Strange Creatures Page 8

  The sound of footsteps in the hallway intercepted my thoughts. Under my door, I saw a jagged bolt of light. Jamie, I thought, and huddled down deep under the covers. With my eyes closed, I envisioned him ambling through the bathroom in his pajamas, going from the toilet to the sink, where he didn’t wash his hands but only sort of absently scratched at his skin until one of his pores was raw and weeping. He looked at himself, and he saw me there, with my shameful thoughts laid bare before him. Sighing, he only shook his head, turned off the bathroom light, and went back to his room.

  I didn’t dare think about Vidya again that night—not consciously. But as I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself painfully to sleep, I couldn’t help but remember the way her clavicle dipped at the base of her throat and the tender way her lips parted when she smiled. I knew then that her body wasn’t all that he liked about her. It was something else. Her voice. A certain way of looking at the world. But those were mysteries to me. I’d never spoken to her. Never heard her speak. My brother’s girlfriend was a stranger.

  I knew she wasn’t mine to think about. Of course, she didn’t precisely belong to Jamie, either. She owned herself, in that way that most people own themselves. Except for Jamie and me, of course, even then. Sleeping in our separate bedrooms. Dreaming, though we never talked about it in the morning light, the exact same dreams, and of the exact same girl.

  One Saturday morning in the gray space between winter and spring, after Jamie had spent the night at Neal’s, I woke up early, pulled on boots and jeans and my shearling coat, skipped breakfast, and trudged outside without a word to Mom or Dad or anyone else. Not that it mattered. Not that they’d ever asked. They knew the woods were safe. Nothing had ever happened there.

  But that day, feeble March, the frost still thickly encasing every budding branch, something did happen. I heard voices, low and dark and familiar. And then I smelled something. A new smell. It wasn’t anything of Earth, that much was certain. I pressed deeper and deeper into the woods, past the wall, past the girders. I wasn’t chased. I was compelled, right toward that old picnic table with the cocks and vulvas and sacred leaves scrawled on top. There was my brother, perched on top like a gargoyle, his back to me. Neal was sitting next to him. Their shoulders were touching. They were whispering, then coughing. There was a smoke cloud over them like a dark portent.

  “I don’t care what she tells you,” Neal was saying. “She’s a girl. She’s never gonna understand.”

  “She’s different.”

  Neal snorted. “Not likely.”

  I watched them, how their bodies nearly formed two halves of a heart, how the smoke swirled around them like a faint calligraphy. My hands curled into fists. That’s when I decided that I’d watched them long enough.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded. Both boys jumped, spewing mouthfuls of smoke as they turned. Their eyes were red-rimmed, like they hadn’t slept. It was early, but it wasn’t that early.

  “Shit. Annie.”

  Those words from Jamie weren’t talking to me; they were talking about me. He hopped off the picnic table and dropped something in the dirt and gravel, then stomped it out with his Skecher. But Neal was slower to turn, and when he did, he was still holding something in his hand, a lumpy little cigarette.

  “Are you guys smoking?” I asked in disbelief. He pawed at the back of his neck.

  “You. Can’t. Tell. Anyone. Annie.” He paused between every word.

  “Why not? Where did you get those? Neal, did your brother buy you those cigarettes?”

  Neal stared at the white little thing, squinting. “No,” he said simply.

  And then he took a drag out of it. I sniffed at the air. It didn’t smell like an ordinary cigarette. The scent was halfway between Gram’s old hippie incense and a skunk’s spray.

  “That’s pot, isn’t it?” I asked, and if my stomach wasn’t already somewhere down by my feet, I certainly felt it tumble over then. Drugs. Neal and Jamie were doing drugs. This was un-fucking-believable, as Jamie would say, if he said anything, but he didn’t. He only kept squinting at me, like the early spring light was much too bright.

  “We took a Vow!” I spat my words. My brother started to open his mouth to answer. But I wouldn’t let him. I only shook my head. “I don’t even know you anymore, James,” I said. Between Vidya and this, I felt like he was standing on the deck of a ship, and I was left on the shore watching him drifting away. He held out his hands. They looked wrinkled and pale.

