It starts at the joints
an aching
a pulling sensation
Like I am a doll
and a child is tugging at my seams
ripping out my threads
The same ancient magic
that gives me the façade of eternal youth
Eventually unwinds inside of me
atrophying
withering
until I finally feed
Only now I starve, ravenous,
waiting for a nectarine
that has stubbornly refused to ripen
But it won’t be long before
the torment of watching her friends
slaughtered time and time again
gives her that final push
to emerge from her chrysalis
And I’ll be right there
fangs bared
Because eventually every predator
needs to stop playing with its food.
Anachronism
November
Considering how frequently I’ve reengaged with reality during a moment when I was sleeping, I’m starting to wonder if I’m an undiagnosed narcoleptic.
My eyes blink open. I’m staring at a familiar desk. It’s the one where I sit in world history class, easily recognizable thanks to the jagged pattern chewed into the desktop. I’d spent the first semester idly picking at the plastic laminate, and now it looks like it was gnawed by a bear.
Fortunately, Garrett’s broad shoulders are blocking me from Mr. Slattery, who’s droning on about the Eastern Zhou Dynasty of China. I remember actually enjoying this chapter in the history book, at least the part of the lecture that I didn’t sleep through.
The sound of Mr. Slattery’s voice has taken a sharp turn into unbearable since I learned about his affair with Ivy. It almost makes me vomit that as little as a few days ago I found him mildly charming.
My whole hand has lost feeling where my chin has been digging into my wrist while I slept. I try to subtly peel my head off the desk into a position where I can look at Mr. Slattery. Unfortunately, his powers of perverted ESP have somehow zeroed in on my nap. “Ms. Lake …” he sings. I can’t even handle the hiss of the Velcro shoes he’s wearing today as he glides down the aisle. “Were you doing your impersonation of Qin Shi Huang’s terra cotta army, as they slept buried in the Chinese countryside?”
“Actually, I was impersonating an overworked, under-slept high school student.” Everyone laughs. I shamelessly yawn and stretch my arms over my head, and that’s when Mr. Slattery’s eyes flicker briefly to my chest. I immediately bring my arms down and cross them.
He runs the chalk eraser in his hand along the chewed-up portion of the desk, leaving a dusty white trail. “Well, Sleeping Beauty, I know my lecture isn’t as exciting as MTV, but if you fall asleep again, I’m going to send the seven dwarves to wake you up.”
As he turns to walk away, I see something lying beside my desk. It’s an origami owl that Ivy must have thrown to wake me up. And when I glance back and see her smiling at me, that’s when I snap. “And which dwarf would you be, Mr. Slattery?” I ask. “Dopey? Horny? Douchebag?”
Slattery stops dead in his tracks. The eraser slips from his fingers. It hits the tile and a plume of white chalk dust goes up like a mushroom cloud. A stunned silence ensues. A few seconds later, Garrett’s shoulders quake in front of me while he fails to stifle his giggling, and I hear pockets of nervous laughter around the room.
“You watch your mouth,” Slattery cautions me. He’s not so friendly now.
I hesitate. After some reflection, I remain fairly confident that Slattery is not Osiris. First of all, the guy has been working at Daedalus for nearly a decade, long before I enrolled here. I’m also beginning to sense that Osiris is coldly logical and devoted exclusively to his cause, capable of patiently investing years finding his phoenix prey and then waiting for the perfect opportunity to spring a trap. Slattery is volatile and tethered to his emotions, and clearly thinks more with his penis than his brain.
However, just because Slattery’s not a killer doesn’t mean he should be spared from justice. In this place, at this time, the bastard hasn’t crossed that unspeakable line with Ivy yet. If we all live through this, you can sure as hell bet I’ll do whatever it takes to stop it from happening. But sooner or later it’s going to happen to someone else. With guys like this, I’m sure they don’t just wake up one morning, suddenly ready to risk their careers and marriages by having an affair with one of their students. They test the waters slowly, and over time they get more comfortable, waiting to see how far they can go before someone speaks up, pushing, always pushing forward, only ever an inch or two …
Until someone tells them to cut the shit. Slattery has finally unglued his sneakers from the floor when I work up the nerve to speak. “I’ll gladly watch my mouth if it means I don’t have to spend another second listening to yours.”
