Seely, Part 2

A serialized short story by W. McCrae.

Guest posts by

W. McCrae

continue this week while I’m on summer break. This is Part 2 of her original short story; you can find Part 1 here.

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It wasn’t until they’d rounded the last corner and come in view of home that Charles realized his backpack was missing. He drew to a halt at the end of Ocotillo Street and scrabbled disbelievingly at his own shoulders, shaken as though he’d missed a step in the dark. Howie didn’t have the bag either, and acted like he’d never heard of such a thing. Its whereabouts after Charles entered the pond were unknown, and the hour was far too late now to begin a search. Charles briefly weighed his options, and found that he had none; he would have to walk in the front door soaking wet, far past Howie’s bedtime and without his schoolwork to boot. Whatever happened after that, he frankly deserved it. He crossed the road toward the house and kept his chin up high, for his brother’s sake. 

As it turned out, Charles was allowed exactly one lucky break that night: he and Howie stepped inside under cover of a fight boiling in the kitchen.

The boys slipped mouselike down the hall together. After putting Howie to bed, rapidly and wordlessly, Charles hid all his sodden clothes at the bottom of the hamper. He sat himself under a steaming shower, and imagined himself washing away down the drain with the pond scum.

The next day at school, a kid Charles barely knew snuck up behind his seat in the cafeteria to whisper, “Heard you’re a really good swimmer, Charlie.” Charles did not respond, but stared blurrily into his fruit cup. His dolor was not cut by Mr. Salvatore’s encouraging feedback at the top of his English paper, nor by the discovery of his name on the list of Freshman Woodwind Ensemble award nominees, posted next to the band room. Following the final bell, Charles spied Reggie and company shoving each other down the hallway ahead of him, and experienced a moment of mournful clarity on the notion that they could ever have been friends. He picked his brother up from the preschool classroom a wiser, wearier man.

Wednesdays always meant bringing Howie to the library after school; by the time they left the building again, the late-afternoon light had begun to draw prematurely thin. Rain flavored the desert wind. It was a long walk home, but tonight, their father’s lone truck in the driveway made for a reassuring view. Charles directed his brother inside, and shouted through the door that he would be back soon. 

Today, his teachers had been forgiving of him for missing his pencils and classwork, just this once. Tomorrow they might not be. He pulled his bicycle from the side yard to ride down Lime Slope, heading toward the quarry. 

The sun that evening did not seem to set, so much as suffocate. By the time Charles arrived at the bottom of the hill on the easternmost end of town, the sky was dark like wet concrete. He leaned his bike against the broken chain-link fence and crawled through gravel to pass back into the limestone-quarry basin, imposed by cliffs like prison walls. A lone raindrop patted his hair.

For fifteen minutes, Charles doggedly scouted through the dirt and scrub along the north side of the quarry. Although he was certain about the stretch of bank his brother must have traversed the night before, his backpack was nowhere to be found. Four fruitless times he retraced the path, with each tour more scattered and desperate than the last. Darkness was closing in quickly, and stones of a certain size all looked baglike from a distance. 

Maybe Howie had hidden it somewhere? That didn’t seem like him. Maybe it was gone; maybe Reggie had thrown it in the water, or stolen it to turn in all the homework as his own. Maybe Mrs. Hayek would recognize Charles’s handwriting on a sentence-mapping worksheet with someone else’s name on it. Maybe she would tell his mother he was helping other students cheat.

Another raindrop flicked Charles’s face as he came to a standstill next to the mud-slick where he’d emerged from the water, twenty-two hours ago. Numbly he dropped to sit on the largest boulder beneath the cliffs, facing across the pond toward the fence and the slate eastern horizon. Up and down an ebbing sickness surged inside him, like water on the gritty shore: it wasn’t his fault, but nobody was going to believe him. He’d have to redo all the homework for half credit, he’d have to save up money to buy another bag… 

Maybe it would have been better if he’d just drowned. 

That was a gratifying thought, when he landed on it. Charles fitted the idea between his teeth and bit down hard. In a misty vision, he entertained the image of his own poor lonesome body floating out there on the water, padding against the reeds. He imagined Reggie crying while the police cuffed him in front of the whole school. Maybe they’d give Charles a memorial plaque in the office, like Harry J. Yates, who died in Saigon in ‘69. Everyone would have to come to his funeral. 