  “You know me. I’m your brother. I’m the same as you. We’re—”

  “We’re not anything,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Don’t talk to me anymore. I don’t want to hear it.”

  I spun around and walked off through the woods, my steps brisk, breaking sticks beneath my feet as I left.

  “Wait here,” I heard my brother say to Neal, but I pretended I didn’t hear anything as I ran through the forest, fleeing the kingdom we once shared. There used to be so many rules, and we’d negotiated each one together. Now there was no negotiating. Jamie lived his life. I lived mine.

  I heard him chasing me. I heard but didn’t care. Let him smoke what he wants and kiss who he wants and live whatever damned fool lie he wants, I said to myself. But when he fixed his hand on my arm and spun me around, my face erupted into tears.

  “Annie, you won’t—” he began, but then he saw how I was sobbing. I collapsed on the ground, hugging my own knees. He didn’t hug me or touch me again. He just stood over me, his mouth open.

  “Are you okay?”

  “What do you care?” I spat, and wiped my nose on the back of my arm. He didn’t say anything, so I pressed: “Don’t pretend that you do!”

  In one of the trees overhead, what seemed like a thousand sparrows were roosting, raising their voices all at once. They sounded frantic. But my brother looked calm. He started again. Quietly, this time: “I just need to know that you won’t tell—”

  “I know the Laws!” I screamed. Jamie flinched like I’d hit him where it hurt. I guess I had. But it was true. If anyone had been faithful to the agreements we’d made, it was me. Jamie was the one who needed to make absolutions. But we both knew that he wouldn’t. We both knew how he’d sinned and would continue to sin.

  “Okay,” he said. “Good.”

  Then he turned and walked away. He went back to Neal and their experiments, their shaking laughter and crude boy jokes, and left me there in a bed of leaves and mud and feathers, crying until there were no tears left.

  13

  IN ONE SWIFT MOVEMENT, THE Nameless Boy grabbed on to the harpy’s tail. She was so surprised that she dropped the hare on the rocks below. Boy noted how the hare’s eyes bolted open, waking to life. Then he saw it take off through the bramble.

  Return to your Watcher, Boy thought as he climbed the harpy’s powerful body. She was thrashing beneath him, craning her head back. But then he whispered in her ear:

  “I won’t kill you. I won’t harm you. I just need you to take me far away from here.”

  That was the summer that I was supposed to go with Miranda to visit her uncle’s farm. But it never happened. Instead, that spring, Miranda caught Lyme disease from a tiny deer tick that had buried itself behind her ear. She was on two different antibiotics, and when I visited her, laid up on her parents’ couch, she looked pale and exhausted, like she hadn’t slept in months. She said her skin was changed from the meds. That she’d burn instantly in the sun. Practically a vampire, she said with a grin, even though I don’t think she thought it was funny. But I caught the drift. There would be no trip to her uncle’s farm that summer, no escape.

  Jamie was gone. Off with Vidya or Neal, I couldn’t be sure. I tried to push thoughts of all of them from my mind, though questions about Vidya occasionally wafted through. I stomped them out as best I could. On the rare occasions I’d see my brother at dinner, he had a rumpled look. His eyes were watery and hooded. He smelled musky, like a skunk, like a piece of spoiled fruit. No one else seemed to
notice or care. Sometimes I thought about chasing him down. Confronting him. Demanding he share himself with me, that he make everything right.

  But the look on his face during dinner told me that it would get us both nowhere. Jamie wasn’t there with us, even when he was there. He was somewhere else.

  That summer was a bad one, long and bright and ugly. There is nothing else to say about it, or at least nothing good.

  14

  AS THE HARPY LIFTED HIM, the boy’s stomach seemed to tumble down through the soles of his feet. He felt his body buck and sway, but he never quite seemed to achieve weightlessness. Instead, something dragged on him. His old life, perhaps? Emperata Annit? With his eyes still closed, he gave his head a shake. Annit would be fine without him. She had an entire kingdom to herself, followers. She had a moon. She had so much more than he’d ever owned. All he had were a few broken toys and some dirty furs. He was just a nameless scamp, an orphan. What was he to her, anyway? She would surely survive the loss of him.