“Out.” Slattery opens the classroom door and sweeps his arm out into the hallway, looking anywhere but at me. “I don’t know what’s crawled under your skirt, Ms. Lake, but you can spread out on Headmaster Black’s chaise lounge and tell him all about it.”
I don’t even bother to collect my books. I just slip out of my seat and head for the door. I feel triumphant that I was able to tell Slattery off, that being in trouble will give me an alibi for when I disappear off campus to initiate my plan.
But then I feel an aftershock of disgust at the idea that, even now, he might already be planning his seduction of Ivy. Dinner. Candles. Wine. I glance back at her. Ivy’s half-smile lingers somewhere between confusion and support, and she squints at me questioningly.
I pause at the door until Slattery meets my threatening gaze. I see a thin veneer of anger, but beneath it, a deep chasm of fear and humiliation. These are not the eyes of a hunter. I lower my voice so only he can hear me. “Let’s be clear: If you ever flirt with anyone in this class again—or try to exercise any of those dark desires inside of you—you’ll be hard-pressed to get a job teaching arts and crafts at a summer camp.” I let my words linger like a bad smell and slip out of the room.
My sandals echo down the empty hallway and I pull out my phone to text Troy. Maybe Slattery calls the office to let them know I’m coming. Maybe he doesn’t.
Either way I’m not going to the headmaster’s.
Suspension is temporary.
Death is forever.
I’m lying in the bed of Troy’s pickup when he meets me in the parking lot. My heart thumps wildly seeing him alive again, really alive. He shakes his head at me over the bumper, which either means he doesn’t understand why I’m cutting class or he’s already heard about my stunt with Slattery.
Apparently the latter. “You sure know how to make an exit,” he says as he vaults over the back gate. “Daedalus will be talking about this one for months.”
I shimmy over to make room next to me in the rubber lining. “Maybe they’ll make me a plaque or a mural,” I say. “Or if I’m really lucky, they’ll commission a sculpture of me to go in the garden behind the arts building.”
“Or maybe they’ll carve an epitaph into your grave. What the hell were you thinking?” He mimics his best authority voice. “Were you drinking an alcoholic beverage? Have you been smoking the pot? I better do a smell check to be sure.” He grabs a handful of my hair and sniffs.
I laugh and slap his hand away. “All you’ll smell is Herbal Essences.” Though in reality, my hair’s current scent is probably the Reverie River.
Troy props himself on one elbow next to me, looking awkward, so I whisper, “Come here,” until he lies beside me. At this point, we would have already been dating for two months, but it took a while before we became physically comfortable with each other.
As friends who grew into something more, the passion was there from the start, waiting under the surface, but we tiptoed over the ice for a while. As we acclimated to our new title, it took time to see which parts of our old friend
ship we imported into the new one, and which we replaced with something deeper, something better.
For a while, we silently stare up into the towering oaks, our hands laced together, his thumb stroking mine. The trees have lost all but a few leaves, which have quickly turned to rust in the chill November air. This is the kind of fall day I’ve always loved the most.
“I have a question for you,” I say. I expect him to look at me like he’s thinking, “Oh god, not another one of Renata’s insecure tangents.” But of course I left my last series of high-maintenance inquiries in a December that no longer exists. One of the few perks of watching your life gradually fade away.
“Are you waiting for an invitation to ask?” He pulls out his phone. “If so, I can send you an Evite right now …”
“You’re a brat.” I push his phone away. “My hypothetical question is this: Say you lived a year that had its ups and downs, but turned out to be one of the happiest of your life. Then imagine that one morning, you woke up and you’d been transported back a year earlier, and you were the only one who could remember everything that happened. Would you do it all over again?”
“First my girlfriend was replaced with a teacher-deposing cyborg,” he says, “and now she’s been replaced with a philosophy major?”