Water at the waterline, flagging around dull stones. Black as shade, again and again. He’d be prepared for the glass-cutting cold, when he went back in. He wouldn’t even flinch. 

From over Charles’s shoulder, someone muttered, “Hey,” and pierced the fantasy with a sharp tap on the arm. Charles gasped out loud and vaulted off the boulder like a startled cat. The tall skinny girl from the night before stood in the witchgrass behind him. She had a book tucked under one arm, a brown backpack hung off the other shoulder, and a scowl on her face, as though he had interrupted her.

“You looking for this?” She plucked disinterestedly at the backpack’s strap.

Charles was speechless. “...Yeah,” he stammered, now from too far away to reach. The girl hoisted his bag onto the face of the stone in between them, rolling her eyes when he leapt forward before she could juke it away again. Securely clutching the backpack to his chest, Charles shot a glare her way. 

“What are you doing back here again?” he demanded. “You a bum or something?”

The girl licked her teeth behind her lips, seeming gratified by his bristle. “I said I’d be here when you wanted to thank me.”

He didn’t remember her saying that. “That’s not why I came back.” Charles swung his backpack onto his shoulder and raised his chin defiantly. She was three inches taller than him. 

“Yeah.” The girl plopped down on the boulder and smirked. “Now you can thank me for finding your backpack, too.” 

Charles flushed a shade darker and opened his mouth to tell her that she must be stupid, because he would have found it himself if it hadn’t been moved—but before he could speak, he was distracted by the realization that the book she was holding was a copy of The Elfstones of Shannara, which had previously been inside his backpack. He yelped, “Hey—!” 

The girl looked sharply at him as he dropped to a crouch and began digging through his bag. It was no coincidence: his copy was missing. He looked up in anger and hurt to accuse her outright, “You stole my book!”

Immediately she curled herself away from him, around the novel like a hungry rat with an egg. “It’s not yours,” she shot back, “it’s from the library!” and when Charles threw himself forward she jumped up to dangle the book out of reach. 

“What’s your problem?” She jutted a bony elbow between them and twisted away from his scrabbling hands. “You can’t share? Not like I saved your life or anything!”

Charles grappled with her for a moment before relenting. He staggered backward in the grass, to put enough space between them that she couldn’t hear the upset in his breath. The girl also backed away from him, clutching the heavy novel under her collarbone as though to comfort it. In a few quick circuits she looked between him and the book, then crunched her eyebrows and made a lemon-sucking face. 

She shot at him, “What day is it?”

“Wednesday,” he spat back, almost too upset to speak. Crossly, and apparently unaffected by his venom, the girl waved a hand and asked for the date, which was April 3.

“Well, see?” She flipped open the back cover of the book and warbled the date-due slip. “You don’t have to return it till the 14th, and it’s a waxing moon, so I bet I finish in less than a week. I’m a good reader. Then you can have it back. You owe me, you know.” She tacked that reminder onto the end of the pitch before circling the book in another tight hug. Her terms were non-negotiable.

This was simply absurd—one further indignity on top of everything else. He swelled full of possible responses: to fight her, or to shout her down, or just to tell her to put the stupid book on hold for herself. But in rapid succession as his eyes flew across her form. A few realizations gave him pause, and his anger reconsidered itself. In what blue shade still remained beneath the heavy clouds, he could see that the girl was wearing the same too-small overalls as she had been the night before, and that they were patched and dirty. She was still jacketless, too, and barefoot on top of all that. 

He’d asked if she was a bum, without thinking about how just off the south side of the quarry-top there lay a stretch of neighborhood where his parents said to never take Howie, where folks kept cars and couches and chained dogs in their yards. She might not own a library card. Pity curled uneasily in his gut.

He’d never met anybody who actually wanted to read the same books as him.

“...You don’t want that book,” he croaked finally. The girl narrowed her eyes, but he got in before she could say anything: “That’s the second book in the series. But I own the first one.” 