  The first day of eighth grade. I had my backpack all ready, my notebook sorted by subject, my pencil box filled with mechanical pencils, the brand I liked, 7 mm leads.

  This year would be different. This year I would be organized. This year, I wouldn’t doodle in my notebooks. I wouldn’t daydream. The teachers wouldn’t send notes home: bright, but unfocused. This year, Dad wouldn’t even have to institute homework time. I’d come home and go straight to my room, and my desk would be clean, and when I was finished and I went to watch TV after dinner, I would watch the same shows that all the other kids watched, the right shows, and I’d have something to talk to them about as we filed onto the bus in the morning.

  I was almost thirteen, and my bat mitzvah was in a few weeks, and that meant something. I would be an adult in the eyes of G-d, and it was time for me to start acting like it. That day, the first day of eighth grade, I waited outside for the bus with Jamie, who was starting high school in the building adjoining the middle school. I was all hope and nervous energy. My brother was a dark cloud beside me. He was zitty and rumpled and I had trouble understanding what a girl like Vidya saw in him. He looked—what had Dad called it?—“troubled” lately, and when Rabbi Schulman asked me at synagogue where my brother had been, I could only shrug. In the back of my head, I knew the truth: the woods, sacred cigarettes. Neal. Vidya. But unlike Jamie, I kept my Vows and the Laws to heart. I told no one what I knew.

  As part of my new, adult identity I vowed I would take every opportunity that came. Maybe it was because Jamie had begun to withdraw from school and home life. In return, I resolved to be the perfect, upstanding kid he no longer was. So in the first week of school, not only did I join art club, like I always did, but also debate team, chorus, and field hockey. Mom cringed at the cost of supplies, but Dad seemed pleased.

  “You should take a cue from your sister,” he told Jamie. Jamie just pushed the hood of his sweatshirt down over his eyes and sulked up the stairs, letting his door slam behind him and leaving all the pictures trembling on the walls.

  Miranda didn’t understand why I’d become such a joiner. My new schedule meant that I no longer sat next to her on the bus on the way home. Instead, I took the late bus with the other overachievers who were scattered throughout our town. To my surprise, Vidya was there, too, sitting in the back, her nose always stuck in a book. The sight of her made my pulse throb, though I was careful to make it look like I hadn’t seen her. But when she wasn’t looking, I peeked at the covers of the books she was reading. Fantasy novels. George R. R. Martin. Patrick Rothfuss. That kind of thing. I wanted to ask her about them, but I didn’t. She belonged to Jamie. She was Jamie’s girlfriend. I shouldn’t have been staring at her. I told myself I shouldn’t have cared.

  But it was hard. Something about the way she smiled as she read drew my gaze magnetically toward her. I told myself that it was because she knew Jamie, in a way no one else did. Even me. She might have been the rune that would have let me decipher him. That’s what I assured myself when I stared at her on the bus. It had nothing to do with how she held a hand against her throat, smiling at something she’d read. It was all only about Jamie.

  She was in chorus with me, too, one of the only classes that was composed of both middle and high schoolers together. I was a soprano, part of the huge pack of girls who sang in high, reedy voices together. She stood on the other end of the risers, by the boys. She was a contralto, one of three.

  I tried to pick her voice out. Usually I couldn’t, but sometimes I heard a low, loping melody. The notes seemed to weave themselves around and around each one of my ribs, knotting them tightly. But why? The sound made my throat tight. I thought a thousand times about going to talk to her. I could ask her about Jamie, what they’d been doing all summer, where he’d been. I could ask her about the books she read, if she believed in alien abduction, something, anything. But there was something about her that made my mind feel all frazzled and wild. Usually, words came easily to me, even though I was someone who spent most her time avoiding people. Not now, though. Not when it came to her.