“Be serious.” I roll onto my side and wrap my arm over his chest. “If you had the year to do all over again, would you try to relive it all the same way? Would you relive parts of it, but change others? Or would you carve a new path?”
“It’s a good question.” I can smell the buttery mints on his breath that he perpetually snacked on the first few months we dated. It was like he expected me to dump him if we kissed and he tasted like peanut butter and jelly. Funny all the little troubles we go to early in relationships to seem perfect, when we’re already perfect in the eyes of our partner. “I suppose if you wanted to be really selfless,” he continues, “then the noble choice would be to try to keep things the same. If you took the memory and ran, you’d be robbing everyone who shared that year with you of all that joy, all those good moments. That, of course,” he adds, “is assuming the year was so happy in the first place because of the people around you, and not because you won the lottery and moved to a tropical island by yourself.”
“So that’s what you’d do?” I scoot closer. My body longs for him, aches for him, in a way that it hasn’t in quite some time. It’s like my skin and bones and blood are already feeling the six months that have been stolen from us. Every kiss on my throat, every nibble on my earlobe, every caress from my neck down to my thighs, every moment of contact between Troy and I left tracks on my body that the snows of time cannot erase. The heat rises in my ears. “You’d do it all again and be just as happy?”
“Well, that’s the thing.” Troy’s glides his finger along my jawline. “Even if you resigned yourself to live the same year identically, you never really could. You’re no longer the same person. You’ll anticipate things that were surprises before. You’ll yawn your way through things that once excited you. A life with no surprises is really just a half life.”
A half life. So that’s the best-case scenario that I can expect when this is all over.
I guess it’s better than no life at all.
“I need to borrow your truck,” I say. “It will only be for the last two periods.” I hold out my palm for the keys.
Troy doesn’t take the bait. “I was willing to chalk it up to a bad day when you cut Slattery down to size, but now you want to cut class and take Blue Thunder out joyriding through the Berkshires? Should I be worried? Is this some sort of super early midlife crisis?”
“Look, I’m not taking your truck on any wild police chases, and I’m not going drag racing with it. I had an idea for an impromptu Amaranthine demonstration tonight and I … need to pick up some supplies.”
“You should have said so in the first place. I’ll see if Ivy and Slade want to help out.” He reaches for the phone again.
I stay his wrist. As much as it bothers me to even entertain the idea, I can’t trust anyone right now. “I want to fly solo on this one. Just for now.” I cup his face in my hands and kiss him. The molecules in my lips have never been so eager to join with his, nor so reluctant to part from them.
When the kiss is over, Troy breathes heavily out of his nose, a dragon exhaling steam. “You get a C-minus for verbal persuasion, but an A-plus for physical coercion.” His keys jingle as he drops them into my open hand. “Let the record show that I’m only comfortable letting you take Blue Thunder alone because I know you can drive stick.”
I peck him on the forehead, scramble to my feet, then hurdle out of the truck and onto the gravel. As much as I’d love to savor moments like these, the only way to find my way back to them later is to have the strength to walk away now.
As I twist the keys in the ignition, Troy raps on the window. I roll it down and he leans in. “If you find yourself in your old neighborhood,” he says, “say hi to your mom for me.”
But that’s not what Troy is really saying. I hear the unspoken undercurrent.
Say hi to your mom for yourself.
I tap him twice on the knuckles and drive off.
Nine drug stores. Two hardware stores. Four wheelbarrows. One thousand water balloons.
And my special ingredient: as many tubes of petroleum jelly as I could get my hands on.
At least I won’t have to worry about being around when my credit card bill comes in the mail.
After I’ve acquired all my supplies, I park in the driveway of the bed and breakfast. Mom’s car is gone—she’s probably out shopping for the wave of Thanksgiving visitors we’ll soon receive. We used to always order a big rotisserie chicken before Dad died, because nobody in the family liked to cook. Now she gets a real turkey and all the fixings just to keep herself occupied. I can’t blame her. We all distract ourselves in our own ways.
