The thing was, my legs were just plain old things to walk on. They had regular jobs. Like running to catch up. Like riding a bike. Like screaming in pain when they hit the sun-hot seat of Meredith’s mom’s car. Those legs would never torment anyone, I was pretty sure.
Here was my experience with desire right then: picking out the cutest boy in my class on every first day of school since I was five and admiring him from afar. That thrilling note-passing in the sixth grade, when Emma English told me that Jeremy Wykowski liked me. Middle school slow dancing, a probably-not-accidental boob touch. That boy from another school who suddenly entwined his fingers with mine at a basketball game, who I fantasized about for months afterward, probably because his real self wasn’t there to mess things up. The last six months with Samuel Crane, involving phone conversations about stuff that seemed deep, kissing behind the metal shop building and a few times in his parents’ basement, hands up a shirt, hands down pants, more like hunting around in your backpack for your phone than anything else. And most recently: the men looking up from their laptops in Victrola. A boy twining my hair around his finger, the smell of hot dogs and mustard around us.
Torment—I had no real idea about any of that, honestly. I wasn’t sure I even liked Samuel Crane the way I should. He liked me, and it seemed like reason enough to kiss back. Obviously, there was some hidden door to the bigger world that I hadn’t walked through yet. I heard about that world in songs and saw it in movies, but it wasn’t mine. It was an intriguing mystery, or maybe an outright lie.
I could feel it stirring around in there, though. Desire. Or desire for desire. I wanted to feel deep, aching want, but I wanted to make someone else feel it too. That was maybe even more appealing—the power to make a guy want me, badly. I would never have admitted this. It seemed wrong, especially since my own mother had made a career out of being a sex object. It was a truth I kept buried, like a secret from myself.
“Syd-Syd!” Meredith called from her seat behind me in the boat. I looked over my shoulder. Meredith made a face, and I made one back.
“Sit ready!” the coxswain called. My hands gripped the oar and I buried the blade in the water. This was the moment we steadied the boat before we rowed like crazy, deep in the intensity and the speed and the high of the race. And these were the moments before I found the hidden door. Right then, I didn’t have a clue where it was.
I would find it, though, as you know. Along with everything that lay behind it. And sixth grade was like two seconds ago, and my hands still had pastel dust on them, and Samuel Crane couldn’t even drive yet.
* * *
One last thing. I should also tell you this:
We won the Mayor’s Cup Regatta. And afterward, we squirted juice packs at each other and ran around screaming. We were excited to win, but even more, school was almost out, and that’s the best feeling there is.
I was so tired that night that I conked right off. That dark sense of being haunted, the ghost—there was no way she was going to keep me awake. So of course I had a horrible dream instead. Warnings are persistent, until they just plain give up on you.
I realize this sounds like something out of one of Lila’s films, one of the scenes where a woman walks into a couple’s shadowy bedroom and you see the glint of silver in the moonlight. But this is the truth: I had a dream about a knife. I woke up and my heart was pounding. It was the kind of terrifying dream that feels so real your hands shake. When I tried to explain it in the morning, though, it seemed silly.
“A horrible person got stabbed in the chest. It was you but it wasn’t you,” Cora repeated in the dining hall, as she chased some Cheerios with her spoon.
“It was so real,” I said, but I could see the little smile at the corner of Cora’s mouth.
CHAPTER FOUR
Exhibit 6: Set of Miyabi Birchwood kitchen knives on magnetic stand
Meredith and her mom, Ellen, drove me to the airport. They always drove me to the airport on school breaks, and picked me up, too. Now that I was finally underway, the ghost had gotten quiet. Then again, maybe I just couldn’t hear her because Ellen had the music up loud, the way we liked it.
“Mer, Mer, Mer! Eight weeks until you come to visit!” I was bouncing all over the place. I was nervous, and the music was on, and back when I was packing my stuff, I convinced myself to get excited. IT could find me anywhere, and maybe my chances were even better away from home, where I could be anyone, not just the person my friends knew.
“I believe we’ve covered that,” Meredith said. She was using her You require a great deal of patience tone, because I’d said the same thing about ten times already. She’d never visited me and Lila before, and eight weeks just seemed like forever. Man, I was going to miss her.
“We got you something.” Ellen reached over the seat, and the car did a frightening little swerve.
“Mom, Jesus! Watch where you’re going!”
“Don’t say ‘Jesus,’ Mer. It sounds bad.” Ellen tossed a plastic bag into my lap. It was probably one of the last plastic bags in existence in the entire Northwest. It maybe should have gone into a plastic bag museum.
“What’s this?”
“Just a few things for the plane.”
Ellen was always giving me stuff. They lived in a medium-size Craftsman in Capitol Hill, and Ellen sometimes spoke of the sacrifices we make for a private school education, meaning the day school rate at Academy. My mother rented a sixteen-million-dollar house and paid the full year of tuition and boarding in advance. Still, Ellen didn’t seem to think I had what I needed.
I peeked in the bag. “You are so nice! Thank you! Oh, wow, jackpot!” Milk Duds, Reese’s, Red Vines. A candy extravaganza. Plus that week’s copy of Inside Entertainment. Also, a few mom-related things, like a package of Kleenex and hand sanitizer. Ellen was always on the front lines in the fight against germs. Hey, it was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.
“And I’m giving you this.” Meredith handed me her copy of The Deepest Dark, by R. W. Wright.
“You finished!”
“God. It’s soooo good.”
“Look what I have for you,” I said, and tossed her The Night Dweller.
We squealed. R. W. Wright was our favorite scary-book writer. We used to eat those up, even if all his books were the same. Vulnerable female and her friends stalked by a psycho. Saved by her last plunge of the knife. I’ll never read him again.
“I brought She’s So Cold, too.” I rubbed my hands together in book glee.
“How do you girls even read those? Brrr.” Ellen gave a fake shiver.
I reached over the seat and grabbed Ellen with monster hands and she shrieked. We rolled the windows down and the music blasted. My hair got all messy in the back seat. I didn’t even care, because I was busy loving the song and thinking about how summer really did smell like sun and just-mowed grass. I was thinking about how much I’d miss home when I was gone. Home—there. Seattle.
These were the things we did. Ellen and Meredith, all of my friends. Regular things. Ellen driving us somewhere and dropping us off. Hanging out after Ms. Fiori’s art class because she was the coolest and she spoke Italian and had a photo of her wife on her desk. Going on our Best Meatball in Seattle hunt, led by Hoodean. Cracking up over private jokes like “Tree Hugger” (don’t ask). They all mostly forgot I had this other life, so I did too. I loved forgetting. I mean, I’d met some of those people in that magazine. But I loved being the me I really was. Not the me I was in relation to someone else.