  When the first chorus rehearsal of the new school year was over, I rushed to stuff my sheet music into my backpack, keeping my eyes down so that no one would see how my nostrils flared, my cheeks heated, my palms sweat.

  “Hey, you’re Annie, right?”

  I turned around as quick as a crossbow’s bolt. Improbable though it was, there she was, her messenger bag slung over one shoulder, her hair down like a gossamer canopy. Her features were big, dark, and perfect. She wore a velvet choker around her neck, some kind of coin that shone, stark silver, against her warm skin, right at the base of her throat. I thought of Jamie kissing that throat. I pushed the thought away.

  “Yeah?” I answered, making myself stand up straighter.

  “James told me about you,” she said, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. I had the feeling that she was trying to sound casual, and failing. I hoped she didn’t notice how my hands shook. What else do you two talk about? a voice at the back of my mind demanded, but I couldn’t form those thoughts into words. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans.

  “Yeah?” I said again. I was desperate to know what she wanted with me. Since Jamie first left for middle school without me, his friends and mine were never the same. Even Neal refused to say hello to me now, though after my outburst in the woods, I’m not sure I blamed him.

  Sometimes I wished I could obliterate my feelings. Maybe rebuild myself from cold metal and gears, one part at a time.

  “Yeah,” Vidya said, and she smiled nervously. When she smiled, I saw that gap between her front teeth. It was cute, a little chipmunky. “He told me that you write fantasy stories together.”

  In my pockets, my hands went still. They went cold. They went heavy. I started to grab my backpack and throw it over my shoulder.

  “He’s not supposed to talk about that—”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I wouldn’t tell anyone. I think it’s cool. James is a great writer. He mentioned you draw maps? I really like maps of imaginary places. I used to have one of Middle Earth on my bedroom wall.”

  I felt my lip tick up, almost of its own volition. I’d tried to read The Lord of the Rings last year but had only gotten halfway through The Two Towers before I got bored. That was a problem I always had with fantasy books. Who cared about other people’s fantasies?

  But she was looking at me, chipmunk smile and snub nose and that silver token rising and falling with each breath. I narrowed my eyes at her, still wary. Jamie had told her. Even though he’d sworn he wouldn’t. “Cool,” I said icily, wondering if she was going to let me leave. By then, the other kids had started filing out toward the hallway. I started walking. But for some reason, she just walked beside me. Like I wanted her there.

  And honestly, part of me almost did. I could feel the heat of her hand beside mine as our strides matched. A thought drifted through my mind, treacherous. You could hold her hand. It was appalling. Mor
tifying. And it must have been why I kept talking, despite the hot coal of betrayal that was simmering in my belly.

  “You like to sing?” I asked. Stupid words. Empty words. When what I really should have been asking her what Jamie had told her—interrogating her about how he’d broken his Vows.

  “Oh yeah,” she said quickly. Her skin darkened a shade, like it embarrassed her. “I’m thinking of joining Madrigals next year instead. You know, the medieval choir? It’s only open to sophomores and upperclassmen. I hear they even wear costumes. My dad thinks I should do jazz band instead, but I don’t like playing guitar and singing at the same time.”

  “You play guitar?” I was finding myself swept up into the current of conversation despite myself. She seemed so easygoing. So normal.

  “Yeah, I’ve been taking lessons since I was six. I also play bass, clarinet, and some piano. Oh, and the banjo. Ukulele, here and there. We have all these instruments around. My dad’s kind of a music nut.”

  My eyes went wide as we stepped into the bright blue light of the September afternoon. I wondered what Vidya had thought of Jamie’s bar mitzvah theme. It must have seemed cheesy and fake to her, someone who actually knew about music.

  “The only stuff my dad likes are work, jogging, and talk radio,” I said, even though that wasn’t entirely fair, and it wasn’t exactly true, either. Dad also liked black coffee and filling out crossword puzzles and yard work and knowing the names of all the birds at our feeders. Those were the things that Mom loved about him, and I loved them about him, too. But Vidya didn’t need to know all that.