I set up shop in the backyard, where I detach the garden hose and begin to fill some plastic buckets with a mixture of water and petroleum jelly. Funneling the concoction into the water balloons is a messy process, and my fingers quickly grow numb from the cold.
I’m halfway through “Operation: Pour & Fill” when I hear the soft crunch of someone stepping in the mulch of the garden.
It’s my mother.
Her frizzy hair is held back by a bandana, and she wears a beat-up pair of denim overalls that I’m pretty sure are older than I am. She grew up on a corn farm in rural Maine. As “country” as Reverie always seems to me, Western Massachusetts was a compromise when she married my Boston-born father.
She sighs and sets a bag of fresh produce next to the hydrangea. “Your school called me saying you’d verbally assaulted a teacher and then cut the rest of your classes, but I never expected to find you here.”
“Oh yeah?” The balloon in my hands grows pregnant as I fill it. I tie it off and add it to the quickly growing pile. “Did you tell them that you’d activate the tracking device implanted in my ankle?”
“Nah,” Mom says. “I told them you’d gnawed that tracker out years ago. I also pointed out that, until today, your record has been immaculate, so I’m sure there was a very good reason you went all Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Something came up. Something more important than fifth-period French.”
“I can see that.” Mom toes the balloons with her sandal. “Important really means something different to you kids these days.”
The mountain of petroleum jelly tubes is poking out of the long grass, so I shift position to block Mom’s view. “Is this the part where you tell me to go back to school, drag myself to the headmaster’s office, and beg him not to revoke my full-ride scholarship?”
“Or …” Mom reaches up and takes the bandana out of her hair. Her curls, a mixture of vivacious gold and the early tides of gray, bounce free around her face. “Or I call the headmaster to tell him that you’re here, you’re safe, and that you’ll be back as soon as you’ve resolved some personal
issues at home.”
Personal issues. When your dad dies, you quickly discover all the euphemisms that counselors, teachers, friends, and even your family will use to veer around directly mentioning his death. I’ve never used it as an excuse before, and I don’t plan on starting now.
“I’m actually really glad you’re home,” Mom says.
“Why’s that? You need a sous chef to help you make all those pumpkin pies?”
“I take it you noticed the Great Wall of Canned Pumpkin on your way through the kitchen,” she says. I didn’t, but I remember Troy and I being force-fed all the pies that were still in the freezer come Christmastime. “Actually,” Mom continues, “I had a bit of a revelation when I got the call from Headmaster Black. I know as a mother that when I hear you’ve been acting out, I’m supposed to feel some sort of anger or disappointment in you. I didn’t feel any of that.” She pauses. “If anything, it triggered this weird urge to apologize.”
This catches me off-guard. “Apologize for what? Unless you somehow induced Mr. Slattery’s metamorphosis into a pervert, you have nothing to be sorry for.”
Mom squints at me. “I was about to suggest that I have a word with this Mr. Slattery, but it sounds like you had enough words with him for the both of us.” Her smirk fades. “Nata, I’ve been a little selfish. You’ve always been so independent, so capable on your own. You’ve always been a good student, a good person, a good friend. You never really needed guidance from your father or me to be that way. You were born with your compass pointing true north.”
It’s like I’m a windup doll, and she’s twisting the metal key in my back, one crank at a time. Everything feels tighter. “So you get one phone call from Daedalus and suddenly you think my compass is busted now? I’m not some lost sheep, Mom.” The bucket I’d been filling starts overflowing. Cold water cascades onto my already freezing toes and I curse.
Mom reaches over and twists the spigot off, but remains there so I’m forced to look at her. “I’m the one who’s lost, Renata. When you applied for that scholarship, and asked if you could move to campus for junior year, I didn’t fight it. I didn’t even try to convince you to stay here. And the worst part is that I convinced myself it was what you needed. To get away from the house, to spend some time not boxed in by all your father’s memories. But the truth is that I didn’t fight it because I didn’t want you around to see me so weak.” Mom bites her lip and a tear carves a channel through her makeup. “They tell you it gets better with time, but they never tell you how slow that process goes.”
Patchwork Page 19