He stopped there, unsure of how to lay out his half-formed idea as an accord. In soft tufts, raindrops hit the earth and kicked the smell of lime into the air. Frogs peeped from the swaying grass. The girl continued to glower at him, not without a few breaks to look down at her own bare feet. Freckles mottled her skin, and her hair was a curly mess. It was still barely light enough to see all that.

Finally she relented, “Okay. So bring me your copy of the first book, and you can have this one back.” She turned away from Charles when he started to protest. “It’s called collateral. Kids your age are too shysty.”

She was barely older than he was. Charles worked his mouth, and finally bit his tongue: “Fine,” he growled, jutting out a rigid arm. She leered at the proffered handshake. “You saved my life or whatever, so—fine.”

The moment hung between them like a spider-strand, broken when the girl stepped forward. She returned Charles’s gruff shake over the surface of the boulder, seeming as unhappy with the compromise as he was, and then she pulled back to drop carelessly onto the stone. 

“My name’s Seely, by the way,” she mentioned offhand as she stretched out her legs.

Charles misheard. “Celia?”

“Over my dead body. Seely. What’s yours?”

“Like the mattress? I’m Charles.”

By now it was nighttime, or near enough beneath the clouds. Rain pissed against the surface of the pond. For the second night in a row, Charles was going to arrive home soaking wet. The girl called Seely seemed to have had the same thought: “Guess you’d better get going,” she told him, more like a command than anything. “Come back when you’ve got the book, then.”

He asked, “Do you go to the high school?” It would have made more sense to meet up after class tomorrow, but she dismissed the question with a shrug and turned away to show she was done talking. They didn’t say goodbye, but it was truly dark by now, and Charles had no more time to waste. He was happy enough to leave her on her wet rock if that’s where she wanted to be.

Home was twenty minutes uphill through intensifying rain. When Charles finally stepped in the front door, Howie cast immediate attention his way: “Charlie’s home!” the little boy bellowed from the kitchen. “Charlie Charlie Charlie Marley—”

Dad hushed him, and sent Charles to go change. When he returned to the kitchen, there was a reheated plate of macaroni and string beans waiting for him on the breakfast bar. He had enough time to eat and drink a cup of cocoa and tell his father about the Freshman Woodwind Ensemble award nominations, before Mom’s headlights shone against the kitchen window and their family chatter fell to a hush.

With quick goodnights, Charles and Howie were ushered off down the hall. Charles sent his brother to bed in turn, and had just settled in to read under the blankets when the bedroom door pushed open again and a small face peeped through.

“Howie!—” Charles sat upright and laid his book on the bedside table. “Go to your room.”

His brother whispered, “Story?” Argument echoed down the hallway behind him. Charles huffed, and then beckoned him in just to get the door closed.

He told Howie, “I don’t have a story for you,” as he always did, while the little boy wiggled and rolled up onto the bed to lay across Charles’s feet. He was more like a dog than a brother.

“It doesn’t have to be a good story,” Howie promised.

“No story,” Charles said crossly, but then he changed his mind. “Fine. Once upon a time, my little brother left my backpack at the quarry overnight, even though I told him to keep it safe. Then I had to go all the way back down to find it so I wouldn’t get expelled, and now that girl Seely is holding one of my books hostage so I can’t read it tonight, and when I get an overdue library fee Mom will kill me. The end. Happy?”

Howie did, in fact, seem happy with the story. With a little whoop he pulled up the end of the comforter to make a cocoon and asked, “Who’s Seely?” 

“The girl from last night.”

“The girl who went on the water to save you?” Charles grimaced. “I love her.”

“Don’t be gross. You brushed your teeth like I told you, right?”

Howie’s nod might have been a lie, but either way, it couldn’t be worth venturing back into the raging hallway. Charles’s room was furthest away from the kitchen, with a good muffling door and an ironwood tree outside the window, whose low leaves cut both sunset and streetlight glow. Howie fell asleep beneath the watchful eyes of the posters on the wall, the X-Men and the Justice League and a collectable box of C-3PO’s pinned above the desk. In his islet of golden reading light, Charles huddled low and turned over the pages of a different, better world. 

He pretended to be asleep when Dad came in to carry Howie back to bed, and spent a long time awake in the dark after that, listening to the rain in the eaves.