?” Slade adds.

  Ivy pulls the top of his seatbelt so that the strap chokes him.

  I laugh, probably too hard, but I’m grateful to be back. With friends like these, it’s easy to forget—if only for a minute—that outside the car, someone, somewhere, wants to kill us.

  Still, I know he’s out there, and that he could already be preparing another strike. Maybe it will even happen today. On my last jump back, I’d popped out on the softball field on the morning of April 27, and in less than twelve hours, Osiris had orchestrated a brand new act of terror.

  Well, if you’re coming back for thirds, I think, then I’ll be ready for you this time, Osiris.

  He may be a skilled hunter.

  But this is my life.

  Eventually conversation in the car peters out, and I grow weary of scrutinizing the streets around us, expecting an attack. Troy falls asleep on my left shoulder, and Ivy ends up snoring on my right.

  I’ve never felt more fortunate to have two people drooling on my collarbones.

  The secret to college admissions tours is that, after you go on enough of them, they start to blend together. Change a canned joke here, throw in a century-old superstition there. When all the landmarks basically remain unchanging from school to school, every tour sounds like the same song:

  Here is the student center

  Here is the dining hall

  Here’s where a drunk freshman puked on the wall

  Our unbearably peppy tour guide, Alicia, reminds me of a coked-out hamster. As we pass the campus store and she dives into the riveting topic of textbooks, I start to wish they did an underground tour where you get to see the authentic campus behind the scenes. None of this clean “official” story crap. I’m less interested in the number of campus libraries, or vegan cafeteria options, or when the chemistry labs were renovated, and more interested in the real things. Like where did that pile of beer cans come from, the cheap ones poking out of the wet grass like aluminum tombstones? Were they from a group of freshman guys out wandering while they tried to scam their way into a frat party? Was it seniors shooting the shit in a cloud of drunken nostalgia now that their college days were coming to an end? Was it sweethearts having a liquid picnic in the grass, while they both wondered whether their love could exist outside the campus gates, or whether it would die a slow and anticlimactic death under the pressure of jobs and car payments and rent and affairs with coworkers or strangers in bars?

  Instead, the mother of a mortified girl from New Jersey points to the beer cans and asks if drinking is an issue on campus. “Drinking is going to happen on any campus,” Alicia explains, reciting from an invisible script. “But our activity board plans a number of fun events every weekend to provide an alternative to binge drinking. For instance …”

  Blah. I tune her out.

  After all, I’ve heard all this before.

  At the end of the tour, the five of us have time to kill before our overnight hosts collect us after class, so we commandeer a long sectional couch in the campus center’s food court.

  My stomach growls. “Jeez, Renata, do you have a yeti living in there?” Wyatt asks.

  Ivy’s eyes light up. “Let’s find out!” She presses her ear to my stomach. “Anybody home?”

  I laugh and ruffle her hair. “Hey, if we get cuddly enough in public and people think we’re a couple, maybe we can buy a few months here without douchebags hitting on us at parties.”

  “Hey, some of us are going to college to become the douchebags who hit on unsuspecting freshmen,” Slade adds.

  I bump Troy with my hip. “And some of us are going to college overseas so our girlfriends won’t know what douchebags we’re being.” I expect everyone to laugh.

  But there’s only a weird silence. Wyatt cocks his head to the side and lowers the paper menu in his hands. “I didn’t know you were studying abroad for college, Troy.”

  Troy stares at me funny, and I realize I’ve made a temporal mistake—an anachronism. At this moment in time, Troy hasn’t mailed his enrollment slip to Barcelona yet. In fact, he would have only received his acceptance letter in the mail earlier this week. He won’t tell me about it for another few days. Hell, I’m not even supposed to know that he applied. If this reality is anything like the last time around, he’ll spend the rest of the week looking crestfallen until I finally badger him into telling me what’s up.

  During the tour, I recognized the distant pall on his face as the stirrings of discontent, and spasms of guilt because he’s saddled with a decision
between two continents: the one where I live, and the one where he wants to blaze a new future for himself.

  Troy clears his throat. He can’t seem to meet anyone’s eyes, especially mine, as he zippers his backpack closed—but not before I spot a white envelope sitting on top. “Yeah. I, uh, got into the University of Barcelona. In Spain. Didn’t really expect an acceptance letter, to be honest, and I doubt I’ll actually go. I was going to share the news later this week, but apparently my girlfriend has been steaming open my mail, reading it, and putting it back in my mailbox.” I’m the only person who doesn’t laugh. I’m too preoccupied trying to figure out how the hell I’m going to explain my way out of this one.

  Slade gives Troy a congratulatory punch on the knee. “Well done, buddy. Pizza for the group on me.” He leans around Troy. “Renata, can I borrow your boyfriend for a few minutes to wingman for me? There are three smokin’ college girls behind the pizza counter, and I only have enough charm to woo two of them at the same time.”

  He’s right. The girls behind the counter are hot, and I’ve never been the jealous type. Besides, this will at least postpone the awkward conversation I’ve tunneled my way into. “You can use my boyfriend as bait if you throw in an order of mozzarella sticks. And I’m banking on the fact that college chicks have no interest in robbing the cradle with two high school seniors.”

  “Please,” Slade says. “My falcon-like perception informs me that the cashier is wearing jean shorts so tight she probably had to be sewn into them. If they’re trying too hard, they must be freshmen—which means they probably won’t know I’m lying when I pretend we’re sophomores.”